I just remembered one place I was at where the software we bought had a support contract that was a downsell. The annual contract was for $5000 or so a year. Sending a tech out cost $400 per hour. Travel time and travel cost -- from New Jersey to California -- were paid by the customer. Minimum charged onsite time was eight hours. One day could (and usually would) easily outstrip the annual costs.
I once asked the justification out of curiosity. I was told that they REALLY hated it when people made them keep track of hours, and this way they didn't have to when people had their service contracts.
In my experience, it doesn't matter if support is 24/7 or three hours a day on odd days of the week every other month. So long as there's a support contract involved, that will get it in over something that has no formal support. I've seen companies buy one product over another solely because, while both are commercial software, one of them offers an option for a support contract and the other does not, whether or not the other one is paid support.
Where I'm at now, it's not uncommon to see support contracts for one product (and not anything from or as ubiquitous as Microsoft, either) reach a quarter of a million dollars a year or more. It's insane.
I can understand it to a degree; there's no guarantee that the version installed today will not be completely dropped next month. It gets a little aggravating when it holds up an entire project, though, because of one small piece.
The upside, of course, is more funding for critical projects.
Sure, we can push for it, but the Kyoto Protocol doesn't. China's energy needs are soaring -- they're expected to need more than a million barrels of oil per day over what they're using now in the near future, even if the Three Gorges project works as planned. China and India both are nuclear powers; theirs are prime cases where additional nuclear reactors would provide a great deal more energy at less long-term cost than oil would.
The US has a relatively clean yard for what it uses. Make the rest of the world live by the same (or at least similar) rules, and we might be a little more willing to talk.
Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, and Qatar are all ahead of the US, and Trinidad & Tobago (they need to select a unified name), Luxembourg, Australia, and Canada aren't that far behind. Furthermore, CO2 emissions per capita for the US from 1980 to 1999 actually decreased by 3%, which is more than can be said for Austria (increased by 10%), Italy (11%), Japan (15%), Spain (28%), Australia (32%), New Zealand (45%), and Ireland (46%). China's has increased by 53%, and India's has increased by 120%. While the latter two's per capita emissions are still a small fraction of those of the United States (2.3 and 1.1 metric tons per capita, against the US's 19.7) and the US's emissions were 23.2% of the world emissions, China and India combined have about 2.1 billion people, are just getting into strong national consumption economies, and were responsible for 16.5% of the global emissions. Those are the two places where work should be concentrated in lowering the emissions growth rates. Or maybe have them address their underground coal fires that spew the same amount of CO2 into the air in China alone as the US does from its cars every year.
Get in early, and you might be able to head off a rapid rise. Instead, the deal was to cut them a lot of slack because of their economic conditions. That's why it will never make it through Congress.
As a little backup for you, the thermal energy of coal is about 6150kWh/ton. The average thermal energy of the material in a fission reactor in the United States is 2,000,000,000kWh/ton, about 325,000 times higher than coal. I imagine a similar difference exists for gasoline.
The climate scientists have, which is why they're far less concerned with Arctic ice cap than they are with the Antarctic ice cap. Most of the ice up north is floating, whereas most of the ice down south is sitting on land (whether dry land or seabed), so if the southern cap melts, there is a definite addition of water to the world's oceans.
There is absolutely no reason why a CAT-scan should cost $2000. Yes, the CAT-scan machine was $17 million when it was bought 12 years ago, it users $110 in power every hour of operation, and the technician who reads the results make $40/hour.
Spacing out a $17M purchase over 12 years comes to $3881 per day without interest. Throw in the electrical and personnel costs you mention (and add in the personnel overhead), a restricted operating schedule that uses them mostly during business-ish hours (with occasional night-time and weekend use), and the time it takes to set up and use the scanner, and suddenly, the $2000 doesn't seem like so much.
Oh, yeah, and you're also not including the overhead that goes onto ALL bills to cover people that don't have and can't really get any health insurance (like the illegal immigrants that take a $3 billion to $5 billion toll on California's healthcare system, and about $20 billion on the entire nation's hospital network).
State law trumps contract law in most (all?) of these cases. For example, in California, you can not sign away overtime rights guaranteed to you by state law. The law does allow for some small modifications, such as 4/40 or 9/80 schedules, but there are limitations.
No, not in the same office, because the people talking (discussing right now how to properly instruct their kids on how to take out the trash) are technical people -- developers, to be exact. I don't know how they get any coding done with the amount of talking going on.
I may have a look at some headphones, though. Maybe they'll help me concentrate.
At the same time, it is rather annoying to be working most of the time and constantly -- and I mean constantly have to listen to a small group of people yak on all day about off-work stuff. In the last month, I've heard a particular group of about three people manage to not gossip or chat for virtually the entire day on perhaps three or four occasions. I know far too much about the movies they've seen, the cars they drive, their commutes, neighbors, wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, restaurants, family, home computers, home networks, vacations, clothes...
One of these days I'm going to snap and wire one of their desks with a remote-controlled device that yells "BACK TO WORK!" that I can use to interrupt them when they talk about stupid things for more than, say, three hours at a time. I just need it to be hard to localize.
Many parts can be this way -- look at car stereos, for example. Airbags are a bit different, though, in that they have to be fit to the area in which they're being installed and they have to respond at the right time for the expected space between the inflation point and the impacting body. I'm not sure what happens (if anything bad) if the body is further than expected, but if the body is closer than expected, the person can suffer injuries from the inflation process itself.
Probably because those that are properly installed and calibrated aren't noticed by you. They do look different from normal cars, but not so much so that you'd notice unless you were looking for them (the blue-white spot in the center of the headlamp case is still visible, but not blindingly so).
Parts that are often stolen are quickly adapted with chips by the manufacturer at the demand of the insurance companies, who will otherwise jack up rates on those vehicles which may result in a subsequent loss of sales. They've been doing this to audio equipment for years, so I wouldn't be surprised to see this happening with the lights or any other high-theft-rate item.
Yeah, I actually caught that reference after my post was made. I was just looking for the text of the original article, which is no longer available on the Discover Magazine website for non-subscribers.
As for progress, it would seem that the Carthage facility was at least in the late stages of construction and testing, if not operational, as of December 2003, according to this site. I have no idea what his position on TDP happens to be, and I know that he has trouble with his link formatting (he uses images\picturename.jpg instead of the appropriate / so you need to make the change manually) and his ability to take clear photos, but there are pictures of what he says is the plant. It would be interesting to have some backup verification of this.
Some of the noise would be unavoidable -- cooling the CPU or video card, for example. Those are technologies that produce heat from devices with no moving parts. However, if something like this could be used to replace the power supply, there would be one less fan there. Replace the motor for the hard drive and CD/DVD drives, and there's less heat generated. Less heat from these devices will help to keep the ambient case temperature lower, and thus make the job of cooling the CPU/GPU easier because they'll be running a few degrees cooler.
Won't make much of a difference, but in some cases, it might be enough to avoid madness.
Some quick math, which may be more or less accurate...
With 65,535 usable port numbers, a three-second range, and an eight-port sequence, there are 2.2 x 10^42 possible combinations. Depending on the max range of time between knocks which would define the minimum and maximum times for a sequence to complete, that gives about 7.4 * 10^35 years to go through half of the possible combinations (from a single IP address).
Higher learning curve for those two for installation and some configuration, whereas Fedora was installed and running in an hour. We needed to get them up and running. RHES is probably going to be the long-term solution -- five years of support per release is pretty enticing. However, budget woes have slowed some things down a bit, so that has to wait until the new quarter.
That you can, and with VMWare 4.5 (just released), you can task more than 1GB of RAM to the virtual machines. If you have an average SMP or a very fast single-CPU system with boatloads of RAM and some good, fast disks (a RAID-1/0 array works wonders for this), you can have a very nice virtual network running with many systems active. I've run a network of about six virtual systems before on one box; one day, I'll see how many I can run with the new RAM availablity.
Native running in Linux requires Microsoft's support. Near-native running -- via something like WINE or Crossover Office -- does not require Microsoft's support, an would, for the most part, be Good Enough to break the hold.
Slashdot Mirror
I sense a new project coming on SourceForge... :)
I just remembered one place I was at where the software we bought had a support contract that was a downsell. The annual contract was for $5000 or so a year. Sending a tech out cost $400 per hour. Travel time and travel cost -- from New Jersey to California -- were paid by the customer. Minimum charged onsite time was eight hours. One day could (and usually would) easily outstrip the annual costs.
I once asked the justification out of curiosity. I was told that they REALLY hated it when people made them keep track of hours, and this way they didn't have to when people had their service contracts.
In my experience, it doesn't matter if support is 24/7 or three hours a day on odd days of the week every other month. So long as there's a support contract involved, that will get it in over something that has no formal support. I've seen companies buy one product over another solely because, while both are commercial software, one of them offers an option for a support contract and the other does not, whether or not the other one is paid support.
Where I'm at now, it's not uncommon to see support contracts for one product (and not anything from or as ubiquitous as Microsoft, either) reach a quarter of a million dollars a year or more. It's insane.
No support, no sale.
I can understand it to a degree; there's no guarantee that the version installed today will not be completely dropped next month. It gets a little aggravating when it holds up an entire project, though, because of one small piece.
The upside, of course, is more funding for critical projects.
Sure, we can push for it, but the Kyoto Protocol doesn't. China's energy needs are soaring -- they're expected to need more than a million barrels of oil per day over what they're using now in the near future, even if the Three Gorges project works as planned. China and India both are nuclear powers; theirs are prime cases where additional nuclear reactors would provide a great deal more energy at less long-term cost than oil would.
The US has a relatively clean yard for what it uses. Make the rest of the world live by the same (or at least similar) rules, and we might be a little more willing to talk.
The problem is that USA actually has the highest emission rate per capita.
No. Have a look and see for yourself.
Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, and Qatar are all ahead of the US, and Trinidad & Tobago (they need to select a unified name), Luxembourg, Australia, and Canada aren't that far behind. Furthermore, CO2 emissions per capita for the US from 1980 to 1999 actually decreased by 3%, which is more than can be said for Austria (increased by 10%), Italy (11%), Japan (15%), Spain (28%), Australia (32%), New Zealand (45%), and Ireland (46%). China's has increased by 53%, and India's has increased by 120%. While the latter two's per capita emissions are still a small fraction of those of the United States (2.3 and 1.1 metric tons per capita, against the US's 19.7) and the US's emissions were 23.2% of the world emissions, China and India combined have about 2.1 billion people, are just getting into strong national consumption economies, and were responsible for 16.5% of the global emissions. Those are the two places where work should be concentrated in lowering the emissions growth rates. Or maybe have them address their underground coal fires that spew the same amount of CO2 into the air in China alone as the US does from its cars every year.
Get in early, and you might be able to head off a rapid rise. Instead, the deal was to cut them a lot of slack because of their economic conditions. That's why it will never make it through Congress.
As a little backup for you, the thermal energy of coal is about 6150kWh/ton. The average thermal energy of the material in a fission reactor in the United States is 2,000,000,000kWh/ton, about 325,000 times higher than coal. I imagine a similar difference exists for gasoline.
The climate scientists have, which is why they're far less concerned with Arctic ice cap than they are with the Antarctic ice cap. Most of the ice up north is floating, whereas most of the ice down south is sitting on land (whether dry land or seabed), so if the southern cap melts, there is a definite addition of water to the world's oceans.
There is absolutely no reason why a CAT-scan should cost $2000. Yes, the CAT-scan machine was $17 million when it was bought 12 years ago, it users $110 in power every hour of operation, and the technician who reads the results make $40/hour.
Spacing out a $17M purchase over 12 years comes to $3881 per day without interest. Throw in the electrical and personnel costs you mention (and add in the personnel overhead), a restricted operating schedule that uses them mostly during business-ish hours (with occasional night-time and weekend use), and the time it takes to set up and use the scanner, and suddenly, the $2000 doesn't seem like so much.
Oh, yeah, and you're also not including the overhead that goes onto ALL bills to cover people that don't have and can't really get any health insurance (like the illegal immigrants that take a $3 billion to $5 billion toll on California's healthcare system, and about $20 billion on the entire nation's hospital network).
State law trumps contract law in most (all?) of these cases. For example, in California, you can not sign away overtime rights guaranteed to you by state law. The law does allow for some small modifications, such as 4/40 or 9/80 schedules, but there are limitations.
No, not in the same office, because the people talking (discussing right now how to properly instruct their kids on how to take out the trash) are technical people -- developers, to be exact. I don't know how they get any coding done with the amount of talking going on.
I may have a look at some headphones, though. Maybe they'll help me concentrate.
At the same time, it is rather annoying to be working most of the time and constantly -- and I mean constantly have to listen to a small group of people yak on all day about off-work stuff. In the last month, I've heard a particular group of about three people manage to not gossip or chat for virtually the entire day on perhaps three or four occasions. I know far too much about the movies they've seen, the cars they drive, their commutes, neighbors, wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, restaurants, family, home computers, home networks, vacations, clothes...
One of these days I'm going to snap and wire one of their desks with a remote-controlled device that yells "BACK TO WORK!" that I can use to interrupt them when they talk about stupid things for more than, say, three hours at a time. I just need it to be hard to localize.
Many parts can be this way -- look at car stereos, for example. Airbags are a bit different, though, in that they have to be fit to the area in which they're being installed and they have to respond at the right time for the expected space between the inflation point and the impacting body. I'm not sure what happens (if anything bad) if the body is further than expected, but if the body is closer than expected, the person can suffer injuries from the inflation process itself.
Probably because those that are properly installed and calibrated aren't noticed by you. They do look different from normal cars, but not so much so that you'd notice unless you were looking for them (the blue-white spot in the center of the headlamp case is still visible, but not blindingly so).
Parts that are often stolen are quickly adapted with chips by the manufacturer at the demand of the insurance companies, who will otherwise jack up rates on those vehicles which may result in a subsequent loss of sales. They've been doing this to audio equipment for years, so I wouldn't be surprised to see this happening with the lights or any other high-theft-rate item.
Hence the part where I said that I wasn't speaking for or against.
Yeah, I actually caught that reference after my post was made. I was just looking for the text of the original article, which is no longer available on the Discover Magazine website for non-subscribers.
As for progress, it would seem that the Carthage facility was at least in the late stages of construction and testing, if not operational, as of December 2003, according to this site. I have no idea what his position on TDP happens to be, and I know that he has trouble with his link formatting (he uses images\picturename.jpg instead of the appropriate / so you need to make the change manually) and his ability to take clear photos, but there are pictures of what he says is the plant. It would be interesting to have some backup verification of this.
US Patent 4,751,486
US Patent 5,594,289
Note that I'm not speaking for or against his claims, but if you want to see how it works, there you go.
Some of the noise would be unavoidable -- cooling the CPU or video card, for example. Those are technologies that produce heat from devices with no moving parts. However, if something like this could be used to replace the power supply, there would be one less fan there. Replace the motor for the hard drive and CD/DVD drives, and there's less heat generated. Less heat from these devices will help to keep the ambient case temperature lower, and thus make the job of cooling the CPU/GPU easier because they'll be running a few degrees cooler.
Won't make much of a difference, but in some cases, it might be enough to avoid madness.
Hopefully not for long.
Some quick math, which may be more or less accurate...
With 65,535 usable port numbers, a three-second range, and an eight-port sequence, there are 2.2 x 10^42 possible combinations. Depending on the max range of time between knocks which would define the minimum and maximum times for a sequence to complete, that gives about 7.4 * 10^35 years to go through half of the possible combinations (from a single IP address).
Wow.
Higher learning curve for those two for installation and some configuration, whereas Fedora was installed and running in an hour. We needed to get them up and running. RHES is probably going to be the long-term solution -- five years of support per release is pretty enticing. However, budget woes have slowed some things down a bit, so that has to wait until the new quarter.
That you can, and with VMWare 4.5 (just released), you can task more than 1GB of RAM to the virtual machines. If you have an average SMP or a very fast single-CPU system with boatloads of RAM and some good, fast disks (a RAID-1/0 array works wonders for this), you can have a very nice virtual network running with many systems active. I've run a network of about six virtual systems before on one box; one day, I'll see how many I can run with the new RAM availablity.
Native running in Linux requires Microsoft's support. Near-native running -- via something like WINE or Crossover Office -- does not require Microsoft's support, an would, for the most part, be Good Enough to break the hold.
YES! Thank you. I thought it was something like Nessus, but of course that's a wholly different application.
I remember being able to fit the whole thing -- dictionary included -- on one HD floppy.