I've encountered situations where I'm trying to do something online and a task starts up due to a cron job that builds some kind of index. The index building should be in the background but somehow takes priority over what I'm doing on the desktop. Those kinds of cron jobs should be default scheduled in the background, not take priority over what is happening on the desktop.
Microsoft's monopoly in the operating system rests on MS Office. It is only the incompatibility of MS office formats that keeps people buying Windows. If OpenOffice is competitive, there is no reason to buy Windows.
First, the power grid has not been dumb. It has been pretty smart for decades. The Smart Grid is a major upgrade, but it isn't a scratch start from a dumb basis.
The existing grid includes sophisticated control centers and sophisticated microprocessor-based protective devices that sense faults and make corrections. Power grid equipment runs into problems all the time (such as equipment failure, storms, and curious animals) and handles them most of the time without putting the lights out.
The grid has always had two infrastructures: an electrical infrastructure (power lines, transformers, generators, etc.) and an information infrastructure. Decades ago, the information infrastructure was rudimentary. Now it is much more extensive. With the Smart Grid it will be even more extensive and will have much more interface to systems at the customer site. However, major upgrades will be needed to integrate massive increases in intermittent renewable energy such as wind and solar, to manage pluggable electric vehicles, and to vastly improve energy efficiency, reduce costs, and improve reliability. That will require standards. That is what the Smart Grid is doing.
Work on some of the Smart Grid standards, including the ones recently forwarded to FERC for rulemaking, started as long as 25 years ago. Those standards need to be deployed. Others will need to be developed.
Second, the Common Information Model is an abstract data model that covers the utility enterprise. It has little or nothing to do with transmitting data over power lines. That is called Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) and (like real estate having three factors in prices -- location, location, and location) it has three problems: interference, interference, and interference. To make BPL work you have to solve the interference problem.
Chertoff was behind the preposterous program on CNN where a collection of lawyers sat around trying to play techies on TV. Most of them were probably technology challenged, and they focused on legal nonsense to deal with a weird technical scenario (a malicious cell phone app goes wild and shuts down the power grid).
His crazy ideas led to the proposal to shut down the Internet in the event of national emergency.
When he was in office he was behind a stunt where a cybersecurity attack was assumed and a piece of equipment was misused and rigged to tear itself apart -- on TV -- by doing something that has been known for decades to be a no-no.
The only value of Chertoff's nonsense is publicity for the issue. Everything beyond that is idiocy.
Cybersecurity is clearly a serious concern and work needs to be done to improve it for critical infrastructure. But off-the-wall ideas coming from Chertoff are not the way to move forward. Instead, we should have people who know what they are doing lead the effort.
In World War II there was an entire army of inflatable weapons in England right across from Calais, France. Its purpose was to convince the Germans that the invasion would come at that point. It really came at Normandy.
During the invasion they even dropped chaff over the Channel near the fake army to make the Germans think the invasion was happening there. Both sides had radar, but the secret was that the Allies had microwave radar and not just VHF radar. The chaff looked like an invasion fleet to the radar.
As part of the ruse, they had General Patton running around inspecting the "troops" and getting them ready for the invasion.
I run Linux as my basic operating system but like to keep Windows around for purposes such as tax software that require it. If a machine came with XP pre-installed, I could squash the Windows partition down to about a quarter or less of the hard drive. Starting with Vista, you had to use M$'s partition resizing tool and it would not go to below half the hard drive. I managed to get XP for all my systems.
I don't know what I'll do some time in the future when I might need a new machine. Perhaps FOSS partition resizing will have caught up by then.
The problem is that the derivatives markets settle in cash and not in the underlying security. They are essentially side bets on the prices in the real markets. The derivatives markets can be many times the size of the real markets and the tail (the derivatives) can wildly wag the dog (the real markets). If futures and options were required to settle in the actual security, the frantic trading would be inhibited. An option to buy or sell stock or a contract for future sale or delivery of stock would need to involve real stock or real money ready to pay for real stock. Of course the broker profits and bonuses would go away, but the markets might be able to regain their sanity.
If a user wants unbreakable encryption, it is easy to do. There is nothing anyone can do to stop it.
Unbreakable encryption predates the modern computer by about a half century. It was invented by the US Army Signal Service for use in World War I. It is commonly called the "one time pad".
It has to be used correctly, or it becomes breakable. It also has logistics issues. The key material has to be physically transported and physically protected.
However, the technology is well known and has been for nearly a century.
Somebody ought to tell our technology-challenged public officials about it.
The government uses peer review to evaluate proposals for science and engineering grants. The same issues probably apply to those evaluations.
I have experienced a situation in which one reviewer recommended turning down a grant for reasons that could be considered as biased, although the bias was groupthink rather than individual. The other reviewers were enthusiastic about funding the grant and regarded it as a potential game-changer. It didn't get funded. A few years later the game-changing nature of the technology was recognized, but it was too late for the original applicant.
Energy supply is an issue of national security. Global warming is just one aspect of the problem and may be a sideshow compared to our serious need for reliable energy supply. This is why alternative energy is a national security issue. That means wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, biofuel, and all of the alternatives. It also means electric cars, so we don't depend on petroleum for our transportation. We should set petroleum aside for use as petrochemical feedstock and not burn it for heat and transportation.
We need to get serious about this. Natural gas won't be far behind oil in reaching its peak. Coal quality is already getting worse and worse. The days of extracted fossil fuels are numbered and the national security implications are growing.
We can either become energy independent based on renewable alternatives or we can prepare for endless war over dwindling supplies of extracted fossil fuels. This is not just an environmental problem. It is an issue of national survival as a great power.
So both manufacturing and high tech are being pushed offshore by companies seeking sub-minimum-wage workers. Then you have a financial industry focused on finding new ways to screw customers and on high stakes gambling with other peoples' money. The gambling gets big bonuses for the gamblers because it only depends on the volume of bets and not on whether the bank can cover them if they lose.
For about two decades after World War II, we had ups and downs, but a family could have a pretty good life with only one income. Tech people were in charge of tech companies, labor unions were strong, and a company's responsibility in its community was part of the social fabric. Now we have Dilbert's boss type managers running tech companies, labor unions are down to a small part of the workforce, and financial traders could care less about who they hurt as they manipulate companies.
The problem is the balance between eating and activity. A person can eat 5000 calories per day if they burn 5000 calories per day. If all you do is sit around, you can become obese on much less food.
So the culprits are empty junk foods, oversize portions, AND anything that attracts people to limit their physical activity. If PlayStation attracts kids to limit their active play AND they don't eat less to compensate, then PlayStation may rightly be named one of the culprits. But so can other things.
The problem is getting out of proper balance, and that is what needs to be addressed.
Not a very accurate measurement IMHO, although its just "popularity" after all:
From TFA:
Bear in mind that the graphs do not represent distribution sales, downloads, or installed base; rather, the data is based entirely on the number of Google searches containing each distribution’s name per unit time as reported by Google’s search insights tool.
It isn't even popularity. When I need information on Fedora or Centos, both of which I use in addition to Ubuntu, I usually go directly to their sites or (for Centos) to the EPEL repository. If you know where to go you don't need to Google.
I was in Kingson Ontario over the weekend and discovered the Military Communications and Electronics Museum on a Canadian forces base. Hadn't planned on going or even heard of the place before -- we just drove by and decided to stop. Among other things they had an Enigma machine.
I would highly recommend stopping there if you happen to be in the area. Admission was free, though we opted to make a donation.
The National Cryptologic Museum is near the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and MD-32. If you take the B&W Parkway a few more miles to BWI Marshall airport, there is a military electronics museum near the hotels adjacent to BWI Marshall. I visited that museum once. They have old radars and communications equipment on display.
I have no doubt that the same issues that affect critical medical devices also affect automobile "drive-by-wire" systems like the Toyota runaway accelerator problem. Those systems need to be subject to inspection and validation by independent experts in the relevant hardware/software technology. And if there are problems, the hardware and software need to be even more thoroughly inspected.
Geothermal energy is everywhere. The Earth has about 5000 years' supply. The skills and equipment for getting it are the same as drilling for oil. The only downside is that geothermal production brings up nasty stuff (such as sulfur) that has to be handled.
Geothermal would be a good activity for the oil drillers displaced by the moratorium on gulf drilling or more generally if we switch to electric cars and alternative fuels.
I recently heard that the simulated network card in virtualization systems can be a point of attack. So, this may be a more general issue than a specific card.
... presumably that we can also discover their IP addresses, but law enforcement has been unable to bring them down?
As I understand it, they don't use static IP addresses. They change their IP addresses frequently. They use all kinds of tricky schemes to shield their activities. It sounds like some of their schemes have been figured out lately and successfully attacked.
Many years ago, I worked at the Glenn L. Martin Company in Middle River, Maryland, just outside Baltimore. That company later became part of Martin-Marietta and was merged into Lockheed-Martin.
Glenn L. Martin established his company in Middle River to be able to work on seaplanes. You don't hear much about those anymore, but they could take off and land on the water. The final seaplane project of the company was a jet seaplane that was later cancelled. On one test flight the pilot flew the plane under the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which caused somewhat of an uproar.
Aurora was also the name of the "cybersecurity attack" on an electric generator that resulted in it bouncing up and down in a video on CNN a few years ago.
Actually, the cyber intrusion was stipulated and the remainder of the attack simulated by doing things with the generator that are known to cause serious problems.
Denatured alcohol wasn't the only poisonous alcohol people drank. Some people drank wood alcohol (methanol), which is itself poisonous. I remember hearing of a concoction called "smoke" that was wood alcohol mixed with water. The people who drank it were called "smoke hounds". It could make them blind and kill them, but they drank it anyway. I once heard of a blind musician who had become blind by drinking smoke when he was in prison.
Some people are crazy enough to drink anything, poison or not.
Looking at the list of participants, they seem to be all policy/political types. Was anyone with technical knowledge involved? My observation of the policy/political types is that their knowledge is so sketchy, vague, and reasoned by analogy (e.g., "collection of tubes") that they can't be depended on for anything technically accurate or definitive.
This event looks like it might have been hype for the purpose of motivating funding.
IEEE-USA has been advocating bi-directional gigabit broadband for several years. The telcos have offered dumbed-down, legacy speeds because they are trying to become more closely associated with the entertainment industry than with telecommunications. The entertainment and other content industries do not want the competition that comes when every subscriber can become an originator.
The failure to mandate that broadband is at least 100 mbps places the US way behind other countries and makes our innovators much less able to develop new concepts in broadband-based applications. That is why Japanese who come to the US are said to feel like they are entering a telecommunications third world.
The FCC is moving to have the US join the developed telecommunications world.
Slashdot Mirror
I've encountered situations where I'm trying to do something online and a task starts up due to a cron job that builds some kind of index. The index building should be in the background but somehow takes priority over what I'm doing on the desktop. Those kinds of cron jobs should be default scheduled in the background, not take priority over what is happening on the desktop.
Microsoft's monopoly in the operating system rests on MS Office. It is only the incompatibility of MS office formats that keeps people buying Windows. If OpenOffice is competitive, there is no reason to buy Windows.
First, the power grid has not been dumb. It has been pretty smart for decades. The Smart Grid is a major upgrade, but it isn't a scratch start from a dumb basis.
The existing grid includes sophisticated control centers and sophisticated microprocessor-based protective devices that sense faults and make corrections. Power grid equipment runs into problems all the time (such as equipment failure, storms, and curious animals) and handles them most of the time without putting the lights out.
The grid has always had two infrastructures: an electrical infrastructure (power lines, transformers, generators, etc.) and an information infrastructure. Decades ago, the information infrastructure was rudimentary. Now it is much more extensive. With the Smart Grid it will be even more extensive and will have much more interface to systems at the customer site. However, major upgrades will be needed to integrate massive increases in intermittent renewable energy such as wind and solar, to manage pluggable electric vehicles, and to vastly improve energy efficiency, reduce costs, and improve reliability. That will require standards. That is what the Smart Grid is doing.
Work on some of the Smart Grid standards, including the ones recently forwarded to FERC for rulemaking, started as long as 25 years ago. Those standards need to be deployed. Others will need to be developed.
Second, the Common Information Model is an abstract data model that covers the utility enterprise. It has little or nothing to do with transmitting data over power lines. That is called Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) and (like real estate having three factors in prices -- location, location, and location) it has three problems: interference, interference, and interference. To make BPL work you have to solve the interference problem.
Chertoff was behind the preposterous program on CNN where a collection of lawyers sat around trying to play techies on TV. Most of them were probably technology challenged, and they focused on legal nonsense to deal with a weird technical scenario (a malicious cell phone app goes wild and shuts down the power grid).
His crazy ideas led to the proposal to shut down the Internet in the event of national emergency.
When he was in office he was behind a stunt where a cybersecurity attack was assumed and a piece of equipment was misused and rigged to tear itself apart -- on TV -- by doing something that has been known for decades to be a no-no.
The only value of Chertoff's nonsense is publicity for the issue. Everything beyond that is idiocy.
Cybersecurity is clearly a serious concern and work needs to be done to improve it for critical infrastructure. But off-the-wall ideas coming from Chertoff are not the way to move forward. Instead, we should have people who know what they are doing lead the effort.
In World War II there was an entire army of inflatable weapons in England right across from Calais, France. Its purpose was to convince the Germans that the invasion would come at that point. It really came at Normandy.
During the invasion they even dropped chaff over the Channel near the fake army to make the Germans think the invasion was happening there. Both sides had radar, but the secret was that the Allies had microwave radar and not just VHF radar. The chaff looked like an invasion fleet to the radar.
As part of the ruse, they had General Patton running around inspecting the "troops" and getting them ready for the invasion.
... was the details of the PLC applications being targeted by the Stuxnet worm. Hmmmm.
I run Linux as my basic operating system but like to keep Windows around for purposes such as tax software that require it. If a machine came with XP pre-installed, I could squash the Windows partition down to about a quarter or less of the hard drive. Starting with Vista, you had to use M$'s partition resizing tool and it would not go to below half the hard drive. I managed to get XP for all my systems.
I don't know what I'll do some time in the future when I might need a new machine. Perhaps FOSS partition resizing will have caught up by then.
The problem is that the derivatives markets settle in cash and not in the underlying security. They are essentially side bets on the prices in the real markets. The derivatives markets can be many times the size of the real markets and the tail (the derivatives) can wildly wag the dog (the real markets). If futures and options were required to settle in the actual security, the frantic trading would be inhibited. An option to buy or sell stock or a contract for future sale or delivery of stock would need to involve real stock or real money ready to pay for real stock. Of course the broker profits and bonuses would go away, but the markets might be able to regain their sanity.
I had a few each Friday and Saturday and several on Monday. The URL's of the links varied. None of them were linkedin.com.
Engage brain before clicking.
If a user wants unbreakable encryption, it is easy to do. There is nothing anyone can do to stop it.
Unbreakable encryption predates the modern computer by about a half century. It was invented by the US Army Signal Service for use in World War I. It is commonly called the "one time pad".
It has to be used correctly, or it becomes breakable. It also has logistics issues. The key material has to be physically transported and physically protected.
However, the technology is well known and has been for nearly a century.
Somebody ought to tell our technology-challenged public officials about it.
The government uses peer review to evaluate proposals for science and engineering grants. The same issues probably apply to those evaluations.
I have experienced a situation in which one reviewer recommended turning down a grant for reasons that could be considered as biased, although the bias was groupthink rather than individual. The other reviewers were enthusiastic about funding the grant and regarded it as a potential game-changer. It didn't get funded. A few years later the game-changing nature of the technology was recognized, but it was too late for the original applicant.
Energy supply is an issue of national security. Global warming is just one aspect of the problem and may be a sideshow compared to our serious need for reliable energy supply. This is why alternative energy is a national security issue. That means wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, biofuel, and all of the alternatives. It also means electric cars, so we don't depend on petroleum for our transportation. We should set petroleum aside for use as petrochemical feedstock and not burn it for heat and transportation.
We need to get serious about this. Natural gas won't be far behind oil in reaching its peak. Coal quality is already getting worse and worse. The days of extracted fossil fuels are numbered and the national security implications are growing.
We can either become energy independent based on renewable alternatives or we can prepare for endless war over dwindling supplies of extracted fossil fuels. This is not just an environmental problem. It is an issue of national survival as a great power.
So both manufacturing and high tech are being pushed offshore by companies seeking sub-minimum-wage workers. Then you have a financial industry focused on finding new ways to screw customers and on high stakes gambling with other peoples' money. The gambling gets big bonuses for the gamblers because it only depends on the volume of bets and not on whether the bank can cover them if they lose.
For about two decades after World War II, we had ups and downs, but a family could have a pretty good life with only one income. Tech people were in charge of tech companies, labor unions were strong, and a company's responsibility in its community was part of the social fabric. Now we have Dilbert's boss type managers running tech companies, labor unions are down to a small part of the workforce, and financial traders could care less about who they hurt as they manipulate companies.
No wonder we have an economic mess.
The problem is the balance between eating and activity. A person can eat 5000 calories per day if they burn 5000 calories per day. If all you do is sit around, you can become obese on much less food.
So the culprits are empty junk foods, oversize portions, AND anything that attracts people to limit their physical activity. If PlayStation attracts kids to limit their active play AND they don't eat less to compensate, then PlayStation may rightly be named one of the culprits. But so can other things.
The problem is getting out of proper balance, and that is what needs to be addressed.
Not a very accurate measurement IMHO, although its just "popularity" after all:
From TFA:
Bear in mind that the graphs do not represent distribution sales, downloads, or installed base; rather, the data is based entirely on the number of Google searches containing each distribution’s name per unit time as reported by Google’s search insights tool.
It isn't even popularity. When I need information on Fedora or Centos, both of which I use in addition to Ubuntu, I usually go directly to their sites or (for Centos) to the EPEL repository. If you know where to go you don't need to Google.
I was in Kingson Ontario over the weekend and discovered the Military Communications and Electronics Museum on a Canadian forces base. Hadn't planned on going or even heard of the place before -- we just drove by and decided to stop. Among other things they had an Enigma machine.
I would highly recommend stopping there if you happen to be in the area. Admission was free, though we opted to make a donation.
The National Cryptologic Museum is near the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and MD-32. If you take the B&W Parkway a few more miles to BWI Marshall airport, there is a military electronics museum near the hotels adjacent to BWI Marshall. I visited that museum once. They have old radars and communications equipment on display.
I have no doubt that the same issues that affect critical medical devices also affect automobile "drive-by-wire" systems like the Toyota runaway accelerator problem. Those systems need to be subject to inspection and validation by independent experts in the relevant hardware/software technology. And if there are problems, the hardware and software need to be even more thoroughly inspected.
Geothermal energy is everywhere. The Earth has about 5000 years' supply. The skills and equipment for getting it are the same as drilling for oil. The only downside is that geothermal production brings up nasty stuff (such as sulfur) that has to be handled.
Geothermal would be a good activity for the oil drillers displaced by the moratorium on gulf drilling or more generally if we switch to electric cars and alternative fuels.
I recently heard that the simulated network card in virtualization systems can be a point of attack. So, this may be a more general issue than a specific card.
As I understand it, they don't use static IP addresses. They change their IP addresses frequently. They use all kinds of tricky schemes to shield their activities. It sounds like some of their schemes have been figured out lately and successfully attacked.
The story is about a Glenn Martin of New Zealand.
Many years ago, I worked at the Glenn L. Martin Company in Middle River, Maryland, just outside Baltimore. That company later became part of Martin-Marietta and was merged into Lockheed-Martin.
Glenn L. Martin established his company in Middle River to be able to work on seaplanes. You don't hear much about those anymore, but they could take off and land on the water. The final seaplane project of the company was a jet seaplane that was later cancelled. On one test flight the pilot flew the plane under the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which caused somewhat of an uproar.
Is this Glenn Martin related to Glenn L. Martin?
Aurora was also the name of the "cybersecurity attack" on an electric generator that resulted in it bouncing up and down in a video on CNN a few years ago.
Actually, the cyber intrusion was stipulated and the remainder of the attack simulated by doing things with the generator that are known to cause serious problems.
Denatured alcohol wasn't the only poisonous alcohol people drank. Some people drank wood alcohol (methanol), which is itself poisonous. I remember hearing of a concoction called "smoke" that was wood alcohol mixed with water. The people who drank it were called "smoke hounds". It could make them blind and kill them, but they drank it anyway. I once heard of a blind musician who had become blind by drinking smoke when he was in prison.
Some people are crazy enough to drink anything, poison or not.
Looking at the list of participants, they seem to be all policy/political types. Was anyone with technical knowledge involved? My observation of the policy/political types is that their knowledge is so sketchy, vague, and reasoned by analogy (e.g., "collection of tubes") that they can't be depended on for anything technically accurate or definitive.
This event looks like it might have been hype for the purpose of motivating funding.
IEEE-USA has been advocating bi-directional gigabit broadband for several years. The telcos have offered dumbed-down, legacy speeds because they are trying to become more closely associated with the entertainment industry than with telecommunications. The entertainment and other content industries do not want the competition that comes when every subscriber can become an originator.
The failure to mandate that broadband is at least 100 mbps places the US way behind other countries and makes our innovators much less able to develop new concepts in broadband-based applications. That is why Japanese who come to the US are said to feel like they are entering a telecommunications third world.
The FCC is moving to have the US join the developed telecommunications world.
Good!!!