This is a *short term* bump in their volume because of PR. They've been discussed in the media every few weeks since the story broke. They admit that the number of calls they receive from prospective customers went from 90 to 2000, which is 20X what they had before this story broke and they have added customers because of this.
All I'm saying is that they everybody needs to wait for the PR bubble to burst. A year isn't long enough to really know.
Also, realize that this information is coming out of a lawsuit, where one of the owners is suing the CEO/Owner over this. The CEO is trying hard to prove this was all a great idea and is working well. I expect the information to be cherry picked and biased in his favor, but there is no way any of that could be proven here so I won't try.
Besides all that, Gravity's not exactly the sort of company you use on impulse. They handle finances. It's not like people are running out to buy twenty dollar bottles of Pepsi on the anniversary of a movie. PR only goes so far in this case.
LOL - They process credit card transactions... Companies that do this are a dime a dozen.. Banks, credit unions, and even Mom and Pop shops are everywhere do this. Google, yahoo, PayPal and even Amazon do this.. So the PR does mean a LOT in this case. Their sales department has enjoyed going from 90 to 2,000 unsolicited contacts which is TOTALY due to the PR they are getting.
You do get that this argument of yours is veiled in class envy, right? That this CEO/Owner will benefit beyond his salary if the company is successful with this ploy? Don't make him into some social pioneer type out for the good of others, he's trying to make lots of money like all the rest of the CxO's out there.
I don't think your question is really valid. The question is can this company, or any other company, survive over the long term using the formula being tried and that has *nothing* to do with Slashdot's (or any of the media's) coverage of them. In fact, I'm reserving final judgment until the media coverage goes away for good and he's left to compete without the FREE PR...
Oh I don't know... Going from 90 inquiries from prospective customers to 2,000 is two orders of magnitude. ALL of that is directly attributable to the PR bump.
Show me *any* business which is able to raise their initial contacts with prospective customers by two orders of magnitude that doesn't do well in the short term....
IMHO - He should be doing better with *that* much interest from prospective customers, but hey... If he can make it work, power to him.
I don't think keeping customers will be his issue, nor will keeping employees. I expect similar levels of service and extremely low employee attrition.
What I do think will be a problem for him is the cost structure for labor. He's likely to be at a disadvantage because his labor costs will be somewhat higher.
It remains to be seen how all this will wash out. Right now he's getting a lot of free PR and has been able to turn that into a steady business, but over the long term, when he becomes "old news" and the benefit of the free PR dies away, I'm not so sure this idea of his will work out all that well. Further, I don't see a rush of other companies implementing his policies so it isn't obviously a huge advantage to do this.
IMHO I think he has set himself up to fail due to his labor cost structure, but we may have to wait a few years for it to become apparent.
Well, the issue is his cost structure and remaining profitable when paying some employees beyond their market value. You are correct, he will have eliminated a lot of his labor costs due to attrition, but it still remains to be seen if this will work out in the long term and if his business will thrive in the long term without the free PR his 15 min of fame has given him.
BTW.... His little "I only get paid 70K too" idea, while true, isn't really the whole story. He is a co-owner of the business, so if the business makes a profit, he directly benefits from it. So don't fall for that little slight of hand.
You just *might* want to try and not be as harshly partisan if you intend to bring people to your point of view. Just a little objectivity, even if you are faking it, goes a long way.
Unless your intent is to come across as a hyper partisan nut case from the left... In which case, carry on....
I was thinking it was more of a pusher beam.... Which would be more efficiently constructed out of nozzles using compressed air... But I suppose the point is not about being practical, but doing something new and unique in a different way. Kind of like teenaged boys saying "Watch this!"
I was looking at the 3M site about the fluid they use. I have no idea how expensive this stuff is, but I have a feeling it's going to be pricy stuff. This means that you won't want it to be disappearing so you will need a closed system. This will imply some kind of air tight enclosure topped with a serious heat exchanger. suppose you could get rid of the chillers if you could afford enough of the Novac liquid and didn't care that it evaporated away... But what's the point of the heat exchangers then? You will still have to provide enough heat transfer capacity and some kind of chilled surface which is likely backed at some point with a traditional phase change process.
I still am not convinced that the phase change at the heat source approach is a good idea, but I hadn't thought of the benefit of having the bubbles stirring the liquid up and making pumps unnecessary. Lowering complexity is usually a good thing so I guess it boils down to how big the bubbles get and how much they impede the heat flow. Having metal heat spreaders may be enough to keep the heat flow uniform in a boiling liquid.
However, if one insists on this approach, It might be a good idea to consider bypassing the heat exchanger stuff and just compress the vapor, dump the heat into the air to condense the vapor into liquid and dump it back into the system to start over.
Two phase cooling eh? I don't know if that's a good idea.
I would contend that it's usually not a good idea to cool something using a liquid when you let that liquid boil when in contact with what you wish to cool. This is especially true for things you wish to keep evenly cool. I understand that you do gain a lot of heat transfer capability by vaporizing the liquid, but you loose the ability to easily keep heat evenly flowing from a surface when you let vapor bubbles form on it. Perhaps you could deal with that issue using conductive materials to spread the heat out (you are going to need some of that anyway) but it might be cheaper to implement a single phase solution. Also, presumably they are suggesting a "closed loop" system for this liquid, where the vapor would need to be recycled by compressing and condensing it back into liquid. This puts the ambient temperature as the lowest you can get the liquid, without some other multi-phase process (and associated expense).
I would think that it would be better to stay a liquid at all times and pump the liquid though a heat exchanger to be cooled using conventional refrigeration methods. You avoid vapor bubbles causing hot spots, only need to come up a suitable liquid based on it's non-reactive nature that will stay liquid and not have to worry about it having the necessary phase change pressure/temperature for your application. Plus, water chillers are already standard fare at current data centers and in industrial cooling equipment. Just pump liquid though the whole thing and push the thermodynamically expensive processes that involve phase changes off onto existing efficient equipment designs which exist. In short, avoid inventing the wheel...
The USA doesn't usually import Middle East oil because it is too far away and there are sources much closer to home which have lower transportation costs. So there is no direct benefit to the USA here. However, the USA IS interested in the free flow of oil and maintaining a stable market from which it obtains it's Oil. So, there is a compelling national interest in keeping the middle east settled and the Oil flowing, even if we don't buy what they pump.
But don't miss the crucial fact that it really is the rest of the world that benefits from our involvement in the middle east and our attempts to maintain stability around the oil producing countries. Where we benefit from stable and low oil prices, so does the rest of the world, especially those countries where they have to import most of the energy they use (which tends to be the third world, poorer countries of the world.)
So look at both sides of that coin you are holding and realize that the USA, while acting in it's interest in the middle east, has helped the rest of the world as much or more than it helped itself. Other countries and cultures would not be so generous.
But if you want to make the USA into this greedy imperialistic "we take what we want and spit on everybody else" don't find me agreeing with you. We show marked restraint for a country that had the power to forcibly take anything and everything it wanted, yet refused to.
And there is no such thing as security in closed source software.
I'm not so sure you can claim that. Where I will admit that closed source software has less people scrutinizing it and generally more eyes the better, I will not admit that makes it less secure. If security is important enough to the developer of a closed solution, important enough to actually cause the right things to happen during development and test to catch security issues before a solution is released, it can be as secure as any software out there. If you have the right people looking at it, looking for the right things, you can produce secure solutions that are closed source.
You see, open source just allows more folks to look at the details, it doesn't mean that the right kind of people actually do look at it. With closed source, you can get secure by demanding it from your development team and giving them the resources to accomplish it.
Not that the government would be out blabbing about them under any circumstances, but I am confident that there hasn't been even one "near miss" where a nuclear explosion was barely avoided.
Of course the press loves to make small accidents into near catastrophic events when they can so we are regaled by stories of how dangerously close we came. For instance, the recent story of the three nuclear devices that impacted Spain and exploded after a refueling accident. Even today we are told that we "narrowly avoided setting off a nuclear bomb" when that happened. That's not true. Yes, the bombs where fully operational, yes many of the safeties had been shut off because of the mission being flown, but NO, the chances of these weapons going nuclear during the accident was nil.
So I'm not buying that there have been 7 unintentional "near detonations" and we KNOW that although there have been situations where nuclear forces have been put on what amounts to a "hair trigger," we never really had somebody pulling said trigger or a situation where the process safeguards didn't work.
Well, I consider your complaint about the last Bush's activities as president to be mostly partisan rhetoric. Where I understand your complaint about "Mission Accomplished" one must consider the setting and the intended audience and take the time to consider the context. You also need to do more than look at the photo, but consider the speech that went with it.
The rhetoric from the left was all about how incompetent and stupid Bush was, and where mistakes where made, I think the left has made a mountain out of a mole hill, used Bush as their favorite whipping boy and used this partisan rhetoric to bludgeon the republicans. Where some of the critiques are valid, many of them are over blown and absurd, the "mission accomplished" one being among the top of the stupid things that get said.
IMHO, what Bush SAID on that carrier was fairly accurate and lined up perfectly with his current understanding of the situation in Iraq, while the banner portrayed a bit more optimistic view than Bush had at the time. However, the photo is what folks see, we don't hear the speech and couple that with the fact that the insurgent problem that no one expected was only just starting in Iraq, that there was a lot more war of a different kind left in Iraq.
Right... I guess everybody has their reasons and justifications for their actions. If this really was true (and I doubt it really was), You cannot drill sideways all that far. Maybe a few thousand feet, which works out to something under 2 miles or so. Iraq took ALL of Kuwait, not just the two miles necessary to preserve it's oil interest. Then they set as many oil wells alight as they could manage in Kuwait. Tell me again how they where motivated by slant drilling???
However, remember that Sadam was clearly warned and the military build up in Saudi took months. He could have withdrawn to the border and never suffered being expelled.
You are free to draw your own conclusions, but Iraq was NOT justified taking ALL of Kuwait under any circumstances. And even if what you say is true, they overstepped the bounds and had to be reined in by somebody. If we hadn't, the Saudi's would have, and that would have sparked a sectarian religious war like no other, disrupted the free flow of oil, and generally made a mess.
Ah yes, my point... There hasn't been an accidental nuclear explosion of a nuclear device that has killed ANYBODY. No accidental ICBM launches, no armed bombs dropped or anything since the end of WW2.
The first invasion WAS about Oil, returning the oil Iraq took by force to it's rightful owners in Kuwait....
The second WASN'T about oil, persay, and control of the oil fields was returned to Iraq AFTER the war. Iraq chooses who develops, maintains and operates their oil resources and the terms of the contracts. Iraq receives payment for the oil they sell.
We may not agree with the Saudi's form of government, their laws and cultural customs, but they generally don't go around making a nuisance of themselves becoming a danger to their neighbors so it's not the USA's place to force changes on them. Saudi Arabia generally lives at peace, has abundant natural resources we need to keep freely flowing for the world so where our ambitions and theirs align with the free flow of energy, we are allies and likely to remain so.
I don't see how this is a problem. In fact, this is an example of where the USA is not out forcing the world into it's mold, but choosing to live peacefully with the rest of the world when possible, despite the differences.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a *short term* bump in their volume because of PR. They've been discussed in the media every few weeks since the story broke. They admit that the number of calls they receive from prospective customers went from 90 to 2000, which is 20X what they had before this story broke and they have added customers because of this.
All I'm saying is that they everybody needs to wait for the PR bubble to burst. A year isn't long enough to really know.
Also, realize that this information is coming out of a lawsuit, where one of the owners is suing the CEO/Owner over this. The CEO is trying hard to prove this was all a great idea and is working well. I expect the information to be cherry picked and biased in his favor, but there is no way any of that could be proven here so I won't try.
Besides all that, Gravity's not exactly the sort of company you use on impulse. They handle finances. It's not like people are running out to buy twenty dollar bottles of Pepsi on the anniversary of a movie. PR only goes so far in this case.
LOL - They process credit card transactions... Companies that do this are a dime a dozen.. Banks, credit unions, and even Mom and Pop shops are everywhere do this. Google, yahoo, PayPal and even Amazon do this.. So the PR does mean a LOT in this case. Their sales department has enjoyed going from 90 to 2,000 unsolicited contacts which is TOTALY due to the PR they are getting.
You do get that this argument of yours is veiled in class envy, right? That this CEO/Owner will benefit beyond his salary if the company is successful with this ploy? Don't make him into some social pioneer type out for the good of others, he's trying to make lots of money like all the rest of the CxO's out there.
I don't think your question is really valid. The question is can this company, or any other company, survive over the long term using the formula being tried and that has *nothing* to do with Slashdot's (or any of the media's) coverage of them. In fact, I'm reserving final judgment until the media coverage goes away for good and he's left to compete without the FREE PR...
Oh I don't know... Going from 90 inquiries from prospective customers to 2,000 is two orders of magnitude. ALL of that is directly attributable to the PR bump.
Show me *any* business which is able to raise their initial contacts with prospective customers by two orders of magnitude that doesn't do well in the short term....
IMHO - He should be doing better with *that* much interest from prospective customers, but hey... If he can make it work, power to him.
So success is staying in business for 6 months? LOL, good luck with your "success" then.
I don't think keeping customers will be his issue, nor will keeping employees. I expect similar levels of service and extremely low employee attrition.
What I do think will be a problem for him is the cost structure for labor. He's likely to be at a disadvantage because his labor costs will be somewhat higher.
It remains to be seen how all this will wash out. Right now he's getting a lot of free PR and has been able to turn that into a steady business, but over the long term, when he becomes "old news" and the benefit of the free PR dies away, I'm not so sure this idea of his will work out all that well. Further, I don't see a rush of other companies implementing his policies so it isn't obviously a huge advantage to do this.
IMHO I think he has set himself up to fail due to his labor cost structure, but we may have to wait a few years for it to become apparent.
Well, the issue is his cost structure and remaining profitable when paying some employees beyond their market value. You are correct, he will have eliminated a lot of his labor costs due to attrition, but it still remains to be seen if this will work out in the long term and if his business will thrive in the long term without the free PR his 15 min of fame has given him.
BTW.... His little "I only get paid 70K too" idea, while true, isn't really the whole story. He is a co-owner of the business, so if the business makes a profit, he directly benefits from it. So don't fall for that little slight of hand.
As soon as your 15 min of fame is over.... Let me know how it's going then.....
You just *might* want to try and not be as harshly partisan if you intend to bring people to your point of view. Just a little objectivity, even if you are faking it, goes a long way.
Unless your intent is to come across as a hyper partisan nut case from the left... In which case, carry on....
I was thinking it was more of a pusher beam.... Which would be more efficiently constructed out of nozzles using compressed air... But I suppose the point is not about being practical, but doing something new and unique in a different way. Kind of like teenaged boys saying "Watch this!"
A tractor beam, that relies on waves propagating through matter, that will work in the nearly matterless void that is space, right?
Just turn up the volume until it works..
In essence, an object sitting in a 'quiet' region of space can be held there if it is surrounded by very high-intensity sound waves.
In Space, no one can hear you tractor beam.
Ah, just turn up the volume until somebody does.... My volume knob thing goes to 11! So there....
I was looking at the 3M site about the fluid they use. I have no idea how expensive this stuff is, but I have a feeling it's going to be pricy stuff. This means that you won't want it to be disappearing so you will need a closed system. This will imply some kind of air tight enclosure topped with a serious heat exchanger. suppose you could get rid of the chillers if you could afford enough of the Novac liquid and didn't care that it evaporated away... But what's the point of the heat exchangers then? You will still have to provide enough heat transfer capacity and some kind of chilled surface which is likely backed at some point with a traditional phase change process.
I still am not convinced that the phase change at the heat source approach is a good idea, but I hadn't thought of the benefit of having the bubbles stirring the liquid up and making pumps unnecessary. Lowering complexity is usually a good thing so I guess it boils down to how big the bubbles get and how much they impede the heat flow. Having metal heat spreaders may be enough to keep the heat flow uniform in a boiling liquid.
However, if one insists on this approach, It might be a good idea to consider bypassing the heat exchanger stuff and just compress the vapor, dump the heat into the air to condense the vapor into liquid and dump it back into the system to start over.
If you think you can stop me with your silly laws then you can go suck on a tailpipe.
I hear VW is hiring software engineers for their diesel engine control units... You should apply....
It's not really a law, but more of a set of guidelines... Moore or less.... He said so himself.
Two phase cooling eh? I don't know if that's a good idea.
I would contend that it's usually not a good idea to cool something using a liquid when you let that liquid boil when in contact with what you wish to cool. This is especially true for things you wish to keep evenly cool. I understand that you do gain a lot of heat transfer capability by vaporizing the liquid, but you loose the ability to easily keep heat evenly flowing from a surface when you let vapor bubbles form on it. Perhaps you could deal with that issue using conductive materials to spread the heat out (you are going to need some of that anyway) but it might be cheaper to implement a single phase solution. Also, presumably they are suggesting a "closed loop" system for this liquid, where the vapor would need to be recycled by compressing and condensing it back into liquid. This puts the ambient temperature as the lowest you can get the liquid, without some other multi-phase process (and associated expense).
I would think that it would be better to stay a liquid at all times and pump the liquid though a heat exchanger to be cooled using conventional refrigeration methods. You avoid vapor bubbles causing hot spots, only need to come up a suitable liquid based on it's non-reactive nature that will stay liquid and not have to worry about it having the necessary phase change pressure/temperature for your application. Plus, water chillers are already standard fare at current data centers and in industrial cooling equipment. Just pump liquid though the whole thing and push the thermodynamically expensive processes that involve phase changes off onto existing efficient equipment designs which exist. In short, avoid inventing the wheel...
The USA doesn't usually import Middle East oil because it is too far away and there are sources much closer to home which have lower transportation costs. So there is no direct benefit to the USA here. However, the USA IS interested in the free flow of oil and maintaining a stable market from which it obtains it's Oil. So, there is a compelling national interest in keeping the middle east settled and the Oil flowing, even if we don't buy what they pump.
But don't miss the crucial fact that it really is the rest of the world that benefits from our involvement in the middle east and our attempts to maintain stability around the oil producing countries. Where we benefit from stable and low oil prices, so does the rest of the world, especially those countries where they have to import most of the energy they use (which tends to be the third world, poorer countries of the world.)
So look at both sides of that coin you are holding and realize that the USA, while acting in it's interest in the middle east, has helped the rest of the world as much or more than it helped itself. Other countries and cultures would not be so generous.
But if you want to make the USA into this greedy imperialistic "we take what we want and spit on everybody else" don't find me agreeing with you. We show marked restraint for a country that had the power to forcibly take anything and everything it wanted, yet refused to.
And there is no such thing as security in closed source software.
I'm not so sure you can claim that. Where I will admit that closed source software has less people scrutinizing it and generally more eyes the better, I will not admit that makes it less secure. If security is important enough to the developer of a closed solution, important enough to actually cause the right things to happen during development and test to catch security issues before a solution is released, it can be as secure as any software out there. If you have the right people looking at it, looking for the right things, you can produce secure solutions that are closed source.
You see, open source just allows more folks to look at the details, it doesn't mean that the right kind of people actually do look at it. With closed source, you can get secure by demanding it from your development team and giving them the resources to accomplish it.
7? Not even ONE that I know of.
Not that the government would be out blabbing about them under any circumstances, but I am confident that there hasn't been even one "near miss" where a nuclear explosion was barely avoided.
Of course the press loves to make small accidents into near catastrophic events when they can so we are regaled by stories of how dangerously close we came. For instance, the recent story of the three nuclear devices that impacted Spain and exploded after a refueling accident. Even today we are told that we "narrowly avoided setting off a nuclear bomb" when that happened. That's not true. Yes, the bombs where fully operational, yes many of the safeties had been shut off because of the mission being flown, but NO, the chances of these weapons going nuclear during the accident was nil.
So I'm not buying that there have been 7 unintentional "near detonations" and we KNOW that although there have been situations where nuclear forces have been put on what amounts to a "hair trigger," we never really had somebody pulling said trigger or a situation where the process safeguards didn't work.
Well, I consider your complaint about the last Bush's activities as president to be mostly partisan rhetoric. Where I understand your complaint about "Mission Accomplished" one must consider the setting and the intended audience and take the time to consider the context. You also need to do more than look at the photo, but consider the speech that went with it.
The rhetoric from the left was all about how incompetent and stupid Bush was, and where mistakes where made, I think the left has made a mountain out of a mole hill, used Bush as their favorite whipping boy and used this partisan rhetoric to bludgeon the republicans. Where some of the critiques are valid, many of them are over blown and absurd, the "mission accomplished" one being among the top of the stupid things that get said.
IMHO, what Bush SAID on that carrier was fairly accurate and lined up perfectly with his current understanding of the situation in Iraq, while the banner portrayed a bit more optimistic view than Bush had at the time. However, the photo is what folks see, we don't hear the speech and couple that with the fact that the insurgent problem that no one expected was only just starting in Iraq, that there was a lot more war of a different kind left in Iraq.
Then Fermi was wrong according to you too..
Right... I guess everybody has their reasons and justifications for their actions. If this really was true (and I doubt it really was), You cannot drill sideways all that far. Maybe a few thousand feet, which works out to something under 2 miles or so. Iraq took ALL of Kuwait, not just the two miles necessary to preserve it's oil interest. Then they set as many oil wells alight as they could manage in Kuwait. Tell me again how they where motivated by slant drilling???
However, remember that Sadam was clearly warned and the military build up in Saudi took months. He could have withdrawn to the border and never suffered being expelled.
You are free to draw your own conclusions, but Iraq was NOT justified taking ALL of Kuwait under any circumstances. And even if what you say is true, they overstepped the bounds and had to be reined in by somebody. If we hadn't, the Saudi's would have, and that would have sparked a sectarian religious war like no other, disrupted the free flow of oil, and generally made a mess.
Ah yes, my point... There hasn't been an accidental nuclear explosion of a nuclear device that has killed ANYBODY. No accidental ICBM launches, no armed bombs dropped or anything since the end of WW2.
The first invasion WAS about Oil, returning the oil Iraq took by force to it's rightful owners in Kuwait....
The second WASN'T about oil, persay, and control of the oil fields was returned to Iraq AFTER the war. Iraq chooses who develops, maintains and operates their oil resources and the terms of the contracts. Iraq receives payment for the oil they sell.
We may not agree with the Saudi's form of government, their laws and cultural customs, but they generally don't go around making a nuisance of themselves becoming a danger to their neighbors so it's not the USA's place to force changes on them. Saudi Arabia generally lives at peace, has abundant natural resources we need to keep freely flowing for the world so where our ambitions and theirs align with the free flow of energy, we are allies and likely to remain so.
I don't see how this is a problem. In fact, this is an example of where the USA is not out forcing the world into it's mold, but choosing to live peacefully with the rest of the world when possible, despite the differences.