Au contraire. There are a number of examples going on across the U.S. and Europe that are already showing savings. I just saw a comment this week about a program in Illinois that is seeing a 10% savings for participants in a real-time pricing program. That program covers 10,000 customers.
Its really telling (and a little sad) that so many people agreed and modded you insightful
Exactly. The posts that are getting modded up at the moment on this story and the posts that are being left to languish really show what side the Slashdot community is on. Shame - no chance of a meaningful discussion, just more mutual onanism on the part of the same people who already all agree and have their minds made up.
I can't speak for the guy you're responding to, but I did read it all. FYI, I work in the electric/utilities industry and am a Smart Grid specialist. No, not at a Sony lookalike, I'm in the wholesale electric quadrant (WEQ).
There are a lot of people taking this very seriously. For instance, NIST is holding a conference in Chicago next month to talk about cyber physical security design at the engineering (think CAD CAM jockeys) level. That's being followed up by a two day conference at their HQ in Gaithersburg MD to talk about CPS at a more strategic level. The first day will be hearing from other industries what they do in CPS space. The second day will be discussing how it applies to the electric industry. That's being followed by another two day workshop by the Cyber Security Working Group of the SGIP to start the next revision of the NIST IR 7628. That's just off the top of my head of what's coming up in the next few weeks.
Clasma this year started a new conference in their schedule, Grid Sec (or something like that). Clasma, if you don't recognize the name, is the crowd that runs Grid Week, Grid Interop, and Connectivity Week.
If you can think about problems and vulnerabilities, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine there are a bunch of people who do this day in, day out, and are passionate about it, who are also thinking about those same problems and more issues that you wouldn't begin to think about unless you are in the WEQ or REQ.
instead of...blah blah blah...you come up with...more blah blah blah
It's not an either/or situation. As you say, Sony is a large corporation. They can have multiple divisions working on different ideas simultaneously.
The rest of your argument is speculative. This is actually expected to bring the cost of electricity down. The (very basic) concepts on which this idea is built are already being used to delay building extremely expensive new generation and transmission.
For more information, search for price responsive demand. Just because Sony's name is attached to this particular story doesn't warrant throwing all these technologies out.
didn't bother to mention the use of Stuxnet...This was as prime an example of Cyberwarfare as you'll ever get
Agreed. And for all the reactions of "but there's nothing to worry about"...in that case, would somebody tell Anonymous to stop playing their bloody stupid games and making people think there is something to worry about.
Script kiddies hacking to protest "oppressive rules" over the internet (aside: is Anonymous really made up almost entirely of 14 year old entitled rich brats? Because that's what they come off sounding like) is just silly. See a problem, real or perceived, and act in a way guaranteed to exacerbate the response. Yep, that'll work.
Missing the point, you are. Read the post to which I responded. Read my post, carefully. See the irony in the activities of these self labelled "free thinkers"?
Many years ago, when I was doing my undergraduate degree, there was a group on the University campus that called themselves "Free Thinkers". They had regular meetings, handed out pamphlets, etc., etc. Everything they did was to proselytize how foolish Christianity was. That was the whole aim of all their meetings, every pamphlet they issued, all their talks and discussions and film nights - "Christianity doesn't make sense".
In fairness, they claimed to be against ALL religions.
...this answer. Or (D) let the students make up their own cards, like many posters are saying.
From the sound of your question, you don't care about students having all the formulas, etc., which is good. Many (most?) of my exams have been some combination of these suggestions, or open book. I think my undergrad university might've had a generic physics equation sheet, because I tended to get sheets with equations that I didn't even recognize. At least one of my exams included several pages of common VAX assembly instructions.
My more recent degrees have either had open book exams (those were the toughest) or "make your own notes". Usually restricted to how much you could bring into class.
The toughest exam I've had in the last four years (I'm halfway into my second graduate degree right now) was open book, open notes, you could look up your notes on your computer, etc. I even think you were allowed to get onto the internet. But the questions required sufficient understanding of the processes that if I'd tried to answer it by searching online I'd have run out of time before I was halfway through.
like transporting people 20km away from a city center and dumping them by the roadside, in the middle of the night if they so wish to, without needing to ensure that they have any means to get home safely. In fact we have had at least one death due to this already as a man froze to death.
Link? I searched and couldn't find this story.
And the GP is spot on. Not flamebait. It really is that simple.
Hahahaha...speaking of someone being a "preachy douche"...
Nonsense, of course. What he is...is a professional. Professionals do sit idly by while inferior people make extremely stupid decisions -- of which "going Microsoft" is most assuredly one. They utilize their best professional judgment, they protest, they complain, they argue, they do everything that they can to argue their case.
Why is "going Microsoft" most assuredly an extremely stupid decision, by the way? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know Microsoft is not well loved around here. But a professional will recognize that one solution doesn't fit all. For some companies it makes a lot of sense to go with all Microsoft. SBS is perfect for a small company, for instance.
I posted in another comment on this story (and many other people have made the same point) that there's not enough information to judge. (Hence the wildly speculative and frequently quite bitter assumptions and assertions that are being posted.) This company just might be make a sensible decision which the original submitter is too arrogant to see. He may not even be privy to all the details to know why it's a sensible decision. Like everyone else rambling on in this story. Yes, including me.
Exactly. As others have pointed out, there's a lot of information we just don't have.
* What does this guy do? I'm assuming something like a server admin, given the vehement reaction, but he could just as well be a network admin who really doesn't like Microsoft, for all I know. * What's with the company? I'm assuming they're quite small, or they wouldn't be able to do a 100% MS shop. How big a transition is this for them? Have they been all Linux before? Why the shift? * More to the point, they either have nothing, or they have something. Assuming the submitter is a tech guy who's very involved on a daily tasks basis, they surely can't be unaware of this, and are taking into account a need to retrain?
As for quitting over this, well, far be it from me to tell you how to live your life. Only you know what responsibilities you have (family?), how easily you can pack up and move if you have to, etc. But you're probably going to find something at any employer that you dislike or disagree with. Only you can decide if it's important enough to you that you want to risk a major life change.
Soon afterwards it was acquired by Slide and new features, including the ability to buy virtual gold bars with real money were added by the time it launched on its own website in December 2008.
So the timeline might be a bit in question. However, from the article comes this tidbit (this appears immediately before the "total amount in controversy..." quote in the summary, which is word for word from the article):
class action represents thousands of people across the who purchased gold and/or subscribed to a $4.95/month VIP subscription
So it's not only about people buying clothes for their pets. Furthermore, the article claims users were:
misled about how long the game would continue
It also was apparently a game that was accessible to and enjoyed by handicapped users. Given that handicapped users often can't play a lot of other games, and by all accounts this was an enjoyable game, and one which encouraged social interaction (a lot of handicapped people are severely restricted in their ability to get out of the house and/or socialize in the usual ways), I can understand their disappointment in it shutting down. (Not saying that this argument will necessarily hold weight in a lawsuit, but many people - bloggers, website posters, talk show hosts - seem to find it all too easy to forget there's always a human side to these stories.)
From a technical viewpoint, IT Administrators have an obligation to protect their infrastructure and their community members from threats, both perceived and actual. Consider for a moment the viewpoint that the messages from change.org were deceptive, harrassing, or threatening in some way, either politcally or technically. If so, was it correct to block change.org?
Yes it was.
I don't really know what was going on because I just couldn't finish that wall of text from Bennett Haselton (and I read books like "The Brothers Karamazov" and "War and Peace" for enjoyment). However, here's my viewpoint.
Your job is to provide an effective computer environment for students to use in the pursuit of education. That means they've got to work when a student needs to run a prescribed application, develop code for a computer science course, do research on sites like Lexis-Nexis or ProQuest, print stuff out, access course e-mail, etc.
Everything else is a perk. And for all the people yelling about freedom of speech, how'd you feel if you had a paper due and the network was down because the admins shrugged and turned a blind eye to some unofficial activities? If you want to get all pompous and sniff, "freedom of speech has a price", try imagining the reaction when you use that on your professor. Or your employer. If freedom of speech is so worthwhile that "it's worth the price", that means it's worth the price to pay for your own wireless/tethering network arrangement and do what you want on non-school/employer equipment.
If a student complains they need to access a site that's been censored, and their rationale is it's related to their course work somehow, at least tell them to get the professor to okay it. If the professor does, err, honestly I'm not sure where you'd go from there. Oh, yay, that leads nicely into my last point. Which is...
I'm not a lawyer. Nor are most of the people here giving you advice. Your university surely has lawyers, either on staff or on retainer. Ask them to give an opinion. That's their job. Yours is to keep the network up for course related work.
Yep, agree with both you and the grandparent poster.
I started wondering what was going on when I reached this gem in the summary:
Damages? Bull****. This is about killing the competition
Someone seems angry, unreasonably so. And as for that article:
Out of the six or so Honeywell models I tried, all were cheaply made and featured piss-poor UIs. I literally punched my wall after becoming so frustrated with one of the Prestige models.
Wow, someone else with anger management issues. He PUNCHED THE WALL because he was frustrated with a thermostat. Someone needs a kitten, except he'd probably throttle it in a blind rage.
This is about reliability. Not trying to be snarky, but asking an honest question: given that so many businesses who operate critical infrastructure that you (I'm assuming) rely on (power, water, etc) are privately owned, would you prefer they just go ahead and do what what they want?
And if the answer is yes, well, fair enough, I suppose. My answer to that question is no.
1. I'd imagine that the news that a major distribution has a new project leader is what people should be discussing. 2. Yes, it is shameful that Slashdot felt they should emphasize this in the headline. 3. But, to be fair, it is mentioned in the linked article...
She will be the first (what took them so long?) female leader of Fedora
4....which isn't any better. ("What took them so long?" Maybe because they had a habit of picking whoever was best for the job regardless of other characteristics?) 5. Futile discussion. Everyone is now focused on the sexism. Way to go, Slashdot editors. And Slashdot readers. And whoever wrote that quote in the linked article.
If there's one thing Linux suffers from in the eyes of the newcomer, it's too much choice, leading to confusion, subsequent frustration (with support) and returning to their hated-but-known Windows.
Alpha plus. You get it.
Ubuntu's...first job is to bring people into the Linux sphere, once they're accustomed to it, they can migrate out to other options
Well, no. Most people don't want to migrate to other options. It's a headache. It's not fun. It's risky. Pick your defense. But the thing is, there's got to be a really compelling reason for most people to want to go to the trouble to make a major shift in how they do things. It's hard enough to show the average user why they'd want to go to Linux. Once they get there, now you want them to migrate within the Linux realm?
A typical Slashdotter will see this as a good thing - plenty of choices, you can tweak and tune things to get what you want.
An average user will see this as a bad thing - too confusing, no clear direction, and what's going to be the next distro du jour? Forget it; it's not worth it.
That stinks, and I'm sorry for you. It sounds like you were in the wrong company, or hit the wrong manager, or something else was going on.
My first company (New Zealand) strongly, strongly, strongly encouraged me to get certified. They gave me a raise to anyone who completed a CNE or an MCSE.
My current company paid for my first master's degree, 100%. The department I was in at that time had more people doing 100% company funded graduate degrees than were not. Now I'm doing a second master's degree. Yep, they're paying 100% of that too. Same with the guy who sits next to me - Master's degree in Software Engineering. And one of the developers, who's finishing her MBA.
Some companies believe in the value of higher education. Some don't. I'm lucky to be in one that does.
By the way, we are all doing our degrees at physical campuses. But I know several people who've gone the University of Phoenix route.
I wondered that. More, I wondered just how the heck the topic came up in the class, unless you have some know-it-all little troll just waiting to show off what they know.
Ironically, this perfectly illustrates how a stand-up meeting has to be focused. If this had happened during a stand-up meeting, a good scrum master should've told him to leave it until after the meeting as it wasn't what they were there to discuss.
Slashdot Mirror
9:36 am - a story is posted on Slashdot: Megaupload Co-Founder Allowed Bail.
11:18 am - a story is posted about outages to high profile web sites.
And to think that people were asking what harm could it do to give the Megaupload guy access to the internet...
Au contraire. There are a number of examples going on across the U.S. and Europe that are already showing savings. I just saw a comment this week about a program in Illinois that is seeing a 10% savings for participants in a real-time pricing program. That program covers 10,000 customers.
Am I missing something?
Yes, yes you are, and so are all the people who modded up up.
Read the other replies.
Look up the definition of "extradition", "cooperation", and "treaty".
Find where it states the FBI operated on foreign soil.
Its really telling (and a little sad) that so many people agreed and modded you insightful
Exactly. The posts that are getting modded up at the moment on this story and the posts that are being left to languish really show what side the Slashdot community is on. Shame - no chance of a meaningful discussion, just more mutual onanism on the part of the same people who already all agree and have their minds made up.
I can't speak for the guy you're responding to, but I did read it all. FYI, I work in the electric/utilities industry and am a Smart Grid specialist. No, not at a Sony lookalike, I'm in the wholesale electric quadrant (WEQ).
There are a lot of people taking this very seriously. For instance, NIST is holding a conference in Chicago next month to talk about cyber physical security design at the engineering (think CAD CAM jockeys) level. That's being followed up by a two day conference at their HQ in Gaithersburg MD to talk about CPS at a more strategic level. The first day will be hearing from other industries what they do in CPS space. The second day will be discussing how it applies to the electric industry. That's being followed by another two day workshop by the Cyber Security Working Group of the SGIP to start the next revision of the NIST IR 7628. That's just off the top of my head of what's coming up in the next few weeks.
Clasma this year started a new conference in their schedule, Grid Sec (or something like that). Clasma, if you don't recognize the name, is the crowd that runs Grid Week, Grid Interop, and Connectivity Week.
If you can think about problems and vulnerabilities, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine there are a bunch of people who do this day in, day out, and are passionate about it, who are also thinking about those same problems and more issues that you wouldn't begin to think about unless you are in the WEQ or REQ.
instead of...blah blah blah...you come up with...more blah blah blah
It's not an either/or situation. As you say, Sony is a large corporation. They can have multiple divisions working on different ideas simultaneously.
The rest of your argument is speculative. This is actually expected to bring the cost of electricity down. The (very basic) concepts on which this idea is built are already being used to delay building extremely expensive new generation and transmission.
For more information, search for price responsive demand. Just because Sony's name is attached to this particular story doesn't warrant throwing all these technologies out.
didn't bother to mention the use of Stuxnet...This was as prime an example of Cyberwarfare as you'll ever get
Agreed. And for all the reactions of "but there's nothing to worry about"...in that case, would somebody tell Anonymous to stop playing their bloody stupid games and making people think there is something to worry about.
Script kiddies hacking to protest "oppressive rules" over the internet (aside: is Anonymous really made up almost entirely of 14 year old entitled rich brats? Because that's what they come off sounding like) is just silly. See a problem, real or perceived, and act in a way guaranteed to exacerbate the response. Yep, that'll work.
It's a really bad analogy.
Of course free thinkers are opposed to religion, because religion is the antithesis of free thinking.
One, nonsense, and two, I'm not talking about religion.
Missing the point, you are. Read the post to which I responded. Read my post, carefully. See the irony in the activities of these self labelled "free thinkers"?
Many years ago, when I was doing my undergraduate degree, there was a group on the University campus that called themselves "Free Thinkers". They had regular meetings, handed out pamphlets, etc., etc. Everything they did was to proselytize how foolish Christianity was. That was the whole aim of all their meetings, every pamphlet they issued, all their talks and discussions and film nights - "Christianity doesn't make sense".
In fairness, they claimed to be against ALL religions.
...this answer. Or (D) let the students make up their own cards, like many posters are saying.
From the sound of your question, you don't care about students having all the formulas, etc., which is good. Many (most?) of my exams have been some combination of these suggestions, or open book. I think my undergrad university might've had a generic physics equation sheet, because I tended to get sheets with equations that I didn't even recognize. At least one of my exams included several pages of common VAX assembly instructions.
My more recent degrees have either had open book exams (those were the toughest) or "make your own notes". Usually restricted to how much you could bring into class.
The toughest exam I've had in the last four years (I'm halfway into my second graduate degree right now) was open book, open notes, you could look up your notes on your computer, etc. I even think you were allowed to get onto the internet. But the questions required sufficient understanding of the processes that if I'd tried to answer it by searching online I'd have run out of time before I was halfway through.
like transporting people 20km away from a city center and dumping them by the roadside, in the middle of the night if they so wish to, without needing to ensure that they have any means to get home safely. In fact we have had at least one death due to this already as a man froze to death.
Link? I searched and couldn't find this story.
And the GP is spot on. Not flamebait. It really is that simple.
Hahahaha...speaking of someone being a "preachy douche"...
Nonsense, of course. What he is...is a professional. Professionals do sit idly by while inferior people make extremely stupid decisions -- of which "going Microsoft" is most assuredly one. They utilize their best professional judgment, they protest, they complain, they argue, they do everything that they can to argue their case.
Why is "going Microsoft" most assuredly an extremely stupid decision, by the way? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know Microsoft is not well loved around here. But a professional will recognize that one solution doesn't fit all. For some companies it makes a lot of sense to go with all Microsoft. SBS is perfect for a small company, for instance.
I posted in another comment on this story (and many other people have made the same point) that there's not enough information to judge. (Hence the wildly speculative and frequently quite bitter assumptions and assertions that are being posted.) This company just might be make a sensible decision which the original submitter is too arrogant to see. He may not even be privy to all the details to know why it's a sensible decision. Like everyone else rambling on in this story. Yes, including me.
up North where the states refuse to allow them
Err...
If you're interested, please contact for a resume: suse jobs dot 10 dot drkshadow at spamgourmet.com
Why not be proactive, if you're interested?Go to suse.com and find the "Careers" link. Apply for something. Just a suggestion.
Exactly. As others have pointed out, there's a lot of information we just don't have.
* What does this guy do? I'm assuming something like a server admin, given the vehement reaction, but he could just as well be a network admin who really doesn't like Microsoft, for all I know.
* What's with the company? I'm assuming they're quite small, or they wouldn't be able to do a 100% MS shop. How big a transition is this for them? Have they been all Linux before? Why the shift?
* More to the point, they either have nothing, or they have something. Assuming the submitter is a tech guy who's very involved on a daily tasks basis, they surely can't be unaware of this, and are taking into account a need to retrain?
As for quitting over this, well, far be it from me to tell you how to live your life. Only you know what responsibilities you have (family?), how easily you can pack up and move if you have to, etc. But you're probably going to find something at any employer that you dislike or disagree with. Only you can decide if it's important enough to you that you want to risk a major life change.
According to the article:
Soon afterwards it was acquired by Slide and new features, including the ability to buy virtual gold bars with real money were added by the time it launched on its own website in December 2008.
So the timeline might be a bit in question. However, from the article comes this tidbit (this appears immediately before the "total amount in controversy..." quote in the summary, which is word for word from the article):
class action represents thousands of people across the who purchased gold and/or subscribed to a $4.95/month VIP subscription
So it's not only about people buying clothes for their pets. Furthermore, the article claims users were:
misled about how long the game would continue
It also was apparently a game that was accessible to and enjoyed by handicapped users. Given that handicapped users often can't play a lot of other games, and by all accounts this was an enjoyable game, and one which encouraged social interaction (a lot of handicapped people are severely restricted in their ability to get out of the house and/or socialize in the usual ways), I can understand their disappointment in it shutting down. (Not saying that this argument will necessarily hold weight in a lawsuit, but many people - bloggers, website posters, talk show hosts - seem to find it all too easy to forget there's always a human side to these stories.)
From a technical viewpoint, IT Administrators have an obligation to protect their infrastructure and their community members from threats, both perceived and actual. Consider for a moment the viewpoint that the messages from change.org were deceptive, harrassing, or threatening in some way, either politcally or technically. If so, was it correct to block change.org?
Yes it was.
I don't really know what was going on because I just couldn't finish that wall of text from Bennett Haselton (and I read books like "The Brothers Karamazov" and "War and Peace" for enjoyment). However, here's my viewpoint.
Your job is to provide an effective computer environment for students to use in the pursuit of education. That means they've got to work when a student needs to run a prescribed application, develop code for a computer science course, do research on sites like Lexis-Nexis or ProQuest, print stuff out, access course e-mail, etc.
Everything else is a perk. And for all the people yelling about freedom of speech, how'd you feel if you had a paper due and the network was down because the admins shrugged and turned a blind eye to some unofficial activities? If you want to get all pompous and sniff, "freedom of speech has a price", try imagining the reaction when you use that on your professor. Or your employer. If freedom of speech is so worthwhile that "it's worth the price", that means it's worth the price to pay for your own wireless/tethering network arrangement and do what you want on non-school/employer equipment.
If a student complains they need to access a site that's been censored, and their rationale is it's related to their course work somehow, at least tell them to get the professor to okay it. If the professor does, err, honestly I'm not sure where you'd go from there. Oh, yay, that leads nicely into my last point. Which is...
I'm not a lawyer. Nor are most of the people here giving you advice. Your university surely has lawyers, either on staff or on retainer. Ask them to give an opinion. That's their job. Yours is to keep the network up for course related work.
Yep, agree with both you and the grandparent poster.
I started wondering what was going on when I reached this gem in the summary:
Damages? Bull****. This is about killing the competition
Someone seems angry, unreasonably so. And as for that article:
Out of the six or so Honeywell models I tried, all were cheaply made and featured piss-poor UIs. I literally punched my wall after becoming so frustrated with one of the Prestige models.
Wow, someone else with anger management issues. He PUNCHED THE WALL because he was frustrated with a thermostat. Someone needs a kitten, except he'd probably throttle it in a blind rage.
Who mentioned terrorism? Not the article.
This is about reliability. Not trying to be snarky, but asking an honest question: given that so many businesses who operate critical infrastructure that you (I'm assuming) rely on (power, water, etc) are privately owned, would you prefer they just go ahead and do what what they want?
And if the answer is yes, well, fair enough, I suppose. My answer to that question is no.
1. I'd imagine that the news that a major distribution has a new project leader is what people should be discussing.
2. Yes, it is shameful that Slashdot felt they should emphasize this in the headline.
3. But, to be fair, it is mentioned in the linked article...
She will be the first (what took them so long?) female leader of Fedora
4. ...which isn't any better. ("What took them so long?" Maybe because they had a habit of picking whoever was best for the job regardless of other characteristics?)
5. Futile discussion. Everyone is now focused on the sexism. Way to go, Slashdot editors. And Slashdot readers. And whoever wrote that quote in the linked article.
If there's one thing Linux suffers from in the eyes of the newcomer, it's too much choice, leading to confusion, subsequent frustration (with support) and returning to their hated-but-known Windows.
Alpha plus. You get it.
Ubuntu's...first job is to bring people into the Linux sphere, once they're accustomed to it, they can migrate out to other options
Well, no. Most people don't want to migrate to other options. It's a headache. It's not fun. It's risky. Pick your defense. But the thing is, there's got to be a really compelling reason for most people to want to go to the trouble to make a major shift in how they do things. It's hard enough to show the average user why they'd want to go to Linux. Once they get there, now you want them to migrate within the Linux realm?
A typical Slashdotter will see this as a good thing - plenty of choices, you can tweak and tune things to get what you want.
An average user will see this as a bad thing - too confusing, no clear direction, and what's going to be the next distro du jour? Forget it; it's not worth it.
That stinks, and I'm sorry for you. It sounds like you were in the wrong company, or hit the wrong manager, or something else was going on.
My first company (New Zealand) strongly, strongly, strongly encouraged me to get certified. They gave me a raise to anyone who completed a CNE or an MCSE.
My current company paid for my first master's degree, 100%. The department I was in at that time had more people doing 100% company funded graduate degrees than were not. Now I'm doing a second master's degree. Yep, they're paying 100% of that too. Same with the guy who sits next to me - Master's degree in Software Engineering. And one of the developers, who's finishing her MBA.
Some companies believe in the value of higher education. Some don't. I'm lucky to be in one that does.
By the way, we are all doing our degrees at physical campuses. But I know several people who've gone the University of Phoenix route.
I wondered that. More, I wondered just how the heck the topic came up in the class, unless you have some know-it-all little troll just waiting to show off what they know.
Ironically, this perfectly illustrates how a stand-up meeting has to be focused. If this had happened during a stand-up meeting, a good scrum master should've told him to leave it until after the meeting as it wasn't what they were there to discuss.
Nope. Not feeding another troll, especially one who misinterprets and misstates what I wrote.