At the moment lots of organisations use 3rd party providers to generate business for them. We call them brokers or agents. Those agents increase your revenue through increasing sales, but also reduce your margins. This isn't a bad thing for business as those brokers and agents are generally better at it than you are yourself.
So the maths becomes, does acquiring the broker reduce our profitability by more or less than the 2%ish saving on tax on turnover.
At this point in time the tax is only targetted at these mega corps, so there isn't the incentive to integrate with suppliers. If the tax is rolled out to all firms then you will see massive mergers as that 2% is applied at every level of the sales chain.
There is now a huge incentive to merge your organisation. There will be an active push now to drive down revenue while holding profit levels the same. The best way to do this is to create massive verticals.
He specifically stated wind & solar. Yes I conflated that with renewables.
There is a large scale hydro project starting now in Aus. I'm not aware of any geothermal suitable locations, and has anyone got large scale tidal power generation right yet?
For most people, the term renewables pretty much means solar and wind, which are intermittent, and the thing that stops them being a total, as opposed to partial, solution is the storage of the energy.
Sure you can generate with roof top PV, but how are you storing enough power to run everything when the sun isn't shining / wind isn't blowing or it's dark?
If you can make your wind farms geographically diverse enough then you can do that. Have melbourne wind farms feeding townsville for example. But it would require a massive overbuild of generation to cover for the days when things aren't blowy.
Either that you need some kind of effective storage system. And currently there isn't the battery technology to do that at a reasonable cost.
No it doesn't. It shows an incomplete subset of some that are wearing a particular device. Assuming we had access to all the data in real time all we would know is how many watches there are. That could be 1 or it could be 50. You could potentially mix that with statistical analysis of other populations to estimate the deployment size but that is it.
It is the huge expanses of empty land that are the killer for PV or wind for Australia.
Sure the wind is always blowing somewhere, but the transmission distances are huge and you need to have the baseload supply. Comparing it to europe with 750+ million people and the related infrastructure power shifting is much much easier.
Australia is perfect for a renewable suplimented system. Not a whole hog replacement system. Not till batteries are way way cheaper.
Re single point of failure, I wasn't proposing shutting down everything else. Already there is a huge interconnect network that passes through the region and you would tap into that. It would also be a multi-generator site, exactly as Loy Yang is.
Water would be the biggest challenge. I don't know enough to know how water efficient a nuclear plant can be. CSG extraction produces masses of water in that region, I'm not sure if that is enough or if it's reliable enough
Cause god knows spotting a military base with a shit load of military hardware in it and a dirty great big barbwire fence is impossible without these fitness apps.
People can't seem to get their head around the fact that Australia is not a suitable country for 100% renewables. So building a new coal plant is off the cards.
That said SA is about the best location in the world to build nuclear plants. Massive uranium deposits, geologically completely stable, educated population and you could locate them near the junction of the 4 states.and supply the whole east coast on existing infrastructure. Oh the dream.
There is also that. But QLD has public ownership of its poles and wires yet the consumer is getting skinned, vs NSW which privatized it and is paying less. I get the feeling that situation could change at any time though. Bad regulation in NSW and consumers get skinned, QLD no longer needs to raise secret taxes and the price goes down.
As far as I can tell there isn't a direct link between public / private ownership and cost outcomes.
Of course then you have the situation in QLD now where 1 public owned corporation owns the rights to all smart meters, and if you change retail provider and are on a smart meter you need to pay to have your current meter removed and a new one installed. Ahhh just so obviously brilliant and economical.
The problem is the australian population is relatively low for the space that it covers. The networks are built around the normal demand levels and not able to cope with the very high peaks. This is made worse by the distances that power has to be transmitted.
Add onto that a complete lack of political will to build any large capacity power generation and you end up here.
It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better, The Loy Yang power stations in the La Trobe valley are coming up on end of life. They are the largest plants in Australia and provide 1/3rd of Victoria's power. Going to be up the creek without a paddle when they EOL.
This falls down as you don't need to keep a vehicle registered if the vehicle is not on the roads.
I have many many motorcycles that are not registered and not on the road. When I purchased them many of them were for a cash transaction in a park where the the seller and I wrote a receipt on a bit of paper.
If I decide I ever want to ride those motorcycles on the road I have to register the vehicle, at which point I have to prove ownership. That ownership proof being the receipt.
I got one for Christmas. I use it to play music, and thats about it. So far I can't see myself using it for anything else yet. The big one I wanted it to do it can't do without using a 3rd party app which is to send messages. If I was able to "ok google, send message to X" on it that would be excellent.
Firstly you can't ban drones. The genie is out of the bottle and you can't shove it back. While DJI is the largest manufacturer of "ready to fly" drones you can build a drone very cheaply from readily available components. And unless you want to ban Arduinos or raspberry pis there isn't a way to control for the flight controllers, let alone trying to ban brushless motors.
Secondly there is no question that the drone operator was at fault. The reasoning is he flew beyond visual range in an area that has a high amount of manned air traffic. While he was under 400ft at the time of the incident there is still too much air traffic to be flying beyond visual range.
On the flip side though notams are difficult to read if your aren't familiar with the terminology. And accessing the information isn't simple and easy. Drones are not going away. What's more, at some point DJI will lose its dominant position and drones will be controlled by iNav, betaflight, cleanflight, ardupilot or what ever. All of which run on a generic STM chip. Regulation via manufacturer will not be possible either.
Sure, it would be great if people used their brains more. But it aint happening. So steps need to be taken to mitigate risk. CASA, the Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority, has released an app which contains real time air safety information which drone users can use to check if their location is ok to fly their drone. This should become the standard approach world wide.
Actually I think in 10-15 years you will be telling the young whipper snappers that "Back in my day we had our own servers in a room over there" and they will look at you like you came from the dark ages.
Cost of compute is going to move towards cost of electricity. Network infrastructure is becoming more and more resilient every day and applications will be developed with cloud in mind.
For some govt data I agree that there needs to be geographically diverse, hot redundant systems with RPO measured in seconds. But only for a small amount of it.
There really is no reason why the phone directory for the department of guinea pig racing needs to be this over engineered.
On one hand you have a cloud supplier, Amazon / Google / MS, that have people that's sole job is look after racks and racks of identical hardware running their own tuned OS. They do 1 thing and they do it very well. Encrypt at rest, encrypted backups, and serious physical access security.
Then on the other hand you have the IT team that does dev, infrastrucure, helpdesk, support, architecture all the while explaining to a non techie why they can't do X without Y$. Which of those builds the better option?
MS is opening an Azure Tenancy in a datacentre in Canberra in April next year. It will be inside the CDC datacentre complex which is overseen but the Australian Signals Directorate and audited for secret classified data. That Azure tenancy will be infinitely more secure than anything some random govt dept develops.
I use the NFC payment system in my phone for 90%+ of my transactions. Pretty much every store in Australia supports paywave / paypass so I just use my phone.
No the reason is you need to bid to get your transaction processed. There are a max of 3.3 transactions per second. How do you get to be the transaction that gets processed? You bid to get your transaction included in the block-chain window. The ~$26 amount was the amount required to get your transaction into the processing window.
Security is not free. It is neither free in that it requires lots of man hours of time to develop & code, and that security has no impact on the user experience.
You can do end to end encryption of all traffic, encrypt at all states, require multi-factor auth, require physical devices, require secure portal software. But all of these have operational costs as well. But in the cost of compute and in the usability of the software.
If you had to access gmail through a specific secure application, with 3+ factor authentication, and it was really really slow, would you use it?
Slashdot Mirror
No not quite.
At the moment lots of organisations use 3rd party providers to generate business for them. We call them brokers or agents. Those agents increase your revenue through increasing sales, but also reduce your margins. This isn't a bad thing for business as those brokers and agents are generally better at it than you are yourself.
So the maths becomes, does acquiring the broker reduce our profitability by more or less than the 2%ish saving on tax on turnover.
At this point in time the tax is only targetted at these mega corps, so there isn't the incentive to integrate with suppliers. If the tax is rolled out to all firms then you will see massive mergers as that 2% is applied at every level of the sales chain.
There is now a huge incentive to merge your organisation. There will be an active push now to drive down revenue while holding profit levels the same. The best way to do this is to create massive verticals.
He specifically stated wind & solar. Yes I conflated that with renewables.
There is a large scale hydro project starting now in Aus. I'm not aware of any geothermal suitable locations, and has anyone got large scale tidal power generation right yet?
For most people, the term renewables pretty much means solar and wind, which are intermittent, and the thing that stops them being a total, as opposed to partial, solution is the storage of the energy.
Isn't that the same problem that every country has with renewables? And isn't that the single thing that prevents wholesale update?
You say that like energy storage is a trivial problem. Energy storage is THE key to a renewable energy future.
How are you storing the power?
Sure you can generate with roof top PV, but how are you storing enough power to run everything when the sun isn't shining / wind isn't blowing or it's dark?
If you can make your wind farms geographically diverse enough then you can do that. Have melbourne wind farms feeding townsville for example. But it would require a massive overbuild of generation to cover for the days when things aren't blowy.
Either that you need some kind of effective storage system. And currently there isn't the battery technology to do that at a reasonable cost.
No it doesn't. It shows an incomplete subset of some that are wearing a particular device. Assuming we had access to all the data in real time all we would know is how many watches there are. That could be 1 or it could be 50. You could potentially mix that with statistical analysis of other populations to estimate the deployment size but that is it.
It is the huge expanses of empty land that are the killer for PV or wind for Australia.
Sure the wind is always blowing somewhere, but the transmission distances are huge and you need to have the baseload supply. Comparing it to europe with 750+ million people and the related infrastructure power shifting is much much easier.
Australia is perfect for a renewable suplimented system. Not a whole hog replacement system. Not till batteries are way way cheaper.
Re single point of failure, I wasn't proposing shutting down everything else. Already there is a huge interconnect network that passes through the region and you would tap into that. It would also be a multi-generator site, exactly as Loy Yang is.
Water would be the biggest challenge. I don't know enough to know how water efficient a nuclear plant can be. CSG extraction produces masses of water in that region, I'm not sure if that is enough or if it's reliable enough
Because the location isn't sensitive. These bases aren't hidden, they are fortified forward operating positions.
What is inside the base is sensitive, what information there is sensitive, what force composition is there is sensitive.
Cause god knows spotting a military base with a shit load of military hardware in it and a dirty great big barbwire fence is impossible without these fitness apps.
To a degree yep.
People can't seem to get their head around the fact that Australia is not a suitable country for 100% renewables. So building a new coal plant is off the cards.
That said SA is about the best location in the world to build nuclear plants. Massive uranium deposits, geologically completely stable, educated population and you could locate them near the junction of the 4 states.and supply the whole east coast on existing infrastructure. Oh the dream.
There is also that. But QLD has public ownership of its poles and wires yet the consumer is getting skinned, vs NSW which privatized it and is paying less. I get the feeling that situation could change at any time though. Bad regulation in NSW and consumers get skinned, QLD no longer needs to raise secret taxes and the price goes down.
As far as I can tell there isn't a direct link between public / private ownership and cost outcomes.
Of course then you have the situation in QLD now where 1 public owned corporation owns the rights to all smart meters, and if you change retail provider and are on a smart meter you need to pay to have your current meter removed and a new one installed. Ahhh just so obviously brilliant and economical.
https://www.aer.gov.au/wholesa...
The problem is the australian population is relatively low for the space that it covers. The networks are built around the normal demand levels and not able to cope with the very high peaks. This is made worse by the distances that power has to be transmitted.
Add onto that a complete lack of political will to build any large capacity power generation and you end up here.
It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better, The Loy Yang power stations in the La Trobe valley are coming up on end of life. They are the largest plants in Australia and provide 1/3rd of Victoria's power. Going to be up the creek without a paddle when they EOL.
This falls down as you don't need to keep a vehicle registered if the vehicle is not on the roads.
I have many many motorcycles that are not registered and not on the road. When I purchased them many of them were for a cash transaction in a park where the the seller and I wrote a receipt on a bit of paper.
If I decide I ever want to ride those motorcycles on the road I have to register the vehicle, at which point I have to prove ownership. That ownership proof being the receipt.
How long would the filters last?
Essentially they have build a big fan to force the air through filters.
Might be a stupid question.
But why don't they do burn offs? It's one of the regular maintenance things done round me.
I got one for Christmas. I use it to play music, and thats about it. So far I can't see myself using it for anything else yet. The big one I wanted it to do it can't do without using a 3rd party app which is to send messages. If I was able to "ok google, send message to X" on it that would be excellent.
Firstly you can't ban drones. The genie is out of the bottle and you can't shove it back. While DJI is the largest manufacturer of "ready to fly" drones you can build a drone very cheaply from readily available components. And unless you want to ban Arduinos or raspberry pis there isn't a way to control for the flight controllers, let alone trying to ban brushless motors.
Secondly there is no question that the drone operator was at fault. The reasoning is he flew beyond visual range in an area that has a high amount of manned air traffic. While he was under 400ft at the time of the incident there is still too much air traffic to be flying beyond visual range.
On the flip side though notams are difficult to read if your aren't familiar with the terminology. And accessing the information isn't simple and easy. Drones are not going away. What's more, at some point DJI will lose its dominant position and drones will be controlled by iNav, betaflight, cleanflight, ardupilot or what ever. All of which run on a generic STM chip. Regulation via manufacturer will not be possible either.
Sure, it would be great if people used their brains more. But it aint happening. So steps need to be taken to mitigate risk. CASA, the Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority, has released an app which contains real time air safety information which drone users can use to check if their location is ok to fly their drone. This should become the standard approach world wide.
Most importantly. You are ignoring that this only affects people who buy the car now. Existing owners can continue the same practice.
Actually I think in 10-15 years you will be telling the young whipper snappers that "Back in my day we had our own servers in a room over there" and they will look at you like you came from the dark ages.
Cost of compute is going to move towards cost of electricity. Network infrastructure is becoming more and more resilient every day and applications will be developed with cloud in mind.
Why?
For some govt data I agree that there needs to be geographically diverse, hot redundant systems with RPO measured in seconds. But only for a small amount of it.
There really is no reason why the phone directory for the department of guinea pig racing needs to be this over engineered.
No. It got a LOT harder.
On one hand you have a cloud supplier, Amazon / Google / MS, that have people that's sole job is look after racks and racks of identical hardware running their own tuned OS. They do 1 thing and they do it very well. Encrypt at rest, encrypted backups, and serious physical access security.
Then on the other hand you have the IT team that does dev, infrastrucure, helpdesk, support, architecture all the while explaining to a non techie why they can't do X without Y$. Which of those builds the better option?
MS is opening an Azure Tenancy in a datacentre in Canberra in April next year. It will be inside the CDC datacentre complex which is overseen but the Australian Signals Directorate and audited for secret classified data. That Azure tenancy will be infinitely more secure than anything some random govt dept develops.
I use the NFC payment system in my phone for 90%+ of my transactions. Pretty much every store in Australia supports paywave / paypass so I just use my phone.
Personally I love it.
No the reason is you need to bid to get your transaction processed. There are a max of 3.3 transactions per second. How do you get to be the transaction that gets processed? You bid to get your transaction included in the block-chain window. The ~$26 amount was the amount required to get your transaction into the processing window.
Samsung does still have an earphone jack. I've got the new note 8 and it's there.
It was actually a deciding factor between the note and the new pixel.
That and it has a sd card slot as well.
Security is not free. It is neither free in that it requires lots of man hours of time to develop & code, and that security has no impact on the user experience.
You can do end to end encryption of all traffic, encrypt at all states, require multi-factor auth, require physical devices, require secure portal software. But all of these have operational costs as well. But in the cost of compute and in the usability of the software.
If you had to access gmail through a specific secure application, with 3+ factor authentication, and it was really really slow, would you use it?