That's OK, the first time I heard someone pronounce it with a hard "G", I had no idea what they meant.
Outside of common (mis-)usage, there isn't any doubt about the correct pronunciation, as it is specificied in the 1987 document defining the format. It's "Jif", as in "jiffy".
If someone tells you their name is spelled Qwerty, and it's pronounced "Fred", then it's pronounced "Fred"
Coal plants burn more coal at night than they need for electricity to keep the furnaces hot for peak usage periods.
No, they don't.
The Incremental Heat Rate of the generators is higher at night when the load is low. This is why Pumped Storage is sometimes used to reduce the effective diversity in the load.
Well, it's hard to say, but probably heavy loading on the local sub-transmission/distribution network. That is a local problem.
Seventy-nine percent (175/220) voltage is ridiculously low, though. I'm not sure incandescent lights would do much more than glow at that voltage. When I was doing transmission planning any simulation with transmission voltages (where percent values are admittedly a *bit* higher) below 95% would have been examined closely as a problem area.
Are you sure you have three phase power into your residence? In the United States three-phase is almost never used into homes, if you are elsewhere, then I don't know.
And there are fast gradients. Some of them are small, like an entire office building starting or shutting down their lights. Some, however, are not so small - like - let's say - an entire neighboorhood starting their electric boilers at the same time). When this happens, a brownout ensures - the electric plant is overwhelmed, and its output voltage drops.
The voltage does not drop. The energy required comes out of the inertia of the rotating mass of the generator/turbine sets of the entire power system until the power system as a whole can adjust(which happens in a matter of minutes). The system frequency would drop if you had enough of a load spike. In actual practice, the load spike (which is usually a generator tripping off line) required on the Eastern Interconnected Network to result in even a 0.1 Hz drop in frequency is roughly 3500MW (PDF). In order words, roughly equal to a very large power plant. You wouldn't notice such a drop in frequency.
This use of car batteries is to reduce the load diversity by shaving the peaks and adding to the load during the low load periods. This is much like other power storage methods, e.g. pumped hydro.
yum update is not generally headachy, it is only headachy when it breaks
Everything is headachy when it breaks.
I've been using RHEL at work and CentOS at home for seven and three years, respectively. Up2date (RHEL3's updater) has only broken once, and was relatively easily repaired. Yum hasn't broken on me yet.
The car still has limits, they're just further out.
Actually, the limits are exactly the same as they are without the stability control systems. The electronics aren't changing the laws of physics. They're just keeping you reined in.
I just did a search for my name and it returned documents on my website that have been gone for years... Their cache on my last name is HORRIBLY out of date...
This is exactly what I saw as well. Since my name is somewhat unusual, but not unique, I usually test search engines by entering my name, both unquoted and quoted, to see what the results are.
Entering my first and last names (unquoted) into Google gives me my web site, at its current URL as the first link.
Entering my name into Ask.com gives me my web site as the sixth link and at the old (6+ months) URL, which is dead. The new site is nowhere to be seen. Entering my name quoted into Ask.com gives the first link, but still the old, dead site.
My wife's site comes up first on both Google and Ask when her name is entered.
My old site was setup to do a permanent redirect to the new site for a couple of months last fall.
This is the kind of thing (dead links) people won't tolerate in a search engine, IMHO.
* When the defendant is not represented by counsel, as he or she has waived the right to counsel in a criminal proceeding, or is otherwise not represented in a civil proceeding. http://mova.missouri.org/cjterms.htm
* A Latin phrase that means "for himself." A person who represents himself in a legal matter alone without the help of a lawyer is said to appear pro se. http://www.nfa.futures.org/basicnet/glossary.aspx
Every day or so, I would look to see if there were articles in "Ask Slashdot", for example. I liked that I could tell "What was on the front page" and keep it separate from the other info I found interesting.
I could also tell, at a glance, how many new articles had been posted in each topic. Sadly, that functionality appears to be gone.
I find the new default to be a bit too cluttered. Just IMHO.
You don't actually need flash, sure some sites are all flash based, but hey, that's their problem!
I don't run flash here. It's actually quite nice. I don't have to be bothered by those annoying flash based ads.
One of the first actions I perform on any new system is to delete (or rename) the Flash plug-in. There have been a few sites which were completely unusable, but most seem to have fall-back non-flash sites. Those that don't have a fall-back, well, I visit their competitors.
For me, the tipping point was flash-based ads, specifically one for a hip-hop movie, which moved across my screen and played a thumping bass line. These days I could just use FlashBlock or whatever, but since there is *so little* Flash-based content worth seeing, IMO, I don't bother.
Yeah, that was my next comment to him when I found that https was still allowed:
"So I can just run an ssh server on 443 and I'll be able to connect to it?"
The risk management guy just shrugged. It stops anyone who can't run their own ssh server, though.
However, it's all a matter of personal risk management. I have 25 years of service at this place, and I just decided that trying to "go around" the rules, especially when the potential penalties are so high, just wasn't worth it.
Did I mention that I use my Treo 600 for ssh, too?:-)
The part that amazes me these days is that people bother to send personal email through their work address when perfectly good webmail clients exist (*cough*gmail*cough*).
Well, perhaps. At my place of work, all known webmail services are blocked and policy is that using a webmail service (that it's blocked for whatever reason) is a serious offence. You probably wouldn't get you dismissed the first time, but maybe the second. All external IM traffic and ssh are blocked as well. When they blocked ssh I asked why and the answer was "we can't see the traffic". I pointed out that they couldn't see https traffic either, but they said, essentially, "too many people would complain if we shut off secure web services". Personally, I think it was ssh's tunneling capabilities that prompted them to restrict it.
All of this is why I have a Treo 600 now. I can do all of my personal email completely separated from the corporate network.
When I was an EE undergrad at Ohio in the 1970's, I had heard that a fellow in the accelerator lab across the way had built a TTL-based computer which ran at 20MHz (I *think*). I tried Googling it, but I didn't find any references. So, I never actually *saw* it and it's a nearly thirty year ago memory. Take it with whatever sized salt you'd like.
I have been looking to get a DVD-recorder for my home theater system for quite awhile. I already have a Tivo, and I'd like to replace my VCRs with a DVD recorder. I partial to the Panasonic products, since they do DVD-RAM, which my Panasonic DVD player can read.
One of things I really want, however, is a Firewire interface on the unit so I can cleanly and easily dump my camcorder tapes to the recorder. This seems like such an obvious feature to me and yet very few units seem to support it. The older Panasonic DMR-E60 had a firewire interface but the DMR-E65 does not! I suppose I'll need to get the DMR-E95, which appears to be the cheapest Panasonic model with IEEE-1394 these days.
And when will they be available someplace other than Japan?
I have a Ximeta 250GB Netdisk and it works great for me.
Details, please!
What OS ( I assume some Un*x variant, since you mention NFS), any problems with setup? Any issues in daily operation?
I am asking because I've been thinking about getting one of these things, mainly for backup of my home fileserver. I have noticed that they had a RH9 RPM for their software, but there seems to be very little info on the net about people using it with Linux.
The cause of the black out was a horribly managed electrical grid that can barely keep up with the current demand.
Wow. Quite an accusation. Any facts to back it up?
Any major failure in the system can cause a cascading failure of the entire section of the grid. That is a horrible design.
Really? There are major circuit outages on the Eastern Interconnected Network every day. The system is designed to have the local area go black instead of blacking out a widespread area. That was the lesson of the 1965 blackout, and the reason the 1977 NYC blackout was limited to the NYC/Long Island areas. By design, blackouts are supposed to stop at the interconnections between control areas, and the fact that the 2003 North Eastern blackout took out several control areas is what was suprising. In the end, however, it did stop at control area boundarys.
How many major, widespread blackouts have occured in the Eastern Interconnected Network in the last 40 years or so? Note that the Eastern Interconnected Network does not include Texas, Quebec or systems west of the Rockies. I am using widespread to mean affecting several system/control areas. The 1977 NYC blackout, although large, did not spread past the New York City/Long Island area.
This reminds me of the old SNL skit "Common Knowledge Jeopardy". A few public figures make ill-informed comments about a subject and suddenly everyone thinks it's a fact.
The grid in the North East US is supplied by horribly inefficient and antiquated power lines that were struggling to keep up thirty years ago. That they are still in use today is an outright crime.
What do you mean by inefficient? Do you think that the conductors somehow wear out? Equipment is inspected and replaced as needed. Yes, it's still done. This is not to say that maintenance procedures are perfect, of course.
As another poster in this article stated, part of the problem is that no one wants new power lines in their back yard. (NIMBY, Not In My Back Yard) Another part of the problem, in my no-so-humble opinion, is that the feds are driving "de-regulation" of the generation portion of the system only, and they're not providing any logical (again, IMNHO) method for funding transmission system upgrades. In fact, having a well-designed trasmission system is becoming a liability as it continues to cost money, but the ability to make money from it is disappearing. (Yes, I meant to quote de-regulation, as they're not de-regulating anything, they're just changing the regulations)
Unfortunately the real cause of the black out is not ever going to be patched and another blackout is as inevitable as this last one was.
What would you recommend as a patch? Seriously, I'm interested to know what you think should be fixed and how.
The report detailing what happened on 14-Aug-2003 is quite well written and interesting. I recommend it.
There are major changes resulting from what we've learned from the study of the events of 14-Aug-2003, just as we learned and changed due to the events of 9-Nov-1965. People are thinking about these problems.
Didn't the story used to be that after a tech maintenenced the machine, he forgot to re-enable an alarm?
That is what happened at the Midwest Independent System Operator (MISO) which is responsible for overseeing First Energy's (and other's) transmission system. First Energy's problem was they weren't seeing any alarms for the various problems.
clever criminals don't get caught so you don't hear about them
Indeed. A few years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who was a county prosecutor about a case which had happened in my end of town.
A woman had her daughter's boyfriend murder her husband for the insurance money. I was amazed that she thought the authorities wouldn't figure it out. My friend said(paraphrasing): "They're mean and they're stupid. You have no idea how mean and how stupid... The smart ones don't get caught."
Of course, most of criminals *think* they're smart enough to get away with their crimes. But as researchers have found, they probably don't know they're not smart enough to avoid being caught.
I was working on my Masters thesis on 4010s right about the time BSG was on TV. Interesting technology. They drew vectors on the screen and kept them lit with a combination of high-persistence phosphor and a low-level electron beam. After a time, the low-level beam would turn off, much like a screen blanker today.
At the university where I was studying, the computer center only had two of the Tektronix terminals. One evening, I was waiting for one of the to free up so that I could do some testing of my code for my thesis project. One of the other grad students got up and left. He was gone for quite awhile... I got up after about fifteen minutes, figuring that he had left and entered (on the blanked screen):
login
to the TSO system. For those of you who don't know, TSO will log OFF anyone logged in when you enter that command. I worked for about another fifteen minutes when the other grad student returned and was *quite* irritated that I had (inadvertantly) logged him off. *sigh*
Ahh, the joys of grad school.
Milalwi
Read the IT Doesn't Matter Article!
on
Does IT Matter?
·
· Score: 1
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that most of the people here are commenting on the title and not the content of the "IT Doesn't Matter" article. I read the original Havard Business Review article some months ago at the recommendation of our CIO.
I think the author (Nicholas G. Carr) is mostly correct. His basic point is that IT is not an option these days, it is a requirement, much like electricity. This is not to say that there won't be cost savings from new IT developments, just that it's better to let others find them and determine which ones are best, so that you can use them without the development costs. As someone else posted here, IT is nearly always a cost center,
I am surprised that nobody has commented on this gem from the article:
Nevertheless companies continue to roll out across-the-board hardware and software upgrades....
The time has come for IT buyers to throw their weight around, to negotiate contracts that ensure the long-term usefulness of their PC investments and impose hard limits on upgrade costs. And if vendors balk, companies should be willing to explore cheaper solutions, including open-source applications and bare-bones network PCs, even if it means sacrificing features.
Are you sure it was this book? From what my publisher told me, someone from amazon.com came by with a truck and picked up all of their copies directly.
D'oh!
No it was not. My mistake. I confused it with the "Tivo Hacks" book. One wonders how I could read the entire review and not understand which book it really was. I must have been especially stupid Wednesday afternoon. Wait! It was before I had my afternoon coffee! Yeah, that's it!
Slashdot Mirror
That's OK, the first time I heard someone pronounce it with a hard "G", I had no idea what they meant.
Outside of common (mis-)usage, there isn't any doubt about the correct pronunciation, as it is specificied in the 1987 document defining the format. It's "Jif", as in "jiffy".
If someone tells you their name is spelled Qwerty, and it's pronounced "Fred", then it's pronounced "Fred"
Sadly, it appears to have been discontinued.
No, they don't.
The Incremental Heat Rate of the generators is higher at night when the load is low. This is why Pumped Storage is sometimes used to reduce the effective diversity in the load.
Milalwi
Well, it's hard to say, but probably heavy loading on the local sub-transmission/distribution network. That is a local problem.
Seventy-nine percent (175/220) voltage is ridiculously low, though. I'm not sure incandescent lights would do much more than glow at that voltage. When I was doing transmission planning any simulation with transmission voltages (where percent values are admittedly a *bit* higher) below 95% would have been examined closely as a problem area.
Are you sure you have three phase power into your residence? In the United States three-phase is almost never used into homes, if you are elsewhere, then I don't know.
Milalwi
The voltage does not drop. The energy required comes out of the inertia of the rotating mass of the generator/turbine sets of the entire power system until the power system as a whole can adjust(which happens in a matter of minutes). The system frequency would drop if you had enough of a load spike. In actual practice, the load spike (which is usually a generator tripping off line) required on the Eastern Interconnected Network to result in even a 0.1 Hz drop in frequency is roughly 3500MW (PDF). In order words, roughly equal to a very large power plant. You wouldn't notice such a drop in frequency.
This use of car batteries is to reduce the load diversity by shaving the peaks and adding to the load during the low load periods. This is much like other power storage methods, e.g. pumped hydro.
Milalwi
Everything is headachy when it breaks.
I've been using RHEL at work and CentOS at home for seven and three years, respectively. Up2date (RHEL3's updater) has only broken once, and was relatively easily repaired. Yum hasn't broken on me yet.
Milalwi
Actually, the limits are exactly the same as they are without the stability control systems. The electronics aren't changing the laws of physics. They're just keeping you reined in.
Milalwi
This is exactly what I saw as well. Since my name is somewhat unusual, but not unique, I usually test search engines by entering my name, both unquoted and quoted, to see what the results are.
Entering my first and last names (unquoted) into Google gives me my web site, at its current URL as the first link.
Entering my name into Ask.com gives me my web site as the sixth link and at the old (6+ months) URL, which is dead. The new site is nowhere to be seen. Entering my name quoted into Ask.com gives the first link, but still the old, dead site.
My wife's site comes up first on both Google and Ask when her name is entered.
My old site was setup to do a permanent redirect to the new site for a couple of months last fall.
This is the kind of thing (dead links) people won't tolerate in a search engine, IMHO.
I *do* like the site preview hover link, though.
Milalwi
I know you're trying to be funny, but Google is your friend:
Query:
define:pro se
Definitions of pro se on the Web:
* A person who does not hire a lawyer and appears for himself/herself in court.
http://clerkofcourt.maricopa.gov/glossary.asp
* To act on one's own behalf; appearing for oneself; representing oneself; to represent oneself in a court action without an attorney.
http://www.courts.mo.gov/osca/index.nsf/0/8b69295b 674dde2186256e15004ea27f
* Acting without the aid of an attorney; representing yourself.
http://www.oah.wa.gov/Glossary.htm
* Representing oneself. Serving as one's own lawyer.
http://www.uscourts.gov/journalistguide/glossary.h tml
* When the defendant is not represented by counsel, as he or she has waived the right to counsel in a criminal proceeding, or is otherwise not represented in a civil proceeding.
http://mova.missouri.org/cjterms.htm
* A person who does not have an attorney to represent him or her and who appears on his or her own behalf before the Court.
http://www.gaappeals.us/cguide/glossary.php
* Latin phrase ("in one's own behalf") applied to defendants who waive the right to counsel and act as their own lawyers in criminal cases.
http://www.mad.uscourts.gov/LocPubs/crimglossary.h tm
* A Latin phrase that means "for himself." A person who represents himself in a legal matter alone without the help of a lawyer is said to appear pro se.
http://www.nfa.futures.org/basicnet/glossary.aspx
* A person appearing without representation by an attorney for himself; in his own behalf; in person.
http://www.nysb.uscourts.gov/prose_man/glossary.ht ml
* When a person who chooses to act as his or her own attorney in a legal action.
https://www.co-childsupport.com/elpaso/glossary/gl ossary.htm
* When a party is not represented by a lawyer but is representing himself.
http://www.courts.state.mn.us/districts/fourth/Gen eral/LegalTerms6.htm
* Without the benefit of counsel; the act of speaking or representing oneself in a court of law.
http://www.alqlist.com/glossary.html
* A debtor who is not represent
So, am I the only one who *liked* the old format?
Every day or so, I would look to see if there were articles in "Ask Slashdot", for example. I liked that I could tell "What was on the front page" and keep it separate from the other info I found interesting.
I could also tell, at a glance, how many new articles had been posted in each topic. Sadly, that functionality appears to be gone.
I find the new default to be a bit too cluttered. Just IMHO.
Milalwi
It's quite a bit cheaper if you're a member, but I love IEEE Software magazine.
Milalwi
One of the first actions I perform on any new system is to delete (or rename) the Flash plug-in. There have been a few sites which were completely unusable, but most seem to have fall-back non-flash sites. Those that don't have a fall-back, well, I visit their competitors.
For me, the tipping point was flash-based ads, specifically one for a hip-hop movie, which moved across my screen and played a thumping bass line. These days I could just use FlashBlock or whatever, but since there is *so little* Flash-based content worth seeing, IMO, I don't bother.
Milalwi
Yeah, that was my next comment to him when I found that https was still allowed:
"So I can just run an ssh server on 443 and I'll be able to connect to it?"
The risk management guy just shrugged. It stops anyone who can't run their own ssh server, though.
However, it's all a matter of personal risk management. I have 25 years of service at this place, and I just decided that trying to "go around" the rules, especially when the potential penalties are so high, just wasn't worth it.
Did I mention that I use my Treo 600 for ssh, too?
Milalwi
Well, perhaps. At my place of work, all known webmail services are blocked and policy is that using a webmail service (that it's blocked for whatever reason) is a serious offence. You probably wouldn't get you dismissed the first time, but maybe the second. All external IM traffic and ssh are blocked as well. When they blocked ssh I asked why and the answer was "we can't see the traffic". I pointed out that they couldn't see https traffic either, but they said, essentially, "too many people would complain if we shut off secure web services". Personally, I think it was ssh's tunneling capabilities that prompted them to restrict it.
All of this is why I have a Treo 600 now. I can do all of my personal email completely separated from the corporate network.
Milalwi
Well, maybe not the webserver part...
When I was an EE undergrad at Ohio in the 1970's, I had heard that a fellow in the accelerator lab across the way had built a TTL-based computer which ran at 20MHz (I *think*). I tried Googling it, but I didn't find any references. So, I never actually *saw* it and it's a nearly thirty year ago memory. Take it with whatever sized salt you'd like.
Milalwi
The original news release, which has an animation to support the story is available at the Ohio State University Research News site.
Milalwi
I have been looking to get a DVD-recorder for my home theater system for quite awhile. I already have a Tivo, and I'd like to replace my VCRs with a DVD recorder. I partial to the Panasonic products, since they do DVD-RAM, which my Panasonic DVD player can read.
One of things I really want, however, is a Firewire interface on the unit so I can cleanly and easily dump my camcorder tapes to the recorder. This seems like such an obvious feature to me and yet very few units seem to support it. The older Panasonic DMR-E60 had a firewire interface but the DMR-E65 does not! I suppose I'll need to get the DMR-E95, which appears to be the cheapest Panasonic model with IEEE-1394 these days.
And when will they be available someplace other than Japan?
Milalwi
My SecurID token doesn expire for another 3+ years, and I've had it more than a year. The one before this had a four-year expiration, I think.
I haven't had to re-syncronize in years.
Milalwi
Details, please!
What OS ( I assume some Un*x variant, since you mention NFS), any problems with setup? Any issues in daily operation?
I am asking because I've been thinking about getting one of these things, mainly for backup of my home fileserver. I have noticed that they had a RH9 RPM for their software, but there seems to be very little info on the net about people using it with Linux.
Thanks,
Milalwi
Wow. Quite an accusation. Any facts to back it up?
Really? There are major circuit outages on the Eastern Interconnected Network every day. The system is designed to have the local area go black instead of blacking out a widespread area. That was the lesson of the 1965 blackout, and the reason the 1977 NYC blackout was limited to the NYC/Long Island areas. By design, blackouts are supposed to stop at the interconnections between control areas, and the fact that the 2003 North Eastern blackout took out several control areas is what was suprising. In the end, however, it did stop at control area boundarys.
How many major, widespread blackouts have occured in the Eastern Interconnected Network in the last 40 years or so? Note that the Eastern Interconnected Network does not include Texas, Quebec or systems west of the Rockies. I am using widespread to mean affecting several system/control areas. The 1977 NYC blackout, although large, did not spread past the New York City/Long Island area.
This reminds me of the old SNL skit "Common Knowledge Jeopardy". A few public figures make ill-informed comments about a subject and suddenly everyone thinks it's a fact.
What do you mean by inefficient? Do you think that the conductors somehow wear out? Equipment is inspected and replaced as needed. Yes, it's still done. This is not to say that maintenance procedures are perfect, of course.
As another poster in this article stated, part of the problem is that no one wants new power lines in their back yard. (NIMBY, Not In My Back Yard) Another part of the problem, in my no-so-humble opinion, is that the feds are driving "de-regulation" of the generation portion of the system only, and they're not providing any logical (again, IMNHO) method for funding transmission system upgrades. In fact, having a well-designed trasmission system is becoming a liability as it continues to cost money, but the ability to make money from it is disappearing. (Yes, I meant to quote de-regulation, as they're not de-regulating anything, they're just changing the regulations)
What would you recommend as a patch? Seriously, I'm interested to know what you think should be fixed and how.
The report detailing what happened on 14-Aug-2003 is quite well written and interesting. I recommend it.
There are major changes resulting from what we've learned from the study of the events of 14-Aug-2003, just as we learned and changed due to the events of 9-Nov-1965. People are thinking about these problems.
Milalwi
That is what happened at the Midwest Independent System Operator (MISO) which is responsible for overseeing First Energy's (and other's) transmission system. First Energy's problem was they weren't seeing any alarms for the various problems.
Milalwi
Indeed. A few years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who was a county prosecutor about a case which had happened in my end of town.
A woman had her daughter's boyfriend murder her husband for the insurance money. I was amazed that she thought the authorities wouldn't figure it out. My friend said(paraphrasing): "They're mean and they're stupid. You have no idea how mean and how stupid... The smart ones don't get caught."
Of course, most of criminals *think* they're smart enough to get away with their crimes. But as researchers have found, they probably don't know they're not smart enough to avoid being caught.
Milalwi
You mean those Tektronix 4010 graphics terminals?
I was working on my Masters thesis on 4010s right about the time BSG was on TV. Interesting technology. They drew vectors on the screen and kept them lit with a combination of high-persistence phosphor and a low-level electron beam. After a time, the low-level beam would turn off, much like a screen blanker today.
At the university where I was studying, the computer center only had two of the Tektronix terminals. One evening, I was waiting for one of the to free up so that I could do some testing of my code for my thesis project. One of the other grad students got up and left. He was gone for quite awhile... I got up after about fifteen minutes, figuring that he had left and entered (on the blanked screen):
login
to the TSO system. For those of you who don't know, TSO will log OFF anyone logged in when you enter that command. I worked for about another fifteen minutes when the other grad student returned and was *quite* irritated that I had (inadvertantly) logged him off. *sigh*
Ahh, the joys of grad school.
Milalwi
I think the author (Nicholas G. Carr) is mostly correct. His basic point is that IT is not an option these days, it is a requirement, much like electricity. This is not to say that there won't be cost savings from new IT developments, just that it's better to let others find them and determine which ones are best, so that you can use them without the development costs. As someone else posted here, IT is nearly always a cost center,
I am surprised that nobody has commented on this gem from the article:
Hmmmm.
Milalwi
D'oh!
No it was not. My mistake. I confused it with the "Tivo Hacks" book. One wonders how I could read the entire review and not understand which book it really was. I must have been especially stupid Wednesday afternoon. Wait! It was before I had my afternoon coffee! Yeah, that's it!
Milalwi