Stuff that they've been miserably slacking on for the last 20 years order to pocket more short term profits while their infrastructure rots.
The only thing the power companies have been slacking on is building power stations, due to economic and regulatory factors that are only partially in their control. Old transformers don't need to be "rebuilt" -- they require almost no maintenance and have life expectancies of decades. The technology for those hasn't changed in a hundred years. Power lines likewise have a low maintenance cost and the technology hasn't changed. Modernization for them has largely been adding power meters that "phone home" wirelessly or via a POTs line, removing the need for meter readers. That really is their biggest project, and it pays for itself quickly -- they're not slouching here to get "more profits".
The Big Lie is that this modernization supposedly needs to be done in order for green energy technologies (eg grid interactive solar) to work,
It's not a lie. If you're interfacing to the grid, they need to have a way to measure how much current you're putting on the wire, when, where, and be able to turn it off and on remotely, just like any other power station. And there are no regulations for how to do this in many municipalities. You think the cost they're talking about is the hardware? Silly you. It's the administrative costs.
They might feel threatened because local generation obviously reduces the amount of energy sold, but it also makes that energy cheaper to sell and distribute because it smooths out the peak loads and reduces average current on long-distance transmission lines.
Dude. power generation in just my state was 66*10^9 kWh in 2005, and represented a mere 1.8% of the total US consumption. The largest operating solar power plant in the world and manages a mere 60MW output, and takes up 25 hectacres of space. The Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant, by comparison, manages 1,096MW output. For ONE of its reactors. Do you seriously think they feel threatened by the solar cells on your roof?
But the power company has this line that it's making the grid "congested" as if the electrons are trying to go in **ZOMG!** both directions or something!
Actually, it's more like they don't want a bunch of DIY greenies hooking equipment up to the grid incorrectly and causing problems that are difficult to trace and would likely be blamed on them, rather than the homeowner. You screwup the hookups, or the power feed isn't phased correctly, and your whole neighborhood goes dark because of your home improvement project.
That's right. When comparing the price/value of computer hardware, the cost of software does not matter. Your $700 mid-range (or upper middle or however you want to measure it) hardware is $700 worth of hardware regardless of how much you spend on software.
Hey, captain obvious called -- something about the "total cost of ownership"? I'm saying "premium" is a weasel-word. It's meaningless.
Wow, what a clever manipulation of statistics. Somehow people who spend less than $1,000 don't have "premium" computers? How does that even work? I mean, I blow $1,500 on hardware but no software and it's "premium", but if I'm a poor graphic designer and buy a PC for $700 instead and spend the rest on Adobe's atrocious licensing fees, that makes me "not premium"? This doesn't say anything about "premium" or "not premium" -- this DOES however say a lot about how much people are willing to blow on Apple products. Answering why they're doing this is left as an excercise for the reader.
I wouldn't personally implement a system like this, but the fact that it doesn't cover all potential circumstances doesn't mean it's worthless. I don't know why Slashdotters always have such a hard time grasping that.
Because we're a bunch of purists who spend our time trying to find novel new solutions to esoteric problems the average person doesn't know or care about. We do have an easy time grasping it, but because of our own personal and professional standards, extensive experience, and training in information technology, we want the best. "Sorta works" just isn't in the geek vocabulary. And, I'd argue, that's how it should be.
It's not security through obscurity; it's advantage through security.
Pardon me for being a purist. But anything this easily thwarted also has no legal value, and my understanding here is that it's a punitive measure against the "leaker". If the document got leaked in the first place, chances are good the "leaker" in question can form an affirmative defense that a third party acquired the copy. Worse, if the algorithm is limited to a finite set of permutations, and anything that sticks to words and phrases is a very finite space (cryptographically speaking), the argument could be made that the document was leaked through a different source, run through the algorithm, and coincidentally matched the "signature" of the leaker's copy.
It's completely bogus. If they want to keep data private, then use real cryptography, and validated software/hardware combinations that make the cost of extracting the data in a usable format more expensive than the data it's protecting. The military does it, as to certain businesses, and intelligence agencies around the world. The technology is there, it works, and it's real security.
Security through obscurity doesn't work. I don't know how many stupid asinine ideas like this I'll have to see before I quit this career, but I suspect the number will be higher than I care to contemplate. This is ridiculously easy to subvert -- just run it through the thesaurus algorithm a few more times. Viola, new unique copies, that don't match what they have on record.
Next on the docket -- "Why you can read your coworkers e-mail but not the NSA's. Explorations in the bleedingly obvious."
Blasting large amounts of EMI solely to avoid the need to put a battery in something is stupid. Right now EM radiation is controlled to the lowest levels it can practically be in order to achieve some transfer of information between two or more points. Any power transfer system is going to muck up what's already in the air. It's called Shannon's Law -- and no matter how you sex up the technology, the fact is you're raising the noise floor doing this.
So either state in the contract that there is a bandwidth cap (and enforce it) or charge more for more bandwidth. Their policy should be bandwidth-based and not content-based. That also happens to be a lot simpler to enforce.
I don't understand why ISPs want to be in the business of policing their users: it costs money to do that. It also costs them lost revenue for cutting off users.
You're assuming it costs more money to police them than it does to kick off the heavier bandwidth users and then have a larger profit margin. 90% of the users pay for the 10% who use bandwidth heavily. Get rid of the 10% and profits soar. Ah, but you assume internet access is a regulated public utility and so they have to be fair and impartial? Te-he. Silly techie, trix are for kids!
"Surely the cable companies are reading the writing on the wall!"
Yeah. "For a really good time, call THE-NET-NURZ." The cable companies laugh at you for one simple reason: They have a government-backed monopoly on the wires coming into your home, and will mercilessly use that stranglehold to kill competition, no matter how innovative, useful, or popular. It doesn't matter, because gosh darn it, don't you want to watch HBO instead?
Re:It's actually kind of scary
on
Lost In the Cloud
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm actually surprised at how quickly some of these platforms like the iPhone have developed completely closed programming environments with barely a peep of protest from the normally pretty libertarian tech crowd.
I'm not. The iPhone was not designed for wizards. It was designed for muggles. The tech community gave up on the slathering flesh-beasts that beat upon the keyboards of the world long ago...
any software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.
You're suggesting Facebook and Apple actually care about your privacy? Are you from the past?
With a Windows Mobile phone, you can download and install a.cab from anywhere you want. If it's not signed you get a brief warning message, and that's it.
Yeah. Most people didn't plunk down $400 for their phone and/or don't have a "windows mobile" phone. Most phones used by consumers today are locked.
Sidekicks -- They have a "marketplace too". Locked down. T-mobile phones. Locked down. AT&T phones. Locked down. Almost every phone in existance has a "market place" equivalent, which has an approval process. Suddenly the iPhone comes along and people were expecting sunshine and kittens?
Apple's managed to get more than fifty thousand apps through the process and onto the store. Nobody's going to write stories about the ones that went smoothly.
Welcome to IT, where we don't care how often you get it right, because your job is to fix it when it goes wrong.
something about "exceeding sane limitations of the electromagnetic spectrum".
Actually, it was a prank call. The "electromagnetic spectrum" is not a finite resource. It would be more practical to say "with existing technology and certain economic factors, paying $70 for this is flatly unfeasible."
...creator Jim Storer, who hadn't given the game a moment's thought since he left high school, and wasn't aware of the phenomenon he spawned.
Yeah. It's always strange when a geek escapes the darkness of the computer cave to explore the big blue room and doesn't come back. Worse, if he does come back, he'll discover that he's become stupider than before.
This story is important because it crossed the line from possible, to (evidently) actual.
We knew it was possible, nay probable, from the day these machines were first used. It's like me pointing to a dark cloud coming and saying "Gee, looks like it's going to rain." Why is it suddenly news when I finally get wet?
Slashdot Mirror
... Would save 75 to 90% of the losses.
And the losses vary from 3-7% overall between the best and worst. -_-
Stuff that they've been miserably slacking on for the last 20 years order to pocket more short term profits while their infrastructure rots.
The only thing the power companies have been slacking on is building power stations, due to economic and regulatory factors that are only partially in their control. Old transformers don't need to be "rebuilt" -- they require almost no maintenance and have life expectancies of decades. The technology for those hasn't changed in a hundred years. Power lines likewise have a low maintenance cost and the technology hasn't changed. Modernization for them has largely been adding power meters that "phone home" wirelessly or via a POTs line, removing the need for meter readers. That really is their biggest project, and it pays for itself quickly -- they're not slouching here to get "more profits".
The Big Lie is that this modernization supposedly needs to be done in order for green energy technologies (eg grid interactive solar) to work,
It's not a lie. If you're interfacing to the grid, they need to have a way to measure how much current you're putting on the wire, when, where, and be able to turn it off and on remotely, just like any other power station. And there are no regulations for how to do this in many municipalities. You think the cost they're talking about is the hardware? Silly you. It's the administrative costs.
They might feel threatened because local generation obviously reduces the amount of energy sold, but it also makes that energy cheaper to sell and distribute because it smooths out the peak loads and reduces average current on long-distance transmission lines.
Dude. power generation in just my state was 66*10^9 kWh in 2005, and represented a mere 1.8% of the total US consumption. The largest operating solar power plant in the world and manages a mere 60MW output, and takes up 25 hectacres of space. The Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant, by comparison, manages 1,096MW output. For ONE of its reactors. Do you seriously think they feel threatened by the solar cells on your roof?
But the power company has this line that it's making the grid "congested" as if the electrons are trying to go in **ZOMG!** both directions or something!
Actually, it's more like they don't want a bunch of DIY greenies hooking equipment up to the grid incorrectly and causing problems that are difficult to trace and would likely be blamed on them, rather than the homeowner. You screwup the hookups, or the power feed isn't phased correctly, and your whole neighborhood goes dark because of your home improvement project.
That's right. When comparing the price/value of computer hardware, the cost of software does not matter. Your $700 mid-range (or upper middle or however you want to measure it) hardware is $700 worth of hardware regardless of how much you spend on software.
Hey, captain obvious called -- something about the "total cost of ownership"? I'm saying "premium" is a weasel-word. It's meaningless.
Wow, what a clever manipulation of statistics. Somehow people who spend less than $1,000 don't have "premium" computers? How does that even work? I mean, I blow $1,500 on hardware but no software and it's "premium", but if I'm a poor graphic designer and buy a PC for $700 instead and spend the rest on Adobe's atrocious licensing fees, that makes me "not premium"? This doesn't say anything about "premium" or "not premium" -- this DOES however say a lot about how much people are willing to blow on Apple products. Answering why they're doing this is left as an excercise for the reader.
The best first language for a programmer is your favorite language. Duh.
'a likely and uncontrolled fall in profits for the core telecom operators,'
Yeah, I bet the horse shoe manufacturers lobbied hard against the introduction of the self-propelled carriage too.
at present it's not clear whether the genius that came out of Spore's development will ever truly be accessible to the game dev community.
Are you telling me they uploaded the developer tron-style and he's in there, right now? Because that's the only way "the genius" got into Spore.
We were generally alarmed by attacks on compression functions that seemed unanticipated by the submitters.
Just when you think Entropy's a bitch...
I wouldn't personally implement a system like this, but the fact that it doesn't cover all potential circumstances doesn't mean it's worthless. I don't know why Slashdotters always have such a hard time grasping that.
Because we're a bunch of purists who spend our time trying to find novel new solutions to esoteric problems the average person doesn't know or care about. We do have an easy time grasping it, but because of our own personal and professional standards, extensive experience, and training in information technology, we want the best. "Sorta works" just isn't in the geek vocabulary. And, I'd argue, that's how it should be.
It's not security through obscurity; it's advantage through security.
Pardon me for being a purist. But anything this easily thwarted also has no legal value, and my understanding here is that it's a punitive measure against the "leaker". If the document got leaked in the first place, chances are good the "leaker" in question can form an affirmative defense that a third party acquired the copy. Worse, if the algorithm is limited to a finite set of permutations, and anything that sticks to words and phrases is a very finite space (cryptographically speaking), the argument could be made that the document was leaked through a different source, run through the algorithm, and coincidentally matched the "signature" of the leaker's copy.
It's completely bogus. If they want to keep data private, then use real cryptography, and validated software/hardware combinations that make the cost of extracting the data in a usable format more expensive than the data it's protecting. The military does it, as to certain businesses, and intelligence agencies around the world. The technology is there, it works, and it's real security.
Security through obscurity doesn't work. I don't know how many stupid asinine ideas like this I'll have to see before I quit this career, but I suspect the number will be higher than I care to contemplate. This is ridiculously easy to subvert -- just run it through the thesaurus algorithm a few more times. Viola, new unique copies, that don't match what they have on record.
Next on the docket -- "Why you can read your coworkers e-mail but not the NSA's. Explorations in the bleedingly obvious."
Blasting large amounts of EMI solely to avoid the need to put a battery in something is stupid. Right now EM radiation is controlled to the lowest levels it can practically be in order to achieve some transfer of information between two or more points. Any power transfer system is going to muck up what's already in the air. It's called Shannon's Law -- and no matter how you sex up the technology, the fact is you're raising the noise floor doing this.
Bad engineer. No cookie for you.
So either state in the contract that there is a bandwidth cap (and enforce it) or charge more for more bandwidth. Their policy should be bandwidth-based and not content-based. That also happens to be a lot simpler to enforce.
The life of the law is not logic.
I don't understand why ISPs want to be in the business of policing their users: it costs money to do that. It also costs them lost revenue for cutting off users.
You're assuming it costs more money to police them than it does to kick off the heavier bandwidth users and then have a larger profit margin. 90% of the users pay for the 10% who use bandwidth heavily. Get rid of the 10% and profits soar. Ah, but you assume internet access is a regulated public utility and so they have to be fair and impartial? Te-he. Silly techie, trix are for kids!
"Surely the cable companies are reading the writing on the wall!"
Yeah. "For a really good time, call THE-NET-NURZ." The cable companies laugh at you for one simple reason: They have a government-backed monopoly on the wires coming into your home, and will mercilessly use that stranglehold to kill competition, no matter how innovative, useful, or popular. It doesn't matter, because gosh darn it, don't you want to watch HBO instead?
I'm actually surprised at how quickly some of these platforms like the iPhone have developed completely closed programming environments with barely a peep of protest from the normally pretty libertarian tech crowd.
I'm not. The iPhone was not designed for wizards. It was designed for muggles. The tech community gave up on the slathering flesh-beasts that beat upon the keyboards of the world long ago...
any software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.
You're suggesting Facebook and Apple actually care about your privacy? Are you from the past?
With a Windows Mobile phone, you can download and install a .cab from anywhere you want. If it's not signed you get a brief warning message, and that's it.
Yeah. Most people didn't plunk down $400 for their phone and/or don't have a "windows mobile" phone. Most phones used by consumers today are locked.
Sidekicks -- They have a "marketplace too". Locked down. T-mobile phones. Locked down. AT&T phones. Locked down. Almost every phone in existance has a "market place" equivalent, which has an approval process. Suddenly the iPhone comes along and people were expecting sunshine and kittens?
Apple's managed to get more than fifty thousand apps through the process and onto the store. Nobody's going to write stories about the ones that went smoothly.
Welcome to IT, where we don't care how often you get it right, because your job is to fix it when it goes wrong.
something about "exceeding sane limitations of the electromagnetic spectrum".
Actually, it was a prank call. The "electromagnetic spectrum" is not a finite resource. It would be more practical to say "with existing technology and certain economic factors, paying $70 for this is flatly unfeasible."
I would like to take this moment to remind everyone how fucking cool America is for landing on the moon.
Yes. And I'd like to remind everyone how fucking cool the rest of the world is, for not bombing us to hell and gone for our arrogant viewpoints.
...creator Jim Storer, who hadn't given the game a moment's thought since he left high school, and wasn't aware of the phenomenon he spawned.
Yeah. It's always strange when a geek escapes the darkness of the computer cave to explore the big blue room and doesn't come back. Worse, if he does come back, he'll discover that he's become stupider than before.
This story is important because it crossed the line from possible, to (evidently) actual.
We knew it was possible, nay probable, from the day these machines were first used. It's like me pointing to a dark cloud coming and saying "Gee, looks like it's going to rain." Why is it suddenly news when I finally get wet?
Oh noes, electronic records can be faked by people who have physical access to the machines. Didn't see THAT one coming.