Your first point is completely invalid when referring to a computer. The effects of a dust-induced thermal blanket are never beneficial. It's not an organism that is capable of adapting to its environment. If a thermal blanket were actually needed, the engineer would deliberately add an insulating layer.
The most thought an engineer gives to dust is to either prevent it through seals and filters, remove it, or to minimize its impact. It is never to depend upon it, with the sole exception of the activity of deliberately designing a dust collector.
If you're cleaning them correctly and carefully, you'll extend their lives. Dust buildup is a leading cause of overheating in PCs, and heat is a real problem.
But if you're cleaning them incorrectly, you'll shorten their lives. Any time you open the case, you're exposing sensitive components to risk, especially static damage. Not grounding yourself to the case when you're touching internal components will allow any static buildup on your body to discharge through a component. Vacuum cleaners draw so much air through them that they generate static electricity, particularly on the tip of a plastic nozzle. Static discharges at lower voltages are invisible and can cause latent damage that you may not immediately discover, but those weaknesses enable other normal stresses to destroy the chip.
When you take it apart to clean it, you're exposing it to non-zero risk. You might make a mechanical mistake in assembly that impacts proper cooling. You might put the CPU heatsink on cockeyed, fail to equally tension all the heat sink mounting screws, or drape a stray cable across a fan and prevent it from turning. Failing to put airflow devices back in their correct place, or failing to reconnect the fans to the power cables, could reduce needed airflow. When you carry it to the workbench, you risk dropping it. I've seen people reuse old thermal paste or glob on a thick layer of new paste when replacing the CPU fan (the fan maker's pre-paste is usually horribly thick.) A bad thermal paste layer will insulate the CPU from the heat sink and cause overheating. Lots of the aftermarket CPU fans have really weird mounting hardware, and you need to be sure they're correctly mounted so they effectively transfer the heat. All these risks can be reduced by learning how to do it right, reading the directions, and taking appropriate precautions.
One way to greatly reduce the risk of damage due to improper handling is to clean the machines only as often as necessary. Dust buildup is dependent on your particular environment. Fabrics, pets, dirt, open windows, flowering plants, carpeting, low humidity, high humidity, smoke, grease, cooking oils, hair sprays, colognes, all are factors that contribute to the build up of dust. So clean it after a year, and figure out what the cleaning schedule should be based on what you discover. It might be that annual cleanings are appropriate, or maybe you can wait two or three years.
All heat is a problem. Direct thermal damage from too much heat is possible, of course, but temperature changes can cause problems too. Thermal expansion causes the mechanical motion of parts. Every material has a different coefficient of expansion, (e.g. aluminum expands more per degree than steel, plastic expands more than aluminum,) so as parts heat and cool, they tug at solder connections, screw mountings, and other interface points inside the case. Repeated heating and cooling cycles increase the possibility of damage. Keeping it clean will keep it cooler, reducing the amount of expansion and motion, and extending the life.
Note that I'm not saying you'll ever drop your computer or ever reassemble it incorrectly, I'm pointing out that the act of cleaning it creates a risk greater than zero, and that the risk is zero when you are not cleaning it. And bigger risks lead to shorter lifespans.
That's the thing about cyberwar. Anyone can jump on the battlefield, from anywhere, at any time. You don't have to spend billions of dollars to field a standing army of cyberwarriors, or rabble-rouse your church members into forming a militia. You can be sitting alone in your mother's basement, muster up a couple thousand bots, and suddenly you're making as much impact on the world as the entire nation-state of North Korea. People who do that have shown themselves to have notoriously poor judgement when it comes to many things, including choices of targets. It only takes the one person, and he's certainly not a signatory to the no-soft-targets treaty.
Rationally thinking about it, someone who can go from "the kid who doesn't help his mom with the trash" to "world power" is going to realize the personal consequences can never outweigh the balance of power they wield. If you were to unleash an all-out attack on dams around the world, manage to open the floodgates and disable the systems that would shut them, you could destroy dozens of populated valleys, killing or displacing thousands of people. There is no sentence commensurate with mass murder. They have only one life to lose; and the continued existence of suicide bombers demonstrates that plenty of people are willing to die for their causes. And the number of school shooters is proof that people are even willing to die for absolutely nothing at all.
Every nation is at least half full of innocent people who are unwilling to sacrifice themselves for the Glory of Dear Leader, and they have a much better self-preservation instinct than an individual, so they will typically obey such a concord. But the "mutually assured destruction" incentives that the Geneva Convention was built around fall apart when one side has nothing to lose. Sadly, we're seeing evidence of that in Syria today, where Assad is in such a losing position that he is now using chemical weapons.
If you think this makes him an incompetent CEO, then you should do something about it. You should immediately divest yourself of Amazon stock, because he is obviously taking the company in the direction of ruin. I'll be happy to buy up all your stock at half the current market price, which would be a bargain for you since you obviously believe this action will drive it straight to zero.
Oh, you don't believe that? Then shut the fuck up.
Let me guess: the captain of the ship is a beautiful bikini-clad woman named Shirley Goesdown? The first mate is Jaws? Instead of sailors, he has henchmen?
Damn, that would totally elevate him a couple notches in my mind!
They might leak and make a mess. And electric grids, boy, that would be inconvenient. And not water treatment plants, or traffic signals. And not banks or shops, either.
The Geneva Convention worked (mostly) because there were mutual prisoners of war who could be mistreated, and horrific effects all around from mustard gas. If Anonymous could post flashing GIFs on an epileptic support group web site for teh lulz, what makes anyone think an attacker will stop at a hospital's firewall?
You suck at trolling. You have to lead people in with a believable premise first, then drop the turd. Make up something about how Adobe had troubles porting it, how the security models caused implementation issues, that kind of stuff. Don't lead with your ace.
If an unnamed biologist did his research this way (constructed a virus that infects creatures around the world), he wouldn't be called an "anonymous researcher", he'd be called a "mad scientist".
And how do you know he didn't conduct these scans from his underground lair? For all we know, he may even own a Persian cat!
If you'd read TFA, (which is really weak on every front and almost not worth reading at all,) you'd see their misleading headline also says "Self-Powered," but they quoted Walgreen's announcement with the words "net zero energy". Slashdotters are furiously inventing stupid technical explanations to slam them for remaining on the grid when the sun don't shine, when the entire problem is only a stupid reporter and an incompetent editor.
For many service providers, keeping their systems available and fixing problems are their number 1 and number 2 priorities. They know that they're only an outage away from being cut loose by many of their customers. Any company willing to switch service providers once is willing to do it again, if only to save a few nickels.
Not only is it their bread and butter, service response and uptime are written in their contracts. They have to take their services very seriously.
And I completely agree that if you're talking about an Amazon or a Microsoft, of course they aren't going to dance like trained monkeys just because your $19.95 VM is hung. But if you were a Fortune 500 company renting corporate email services from Microsoft, you could bet that they'd jump on your problems right away.
When I first saw the ad for the V&V expansion "Final Fight with the Furies" I was fairly certain it said "Anal Fight with the Furries." I fully expect this to be downvoted to oblivion but go to the website and check it out for yourself before you judge. It's the second item down in the purple box.
I think that was just screen burn-in from your porn collection.
Because that's how these things are done up and down Big Corporate America. Being quietly offered the chance to "quit or be fired", most executives choose the resume-preserving path. They are then unctuously thanked for their many contributions, and wished well while they go on to pursue other interests or spend more time with their families.
It's a professional courtesy. Sure, the board could fire him, but once they start down the paths of firing executives, other executives find themselves uncomfortably on the firing line. That way lies chaos, so instead, the Old Boys Network has unwritten protocols that govern the whole process, keeping it "civilized."
The thing about executives is that their contracts make clear they're holding a "future scapegoat" role. In a larger company it's just a matter of time before some big project goes bad, and heads need to roll in order to slake the bloodlust of the stockholders. The guy in the corner office knows up front that he's going to be sacrificed if such a thing happens on his watch. When it does, it's not a big deal. The other Old Boys at The Club will say to him "too bad, old chum, your subordinates obviously let you down. Don't mind that, same thing happens everywhere, they're all incompetent. Have a drink. How would you like a nice cushy job being our scapegoat for a while?"
If your company isn't already being run by these kinds of self-serving bastards, I suggest you quit reading slashdot, and go back to work. That's a boss you want to keep, and not a job you want to lose.
What makes you think they haven't? There's nothing about a Senior VP job or a CIO job that requires the executive to live full-time in the USA. If a board is serious about their outsourcing, even those jobs go to the lowest bidder.
Now, should it go to a contractor? Different question. They certainly could not do worse than most of the non-engineering MBAs I've seen in the corner offices.
And from a company point of view, I can also produce statistics on how many of our systems we ourselves screwed up with no help from the cloud. People screw up. Hardware fails.
The difference with the cloud is that you've added two additional horribly complex systems (the network and the external servers) that can also be screwed up by people or fail for various reasons. You've also added the latency required to access the remote service. On top of that you've added multiple entry and exit points for data coming into and leaving your network, with extra key exchanges needed, and a different security environment to either be audited or blindly trusted.
In exchange, you get to avoid the up front costs of installing a few servers, and the ongoing costs of managing them. Instead, you simply pay someone else on an ongoing basis to buy and maintain their own hardware with your money. And if they raise their rates, or go out of business, or buy cheap servers, or hire stupid people, or smart lawyers, guess what? You're only a lot worse off than you were before.
It's a pretty cloud when it's way up in the blue sky. But it's nothing but fog when it's in your face.
No. If you owned an automobile dealership, and wrote down the names and addresses of every customer on a poster, and I asked you for a copy of the poster, and you gave it to me, and then had me prosecuted for displaying the poster, that's the analogy you should be considering here.
I believe you're asking "where is the power for the heat coming from?" The power for the heat pump comes from electricity, but the heat pump is just moving heat from one location to another; in this case, from outdoors to indoors. It's literally operating just like an air conditioner or a refrigerator, except instead of wanting to climb in with the food to keep cold, you want to stand by the exhaust coils and keep yourself warm.
A pump pushes compressed refrigerant through tubing into an expansion valve located outside your house. When a pressurized refrigerant is expanded it evaporates into a vapor/liquid mix which abruptly cools it down, chilling the tubing colder than it was (note that it's just relatively colder than before, not a specific temperature.) The tubing has fins to improve heat transfer. A fan blows outside air across the fins on the chilly coiled tubing, making the outside air colder than it was before. The tubes take in heat from the surrounding air and warm up the refrigerant. The warmed vapor/liquid mix is pumped into the house through a tube. The pressure of the pump compresses the mix back into a liquid, causing it to superheat. The warmed compressed liquid refrigerant flows through a set of finned tubing that is installed in your forced air heating system. A fan blows the warmed air through your house, while the pump recirculates the cooled liquid back outside, and the cycle continues.
Because it's just a refrigerator or AC operating in reverse, and the inside coils are the hot coils, the outside coils are even colder than they were before. If the outside temperature is 20 degrees, the coils may be as cold as 0 degrees. That difference is where the heat energy comes from.
Using the grid as a storage device solves a very complicated problem in a very simple manner.
Consider the nature of electricity: the fuel has to be consumed at the same time and rate as the demand for the power, or the power has to come from storage. Wind and solar obviously cannot be adjusted to meet the demand. Insufficient generation means the power has to either be retrieved from storage or bought from someone else. Excess generation can either be wasted or stored; since waste is undesirable, storage becomes a critical component of such a system. But storing hundreds of kWh of power is a huge engineering problem. Various kinds of power storage technologies have various problematic attributes: they're expensive, toxic, corrosive, flammable, hazardous, inefficient, and/or massive, and overall present an increased level of risk and cost. And by nature they have to be risky - they contain a tremendous amount of power.
The grid, on the other hand, is already present, and represents a demand far greater than a store's rooftop solar cells can ever meet. There are plenty of consumers who will use that spare electricity when they need it and the store doesn't. By pumping the excess solar power into the grid, the people who burn coal to make electricity will burn less coal, because the demand for their product is lowered. The energy is stored by remaining in the unburned coal.
And that turns into benefits for society as a whole. Less demand means less pollution, fewer power plants, fewer fossil fuels destroyed -- all those reduce our overall costs.
And the only device they need to make it work? An electric meter that runs in both directions. Storage is accomplished with money instead of batteries.
Geothermal is indeed an energy extraction method, and the primary difference with wind generation is that it isn't turned into electricity between harvest and delivery. To say it's not "generation" is disingenuous.
The only reason they remain "dependent" on fossil fuels is that it's inefficient and expensive to build a giant storage device to keep the excess power they generate. The grid is a 100% efficient ersatz battery, and the only cost is a meter that spins in both directions. "Net zero" does not necessarily mean "independent".
Actually, your heat pump is probably efficient all the way down to about 20 - 22F. Any colder than that, and it's more efficient to burn natural gas or propane.
Even if it's running 24x7 at 30F, it's using less energy than burning fuel.
Yeah, I was wondering about the energy break-even point of razing and rebuilding, too. Those bulldozers and steel foundries don't run on unicorn farts.
Flash back 30 years to your Cable TV model. Your bill paid not only for the distribution network of wires, but $0.25 per month was paid to each cable network to carry the channel to you. That hasn't changed in 30 years. What also hasn't changed is that a cable subscriber still pays $0.25 per month to Discovery Channel. One cable bill combines payment for both distribution and content. The only difference is that inflation has eaten away at those rates, and instead of jacking up cable bills to cover the costs, the channels had to generate revenue themselves, so they added advertisers.
Now, when you said that most Internet content was user generated and there was little advertising, you failed to point out that there was absolutely no system in place for your ISP to pay sites to be content providers. That's a significant difference between the Internet and Cable TV. (Thank god, or we'd have the SocialistNet instead of the Internet.) Content providing has always, always been at the expense of the provider, unsubsidized by the network. It's capitalism all the way.
Despite what you want to believe, quality content is not free to produce. It takes time and money, and it doesn't matter if you're filming Game of Thrones or sending reporters into Washington D.C. If you want quality information, it will cost someone. If it's "free", and it's not overt advertising, the chances are good it's propaganda being produced by someone with an agenda who stands to gain by influencing you.
Who would you trust more to report on the happenings in the Capital: an NPR reporter, a FOX news reporter, Ariana Huffington, a CNN reporter, some guy with a cell phone, the Republican congressman from Texas, or the Democratic congressman from New York? Now take away the advertising revenue, and see who stops reporting. NPR begs for money every month, so their guy is still there. FOX is paid for by Rupert Murdoch, who wants people to hear the "don't tax rich people" message, so he's still there. Ariana is reporting on the Republicans blocking all the rational proposals of the Democrats, so she stays. The CNN reporter isn't getting a paycheck, so he leaves. The guy with the cell phone also has a tinfoil hat and is reporting on the progress of some paint flakes taking the shape of Jesus, and that he'll eat a sandwich at the homeless shelter later and he hopes it won't be salami again and Congress is swinging purple, definitely purple. The Republican congressman reports that his partners across the aisle are all taxing and spending, and the Democratic congressman reports that the Republicans are all divisive and duplicitous.
The only one of that whole batch I'd trust is the guy who is still getting paid to be there: the NPR guy. Everyone else is biased, crazy, or both. If you don't pay for the content, you're only going to get free lies.
you make no sense. what does internet or network have to do with paying for content?
That's because he can't tell the difference between the network and the sites connected to it. If you gave him a gigabyte ethernet cable connected to a video streaming service that only showed ESPN reruns of the 2008 Daytona 500 and a three minute porn loop, he probably couldn't tell the difference between that and the internet either.
So those are all solvable problems. Want to set payment at 0.1 cents? Fine, call your pretend contributions "dimes not dollars".
Micropayments would not be sent directly to the site, as the transaction fees would certainly kill them. So as a web surfer, I'd set up an account with MicropaymentsRus.com, and deposit some fixed amount of money into it on a monthly basis, making only one payment transaction per month. To pay the sites, they could set up a threshold system, where if donations exceed some amount like $100.00 per month, they'd make a monthly deposit into the site's bank account (ACH transfers are cheaper than credit transactions.) If donations didn't meet the threshold, they'd send the payment once the amount reached $100.00; if the amount didn't get that high in three months they'd send whatever the balance was. That way they're minimizing the number of expensive funds transfers.
To make it work, the micropayment operator would have to take a cut from the amount sent to the sites, and it's those transaction costs that would determine if such a system is viable. I'm wondering if it would be possible to make a go of it entirely on the interest earned by the unspent deposits, or if the operator would have to take some cut off the top, which I think would have to be well under 10% to get people to accept it. If it were a non-profit entity it could be run on a cost basis.
As a user, I'd also need it to be automated. If I value a site (or if my browser thinks I spend a lot of time on a site it could prompt me) I'd want to donate a penny per page, or perhaps a penny per minute. But I know me -- I'll forget to click the button. I'd also really like my micropayment processor to notify the site that I'm a paying customer so they could suppress their more pernicious ads. That would be the best ad blocker of all.
The things to watch out for would be security. Because it's the client's money, the software in the browser would have to have full out-of-band control over the spending of money - imagine a javascript clicking "pay evilhacker1.org $0.03" , "pay evilhacker2.org $0.03", continuing through hundreds of money laundering sites at a slow and steady pace for hours at a time, until your balance hit zero. As it is, the micropayment systems would likely be the first thing attacked on zombie computers.
The key to understanding the profitability is that it only works if hundreds of thousands of micropayments flow through the system. Setting it up is a big investment risk, and is not guaranteed to pay off. Google could do it of course, but I couldn't personally afford to risk the startup capital needed for something like this. Experiments like this one might be an interesting shot at figuring out the viability of such a system.
Slashdot Mirror
because sony never tried to sensor a negative review.
That must be because they never detected them.
Your first point is completely invalid when referring to a computer. The effects of a dust-induced thermal blanket are never beneficial. It's not an organism that is capable of adapting to its environment. If a thermal blanket were actually needed, the engineer would deliberately add an insulating layer.
The most thought an engineer gives to dust is to either prevent it through seals and filters, remove it, or to minimize its impact. It is never to depend upon it, with the sole exception of the activity of deliberately designing a dust collector.
If you're cleaning them correctly and carefully, you'll extend their lives. Dust buildup is a leading cause of overheating in PCs, and heat is a real problem.
But if you're cleaning them incorrectly, you'll shorten their lives. Any time you open the case, you're exposing sensitive components to risk, especially static damage. Not grounding yourself to the case when you're touching internal components will allow any static buildup on your body to discharge through a component. Vacuum cleaners draw so much air through them that they generate static electricity, particularly on the tip of a plastic nozzle. Static discharges at lower voltages are invisible and can cause latent damage that you may not immediately discover, but those weaknesses enable other normal stresses to destroy the chip.
When you take it apart to clean it, you're exposing it to non-zero risk. You might make a mechanical mistake in assembly that impacts proper cooling. You might put the CPU heatsink on cockeyed, fail to equally tension all the heat sink mounting screws, or drape a stray cable across a fan and prevent it from turning. Failing to put airflow devices back in their correct place, or failing to reconnect the fans to the power cables, could reduce needed airflow. When you carry it to the workbench, you risk dropping it. I've seen people reuse old thermal paste or glob on a thick layer of new paste when replacing the CPU fan (the fan maker's pre-paste is usually horribly thick.) A bad thermal paste layer will insulate the CPU from the heat sink and cause overheating. Lots of the aftermarket CPU fans have really weird mounting hardware, and you need to be sure they're correctly mounted so they effectively transfer the heat. All these risks can be reduced by learning how to do it right, reading the directions, and taking appropriate precautions.
One way to greatly reduce the risk of damage due to improper handling is to clean the machines only as often as necessary. Dust buildup is dependent on your particular environment. Fabrics, pets, dirt, open windows, flowering plants, carpeting, low humidity, high humidity, smoke, grease, cooking oils, hair sprays, colognes, all are factors that contribute to the build up of dust. So clean it after a year, and figure out what the cleaning schedule should be based on what you discover. It might be that annual cleanings are appropriate, or maybe you can wait two or three years.
All heat is a problem. Direct thermal damage from too much heat is possible, of course, but temperature changes can cause problems too. Thermal expansion causes the mechanical motion of parts. Every material has a different coefficient of expansion, (e.g. aluminum expands more per degree than steel, plastic expands more than aluminum,) so as parts heat and cool, they tug at solder connections, screw mountings, and other interface points inside the case. Repeated heating and cooling cycles increase the possibility of damage. Keeping it clean will keep it cooler, reducing the amount of expansion and motion, and extending the life.
Note that I'm not saying you'll ever drop your computer or ever reassemble it incorrectly, I'm pointing out that the act of cleaning it creates a risk greater than zero, and that the risk is zero when you are not cleaning it. And bigger risks lead to shorter lifespans.
That's the thing about cyberwar. Anyone can jump on the battlefield, from anywhere, at any time. You don't have to spend billions of dollars to field a standing army of cyberwarriors, or rabble-rouse your church members into forming a militia. You can be sitting alone in your mother's basement, muster up a couple thousand bots, and suddenly you're making as much impact on the world as the entire nation-state of North Korea. People who do that have shown themselves to have notoriously poor judgement when it comes to many things, including choices of targets. It only takes the one person, and he's certainly not a signatory to the no-soft-targets treaty.
Rationally thinking about it, someone who can go from "the kid who doesn't help his mom with the trash" to "world power" is going to realize the personal consequences can never outweigh the balance of power they wield. If you were to unleash an all-out attack on dams around the world, manage to open the floodgates and disable the systems that would shut them, you could destroy dozens of populated valleys, killing or displacing thousands of people. There is no sentence commensurate with mass murder. They have only one life to lose; and the continued existence of suicide bombers demonstrates that plenty of people are willing to die for their causes. And the number of school shooters is proof that people are even willing to die for absolutely nothing at all.
Every nation is at least half full of innocent people who are unwilling to sacrifice themselves for the Glory of Dear Leader, and they have a much better self-preservation instinct than an individual, so they will typically obey such a concord. But the "mutually assured destruction" incentives that the Geneva Convention was built around fall apart when one side has nothing to lose. Sadly, we're seeing evidence of that in Syria today, where Assad is in such a losing position that he is now using chemical weapons.
If you think this makes him an incompetent CEO, then you should do something about it. You should immediately divest yourself of Amazon stock, because he is obviously taking the company in the direction of ruin. I'll be happy to buy up all your stock at half the current market price, which would be a bargain for you since you obviously believe this action will drive it straight to zero.
Oh, you don't believe that? Then shut the fuck up.
Let me guess: the captain of the ship is a beautiful bikini-clad woman named Shirley Goesdown? The first mate is Jaws? Instead of sailors, he has henchmen?
Damn, that would totally elevate him a couple notches in my mind!
They might leak and make a mess. And electric grids, boy, that would be inconvenient. And not water treatment plants, or traffic signals. And not banks or shops, either.
The Geneva Convention worked (mostly) because there were mutual prisoners of war who could be mistreated, and horrific effects all around from mustard gas. If Anonymous could post flashing GIFs on an epileptic support group web site for teh lulz, what makes anyone think an attacker will stop at a hospital's firewall?
You suck at trolling. You have to lead people in with a believable premise first, then drop the turd. Make up something about how Adobe had troubles porting it, how the security models caused implementation issues, that kind of stuff. Don't lead with your ace.
If an unnamed biologist did his research this way (constructed a virus that infects creatures around the world), he wouldn't be called an "anonymous researcher", he'd be called a "mad scientist".
And how do you know he didn't conduct these scans from his underground lair? For all we know, he may even own a Persian cat!
If you'd read TFA, (which is really weak on every front and almost not worth reading at all,) you'd see their misleading headline also says "Self-Powered," but they quoted Walgreen's announcement with the words "net zero energy". Slashdotters are furiously inventing stupid technical explanations to slam them for remaining on the grid when the sun don't shine, when the entire problem is only a stupid reporter and an incompetent editor.
For many service providers, keeping their systems available and fixing problems are their number 1 and number 2 priorities. They know that they're only an outage away from being cut loose by many of their customers. Any company willing to switch service providers once is willing to do it again, if only to save a few nickels.
Not only is it their bread and butter, service response and uptime are written in their contracts. They have to take their services very seriously.
And I completely agree that if you're talking about an Amazon or a Microsoft, of course they aren't going to dance like trained monkeys just because your $19.95 VM is hung. But if you were a Fortune 500 company renting corporate email services from Microsoft, you could bet that they'd jump on your problems right away.
When I first saw the ad for the V&V expansion "Final Fight with the Furies" I was fairly certain it said "Anal Fight with the Furries." I fully expect this to be downvoted to oblivion but go to the website and check it out for yourself before you judge. It's the second item down in the purple box.
I think that was just screen burn-in from your porn collection.
Because that's how these things are done up and down Big Corporate America. Being quietly offered the chance to "quit or be fired", most executives choose the resume-preserving path. They are then unctuously thanked for their many contributions, and wished well while they go on to pursue other interests or spend more time with their families.
It's a professional courtesy. Sure, the board could fire him, but once they start down the paths of firing executives, other executives find themselves uncomfortably on the firing line. That way lies chaos, so instead, the Old Boys Network has unwritten protocols that govern the whole process, keeping it "civilized."
The thing about executives is that their contracts make clear they're holding a "future scapegoat" role. In a larger company it's just a matter of time before some big project goes bad, and heads need to roll in order to slake the bloodlust of the stockholders. The guy in the corner office knows up front that he's going to be sacrificed if such a thing happens on his watch. When it does, it's not a big deal. The other Old Boys at The Club will say to him "too bad, old chum, your subordinates obviously let you down. Don't mind that, same thing happens everywhere, they're all incompetent. Have a drink. How would you like a nice cushy job being our scapegoat for a while?"
If your company isn't already being run by these kinds of self-serving bastards, I suggest you quit reading slashdot, and go back to work. That's a boss you want to keep, and not a job you want to lose.
What makes you think they haven't? There's nothing about a Senior VP job or a CIO job that requires the executive to live full-time in the USA. If a board is serious about their outsourcing, even those jobs go to the lowest bidder.
Now, should it go to a contractor? Different question. They certainly could not do worse than most of the non-engineering MBAs I've seen in the corner offices.
And from a company point of view, I can also produce statistics on how many of our systems we ourselves screwed up with no help from the cloud. People screw up. Hardware fails.
The difference with the cloud is that you've added two additional horribly complex systems (the network and the external servers) that can also be screwed up by people or fail for various reasons. You've also added the latency required to access the remote service. On top of that you've added multiple entry and exit points for data coming into and leaving your network, with extra key exchanges needed, and a different security environment to either be audited or blindly trusted.
In exchange, you get to avoid the up front costs of installing a few servers, and the ongoing costs of managing them. Instead, you simply pay someone else on an ongoing basis to buy and maintain their own hardware with your money. And if they raise their rates, or go out of business, or buy cheap servers, or hire stupid people, or smart lawyers, guess what? You're only a lot worse off than you were before.
It's a pretty cloud when it's way up in the blue sky. But it's nothing but fog when it's in your face.
No. If you owned an automobile dealership, and wrote down the names and addresses of every customer on a poster, and I asked you for a copy of the poster, and you gave it to me, and then had me prosecuted for displaying the poster, that's the analogy you should be considering here.
I believe you're asking "where is the power for the heat coming from?" The power for the heat pump comes from electricity, but the heat pump is just moving heat from one location to another; in this case, from outdoors to indoors. It's literally operating just like an air conditioner or a refrigerator, except instead of wanting to climb in with the food to keep cold, you want to stand by the exhaust coils and keep yourself warm.
A pump pushes compressed refrigerant through tubing into an expansion valve located outside your house. When a pressurized refrigerant is expanded it evaporates into a vapor/liquid mix which abruptly cools it down, chilling the tubing colder than it was (note that it's just relatively colder than before, not a specific temperature.) The tubing has fins to improve heat transfer. A fan blows outside air across the fins on the chilly coiled tubing, making the outside air colder than it was before. The tubes take in heat from the surrounding air and warm up the refrigerant. The warmed vapor/liquid mix is pumped into the house through a tube. The pressure of the pump compresses the mix back into a liquid, causing it to superheat. The warmed compressed liquid refrigerant flows through a set of finned tubing that is installed in your forced air heating system. A fan blows the warmed air through your house, while the pump recirculates the cooled liquid back outside, and the cycle continues.
Because it's just a refrigerator or AC operating in reverse, and the inside coils are the hot coils, the outside coils are even colder than they were before. If the outside temperature is 20 degrees, the coils may be as cold as 0 degrees. That difference is where the heat energy comes from.
Using the grid as a storage device solves a very complicated problem in a very simple manner.
Consider the nature of electricity: the fuel has to be consumed at the same time and rate as the demand for the power, or the power has to come from storage. Wind and solar obviously cannot be adjusted to meet the demand. Insufficient generation means the power has to either be retrieved from storage or bought from someone else. Excess generation can either be wasted or stored; since waste is undesirable, storage becomes a critical component of such a system. But storing hundreds of kWh of power is a huge engineering problem. Various kinds of power storage technologies have various problematic attributes: they're expensive, toxic, corrosive, flammable, hazardous, inefficient, and/or massive, and overall present an increased level of risk and cost. And by nature they have to be risky - they contain a tremendous amount of power.
The grid, on the other hand, is already present, and represents a demand far greater than a store's rooftop solar cells can ever meet. There are plenty of consumers who will use that spare electricity when they need it and the store doesn't. By pumping the excess solar power into the grid, the people who burn coal to make electricity will burn less coal, because the demand for their product is lowered. The energy is stored by remaining in the unburned coal.
And that turns into benefits for society as a whole. Less demand means less pollution, fewer power plants, fewer fossil fuels destroyed -- all those reduce our overall costs.
And the only device they need to make it work? An electric meter that runs in both directions. Storage is accomplished with money instead of batteries.
Geothermal is indeed an energy extraction method, and the primary difference with wind generation is that it isn't turned into electricity between harvest and delivery. To say it's not "generation" is disingenuous.
The only reason they remain "dependent" on fossil fuels is that it's inefficient and expensive to build a giant storage device to keep the excess power they generate. The grid is a 100% efficient ersatz battery, and the only cost is a meter that spins in both directions. "Net zero" does not necessarily mean "independent".
Actually, your heat pump is probably efficient all the way down to about 20 - 22F. Any colder than that, and it's more efficient to burn natural gas or propane.
Even if it's running 24x7 at 30F, it's using less energy than burning fuel.
Yeah, I was wondering about the energy break-even point of razing and rebuilding, too. Those bulldozers and steel foundries don't run on unicorn farts.
Jon Stewart pointed this out once when he noted that, "no Congressman ever got ahead by jumping on his desk and yelling 'be reasonable!'"
"You suck" is much more powerful than "me, too."
Flash back 30 years to your Cable TV model. Your bill paid not only for the distribution network of wires, but $0.25 per month was paid to each cable network to carry the channel to you. That hasn't changed in 30 years. What also hasn't changed is that a cable subscriber still pays $0.25 per month to Discovery Channel. One cable bill combines payment for both distribution and content. The only difference is that inflation has eaten away at those rates, and instead of jacking up cable bills to cover the costs, the channels had to generate revenue themselves, so they added advertisers.
Now, when you said that most Internet content was user generated and there was little advertising, you failed to point out that there was absolutely no system in place for your ISP to pay sites to be content providers. That's a significant difference between the Internet and Cable TV. (Thank god, or we'd have the SocialistNet instead of the Internet.) Content providing has always, always been at the expense of the provider, unsubsidized by the network. It's capitalism all the way.
Despite what you want to believe, quality content is not free to produce. It takes time and money, and it doesn't matter if you're filming Game of Thrones or sending reporters into Washington D.C. If you want quality information, it will cost someone. If it's "free", and it's not overt advertising, the chances are good it's propaganda being produced by someone with an agenda who stands to gain by influencing you.
Who would you trust more to report on the happenings in the Capital: an NPR reporter, a FOX news reporter, Ariana Huffington, a CNN reporter, some guy with a cell phone, the Republican congressman from Texas, or the Democratic congressman from New York? Now take away the advertising revenue, and see who stops reporting. NPR begs for money every month, so their guy is still there. FOX is paid for by Rupert Murdoch, who wants people to hear the "don't tax rich people" message, so he's still there. Ariana is reporting on the Republicans blocking all the rational proposals of the Democrats, so she stays. The CNN reporter isn't getting a paycheck, so he leaves. The guy with the cell phone also has a tinfoil hat and is reporting on the progress of some paint flakes taking the shape of Jesus, and that he'll eat a sandwich at the homeless shelter later and he hopes it won't be salami again and Congress is swinging purple, definitely purple. The Republican congressman reports that his partners across the aisle are all taxing and spending, and the Democratic congressman reports that the Republicans are all divisive and duplicitous.
The only one of that whole batch I'd trust is the guy who is still getting paid to be there: the NPR guy. Everyone else is biased, crazy, or both. If you don't pay for the content, you're only going to get free lies.
you make no sense. what does internet or network have to do with paying for content?
That's because he can't tell the difference between the network and the sites connected to it. If you gave him a gigabyte ethernet cable connected to a video streaming service that only showed ESPN reruns of the 2008 Daytona 500 and a three minute porn loop, he probably couldn't tell the difference between that and the internet either.
So those are all solvable problems. Want to set payment at 0.1 cents? Fine, call your pretend contributions "dimes not dollars".
Micropayments would not be sent directly to the site, as the transaction fees would certainly kill them. So as a web surfer, I'd set up an account with MicropaymentsRus.com, and deposit some fixed amount of money into it on a monthly basis, making only one payment transaction per month. To pay the sites, they could set up a threshold system, where if donations exceed some amount like $100.00 per month, they'd make a monthly deposit into the site's bank account (ACH transfers are cheaper than credit transactions.) If donations didn't meet the threshold, they'd send the payment once the amount reached $100.00; if the amount didn't get that high in three months they'd send whatever the balance was. That way they're minimizing the number of expensive funds transfers.
To make it work, the micropayment operator would have to take a cut from the amount sent to the sites, and it's those transaction costs that would determine if such a system is viable. I'm wondering if it would be possible to make a go of it entirely on the interest earned by the unspent deposits, or if the operator would have to take some cut off the top, which I think would have to be well under 10% to get people to accept it. If it were a non-profit entity it could be run on a cost basis.
As a user, I'd also need it to be automated. If I value a site (or if my browser thinks I spend a lot of time on a site it could prompt me) I'd want to donate a penny per page, or perhaps a penny per minute. But I know me -- I'll forget to click the button. I'd also really like my micropayment processor to notify the site that I'm a paying customer so they could suppress their more pernicious ads. That would be the best ad blocker of all.
The things to watch out for would be security. Because it's the client's money, the software in the browser would have to have full out-of-band control over the spending of money - imagine a javascript clicking "pay evilhacker1.org $0.03" , "pay evilhacker2.org $0.03", continuing through hundreds of money laundering sites at a slow and steady pace for hours at a time, until your balance hit zero. As it is, the micropayment systems would likely be the first thing attacked on zombie computers.
The key to understanding the profitability is that it only works if hundreds of thousands of micropayments flow through the system. Setting it up is a big investment risk, and is not guaranteed to pay off. Google could do it of course, but I couldn't personally afford to risk the startup capital needed for something like this. Experiments like this one might be an interesting shot at figuring out the viability of such a system.