I have to wonder what a "Cloud Based OS" even would mean, if that's even a thing.
They already have a perfectly good cloud app for data and small amounts of media.. Probably means you download your apps off the network. Probably use your local hard drive as something of a cache.
In unix terms youd probably mount a FUSE file system as root, and every time you access anything it tries to check "/nfs/cloudy-with-a-chance-of-segfaults/whatever" to see if a new version exists, and if so, copies it into your cache. And probably tries to save a "backup" on both the local drive and the nfs mount.
Of course they'll use some crazy appletalk over TCP interface instead of NFS, but the idea seems obvious.
cloud based... what the heck does that mean anyway
We used to call them X-terminals.
Diskless, boots off the network and connects to a central machine. In this case, the "central" is "distributed", and it may or may not have a disk.
In short, the finest technology from the 80s is back.:-P
We called them 3270 terminals. Connect to a local cluster controller(more or less a stat mux, not a heck of a lot more), then to a NCP, then via VTAM back to the mainframe, probably a system 370 series although memory fades with time. Oddly enough that is exactly the same config I had in the mid 90s except they emulated the 3270 on PCs, mostly.
In short, the finest technology from the 70s is back:-P
I googled around and Duke uses software called "Echelon" (yeah as if that word doesn't have a negative history) and the press release rags have stories listing zigbee based links as a competitor of that Echelon system. Which may not longer be the case if they added zigbee support to Echelon.
Similar design, seems to be a different technology interface.
Are they marketers and resellers, or do they do their own billing?
I'm sure there are well over 259 places to buy cell phones in my city, but different wallpaper in the store or different kiosk in the mall doesn't mean the actual contracts are oriented toward anything but screwing over the customer.
You are almost certainly selecting 1 of 47 marketing operations not 47 "providers" aka 47 electrical power plants.
That all depends, here our electricity is provided by a public utility. But if you're in a part of the country where it was deregulated and/or the utility is private, then you could see all sorts of problems like that.
Thats the point. My telephone was provided by a public utility. Now they want to block netflix/itunes/etc because they are also providing video.
The advantage to the consumer is that the power company is used to providing a (metered) pipe and thats about it. They have no other competitive issues because you can't power your house with an internet connection.
Today, sure. Back in 1984 when I got my first modem AT&T had no residential video service to compete with me.
It only takes a few months for, say, General Electric/NBC to buy my local power company, and then guess what happens to my netflix access?
The funny part is my water meter is read by a simple low power RF system... So I have the option of electricity and electro-internet OR running water. Hmmm.
I know thats different in other places, but I never saw a power meter OUTSIDE a house over here and no firefighter is pissed of about that fact.
Power cables run directly from the main branch below the street into the basements along with water, phone and cable tv.
This never has been an issue with the firefighters I know of.
Oh they're probably pissed, but even if they change the building code its not going to fix itself instantly so, don't worry be happy.
The logic is, if the house is on fire and you intend to fill it with water and firemen, by far the fastest and safest way to pull electrical power to the site is to pull the meter. Every other option, like giant fiberglass bolt cutters, calling a lineman, etc, is slower, more expensive, less safe...
Sooooooo, what exactly will Ofcoms explanation be when all of a sudden.... And every HAM in Britain's equipment suddenly broke due to magic?...
I am not sure of your regulations, but here the line will be "And every facebook / youtube / netflix couch potatoe in the neighborhood screams when I key my 1500 watt legal limit ham radio amplifier (now required to be heard over the noise, I used to do 5 watts QRP)"
Here in Houston, CenterPoint Energy provides the utility. As of a few weeks ago, I've noticed that my energy provider keeps a record of how much energy I've used each day on the hour. It's pretty damned cool that I can review this data. I can even spot the areas where I've cooked (electric, no gas) at that time of day. What I'm must curious about is *how* each meter uploads the data.
I've been informed by others that maybe it uses a form of powerline broadband with the new meters. Is this true?
The term you don't know to google for is "Zigbee". Google for "Zigbee Houston CenterPoint Energy" and you'll pages of links explaining how there is a zigbee (which is vaguely like long distance bluetooth) link from many meters to a poletop device that connects via some vaguely wifi-ish radios and/or GSM/CDMA cellular data service (like a kindle whispernet) back to the office. You can find the resume of the guy whom set up the cellular side links, if you search carefully.
Not exactly powerline broadband. More like somewhat slow radio.
I don't think they mean that the smart meters themselves will be used for networking, I think they mean that the efforts to install proper powerline networking equipment at the electricity company's end can be shared with the efforts to install infrastructure to talk to the smart meters in the same locations.
Right, my whole point was the infrastructure for electric meters is best engineered at the "K" level, and they're trying to convince us they'll piggyback a "G" level service on top of it. Total BS.
A similar six order of magnitude malfunction can be seen in this line of reasoning. "I'm taking a glass of iced tea out in the backyard to drink. Both a glass of tea and an inground swimming pool are conceptually similar in that both are concave objects without a top that are full of liquid, I may as well install an inground swimming pool at the same time as I carry my glass of iced tea outside, since they are such similar engineering tasks"
They cost a fortune to install & maintain, much more than any reduced electrical consumption.
The real scam of it, is the purpose is to create a confuseopoly in the billing department.
Rather than $X per month for a meter, and $Y/KWH, the want all the customer friendly transparency of a cell phone contract.
"OH I'm sorry sir, your monthly contract is $200 for 2000 prime KWH and every KWH over that is charged at a very reasonable $50/KWH. I'm sorry your bill is $2000 this month. Would you like to sign a new 5 year contract for more KWH, perhaps $400 for 4100 KWH?"
"I'm in a friends and family electrical contract, so only one of us can run our air conditioner at any instant, or else they bill all of us triple rates"
"Why am I running my space heater on the patio? Well, I've got a 1000 KHW contract, its the end of the month and I've only used 950 KWH, so I figured no sense wasting my money"
UK government is backing the installation of smart meters across the country, and it seems a new generation of 200Mbps powerline broadband could ride on that
OK so lets take a look at a typical smart meter, how bout a PCR423 from nationpower.
It has to be mounted inside the building (which probably pisses off the fire department to no end) and runs at 1200 baud IR, 2400 baud RS485 (for an external modem), a mysterious RF link, and a GPRS/CDMA interface that is probably vaguely Kindle/whispernet like. No options for commo over power lines, but we can guess "somewhere around a K/s" since thats all thats required and all the other interfaces run about that fast, more or less.
And we'll run 200 M/s over that size of link, what, using compression or something?
I'm just saying there's got to be more to the story, as the app that fractional gig internet access is supposedly going to "piggyback" is probably (and appropriately) running about 1980's phone modem speed.
The author must have worked very hard to avoid examining the history of steam and impulse on the PC, where a wide range of prices happily coexist. Either that or hes one of those "I've never used a PC" people.
Because many people take the whole 2012 thing seriously.
The funny part about the 2012 thing, is if the folks whom made the "prediction" turn out to be correct, it'll be the first time they ever got anything right, yet also be the last time. Their 15 minutes of fame, sorta.
Now somebody like Nostradamus, he had the good sense to be so vague that he can't be proven wrong.
What I cannot fathom is why people buy vanity license plates to put their callsign on.
From the folks I know, it seems extremely highly correlated with ARES and the like membership. Almost a 100% chance there is an orange vest in the trunk of that car.
if you are tooling around in your car you aren't at home where all your expensive ham radios are
I bet you consider those guys with APRS trackers in their car to be very amusing.
There is just one difference, though. The trading machines, regardless of their location, have the same length cable to the switch. Even if it means coiling some of it up. The latency demands are so strict, the customers even care about the cable length - and it's just easier to give all the customers the same length than to maintain tiered pricing on the racks.
Its marketing. The propagation delay between different pairs can vary by up to 50 ns due to the different twists. That is why the fancier "VGA over CAT-5" converter box thingies have a skew compensator. If you use a layer 1 that uses all 4 pairs it doesnt matter, but if you use a layer 1 that uses only two pair, then theoretically some customers will have a ping time 50ns lower than the slowest customers. one foot roughly equaling one nanosecond means the electrical delay can't be specified more accurately than 50 feet. Noobs have all kinds of fun with TDRs because of this.
You'd be way the heck better off using fiber, as first of all, it will actually work, and secondly, its more expensive so it must be better (aka monster cable marketing)
I take it you don't read for long periods of time.... it's that trying to read for long periods of time on a monitor sucks....
Get your eyes checked. Seriously, not being a jerk, just some advice at the human level. Its like heart problems where if the doc catches it early, its no problemo vs you wait for it to start working. Being blind would kind of suck, especially if it could have been easily prevented. My grandmother has taken eyedrops for most of her life, something about an iris problem or whatever, but a lifetime of eyedrops beats the heck out of getting diagnosed after going blind. Maybe all you need is eyeglasses.
Normal healthy people can gaze into their LCD monitor or LCD TV for, frankly, the majority of their waking time, with no pain or discomfort at all. A world full of office workers gaze into their laptop LCD all day, then watch their LCD TV all night, no problemo.
"no pain no gain" is for a (inaccurate) motto for weightlifters, not readers. If reading hurts, you're totally doing it wrong.
Electronic media need some means of going over the content like that
Is the "scroll bar" patented or something? I've seen plenty of GPL software providing a scroll bar on desktops. I've seen free software on the itunes app store that has a user interface with "multitouch scrolling" so I'm guessing its not patented or at least has a license generous enough that a "magazine app" could implement that UI component?
I'm not seeing an entire industry being destroyed because of a minor UI feature.
It's not just the ads, it's the proprietary formats and lack of portability.
What will happen to this stuff in a year, or in 5?
...
Ultimately, if you can't resell it then you don't really own it.
The problem is we're talking about magazines here. You know, last months news, provided next month, squeezed into the spaces between the ads and complimentary copy? Other than hoarders and museums no one wants my July 1991 discover magazine.
The only "media" I can think of with a deader aftermarket would be something like recordings of local TV news.
Your argument is, however, excellent for any media that actually has an aftermarket. You should have made a slippery slope argument that this is the nearly ideal application for DRM and "right to read" and all that and it'll "inevitably" spread its poison into the book and music market or something like that.
You know that trivia fact that if you whacked a dinosaurs tail, the nerve impulses would take 2 minutes or whatever to go to the brain and back? Something to do with inadequate myelination or something?
Well in this situation the dinosaurs don't know they're dead yet and are still thrashing around noisily. We can say "bye" to them soon. Maybe we can make crude oil out of them?
Half the "fun" of a physical magazine is the ability to skim through it and flip the pages.... But how many people read magazines in a start to finish fashion?
There are people that don't? How do you know if you missed that cool article, you know, the one you skipped past accidentally?
And there are people that physically "enjoy" flipping pages? Just get an old TV guide and flap away. No need to blow money on a new magazine every time you get the urge.
The privacy issue has to be framed against the fact that they have this same information on you when you subscribe annually in print form.
All make magazine knows about me is my address and CC number. If they outsource fulfillment, they don't even know that. The nosiest print magazine I can think of is QST where the ARRL also knows my callsign.
Apple / Google know an unholy heck of a lot more about me.
That's probably because the format sucks for reading. I'm sure it's great for cruising the web.
Whats the optical difference between "reading" wireds app, and "cruising the web" by jaywalking over to www.wired.com? Does the app suck, more than the website, I mean?
Also, why is it no good for reading, other than some marketing guy says e-ink is better and some stockholm syndrome victims repeat it?
I have no problem reading on my ipad. I'm told I'm supposed to, but the dang thing just works.
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I have to wonder what a "Cloud Based OS" even would mean, if that's even a thing.
They already have a perfectly good cloud app for data and small amounts of media.. Probably means you download your apps off the network. Probably use your local hard drive as something of a cache.
In unix terms youd probably mount a FUSE file system as root, and every time you access anything it tries to check "/nfs/cloudy-with-a-chance-of-segfaults/whatever" to see if a new version exists, and if so, copies it into your cache. And probably tries to save a "backup" on both the local drive and the nfs mount.
Of course they'll use some crazy appletalk over TCP interface instead of NFS, but the idea seems obvious.
We used to call them X-terminals.
Diskless, boots off the network and connects to a central machine. In this case, the "central" is "distributed", and it may or may not have a disk.
In short, the finest technology from the 80s is back. :-P
We called them 3270 terminals. Connect to a local cluster controller(more or less a stat mux, not a heck of a lot more), then to a NCP, then via VTAM back to the mainframe, probably a system 370 series although memory fades with time. Oddly enough that is exactly the same config I had in the mid 90s except they emulated the 3270 on PCs, mostly.
In short, the finest technology from the 70s is back :-P
I googled around and Duke uses software called "Echelon" (yeah as if that word doesn't have a negative history) and the press release rags have stories listing zigbee based links as a competitor of that Echelon system. Which may not longer be the case if they added zigbee support to Echelon.
Similar design, seems to be a different technology interface.
Are they marketers and resellers, or do they do their own billing?
I'm sure there are well over 259 places to buy cell phones in my city, but different wallpaper in the store or different kiosk in the mall doesn't mean the actual contracts are oriented toward anything but screwing over the customer.
You are almost certainly selecting 1 of 47 marketing operations not 47 "providers" aka 47 electrical power plants.
That all depends, here our electricity is provided by a public utility. But if you're in a part of the country where it was deregulated and/or the utility is private, then you could see all sorts of problems like that.
Thats the point. My telephone was provided by a public utility. Now they want to block netflix/itunes/etc because they are also providing video.
The advantage to the consumer is that the power company is used to providing a (metered) pipe and thats about it. They have no other competitive issues because you can't power your house with an internet connection.
Today, sure. Back in 1984 when I got my first modem AT&T had no residential video service to compete with me.
It only takes a few months for, say, General Electric/NBC to buy my local power company, and then guess what happens to my netflix access?
Nobody uses radio for anything anymore.
The funny part is my water meter is read by a simple low power RF system... So I have the option of electricity and electro-internet OR running water. Hmmm.
I know thats different in other places, but I never saw a power meter OUTSIDE a house over here and no firefighter is pissed of about that fact.
Power cables run directly from the main branch below the street into the basements along with water, phone and cable tv.
This never has been an issue with the firefighters I know of.
Oh they're probably pissed, but even if they change the building code its not going to fix itself instantly so, don't worry be happy.
The logic is, if the house is on fire and you intend to fill it with water and firemen, by far the fastest and safest way to pull electrical power to the site is to pull the meter. Every other option, like giant fiberglass bolt cutters, calling a lineman, etc, is slower, more expensive, less safe...
Sooooooo, what exactly will Ofcoms explanation be when all of a sudden ....
And every HAM in Britain's equipment suddenly broke due to magic?...
I am not sure of your regulations, but here the line will be "And every facebook / youtube / netflix couch potatoe in the neighborhood screams when I key my 1500 watt legal limit ham radio amplifier (now required to be heard over the noise, I used to do 5 watts QRP)"
Here in Houston, CenterPoint Energy provides the utility. As of a few weeks ago, I've noticed that my energy provider keeps a record of how much energy I've used each day on the hour. It's pretty damned cool that I can review this data. I can even spot the areas where I've cooked (electric, no gas) at that time of day. What I'm must curious about is *how* each meter uploads the data.
I've been informed by others that maybe it uses a form of powerline broadband with the new meters. Is this true?
The term you don't know to google for is "Zigbee". Google for "Zigbee Houston CenterPoint Energy" and you'll pages of links explaining how there is a zigbee (which is vaguely like long distance bluetooth) link from many meters to a poletop device that connects via some vaguely wifi-ish radios and/or GSM/CDMA cellular data service (like a kindle whispernet) back to the office. You can find the resume of the guy whom set up the cellular side links, if you search carefully.
Not exactly powerline broadband. More like somewhat slow radio.
I don't think they mean that the smart meters themselves will be used for networking, I think they mean that the efforts to install proper powerline networking equipment at the electricity company's end can be shared with the efforts to install infrastructure to talk to the smart meters in the same locations.
Right, my whole point was the infrastructure for electric meters is best engineered at the "K" level, and they're trying to convince us they'll piggyback a "G" level service on top of it. Total BS.
A similar six order of magnitude malfunction can be seen in this line of reasoning. "I'm taking a glass of iced tea out in the backyard to drink. Both a glass of tea and an inground swimming pool are conceptually similar in that both are concave objects without a top that are full of liquid, I may as well install an inground swimming pool at the same time as I carry my glass of iced tea outside, since they are such similar engineering tasks"
They cost a fortune to install & maintain, much more than any reduced electrical consumption.
The real scam of it, is the purpose is to create a confuseopoly in the billing department.
Rather than $X per month for a meter, and $Y/KWH, the want all the customer friendly transparency of a cell phone contract.
"OH I'm sorry sir, your monthly contract is $200 for 2000 prime KWH and every KWH over that is charged at a very reasonable $50/KWH. I'm sorry your bill is $2000 this month. Would you like to sign a new 5 year contract for more KWH, perhaps $400 for 4100 KWH?"
"I'm in a friends and family electrical contract, so only one of us can run our air conditioner at any instant, or else they bill all of us triple rates"
"Why am I running my space heater on the patio? Well, I've got a 1000 KHW contract, its the end of the month and I've only used 950 KWH, so I figured no sense wasting my money"
F those money grubing scum.
UK government is backing the installation of smart meters across the country, and it seems a new generation of 200Mbps powerline broadband could ride on that
OK so lets take a look at a typical smart meter, how bout a PCR423 from nationpower.
It has to be mounted inside the building (which probably pisses off the fire department to no end) and runs at 1200 baud IR, 2400 baud RS485 (for an external modem), a mysterious RF link, and a GPRS/CDMA interface that is probably vaguely Kindle/whispernet like. No options for commo over power lines, but we can guess "somewhere around a K/s" since thats all thats required and all the other interfaces run about that fast, more or less.
And we'll run 200 M/s over that size of link, what, using compression or something?
I'm just saying there's got to be more to the story, as the app that fractional gig internet access is supposedly going to "piggyback" is probably (and appropriately) running about 1980's phone modem speed.
The author must have worked very hard to avoid examining the history of steam and impulse on the PC, where a wide range of prices happily coexist.
Either that or hes one of those "I've never used a PC" people.
Because many people take the whole 2012 thing seriously.
The funny part about the 2012 thing, is if the folks whom made the "prediction" turn out to be correct, it'll be the first time they ever got anything right, yet also be the last time. Their 15 minutes of fame, sorta.
Now somebody like Nostradamus, he had the good sense to be so vague that he can't be proven wrong.
What I cannot fathom is why people buy vanity license plates to put their callsign on.
From the folks I know, it seems extremely highly correlated with ARES and the like membership. Almost a 100% chance there is an orange vest in the trunk of that car.
if you are tooling around in your car you aren't at home where all your expensive ham radios are
I bet you consider those guys with APRS trackers in their car to be very amusing.
Well that's just dumb. Is every person going to buy $300 worth of your product because of the commercial?
The car dealers and local food stores seem to think so. They're probably correct.
There is just one difference, though. The trading machines, regardless of their location, have the same length cable to the switch. Even if it means coiling some of it up. The latency demands are so strict, the customers even care about the cable length - and it's just easier to give all the customers the same length than to maintain tiered pricing on the racks.
Its marketing. The propagation delay between different pairs can vary by up to 50 ns due to the different twists. That is why the fancier "VGA over CAT-5" converter box thingies have a skew compensator. If you use a layer 1 that uses all 4 pairs it doesnt matter, but if you use a layer 1 that uses only two pair, then theoretically some customers will have a ping time 50ns lower than the slowest customers. one foot roughly equaling one nanosecond means the electrical delay can't be specified more accurately than 50 feet. Noobs have all kinds of fun with TDRs because of this.
You'd be way the heck better off using fiber, as first of all, it will actually work, and secondly, its more expensive so it must be better (aka monster cable marketing)
I take it you don't read for long periods of time. ... it's that trying to read for long periods of time on a monitor sucks....
Get your eyes checked. Seriously, not being a jerk, just some advice at the human level. Its like heart problems where if the doc catches it early, its no problemo vs you wait for it to start working. Being blind would kind of suck, especially if it could have been easily prevented. My grandmother has taken eyedrops for most of her life, something about an iris problem or whatever, but a lifetime of eyedrops beats the heck out of getting diagnosed after going blind. Maybe all you need is eyeglasses.
Normal healthy people can gaze into their LCD monitor or LCD TV for, frankly, the majority of their waking time, with no pain or discomfort at all. A world full of office workers gaze into their laptop LCD all day, then watch their LCD TV all night, no problemo.
"no pain no gain" is for a (inaccurate) motto for weightlifters, not readers. If reading hurts, you're totally doing it wrong.
Electronic media need some means of going over the content like that
Is the "scroll bar" patented or something? I've seen plenty of GPL software providing a scroll bar on desktops. I've seen free software on the itunes app store that has a user interface with "multitouch scrolling" so I'm guessing its not patented or at least has a license generous enough that a "magazine app" could implement that UI component?
I'm not seeing an entire industry being destroyed because of a minor UI feature.
It's not just the ads, it's the proprietary formats and lack of portability.
What will happen to this stuff in a year, or in 5?
Ultimately, if you can't resell it then you don't really own it.
The problem is we're talking about magazines here. You know, last months news, provided next month, squeezed into the spaces between the ads and complimentary copy? Other than hoarders and museums no one wants my July 1991 discover magazine.
The only "media" I can think of with a deader aftermarket would be something like recordings of local TV news.
Your argument is, however, excellent for any media that actually has an aftermarket. You should have made a slippery slope argument that this is the nearly ideal application for DRM and "right to read" and all that and it'll "inevitably" spread its poison into the book and music market or something like that.
Am I missing something?
You know that trivia fact that if you whacked a dinosaurs tail, the nerve impulses would take 2 minutes or whatever to go to the brain and back? Something to do with inadequate myelination or something?
Well in this situation the dinosaurs don't know they're dead yet and are still thrashing around noisily. We can say "bye" to them soon. Maybe we can make crude oil out of them?
Half the "fun" of a physical magazine is the ability to skim through it and flip the pages.... But how many people read magazines in a start to finish fashion?
There are people that don't? How do you know if you missed that cool article, you know, the one you skipped past accidentally?
And there are people that physically "enjoy" flipping pages? Just get an old TV guide and flap away. No need to blow money on a new magazine every time you get the urge.
The privacy issue has to be framed against the fact that they have this same information on you when you subscribe annually in print form.
All make magazine knows about me is my address and CC number. If they outsource fulfillment, they don't even know that. The nosiest print magazine I can think of is QST where the ARRL also knows my callsign.
Apple / Google know an unholy heck of a lot more about me.
That's probably because the format sucks for reading. I'm sure it's great for cruising the web.
Whats the optical difference between "reading" wireds app, and "cruising the web" by jaywalking over to www.wired.com? Does the app suck, more than the website, I mean?
Also, why is it no good for reading, other than some marketing guy says e-ink is better and some stockholm syndrome victims repeat it?
I have no problem reading on my ipad. I'm told I'm supposed to, but the dang thing just works.