Mod the parrent post funny... it's clearly a joke. Swapping standard to metric never went over well, swapping IPv4 to IPv6 is stuck in the mud... swapping everything that plugs in over to DC is just plain not gonna happen.
The killer app here is the "large battery" that can take in excess power and give it back when we need it. Of course, real world problems like loss, reaction time, and how you make sure such a thing doesn't explode are standing in the way. It's going to take a lot of science work to solve this problem, but the payoff will be huge once it is solved.
Better warning systems... Wanna fill out forms telling the government exactly when you plan on turning on your lights?
The power company doesn't get an early warning for how much power people are going to use. They can guess based on weather conditions and history, but that's not accurate enough a number for them to work with.
Remember back to physics class... (or read this on How Stuff Works if you can't...). Voltage equals current times resistance. And anything that you plug in to use power is a resistor. What this means in simple terms is that whenever you turn on anything, you've changed the resistance value on your local power network, so either you've just changed the voltage on the power network, or some power generator somewhere is going to have to step up to the plate and provide more current.
If you've ever read APC marketing material, you know that you want your computer, and for that matter everything else you plug in, to get a nice steady dose of 120 Volt power. There's a little room for tolerance, but not much.
So, whenever a city's power draw changes, the electicial system's gotta react pretty quickly. Too little voltage is a clear problem, it's a brownout. Too much voltage is also a problem, it's a power surge. The large power grids come into play as a way for a network that has too much power and a network that has too little to solve each others problems by joining together and letting physics do its thing.
So, when something goes horribly wrong, it takes nine seconds for a ordinary day to become a bad one. Nobody had any warning because the power grid has to react instantly to unexpected situations, and usually does just fine. It was the one time it didn't react properly that we all noticed.
The fact is, a small little trade magazine article that only a few hundred people cared about last week is now interesting to nearly everybody this week.
Right, we never hear about the number of times having the grid has prevented a blackout. One one plant has to shut down, the power is instantly brought in from another place to balance it all out.
This cascading failure was a result of the grid trying too hard and failing. The grid should have cut off the first failed area, whatever it was, instead of allowing it to send its demands further down the chain. Some safety feature that was supposed to be there didn't kick in when it needed to... why it didn't is the question that the investigators will be working on for a while.
Having more connects to elsewhere does increase the risk and possible scope of this kind of disaster, but this is the kind of thing that on paper isn't supposed to happen. The solution isn't to rip the grid apart, or prevent it from expanding, but to make sure that all the systems on the grid are playing by the safety rules.
Simple. A nuclear power plant cannot allow its safety systems to be powered by itself, because if the nuclear systems malfunctioned they'd definitely need their safety systems. With connections to outside power failing without a clear sign of a return time, they have no choice but begin the shutdown process.
Reporter Shepard Smith at JFK airport said over the Fox News network that airport maitainance workers were delayed in fixing the generator because they were initially denied access to it because they could not be cleared to access the generators without the metal detectors being powered.
I don't think this is an overreaction. This is just as bad as an earthquake or any other naturally occuring problem. NYC has ground to a halt, and several other major cities as well.
People are going to be annoyed, business is going to be disrupted. It may be a mess that doesn't affect you since you're here with a working computer, but it's certainly news.
Clock in a "here" report from Central MA as well.
Seems like Most of New England is safe, as we're tied to an unaffected Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant. Our grid hasn't gone down, although I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually are asked to power down whatever we can to allow New England to donate some power to the affected zone once they figure out a link that gets the power there.
That's exactly my point. Using a PRNG is equally secure as an RNG so long as I don't tell you which PRNG I'm using. You can only use the shortcut of testing the more likely outcomes of my PRNG first if you know which PRNG I'm using.
So, keeping your PRNG of choice a secret turns your PRNG into an RNG for codebreaking purposes. The codebreakers will have to solve for multiple encryption keys before they have enough keys to start looking for paterns.
Being truely random isn't exactly the goal of encryption, the idea is to create a sequence that causes the person trying to decode the message can't make heads or tails of.
Think of the codebreakers who had to break the Purple encryption scheme. The frist thing they had to do was to figure out what hit them, because standard letter frequency analysis techniques failed because all of the letters of the alphabet were being used with equal frequency in the face-value code.
Changing the ground rules on the codebreakers will always lengthen the time it takes to crack a code. It's always hard to predict a variable when the codebreakers don't know what they're trying to predict.
I never truely understood how state lotto systems produced randomness anyway. Afterall, the standards for the balls and machinery are so exacting that any measureable fault is not tolerated. The same machinery with the same timeing drops balls of the same weight from the same positons with the same babe standing on the same mark on the floor. Couldn't the remaining major variables such the gravitational pull of the moon eventually be solved for?
Notice that a meeting of everybody involved in this other than the students have declared that the only one who possiby could be liable are the students?
I think a newbies would suspect something is up when they see that there's always at least 150 posts already there by the time the article first appears to them.
Also an old Google trick. By throwing in a needless mention of the words Roomba and iRobot into complete sentances, it's a way to associate the page with those terms in Google...
My point is, an MD5 hash ballot is no more secure than a paper ballet when it comes to voter fraud, it still depends on the honesty and fairness of the poll operators.
Ballots as bytes are a bad idea. I have no problem with a computer helping people fill out their ballots, but the end result should be a human-readable piece of paper that ends up in the ballot box for counting and recounting.
The problem with that is by giving a heavy disadvantage to the newest user on the system will likely make that new user feel unwelcome. That leads to abandonded newbie accounts, which is a bad thing for business. If you have no replacement customers coming in for the ones who leave, you'll have a decaying site and there won't be any/. effect anymore, nor will there be a/.
Beware of side effects when you try to implement simple solutions like that...
Also, notice the challenge is issued on Sunday of one of the deadest weeks in the academic calendar. In most places, there's nobody in the dorms. Summer session is over, but the incoming freshmen don't move in until at least next week. This is when the computer departments are allowed to disrupt services and do the moves they've been planning since January (when the holiday break is the other dead time on campus) because there's hardly anybody left on campus to complain.
(also having a university-supplied BIG PIPE doesn't hurt)
Duh. What this article really shows is how small of a server is needed to serve up content, the most frequent limiter in a/. effect is a bandwidth bottleneck leading out of whatever small company has unfortunately become popular. Sites hosted where there is proper bandwidth usually come out fine...
Slashdot Mirror
Mod the parrent post funny... it's clearly a joke. Swapping standard to metric never went over well, swapping IPv4 to IPv6 is stuck in the mud... swapping everything that plugs in over to DC is just plain not gonna happen.
The killer app here is the "large battery" that can take in excess power and give it back when we need it. Of course, real world problems like loss, reaction time, and how you make sure such a thing doesn't explode are standing in the way. It's going to take a lot of science work to solve this problem, but the payoff will be huge once it is solved.
Better warning systems... Wanna fill out forms telling the government exactly when you plan on turning on your lights?
The power company doesn't get an early warning for how much power people are going to use. They can guess based on weather conditions and history, but that's not accurate enough a number for them to work with.
Remember back to physics class... (or read this on How Stuff Works if you can't...). Voltage equals current times resistance. And anything that you plug in to use power is a resistor. What this means in simple terms is that whenever you turn on anything, you've changed the resistance value on your local power network, so either you've just changed the voltage on the power network, or some power generator somewhere is going to have to step up to the plate and provide more current.
If you've ever read APC marketing material, you know that you want your computer, and for that matter everything else you plug in, to get a nice steady dose of 120 Volt power. There's a little room for tolerance, but not much.
So, whenever a city's power draw changes, the electicial system's gotta react pretty quickly. Too little voltage is a clear problem, it's a brownout. Too much voltage is also a problem, it's a power surge. The large power grids come into play as a way for a network that has too much power and a network that has too little to solve each others problems by joining together and letting physics do its thing.
So, when something goes horribly wrong, it takes nine seconds for a ordinary day to become a bad one. Nobody had any warning because the power grid has to react instantly to unexpected situations, and usually does just fine. It was the one time it didn't react properly that we all noticed.
The fact is, a small little trade magazine article that only a few hundred people cared about last week is now interesting to nearly everybody this week.
Right, we never hear about the number of times having the grid has prevented a blackout. One one plant has to shut down, the power is instantly brought in from another place to balance it all out.
This cascading failure was a result of the grid trying too hard and failing. The grid should have cut off the first failed area, whatever it was, instead of allowing it to send its demands further down the chain. Some safety feature that was supposed to be there didn't kick in when it needed to... why it didn't is the question that the investigators will be working on for a while.
Having more connects to elsewhere does increase the risk and possible scope of this kind of disaster, but this is the kind of thing that on paper isn't supposed to happen. The solution isn't to rip the grid apart, or prevent it from expanding, but to make sure that all the systems on the grid are playing by the safety rules.
The black smoke clealy wasn't meant to happen by design, but the key is it was an effect of the system failure, not the cause.
Simple. A nuclear power plant cannot allow its safety systems to be powered by itself, because if the nuclear systems malfunctioned they'd definitely need their safety systems. With connections to outside power failing without a clear sign of a return time, they have no choice but begin the shutdown process.
Interesting to note, the only TV network that seems to have been disrupted on my DirecTV system was Bloomberg Television.
Reporter Shepard Smith at JFK airport said over the Fox News network that airport maitainance workers were delayed in fixing the generator because they were initially denied access to it because they could not be cleared to access the generators without the metal detectors being powered.
I don't think this is an overreaction. This is just as bad as an earthquake or any other naturally occuring problem. NYC has ground to a halt, and several other major cities as well.
People are going to be annoyed, business is going to be disrupted. It may be a mess that doesn't affect you since you're here with a working computer, but it's certainly news.
Clock in a "here" report from Central MA as well. Seems like Most of New England is safe, as we're tied to an unaffected Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant. Our grid hasn't gone down, although I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually are asked to power down whatever we can to allow New England to donate some power to the affected zone once they figure out a link that gets the power there.
That's exactly my point. Using a PRNG is equally secure as an RNG so long as I don't tell you which PRNG I'm using. You can only use the shortcut of testing the more likely outcomes of my PRNG first if you know which PRNG I'm using.
So, keeping your PRNG of choice a secret turns your PRNG into an RNG for codebreaking purposes. The codebreakers will have to solve for multiple encryption keys before they have enough keys to start looking for paterns.
Being truely random isn't exactly the goal of encryption, the idea is to create a sequence that causes the person trying to decode the message can't make heads or tails of.
Think of the codebreakers who had to break the Purple encryption scheme. The frist thing they had to do was to figure out what hit them, because standard letter frequency analysis techniques failed because all of the letters of the alphabet were being used with equal frequency in the face-value code.
Changing the ground rules on the codebreakers will always lengthen the time it takes to crack a code. It's always hard to predict a variable when the codebreakers don't know what they're trying to predict.
Is the number of page hits before a slashdotting also a random variable?
I never truely understood how state lotto systems produced randomness anyway. Afterall, the standards for the balls and machinery are so exacting that any measureable fault is not tolerated. The same machinery with the same timeing drops balls of the same weight from the same positons with the same babe standing on the same mark on the floor. Couldn't the remaining major variables such the gravitational pull of the moon eventually be solved for?
Notice that a meeting of everybody involved in this other than the students have declared that the only one who possiby could be liable are the students?
I think a newbies would suspect something is up when they see that there's always at least 150 posts already there by the time the article first appears to them.
Stragely enough, HSN, America's Store (HSN 2), QVC, Shop At Home, ShopNBC, and ACN are all still coming into my DirecTV system.
Also an old Google trick. By throwing in a needless mention of the words Roomba and iRobot into complete sentances, it's a way to associate the page with those terms in Google...
My point is, an MD5 hash ballot is no more secure than a paper ballet when it comes to voter fraud, it still depends on the honesty and fairness of the poll operators.
Ballots as bytes are a bad idea. I have no problem with a computer helping people fill out their ballots, but the end result should be a human-readable piece of paper that ends up in the ballot box for counting and recounting.
You're also hackable at step 3. Insert a corrupt poll worker and that voter can get multiple sessions...
The problem with that is by giving a heavy disadvantage to the newest user on the system will likely make that new user feel unwelcome. That leads to abandonded newbie accounts, which is a bad thing for business. If you have no replacement customers coming in for the ones who leave, you'll have a decaying site and there won't be any /. effect anymore, nor will there be a /.
Beware of side effects when you try to implement simple solutions like that...
Memo to web designers who think having a 2 MB Flash animation on the first page is cool: Nobody's gonna be able to see your wonderful piece of art.
Having a small home page that can be served quickly is a key factor in not losing visitors when the heavy usage comes.
Also, notice the challenge is issued on Sunday of one of the deadest weeks in the academic calendar. In most places, there's nobody in the dorms. Summer session is over, but the incoming freshmen don't move in until at least next week. This is when the computer departments are allowed to disrupt services and do the moves they've been planning since January (when the holiday break is the other dead time on campus) because there's hardly anybody left on campus to complain.
(also having a university-supplied BIG PIPE doesn't hurt)
/. effect is a bandwidth bottleneck leading out of whatever small company has unfortunately become popular. Sites hosted where there is proper bandwidth usually come out fine...
Duh. What this article really shows is how small of a server is needed to serve up content, the most frequent limiter in a