I actually don't know what movie you're talking about, but the etymology of the word gimp dates back to the 17th century, and its usage as a derogatory (or at least anachronistic) word meaning lameness goes back to the early 20th century. That's the meaning that always comes to my mind (and I didn't grow up in the U.S.).
Sigh, no. The article says that. And in fairness the bill does also say that. However, the bill goes on to say:
Former student is defined as any person who was at one time a student at the school at which the teacher is employed and who is eighteen years of age or less and who has not graduated.
Without caring too much to parse this out, it's still pretty clear from the last half of that sentence that it's not a lifetime problem. Ten, 15 years have passed? Student is now over 18, presto, no problem.
(I also note it says "the school at which the teacher IS employed", which I take to mean if you've moved on to another school then students from prior schools are okay, but I could be taking that out of context.)
No, don't bribe them, that only works with administrative people and salescritters. Treat them with respect
Mindblowing, just how oblivious you have to be to type those 1.5 sentences in succession.
I realize that this whole concept is abhorent to the modern MBA
Sigh. Yet again the MBA thing. You know, if this guy had taken the sort of ethics class that is often a core requirement in MBA classes he might have thought twice about the consequences of his actions.
What you really should care about when it comes to IT department is to keep them happy. The cost compared to what can happen when an employee is disgruntled is minor.
Sooo, you mean, bribe them to not misbehave, essentially. How about what I should really care about is to raise standards so I don't have some childish megalomaniacal sysadmin who has far more power than is good for him.
I am really fed up with this entitlement mentality on Slashdot. Forget the whole "but the company was evil/incompetent" nonsense and self-justification. Whatever happened to personal responsibility, ethics, and the knowledge that two wrongs don't make a right? If you want to know why techies are not treated with more respect, it's because of idiotic behavior like this.
No, actually, I'd say it's more that you have made the error of thinking that because it's dramatized it bears no resemblance toreality. Social engineering is a bigdeal, to the extent that in places where security is paramount it's a major component in vulnerability assessment and penetration testing.
This happened a coupleof years ago in Silicon Valley. Took out 911 and ATMs in some cases. Just happened to be during contract negotiations with the labor union.
Then you haven't been paying attention. It's a goal for several reasons:
* Blind hatred of Microsoft by idealists; * Fervent desire to promote the FOSS agenda and/or ideology.
Slightly more pragmatically:
* The awareness that a niche product means limited options for those who want more choice.
This is the irony. Linux is about freedom of choice, but if it is not prevalent on the desktop then you have a vastly restricted choice of anything outside of the most ubiquitous types of product. Software developers primarily write for most popular platforms first. Yes, many write for personal interest, but that gets you an odd bag lot of applications - it doesn't get you comprehensive coverage.
Google Docs is already truly robust enough for businesses
Really? It may be getting there, but it's taking way too long. Their spreadsheet app didn't have filtering until March of this year. Sorry, but that's not professional grade, no matter how small your company is.
This is our world now. We exist without nationality, without religious bias. We have the right to not be surveilled, not be stalked, and not be used for profit. We have the right to not live as slaves.
We are anonymous We are legion We do not forgive We do not forget Expect us
Good heavens, what a lot of drivel. They could, I suppose, just not join Facebook, but instead of taking some personal responsibility they'd rather wave their egos around. Wonderful. Whoever wrote this little piece of poetry may not be some angst-ridden prepubescent teenager, but they sure write like one.
I'll end this by just saying: fuck lawyers. There is good reason why so many people despise and hate them, and our present patent system is an excellent example.
Ah, well, at least you've got some well reasoned and sensible discourse going on. Thanks for the value you've added to the discussion.
We have no idea whether Google's best days are behind it, but Google's main failure has been in social networking where it has finally released a product which, even though it is terribly incomplete, limited and difficult to get into, is considered by most people who've used it as much better than Facebook.
Err, you forgot about Google Wave. And Google Power. And Google Catalog. And Google Answers. And Google Coupons. And Google Checkout. Mind you, so did everyone else, which is why they are failures.
Google has come out with more than just a great search engine - maps is really good, and gmail is wildly popular (although I suspect that's because of all the hype originally. I don't like it, but me by myself is merely an anecdote.) Even Google Docs, which I think is next to useless. But to claim their only failure is Google Plus, and downplay it, is a bit disingenuous.
I think the real question is why are techies still so enamored of Google that they are willing to ignore the massive data mining, and are falling over themselves to explain away things which would be leapt on gleefully in another context. I've been in I.T. for longer than most of Slashdot's users have been alive (and no, I'm not exaggerating, I really have been in this game for that long), and data mining used to be one of my specialties, but even I was surprised when I one day examined just how much information Google had really collected about me. Not that I didn't realize they could...I just, you know, thought they wouldn't. Naive me. No longer - I use alternate mapping services, alternate search services, and still don't use GMail (but that's because it offers no benefit to me over my existing well established addresses).
Not really the grid operators (they care, but for different reasons). The transmission networks are just dandy. The distribution networks are the ones that would potentially be strained by the PEV scenario.
I wish I knew. I do not think you're alone, looking at the visitor trends. I, too, want something with the kind of stories/. used to have, and the quality of commentary that/. used to have.
Oh wow, you're right. Those poor developers, and everyone else who puts up with not getting any reimbursement for their product, even if it is intangible.
These guys who are complaining in this story at least got the choice of whether to participate in the "free app" promotion. Just imagine how awful it'd be if this happened and you didn't even WANT to be included!
Like, say, oh, if people were downloading your music for free without your permission?... Yeah, I'm sure I'll be marked troll, but it doesn't change the hypocrisy of the "but the RIAA/MPAA need to update their business model, blah blah blah" crowd.
I can't disagree with you. In fact, the article even supports this by talking openly about the security issues.
Believe me, I have clients who just don't understand why they can't go to dell.com and order a server and have us plug it into out network. I well remember many years ago when someone circumvented IT and specced out a server on IBM's web site and talked procurement into buying it. They saw big, honking fast, expensive, had to be amazing, right? Problem was the server they ordered was ideal for a specific purpose and completely useless for their purpose. (I forget the details; something like what the client wanted was a database server and they got something that only had three disk slots.) It had to be sent back at great expense and then we had to order the right hardware.
Anyway, I digress. You make an excellent point about identifying requirements before choosing technology, but there also has to be room for the "let's play" bit. But management has to be able to accept that sometimes a solution is looking for a problem that doesn't exist and that's still a success (you identified, you tested, you determined lack of fit).
Well, nice way to judge based on a Gartner quote. It's a shame you stopped reading right there - the very next paragraph shows why this is important.
In 2005, the idea promoted by Gartner that consumerization would be the most important trend of the next decade might have been controversial. But traction from the iPhone, which went from 0 percent adoption to 80 percent of Fortune 100 companies between June 2008 and June 2010, undeniably demonstrates the powerful impact of this trend.
Management and business leaders have their own technical language, funnily enough. Just as technologists have developed a specialized terminology to efficiently and unambiguously communicate their thoughts, other niches also have ways of saying things which might appear cumbersome or unwieldy (or downright impenetrable) to outsiders but which have a crisp meaning to the users.
That paragraph has a fair few buzz words, admittedly, but it's pretty clear what it actually says. Innovation is happening at the consumer device level, and CIOs can look to that arena and figure out a strategy to get the best technology into their environment, or they can let their networks stagnate. Seriously, how hard is that to parse out?
If you'd gone on further, you'd have seen a fantastic exceprt at the bottom of page two about an IT department for Hyatt Hotels taking the iPad and proving how it could really help the organization. And it's even relatively business buzz word free, for your convenience.
Ironically, just a wee bit further on is this snippet:
IT groups have to "shed our arrogance" to give the underlying technology a chance to succeed.
Next time, get over yourself and read the damn article. You might learn something. Or, there again, with your attitude, you might not.
That is a great question. There are other people who know more about EVs than I do in this kind of capacity, but one really good proof of concept example is what MAGICC has been doing. Imagine that you have not just your EV but hundreds or thousands of them and they have the smarts to talk back to a central computer. Now you can start getting really clever with the computer calling on those EVs in series to produce frequency regulation services. You'll get paid (the figures out of MAGICC would suggest something like six dollars a day is possible - not going to make you rich, but I wouldn't say no) and the grid operator now has a very fast ramping system that could potentially aggregate up to several MW and enhance grid reliability and efficiency.
By the way, a few posters have suggested this is going to kill your battery. I'm not going to scoff at that, but the technology is getting WAY better and attending conferences like the ESA conferences will quickly give you the idea that a lot of reallyclever people are putting a fair chunk of research into improving the technology.
Not to gloss over the problems, but this is what being a researcher is all about, and it's really exciting.
My understanding is that you can't charge one of these from regular wall current but need at least 220V
Nope, you can charge using 120 V, but it takes a lot longer. 120 V charging is defined as level 1 charging, while 240 V is level 2 charging. There's also a level 3 charging for very fast charging, which I think from memory is only being tested in Japan right now.
It's an elegantly simple concept, indeed. The biggest problem is finding the right topograpy (although there are ways to deal with that - but then it becomes less simple). FERC has a paragraph that points out some of the crucial points quite succinctly:
These projects are uniquely suited for generating power when demand for electricity is high and for supplying reserve capacity to complement the output of large fossil-fueled and nuclear steam-electric plants. Start-up of this type of project is almost immediate, thus serving peak demand for power better than fossil-fueled plants that require significantly more start-up time. Like conventional projects, they use falling water to generate power, but they use reversible turbines to pump the water back to the upper reservoir. This type of project is particularly effective at sites having high heads (large differences in elevation between the upper and lower reservoir)./QUOTE
One of the big problems with "smart grid" as a term is it's so nebulous. There are plenty of people who are really, really clever and very, very experienced who will argue passionately that we already have a smart grid and we should be more properly talking about a smarter grid. But there are as many definitions of smart grid as there are consultants looking to make a buck.
smart grid - The integration and application of real-time monitoring, advanced sensing, communications, analytics, and control, enabling the dynamic flow of both energy and information to accommodate existing and new forms of supply, delivery, and use in a secure, reliable, and efficient electric power system, from generation source to end-user.
Frankly, I don't like this definition because it's way too verbose. If you want to get to the essence, it's two way communication and control.
But here's the thing to keep in mind. Lots of people have cars. Not a lot of people have a pumped storage facility, or even the geography to set one up.
Energy demand is indeed highly predictable, but there's always an element of the unknown. The issue we're finding these days is energy generation can be highly predictable but public sentiment wants it to be clean and green without realizing that you sacrifice the reliability and/or the price efficiency of coal. Everything in electricity is about arbitrage, at least at the wholesale level.
Forget about saving money. If you already have a car, which in modern day U.S. many people see as a necessity (please, no-one respond with your anecdotal "not me, I take the bus/ride my bicycle everywhere" - that's not my point), and are now told you can effectively use it as a giant whole-house UPS, that's going to be worth something to a lot of people.
Well, I have zero credentials as I don't have an Android phone and don't use GMail or Google+ or really any of Google's services at all, but I can read the article.
I asked Google what would happen. The news is both good and bad.
"Your Android phone would still function, for example to make phone calls, surf the Web, send and receive texts, etc.," sayeth a Google spokeshuman. "Obviously Gmail, Contacts and other services tied to your Google Account wouldn't work."
In that case, your only option would be to create a new Google account and, yes, start from scratch. That would likely involve a factory reset of your phone, so kiss your contacts, text messages, and other stored data goodbye.
So...I don't think it's quite as bad as the attention-seeking story headline makes it sound at first read, but it's still inconvenient at best. I lost several (not all) of my contacts a few months ago when my company upgraded my BlackBerry and it's a pain in the proverbial. If you're doing this for development purposes, you probably don't have actual real contacts stored on your phone.
No, this not (sic)a plan to use Congress to generate power, though that would certainly be an endless supply
Yep, another old, tired, stupid and vacuous panning in the summary that you'd expect from a 14 year old who thinks he's massively clever. This is is what Slashdot has become.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually don't know what movie you're talking about, but the etymology of the word gimp dates back to the 17th century, and its usage as a derogatory (or at least anachronistic) word meaning lameness goes back to the early 20th century. That's the meaning that always comes to my mind (and I didn't grow up in the U.S.).
So you believe the ends justify the means?
Sigh, no. The article says that. And in fairness the bill does also say that. However, the bill goes on to say:
Former student is defined as any person who was at one time a student at the school at which the teacher is employed and who is eighteen years of age or less and who has not graduated.
Without caring too much to parse this out, it's still pretty clear from the last half of that sentence that it's not a lifetime problem. Ten, 15 years have passed? Student is now over 18, presto, no problem.
(I also note it says "the school at which the teacher IS employed", which I take to mean if you've moved on to another school then students from prior schools are okay, but I could be taking that out of context.)
No, don't bribe them, that only works with administrative people and salescritters. Treat them with respect
Mindblowing, just how oblivious you have to be to type those 1.5 sentences in succession.
I realize that this whole concept is abhorent to the modern MBA
Sigh. Yet again the MBA thing. You know, if this guy had taken the sort of ethics class that is often a core requirement in MBA classes he might have thought twice about the consequences of his actions.
What you really should care about when it comes to IT department is to keep them happy. The cost compared to what can happen when an employee is disgruntled is minor.
Sooo, you mean, bribe them to not misbehave, essentially. How about what I should really care about is to raise standards so I don't have some childish megalomaniacal sysadmin who has far more power than is good for him.
I am really fed up with this entitlement mentality on Slashdot. Forget the whole "but the company was evil/incompetent" nonsense and self-justification. Whatever happened to personal responsibility, ethics, and the knowledge that two wrongs don't make a right? If you want to know why techies are not treated with more respect, it's because of idiotic behavior like this.
No, actually, I'd say it's more that you have made the error of thinking that because it's dramatized it bears no resemblance to reality. Social engineering is a big deal, to the extent that in places where security is paramount it's a major component in vulnerability assessment and penetration testing.
This happened a couple of years ago in Silicon Valley. Took out 911 and ATMs in some cases. Just happened to be during contract negotiations with the labor union.
Wasn't aware there was a goal
Then you haven't been paying attention. It's a goal for several reasons:
* Blind hatred of Microsoft by idealists;
* Fervent desire to promote the FOSS agenda and/or ideology.
Slightly more pragmatically:
* The awareness that a niche product means limited options for those who want more choice.
This is the irony. Linux is about freedom of choice, but if it is not prevalent on the desktop then you have a vastly restricted choice of anything outside of the most ubiquitous types of product. Software developers primarily write for most popular platforms first. Yes, many write for personal interest, but that gets you an odd bag lot of applications - it doesn't get you comprehensive coverage.
Google Docs is already truly robust enough for businesses
Really? It may be getting there, but it's taking way too long. Their spreadsheet app didn't have filtering until March of this year. Sorry, but that's not professional grade, no matter how small your company is.
This is our world now. We exist without nationality, without religious bias. We have the right to not be surveilled, not be stalked, and not be used for profit. We have the right to not live as slaves.
We are anonymous
We are legion
We do not forgive
We do not forget
Expect us
Good heavens, what a lot of drivel. They could, I suppose, just not join Facebook, but instead of taking some personal responsibility they'd rather wave their egos around. Wonderful. Whoever wrote this little piece of poetry may not be some angst-ridden prepubescent teenager, but they sure write like one.
Yes, I have, as it happens. That is the cool part of it, I must say. The rest of it is quite simply amateurish.
May I be allowed to say
No, you may not.
The patent system is supposed to be used so a new device has maybe a handful of patents in it.
I liked this response.
I'll end this by just saying: fuck lawyers. There is good reason why so many people despise and hate them, and our present patent system is an excellent example.
Ah, well, at least you've got some well reasoned and sensible discourse going on. Thanks for the value you've added to the discussion.
We have no idea whether Google's best days are behind it, but Google's main failure has been in social networking where it has finally released a product which, even though it is terribly incomplete, limited and difficult to get into, is considered by most people who've used it as much better than Facebook.
Err, you forgot about Google Wave. And Google Power. And Google Catalog. And Google Answers. And Google Coupons. And Google Checkout. Mind you, so did everyone else, which is why they are failures.
Google has come out with more than just a great search engine - maps is really good, and gmail is wildly popular (although I suspect that's because of all the hype originally. I don't like it, but me by myself is merely an anecdote.) Even Google Docs, which I think is next to useless. But to claim their only failure is Google Plus, and downplay it, is a bit disingenuous.
I think the real question is why are techies still so enamored of Google that they are willing to ignore the massive data mining, and are falling over themselves to explain away things which would be leapt on gleefully in another context. I've been in I.T. for longer than most of Slashdot's users have been alive (and no, I'm not exaggerating, I really have been in this game for that long), and data mining used to be one of my specialties, but even I was surprised when I one day examined just how much information Google had really collected about me. Not that I didn't realize they could...I just, you know, thought they wouldn't. Naive me. No longer - I use alternate mapping services, alternate search services, and still don't use GMail (but that's because it offers no benefit to me over my existing well established addresses).
Not really the grid operators (they care, but for different reasons). The transmission networks are just dandy. The distribution networks are the ones that would potentially be strained by the PEV scenario.
Apple is intuitive, stylish, and their software just works.
iTunes. Q.E.D.
I wish I knew. I do not think you're alone, looking at the visitor trends. I, too, want something with the kind of stories /. used to have, and the quality of commentary that /. used to have.
Oh wow, you're right. Those poor developers, and everyone else who puts up with not getting any reimbursement for their product, even if it is intangible.
These guys who are complaining in this story at least got the choice of whether to participate in the "free app" promotion. Just imagine how awful it'd be if this happened and you didn't even WANT to be included!
Like, say, oh, if people were downloading your music for free without your permission? ... Yeah, I'm sure I'll be marked troll, but it doesn't change the hypocrisy of the "but the RIAA/MPAA need to update their business model, blah blah blah" crowd.
I can't disagree with you. In fact, the article even supports this by talking openly about the security issues.
Believe me, I have clients who just don't understand why they can't go to dell.com and order a server and have us plug it into out network. I well remember many years ago when someone circumvented IT and specced out a server on IBM's web site and talked procurement into buying it. They saw big, honking fast, expensive, had to be amazing, right? Problem was the server they ordered was ideal for a specific purpose and completely useless for their purpose. (I forget the details; something like what the client wanted was a database server and they got something that only had three disk slots.) It had to be sent back at great expense and then we had to order the right hardware.
Anyway, I digress. You make an excellent point about identifying requirements before choosing technology, but there also has to be room for the "let's play" bit. But management has to be able to accept that sometimes a solution is looking for a problem that doesn't exist and that's still a success (you identified, you tested, you determined lack of fit).
Well, nice way to judge based on a Gartner quote. It's a shame you stopped reading right there - the very next paragraph shows why this is important.
In 2005, the idea promoted by Gartner that consumerization would be the most important trend of the next decade might have been controversial. But traction from the iPhone, which went from 0 percent adoption to 80 percent of Fortune 100 companies between June 2008 and June 2010, undeniably demonstrates the powerful impact of this trend.
Management and business leaders have their own technical language, funnily enough. Just as technologists have developed a specialized terminology to efficiently and unambiguously communicate their thoughts, other niches also have ways of saying things which might appear cumbersome or unwieldy (or downright impenetrable) to outsiders but which have a crisp meaning to the users.
That paragraph has a fair few buzz words, admittedly, but it's pretty clear what it actually says. Innovation is happening at the consumer device level, and CIOs can look to that arena and figure out a strategy to get the best technology into their environment, or they can let their networks stagnate. Seriously, how hard is that to parse out?
If you'd gone on further, you'd have seen a fantastic exceprt at the bottom of page two about an IT department for Hyatt Hotels taking the iPad and proving how it could really help the organization. And it's even relatively business buzz word free, for your convenience.
Ironically, just a wee bit further on is this snippet:
IT groups have to "shed our arrogance" to give the underlying technology a chance to succeed.
Next time, get over yourself and read the damn article. You might learn something. Or, there again, with your attitude, you might not.
That is a great question. There are other people who know more about EVs than I do in this kind of capacity, but one really good proof of concept example is what MAGICC has been doing. Imagine that you have not just your EV but hundreds or thousands of them and they have the smarts to talk back to a central computer. Now you can start getting really clever with the computer calling on those EVs in series to produce frequency regulation services. You'll get paid (the figures out of MAGICC would suggest something like six dollars a day is possible - not going to make you rich, but I wouldn't say no) and the grid operator now has a very fast ramping system that could potentially aggregate up to several MW and enhance grid reliability and efficiency.
By the way, a few posters have suggested this is going to kill your battery. I'm not going to scoff at that, but the technology is getting WAY better and attending conferences like the ESA conferences will quickly give you the idea that a lot of really clever people are putting a fair chunk of research into improving the technology.
Not to gloss over the problems, but this is what being a researcher is all about, and it's really exciting.
My understanding is that you can't charge one of these from regular wall current but need at least 220V
Nope, you can charge using 120 V, but it takes a lot longer. 120 V charging is defined as level 1 charging, while 240 V is level 2 charging. There's also a level 3 charging for very fast charging, which I think from memory is only being tested in Japan right now.
Search on SAE J1772 for more details.
It's an elegantly simple concept, indeed. The biggest problem is finding the right topograpy (although there are ways to deal with that - but then it becomes less simple). FERC has a paragraph that points out some of the crucial points quite succinctly:
These projects are uniquely suited for generating power when demand for electricity is high and for supplying reserve capacity to complement the output of large fossil-fueled and nuclear steam-electric plants. Start-up of this type of project is almost immediate, thus serving peak demand for power better than fossil-fueled plants that require significantly more start-up time. Like conventional projects, they use falling water to generate power, but they use reversible turbines to pump the water back to the upper reservoir. This type of project is particularly effective at sites having high heads (large differences in elevation between the upper and lower reservoir). /QUOTE
One of the big problems with "smart grid" as a term is it's so nebulous. There are plenty of people who are really, really clever and very, very experienced who will argue passionately that we already have a smart grid and we should be more properly talking about a smarter grid. But there are as many definitions of smart grid as there are consultants looking to make a buck.
Look at this definition:
smart grid - The integration and application of real-time monitoring, advanced sensing, communications, analytics, and control, enabling the dynamic flow of both energy and information to accommodate existing and new forms of supply, delivery, and use in a secure, reliable, and efficient electric power system, from generation source to end-user.
Frankly, I don't like this definition because it's way too verbose. If you want to get to the essence, it's two way communication and control.
But here's the thing to keep in mind. Lots of people have cars. Not a lot of people have a pumped storage facility, or even the geography to set one up.
Energy demand is indeed highly predictable, but there's always an element of the unknown. The issue we're finding these days is energy generation can be highly predictable but public sentiment wants it to be clean and green without realizing that you sacrifice the reliability and/or the price efficiency of coal. Everything in electricity is about arbitrage, at least at the wholesale level.
Forget about saving money. If you already have a car, which in modern day U.S. many people see as a necessity (please, no-one respond with your anecdotal "not me, I take the bus/ride my bicycle everywhere" - that's not my point), and are now told you can effectively use it as a giant whole-house UPS, that's going to be worth something to a lot of people.
Well, I have zero credentials as I don't have an Android phone and don't use GMail or Google+ or really any of Google's services at all, but I can read the article.
I asked Google what would happen. The news is both good and bad.
"Your Android phone would still function, for example to make phone calls, surf the Web, send and receive texts, etc.," sayeth a Google spokeshuman. "Obviously Gmail, Contacts and other services tied to your Google Account wouldn't work."
In that case, your only option would be to create a new Google account and, yes, start from scratch. That would likely involve a factory reset of your phone, so kiss your contacts, text messages, and other stored data goodbye.
So...I don't think it's quite as bad as the attention-seeking story headline makes it sound at first read, but it's still inconvenient at best. I lost several (not all) of my contacts a few months ago when my company upgraded my BlackBerry and it's a pain in the proverbial. If you're doing this for development purposes, you probably don't have actual real contacts stored on your phone.
No, this not (sic) a plan to use Congress to generate power, though that would certainly be an endless supply
Yep, another old, tired, stupid and vacuous panning in the summary that you'd expect from a 14 year old who thinks he's massively clever. This is is what Slashdot has become.