That's one part of it, but the easier and proven (at least as a proof of concept) part of it is frequency regulation. The article says they are partnering with the University of Delaware, who has done a lot of work in recent years looking at exactly this. You don't target every vehicle indiscriminately; you have a server which registers a pool of vehicles and distributes the frequency regulation requests.
The University of Delaware has been doing this for a few years in partnership with PJM Interconnection, who are the largest grid operator in the country. They have a boat load of data about what happens with the batteries, how the lifecycle is affected, etc., etc.
(Slashdot, some random story about spam) Blah blah blah paragon of virtue morals everyone should do what's right holier than thou...
(Slashdot, some random story about copyright infringement) whine anger pout serves them right greedy thieving fascists yeah it's wrong but *&^% those &^%*# I'll keep on downloading stuff I haven't bought until the day I die (justify blindly, etc....)
...non-commission-incentive employees will receive one year's regular base pay plus their annual incentive target amount. Commission-incentive employees will receive 80% of one year's regular base pay, plus 80% of their annual target commissions...
Health benefits will include a lump-sum payment equivalent to 24 months of current medical, dental, and vision coverage...
Cisco will also provide 401(k) and stock payments to eligible employees. For 401(k) plans, the company will provide a one-time payment equal to approximately two years of company matching contributions, paid as a lump sum outside of the 401(k) plan. Payment will be calculated as 4.5% multiplied by total 2011 target compensation, up to a $245,000 limit, regardless of participants' actual 401(k) participation level.
And it wasn't about getting mid-career people out and cutting 20 years off their expected jobs.
The program is aimed at a segment of U.S. and Canadian employees at least 50 years old who have a combined age plus years of service with Cisco totaling at least 60
Just once, someone would read the article before making stupid comments like this. Here, from one of the linked articles from back in July:
The layoffs will eliminate about 9 percent of Cisco's regular, full-time workforce. In the ranks of vice president and above, Cisco said it will cut 15 percent of employees.
There, does that make you happy? Here's another one:
{Cisco} moved from a controversial collection of boards and councils managing the company to named individuals being responsible for product lines.
Sounds like administrative middle management being eliminated to me.
Also note that in the announcment in July, they talked about transferring a unit to Foxconn, saying:
No jobs will be lost in that transaction, but about 5,000 Cisco employees will be transferred to Foxconn
Read the articles and get that chip off of your shoulder.
Thanks. I started to post this same point, but Slashdot ate my post. There's HR, training, travel coordinators, project management, facilities (building maintenance, for instance), mailroom staff, on-site copy personnel, cafeteria staff... A lot of times I see people assuming that if you're not technical then you're overhead, but they never stop to consider the sheer amount of work required to support the core business functions.
By the way, the actual quote is this:
Cisco's five areas of focus now are its core routing and switching business, collaboration, data-center virtualization, video, and tying these elements together in an overall architecture.
Wow. Really? Wow. Enlighten me - exactly how is the FBI a threat to national security? Spell it out for me, please.
Anonymous simply reveals how insecure we are.
Perhaps a little. I think it's more the case that Anonymous simply reveals the dangers of a plethora of immature kids with more powerful tools than they can handle.
(Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh. Dumb post boosted up by dumb moderators who think a pithy comment is automatically insightful. It's not.
I think you're the one who doesn't get it. Linux is ubiquitous, and has been for several years, in the enterprise server world. Granted, the post you responded to was a bit of a troll, but you've missed an important point.
You can bark all you like about the marketing strength of Microsoft, but the CSO doesn't much care about marketing if the FBI comes visiting because you just self reported a hack and your company is an enormous financial institution, has millions of health records on file, or is part of the critical infrastructure.
Whatever the reality of who is behind Linux, the end user isn't going to be swayed by an argument that boils down to "people shouldn't hack us because, wow, golly gee, Linux is the show we can put on in our own back yard, mister". And all the arguments about costs aren't that strong; the licensing costs are obviously in favor of Linux, but the support costs are usually about the same between deploying Microsoft and deploying Red Hat.
I know it's conventional on Slashdot to run down the stereotypical technically illiterate bean counter with an MBA, but my experience has been that most companies have fairly hard nosed and at least somewhat technically astute people in positions of responsibility. They may not understand the ins and outs of SQL injection, but they are going to be less than receptive to the argument that "people won't hack us on Linux; it'd be rude".
I am surprised that the utilities have not worked closely with USPS to get them electric trucks.
They're trying it. Buses too. Trainsare being looked at for storage. There's a huge amount of different pilots being looked at around the world with some really cool ideas. BOMA doing large scale DR in Chicago. And on and on.
Excellent. So you have placed a (possibly arbitrary, possibly not) value on this information of $2.5 million. Let's say that takes one kilobyte to represent informationally. Google says one terabyte = 1 073 741 824 kilobytes. Let's round down to be conservative, to 1 000 000 000 kilobytes.
$2.5 million dollars per kilobyte for 1 000 000 000 kilobytes comes out to $2,500,000,000,000,000. That's 2.5 quadrillion dollars for a terabyte of data.
Silly, isn't it? It's not about the quantity of information. You can't just say "one terabyte can store this many songs, and so it's worth $14.99 per song" or whatever random quantification you use. Your SSN, etc., are worth $2.5 million to you. That's what counts. I may or may not agree with your valuation, but that's what you say it's worth. How can I dispute that?
Not really that odd. How do you make a figure of that much power consumption relatable to the average reader?
I have no idea how big Wal-Mart is, but saying it has the same market cap as Google is just as pointless. Wal-Mart has thousands (I assume; like I said, I have no idea how to quantify how big they really are, just that they're really really big) of stores, each with a moderate HVAC system attached.
If you want to go that way, you also have to compare transportation costs - not relevant for Google, highly important for Wal-Mart. I'd suspect, by the way, they've got a highly optimized supply chain, because that is a big cost in both terms of money and time, and supply chain management is a highly mathematical science. (Yes, I have an MBA. Deal with it.)
Much easier to say it's enough to power 200,000 homes. Any reader, no matter what their field of expertise, can understand that and say "ahh...well, that's quite a lot, then". If you were writing in Fortune or BusinessWeek, then the comparisons you're thinking of are probably more likely to be well understood by that readership; but this is the NY Times. They can't assume business knowledge expertise.
If you put it that way, how much space do you think it'd take to represent your social security number, home address, credit card information, and banking information? A few hundred bytes, at most?
So what? It's still a criminal and illegal act, and even the staunchest defenders of copyright infringement admit that. (They instead focus on the justification of that act and why it is morally acceptable in their viewpoint.)
I wish we could get past all the semantics arguments and instead focus on the issues. It's illegal, and in my opinion it's also morally wrong. I know that's not a popular opinion here on Slashdot, but endless debate on the semantics of what you call it is - yes - weaselling out of the actual point of it.
If I had mod points you'd get them. I actually disagree with you, but this is still the most pertinent, informative, and insightful comment I've seen on this story so far.
Probably because enough of us have been patted down by the TSA to know it's all-too-plausible.
As of 4:30 PM in New York, this is modded +5 Insightful. Fine, I'll bite.
I travel a hell of a lot, and I've never seen or experienced this. I get to talking with complete strangers in airport bars, and I've never heard of this happening. I am in conferences and meetings and one-on-one discussions and having dinner with hundreds of different travelers throughout the course of the year, and not ONE of them has mentioned this.
Seriously, people here on Slashdot are talking about common sense all the time. It doesn't take that much of a brain to figure that groping someone in a crowded security area where hundreds of passengers are watching you to see if it's their turn yet is a really dumb idea. (And please, try and restrain from the stupid prejudiced "but you have to be that stupid to be a TSA agent" idiocy.)
With the size of Slashdot's readership, if what you say bears any grain of truth, I want affirmations. From a mere ten readers. If it's genuinely deserving of a +5 Insightful, that should be a few minutes.
Otherwise, I call blatant BS and total unjustified bias, just like the story summary.
Mmm...Yahoo isn't really "my thing". I like some of their features, I've been using it for a long time, and My Yahoo is my home page, but I'm not married to Yahoo. (I do feel nostalgic about it sometimes, for lots of reasons which I won't go into, but I also feel nostalgic about AltaVista and DEC. Doesn't mean I use them on a daily basis.)
Google has some neat stuff, but I just don't like one company having that much data about me. And, for me, they don't have anything which is a killer. Search, sure, great, but I usually get just as good results for my needs in Yahoo, and so I use that out of convenience.
I usually use MapQuest, not Yahoo Maps - I just go to Yahoo Maps when MapQuest's interface throws a tantrum and refuses to work for me.
My point? Nothing is forever. I do use Yahoo, and it's the site I go to most frequently. But if they go belly-up, or close my account, I'll shrug and move on (okay, simply because that e-mail account is so old I'll sulk a bit about some of the stuff I've lost, but all the important information is backed up). I read about how much people rely on Google and how fragile some of the account veracity seems to be and it unnerves me. I don't want to be that committed to a free service that treats me like a number, and as someone else posted there's a feeling of giant corporate "you aren't our customer, you are a data point for our real customers" anonymity with Google which I don't get with Yahoo. Yeah, I know they have no clue who I am, but at least they don't make it so obvious as Google.
I don't know...I have been using it as my home page for longer than I can remember. Sign in to my.yahoo.com and set it up the way I like it, done. Clean and simple.
Yahoo also has my oldest mail account, at something like 14 years. That account is all over the web and if I get one spam e-mail in six months that doesn't get caught it's something I notice because it's so unusual.
Oh yes, and Maps. Google Maps? Forget it, they still don't know my street exists and it's been here for five years. I like MapQuest, but sometimes it just flakes out and won't give me directions. Yahoo Maps is the most consistently reliable for me.
...the difference between open source and a proprietary model is to allow people to be idiots? Correct me if I'm wrong.
Correction coming.
The difference between open source and a proprietary model is that you have to pay for the COTS proprietary system. This means the company will cover its costs and be able to pay their own developers, who will keep maintaining it.
You do not have to pay for an open source system, but you're an idiot if you don't, because it's only by paying for it that the developers will be able to keep maintaining it.
Alternately, you can choose to maintain it yourself, but you are also an idiot at that point because that is an inefficient and expensive proposition, and you have to pay your own developers to keep maintaining it.
I hope you have found this guide to the vast superiority of the philosophy of open source to be helpful. If so, please consider paying me so I can keep maintaining it. If you don't, Jim Zemlin says you're an idiot.
And in the U.S., the charge (sorry...) of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel is exactly this. Note that the SGIP is not an SDO. They are there to
coordinate standards development for the Smart Grid
The SGIP is a partnership between NIST and industry, academia, etc. Rick Scholer of Chrysler is on the governing board (as is Vint Cerf, incidentally).
I don't trust... them... that's why I constantly do what I can to destroy them.
Naive. You don't trust them, and yet by attempting to destroy them* you give up all that precious anonymity. You should read Hercule Poirot and get even more paranoid.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't use it for bulk storage. Use it for frequency regulation.
That's one part of it, but the easier and proven (at least as a proof of concept) part of it is frequency regulation. The article says they are partnering with the University of Delaware, who has done a lot of work in recent years looking at exactly this. You don't target every vehicle indiscriminately; you have a server which registers a pool of vehicles and distributes the frequency regulation requests.
The University of Delaware has been doing this for a few years in partnership with PJM Interconnection, who are the largest grid operator in the country. They have a boat load of data about what happens with the batteries, how the lifecycle is affected, etc., etc.
See what happens if you can't afford to go to university?!? Won't someone think of the children etc.
(Slashdot, some random story about spam) Blah blah blah paragon of virtue morals everyone should do what's right holier than thou...
(Slashdot, some random story about copyright infringement) whine anger pout serves them right greedy thieving fascists yeah it's wrong but *&^% those &^%*# I'll keep on downloading stuff I haven't bought until the day I die (justify blindly, etc....)
Yes, good point about the people taking voluntary early retirement. From that article:
...non-commission-incentive employees will receive one year's regular base pay plus their annual incentive target amount. Commission-incentive employees will receive 80% of one year's regular base pay, plus 80% of their annual target commissions...
Health benefits will include a lump-sum payment equivalent to 24 months of current medical, dental, and vision coverage...
Cisco will also provide 401(k) and stock payments to eligible employees. For 401(k) plans, the company will provide a one-time payment equal to approximately two years of company matching contributions, paid as a lump sum outside of the 401(k) plan. Payment will be calculated as 4.5% multiplied by total 2011 target compensation, up to a $245,000 limit, regardless of participants' actual 401(k) participation level.
And it wasn't about getting mid-career people out and cutting 20 years off their expected jobs.
The program is aimed at a segment of U.S. and Canadian employees at least 50 years old who have a combined age plus years of service with Cisco totaling at least 60
Just once, someone would read the article before making stupid comments like this. Here, from one of the linked articles from back in July:
The layoffs will eliminate about 9 percent of Cisco's regular, full-time workforce. In the ranks of vice president and above, Cisco said it will cut 15 percent of employees.
There, does that make you happy? Here's another one:
{Cisco} moved from a controversial collection of boards and councils managing the company to named individuals being responsible for product lines.
Sounds like administrative middle management being eliminated to me.
Also note that in the announcment in July, they talked about transferring a unit to Foxconn, saying:
No jobs will be lost in that transaction, but about 5,000 Cisco employees will be transferred to Foxconn
Read the articles and get that chip off of your shoulder.
Thanks. I started to post this same point, but Slashdot ate my post. There's HR, training, travel coordinators, project management, facilities (building maintenance, for instance), mailroom staff, on-site copy personnel, cafeteria staff... A lot of times I see people assuming that if you're not technical then you're overhead, but they never stop to consider the sheer amount of work required to support the core business functions.
By the way, the actual quote is this:
Cisco's five areas of focus now are its core routing and switching business, collaboration, data-center virtualization, video, and tying these elements together in an overall architecture.
Emphasis mine.
The FBI is the threat to national security.
Wow. Really? Wow. Enlighten me - exactly how is the FBI a threat to national security? Spell it out for me, please.
Anonymous simply reveals how insecure we are.
Perhaps a little. I think it's more the case that Anonymous simply reveals the dangers of a plethora of immature kids with more powerful tools than they can handle.
(Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh. Dumb post boosted up by dumb moderators who think a pithy comment is automatically insightful. It's not.
I think you're the one who doesn't get it. Linux is ubiquitous, and has been for several years, in the enterprise server world. Granted, the post you responded to was a bit of a troll, but you've missed an important point.
You can bark all you like about the marketing strength of Microsoft, but the CSO doesn't much care about marketing if the FBI comes visiting because you just self reported a hack and your company is an enormous financial institution, has millions of health records on file, or is part of the critical infrastructure.
Whatever the reality of who is behind Linux, the end user isn't going to be swayed by an argument that boils down to "people shouldn't hack us because, wow, golly gee, Linux is the show we can put on in our own back yard, mister". And all the arguments about costs aren't that strong; the licensing costs are obviously in favor of Linux, but the support costs are usually about the same between deploying Microsoft and deploying Red Hat.
I know it's conventional on Slashdot to run down the stereotypical technically illiterate bean counter with an MBA, but my experience has been that most companies have fairly hard nosed and at least somewhat technically astute people in positions of responsibility. They may not understand the ins and outs of SQL injection, but they are going to be less than receptive to the argument that "people won't hack us on Linux; it'd be rude".
I am surprised that the utilities have not worked closely with USPS to get them electric trucks.
They're trying it. Buses too. Trains are being looked at for storage. There's a huge amount of different pilots being looked at around the world with some really cool ideas. BOMA doing large scale DR in Chicago. And on and on.
Excellent. So you have placed a (possibly arbitrary, possibly not) value on this information of $2.5 million. Let's say that takes one kilobyte to represent informationally. Google says one terabyte = 1 073 741 824 kilobytes. Let's round down to be conservative, to 1 000 000 000 kilobytes.
$2.5 million dollars per kilobyte for 1 000 000 000 kilobytes comes out to $2,500,000,000,000,000. That's 2.5 quadrillion dollars for a terabyte of data.
Silly, isn't it? It's not about the quantity of information. You can't just say "one terabyte can store this many songs, and so it's worth $14.99 per song" or whatever random quantification you use. Your SSN, etc., are worth $2.5 million to you. That's what counts. I may or may not agree with your valuation, but that's what you say it's worth. How can I dispute that?
Not really that odd. How do you make a figure of that much power consumption relatable to the average reader?
I have no idea how big Wal-Mart is, but saying it has the same market cap as Google is just as pointless. Wal-Mart has thousands (I assume; like I said, I have no idea how to quantify how big they really are, just that they're really really big) of stores, each with a moderate HVAC system attached.
If you want to go that way, you also have to compare transportation costs - not relevant for Google, highly important for Wal-Mart. I'd suspect, by the way, they've got a highly optimized supply chain, because that is a big cost in both terms of money and time, and supply chain management is a highly mathematical science. (Yes, I have an MBA. Deal with it.)
Much easier to say it's enough to power 200,000 homes. Any reader, no matter what their field of expertise, can understand that and say "ahh...well, that's quite a lot, then". If you were writing in Fortune or BusinessWeek, then the comparisons you're thinking of are probably more likely to be well understood by that readership; but this is the NY Times. They can't assume business knowledge expertise.
If you put it that way, how much space do you think it'd take to represent your social security number, home address, credit card information, and banking information? A few hundred bytes, at most?
How much is that worth?
So what? It's still a criminal and illegal act, and even the staunchest defenders of copyright infringement admit that. (They instead focus on the justification of that act and why it is morally acceptable in their viewpoint.)
I wish we could get past all the semantics arguments and instead focus on the issues. It's illegal, and in my opinion it's also morally wrong. I know that's not a popular opinion here on Slashdot, but endless debate on the semantics of what you call it is - yes - weaselling out of the actual point of it.
Well, damn...
If I had mod points you'd get them. I actually disagree with you, but this is still the most pertinent, informative, and insightful comment I've seen on this story so far.
Probably because enough of us have been patted down by the TSA to know it's all-too-plausible.
As of 4:30 PM in New York, this is modded +5 Insightful. Fine, I'll bite.
I travel a hell of a lot, and I've never seen or experienced this. I get to talking with complete strangers in airport bars, and I've never heard of this happening. I am in conferences and meetings and one-on-one discussions and having dinner with hundreds of different travelers throughout the course of the year, and not ONE of them has mentioned this.
Seriously, people here on Slashdot are talking about common sense all the time. It doesn't take that much of a brain to figure that groping someone in a crowded security area where hundreds of passengers are watching you to see if it's their turn yet is a really dumb idea. (And please, try and restrain from the stupid prejudiced "but you have to be that stupid to be a TSA agent" idiocy.)
With the size of Slashdot's readership, if what you say bears any grain of truth, I want affirmations. From a mere ten readers. If it's genuinely deserving of a +5 Insightful, that should be a few minutes.
Otherwise, I call blatant BS and total unjustified bias, just like the story summary.
Yahoo was your thing, Google is mine.
Mmm...Yahoo isn't really "my thing". I like some of their features, I've been using it for a long time, and My Yahoo is my home page, but I'm not married to Yahoo. (I do feel nostalgic about it sometimes, for lots of reasons which I won't go into, but I also feel nostalgic about AltaVista and DEC. Doesn't mean I use them on a daily basis.)
Google has some neat stuff, but I just don't like one company having that much data about me. And, for me, they don't have anything which is a killer. Search, sure, great, but I usually get just as good results for my needs in Yahoo, and so I use that out of convenience.
I usually use MapQuest, not Yahoo Maps - I just go to Yahoo Maps when MapQuest's interface throws a tantrum and refuses to work for me.
My point? Nothing is forever. I do use Yahoo, and it's the site I go to most frequently. But if they go belly-up, or close my account, I'll shrug and move on (okay, simply because that e-mail account is so old I'll sulk a bit about some of the stuff I've lost, but all the important information is backed up). I read about how much people rely on Google and how fragile some of the account veracity seems to be and it unnerves me. I don't want to be that committed to a free service that treats me like a number, and as someone else posted there's a feeling of giant corporate "you aren't our customer, you are a data point for our real customers" anonymity with Google which I don't get with Yahoo. Yeah, I know they have no clue who I am, but at least they don't make it so obvious as Google.
I don't know...I have been using it as my home page for longer than I can remember. Sign in to my.yahoo.com and set it up the way I like it, done. Clean and simple.
Yahoo also has my oldest mail account, at something like 14 years. That account is all over the web and if I get one spam e-mail in six months that doesn't get caught it's something I notice because it's so unusual.
Oh yes, and Maps. Google Maps? Forget it, they still don't know my street exists and it's been here for five years. I like MapQuest, but sometimes it just flakes out and won't give me directions. Yahoo Maps is the most consistently reliable for me.
...read a slashdot summary and automatically assume it represents the article, the truth, or any combination thereof
Then why even have a summary?
...the difference between open source and a proprietary model is to allow people to be idiots? Correct me if I'm wrong.
Correction coming.
The difference between open source and a proprietary model is that you have to pay for the COTS proprietary system. This means the company will cover its costs and be able to pay their own developers, who will keep maintaining it.
You do not have to pay for an open source system, but you're an idiot if you don't, because it's only by paying for it that the developers will be able to keep maintaining it.
Alternately, you can choose to maintain it yourself, but you are also an idiot at that point because that is an inefficient and expensive proposition, and you have to pay your own developers to keep maintaining it.
I hope you have found this guide to the vast superiority of the philosophy of open source to be helpful. If so, please consider paying me so I can keep maintaining it. If you don't, Jim Zemlin says you're an idiot.
And in the U.S., the charge (sorry...) of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel is exactly this. Note that the SGIP is not an SDO. They are there to
coordinate standards development for the Smart Grid
The SGIP is a partnership between NIST and industry, academia, etc. Rick Scholer of Chrysler is on the governing board (as is Vint Cerf, incidentally).
You're looking down your nose at this, and you want to go back to IRC for, what, its superior intellectual discussions? Have you read bash.org lately?
Okay, let me show you what I mean. This is the first comment that comes up when I click the "random" button:
[High`] its ko myabe uoy cuodl noe dya
And this is down three more quotes:
[torque--> i can fart out loud in an internet cafe because everyones wearing headphones
If that's your idea of the "good old IRC days", no wonder you think virtual sheep tossing is a waste of time...
:-) True. My point was to abide by Hercule Poirot's dictum - the more someone talks, even if they lie, the more they reveal about themselves.
The US really does need a high-speed freight transportation system with Asia.
It has one, it's called aircraft. If it's too heavy for a plane then chances are you really don't need it that quickly.
It really needs to come down to days
Why?
Should be far more energy efficient (->cheaper) than boat as well.
Nope. Speed = expensive. Methinks you should read up on supply chain management.
Mature.
I don't trust ... them ... that's why I constantly do what I can to destroy them.
Naive. You don't trust them, and yet by attempting to destroy them* you give up all that precious anonymity. You should read Hercule Poirot and get even more paranoid.
* or so you claim. Talk is cheap.