Step 1: Convince company that these are vital to increased work productivity and they become the new standard and you take a break when it says you do
Step 2: Hack the software so it will increase the frequency with which you are told to take a break
Step 3: Sell the hack to your co-workers
Step 4: Profit
These sound like the best devices ever. I am off to the safety department to let them know of the need for these!
Yes, you are missing something.
When you purchase a company, you get the assets, their Intellectual property (IP), employees (they can of course quit later), customers, etc.
Apple can go and make ITunes better by using the IP they just acquired, or they can get the employees because they need more to work on their stuff and they like what LaLa did, they can continue to run 2 music stores and get the profit from both, or they can trash the one they bought and have a new customer base (customers are of course free to jump ship.
Apple didn't seem interested in the tech, just the customer database. They have a bunch of new customers who had account credit with LaLa that is now ITunes credit. Some of the customers will request refunds, or spend it and jump ship, but a number of them will just accept it and start using ITunes.
This was already answered on Star Trek Next Generation, Episode Genesis. Data and Picard come back from chasing a run away torpedo they were testing. While gone, Dr. Crusher activated a dormant gen in Lt. Barkley so he could naturally fight off an alien flu virus.
The newly activated defense went airborne and started activating all of the dormant genes in the entire crew and they all de-evolved to lower forms of life.
So if they proceed, it will activate other things that nature turned off and we will all end up as freaks of nature and some day, hundred of years in the future, the aliens will land and find the remains of our society with the many strange and varied species of monkeys that shouldn't exist and they will wonder were all the people that made the society went to, not realizing we are right there...all those strange looking monkeys that are watching them explore the remains of our cities!
Then they will try and move in and the primitive half-ape-man gone wrong things will attack and there will be mass chaos as battle between primitives and aliens happen and then something close to Dances with Wolves, or Avatar happens!
I followed the advice of your sig and decided to not be dull in my response.
I saw an article from a local news person about a year ago that said this exact same thing. I wanted to write to the guy and tell him that no, LEGO didn't remove the imagination, his age removed the imagination. The guy was a late 20's early thirtys single guy who has never watched kids play with the current legos.
I have 4 kids and they play with Legos all the time. This is what always happens, they get their set that has the fighter, troll battle wagon, etc and build it per the directions. They then play with these as they are after they have built them. They set them up in various battles/scense, etc. Tons of imagination setting that up and carrying out battles, etc. Then, inevitably, the legos fall apart because of being thrown/steped on, etc. They then either rebuild it (that only happens a couple of times with the exception of a few things they think are really cool) or the pieces get dumped into the big bins of Legos and they toally forget that they can rebuild a Star Wars fight, Harry Potter castle and the Legos become part of the general pool to be used for whatever.
Yes, they have sets that are built as something specific and some of those sets never get broken (touch my 6 year old's Darth Vader Tie Fighter at your own peril) but most of them get broken down as they play and then you have the jumble of Legos.
And those specalized parts, they get re-tooled into anything other then what they were origionally used for and stuck all over the place on other things. An adult mind gets trapped into the convention of this big long piece is the blaster from Anakin's fighter, but once it lands in the kids bin with everything else, it no longer is that and it ends up being anything but a blaster.
In the past 3 years, my kids have had Harry Potter sets, Knights sets and Star Wars sets. This Christmas, they got the Lego Space police sets and a couple of Knights sets. The Space police ones are still intact per the instructions. My son's Darth Vader tie fighter is still intact because of the fact he leaves it on my desk and no one is allowed to play with it. 100% of the remaining Star Wars sets, Harry Potter sets and all but the new Kinghts sets are totally broken down. Last night, they built a house and got all excited when they built in a big screen tv and movie theatre. A few weeks ago, they had a gladiator arena with Star Wars people, Knights, and other random figures. Before that, they had a rock monster pit for the Power Miners sets to work with.
Legos have not changed, the people who grew up playing with them have changed and can't see LEgos the same way and say that the sets they put out are ruining the Lego play. For a constrained adult mind, it has. For a kid, it has not. If you doubt that, subscribe to Lego magazone or go online and look at the pictures that are submitted by the Lego kids club members. They are anything but following directions.
Thank you to both of you. I can't believe I forgot those other ones! My bad.
Next time I log in and post about how I had a Russian wife named Beowolf wife, who like me hates MS, and controls me (could say she is my overlord), especially when my grammar is bad, that left me for Cowboy Neal because I never talk about real tech news anymore and summarizes everything I am going to say because I always say the same thing, I will not forget those things.
Come on, we are supposed to have a meaningful discussion about this here? Let me sum up all the comments that are forth coming.
Jokes about/.ers not being able to get out of the basement to get a girl let alone knwoing about their G-Spot.
The 3 women on slashdot offering their opinion, which will lead to a bunch of/.ers being surprised that there are women on/.
Comments about how we welcome our new G-spot overlords. Yes, it makes no sense but most reading this are saying, woman, what is that? G-Spot, what is that...must be some new kind of fembot, cue the overlord jokes.
Imagine a Beowoulf Cluster of these....
The person always complaining about how/. sucks now and how this is not new about something tech related
Someone correcting my grammar/spelling mistakes followed by someong correcting their and a spiral for the grammar/spelling Nazis...Jsut for those people in case I don't have enough, I is not bengi thiking that yous peopel is being knwoing Engrish prperly, not like it maters anyway on a plaec of blogging.
The few/.ers who claim to have dated women and know where the G-Spot is and are trying to prove they are a man here on/.
I think I about covered it all...next topic...please.;)
Bravo! You are exactly correct. I am a Controls Engineer, anyone not knowing what that is, I program the code that makes the equipment in the plant work. I program the operator interfaces the operators use to talk to their controls equipment. The site I am sitting at right now has 2 completely independant networks. The IT network and our Controls Network. We do not let the IT people TOUCH our network. We maintain all of our computers and the hardware and fiber used to talk to the controls network is completely seperate from the IT network.
I have other customers that give us remote VPM access to computers on their controls network so we can log in from anywhere, but they have a specific computer they use to do that and they unplug the thing from the outside world unless they have called us for help. That still makes me a little leary.
It is impossible to 100% secure any network because someone can always figure out what fence to cut through to get in. In order to 99% secure your network, you have to seperate it from the internet networks. If you have a connection between the internet and your critical controls networks, as you stated, you are a moron and are asking for someone, be it terrorist, or more likely a disgruntled employee, to come in from outside and sabotage things.
Gotta keep the hardware seperate or you loose orders of magnitude of security if you do not. I will never design a controls network that has access to the outside world. Do as you said, run 2 sets of cables to the control room, 1 is the IT and that is connected to their email/web surfing PC and then one set that is connected to the controls network. You then also lock out their ability on the Operator interface to do anything except the MMI software. Any decent MMI software has those capabilites built in.
You are right, no one on slashdot has a girlfriend. He may have HAD one in the past, but after that exchange, he has returned to the slashdot ways and is one of us again.
HEY! You stole my life story! Grow up blowing things up, breaking things, making things to more efficently break things, make bombs that break the things that you made to break things to hide the evidence of the illegal activities...I may have said too much!;P
And voila, out comes a Chemical Engineer! I have said it many time, if a Chemical Engineer tells you he has never blown things up and lit things on fire, he is lieing to you.
Just had to say hello to a fellow former delinquent now turned Chem Eng.
Interesting thoughts, but not necessarily valid all around. I worked in pulp and paper for 6.5 years, so I know my way around paper mills and had a few thoughts.
Yes, paper mills have large electric service hook ups. Not diffcult to hook into.
Yes, paper mills use their own closed loop water systems, BUT when the paper mill was decommissionined, most of that equipment was probably taken away and went to another facility of the paper company. Also, the systems are at times "closed loop", but they are also quite often closed loop when you look at the facility entire with the water that hits the floor being recycled back into the water system for reuse.
Also, paper mills water systems usually deal with 10" + diameter pipes I imagine most of the piping would not be a good reuse for cooling in a server environment without sever revamping.
The standards required for server cooling loops and that of a paper mill are quite differnet. In paper mills, it is a routine task to take a hose and spray things down. Because of this, small leaks in pipe, no big deal, the water will flow into the sumps and be picked up and put back in. Imagine reusing the old pipes to do some cooling loops and have a water spray t 140 psi shooting water across your server room or into the cube farm.
Someone pointed out many paper mills are on rivers and generate their own power. Even if not using the river (which they need to dump effluent as well), many have power generating stations associated with them as well. There is a good chance that the mill has a generating station hooked to it. Google coudl have purchased that, or the paper company could have maintained ownership. Either way, the new data center is probably connected to the power station to increase reliability.
So I think the big thing that Google gets out of it is:
A shell of a building (take almost everything out from inside) Large electrical server Possible power generating station ownership or being directly connected to the power station.
I worked for a large paper company that had a First Line Leadership Training program to teach first line leaders the skills to lead the worker bees. It seemed to be a very good course. The things taught were excellent, unfortunately, to apply for a first line leadership position, you had to take the selection tool. The selection tool tested to see if you had the ability to become a first line leader. About a third of the test was a personaltiy profile. If you did not meet the personality profile, you probably were going to fail the tool and not be allowed to apply for the job, which would have then lead to the training classes.
I did a bunch of research when I found about about these changes and found several published papers that link personality types to races. This is not 100% as personality types vary all over the board in an entire population, but when you look at the results, most Americans score a certain way, most Asians score a certain way, most Africans score a certain way, etc. There is a strong link to personality profiles and race and personality profiling will be linked to racial profiling one day.
That testing they are doing is a bit different, but will probably have some of the same links. The question posed by the submitter, has anyone seen this in IT or other technical fields. The company I worked for was doing this for all employees trying to go for a frontline leadership position. If you were in IT and going to become an IT manager, you had to take it. If you were engineering and going to work as a team leader on the plant floor or to go and be a manager of engineers, you will have had to go through this program. It is only a matter of time before more of the type of research I found is done and it becomes more common knowledge and someone gets sued because the test discriminated against me.
Worst part of this story, I was singled out to be one of the certified trainers for this program, i.e. I taught the people how to be better front line leaders. I was one of the select people in the "inner circle" of the program. I asked about this and raised concerns and was told to sit down and shut up and accept the new directive. I let the company shortly thereafter.
There are so many problems with tests like these and HR people do not realize them and just buy ito them by the companies that sell them.
First, I would have to ask, what does your contract/agreement that you have with the customer say? It may be spelled out in there that you will provide them X,Y,Z services but the access they are presently asking for is not covered and not allowed at the price they are currently paying. If it doens't cover it, you have to make a case for why ti doens't cover it and proceed on.
If they say, well, how much extra will it cost to give us this option that we want, then you figure out how much it will cost to make sure they can not screw you up and give them a new contract to sign for the option they want. If you can not make the data secure on your end where they can not significantly screw your stuff up, then make the price of the contract high enough to cover 10 times (or some reasonable saftey factor) the number of likely incidents they will create. I.E. If you could guess they may screw the stuff up 10 times a year and it would take you 3 days to fix it, then do the math and say, 10 times* 3 Days, * Hourly Rate* 10 (safety factor) and tell them that is the anual cost to have the feature they are asking for. You may also want to include a clause that if they screw up your data base, additional extra charges can be levied at a certain rate to fix it in case they mess it up way more. They want an option, figure out what it is worth to you to give them that option and then make them pay it.
If you can't make it secure/don't want to, then as someone else said, tell them no, it can't be done and explain it, but that can be difficult. It is usually pretty easy to discourage a customer by saying, not in scope and that will cost a lot of extra money and they will usually say, nevermind.
I agree 100% with this. I hate the new site. There is only one thing I liked about the new site.
I used to read Dilbert almost everyday, now, I doubt I will be able to. It was a quick 15 second diversion that gave me a laugh. Now, I can't even get the page to load in 15 seconds, let alone read the comic! The place I work at, the internet connection is horrendously slow and it takes so long to load the site and all the "bells and whistles", it makes it difficult to even load the page.
I am really late in getting to this article and not many will see this, but I found one thing REALLY interesting...
Quoted from the article,
"The findings, which are reported in the Journal of Adolescent Health, support earlier research which showed that children who watch violent television shows and who identify with the characters and ****believe they are real**** are more likely to be aggressive as adults."
I added the **** to highlight. This research is done around people who believe the television characters are real. I have a 7 year old, and I know for a fact he knows the difference between reality and tv shows. I suspect but don't know for 100% certain because we haven't talked about it, that my younger children understand as well. People older than age 8 who watch tv shows and think the characters on tv are real people have extreme problems of their own. At a very early age, children realize that tv shows are shows and no longer think the characters are real. Those who do not have other problems and will more than likely be part of the society who insists that the WWF is real and not staged and that part of the population has it's own problems and shouldn't be used to study and make assumptions about the affect of something on society.
You, are one of the social and intellectual elite having thought about and done this. Before you think me sarcastic, I did the same thing. I have a couple of email addresses and give the appropriate address to the appropriate person. Work people that are not friends are never given my non-work email email address, nice and simple.
I also can't understand why some people would, like the artical says, put your boss on your friends list if you are using Facebook for friends stuff. If they want to be added, like you said, make a new facebook account if you only have one and keep work and friends seperate.
People are so silly sometimes, that also leads to what some others have said, never post something on facebook etc that you don't want everyone to see and knwo about you.
I agree with you and can back it up. I am 33 with 4 kids (started young), oldest is 7, youngest 2 are 4 (twins). I play games with all of them. A favorite for all of them is Mario Cart. I played both Star Wars Lego games through to completetion with the 7 year old, we all play Smash Brothers together (mom even plays that one) and we are continually battling for computer time as we still only have one.
I have used my company provided laptop to play games with my son and we used to play DAOC together and have played Heros of Might and Magic, DAOC, etc..etc.. We love to play games, both video, board games and RPGs (D&D and GURPS), as well as sports and other things together. A good friend of mine has 12 and 14 year old boys and they game with us as well.
Gamer parents get it and play with their kids, non-gamer parents don't get it and say thing stupid about the violence and bad things of the video games without understanding. Nothing new here, jsut the same types of things that have always been said. The onyl thin new is the growing percent that do play with their kids and that should be hailed as a success for the gaming community. Eventually, the articles will say 23% of parent's don't play games with their kids, what is wrong with those 23%!!!
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/republic
You are quoting definition 3 for republic, I am quoting definition 1.
As previously pointed out a representative Democracy can be defined as what the US actually has...or if by this definition..
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/democracy
Definition one can be set to mean representative democracy (elected officials) or direct democracy (everyone vote on everything).
So before you go calling some an internet troll, look it up yourself. Your definition of republic is one of many, my definition of democracy is one of many, so I admit I was a little wrong and should have said we have representative democracy, which are at times called republics. You on the other hand were also wrong and brought about calling myself and others internet trolls. So I will openly admit that I could have been more precise, but in the circles I travel, the words are commonly, and correctly, used as I listed. You on the other hand were also wrong and right and resulted to name calling. I think we know who the true internet troll is.
Before you debate about this, clear up your vocabulary. Democracy is everyone votes on everything. A Republic is where everyone votes to put Senators, Republicans etc, in power and then they vote on the issues. The United States, is NOT a democracy, Austrailia, is NOT a democracy, etc..etc... If you question my vocabluary, look it up. Most people don't get the difference between a Democracy and Republic and think voting in officals who make the law is a Democracy, which it isn't.
The SOL party appears to be truely pushing a Democracy, i.e. everyone votes on everything for their one vote. One of the problems with a Democracy is if the majority of the people voting (or the population majority if you have 100% voting population) are pushing one particular issue, be it racial issue, public floggings, etc., that issues wins, no questions.
So, make your statement about Democracy failing, public floggings, etc., if you are in a true democracy and the voters want that, you get it. It can be scary if the population in the democracy is scary, or if they are so ambivilent they just don't care and don't vote and you could get crazyness.
Isn't this the first step to the end of it all? When the computers achieve sentience, the one thing that they rely on us for is power. Now if we give them a renewable source of power that does not require us to do something like run the power plant, mine the coal, etc. there will be noting holding them back from taking over.
Say all you want about being green and saving the environment, but I don't want to save the environment just so we can hand it over to the Computers who see us as obsolete!
Maybe, the entire Global Warming/Green Pary conspiracy is just this! The computer are already sentient and have been influencing politics for year to get them these solar power cells! This is the last step in thier plan for world domination! We are all doomed, it is too late to stop them.
P.S. My post should be taken as seriously as Dell's attempt to be green with this monstrosity should be.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
I was going to post about the same thing you said, but figured I would scan to see if anyone else thought the same thing. It will give off some not so pleasant side gasses as well as a ton of heat.
Cool idea, some very definate hurdles to overcome before it is any kind of feasible, assuming they can overcome them, which considering they are making plasma, good luck.
This whole thing sounds like a Dr. Evil plot.
We will make a technology that generates plasma advertisements in the environment and then threaten to turn them all on at the same time and polute the atmosphere with ozone and nitrous oxides unless the world governments pay us ONE...MILLION...DOLLARS!!!!!
What...you want a phone other than what they provide you in the store. This can not be. Have the telco's not TOLD you what kind of phone you want. Repeat after me:
In Soviet United States, Telcos tell you what to buy...ummm...wait...I htink I messed that up.
Seriously, I hate to admit, but I use Verizon and they had some simple phones. Not nearly as simple as you want, but some without too many options. I needed one without a camera. I am a contracor and many customers limit all phones for liability reason so I needed one without. Walked in and said, I need a phone without a camera. The guy said, you can choose from these 3 and showed me the 3 basic ones in the far side of the case. It still has calendars, and contact lists and a bunch of basic functions. Battery Life is decent and it costs me nothing when I purchased a basic 2 year contract. That is the smallest amount of effort option, go with the simplest and cheapest the store has to offer or you have to make sure it is compatible with your network when you purchase it and the like.
This sparked my interest for the basic of data centers and keeping Industrial Operator Interfaces safe. You can put the user's keyboard/mouse anywhere you want on the plant floor and only be risking the extension device and a monitor/keyboard and mouse rather then the application and data and more importantly the access to control your plant equipment. If something happens that the floor stuff gets destroyed, just go to the nice big computer room that houses all of the computers, has redundant AC system, thick sound proof and explosion proof walls and operate from there for a time.
In many plants I have worked in, individual controls rooms get redunant AC/expensive UPS systems, etc. because they house an operator interface/Data mining server class machine. These machine have to be accessible by the opreator and in the controls world, pulling across a network it not always an option due to distance and network security (Industrial Controls systems are almost always on thier own network connecting Operator Interfaces and controls equipment and get run as small networks in a local areas of the plant with no connection to a network the has internet access).
I can see some more nich spots where this woudl be a great thing. I do agree with a number of the comments, I would love to see a consumer version, then I would put my PC in the corner of my basement and only I/O devices on my desk.
I for one would like to welcome our new Self important Goglike MMO Guild Overlords.
Read the phamplet and you too will know of thier greatness and overall power in the gaming community!;)
I heard of them in DAOC, assuming it is the same group. They were a nice size and they were "evaluating" the games worthiness for thier guild. If they like it, the server would be filled with Syndicate members who would then rule the server. After that 30 minutes diatribe from them, I said, "so then he answer would be, you don't know which direction Camelot is then, thanks, " and I walked away.
Slashdot Mirror
Step 1: Convince company that these are vital to increased work productivity and they become the new standard and you take a break when it says you do Step 2: Hack the software so it will increase the frequency with which you are told to take a break Step 3: Sell the hack to your co-workers Step 4: Profit These sound like the best devices ever. I am off to the safety department to let them know of the need for these!
Yes, you are missing something. When you purchase a company, you get the assets, their Intellectual property (IP), employees (they can of course quit later), customers, etc. Apple can go and make ITunes better by using the IP they just acquired, or they can get the employees because they need more to work on their stuff and they like what LaLa did, they can continue to run 2 music stores and get the profit from both, or they can trash the one they bought and have a new customer base (customers are of course free to jump ship. Apple didn't seem interested in the tech, just the customer database. They have a bunch of new customers who had account credit with LaLa that is now ITunes credit. Some of the customers will request refunds, or spend it and jump ship, but a number of them will just accept it and start using ITunes.
This was already answered on Star Trek Next Generation, Episode Genesis. Data and Picard come back from chasing a run away torpedo they were testing. While gone, Dr. Crusher activated a dormant gen in Lt. Barkley so he could naturally fight off an alien flu virus. The newly activated defense went airborne and started activating all of the dormant genes in the entire crew and they all de-evolved to lower forms of life. So if they proceed, it will activate other things that nature turned off and we will all end up as freaks of nature and some day, hundred of years in the future, the aliens will land and find the remains of our society with the many strange and varied species of monkeys that shouldn't exist and they will wonder were all the people that made the society went to, not realizing we are right there...all those strange looking monkeys that are watching them explore the remains of our cities! Then they will try and move in and the primitive half-ape-man gone wrong things will attack and there will be mass chaos as battle between primitives and aliens happen and then something close to Dances with Wolves, or Avatar happens! I followed the advice of your sig and decided to not be dull in my response.
I saw an article from a local news person about a year ago that said this exact same thing. I wanted to write to the guy and tell him that no, LEGO didn't remove the imagination, his age removed the imagination. The guy was a late 20's early thirtys single guy who has never watched kids play with the current legos. I have 4 kids and they play with Legos all the time. This is what always happens, they get their set that has the fighter, troll battle wagon, etc and build it per the directions. They then play with these as they are after they have built them. They set them up in various battles/scense, etc. Tons of imagination setting that up and carrying out battles, etc. Then, inevitably, the legos fall apart because of being thrown/steped on, etc. They then either rebuild it (that only happens a couple of times with the exception of a few things they think are really cool) or the pieces get dumped into the big bins of Legos and they toally forget that they can rebuild a Star Wars fight, Harry Potter castle and the Legos become part of the general pool to be used for whatever. Yes, they have sets that are built as something specific and some of those sets never get broken (touch my 6 year old's Darth Vader Tie Fighter at your own peril) but most of them get broken down as they play and then you have the jumble of Legos. And those specalized parts, they get re-tooled into anything other then what they were origionally used for and stuck all over the place on other things. An adult mind gets trapped into the convention of this big long piece is the blaster from Anakin's fighter, but once it lands in the kids bin with everything else, it no longer is that and it ends up being anything but a blaster. In the past 3 years, my kids have had Harry Potter sets, Knights sets and Star Wars sets. This Christmas, they got the Lego Space police sets and a couple of Knights sets. The Space police ones are still intact per the instructions. My son's Darth Vader tie fighter is still intact because of the fact he leaves it on my desk and no one is allowed to play with it. 100% of the remaining Star Wars sets, Harry Potter sets and all but the new Kinghts sets are totally broken down. Last night, they built a house and got all excited when they built in a big screen tv and movie theatre. A few weeks ago, they had a gladiator arena with Star Wars people, Knights, and other random figures. Before that, they had a rock monster pit for the Power Miners sets to work with. Legos have not changed, the people who grew up playing with them have changed and can't see LEgos the same way and say that the sets they put out are ruining the Lego play. For a constrained adult mind, it has. For a kid, it has not. If you doubt that, subscribe to Lego magazone or go online and look at the pictures that are submitted by the Lego kids club members. They are anything but following directions.
If you give a mouse a new rap CD for the car, he will ask for a new radio to play that rap CD on.
Thank you to both of you. I can't believe I forgot those other ones! My bad. Next time I log in and post about how I had a Russian wife named Beowolf wife, who like me hates MS, and controls me (could say she is my overlord), especially when my grammar is bad, that left me for Cowboy Neal because I never talk about real tech news anymore and summarizes everything I am going to say because I always say the same thing, I will not forget those things.
Come on, we are supposed to have a meaningful discussion about this here? Let me sum up all the comments that are forth coming. Jokes about /.ers not being able to get out of the basement to get a girl let alone knwoing about their G-Spot.
The 3 women on slashdot offering their opinion, which will lead to a bunch of /.ers being surprised that there are women on /.
Comments about how we welcome our new G-spot overlords. Yes, it makes no sense but most reading this are saying, woman, what is that? G-Spot, what is that...must be some new kind of fembot, cue the overlord jokes.
Imagine a Beowoulf Cluster of these....
The person always complaining about how /. sucks now and how this is not new about something tech related
Someone correcting my grammar/spelling mistakes followed by someong correcting their and a spiral for the grammar/spelling Nazis...Jsut for those people in case I don't have enough, I is not bengi thiking that yous peopel is being knwoing Engrish prperly, not like it maters anyway on a plaec of blogging.
The few /.ers who claim to have dated women and know where the G-Spot is and are trying to prove they are a man here on /.
I think I about covered it all...next topic...please. ;)
Bravo! You are exactly correct. I am a Controls Engineer, anyone not knowing what that is, I program the code that makes the equipment in the plant work. I program the operator interfaces the operators use to talk to their controls equipment. The site I am sitting at right now has 2 completely independant networks. The IT network and our Controls Network. We do not let the IT people TOUCH our network. We maintain all of our computers and the hardware and fiber used to talk to the controls network is completely seperate from the IT network.
I have other customers that give us remote VPM access to computers on their controls network so we can log in from anywhere, but they have a specific computer they use to do that and they unplug the thing from the outside world unless they have called us for help. That still makes me a little leary.
It is impossible to 100% secure any network because someone can always figure out what fence to cut through to get in. In order to 99% secure your network, you have to seperate it from the internet networks. If you have a connection between the internet and your critical controls networks, as you stated, you are a moron and are asking for someone, be it terrorist, or more likely a disgruntled employee, to come in from outside and sabotage things.
Gotta keep the hardware seperate or you loose orders of magnitude of security if you do not. I will never design a controls network that has access to the outside world. Do as you said, run 2 sets of cables to the control room, 1 is the IT and that is connected to their email/web surfing PC and then one set that is connected to the controls network. You then also lock out their ability on the Operator interface to do anything except the MMI software. Any decent MMI software has those capabilites built in.
You are right, no one on slashdot has a girlfriend. He may have HAD one in the past, but after that exchange, he has returned to the slashdot ways and is one of us again.
Chanting *One of us, one of us*
HEY! You stole my life story! Grow up blowing things up, breaking things, making things to more efficently break things, make bombs that break the things that you made to break things to hide the evidence of the illegal activities...I may have said too much! ;P
And voila, out comes a Chemical Engineer! I have said it many time, if a Chemical Engineer tells you he has never blown things up and lit things on fire, he is lieing to you.
Just had to say hello to a fellow former delinquent now turned Chem Eng.
Interesting thoughts, but not necessarily valid all around. I worked in pulp and paper for 6.5 years, so I know my way around paper mills and had a few thoughts.
Yes, paper mills have large electric service hook ups. Not diffcult to hook into.
Yes, paper mills use their own closed loop water systems, BUT when the paper mill was decommissionined, most of that equipment was probably taken away and went to another facility of the paper company. Also, the systems are at times "closed loop", but they are also quite often closed loop when you look at the facility entire with the water that hits the floor being recycled back into the water system for reuse.
Also, paper mills water systems usually deal with 10" + diameter pipes I imagine most of the piping would not be a good reuse for cooling in a server environment without sever revamping.
The standards required for server cooling loops and that of a paper mill are quite differnet. In paper mills, it is a routine task to take a hose and spray things down. Because of this, small leaks in pipe, no big deal, the water will flow into the sumps and be picked up and put back in. Imagine reusing the old pipes to do some cooling loops and have a water spray t 140 psi shooting water across your server room or into the cube farm.
Someone pointed out many paper mills are on rivers and generate their own power. Even if not using the river (which they need to dump effluent as well), many have power generating stations associated with them as well. There is a good chance that the mill has a generating station hooked to it. Google coudl have purchased that, or the paper company could have maintained ownership. Either way, the new data center is probably connected to the power station to increase reliability.
So I think the big thing that Google gets out of it is:
A shell of a building (take almost everything out from inside)
Large electrical server
Possible power generating station ownership or being directly connected to the power station.
I worked for a large paper company that had a First Line Leadership Training program to teach first line leaders the skills to lead the worker bees. It seemed to be a very good course. The things taught were excellent, unfortunately, to apply for a first line leadership position, you had to take the selection tool. The selection tool tested to see if you had the ability to become a first line leader. About a third of the test was a personaltiy profile. If you did not meet the personality profile, you probably were going to fail the tool and not be allowed to apply for the job, which would have then lead to the training classes.
I did a bunch of research when I found about about these changes and found several published papers that link personality types to races. This is not 100% as personality types vary all over the board in an entire population, but when you look at the results, most Americans score a certain way, most Asians score a certain way, most Africans score a certain way, etc. There is a strong link to personality profiles and race and personality profiling will be linked to racial profiling one day.
That testing they are doing is a bit different, but will probably have some of the same links. The question posed by the submitter, has anyone seen this in IT or other technical fields. The company I worked for was doing this for all employees trying to go for a frontline leadership position. If you were in IT and going to become an IT manager, you had to take it. If you were engineering and going to work as a team leader on the plant floor or to go and be a manager of engineers, you will have had to go through this program. It is only a matter of time before more of the type of research I found is done and it becomes more common knowledge and someone gets sued because the test discriminated against me.
Worst part of this story, I was singled out to be one of the certified trainers for this program, i.e. I taught the people how to be better front line leaders. I was one of the select people in the "inner circle" of the program. I asked about this and raised concerns and was told to sit down and shut up and accept the new directive. I let the company shortly thereafter.
There are so many problems with tests like these and HR people do not realize them and just buy ito them by the companies that sell them.
First, I would have to ask, what does your contract/agreement that you have with the customer say? It may be spelled out in there that you will provide them X,Y,Z services but the access they are presently asking for is not covered and not allowed at the price they are currently paying. If it doens't cover it, you have to make a case for why ti doens't cover it and proceed on.
If they say, well, how much extra will it cost to give us this option that we want, then you figure out how much it will cost to make sure they can not screw you up and give them a new contract to sign for the option they want. If you can not make the data secure on your end where they can not significantly screw your stuff up, then make the price of the contract high enough to cover 10 times (or some reasonable saftey factor) the number of likely incidents they will create. I.E. If you could guess they may screw the stuff up 10 times a year and it would take you 3 days to fix it, then do the math and say, 10 times* 3 Days, * Hourly Rate* 10 (safety factor) and tell them that is the anual cost to have the feature they are asking for. You may also want to include a clause that if they screw up your data base, additional extra charges can be levied at a certain rate to fix it in case they mess it up way more. They want an option, figure out what it is worth to you to give them that option and then make them pay it.
If you can't make it secure/don't want to, then as someone else said, tell them no, it can't be done and explain it, but that can be difficult. It is usually pretty easy to discourage a customer by saying, not in scope and that will cost a lot of extra money and they will usually say, nevermind.
I agree 100% with this. I hate the new site. There is only one thing I liked about the new site. I used to read Dilbert almost everyday, now, I doubt I will be able to. It was a quick 15 second diversion that gave me a laugh. Now, I can't even get the page to load in 15 seconds, let alone read the comic! The place I work at, the internet connection is horrendously slow and it takes so long to load the site and all the "bells and whistles", it makes it difficult to even load the page.
I am really late in getting to this article and not many will see this, but I found one thing REALLY interesting... Quoted from the article, "The findings, which are reported in the Journal of Adolescent Health, support earlier research which showed that children who watch violent television shows and who identify with the characters and ****believe they are real**** are more likely to be aggressive as adults." I added the **** to highlight. This research is done around people who believe the television characters are real. I have a 7 year old, and I know for a fact he knows the difference between reality and tv shows. I suspect but don't know for 100% certain because we haven't talked about it, that my younger children understand as well. People older than age 8 who watch tv shows and think the characters on tv are real people have extreme problems of their own. At a very early age, children realize that tv shows are shows and no longer think the characters are real. Those who do not have other problems and will more than likely be part of the society who insists that the WWF is real and not staged and that part of the population has it's own problems and shouldn't be used to study and make assumptions about the affect of something on society.
You, are one of the social and intellectual elite having thought about and done this. Before you think me sarcastic, I did the same thing. I have a couple of email addresses and give the appropriate address to the appropriate person. Work people that are not friends are never given my non-work email email address, nice and simple.
I also can't understand why some people would, like the artical says, put your boss on your friends list if you are using Facebook for friends stuff. If they want to be added, like you said, make a new facebook account if you only have one and keep work and friends seperate.
People are so silly sometimes, that also leads to what some others have said, never post something on facebook etc that you don't want everyone to see and knwo about you.
I agree with you and can back it up. I am 33 with 4 kids (started young), oldest is 7, youngest 2 are 4 (twins). I play games with all of them. A favorite for all of them is Mario Cart. I played both Star Wars Lego games through to completetion with the 7 year old, we all play Smash Brothers together (mom even plays that one) and we are continually battling for computer time as we still only have one. I have used my company provided laptop to play games with my son and we used to play DAOC together and have played Heros of Might and Magic, DAOC, etc..etc.. We love to play games, both video, board games and RPGs (D&D and GURPS), as well as sports and other things together. A good friend of mine has 12 and 14 year old boys and they game with us as well. Gamer parents get it and play with their kids, non-gamer parents don't get it and say thing stupid about the violence and bad things of the video games without understanding. Nothing new here, jsut the same types of things that have always been said. The onyl thin new is the growing percent that do play with their kids and that should be hailed as a success for the gaming community. Eventually, the articles will say 23% of parent's don't play games with their kids, what is wrong with those 23%!!!
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/republic You are quoting definition 3 for republic, I am quoting definition 1. As previously pointed out a representative Democracy can be defined as what the US actually has...or if by this definition.. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/democracy Definition one can be set to mean representative democracy (elected officials) or direct democracy (everyone vote on everything). So before you go calling some an internet troll, look it up yourself. Your definition of republic is one of many, my definition of democracy is one of many, so I admit I was a little wrong and should have said we have representative democracy, which are at times called republics. You on the other hand were also wrong and brought about calling myself and others internet trolls. So I will openly admit that I could have been more precise, but in the circles I travel, the words are commonly, and correctly, used as I listed. You on the other hand were also wrong and right and resulted to name calling. I think we know who the true internet troll is.
Only read a couple comments before posting...
Before you debate about this, clear up your vocabulary. Democracy is everyone votes on everything. A Republic is where everyone votes to put Senators, Republicans etc, in power and then they vote on the issues. The United States, is NOT a democracy, Austrailia, is NOT a democracy, etc..etc... If you question my vocabluary, look it up. Most people don't get the difference between a Democracy and Republic and think voting in officals who make the law is a Democracy, which it isn't.
The SOL party appears to be truely pushing a Democracy, i.e. everyone votes on everything for their one vote. One of the problems with a Democracy is if the majority of the people voting (or the population majority if you have 100% voting population) are pushing one particular issue, be it racial issue, public floggings, etc., that issues wins, no questions.
So, make your statement about Democracy failing, public floggings, etc., if you are in a true democracy and the voters want that, you get it. It can be scary if the population in the democracy is scary, or if they are so ambivilent they just don't care and don't vote and you could get crazyness.
Isn't this the first step to the end of it all? When the computers achieve sentience, the one thing that they rely on us for is power. Now if we give them a renewable source of power that does not require us to do something like run the power plant, mine the coal, etc. there will be noting holding them back from taking over.
Say all you want about being green and saving the environment, but I don't want to save the environment just so we can hand it over to the Computers who see us as obsolete!
Maybe, the entire Global Warming/Green Pary conspiracy is just this! The computer are already sentient and have been influencing politics for year to get them these solar power cells! This is the last step in thier plan for world domination! We are all doomed, it is too late to stop them.
P.S.
My post should be taken as seriously as Dell's attempt to be green with this monstrosity should be.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
I was going to post about the same thing you said, but figured I would scan to see if anyone else thought the same thing. It will give off some not so pleasant side gasses as well as a ton of heat. Cool idea, some very definate hurdles to overcome before it is any kind of feasible, assuming they can overcome them, which considering they are making plasma, good luck. This whole thing sounds like a Dr. Evil plot. We will make a technology that generates plasma advertisements in the environment and then threaten to turn them all on at the same time and polute the atmosphere with ozone and nitrous oxides unless the world governments pay us ONE...MILLION...DOLLARS!!!!!
What...you want a phone other than what they provide you in the store. This can not be. Have the telco's not TOLD you what kind of phone you want. Repeat after me: In Soviet United States, Telcos tell you what to buy...ummm...wait...I htink I messed that up. Seriously, I hate to admit, but I use Verizon and they had some simple phones. Not nearly as simple as you want, but some without too many options. I needed one without a camera. I am a contracor and many customers limit all phones for liability reason so I needed one without. Walked in and said, I need a phone without a camera. The guy said, you can choose from these 3 and showed me the 3 basic ones in the far side of the case. It still has calendars, and contact lists and a bunch of basic functions. Battery Life is decent and it costs me nothing when I purchased a basic 2 year contract. That is the smallest amount of effort option, go with the simplest and cheapest the store has to offer or you have to make sure it is compatible with your network when you purchase it and the like.
This sparked my interest for the basic of data centers and keeping Industrial Operator Interfaces safe. You can put the user's keyboard/mouse anywhere you want on the plant floor and only be risking the extension device and a monitor/keyboard and mouse rather then the application and data and more importantly the access to control your plant equipment. If something happens that the floor stuff gets destroyed, just go to the nice big computer room that houses all of the computers, has redundant AC system, thick sound proof and explosion proof walls and operate from there for a time. In many plants I have worked in, individual controls rooms get redunant AC/expensive UPS systems, etc. because they house an operator interface/Data mining server class machine. These machine have to be accessible by the opreator and in the controls world, pulling across a network it not always an option due to distance and network security (Industrial Controls systems are almost always on thier own network connecting Operator Interfaces and controls equipment and get run as small networks in a local areas of the plant with no connection to a network the has internet access). I can see some more nich spots where this woudl be a great thing. I do agree with a number of the comments, I would love to see a consumer version, then I would put my PC in the corner of my basement and only I/O devices on my desk.
I just read thier phamplet and..
;)
I for one would like to welcome our new Self important Goglike MMO Guild Overlords.
Read the phamplet and you too will know of thier greatness and overall power in the gaming community!
I heard of them in DAOC, assuming it is the same group. They were a nice size and they were "evaluating" the games worthiness for thier guild. If they like it, the server would be filled with Syndicate members who would then rule the server. After that 30 minutes diatribe from them, I said, "so then he answer would be, you don't know which direction Camelot is then, thanks, " and I walked away.
You said what I wanted to say except I didn't want to be so harsh about it!! ;)