I am an electrical engineer and work in the utiltiy industry. My firm recently performed a series of studies on this very topic. Believe me, this subject has been studied *extensively* in many different ways by the utility companies. If anyone understands TCO it is the utilities. In almost all situations, even where subjected to the worst weather conditions, it does not work out financially for the utility companies to put the lines underground. There are plenty of factors besides money that can influence the decision (e.g. neighborhoods conerned about aesthetics, customers concerned about reliability, etc). In some locations, franchise agreements require underground installations in certain areas. In other cases, some customers are willing to pay for it for percieved reliability improvements (difficult to prove).
We studied conversion of some existing neighborhoods for a few cities in the midwestern U.S. a couple of years ago. The costs for conversion in those cases were unmanageable. Conversion has been done in a (very) few small areas where neighborhoods were willing to pay for it. Other programs that have been implemented include thoroughfare visual improvements and residential service drop undergrounding. These can make sense in some circumstances.
There was an excellent article in IEEE Spectrum (a very respected electrical trade publication) a few months back about pluggable hybrids. That has the potential to be the best near-term solution.
Not sure about the ethanol part - maybe we can make that work too, but it takes so much energy to make fertilizer to grow grain to make ethanol - it is a very inefficient process and uses lots of petroleum.
To my knowlege (and I am an electrical engineer), a very miniscule portion of our power is being generated by so called distributed generation. Why? Because in most cases it doesn't work financially. As un-sexy as they are, large power plants are much more efficient and cost effective than most small DG installations (including solar).
At present, nuclear power is our ONLY feasable solution to the looming environmental crisis. We have the technology now. We've proven it can be cost-effective. The fuel supply is nearly limitless with reprocessing and new reactor technologies. We can build electric cars now, and eliminate our dependence on foreign oil now.
What are we waiting for???? The time to act is NOW.
I was there in June, the day they closed access to the rock face. I am a mainlander, and don't get to Hawai'i often. I remember being rather disappointed at the time. Thought about going anyway, but decided better. Now I see why the park officials are so cautious. My visit was VERY worthwhile regardless.
I was at Kiluaea in June and they and just closed access to tourists anywhere near the rock face due to fear of collapse. I was rather disappointed at the time. Now I see why...
The IMAP implementation in TB is much smoother than Mozilla. Behavior in Mozilla is not consistent - hangs opening folders and emails are common. TB always works.
I have some systems that won't connect at all after installing SP2, others that I can make work by re-installing the network stack and others that don't have any problems at all.
On the VPN concentrator, if I disable the requirement to "see" the Cisco default client firewall, then there is no problem. But I don't like to work that way. It seems SP2 is preventing the necessary communication and there is no way to truly disable the SP2 firewall functions. Cisco claims to be working on work-around for the problem.
My local cable doesn't have NASA TV any more. They replaced it with something useful like UPN. So I have to get the internet feed. Well it worked just fine up until they first thought it had landed and then then it died and I couldn't reconnect for about 15 minutes. Probably too much load on the servers? Sometimes the quality seemed as if it was being broadcast from mars.
There did seem to be a fair number of technical glitches between the anchors. You would think if they could land this thing on mars...
I did like the style overall except for the lack of audio.
My first three comptuers were TRS-80's. For my first model I, I was too cheap to buy the expansion box from RS, so I bought a clone circuit board and a box of chips from an ad in a magazine. That allowed me to upgrade to 48K of RAM. I borrowed a friend's Level II ROM and burned a copy on my home-made EPROM programmer. Wow, I had forgotten about all of that! Sniff. That was true hacking.
I still have that system, and as of a year or so ago when I last fired it up, it still worked.
I have fond memories of many, many after-school hours typing hundreds of pages of BASIC code for games out of various magazines and then spending coutless hours debugging and finding my many typo's. Those were the days.
How 'bout a quick tutorial from someone who knows pgp or gpg or MD5 on how to use it to figure out if my recent install is trojaned?
Also, the CERT advisory doesn't give any fixes, it just gives the signatures. It doesn't seem like installing a good version would eliminate the trojan.
Slashdot Mirror
I just renewed my contract with Sprint and the price is about half (combined with local loop) what I was paying three years ago.
I am an electrical engineer and work in the utiltiy industry. My firm recently performed a series of studies on this very topic. Believe me, this subject has been studied *extensively* in many different ways by the utility companies. If anyone understands TCO it is the utilities. In almost all situations, even where subjected to the worst weather conditions, it does not work out financially for the utility companies to put the lines underground. There are plenty of factors besides money that can influence the decision (e.g. neighborhoods conerned about aesthetics, customers concerned about reliability, etc). In some locations, franchise agreements require underground installations in certain areas. In other cases, some customers are willing to pay for it for percieved reliability improvements (difficult to prove).
We studied conversion of some existing neighborhoods for a few cities in the midwestern U.S. a couple of years ago. The costs for conversion in those cases were unmanageable. Conversion has been done in a (very) few small areas where neighborhoods were willing to pay for it. Other programs that have been implemented include thoroughfare visual improvements and residential service drop undergrounding. These can make sense in some circumstances.
There was an excellent article in IEEE Spectrum (a very respected electrical trade publication) a few months back about pluggable hybrids. That has the potential to be the best near-term solution.
Not sure about the ethanol part - maybe we can make that work too, but it takes so much energy to make fertilizer to grow grain to make ethanol - it is a very inefficient process and uses lots of petroleum.
What is we're supposed to have learned exactly?
To my knowlege (and I am an electrical engineer), a very miniscule portion of our power is being generated by so called distributed generation. Why? Because in most cases it doesn't work financially. As un-sexy as they are, large power plants are much more efficient and cost effective than most small DG installations (including solar).
At present, nuclear power is our ONLY feasable solution to the looming environmental crisis. We have the technology now. We've proven it can be cost-effective. The fuel supply is nearly limitless with reprocessing and new reactor technologies. We can build electric cars now, and eliminate our dependence on foreign oil now.
What are we waiting for???? The time to act is NOW.
I was there in June, the day they closed access to the rock face. I am a mainlander, and don't get to Hawai'i often. I remember being rather disappointed at the time. Thought about going anyway, but decided better. Now I see why the park officials are so cautious. My visit was VERY worthwhile regardless.
I was at Kiluaea in June and they and just closed access to tourists anywhere near the rock face due to fear of collapse. I was rather disappointed at the time. Now I see why...
The IMAP implementation in TB is much smoother than Mozilla. Behavior in Mozilla is not consistent - hangs opening folders and emails are common. TB always works.
I have some systems that won't connect at all after installing SP2, others that I can make work by re-installing the network stack and others that don't have any problems at all.
On the VPN concentrator, if I disable the requirement to "see" the Cisco default client firewall, then there is no problem. But I don't like to work that way. It seems SP2 is preventing the necessary communication and there is no way to truly disable the SP2 firewall functions. Cisco claims to be working on work-around for the problem.
My local cable doesn't have NASA TV any more. They replaced it with something useful like UPN. So I have to get the internet feed. Well it worked just fine up until they first thought it had landed and then then it died and I couldn't reconnect for about 15 minutes. Probably too much load on the servers? Sometimes the quality seemed as if it was being broadcast from mars.
There did seem to be a fair number of technical glitches between the anchors. You would think if they could land this thing on mars...
I did like the style overall except for the lack of audio.
My first three comptuers were TRS-80's. For my first model I, I was too cheap to buy the expansion box from RS, so I bought a clone circuit board and a box of chips from an ad in a magazine. That allowed me to upgrade to 48K of RAM. I borrowed a friend's Level II ROM and burned a copy on my home-made EPROM programmer. Wow, I had forgotten about all of that! Sniff. That was true hacking.
I still have that system, and as of a year or so ago when I last fired it up, it still worked.
I have fond memories of many, many after-school hours typing hundreds of pages of BASIC code for games out of various magazines and then spending coutless hours debugging and finding my many typo's. Those were the days.
How 'bout a quick tutorial from someone who knows pgp or gpg or MD5 on how to use it to figure out if my recent install is trojaned?
Also, the CERT advisory doesn't give any fixes, it just gives the signatures. It doesn't seem like installing a good version would eliminate the trojan.
HP/Redhat should first fix their drivers. The DL380 integrated array controller does not support tape drives on RedHat.