and if your wallet is lost/stolen, not identifying each password with a particular site will give you enough time to change the passwords before you can be compromised
But I needed the wallet to know what the passwords were so I could change them! DOH!
True, but fortunately compensated for by the "want an alternative out there so badly we're willing to put our own time and energy into it" crowd. Both are necessary to a healthy competitive industry.
So I am lost as to what the smart grid is actually supposed to do, aside from a fancy version of automated demand-response. It wouldn't be fast enough to actually function as "protection".
Ok, let's add another reason, because "Smart Grid" means more than just smart meters. A good 'nother reason is encouragement of alternative forms of energy production, such as wind, home/small business microgeneration capability (PV or MicroCHP).
In the latter case, this means adding enough data processing capacity to backhaul networks (essentially LANS running in parallel to electricity delivery) to allow the networks to read net +/- usage and pay users for any surplus power pushed back into the grid (at least one pilot program augured because they insisted on a flat rate structure - that won't wash). Electricity network infrastructure developed a half-century or so ago didn't mostly accommodate this in their business model, and the hardware isn't there to read it.
Newer infrastructure often includes this and older infrastructure needs retrofit to allow it. Australian distribution network operators believe the better power usage profiling will pay for the lot, but distributed generation is something the public and the government regulators are pushing them to do. Either way, nobody in the electricity industry here ("nobody" defined as 0 out of 24 C-level execs we recently interviewed) believes that upgrading our infrastructure to understand and accommodate changing usage profiles isn't critical to providing flexible, scalable power to people who are demanding better use of the generating capacity we have and the alternatives they're being forced to have a look at.
They're looking at the biggest expenditure in decades in an expensive industry, and the intitiatives that fit under the "Smart Grid" umbrella are part of this overall modernisation. They're also very tightly regulated - can't tie their shoes without a water tight business case, so the money justification is being looked at very carefully. Giant analogue meters filling a wall a'la Fritz Lang just ain't the shizz any more.
Umm, looking at the above, I should admit - I am indeed an industry shill. But I'm a well informed one, and this is neutral spin.
Not to mention a lot of people would be seriously PISSED and you'd be in deep legal shit for messing with other people's computers.. I'm sure these guys could still face possible trouble even for just admitting they've brought down the head of the botnets, but IMO they're pretty justified to do that. Wiping people's machines, while tempting, is just a no-no. If we want vigilante justice to become more acceptable in these situations, then it's best to be 'nice' about it.
I was about to post a "yes, take the bots down, destroy them" comment -- then thought, hey - that sword cuts two ways. If one group gets away with vigilante destruction of targeted systems, then what's the difference if a group we don't agree with - say, the RIAA or MPAA - starts using this precedent as justification and starts taking down systems themselves? Slippery slope doesn't *begin* to describe it.
The problem is - once you start bypassing the justice system for good reasons, it becomes easier to do it for bad ones. Take it to the courts with a winning strategy and let them take them down. That way at least you might get public funding for bringing the bastards under the gun.
A new postulate is needed here. Whenever a thread makes any mention of Godwin's Law, it is essentially defunct as a source of meaningful information on the topic.
Just spin it off, keep a small interest that will prevent the spun-off unit from going rogue, and claim victory.
Does MySQL own the IP for a test suite that proves compatibility with the standard, such as Java does? Just curious here, don't really know.
On the other hand, Open or not, there are ways you can capitalise on IP by diminishing its impact in the market. Gentle, persistent, overtly benign yet pernicious change will do it. The principle of "extend, embrace, extinguish" isn't just limited to one monopoly.
And here I worry about Jim Fisk's ghost buying up the equivalent of today's Red Car line (ref: Chinatown, Fisk Tires, Firestone Tires, Roger Rabbit, California Freeways, Red Car" -- ahh bugger it, here's a link). If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em. Then buy a backhoe. Golden rule again - guy with the gold makes the rules.
As an Australian and on Rememberance Day, I withhold my sense of humour for a moment and object to your use of the term "Digger". We use it as a term of endearment toward people who go out and get their asses shot off on our behalf, and something we respect them highly for. Don't dilute that coin please.
Actually, you should buy the stuff in yellow cake form from us in Australia, up in the beautiful tropical North. You can also use this as an IQ and literacy test for your outsourced mining company. For example, determining whether they can follow written safety procedures can be tested by confronting them with one of our many attractive "Danger - Crocodile Infested Waters - Do Not Swim" warning signs, handing them a towel and a pair of bathers and seeing if they can handle the conflict.
SQLite is a nice alternative for embedded systems. The whole distribution is less than half a meg. Works quite well for the opposite side of the spectrum covered by TFA. Smaller than Access, smaller than darn near anything, a fully self contained SQL environment expressed in a file. For the Big Huge scale (petabytes) look at Google's BigTables.
You laugh, but the things I see done in Excel on a daily basis in production environments getting a LOT of work done are a testament to it's power. It is one of the best rapid application development platforms in existance.
Maybe not the best, but quite possibly the most popular and persistent. As I've said before, a tremendous - a truly disturbingly tremendous - amount of the world's wealth exists nowhere else than on the common Excel spreadsheet. This statement brought to you courtesy of a bit of work I did once for a major bank's managed funds section (I think working on nuclear munitions would have scared me less).
For those of you who aren't across why, it's simple - convenience. Open Excel, create a macro, do a few things (open a spreadsheet file, format, move, change or populate a few columns, whatever) then close the macro.
Now, press Alt+F11. Find the macro code. You're sitting in an IDE that allows you to write VBA, with the entire development and production environment encapsulated in that single Excel document, backed by the Office platform that most of the worlds businesses, correctly or in, have installed on every desktop.
What this has meant for financial organisations is - you can effectively wrap that spreadsheet around a rock* and throw it through another company's window, and they will also be able to run the software on that document.
You cannot ever underestimate the power of simple convenience. Those suckers are busy, the rules are always changing and fast+simple software development rules the waves.
----
*It's one of those mettyphores. Honest. If it's insufficiently literal, substitute "a USB key tied to a lead sinker".
For a city sized dome, you would need a separate extraction system for waste gases - a municipal sized central vacuuming system.
For that much thermal loading, you could pretty well depend on convection to handle that for you. What you would need is a system of vents. I say "system" because one central vent would probably result in a lot of interesting but rather destructive music.
I'm an environmentalist, but I never felt the need to life in order to push my cause (as you apparently do). Typical trains use the equivalent of 1 gallon gasoline every 25 passenger-miles. My Honda Insight hybrid using that same 1 gallon can achieve 75 passenger-miles (or 150 passenger-miles if I carry a friend).
The reason trains are so inefficient is due to their frequent stops and starts
Long ago in a distribution centre a far far away - well, east SF bay, anyway - we had a custom mini doing a bit of work for a major retail store chain's logistics business. In the warehouse they built a little room for the mini upstairs, everything cheap but per spec, they insisted. They used one of their domestic air conditioners for the cooling, as it had the right thermal rating to match the heat dissipation we required for our gear. Cool, we said - no problem, cheap is ok as long as it's specced correctly.
It wasn't long before we had a service call for a hardware failure. Sent the engineer out, and it was about 110 in the computer room. They'd installed the air intake and air outflow of the air conditioner in the same tiny room.
(checks wallet)... I have 30 cents here and neither coin is a nickel. Both show Betty Windsor Junior on one side, and one has a platypus on the other. What strange country are you from that doesn't have the Queen on your coins? Or platypese?
I have trouble believing that the "smart grid" really solves this, although you can do some things with networked protection strategies and more selective load shed.
The true payback - the ROI for the Smart Grid is expected to be in better profiling of usage so that it can be planned for, so that the generators can be ramped up at the right time and spun down at the right time. This has everything to do with the cost of fuel.
Considering that to handle peak loads, capacity is often run at +100% of actual demand - a number I got directly from a C-level distribution network exec - any corners shaved off that power usage profile amount to a significant saving, potentially $billions. The point is to find out exactly when power usage happens, and until the grid smartens up a bit they're stuck with guesswork and an increasingly expensive fudge-factor.
This is way too many dollars to spend on guesswork, so they want better instrumentation and better information systems and better backhaul networks - the biggest investment in decades for most of these operators - so they can make better use of Fossils of Escalating Cost.
So although the "smart grid" may not completely solve the problem, it's likely to go a long way to minimising outages and saving huge bucks on fuel. Infrastructure money well spent, I hold.
I work for a company involved in SCADA systems that control half of Australia's water supply and a fair bit of the country's power grid.
SCADA networks have evolved, out of convenience, to coexist with existing LANS and thus progressively have become more dependent on TCP/IP protocols, thus becoming (rather by default) Internet-enabled.
Vulnerabilities are to some degree covered by the RTU programming, which has built in safeguards against doing wrong things. But it's not impossible for a dedicated hacker to create a bit of havoc, and this point is not lost on our client base. Our clients are actively investing now to isolate SCADA networks from the Internet, because safety has to overrule operational convenience. Work is going on now, and the door is fast closing on this avenue of attack.
It's all about SCADA. Little intelligent valves in little steel boxes attached to a lot of industrial plant. It's automation, true, but there are rather a lot of eyes watching it.
And why do you think this is happening? Would it be that smaller generators are somehow more efficient than large, high-capacity generating plants? Or do you think that it has been impossible to get a permit to build a large high-capacity generating plant for the last 30 years or so?
I don't think per-kilowatt cost is necessarily the prime driver. The real gain is in the flexibility that comes from decentralisation of supply. A large scale generator may take 36 months to install, which is cool if you have the mandate and the organisation and the plans. But a single home or business microCHP installation can happen in one or two days, and they're sourced from an assembly line. Volkswagen AG and Whispergen (NZ) are two microCHP makers. They're both powered by natural gas, although the Whispergen is a Stirling design and more flexible in fuel source.
If you can manage growth incrementally, and serve your community needs with smaller, easier to acquire energy sources, it stands to reason that you'd be less inclined to either shortages or expensive oversupply. And in a growth scenario, it's a bit difficult to ask an existing community to pay not just for their own power capacity, but to underwrite the needs of future people too. Small is beautiful, even if it ain't cheap.
Whatever happened once in Spain does not change the basic facts.
Sometimes the wind does not blow at all, so you need to keep 100% generating capacity that can be brought on line within 20 minutes.
One trend I've seen in recent studies is toward distributed, decentralised power generation. We're not talking about one technology taking over, but rather a larger number of smaller generators in a variety of formats coming together to augment the primary generators we have. This is already happening to some degree, and expectations are that it will grow.
So as your city grows - instead of (say) three coal generators, you might add one new coal generator plus a few hundred wind turbines, a few thousand gas fired microCHP generators (similar to the Whispergen Stirling units being deployed in Spain) and quite a few thousand private photovoltaic arrays (in Perth for example, the applications for PV installations are running at better than 3 thousand per month at the moment).
The combination of all these will tend to even out the supply across the grid, but there still needs to be fairly careful power regulation at each end point.
Let's kill Silverlight and Flash with Javascript and JavaFX, the open languages.
Sad face here, I wonder just how open Java will remain. Consider: Java was defined by the Sun Java Test Suite, wasn't it? And now Oracle owns Sun. Oracle has long been known to me as a very agressive closed, proprietary company living off their software licenses.
Should the Open Source community still be backing Java, now that the rather benign hand of Sun is no longer controlling it? Is it time to rally around something else now? Some language where you aren't in danger of being sued for infringement if you copy a test suite?
I am worried about Oracle pulling the strings, at some point they may think it in their best interests to act in such a way as to drive the language to more proprietary platforms. It's within their scope to do so, and it may be in their best interests to try. What was once the language choice for clear sailing is now in treacherous waters I think. Write once, run everywhere - for a given value of "everywhere".
1. How does one go about proving that a specific individual committed copyright infringement?
That presumes the RIAA/MPAA give a fig about collateral damage. So far the evidence is that they don't, much.
We have to keep hammering back at attempts to short-circuit all attempts to punish people in groups, of course. Convenience on the part of the plaintiff is not an acceptable reason to violate such a universal legal convention, one underpinned by the lessons of WWII.
Slashdot Mirror
and if your wallet is lost/stolen, not identifying each password with a particular site will give you enough time to change the passwords before you can be compromised
But I needed the wallet to know what the passwords were so I could change them! DOH!
Of course there's the "want it for free" crowd
True, but fortunately compensated for by the "want an alternative out there so badly we're willing to put our own time and energy into it" crowd. Both are necessary to a healthy competitive industry.
All you know is Ellison really does want MySQL. How does that automatically make the deal anti-competitive?
Geez, and I thought I was an industry shill.
I applaud you sir or madam. Never too old to learn something on Slashdot.
/golfclap
So I am lost as to what the smart grid is actually supposed to do, aside from a fancy version of automated demand-response. It wouldn't be fast enough to actually function as "protection".
Ok, let's add another reason, because "Smart Grid" means more than just smart meters. A good 'nother reason is encouragement of alternative forms of energy production, such as wind, home/small business microgeneration capability (PV or MicroCHP).
In the latter case, this means adding enough data processing capacity to backhaul networks (essentially LANS running in parallel to electricity delivery) to allow the networks to read net +/- usage and pay users for any surplus power pushed back into the grid (at least one pilot program augured because they insisted on a flat rate structure - that won't wash). Electricity network infrastructure developed a half-century or so ago didn't mostly accommodate this in their business model, and the hardware isn't there to read it.
Newer infrastructure often includes this and older infrastructure needs retrofit to allow it. Australian distribution network operators believe the better power usage profiling will pay for the lot, but distributed generation is something the public and the government regulators are pushing them to do. Either way, nobody in the electricity industry here ("nobody" defined as 0 out of 24 C-level execs we recently interviewed) believes that upgrading our infrastructure to understand and accommodate changing usage profiles isn't critical to providing flexible, scalable power to people who are demanding better use of the generating capacity we have and the alternatives they're being forced to have a look at.
They're looking at the biggest expenditure in decades in an expensive industry, and the intitiatives that fit under the "Smart Grid" umbrella are part of this overall modernisation. They're also very tightly regulated - can't tie their shoes without a water tight business case, so the money justification is being looked at very carefully. Giant analogue meters filling a wall a'la Fritz Lang just ain't the shizz any more.
Umm, looking at the above, I should admit - I am indeed an industry shill. But I'm a well informed one, and this is neutral spin.
Not to mention a lot of people would be seriously PISSED and you'd be in deep legal shit for messing with other people's computers.. I'm sure these guys could still face possible trouble even for just admitting they've brought down the head of the botnets, but IMO they're pretty justified to do that. Wiping people's machines, while tempting, is just a no-no. If we want vigilante justice to become more acceptable in these situations, then it's best to be 'nice' about it.
I was about to post a "yes, take the bots down, destroy them" comment -- then thought, hey - that sword cuts two ways. If one group gets away with vigilante destruction of targeted systems, then what's the difference if a group we don't agree with - say, the RIAA or MPAA - starts using this precedent as justification and starts taking down systems themselves? Slippery slope doesn't *begin* to describe it.
The problem is - once you start bypassing the justice system for good reasons, it becomes easier to do it for bad ones. Take it to the courts with a winning strategy and let them take them down. That way at least you might get public funding for bringing the bastards under the gun.
I never metameme I didn't like.
Just spin it off, keep a small interest that will prevent the spun-off unit from going rogue, and claim victory.
Does MySQL own the IP for a test suite that proves compatibility with the standard, such as Java does? Just curious here, don't really know.
On the other hand, Open or not, there are ways you can capitalise on IP by diminishing its impact in the market. Gentle, persistent, overtly benign yet pernicious change will do it. The principle of "extend, embrace, extinguish" isn't just limited to one monopoly.
And here I worry about Jim Fisk's ghost buying up the equivalent of today's Red Car line (ref: Chinatown, Fisk Tires, Firestone Tires, Roger Rabbit, California Freeways, Red Car" -- ahh bugger it, here's a link). If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em. Then buy a backhoe. Golden rule again - guy with the gold makes the rules.
As an Australian and on Rememberance Day, I withhold my sense of humour for a moment and object to your use of the term "Digger". We use it as a term of endearment toward people who go out and get their asses shot off on our behalf, and something we respect them highly for. Don't dilute that coin please.
Actually, you should buy the stuff in yellow cake form from us in Australia, up in the beautiful tropical North. You can also use this as an IQ and literacy test for your outsourced mining company. For example, determining whether they can follow written safety procedures can be tested by confronting them with one of our many attractive "Danger - Crocodile Infested Waters - Do Not Swim" warning signs, handing them a towel and a pair of bathers and seeing if they can handle the conflict.
SQLite is a nice alternative for embedded systems. The whole distribution is less than half a meg. Works quite well for the opposite side of the spectrum covered by TFA. Smaller than Access, smaller than darn near anything, a fully self contained SQL environment expressed in a file. For the Big Huge scale (petabytes) look at Google's BigTables.
You laugh, but the things I see done in Excel on a daily basis in production environments getting a LOT of work done are a testament to it's power. It is one of the best rapid application development platforms in existance.
Maybe not the best, but quite possibly the most popular and persistent. As I've said before, a tremendous - a truly disturbingly tremendous - amount of the world's wealth exists nowhere else than on the common Excel spreadsheet. This statement brought to you courtesy of a bit of work I did once for a major bank's managed funds section (I think working on nuclear munitions would have scared me less).
For those of you who aren't across why, it's simple - convenience. Open Excel, create a macro, do a few things (open a spreadsheet file, format, move, change or populate a few columns, whatever) then close the macro.
Now, press Alt+F11. Find the macro code. You're sitting in an IDE that allows you to write VBA, with the entire development and production environment encapsulated in that single Excel document, backed by the Office platform that most of the worlds businesses, correctly or in, have installed on every desktop.
What this has meant for financial organisations is - you can effectively wrap that spreadsheet around a rock* and throw it through another company's window, and they will also be able to run the software on that document.
You cannot ever underestimate the power of simple convenience. Those suckers are busy, the rules are always changing and fast+simple software development rules the waves.
----
*It's one of those mettyphores. Honest. If it's insufficiently literal, substitute "a USB key tied to a lead sinker".
Yes. Murdoch should know by now that if Content is King, then Indexing is Queen, Prince and the Civil Service.
While this sentiment is unanimous, it'll never be allowed to happen.
No doubt bypassing all that sticky mortality stuff, his head will probably be there on the dashboard with Richard Nixon's.
For a city sized dome, you would need a separate extraction system for waste gases - a municipal sized central vacuuming system.
For that much thermal loading, you could pretty well depend on convection to handle that for you. What you would need is a system of vents. I say "system" because one central vent would probably result in a lot of interesting but rather destructive music.
I call Shenanigans!
Facts are otherwise and here they are.
A smattering of basic physics helps.
Long ago in a distribution centre a far far away - well, east SF bay, anyway - we had a custom mini doing a bit of work for a major retail store chain's logistics business. In the warehouse they built a little room for the mini upstairs, everything cheap but per spec, they insisted. They used one of their domestic air conditioners for the cooling, as it had the right thermal rating to match the heat dissipation we required for our gear. Cool, we said - no problem, cheap is ok as long as it's specced correctly.
It wasn't long before we had a service call for a hardware failure. Sent the engineer out, and it was about 110 in the computer room. They'd installed the air intake and air outflow of the air conditioner in the same tiny room.
And of course, don't forget the simple visual inspection. Sometimes the cabling infrastructure may not quite be up to spec.
Those with the ability to secure the system need to be the ones paying for breeches.
Really? That sounds like utter pants to me.
Barbarians.
I have trouble believing that the "smart grid" really solves this, although you can do some things with networked protection strategies and more selective load shed.
The true payback - the ROI for the Smart Grid is expected to be in better profiling of usage so that it can be planned for, so that the generators can be ramped up at the right time and spun down at the right time. This has everything to do with the cost of fuel.
Considering that to handle peak loads, capacity is often run at +100% of actual demand - a number I got directly from a C-level distribution network exec - any corners shaved off that power usage profile amount to a significant saving, potentially $billions. The point is to find out exactly when power usage happens, and until the grid smartens up a bit they're stuck with guesswork and an increasingly expensive fudge-factor.
This is way too many dollars to spend on guesswork, so they want better instrumentation and better information systems and better backhaul networks - the biggest investment in decades for most of these operators - so they can make better use of Fossils of Escalating Cost.
So although the "smart grid" may not completely solve the problem, it's likely to go a long way to minimising outages and saving huge bucks on fuel. Infrastructure money well spent, I hold.
I work for a company involved in SCADA systems that control half of Australia's water supply and a fair bit of the country's power grid.
SCADA networks have evolved, out of convenience, to coexist with existing LANS and thus progressively have become more dependent on TCP/IP protocols, thus becoming (rather by default) Internet-enabled.
Vulnerabilities are to some degree covered by the RTU programming, which has built in safeguards against doing wrong things. But it's not impossible for a dedicated hacker to create a bit of havoc, and this point is not lost on our client base. Our clients are actively investing now to isolate SCADA networks from the Internet, because safety has to overrule operational convenience. Work is going on now, and the door is fast closing on this avenue of attack.
It's all about SCADA. Little intelligent valves in little steel boxes attached to a lot of industrial plant. It's automation, true, but there are rather a lot of eyes watching it.
And why do you think this is happening? Would it be that smaller generators are somehow more efficient than large, high-capacity generating plants? Or do you think that it has been impossible to get a permit to build a large high-capacity generating plant for the last 30 years or so?
I don't think per-kilowatt cost is necessarily the prime driver. The real gain is in the flexibility that comes from decentralisation of supply. A large scale generator may take 36 months to install, which is cool if you have the mandate and the organisation and the plans. But a single home or business microCHP installation can happen in one or two days, and they're sourced from an assembly line. Volkswagen AG and Whispergen (NZ) are two microCHP makers. They're both powered by natural gas, although the Whispergen is a Stirling design and more flexible in fuel source.
If you can manage growth incrementally, and serve your community needs with smaller, easier to acquire energy sources, it stands to reason that you'd be less inclined to either shortages or expensive oversupply. And in a growth scenario, it's a bit difficult to ask an existing community to pay not just for their own power capacity, but to underwrite the needs of future people too. Small is beautiful, even if it ain't cheap.
One trend I've seen in recent studies is toward distributed, decentralised power generation. We're not talking about one technology taking over, but rather a larger number of smaller generators in a variety of formats coming together to augment the primary generators we have. This is already happening to some degree, and expectations are that it will grow.
So as your city grows - instead of (say) three coal generators, you might add one new coal generator plus a few hundred wind turbines, a few thousand gas fired microCHP generators (similar to the Whispergen Stirling units being deployed in Spain) and quite a few thousand private photovoltaic arrays (in Perth for example, the applications for PV installations are running at better than 3 thousand per month at the moment).
The combination of all these will tend to even out the supply across the grid, but there still needs to be fairly careful power regulation at each end point.
Let's kill Silverlight and Flash with Javascript and JavaFX, the open languages.
Sad face here, I wonder just how open Java will remain. Consider: Java was defined by the Sun Java Test Suite, wasn't it? And now Oracle owns Sun. Oracle has long been known to me as a very agressive closed, proprietary company living off their software licenses.
Should the Open Source community still be backing Java, now that the rather benign hand of Sun is no longer controlling it? Is it time to rally around something else now? Some language where you aren't in danger of being sued for infringement if you copy a test suite?
I am worried about Oracle pulling the strings, at some point they may think it in their best interests to act in such a way as to drive the language to more proprietary platforms. It's within their scope to do so, and it may be in their best interests to try. What was once the language choice for clear sailing is now in treacherous waters I think. Write once, run everywhere - for a given value of "everywhere".
1. How does one go about proving that a specific individual committed copyright infringement?
That presumes the RIAA/MPAA give a fig about collateral damage. So far the evidence is that they don't, much.
We have to keep hammering back at attempts to short-circuit all attempts to punish people in groups, of course. Convenience on the part of the plaintiff is not an acceptable reason to violate such a universal legal convention, one underpinned by the lessons of WWII.