hospitals try to keep off networks, especially public ones
The sysadmins try, but fail. Most hospital networks and devices ARE connected to the internet in some way. Doctors want their access from the various desktop machines, of course, but many of the diagnostic machines offer things like "click this button to email the ultrasound pictures". So they do.
I was appalled to learn this a few years ago from a hospital sysadmin here on/. The thing he pointed out is that Doctors are Gods. If they say "This thing can email pictures? Well yeah, hook it up!" then the sysadmin has zero choice. Holes get punched in firewalls that should never have been punched, and the gear gets hooked up.
And because medical devices are certified only to work with a particular operating system at a particular patch level, they don't get upgraded unless the vendor comes out with a new certified patched OS. That means the ultrasound machine sitting on that cart might still be running Windows XP SP 1. It's crazy.
NTP would actually be the least of their worries. That's something they could more easily house internally.
I'd like to know what makes them think the hashes of the passwords are safe. I think the thieves should paste one into Google and see what pops up (Google being well known as the world's most widely available rainbow table for common hash digest values.) What are the chances these security boffins salted their hashes?
But it's almost impossible to measure the impact of the computing power lost. First, were there actual delays incurred because of the mining software, or did the process quickly get out of the way when a higher priority task happened? If there were delays, would they know how many internal users were supposed to be using it, and how much additional payroll burden they had due to those users working overtime because of the delays? Or if they didn't put in any overtime because of the delays, did they accomplish less work? Or were they just annoyed?
Then, do they know about the time spent by external users (customers, who aren't being paid by ABC?) Did the external users have a bad experience, such that they refused to use the site and instead conducted their business via very expensive postal mail or drive to the offices and complained to expensive humans? Were there service issues opened and handled due to poor response times?
The amount of electricity consumed can be documented, which makes it a "hard" cost, one that could easily be presented in a courtroom. The reduced access to the resources may not be documentable; therefore it's really a "soft" cost, and isn't recoverable.
It might be an IMEI sniffer. It could tell corporate security "hey, a known shoplifter's phone just showed up in store #1234." I don't know about Canadian law, but in the U.S. that may not be violating privacy because it's not "intercepting a conversation", it's just listening to a broadcast of something the phone is already doing. Of course, even that tool could be abused. "Did Bob show up to work on time today? His phone's not there."
But being that it's Bell, they would have all that information anyway via the existing cell towers. Why would they need a special device to monitor those signals in the store when they already have a network of towers capable of triangulating that a device is or isn't in the store?
Perhaps it's much less nefarious. Maybe it's just a micro-cell used to ensure good cellular reception while customers are shopping in the store.
You are either ignoring or not respecting the rights of people on your network, or you are a religious nutjob trying to filter the world to people on your network. Neither of which should be done.
As the GPP said, go take an ethics class, as this is probably highly unethical.
If you consider it unethical, then it's up to you to not help them. Don't write monitoring software, don't install it, don't support systems that use it, don't buy from companies that sell it. And you might even decide not to help someone who just works with clients like these.
But a different person might consider it ethical. For example, they might be a religious nutjob of the same cult. They can each help each other out, writing monitoring programs, building monitoring boxes, whatever. And consider that giving up a large chunk of change by not working with the nutjobs is not a business choice everyone can afford.
I find it's much easier to live life when I don't worry about all the nutjobs out there. I feel bad for their kids, but that's as far as it goes. And I can't spend my whole life tracking "I remember when you helped the nutjobs back in '08, therefore you're still a bad person." That list quickly grows long and complex, and really doesn't matter much.
There are two costs: the cost of "computing power unavailable to the organization", and the "additional power consumed". The first would be his impact on systems, and would be extremely difficult to measure. But the second is very easy: measure the increase in machine power consumption caused by running the client. Did it draw an extra 160W per server? Multiply that by the number of servers, and then double it to account for the additional cooling required to remove the extra heat. There's the increase in power, crossed with the electric bill, and Bob's yer uncle. The guy cost them real money.
Yeah, the examples were really to point out that there are specific price points. The total cost of an electric device is the upfront cost of the device itself amortized over the life of the device, plus the electric costs over time (on an increasing scale as electric rates change over time),
Consider a set of three bulb choices, a 100W incandescent bulb is $1 that lasts 1,000 hours, an equivalent 26W CFL that costs $4 and lasts 6,000 hours, and an equivalent 10W LED bulb that costs $60 and lasts 30,000 hours. Let's say you use them 12 hours per day. If electricity is $0.15 (I'm assuming that's near your rate), the incandescent costs $70/year, the CFL costs $19/year, and the LED costs $15/year. Of course, you'll be changing the incandescent bulbs every 3 months, the CFLs every 2 years, and the LED every 6 years. So if the bulb is in a hard-to-get-to fixture, you'll spend a lot less time getting the ladder out to change it, and your chances of falling and hurting yourself drop by a factor of 30.
Usage is also a key factor: if you use them for only 15 minutes per day, the incandescent costs $1.46, the CFL is $0.39, and the LED is $0.32. The difference is the incandescent will last 11 years, the CFL will last 100 years, and the LED would last 328 years. Does anyone get full value from a 100 year lifetime? Will the CFL really hold gas for 100 years? Will we still be using the same kinds of technology in 328 years? If you put a maximum lifetime of 10 years on each, the LED bulb jumps to $6.14 per year, and the CFL doubles to $0.76, while the incandescent doesn't change.
On the other hand, the future is full of uncertainty. LED longevity figures are mostly predictions, and not based on field collected data, so will they really last 30,000 hours? Will LED bulb prices drop sharply in three years? Will electric prices go up or down?
Regarding HVAC costs, I have an air-source heat pump on a special "demand meter" that cuts cooling by 20 minutes per hour during peak generation times (they send out a radio signal to tell the meters to switch to controlled-load mode. For this, my electric co-op charges me only $0.057/kWh for all the usage throughout the year. Very cost effective, much cheaper than the gas. But being air-sourced, it stops being efficient at temperatures below about 22F in the winter, and my thermostat then calls for gas heat.
The problem with solar up here (at 45 degrees latitude) is that there simply isn't enough sunlight in the winter. 1 square meter at noon in July collects 1400W of energy, but the same collector in December sees only 60W at noon. And in July, it will produce for 16 hours a day, whereas in December it might produce for less than 8 hours. Because storing electricity isn't terribly efficient yet, it's not like it all balances out over the year.
This isn't a "pro-American-jobs" move. It's an "anti-Chinese-monopoly" move. It just happens to have a component that resonates with a certain political demographic that likest to rally around "rah rah American-jobs!"
Setting up a silicon foundry to make the panels is a big investment. If Chinese firms dump cheap solar panels on America, driving American companies out of business, and then because they've cornered the market, they'll raise their prices high and keep them there, right? You seem to think that someone will come along and try making that investment again because prices are too high, but they won't. If there's no protection today against the monopolistic practices, why would I dump $10 million into a fab plant tomorrow, knowing full well that the Chinese will just drop their prices again and run me out of business?
Given that we have to play by anti-monopoly, emission-controlled, and pro-labor laws here, our market also can't support competition with external monopolies, uncontrolled polluters, and unregulated labor. Since we can't regulate their external business practices directly, the only tool we can effectively wield is to penalize the unfair imports.
What really has to happen to have an effect is for the tariffs to be tied to the specific behaviors we value. If we say "polluting is worth 150% of your cost of goods, underpaid, overworked labor is worth 100%, and monopolistic dumping is worth 50%", then they could choose to avoid the tariffs associated with pollution first. If we just say "Shen-zhen plant, we charge you tariffs of 200% because you're Chinese" they have no incentive to change behavior, they'll just to go try their dumping tricks on other countries.
Will any of this make solar panels affordable here (regardless of who makes them)? That depends on the non-solar energy markets. For comparison, look at the lighting market. Right now, high efficiency lighting isn't cost effective because electricity is cheap. Double the price of electricity, though, and the most cost effective lighting changes from incandescent to CFL. Double it again, and the most cost effective lighting is LED. The same is true with solar - as long as electricity is cheap, solar isn't cost effective. Raise the rates of electricity, and the balance will shift. Implement the smart grid, and suddenly solar panels will be the next big thing as customers discover that their A/C is costing them $50/per day using peak generating capacity. Or maybe solar will be effective only in the southern states, where A/C costs are the bulk of electricity usage, and the sunlight produces enough energy year round to make the panels worth it. They may never be effective in the northern states, where even the most efficient panels simply don't get enough sunlight to recoup their cost.
Which is exactly why I say you have to document all the costs associated with it. If management doesn't see that they get 1/20th of the value for their dollars spent in the offshoring process, they will believe that they are smart and wise and saving money, and continue down that path indefinitely.
The reason companies are outsourcing development today is that they don't understand just how complex, risky, expensive, and slow it really is. It might be that their current processes are terrible, and they can't see the value they're getting. The problem is that if you're terrible before outsourcing, you'll only be terrible, slow, and expensive after outsourcing.
My advice is "clean up the in-house process first". Figure out your own productivity and quality issues. Because those things won't fix themselves magically if you just ship them overseas.
You're making a lot of stuff up to fill in gaps in what I didn't bother typing.
I'm simply saying that if they can't be arsed to fix their crappy virus laden computers today, why should I care if taking down a malware-stand-in DNS server leaves them hanging without a working name server tomorrow? It's. Not. My. Problem.
What my bad car analogy was referring to is that cops don't perform car inspections today, but they will pull you over and tag you if your bumper is dragging behind you on the freeway, or if you're throwing caltrops out the windows, or otherwise threatening the safety of others on the road. This is obviously an imperfect analogy, one that you carried way too far in your reach for points to criticize. Perhaps a slightly better analogy might be that the internet is like rural roads that have signs saying "minimum maintenance road - travel at your own risk". If you bought cheap gas that was watered down and your car stalls in the woods, if I'm passing by it's not my job to drag your car back to town. Call for your own damn tow truck.
I'm certainly not saying we need to inspect computers. No internet cops need to be created to tag these people. All I'm saying is that I'm not going to shed a tear if they're disconnected through their own lack of action or knowledge.
Of course, it may become my brother-in-law's problem, which I'm sure my wife would still make into my problem somehow,
Why warn them at all? If they can't be bothered to keep their equipment in good working condition, which means free of malware, the rest of the internet doesn't need them polluting the waters.
We don't let people drive cars on public roads that risk the safety of the other drivers. Why should we put up with an infected virus-spewing computer?
Believe it or not, Apple has a defense against this built in to iOS 5.
The automated "read a suspect's cellphone tools" I've heard of work by performing a tethered jailbreak. After executing the jailbreak logic, they read the memory containing the security key, and brute force the simple 4 digit PIN, which then grants full access to the machine. The process takes from a few seconds to a few minutes.
The fix is to go into Settings / General / Passcode lock, and turn "Simple Passcode" to Off. Set a passcode longer than 10 characters. The brute force time has now been extended to longer than your natural lifetime.
Of course, you now have a 10+ character passcode to enter every time you want to use your phone. It's up to you to decide if your security is that important to you.
Start now with documentation. You need to document your current productivity. How many features did you produce last year? How many defects did you introduce? How often did you release? How many lines of code did you write? How many developer hours per year did all that output take? Establish a basis of how effective you have been with on-site developers.
Then you start planning. Be very explicit when you write up the process you want them to follow in your Statement of Work. Do you want them doing Test Driven Development? Specify it as completely as you would for your own high quality code, perhaps a statement like "> 95% code coverage by automated unit tests, code complexity must average < 2.0, static code analysis will be performed using pmd and must report zero warning-level or higher defects, all code subject to review prior to acceptance and payment", etc. Write the master test plan at this time, and get them to commit to it as well.
Your goal at this time needs to be to ensure the code is of good quality up front, rather than planning to complain about it after they call it complete.
Then, get ready to write more documentation. You'll be writing a lot of specs for these people. There will be many questions on your specs, so be sure you have the time to spend exchanging conversations and emails. If you're 8-12 time zones away from the development team, you get one shot per day at asking and answering questions. This means that you have to be "more explicit" up front, or you'll spend a month having a conversation that could have been answered in a day. As we all know, being correct and complete in your up-front designs is an almost super-human task, so plan for delays to get them cleared up.
In your specs you'll need to be explicit when you include non-functional requirements such as performance, stress testing, logging, minimum production machine requirements, etc. You might want to provide them with a test environment that they can run to prove they're doing OK.
Consider traveling to their site and working with them for the first week to jump-start the project.
Once things are underway, you need to be sure their code is continually of acceptable quality. Plan to spend a lot of your days reviewing their output. To keep them from going off the rails, you have to make sure that you're getting it in a timely fashion. In your SOW, specify nightly code check-ins so you can do daily code reviews. Then do them. Be sure to review the tests as well as the code. You're responsible for sending them your feedback as quickly as you can.
Next, compare the output you get after the code reviews. Are they taking your advice in a timely fashion? Are they following your recommendations? Is the architecture still sound? Is the code maintainable, extensible, legible, does it have all the -abilities of good code? If not, be sure your SOW specifies escalation paths and penalties or whatever for non-compliance. Get your boss involved right away if you see the train leaving the track.
When you finally start getting your code drops from them, be sure to have your testing team start on it right away.
Now you finally have some data you can use to compare against your own output. How much money did you spend per feature? How long did it take them to write them? How many defects? Deploy the code to your beta users and see what complaints they have.
And be forewarned: this means your job will shift from Engineer to Technical Project Manager. As you're already an engineer, this will probably not be an easy transition for you.
Be sure to periodically review these results with your boss. I would warn you now that your opinions will differ. You may say "the code is crappy, hard to maintain, fragile" or whatever, but his goal might be "they shipped on time, on budget, and the customers aren't complaining about the bugs, so it's good enough for the shareholders." And don't forget to include all your own time and expenses for everything, including the planning steps, when adding up the final total.
Sorry, I meant the artistic balance of a scene, not the sense of balance you use to remain upright. Although I wouldn't be surprised to learn that someone has created an image generating program that applies various composition techniques such as the rule of thirds, principles of the color wheel, etc., but that's not necessarily guaranteed to make a model look "sultry" or "innocent" or "happy" or whatever emotion the marketer is looking to convey. A talented human still has to run the show.
And I think the words you were looking for are " * Serving suggestion ":-)
I assure you that our photography department is very thoroughly busy taking actual pictures of actual products. Their strobes can be seen flashing from the building lobby. And it also explains why every so often the lobby has people transporting portable kennels full of cute cats and dogs.
The company I work for is very careful about spending money on anything that could be replaced with a system. If it were cheaper, and there were no legal or regulatory issues, I know we'd be using rendered images instead of human photographers. So either it's not yet cheaper, or it would be unethical to use rendered models instead of photographs. Or maybe, just maybe, the artistic director is convinced that photos are still better at conveying emotion than a rendered model.
The balance point comes when the cost of creating and rendering the model to an adequate degree equals the cost of photographing reality.
So for things you're going to reuse in a lot of scenes, such as a car that turns into a giant robot, yeah, the 3D model is way cheaper. For a revolting uncanny-valley version of Tom Hanks on a steam train in a blizzard, 3D is cheaper (but not better.) For a one-off modeling job to create a beautiful person using a product for an advertisement, the effort required to create the model and environment still takes a lot of human work to make it happen. Not that it doesn't take hours of makeup and lighting and staging to photograph the beautiful person and the product, just that the balance is still on the side of the photographer.
Are you imagining a future where an advertising agency has thousands of pre-rendered models they can toss into an environment, slap a couple of boxes of product images onto the virtual tabletop, and click "print"? They do some of that today. But a lot of them have to be careful that they aren't misrepresenting the products. You can show a virtual package under a virtual christmas tree making a virtual kid virtually happy. But you can't show 3D rendered oranges and say "look how perfect our oranges are!" The FTC does have regulatory authority there, and will investigate misleading imagery in advertising.
The thing about 3D modeling (or even 2D art, such as painting), is that a good rendering takes a tremendous amount of talent. I'm not talking about abstract art, or crayon-outlined cartoons, but creating photorealistic imagery takes a trained eye, requiring roughly the same skills as the photographer. A computer can do some of the work, such as making sure the model's foot is touching the floor, but it can't yet give you a sense of balance. That only comes as input from the human operator.
Everywhere around here for residential use, surveyors use GPS to locate existing reference markers, and from there, they use transits to locate the needed points. However, I think the commercial/road builders use GPS as their primary source, because they need speed more than they need high precision. They can't spend time continually hunting for stakes; and when a road is off by an inch but is well within its right of way, it just doesn't matter.
There are no effective shields that wouldn't also block the GPS signals themselves. Even though you don't know what you're talking about, you are thinking of high pass filters, and guess what, sunshine? There are no such things as filters precise enough to isolate the GPS signals from the Lightsquared signals. Not even close. They don't exist today, and they can't be made with today's technology.
Come back and make this kind of foolish statement after getting your doctorate in electrical engineering, and maybe by then you'll have a valid comment.
"Surgery"? Body modders are not surgeons. They may (or may not) follow best practices around hygiene, sterilization, air filtration, infection control, etc. Their pain management is limited to over the counter medications and topical treatments such as ice. What they have in common with surgeons is they both take knives to skin.
When you're paying American electric rates, it's definitely harder to justify. But when you're paying up to seven times as much for European electricity (I have a rural Minnesota relative paying $0.05/kWh, and I know the published rates in England are $0.38/kWh) it can make a much bigger difference.
I would agree ss long as we are mindful to take into account the energy and emissions used to create the replacement.
That's actually already mostly* accounted for in the cost of the new goods. The manufacturers will add their costs of energy, raw materials, labor, and whatever else into the sale price of the unit. (If they don't, they make no money!) Plus, consider that manufacturing costs are incurred only one-time. If smelting the bauxite to make the aluminum frame takes X kilowatt hours per kilogram (I have no idea how much it really takes) the manufacturer of the aluminum will recoup all those expenses when they sell the material to the case maker. And the case maker will get back their additional electrical costs and machinery costs when they sell me the case.
Unlike the fixed material cost, operational costs are ongoing. If you look at your computer usage, and can predict that you will continue to use a computer in the same way for at least another year, and you have an old computer that already costs $1200/year in electricity to run, and a new computer would cost you only $400/year in electricity, as long as the sum of everything that goes into replacing it is less than $800, it's a net gain with a Return On Investment of less than 12 months.
There's a lot of "if" in the above conclusion, of course. You could suddenly move to a region with much cheaper electric rates, cutting the predicted electrical costs from $1200 to $400. You might start shutting off your computer when you're not using it, saving $800 per year in electricity. You could buy the replacement on credit, and lose your job before paying off the whole amount. All these scenarios leave you with less benefit than had you kept the old machine. Predicting the future always carries a level of uncertainty.
* By "mostly", I mean that mining and manufacturing using cheap labor in countries with few enforced pollution regulations represent only the cost to you today. The costs to society are as yet unaccounted for, but as long as we remain greedy and continually demand cheap goods, those countries will continue to sell them at unsustainably low prices, trading polluted skies and rivers for dollars. They'll have hard decisions to make in the near future: continue to pollute and risk fomenting a revolution (as happened in France in 1798), or regulate and drive up costs. But that doesn't actually factor into the equation of "should I repair or replace this computer today?"
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many of them have insufficient training to give informed recommendations
No, they're plenty well trained -- by the Monster Cable factory reps. "Tell them that our HDMI cables will really bring out the reds!"
Now, if they had actual training, they probably would just sell good equipment at fair prices, and that wouldn't make HQ happy at all.
hospitals try to keep off networks, especially public ones
The sysadmins try, but fail. Most hospital networks and devices ARE connected to the internet in some way. Doctors want their access from the various desktop machines, of course, but many of the diagnostic machines offer things like "click this button to email the ultrasound pictures". So they do.
I was appalled to learn this a few years ago from a hospital sysadmin here on /. The thing he pointed out is that Doctors are Gods. If they say "This thing can email pictures? Well yeah, hook it up!" then the sysadmin has zero choice. Holes get punched in firewalls that should never have been punched, and the gear gets hooked up.
And because medical devices are certified only to work with a particular operating system at a particular patch level, they don't get upgraded unless the vendor comes out with a new certified patched OS. That means the ultrasound machine sitting on that cart might still be running Windows XP SP 1. It's crazy.
NTP would actually be the least of their worries. That's something they could more easily house internally.
I'd like to know what makes them think the hashes of the passwords are safe. I think the thieves should paste one into Google and see what pops up (Google being well known as the world's most widely available rainbow table for common hash digest values.) What are the chances these security boffins salted their hashes?
But it's almost impossible to measure the impact of the computing power lost. First, were there actual delays incurred because of the mining software, or did the process quickly get out of the way when a higher priority task happened? If there were delays, would they know how many internal users were supposed to be using it, and how much additional payroll burden they had due to those users working overtime because of the delays? Or if they didn't put in any overtime because of the delays, did they accomplish less work? Or were they just annoyed?
Then, do they know about the time spent by external users (customers, who aren't being paid by ABC?) Did the external users have a bad experience, such that they refused to use the site and instead conducted their business via very expensive postal mail or drive to the offices and complained to expensive humans? Were there service issues opened and handled due to poor response times?
The amount of electricity consumed can be documented, which makes it a "hard" cost, one that could easily be presented in a courtroom. The reduced access to the resources may not be documentable; therefore it's really a "soft" cost, and isn't recoverable.
It might be an IMEI sniffer. It could tell corporate security "hey, a known shoplifter's phone just showed up in store #1234." I don't know about Canadian law, but in the U.S. that may not be violating privacy because it's not "intercepting a conversation", it's just listening to a broadcast of something the phone is already doing. Of course, even that tool could be abused. "Did Bob show up to work on time today? His phone's not there."
But being that it's Bell, they would have all that information anyway via the existing cell towers. Why would they need a special device to monitor those signals in the store when they already have a network of towers capable of triangulating that a device is or isn't in the store?
Perhaps it's much less nefarious. Maybe it's just a micro-cell used to ensure good cellular reception while customers are shopping in the store.
You are either ignoring or not respecting the rights of people on your network, or you are a religious nutjob trying to filter the world to people on your network. Neither of which should be done.
As the GPP said, go take an ethics class, as this is probably highly unethical.
If you consider it unethical, then it's up to you to not help them. Don't write monitoring software, don't install it, don't support systems that use it, don't buy from companies that sell it. And you might even decide not to help someone who just works with clients like these.
But a different person might consider it ethical. For example, they might be a religious nutjob of the same cult. They can each help each other out, writing monitoring programs, building monitoring boxes, whatever. And consider that giving up a large chunk of change by not working with the nutjobs is not a business choice everyone can afford.
I find it's much easier to live life when I don't worry about all the nutjobs out there. I feel bad for their kids, but that's as far as it goes. And I can't spend my whole life tracking "I remember when you helped the nutjobs back in '08, therefore you're still a bad person." That list quickly grows long and complex, and really doesn't matter much.
Except for Sony and DRM. I hate Sony. :-)
There are two costs: the cost of "computing power unavailable to the organization", and the "additional power consumed". The first would be his impact on systems, and would be extremely difficult to measure. But the second is very easy: measure the increase in machine power consumption caused by running the client. Did it draw an extra 160W per server? Multiply that by the number of servers, and then double it to account for the additional cooling required to remove the extra heat. There's the increase in power, crossed with the electric bill, and Bob's yer uncle. The guy cost them real money.
Yeah, the examples were really to point out that there are specific price points. The total cost of an electric device is the upfront cost of the device itself amortized over the life of the device, plus the electric costs over time (on an increasing scale as electric rates change over time),
Consider a set of three bulb choices, a 100W incandescent bulb is $1 that lasts 1,000 hours, an equivalent 26W CFL that costs $4 and lasts 6,000 hours, and an equivalent 10W LED bulb that costs $60 and lasts 30,000 hours. Let's say you use them 12 hours per day. If electricity is $0.15 (I'm assuming that's near your rate), the incandescent costs $70/year, the CFL costs $19/year, and the LED costs $15/year. Of course, you'll be changing the incandescent bulbs every 3 months, the CFLs every 2 years, and the LED every 6 years. So if the bulb is in a hard-to-get-to fixture, you'll spend a lot less time getting the ladder out to change it, and your chances of falling and hurting yourself drop by a factor of 30.
Usage is also a key factor: if you use them for only 15 minutes per day, the incandescent costs $1.46, the CFL is $0.39, and the LED is $0.32. The difference is the incandescent will last 11 years, the CFL will last 100 years, and the LED would last 328 years. Does anyone get full value from a 100 year lifetime? Will the CFL really hold gas for 100 years? Will we still be using the same kinds of technology in 328 years? If you put a maximum lifetime of 10 years on each, the LED bulb jumps to $6.14 per year, and the CFL doubles to $0.76, while the incandescent doesn't change.
On the other hand, the future is full of uncertainty. LED longevity figures are mostly predictions, and not based on field collected data, so will they really last 30,000 hours? Will LED bulb prices drop sharply in three years? Will electric prices go up or down?
Regarding HVAC costs, I have an air-source heat pump on a special "demand meter" that cuts cooling by 20 minutes per hour during peak generation times (they send out a radio signal to tell the meters to switch to controlled-load mode. For this, my electric co-op charges me only $0.057/kWh for all the usage throughout the year. Very cost effective, much cheaper than the gas. But being air-sourced, it stops being efficient at temperatures below about 22F in the winter, and my thermostat then calls for gas heat.
The problem with solar up here (at 45 degrees latitude) is that there simply isn't enough sunlight in the winter. 1 square meter at noon in July collects 1400W of energy, but the same collector in December sees only 60W at noon. And in July, it will produce for 16 hours a day, whereas in December it might produce for less than 8 hours. Because storing electricity isn't terribly efficient yet, it's not like it all balances out over the year.
This isn't a "pro-American-jobs" move. It's an "anti-Chinese-monopoly" move. It just happens to have a component that resonates with a certain political demographic that likest to rally around "rah rah American-jobs!"
Setting up a silicon foundry to make the panels is a big investment. If Chinese firms dump cheap solar panels on America, driving American companies out of business, and then because they've cornered the market, they'll raise their prices high and keep them there, right? You seem to think that someone will come along and try making that investment again because prices are too high, but they won't. If there's no protection today against the monopolistic practices, why would I dump $10 million into a fab plant tomorrow, knowing full well that the Chinese will just drop their prices again and run me out of business?
Given that we have to play by anti-monopoly, emission-controlled, and pro-labor laws here, our market also can't support competition with external monopolies, uncontrolled polluters, and unregulated labor. Since we can't regulate their external business practices directly, the only tool we can effectively wield is to penalize the unfair imports.
What really has to happen to have an effect is for the tariffs to be tied to the specific behaviors we value. If we say "polluting is worth 150% of your cost of goods, underpaid, overworked labor is worth 100%, and monopolistic dumping is worth 50%", then they could choose to avoid the tariffs associated with pollution first. If we just say "Shen-zhen plant, we charge you tariffs of 200% because you're Chinese" they have no incentive to change behavior, they'll just to go try their dumping tricks on other countries.
Will any of this make solar panels affordable here (regardless of who makes them)? That depends on the non-solar energy markets. For comparison, look at the lighting market. Right now, high efficiency lighting isn't cost effective because electricity is cheap. Double the price of electricity, though, and the most cost effective lighting changes from incandescent to CFL. Double it again, and the most cost effective lighting is LED. The same is true with solar - as long as electricity is cheap, solar isn't cost effective. Raise the rates of electricity, and the balance will shift. Implement the smart grid, and suddenly solar panels will be the next big thing as customers discover that their A/C is costing them $50/per day using peak generating capacity. Or maybe solar will be effective only in the southern states, where A/C costs are the bulk of electricity usage, and the sunlight produces enough energy year round to make the panels worth it. They may never be effective in the northern states, where even the most efficient panels simply don't get enough sunlight to recoup their cost.
If you can afford that watch, I can pretty much guarantee that your car already costs a lot more than it does.
Which is exactly why I say you have to document all the costs associated with it. If management doesn't see that they get 1/20th of the value for their dollars spent in the offshoring process, they will believe that they are smart and wise and saving money, and continue down that path indefinitely.
The reason companies are outsourcing development today is that they don't understand just how complex, risky, expensive, and slow it really is. It might be that their current processes are terrible, and they can't see the value they're getting. The problem is that if you're terrible before outsourcing, you'll only be terrible, slow, and expensive after outsourcing.
My advice is "clean up the in-house process first". Figure out your own productivity and quality issues. Because those things won't fix themselves magically if you just ship them overseas.
You're making a lot of stuff up to fill in gaps in what I didn't bother typing.
I'm simply saying that if they can't be arsed to fix their crappy virus laden computers today, why should I care if taking down a malware-stand-in DNS server leaves them hanging without a working name server tomorrow? It's. Not. My. Problem.
What my bad car analogy was referring to is that cops don't perform car inspections today, but they will pull you over and tag you if your bumper is dragging behind you on the freeway, or if you're throwing caltrops out the windows, or otherwise threatening the safety of others on the road. This is obviously an imperfect analogy, one that you carried way too far in your reach for points to criticize. Perhaps a slightly better analogy might be that the internet is like rural roads that have signs saying "minimum maintenance road - travel at your own risk". If you bought cheap gas that was watered down and your car stalls in the woods, if I'm passing by it's not my job to drag your car back to town. Call for your own damn tow truck.
I'm certainly not saying we need to inspect computers. No internet cops need to be created to tag these people. All I'm saying is that I'm not going to shed a tear if they're disconnected through their own lack of action or knowledge.
Of course, it may become my brother-in-law's problem, which I'm sure my wife would still make into my problem somehow,
Why warn them at all? If they can't be bothered to keep their equipment in good working condition, which means free of malware, the rest of the internet doesn't need them polluting the waters.
We don't let people drive cars on public roads that risk the safety of the other drivers. Why should we put up with an infected virus-spewing computer?
Believe it or not, Apple has a defense against this built in to iOS 5.
The automated "read a suspect's cellphone tools" I've heard of work by performing a tethered jailbreak. After executing the jailbreak logic, they read the memory containing the security key, and brute force the simple 4 digit PIN, which then grants full access to the machine. The process takes from a few seconds to a few minutes.
The fix is to go into Settings / General / Passcode lock, and turn "Simple Passcode" to Off. Set a passcode longer than 10 characters. The brute force time has now been extended to longer than your natural lifetime.
Of course, you now have a 10+ character passcode to enter every time you want to use your phone. It's up to you to decide if your security is that important to you.
I think it was Steven Wright who asked "If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do they all have to drown?"
Start now with documentation. You need to document your current productivity. How many features did you produce last year? How many defects did you introduce? How often did you release? How many lines of code did you write? How many developer hours per year did all that output take? Establish a basis of how effective you have been with on-site developers.
Then you start planning. Be very explicit when you write up the process you want them to follow in your Statement of Work. Do you want them doing Test Driven Development? Specify it as completely as you would for your own high quality code, perhaps a statement like "> 95% code coverage by automated unit tests, code complexity must average < 2.0, static code analysis will be performed using pmd and must report zero warning-level or higher defects, all code subject to review prior to acceptance and payment", etc. Write the master test plan at this time, and get them to commit to it as well.
Your goal at this time needs to be to ensure the code is of good quality up front, rather than planning to complain about it after they call it complete.
Then, get ready to write more documentation. You'll be writing a lot of specs for these people. There will be many questions on your specs, so be sure you have the time to spend exchanging conversations and emails. If you're 8-12 time zones away from the development team, you get one shot per day at asking and answering questions. This means that you have to be "more explicit" up front, or you'll spend a month having a conversation that could have been answered in a day. As we all know, being correct and complete in your up-front designs is an almost super-human task, so plan for delays to get them cleared up.
In your specs you'll need to be explicit when you include non-functional requirements such as performance, stress testing, logging, minimum production machine requirements, etc. You might want to provide them with a test environment that they can run to prove they're doing OK.
Consider traveling to their site and working with them for the first week to jump-start the project.
Once things are underway, you need to be sure their code is continually of acceptable quality. Plan to spend a lot of your days reviewing their output. To keep them from going off the rails, you have to make sure that you're getting it in a timely fashion. In your SOW, specify nightly code check-ins so you can do daily code reviews. Then do them. Be sure to review the tests as well as the code. You're responsible for sending them your feedback as quickly as you can.
Next, compare the output you get after the code reviews. Are they taking your advice in a timely fashion? Are they following your recommendations? Is the architecture still sound? Is the code maintainable, extensible, legible, does it have all the -abilities of good code? If not, be sure your SOW specifies escalation paths and penalties or whatever for non-compliance. Get your boss involved right away if you see the train leaving the track.
When you finally start getting your code drops from them, be sure to have your testing team start on it right away.
Now you finally have some data you can use to compare against your own output. How much money did you spend per feature? How long did it take them to write them? How many defects? Deploy the code to your beta users and see what complaints they have.
And be forewarned: this means your job will shift from Engineer to Technical Project Manager. As you're already an engineer, this will probably not be an easy transition for you.
Be sure to periodically review these results with your boss. I would warn you now that your opinions will differ. You may say "the code is crappy, hard to maintain, fragile" or whatever, but his goal might be "they shipped on time, on budget, and the customers aren't complaining about the bugs, so it's good enough for the shareholders." And don't forget to include all your own time and expenses for everything, including the planning steps, when adding up the final total.
Sorry, I meant the artistic balance of a scene, not the sense of balance you use to remain upright. Although I wouldn't be surprised to learn that someone has created an image generating program that applies various composition techniques such as the rule of thirds, principles of the color wheel, etc., but that's not necessarily guaranteed to make a model look "sultry" or "innocent" or "happy" or whatever emotion the marketer is looking to convey. A talented human still has to run the show.
And I think the words you were looking for are " * Serving suggestion " :-)
I assure you that our photography department is very thoroughly busy taking actual pictures of actual products. Their strobes can be seen flashing from the building lobby. And it also explains why every so often the lobby has people transporting portable kennels full of cute cats and dogs.
The company I work for is very careful about spending money on anything that could be replaced with a system. If it were cheaper, and there were no legal or regulatory issues, I know we'd be using rendered images instead of human photographers. So either it's not yet cheaper, or it would be unethical to use rendered models instead of photographs. Or maybe, just maybe, the artistic director is convinced that photos are still better at conveying emotion than a rendered model.
The balance point comes when the cost of creating and rendering the model to an adequate degree equals the cost of photographing reality.
So for things you're going to reuse in a lot of scenes, such as a car that turns into a giant robot, yeah, the 3D model is way cheaper. For a revolting uncanny-valley version of Tom Hanks on a steam train in a blizzard, 3D is cheaper (but not better.) For a one-off modeling job to create a beautiful person using a product for an advertisement, the effort required to create the model and environment still takes a lot of human work to make it happen. Not that it doesn't take hours of makeup and lighting and staging to photograph the beautiful person and the product, just that the balance is still on the side of the photographer.
Are you imagining a future where an advertising agency has thousands of pre-rendered models they can toss into an environment, slap a couple of boxes of product images onto the virtual tabletop, and click "print"? They do some of that today. But a lot of them have to be careful that they aren't misrepresenting the products. You can show a virtual package under a virtual christmas tree making a virtual kid virtually happy. But you can't show 3D rendered oranges and say "look how perfect our oranges are!" The FTC does have regulatory authority there, and will investigate misleading imagery in advertising.
The thing about 3D modeling (or even 2D art, such as painting), is that a good rendering takes a tremendous amount of talent. I'm not talking about abstract art, or crayon-outlined cartoons, but creating photorealistic imagery takes a trained eye, requiring roughly the same skills as the photographer. A computer can do some of the work, such as making sure the model's foot is touching the floor, but it can't yet give you a sense of balance. That only comes as input from the human operator.
Everywhere around here for residential use, surveyors use GPS to locate existing reference markers, and from there, they use transits to locate the needed points. However, I think the commercial/road builders use GPS as their primary source, because they need speed more than they need high precision. They can't spend time continually hunting for stakes; and when a road is off by an inch but is well within its right of way, it just doesn't matter.
There are no effective shields that wouldn't also block the GPS signals themselves. Even though you don't know what you're talking about, you are thinking of high pass filters, and guess what, sunshine? There are no such things as filters precise enough to isolate the GPS signals from the Lightsquared signals. Not even close. They don't exist today, and they can't be made with today's technology.
Come back and make this kind of foolish statement after getting your doctorate in electrical engineering, and maybe by then you'll have a valid comment.
His science knowledge is so bad that Rick Berman could have successfully used him... :-)
"Surgery"? Body modders are not surgeons. They may (or may not) follow best practices around hygiene, sterilization, air filtration, infection control, etc. Their pain management is limited to over the counter medications and topical treatments such as ice. What they have in common with surgeons is they both take knives to skin.
When you're paying American electric rates, it's definitely harder to justify. But when you're paying up to seven times as much for European electricity (I have a rural Minnesota relative paying $0.05/kWh, and I know the published rates in England are $0.38/kWh) it can make a much bigger difference.
I would agree ss long as we are mindful to take into account the energy and emissions used to create the replacement.
That's actually already mostly* accounted for in the cost of the new goods. The manufacturers will add their costs of energy, raw materials, labor, and whatever else into the sale price of the unit. (If they don't, they make no money!) Plus, consider that manufacturing costs are incurred only one-time. If smelting the bauxite to make the aluminum frame takes X kilowatt hours per kilogram (I have no idea how much it really takes) the manufacturer of the aluminum will recoup all those expenses when they sell the material to the case maker. And the case maker will get back their additional electrical costs and machinery costs when they sell me the case.
Unlike the fixed material cost, operational costs are ongoing. If you look at your computer usage, and can predict that you will continue to use a computer in the same way for at least another year, and you have an old computer that already costs $1200/year in electricity to run, and a new computer would cost you only $400/year in electricity, as long as the sum of everything that goes into replacing it is less than $800, it's a net gain with a Return On Investment of less than 12 months.
There's a lot of "if" in the above conclusion, of course. You could suddenly move to a region with much cheaper electric rates, cutting the predicted electrical costs from $1200 to $400. You might start shutting off your computer when you're not using it, saving $800 per year in electricity. You could buy the replacement on credit, and lose your job before paying off the whole amount. All these scenarios leave you with less benefit than had you kept the old machine. Predicting the future always carries a level of uncertainty.
* By "mostly", I mean that mining and manufacturing using cheap labor in countries with few enforced pollution regulations represent only the cost to you today. The costs to society are as yet unaccounted for, but as long as we remain greedy and continually demand cheap goods, those countries will continue to sell them at unsustainably low prices, trading polluted skies and rivers for dollars. They'll have hard decisions to make in the near future: continue to pollute and risk fomenting a revolution (as happened in France in 1798), or regulate and drive up costs. But that doesn't actually factor into the equation of "should I repair or replace this computer today?"