You'd do better by posting "50% of the proceeds of this toll booth go to charity" and doubling the price. Your way requires the rest to buy balaclavas, which will never fly.
Security is better served by doing proper stateful firewalling, and this is probably best achieved by removing NAT from the equation so that people don't have a false sense of security.
Now that's just being silly. Most people aren't going to be influenced by such a lesson, because they fundamentally don't care about such issues. NAT is still a good thing, although I do agree with much else you say.
I disagree with your contention that most routers don't offer stateful firewalls; check the age of your information, most of them do now.
For my choice, I run a nice little NetGear wireless router at home. It's IPV4, uses NAT and includes a stateful firewall. (The router is quite good, but I've found the NetGear wireless Ethernet cards at the PC end rather suck on many levels. Get the router, ignore the cards). I regularly check our home systems (six of them) for malware, zero day exploits I read about, etc. and we're all pretty clean. Our ISP (Optus) offers a firewalled connection too, which helps. And the kids know better than to click links indiscriminately. You can teach 'em that.
do you really want every appliance in your house directly addressable from anywhere in the world? After all, what could possibly go wrong?
Part of the appeal, according to the electricity execs we've surveyed recently (study to be released soon) is the idea that people might like to know better where their money is going on a per-household-circuit level. A better dashboard, if you will. (warning: car analogy follows) It's like the dashboard of your car - you have a speedometer, tachometer, various warning lights - yet your house has nothing of the sort to show you your energy use, and you're using a similar amount of energy (car energy use approximates household energy use, it turns out). There's a hope that overall energy use will be cut down if people have better knowledge of where they're using it, and giving people that sort of dashboard option may help. Electricity is a big part of a lot of people's spend, and if they save money and the electricity providers save money, everybody benefits.
Take-up will be proportional to how helpful it can be made, how easy it is to access, and how secure it can be made, how compliant with privacy regs.
An interesting side observation from our survey is that the C-level people we've spoken to are concerned about the same things we are - effect on climate, safety of the workforce, renewable energy sources, and they're quite passionate about wanting to make a positive difference. They're not quite the rapacious bastards I thought they were.
Smart meters are only part of the smart grid, although where they're being deployed it's considered essential to it. And the jury is still out as to how they're going to do the remote reading in many places - that will involve networking, and considering the millions of end points it may end up being a purpose-built protocol running across purpose-built hardware. IPV6 is all well and good and well thought out, but security is a big concern of the electricity companies and they're not entirely wedded to Internet protocols, which may not be considered sufficiently hardened to them. Get it wrong and the juice could be turned on at an inappropriate moment, killing somebody.
And the new networking framework doesn't just apply to the meters, either - distributors are planning to improve their back haul networks from high voltage infrastructure on down to the substation level too. Part of the reason for smart metering (along with remote reading) is to get a better usage profile - that is, when, during the day, the peaks and troughs of usage occur in any part of the network. There are big bucks to be saved by coupling that knowledge to demand-side electricity management.
In Australia we have a national electricity market, and both bulk electricity and retail customer transactions are traded across a common market settlements system called MSATS. It's already geared to handle the higher load of transactions that smart metering will impose, and has since 2001.
The pathways connect Lagrange points where gravitational forces balance out. Depicted by computer graphics, the pathways look like strands of spaghetti that wrap around planetary bodies
I knew it! My belief in the one true faith is justified!
I've been compiling an electricity industry report over the last couple of weeks. One of the interesting things I ran across was Whispergen, a company in New Zealand (I'm not affiliated with them). Quiet, low maintenance home generators based on multifuel Stirling engines. They've recently opened a new factory in Spain for high volume production.
Very interesting - if we can manufacture fluids from waste plastic that are reasonably energy-dense, the exact thermal profile of their burn may not rule out their being used to put electricity back into the grid on a wider basis. External combustion engines are quite resilient to differences in fuel type, because they really only need a thermal differential to work - not a precisely metered injection of fuel with specific burn characteristics like an internal combustion engine requires. Volkswagen and Lichtblick in Germany are also rolling out a pilot for fixed home distributed generation units, as (I believe) was reported earlier on this forum. Keyword is MicroCHP (combined heating and power).
The fact that variations in the quality of fuel can be accommodated easily argues in favour of there being an economic advantage in using them where they might otherwise not be as attractive to use. Current grid buy-back systems here in Australia are largely photovoltaic (thousands of new applications per month) in WA and QLD, but the grid does actually need to smarten up a bit to use distributed generation elsewhere. The ability to handle electricity buy-back and the ability to keep the load level is key.
And 20gb is about right for us; we get the "used up 90%" email from Optus about two days before the end of the billing period. Quite happy with them. Wife is a photographer, I'm a WoW tragic.
I was also architect in charge of Telstra's integration of NetCracker (unfortunate name) internet onboarding design system (replacing a rather large number of VBA-infected spreadsheets). The software was from Boston, the team of integration programmers was from Russia, and were culturally disinclined to document their work. And if you asked any of them what time it was, they'd tell you how to build a clock. Sol Trujillo had just taken a backhoe to the organisation, and some of my own team stayed on to complete the job despite not having been paid for weeks (nobody could figure out who should sign their timesheets during the reorg). It was a good product, though, and it went in and was running despite our best efforts. Whether or not the sales force was able to make the inertial shift to use it I don't know, I jumped ship as soon as I could.
But dear gods, the hoops you had to jump through. A smaller, tighter organisation - or rather two of them - would offer a geometric reduction in the number of touch points in the organisation, the total number of people you have to get approvals across. That can only be a good thing.
43 *billion* dollars ? That must be some expensive cable ?
We're talking about spanning a continent here. And it's not just the cost of the highly refined melted glass - there's a lot of money involved in laying that cable a few thousand kilometers at a time, across terrain that might be described as um, marginally passable, to say nothing of the connection costs. The 43Big is not an outrageous number at all.
We should probably be less concerned with his data on netbook usage in his classes, then, and more concerned with an intelligent campus. Think about it: several buildings under his control, several dozen super powerful computers all obeying him...Howl's Moving Castle mixed with HAL intelligence, methinks.
Worse, the entire campus would be obscured by huge billows of steam, and you wouldn't see it coming!
I built a 64-bit Vista box last year for gaming and it hasn't picked up lint. The reason? Everything other than gaming goes in an XP virtual machine. I've rolled back to the snapshot, applied patches, retaken the snapshot, and then reinstalled apps 3 times in the VM, but the main box has stayed minty fresh.
I suspect the "troll" mod to the above was a mistake on someone's part. It's actually a very good scheme for keeping an underlying operating system clean. Of course, if you have malware, a virtual image is a good way to preserve it as well. Swings and roundabouts. But mod pp "underrated" please.
Documents aren't washing machines, and metaphors only go so far. We're not talking about reliably cleaning clothes, we're talking about the preservation of knowledge and the passage of information that defines civilisation. When most of the information is in the MS Office proprietary format, there's a huge inertia against changing it to a more neutral format. The problem of one corporation's control over the format may be obviated if there is some way to legally ensure the appropriate version of the reading/writing software will always be available, but that currently isn't the case is it? MSFT has arbitrary control.
Bubbles happen when governments steal from rational people in order to give to irrational people.
I think this is analogous to Ringworld's Spill Mountains. There's a lot of Flup to move, and you don't want it to concentrate too much in a few small areas.
There you go, insight for the day. Finance is Flup.
This is just another in a very long line of people wanting something for nothing.
Give me a break. It's more important to have the capability of reading and writing documents everywhere and not having to worry about information surviving past the arbitrary economic lifespan of some corporation.
By focusing on the ROI on document software, something that should be as prevalent and available as air, you're letting a fixation on the rocks in the road cost you your awareness of the horizon. Look up for once and stop muttering at your shoes.
Has ANYONE used the "Add/Remove" function in Windows to INSTALL something? I never thought of that. I certainly haven't, as pretty much everything installs itself or makes the appropriate installer app calls automatically.
I used this feature once - you were given a large list of programs from which you could choose to install. It's related to MS Systems Management Server (which goes under a different name, now, SMS being too confusing. But I can't be buggered to look it up).
Of course, this would have been prohibitively expensive to implement for most folks, but I was working on a contract for The Borg at the time and apps license costs didn't seem to enter into the equation.
Right, but what caused it to become that way? Wealth doesn't just disappear for no reason.
It starts when you outsource the means of production, proceeds through the middle where you outsource management and control, until it reaches the point where you discover you've outsourced your board of directors. Then stops.
Mate, we've got you all. Nobody takes the government seriously down under, so when you say look at the country we look at the land. And this old stone boat has been here since the days of the Rainbow Serpent. Ask Lady Uluru, she'll tell ya - she was eroding, round shouldered and wise when the rest of you were still shaking off a fresh coat of seaweed.
It may also be the first shot in an attempt to embrace and extend, too. After all, there's quite a lot of rather nice technology in Linux. Apt-get and the open source infrastructure is a heck of an improvement over Microsoft's "Add or remove programs" feature, in my opinion, to say nothing of the dog. Just one example.
I wonder if future convergence will ever reach a point where I'll be writing this on my favorite (yet to be developed) operating system, an outgrowth of some mixture of a number of them.
Or maybe I'll just chuck it all and go back to VMS.
I don't mind that my car has a license plate. I don't even mind having to register with the authorities or prove that the car is indeed my own. What really pisses me off is the cameras and systems that track where I'm going by using the information on that license plate, and tying it to my behaviour patterns.
I'm not a law breaker and I'm not paranoid*, I just don't want my behaviour modified by stealthy incursions into my privacy that could result in profiling and ultimately curtailing my choices in where I go, what I see and what I do. WGA is, I believe, just part of a trend that increasingly encourages powerful public institutions to think of people as objects, as statistics, and the effect of treating people as objects is the source of pretty much all I consider crime in the world.
(*I walked by a construction site the other day and the roofer told me that I wasn't paranoid - in morse code. Clever, aren't they?)
A very long time ago, a friend in our share house was given one of their "personality test" questionaires. I asked for a copy too, and got it. Said friend agonised over his questionnaire, and his answers were all over the page. It was a simple mark-sense sheet - remember those? Anyway, I said "watch this..." and I took a ruler and marked every question right down the middle. One to five, I marked three for all of them. I used the right home address, but a false name (my scam-o-meter being active even as a teenager in the late 60's).
I bet my friend my share of the utilities for that month that the "analysis" response would be identical.
The written response we got some days later and indeed, they were identical. I had won. And apparently, we were both "quite unique". And I had the joy of writing "not at this address" on all the mail sent to the false name I gave at that address. Unless they've razed that house, they're probably still getting letter spam.
Biggest damn con on the planet until Nigerian 419 arrived, in my opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd do better by posting "50% of the proceeds of this toll booth go to charity" and doubling the price. Your way requires the rest to buy balaclavas, which will never fly.
Yeah, except it doesn't actually work that way. Here's what happens:
1. Board level manager's meeting...
Congratulations, in not seeking it you have achieved the Tao. Please turn over your existing duties and report to the Yellow Emperor immediately.
Seriously, I wish I had mod points just now. That one caused sinus damage.
My guess would be Paul Allen, or a proxy thereof, will sit there bidding until he wins. And it will go for over $120,000, easily.
Security is better served by doing proper stateful firewalling, and this is probably best achieved by removing NAT from the equation so that people don't have a false sense of security.
Now that's just being silly. Most people aren't going to be influenced by such a lesson, because they fundamentally don't care about such issues. NAT is still a good thing, although I do agree with much else you say.
I disagree with your contention that most routers don't offer stateful firewalls; check the age of your information, most of them do now.
For my choice, I run a nice little NetGear wireless router at home. It's IPV4, uses NAT and includes a stateful firewall. (The router is quite good, but I've found the NetGear wireless Ethernet cards at the PC end rather suck on many levels. Get the router, ignore the cards). I regularly check our home systems (six of them) for malware, zero day exploits I read about, etc. and we're all pretty clean. Our ISP (Optus) offers a firewalled connection too, which helps. And the kids know better than to click links indiscriminately. You can teach 'em that.
do you really want every appliance in your house directly addressable from anywhere in the world? After all, what could possibly go wrong?
Part of the appeal, according to the electricity execs we've surveyed recently (study to be released soon) is the idea that people might like to know better where their money is going on a per-household-circuit level. A better dashboard, if you will. (warning: car analogy follows) It's like the dashboard of your car - you have a speedometer, tachometer, various warning lights - yet your house has nothing of the sort to show you your energy use, and you're using a similar amount of energy (car energy use approximates household energy use, it turns out). There's a hope that overall energy use will be cut down if people have better knowledge of where they're using it, and giving people that sort of dashboard option may help. Electricity is a big part of a lot of people's spend, and if they save money and the electricity providers save money, everybody benefits.
Take-up will be proportional to how helpful it can be made, how easy it is to access, and how secure it can be made, how compliant with privacy regs.
An interesting side observation from our survey is that the C-level people we've spoken to are concerned about the same things we are - effect on climate, safety of the workforce, renewable energy sources, and they're quite passionate about wanting to make a positive difference. They're not quite the rapacious bastards I thought they were.
Smart meters are only part of the smart grid, although where they're being deployed it's considered essential to it. And the jury is still out as to how they're going to do the remote reading in many places - that will involve networking, and considering the millions of end points it may end up being a purpose-built protocol running across purpose-built hardware. IPV6 is all well and good and well thought out, but security is a big concern of the electricity companies and they're not entirely wedded to Internet protocols, which may not be considered sufficiently hardened to them. Get it wrong and the juice could be turned on at an inappropriate moment, killing somebody.
And the new networking framework doesn't just apply to the meters, either - distributors are planning to improve their back haul networks from high voltage infrastructure on down to the substation level too. Part of the reason for smart metering (along with remote reading) is to get a better usage profile - that is, when, during the day, the peaks and troughs of usage occur in any part of the network. There are big bucks to be saved by coupling that knowledge to demand-side electricity management.
In Australia we have a national electricity market, and both bulk electricity and retail customer transactions are traded across a common market settlements system called MSATS. It's already geared to handle the higher load of transactions that smart metering will impose, and has since 2001.
The pathways connect Lagrange points where gravitational forces balance out. Depicted by computer graphics, the pathways look like strands of spaghetti that wrap around planetary bodies
I knew it! My belief in the one true faith is justified!
-- Strict Constructionist Pastafarian (Bolognaise)
I've been compiling an electricity industry report over the last couple of weeks. One of the interesting things I ran across was Whispergen, a company in New Zealand (I'm not affiliated with them). Quiet, low maintenance home generators based on multifuel Stirling engines. They've recently opened a new factory in Spain for high volume production.
Very interesting - if we can manufacture fluids from waste plastic that are reasonably energy-dense, the exact thermal profile of their burn may not rule out their being used to put electricity back into the grid on a wider basis. External combustion engines are quite resilient to differences in fuel type, because they really only need a thermal differential to work - not a precisely metered injection of fuel with specific burn characteristics like an internal combustion engine requires. Volkswagen and Lichtblick in Germany are also rolling out a pilot for fixed home distributed generation units, as (I believe) was reported earlier on this forum. Keyword is MicroCHP (combined heating and power).
The fact that variations in the quality of fuel can be accommodated easily argues in favour of there being an economic advantage in using them where they might otherwise not be as attractive to use. Current grid buy-back systems here in Australia are largely photovoltaic (thousands of new applications per month) in WA and QLD, but the grid does actually need to smarten up a bit to use distributed generation elsewhere. The ability to handle electricity buy-back and the ability to keep the load level is key.
I am elderly folk, you insensitive clod!
And 20gb is about right for us; we get the "used up 90%" email from Optus about two days before the end of the billing period. Quite happy with them. Wife is a photographer, I'm a WoW tragic.
I was also architect in charge of Telstra's integration of NetCracker (unfortunate name) internet onboarding design system (replacing a rather large number of VBA-infected spreadsheets). The software was from Boston, the team of integration programmers was from Russia, and were culturally disinclined to document their work. And if you asked any of them what time it was, they'd tell you how to build a clock. Sol Trujillo had just taken a backhoe to the organisation, and some of my own team stayed on to complete the job despite not having been paid for weeks (nobody could figure out who should sign their timesheets during the reorg). It was a good product, though, and it went in and was running despite our best efforts. Whether or not the sales force was able to make the inertial shift to use it I don't know, I jumped ship as soon as I could.
But dear gods, the hoops you had to jump through. A smaller, tighter organisation - or rather two of them - would offer a geometric reduction in the number of touch points in the organisation, the total number of people you have to get approvals across. That can only be a good thing.
43 *billion* dollars ? That must be some expensive cable ?
We're talking about spanning a continent here. And it's not just the cost of the highly refined melted glass - there's a lot of money involved in laying that cable a few thousand kilometers at a time, across terrain that might be described as um, marginally passable, to say nothing of the connection costs. The 43Big is not an outrageous number at all.
And I'm sure most of the bot nets are from computers in Australia!
Which as everybody knows, is populated entirely by criminals! So clearly I can't use the botnet closest to me!
We should probably be less concerned with his data on netbook usage in his classes, then, and more concerned with an intelligent campus. Think about it: several buildings under his control, several dozen super powerful computers all obeying him...Howl's Moving Castle mixed with HAL intelligence, methinks.
Worse, the entire campus would be obscured by huge billows of steam, and you wouldn't see it coming!
I built a 64-bit Vista box last year for gaming and it hasn't picked up lint. The reason? Everything other than gaming goes in an XP virtual machine. I've rolled back to the snapshot, applied patches, retaken the snapshot, and then reinstalled apps 3 times in the VM, but the main box has stayed minty fresh.
I suspect the "troll" mod to the above was a mistake on someone's part. It's actually a very good scheme for keeping an underlying operating system clean. Of course, if you have malware, a virtual image is a good way to preserve it as well. Swings and roundabouts. But mod pp "underrated" please.
Documents aren't washing machines, and metaphors only go so far. We're not talking about reliably cleaning clothes, we're talking about the preservation of knowledge and the passage of information that defines civilisation. When most of the information is in the MS Office proprietary format, there's a huge inertia against changing it to a more neutral format. The problem of one corporation's control over the format may be obviated if there is some way to legally ensure the appropriate version of the reading/writing software will always be available, but that currently isn't the case is it? MSFT has arbitrary control.
when will these music industries/RIAJ/RIAA/etc ever learn from Amazon/Ebay/etc
Reminds me of the French automobile in Bruce McCall's "Zany Afternoons" that was "so exclusive that none will be built!".
I have no problem resisting the urge to buy merchandise from companies that treat me as an adversary.
Bubbles happen when governments steal from rational people in order to give to irrational people.
I think this is analogous to Ringworld's Spill Mountains. There's a lot of Flup to move, and you don't want it to concentrate too much in a few small areas.
There you go, insight for the day. Finance is Flup.
This is just another in a very long line of people wanting something for nothing.
Give me a break. It's more important to have the capability of reading and writing documents everywhere and not having to worry about information surviving past the arbitrary economic lifespan of some corporation.
By focusing on the ROI on document software, something that should be as prevalent and available as air, you're letting a fixation on the rocks in the road cost you your awareness of the horizon. Look up for once and stop muttering at your shoes.
I am a programmer, and I am usually quite reluctant to teaching people about e.g. programming
Please tell me more about this example-based programming language.
Has ANYONE used the "Add/Remove" function in Windows to INSTALL something? I never thought of that. I certainly haven't, as pretty much everything installs itself or makes the appropriate installer app calls automatically.
I used this feature once - you were given a large list of programs from which you could choose to install. It's related to MS Systems Management Server (which goes under a different name, now, SMS being too confusing. But I can't be buggered to look it up).
Of course, this would have been prohibitively expensive to implement for most folks, but I was working on a contract for The Borg at the time and apps license costs didn't seem to enter into the equation.
Right, but what caused it to become that way? Wealth doesn't just disappear for no reason.
It starts when you outsource the means of production, proceeds through the middle where you outsource management and control, until it reaches the point where you discover you've outsourced your board of directors. Then stops.
Mate, we've got you all. Nobody takes the government seriously down under, so when you say look at the country we look at the land. And this old stone boat has been here since the days of the Rainbow Serpent. Ask Lady Uluru, she'll tell ya - she was eroding, round shouldered and wise when the rest of you were still shaking off a fresh coat of seaweed.
It may also be the first shot in an attempt to embrace and extend, too. After all, there's quite a lot of rather nice technology in Linux. Apt-get and the open source infrastructure is a heck of an improvement over Microsoft's "Add or remove programs" feature, in my opinion, to say nothing of the dog. Just one example.
I wonder if future convergence will ever reach a point where I'll be writing this on my favorite (yet to be developed) operating system, an outgrowth of some mixture of a number of them.
Or maybe I'll just chuck it all and go back to VMS.
...when you have Search? Pick your own keywords.
I don't mind that my car has a license plate. I don't even mind having to register with the authorities or prove that the car is indeed my own. What really pisses me off is the cameras and systems that track where I'm going by using the information on that license plate, and tying it to my behaviour patterns.
I'm not a law breaker and I'm not paranoid*, I just don't want my behaviour modified by stealthy incursions into my privacy that could result in profiling and ultimately curtailing my choices in where I go, what I see and what I do. WGA is, I believe, just part of a trend that increasingly encourages powerful public institutions to think of people as objects, as statistics, and the effect of treating people as objects is the source of pretty much all I consider crime in the world.
(*I walked by a construction site the other day and the roofer told me that I wasn't paranoid - in morse code. Clever, aren't they?)
A very long time ago, a friend in our share house was given one of their "personality test" questionaires. I asked for a copy too, and got it. Said friend agonised over his questionnaire, and his answers were all over the page. It was a simple mark-sense sheet - remember those? Anyway, I said "watch this..." and I took a ruler and marked every question right down the middle. One to five, I marked three for all of them. I used the right home address, but a false name (my scam-o-meter being active even as a teenager in the late 60's).
I bet my friend my share of the utilities for that month that the "analysis" response would be identical.
The written response we got some days later and indeed, they were identical. I had won. And apparently, we were both "quite unique". And I had the joy of writing "not at this address" on all the mail sent to the false name I gave at that address. Unless they've razed that house, they're probably still getting letter spam.
Biggest damn con on the planet until Nigerian 419 arrived, in my opinion.