Why is the landlord at fault? When I owned a rental property, I only visited the property once every 6 months or so, more than enough time for someone to build a meth-lab or accumulate explosives.
Should I be required to invade the tenants privacy more often and visit the tenants monthly? Weekly? Daily?
Your Psion 5 is not going to exist, too think for modern sensibilities.
Yeah, I suspect you are correct, but what I want my phone for most is ssh so I don't have to lug a netbook around whenever I'm on-call and need to fix something. I'd much rather lug a (relatively) thick phone that is still pocketable around than a full netbook.
Only because the music industry was busy fighting the Internet instead of innovating, while Apple did. I mean, seriously... shouldn't the music industry have come up with iTunes WAY before Apple?
They did, or rather, someone did back in 1999 or so, but the music industry shut them down. Mp3.com was one of the early online music distributors -- they had a great business model -- they kept your existing music library online (verified by making you load the original CD) and whenever you bought a physical CD from them you could download or stream it online instantly.
It was a great service, I bought dozens of albums from them, but I guess the music industry thought that DRM locked solutions were the way to maximize profits.
While it's true they can find geographic sales data from distributors, Advertisers are willing to pay more money for "Small Business Owners earning > $200K/year with interests in technology and basket weaving living outside of mid-west small towns, driving a BMW or Mercedes as their primary car" than for "People who live in smaller towns that frequent mall book stores, primarily in the mid-west"
but you are paying full-price for the magazine, but when you subscribe, you're often paying 50 - 80% (up to 100%) off of newsstand prices. Magazines can do that because they can quantify you to advertisers, and can often provide demographic information to advertisers either from a survey that you fill out, or by correlating you with other marketing databases.
Apple is not so much a "digital kiosk" as they are a digital "Publisher's Clearinghouse" that sells magazine subscriptions.
Maybe publishers should let people pay a higher price to remain anonymous, or a lower price if they allow their personal information to be sent to the publisher.
I'm currently looking into which android phone to buy and found this to be amazing for comparing them.
That tool would be amazingly useful if it had a way to search by feature rather than only by model name. I want a phone with a keyboard, but I don't know all of the phone models that have a keyboard.
While I'm posting -- which Android phone has the best keyboard? I have the original Droid now and the keyboard sucks -- it's way too flat. The Droid 2 seems to be a little better, but still not that great. My Blackberry keyboard is much better than my Droid keyboard, but still not all that great.
My ideal phone keyboard would be something like the old Psion 5 keyboard. it seems like something like that would be possible in a form factor a little thicker than my droid since the keys can be depressed when the phone is in its folded state.
I normally wouldn't take issue to this, however their wording and context makes it sound like people will be able to see updates within 60 seconds. While it may update on their end within 60 seconds, after your DNS Servers cache, operating system's cache and the browsers cache, you are looking at atleast an hour depending on what setup you have. Fix it Amazon.
What is wrong with what they wrote? Route 53 isn't designed for end users who don't understand all of the caching points of DNS entries -- if I swing my DNS entry to point to another server IP, based on what they wrote, I know that within 60 seconds I'll start to see clients hitting that new server. And I know that I'll still see lingering hits at the old IP even after 24 hours.
Amazon has no control over client side caching -- TTL is advisory, not mandatory.
No more trusting amazon for web services. If they can't sustain the DOS (political), how can we trust? Lean from Wikileaks.
Ok, let's see what we can learn from Wikileaks. To me it sounds like we learned that if you violate the Terms of Use of an ISP, then you lose your website. But I think that you learned that Amazon is bad and some other ISP would have acted differently.
I'll make a deal with you - identify a single ISP within the USA that would be willing to host Wikileaks content at around the same price point as Amazon EC2 (i.e. less than $200/month) and I'll buy the webhosting and mirror the Wikileaks site. If you think the $200 price cap is unreasonable, let me know what a reasonable price would be.
If the site gets shut down and my hosting costs are not refunded, then you pay that portion of the costs.
I live in Chicago. In the burbs there is a Route 53. It's heavily congested and often under construction. Is this what Amazon is offering?
I live in Holland, Michigan. There's also a route 53 here. It's well known for the glory holes, where a guy can get an anonymous blowjob, right next door to the geek compound.
I hope the Amazon Route 53 is more like the Michigan one - that one sounds much more fun.
Exactly, they showed their true colors in the way that they handled the WikiLeaks affair / pressure from the government. Thanks, but NO THANKS Amazon!
Yes, it's amazing that a US based company would refuse to host content that has been deemed illegal by the US Government. Their terms of use are pretty clear...or we otherwise determine, in our sole discretion, that you may be using AWS Services for any illegal purpose or in a way that violates the law or violates, infringes, or misappropriates the rights of any third party; (viii) we determine, in our sole discretion, that our provision of any of the Services to you is prohibited by applicable law, or has become impractical or unfeasible for any legal or regulatory reason. The US Gov't has declared that the data is illegal, so it seems that Amazon was well within its rights to enforce their ToU -- especially since they would likely face legal percussions from the US Gov't if they did not take down the content -- or at the very least would be subject to repeated DoS attacks.
While I think Wikileaks is doing the right thing, I don't think there is any dispute that the diplomatic cables were obtained illegally and are not legal for distribution in this country.
What did you expect Amazon to do? Is there another ISP in this country that would keep the content up? Not that it would matter after the US Gov't got their bandwidth provider to pull the plug out of national security concerns.
The article says the ship weighs 10,000 tons. Scrap steel is worth around 15 cents a pound, so the whole ship is only worth around $3M as scrap. They said that they are hoping to get $1.5M for it, but I'm not sure that's realistic after the towing, drydock and labor costs are added in (though I guess if they tow it to some third world country for scrapping, the docking and labor fees would be minimal)
Yes, I have described all facets of my security in 2 sentences and it consists entirely of port access control on my switches. Oh, I forgot to include the admin passwords for the switches, they are all set to "RngZr". Come hack me, please.
It doesn't, but they way I understood it, you had the printers on the vlan because they didn't support 802.1x anyway.
I have the printers on their own VLAN because they don't support 802.1x, and I don't allow any non-802.1x devices on the corporate VLAN. Well, another reason is because IT doesn't maintain the printers, an outside company does. I have yet another VLAN for other miscellaneous non-802.1x devices (like building control systems).
Your switches are probably better than most (by definition, if you can run 802.1x), in many cases a device can negotiate "trunk" (aka another switch) status on any random port. Even on devices which can disable it for all but a specified set of ports, that oftentimes is an option that must be enabled.
They are just run of the mill Cisco switches -- call me a Cisco fan-boy, but I wouldn't implement a secure corporate network on anything else.
Plus vmware and other virtual adapter type applications cause real heartache in environments like yours (cause even a non switched endpoint can have multiple mac's and don't necessary support 802.1x).
Yes, VMWare can be a headache, but so far we've been able to enforce a simple policy....If someone wants to run VMWare, they can use NAT networking and run as many VM's as they please on their computer. If they need a bridged network, they can live on the guest VLAN and VPN in to the corporate net when they need inside access.
Locking the mac to a given switch port achieves the same functionality.
how does locking a MAC to a particular port prevent someone from spoofing that printer's MAC on his laptop and plugging into the same switch port to gain the same network access that the printer had?
My point is that unless your very careful the vlan probably isn't going to give you 100% protection in this regard. Vlan tagging tends to be more a "gentleman's agreement" type protocol. A device which talks MSTP could very well just change its vlan tagging.
I'm not aware of any mechanism to allow an endpoint to access another VLAN on an switch port set as an "access" port rather than a "trunk" port. I'm not using tagged VLANs for endpoints.
Well a lot of people fail to remember that the majority of the Ethernet switches being sold today only send packets to the specific port the endpoint is on, unless its a broadcase/multicast packet. This means that plugging joe random promiscuous mode adapter into a switch won't give you visibility to the whole network.
I'm not worried about someone snooping packets (well, I am, but that's not why I use 802.1x). I'm more worried about someone plugging into the corporate VLAN and having unfettered access to try to hack into all of my endpoints. While we do have antivirus and a pretty decent patching policy, I'm not really ready to declare that all of my hosts are immune to attack. Network access control is just one layer in my security and keeping non 802.1x authenticated devices off of my main corporate network is trivial to implement and prevents someone from spoofing my printer's MAC address to give him full network access.
You said but one of the printers on the vlan could be compromised and you would never know then you said I'm not sure what extra security you might be gaining putting the printers on their own vlan instead of on the regular network Didn't you answer your own question? By putting my printers on their own VLAN than can't reach any other hosts on the network (except for the DMZ mail server to send out problem notifications), then there's not a whole lot a compromised printer can do to my network.
Using your logic, I guess I can get rid of my internet firewall and don't even need a router since the very nature of ethernet switches won't let any outsiders snoop my traffic? I mean really, what possible harm could someone do if all they can do is send/receive traffic to any port on any of my internal hosts?
Cloud computing doesn't necessarily mean "access from anywhere". Admin (ssh, rdesktop) access to my EC2 instances is only available from our corporate network. (except the EC2 control panel itself, but that password is only known to 2 IT server admins who already access servers at the office via VPN from home, so I see no additional risk to them accessing the EC2 control panel).
How to protect about this? Cisco's core routers have plenty of tools to deal with rogue devices (MAC address locking per port, healthchecking, etc.) Wireless networks take some more doing, but can be just as well locked down.
Agreed -- we use 802.1x authentication on all of our switch pots, only domain computers are allowed on the network. We do MAC address bypass on specific ports for known network printers, etc, but they go on a limited access VLAN. No one outside of IT can receive a printer in the mail and just plug it in and have it on our network.
I thought all midsized and larger businesses used some sort of port control to control network access?
Small business are usually so lax in computer security that there are so many holes in their network making it unnecessary to send them a Trojan Printer to hack in. I've done work for a number of small businesses that use 40 bit WEP to "protect" their Wifi network -- and no amount of persuading from me will make them change it.
No serious CIO or sysadmin puts all their critical services and ultra sensitive data on someone else's hardware, trusting their entire future to Company Z's business plan. Hell, I didn't hear about *any* security in "the cloud" until 2 years after the cloud hype began.
Never put it on someone elses's hardware? Is that what you meant to write? Do you build your own computers? Do your own chipset fabrication? Solder up your own motherboards?
Unless they're mining silicon from the ground, turning it into chips and building it into a computer, every company runs their services and ultra-sensitive data on someone else's hardware. It's just that some companies draw the line between what services they buy externally and what they support internally in different places.
I know of a number of companies that are running entirely on Rackspace and Amazon EC2 cloud solutions. The cloud providers have no root/Adminisrator access, but have full physical access to the machines, and take care of all hardware support.
Of course, the cloud term is thrown around pretty loosely and maybe cloud hosted servers aren't really "Cloud Computing" - I'd never build an important company application as a cloud App that depends on someone else's API (i.e. Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services) that is subject to change and doesn't run anywhere else.
Anybody can see that he meant "one nine after the decimal point". The 99 is a given.
When talking about service uptime, "nine's" has a specific meaning -- one 9 means 90% availability, or conversely, means 36.5 allowable days of downtime per year.
So yes, anyone can try to figure out what he meant, but unless someone points out that what he said was not what he meant, he may never know.
Granted, solar generated electricity becomes economically unattractive at higher latitudes (or even physically impractical in long winter nights). Solar power has a dubious economic payback even in areas with good solar potential.
Conveniently, most of the world's population is between 45 degrees N and S latitudes so solar still has great potential to aid in power production.
Solar hot water is practical even in Alaska (~ 60 degrees N) throughout much of the year - perhaps excluding Nov-Jan.
Freezing climates are not a problem - you can use an antifreeze solution in the collectors or use a drainback system that drains water from the system when the collectors are not operating and generating heat.
Evacuated tube solar collectors work quite well even in freezing temperatures since there's little heat loss to the environment.
While I agree that Nuclear is the best overall answer, I don't agree that Solar is not part of the solution.
I live in the mid-northern USA (San Francisco, CA). With less than 100 square meters of solar panels, I can generate enough power for all of my non-heating needs *and* 25KWH a day to power a Nissan Leaf through a 70 mile round-trip commute.
Even if I lived in the Northern USA in Seattle, I'd need 120 sq meters of panels, which would still fit on my roof. And I'd still have room on my patio roof for my solar hot water heater.
Granted, not everyone has roof space (i.e. apartment dwellers), but Solar could be an important part of power generation for many people (especially those in low density neighborhoods where they actually have a 70 mile commute -- my commute is 3 miles and is often by bike or train)
Of course, this brings up a similar problem for power companies - if everyone puts a 10 KW Solar array on their roof, they may run into the same capacity problems on a sunny day that they face during overnight car charging. (though that could be mediated by local storage (i.e. batteries at my house to store a few KWH of power that is used to charge my car at night) or by using an automated control system to dial-back the amount of power that my solar cells feed into the grid during peak generating times.
Just had some asbestos removed, and the ventilation system was using 50kW (5 x 10kW fan units). We had a 400A supply breaker installed by the electric board, it was 125A before that.
What size house do you have? Here is a HEPA negative exhaust fan rated at 2000CFM @ 2400 watts. So 50KW implies around 40,000CFM. (sorry for the non-metric units, but the fan was rated in CFM)
A 2000 sq ft house would have around 20,000 cubic feet of livable space, maybe 30K including attic. 50KW worth of fans would do a full-volume replacement around every minute.
When they did asbestos abatement at my office, they sized the units to have a full-volume replacement of air every 10 minutes (but were required to only do every 15 minutes) Is your house so leaky that they had to use so many fans to maintain adequate pressure?
I'm not sure why my political leanings matter...I just prefer to listen to facts. I'm not disputing the fact, I just want more information.
Since I'm in the middle of the SF Bay Area and neither me nor my neighbors in the region have been experiencing repeated brownouts, I'm just curious where all of these brownouts are happening. (note that I'm talking about brownouts, not the infamous rolling blackouts that did occur during energy deregulation)
It shouldn't be hard to answer, and the answer will be the same regardless of politics.
It's only a problem if power companies and politicians refuse to plan for it. There is a lot of slack capacity at night, but not enough to replace all cars with full-electric cars.
Solar could help (if workplace charging becomes commonplace), but the most viable proven solution right now is Nuclear. Getting Nuclear capacity in place before the onslaught of electric cars will take cooperation between the power industry and government.
The UK power distribution network works differently than in the USA.
In the UK, they tend to use large (up to ~1MW) substations that power a large number of houses (they can do this because the higher household voltage leads to less distribution power loss). In the USA, they use smaller pole mounted transformers (~16KVA- 100KVA) that serve a few houses. A few neighbors with high capacity charge stations can exceed the capacity of the transformer.
Another benefit of the UK model is that smart charging stations gives the power company more flexibility in distributing the load - it's easier to spread the load out from 5pm - 9am (or even all day long) since there may be 100 or more households in the substation with varying needs and commute times. In the US, if a few neighbors have to charge from 11pm - 5am, the power company may not be able to stagger the charge times enough to keep the load under the transformer capacity.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is the landlord at fault? When I owned a rental property, I only visited the property once every 6 months or so, more than enough time for someone to build a meth-lab or accumulate explosives.
Should I be required to invade the tenants privacy more often and visit the tenants monthly? Weekly? Daily?
Thanks!
Your Psion 5 is not going to exist, too think for modern sensibilities.
Yeah, I suspect you are correct, but what I want my phone for most is ssh so I don't have to lug a netbook around whenever I'm on-call and need to fix something. I'd much rather lug a (relatively) thick phone that is still pocketable around than a full netbook.
Only because the music industry was busy fighting the Internet instead of innovating, while Apple did. I mean, seriously... shouldn't the music industry have come up with iTunes WAY before Apple?
They did, or rather, someone did back in 1999 or so, but the music industry shut them down. Mp3.com was one of the early online music distributors -- they had a great business model -- they kept your existing music library online (verified by making you load the original CD) and whenever you bought a physical CD from them you could download or stream it online instantly.
It was a great service, I bought dozens of albums from them, but I guess the music industry thought that DRM locked solutions were the way to maximize profits.
While it's true they can find geographic sales data from distributors, Advertisers are willing to pay more money for "Small Business Owners earning > $200K/year with interests in technology and basket weaving living outside of mid-west small towns, driving a BMW or Mercedes as their primary car" than for "People who live in smaller towns that frequent mall book stores, primarily in the mid-west"
but you are paying full-price for the magazine, but when you subscribe, you're often paying 50 - 80% (up to 100%) off of newsstand prices. Magazines can do that because they can quantify you to advertisers, and can often provide demographic information to advertisers either from a survey that you fill out, or by correlating you with other marketing databases.
Apple is not so much a "digital kiosk" as they are a digital "Publisher's Clearinghouse" that sells magazine subscriptions.
Maybe publishers should let people pay a higher price to remain anonymous, or a lower price if they allow their personal information to be sent to the publisher.
I'm currently looking into which android phone to buy and found this to be amazing for comparing them.
That tool would be amazingly useful if it had a way to search by feature rather than only by model name. I want a phone with a keyboard, but I don't know all of the phone models that have a keyboard.
While I'm posting -- which Android phone has the best keyboard? I have the original Droid now and the keyboard sucks -- it's way too flat. The Droid 2 seems to be a little better, but still not that great. My Blackberry keyboard is much better than my Droid keyboard, but still not all that great.
My ideal phone keyboard would be something like the old Psion 5 keyboard. it seems like something like that would be possible in a form factor a little thicker than my droid since the keys can be depressed when the phone is in its folded state.
I normally wouldn't take issue to this, however their wording and context makes it sound like people will be able to see updates within 60 seconds. While it may update on their end within 60 seconds, after your DNS Servers cache, operating system's cache and the browsers cache, you are looking at atleast an hour depending on what setup you have. Fix it Amazon.
What is wrong with what they wrote? Route 53 isn't designed for end users who don't understand all of the caching points of DNS entries -- if I swing my DNS entry to point to another server IP, based on what they wrote, I know that within 60 seconds I'll start to see clients hitting that new server. And I know that I'll still see lingering hits at the old IP even after 24 hours.
Amazon has no control over client side caching -- TTL is advisory, not mandatory.
No more trusting amazon for web services. If they can't sustain the DOS (political), how can we trust? Lean from Wikileaks.
Ok, let's see what we can learn from Wikileaks. To me it sounds like we learned that if you violate the Terms of Use of an ISP, then you lose your website. But I think that you learned that Amazon is bad and some other ISP would have acted differently.
I'll make a deal with you - identify a single ISP within the USA that would be willing to host Wikileaks content at around the same price point as Amazon EC2 (i.e. less than $200/month) and I'll buy the webhosting and mirror the Wikileaks site. If you think the $200 price cap is unreasonable, let me know what a reasonable price would be.
If the site gets shut down and my hosting costs are not refunded, then you pay that portion of the costs.
Sound fair?
I live in Chicago. In the burbs there is a Route 53. It's heavily congested and often under construction. Is this what Amazon is offering?
I live in Holland, Michigan. There's also a route 53 here. It's well known for the glory holes, where a guy can get an anonymous blowjob, right next door to the geek compound.
I hope the Amazon Route 53 is more like the Michigan one - that one sounds much more fun.
Exactly, they showed their true colors in the way that they handled the WikiLeaks affair / pressure from the government. Thanks, but NO THANKS Amazon!
Yes, it's amazing that a US based company would refuse to host content that has been deemed illegal by the US Government. Their terms of use are pretty clear ...or we otherwise determine, in our sole discretion, that you may be using AWS Services for any illegal purpose or in a way that violates the law or violates, infringes, or misappropriates the rights of any third party; (viii) we determine, in our sole discretion, that our provision of any of the Services to you is prohibited by applicable law, or has become impractical or unfeasible for any legal or regulatory reason. The US Gov't has declared that the data is illegal, so it seems that Amazon was well within its rights to enforce their ToU -- especially since they would likely face legal percussions from the US Gov't if they did not take down the content -- or at the very least would be subject to repeated DoS attacks.
While I think Wikileaks is doing the right thing, I don't think there is any dispute that the diplomatic cables were obtained illegally and are not legal for distribution in this country.
What did you expect Amazon to do? Is there another ISP in this country that would keep the content up? Not that it would matter after the US Gov't got their bandwidth provider to pull the plug out of national security concerns.
The article says the ship weighs 10,000 tons. Scrap steel is worth around 15 cents a pound, so the whole ship is only worth around $3M as scrap. They said that they are hoping to get $1.5M for it, but I'm not sure that's realistic after the towing, drydock and labor costs are added in (though I guess if they tow it to some third world country for scrapping, the docking and labor fees would be minimal)
Yes, I have described all facets of my security in 2 sentences and it consists entirely of port access control on my switches. Oh, I forgot to include the admin passwords for the switches, they are all set to "RngZr". Come hack me, please.
It doesn't, but they way I understood it, you had the printers on the vlan because they didn't support 802.1x anyway.
I have the printers on their own VLAN because they don't support 802.1x, and I don't allow any non-802.1x devices on the corporate VLAN. Well, another reason is because IT doesn't maintain the printers, an outside company does. I have yet another VLAN for other miscellaneous non-802.1x devices (like building control systems).
Your switches are probably better than most (by definition, if you can run 802.1x), in many cases a device can negotiate "trunk" (aka another switch) status on any random port. Even on devices which can disable it for all but a specified set of ports, that oftentimes is an option that must be enabled.
They are just run of the mill Cisco switches -- call me a Cisco fan-boy, but I wouldn't implement a secure corporate network on anything else.
Plus vmware and other virtual adapter type applications cause real heartache in environments like yours (cause even a non switched endpoint can have multiple mac's and don't necessary support 802.1x).
Yes, VMWare can be a headache, but so far we've been able to enforce a simple policy....If someone wants to run VMWare, they can use NAT networking and run as many VM's as they please on their computer. If they need a bridged network, they can live on the guest VLAN and VPN in to the corporate net when they need inside access.
Locking the mac to a given switch port achieves the same functionality.
how does locking a MAC to a particular port prevent someone from spoofing that printer's MAC on his laptop and plugging into the same switch port to gain the same network access that the printer had?
My point is that unless your very careful the vlan probably isn't going to give you 100% protection in this regard. Vlan tagging tends to be more a "gentleman's agreement" type protocol. A device which talks MSTP could very well just change its vlan tagging.
I'm not aware of any mechanism to allow an endpoint to access another VLAN on an switch port set as an "access" port rather than a "trunk" port. I'm not using tagged VLANs for endpoints.
Well a lot of people fail to remember that the majority of the Ethernet switches being sold today only send packets to the specific port the endpoint is on, unless its a broadcase/multicast packet. This means that plugging joe random promiscuous mode adapter into a switch won't give you visibility to the whole network.
I'm not worried about someone snooping packets (well, I am, but that's not why I use 802.1x). I'm more worried about someone plugging into the corporate VLAN and having unfettered access to try to hack into all of my endpoints. While we do have antivirus and a pretty decent patching policy, I'm not really ready to declare that all of my hosts are immune to attack. Network access control is just one layer in my security and keeping non 802.1x authenticated devices off of my main corporate network is trivial to implement and prevents someone from spoofing my printer's MAC address to give him full network access.
You said but one of the printers on the vlan could be compromised and you would never know then you said I'm not sure what extra security you might be gaining putting the printers on their own vlan instead of on the regular network Didn't you answer your own question? By putting my printers on their own VLAN than can't reach any other hosts on the network (except for the DMZ mail server to send out problem notifications), then there's not a whole lot a compromised printer can do to my network.
Using your logic, I guess I can get rid of my internet firewall and don't even need a router since the very nature of ethernet switches won't let any outsiders snoop my traffic? I mean really, what possible harm could someone do if all they can do is send/receive traffic to any port on any of my internal hosts?
Cloud computing doesn't necessarily mean "access from anywhere". Admin (ssh, rdesktop) access to my EC2 instances is only available from our corporate network. (except the EC2 control panel itself, but that password is only known to 2 IT server admins who already access servers at the office via VPN from home, so I see no additional risk to them accessing the EC2 control panel).
How to protect about this? Cisco's core routers have plenty of tools to deal with rogue devices (MAC address locking per port, healthchecking, etc.) Wireless networks take some more doing, but can be just as well locked down.
Agreed -- we use 802.1x authentication on all of our switch pots, only domain computers are allowed on the network. We do MAC address bypass on specific ports for known network printers, etc, but they go on a limited access VLAN. No one outside of IT can receive a printer in the mail and just plug it in and have it on our network.
I thought all midsized and larger businesses used some sort of port control to control network access?
Small business are usually so lax in computer security that there are so many holes in their network making it unnecessary to send them a Trojan Printer to hack in. I've done work for a number of small businesses that use 40 bit WEP to "protect" their Wifi network -- and no amount of persuading from me will make them change it.
No serious CIO or sysadmin puts all their critical services and ultra sensitive data on someone else's hardware, trusting their entire future to Company Z's business plan. Hell, I didn't hear about *any* security in "the cloud" until 2 years after the cloud hype began.
Never put it on someone elses's hardware? Is that what you meant to write? Do you build your own computers? Do your own chipset fabrication? Solder up your own motherboards?
Unless they're mining silicon from the ground, turning it into chips and building it into a computer, every company runs their services and ultra-sensitive data on someone else's hardware. It's just that some companies draw the line between what services they buy externally and what they support internally in different places.
I know of a number of companies that are running entirely on Rackspace and Amazon EC2 cloud solutions. The cloud providers have no root/Adminisrator access, but have full physical access to the machines, and take care of all hardware support.
Of course, the cloud term is thrown around pretty loosely and maybe cloud hosted servers aren't really "Cloud Computing" - I'd never build an important company application as a cloud App that depends on someone else's API (i.e. Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services) that is subject to change and doesn't run anywhere else.
Anybody can see that he meant "one nine after the decimal point". The 99 is a given.
When talking about service uptime, "nine's" has a specific meaning -- one 9 means 90% availability, or conversely, means 36.5 allowable days of downtime per year.
So yes, anyone can try to figure out what he meant, but unless someone points out that what he said was not what he meant, he may never know.
Granted, solar generated electricity becomes economically unattractive at higher latitudes (or even physically impractical in long winter nights). Solar power has a dubious economic payback even in areas with good solar potential.
Conveniently, most of the world's population is between 45 degrees N and S latitudes so solar still has great potential to aid in power production.
Solar hot water is practical even in Alaska (~ 60 degrees N) throughout much of the year - perhaps excluding Nov-Jan.
Freezing climates are not a problem - you can use an antifreeze solution in the collectors or use a drainback system that drains water from the system when the collectors are not operating and generating heat.
Evacuated tube solar collectors work quite well even in freezing temperatures since there's little heat loss to the environment.
While I agree that Nuclear is the best overall answer, I don't agree that Solar is not part of the solution.
I live in the mid-northern USA (San Francisco, CA). With less than 100 square meters of solar panels, I can generate enough power for all of my non-heating needs *and* 25KWH a day to power a Nissan Leaf through a 70 mile round-trip commute.
Even if I lived in the Northern USA in Seattle, I'd need 120 sq meters of panels, which would still fit on my roof. And I'd still have room on my patio roof for my solar hot water heater.
Granted, not everyone has roof space (i.e. apartment dwellers), but Solar could be an important part of power generation for many people (especially those in low density neighborhoods where they actually have a 70 mile commute -- my commute is 3 miles and is often by bike or train)
Of course, this brings up a similar problem for power companies - if everyone puts a 10 KW Solar array on their roof, they may run into the same capacity problems on a sunny day that they face during overnight car charging. (though that could be mediated by local storage (i.e. batteries at my house to store a few KWH of power that is used to charge my car at night) or by using an automated control system to dial-back the amount of power that my solar cells feed into the grid during peak generating times.
Just had some asbestos removed, and the ventilation system was using 50kW (5 x 10kW fan units). We had a 400A supply breaker installed by the electric board, it was 125A before that.
What size house do you have? Here is a HEPA negative exhaust fan rated at 2000CFM @ 2400 watts. So 50KW implies around 40,000CFM. (sorry for the non-metric units, but the fan was rated in CFM)
A 2000 sq ft house would have around 20,000 cubic feet of livable space, maybe 30K including attic. 50KW worth of fans would do a full-volume replacement around every minute.
When they did asbestos abatement at my office, they sized the units to have a full-volume replacement of air every 10 minutes (but were required to only do every 15 minutes) Is your house so leaky that they had to use so many fans to maintain adequate pressure?
I'm not sure why my political leanings matter...I just prefer to listen to facts. I'm not disputing the fact, I just want more information.
Since I'm in the middle of the SF Bay Area and neither me nor my neighbors in the region have been experiencing repeated brownouts, I'm just curious where all of these brownouts are happening. (note that I'm talking about brownouts, not the infamous rolling blackouts that did occur during energy deregulation)
It shouldn't be hard to answer, and the answer will be the same regardless of politics.
It's only a problem if power companies and politicians refuse to plan for it. There is a lot of slack capacity at night, but not enough to replace all cars with full-electric cars.
Solar could help (if workplace charging becomes commonplace), but the most viable proven solution right now is Nuclear. Getting Nuclear capacity in place before the onslaught of electric cars will take cooperation between the power industry and government.
The UK power distribution network works differently than in the USA.
In the UK, they tend to use large (up to ~1MW) substations that power a large number of houses (they can do this because the higher household voltage leads to less distribution power loss). In the USA, they use smaller pole mounted transformers (~16KVA- 100KVA) that serve a few houses. A few neighbors with high capacity charge stations can exceed the capacity of the transformer.
Another benefit of the UK model is that smart charging stations gives the power company more flexibility in distributing the load - it's easier to spread the load out from 5pm - 9am (or even all day long) since there may be 100 or more households in the substation with varying needs and commute times. In the US, if a few neighbors have to charge from 11pm - 5am, the power company may not be able to stagger the charge times enough to keep the load under the transformer capacity.