Is that it is (like nearly every other system out there) an economical system; it's all about supply and demand.
I this case there's a supply of plenty of clocks. There's an (existing) demand for a certain level of performance; if the supply outstrips that demand, then the supply is devalued, and consequently the programmers don't spend as much time conserving that resource.
Or to put it another way, programs behave like a gas with respect to responsiveness and user expectation; they expand to fill the available space.
Or to reword it another way (quoting from the article): computers are, in fact, doing more than they used to. A lot of the things computers do are fairly subtle, happening beneath the radar of a user's perception. Many functions are automatic and, as discussed in last month's column, you could probably do without some of them.
a dual core architecture is two processors on the same chip, which should theoretically double the computing power.
And in true multithreaded apps that might even be possible. But the sad reality is that the number of instructions you can run per second in the real world is related more to how many bits you can move in and out of the processor than the actual speed of the processor.
Most instructions can be executed in a handful of clocks. adding AND multiplying can generally be done in the same clock. On some procs you can add in ZERO clocks (that's how the add+multiply in one clock trick is accomplished)
So for maximum performance, you need a memory bus that can keep up with that demand. But we're seeing multi-GHz processors on sub-GHz memory buses.
I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet.
Absolutely none. I feel perfectly safe with anything we can possibly do to Mars as far into the foreseeable future as possible.
You know why?
I don't live there.
That gives you a lot of room for experimentation.
Mars' only value to me, other than scientific curiosity, at this point in time is as a future liveable planet. Which value can only be realized by terraforming. Therefore any terraforming plan which seems at all likely is not only "safe" from my perspective, but "valuable" as well.
My only caution is one I tell my project manager when we're moving code into production; have a rollback plan, just in case.
What a stupid patent! This is why patents should not be allowed to exist in software.
No, this is why patent examiners for software patents should be required to have a certain amount of knowledge of the current state of the art in the field...
Use 802.11 or wired networking within each greenhouse with bridges between.
The bridges can be a variety of technologies depending on the needs and setup. Visible light / infrared / laser repeaters are pretty good for line of sight apps but have problems in extremely severe weather.
The cantennas are a good choice. From all accounts homemade can be as good as commercial easily, if you build them with precision. Just use wired to 802.11 bridges, set each bridge to a different channel. If you use wireless inside the greenhouses, that whole network is on one channel with the same SSID. That way any mobile devices have only one network configuration to worry about.
for your transmitters I would highly recommend a commercial two antenna router for any greenhouse that can transmit to two different locations; I'm assuming the greenhouses aren't all in a line but spread apart across a property, in which case you want a tree-style hierarchy. The fewer transmission points the more reliable the whole network...
Total you're talking about three to four thousand in equipment, and that's if you buy consumer grade wireless equipment and make your own cantennas. For receiving the network traffic from another greenhouse there are wireless ethernet bridges available for about $80. I believe Linksys makes one specifically for gaming consoles, that has an antenna input. Not sure if it can do WEP or not. A slightly more attractive option is diskless Linux routers with wireless receivers. Customize a LiveCD, give each one an IDE-Flash adapter and use a small Flash card for configuration information. Use Mini-ITX boards with DC-DC power supplies if you do it... those can be made totally fanless and somewhat ruggedized for the condition they're in. I'm not sure if greenhouses are this way, but I know a lot of industrial facilities have 12V DC power as well as line power, so you might even be able to save on the AC-DC bricks to convert 120V down.
You can build a diskless fanless headless Mini-ITX computer for $200 - $250. The advantage is if you want to run a VPN or something like that and completely not have to worry about wireless security, it's possible with these devices. And in the future with some minor instrumentation purchases, each device can monitor temperature, humidity, whatever might be important throughout the greenhouses and report to a monitoring application...
if it can light up an LED with the juice it's pouring into the air, what else might it be doing that we're not aware of yet?
Did you even bother to look at the prototype? It's mostly battery. I mean come on, you click the link, and there is ONE, count them ONE image on that page.
Let's not make fear inciting "radiation is bad" posts without AT LEAST reading the story first? Just a suggestion...
So, if you habitually browse armadillo porn, the system will know about it. And if you go a day *without* browsing armadillo porn, the system will think something's up and lock you out.
But do you really want the system to record the fact that you browse armadillo porn?
More importantly do you want to feel compelled to compulsively look at armadillo porn daily out of fear that if you don't it'll raise a red flag and you'll be "caught with your pants down"
That's a funny phrase to use here considering that you're getting caught for NOT looking at porn...
that monitors usage activities and alerts suspicious activity seems like a good idea...
But think about it. How often do your usage patterns change. I might be an atypical user, but my network packets don't keep the same pattern for now; I have a meta pattern that shifts every new project. This week I've been exchanging a lot of packets with our file server, talking with source safe, access databases, and collaborative UML modelling.
Last week nearly all my packets were terminal services to the production environment for one of my clients.
The week before that I was almost pure database.
I think if you tried to monitor usage activities, there would be enough users like me to break the security model completely...
Because the AARP is one of the most powerful lobbying groups there is, and they fight tooth and nail against anything that even resembles competency testing.
Which is quite ironic, considering who we're talking about here
Really? Can counter-rotating flywheels store as much energy as 1900 tons of rocket fuel?
In theory, sure. In reality, probably not... but that's not the point. The point is that you need some sort of high capacity energy storage medium to make electromagnetic propulsion feasible. And in this case we're not trying to bring up energy to slow down... we're using the relative velocity of the ship in the earth's magnetic field to CREATE energy, decreasing that velocity.
After that, do with that energy what you will. Fire it out of a laser for propulsion or communications, use it to crack CO2 into oxygen, run a forward-pointing ion engine, make your tv dinners. Doesn't really matter. Though the ion engine and the laser are my two favorite options.
The point of the counter rotating flywheel is, if you've gotta store the energy anyways, why not store it in a form that also provides you dynamic attitude control for (practically) free? And in this case the cost isn't propellent gases, but electrical system losses... that same electricity you're skimming out of the earth's magnetic field in the first place...
If you can find a Microsoftie that personally saw such a shirt or button (and not the one mentioned in the article) I'll give you my copy of Duke Nukem Forever
Are all of the puzzles tetris-ish? Is it possible to play the game without doing any puzzles?
Can anyone offer some of their experience with it?
while there are a few dropping blocks puzzles, I would hesitate to call them tetris-ish. The main puzzle for swabbies, sailing, is very reminiscent of Dr. Mario, however.
I've found the puzzles to be quite varied and engaging.
It is not possible to play the game without doing any puzzles. Practically any task you want to do is based on a puzzle. And how well you do on the puzzle is reflected, both in how productive you were at the task, and in your personal reputation in the game.
Though you can freelance, a lot of people join a crew. Whether you've joined a crew or not, there are temporary crew positions open pretty much all the time. However if you are not in a permanent crew, you can't become an officer, which means no ships for you.
A ship needs a crew of from 6 to about 30 to operate. Any spots not filled by a person can be filled by a (generally average) AI bot, at the discretion of the captain. There are three main duties on a ship, sailing, bilging, and carpentry. In addition, you have the more advanced duties of gunning and navigation. I would highly recommend going on a naval ship to practice gunning as that's a skill that's in high demand, especially since if you need someone to gun on a ship, you need them to do it well. Kind of a chicken and egg problem.
Landside there are plenty of crafting type puzzles to do. Most pirates have a few landside jobs as well as their piratical duties. In fact, the economy is based on it. I personally love distilling.
There are a few versus mode puzzles, swordfighting and the drinking game can be played for a wager (swordfighting is also played between two ships when one intercepts the other) plus there's some in-game card games.
I've been a subscriber for a few months, logging on maybe twice a week. Every time I go in it seems like they've improved a part of the game. Updates are frequent, but relatively speedy over my broadband connection.
P.S. I'm Mrln in the game if anyone wants to say hi real quick.
I wonder how susceptible this sail would be to space dust, meteorites and space junk?
Not that susceptible. You design it to tear on impact, leaving an impact hole only marginally larger than the impact object.
This sail isn't like a wind sail; wind sails work off of a pressurized fluid, which will tend to flow through holes and tears, meaning even a small tear can greatly effect efficiency.
This sail works off of photon pressure, which does not flow like a fluid, so a small hole means you only lose thrust in proportion to the area of the hole...
So you're going faster than any interplanetary craft to date, and your only propulsion system requires you to be moving away from the sun (or the Earth, if they're using a laser to push you)
As I've previously discussed on slashdot, you do not need to be moving outward from your energy source in a solar sail, you can achieve thrust vectors in any direction from full away to orthogonal (perpendicular for the 2D vector peeps)
And orbital mechanics isn't of the form of "thrust straight at where you want to go" it's more like "thrust in the direction of orbit to move away from primary, thrust against the direction of orbit to move towards primary"
The only time a solar sail would even find it efficient to thrust directly away from the inner solar system is if it was an interstellar sail, after it reached escape velocity... before then thrust away from the primary doesn't change the mean orbit distance, it changes the eccentricity of the orbit.
The trick to doing it with wax is to hold the entire sample at the freezing point and let it cool slowly enough that the thermal energy has time to move through the system and be very nearly equal when those last few calories of heat are removed and the phase change occurs. You want the phase change to be a smooth continuous travelling wave. The barrier to that is that solids have different heat conductivities than liquids, when you try to remove too much heat at once, you remove from a continuous area, then the phase change stops while conduction does it's thing, you get a very staccato rhythym, and that's where the ripples come from.
Yeah the electromagnetic engine is simple too; a mile steel cable was used in the tests. You put electricity into it, you speed up (w.r.t the earth's magnetic field), you take electricity out of it, you slow down.
Think if it as being kind of like the regenerative braking systems on hybrid / electric cars...
You are right in thinking that the delta v would be low. But just like you can increase an electromagnetic motor's force by adding more windings of wire, you could increase this system's effectiveness by adding more cables.
And for energy storage, you can use counter-rotating flywheels and get rid of all the gyros and whatnot that the shuttle uses for attitude correction.
ok that was in jest. But seriously, how much good is a field manual going to do you when its possible for handheld computers to encrypt data to such a strong degree that it's theoretically impossible to decrypt with any likelihood of success that's indistinguishable from zero in the lifetime of the universe?
I mean even if the guys at the NSA use different theories from the rest of us, I can only imagine that the methods they use still require vast amounts of hardware...
Have you seen the rocket boosters they use to launch the shuttles? They'd need the same boosters to slow it down again. And then they'd need way, way bigger rockets just to lift those boosters into orbit in the first place. The total amount of fuel required is staggering.
Not necessarily. Electromagnetic braking against the earth's field is possible. There are some practical limitations to the technology right now... but we've only tried it once! The biggest barrier is making it efficient enough to make a big difference in the entry velocity. The second biggest is figuring out what to do with all that energy you're creating, though since it's already high voltage a forward-pointing ion engine might be a possibility.
The third problem is resistive wire heating. If we could make a spoolable paintable superconducting wire, we could solve that easily too. Why paintable? Give it white paint to reflect sunlight and you can probably keep it at liquid nitrogen temperatures with a moderate heatsink system...
The bottom line is, shopping on price isn't the best in this industry. Shop on philosophy. Find a development organisation that obviously has your best interests at heart. Call previous clients and references.
As far as the low end of the spectrum, let me put it this way, you need to charge 3 times your people's salary to turn a profit in this industry. That's not a hard and fast rule but its about right. So if you've got a bid that looks to be about $30 an hour, the question you need to ask yourself, is why are their programmers willing to work for $10/hour?
On the other side of the fence, there's a lot of corruption and gouging in this industry too. And a lot of big companies that couldn't care less whether you come back for more business or not later. Don't assume just because someone's charging you $100,000 for a website that you're going to get a website worth $100,000 when you're done.
I don't know how to solve it... One of the approaches I've seen is to hire multiple outsourcers; hire the one with the best project team to do the work, and hire a different one to provide project oversight for you. There are obviously some conflict of interest issues here but if you can manage those, it should provide pretty good benchmarks and performance measurements that, if you could do it yourself, you wouldn't need to outsource...
This also raised the all-important "Why do we even have that button?" question.
Those buttons are generally maintenance devices; it's usually less of a button and more of a keyswitch though. So the guy comes in to service something, he needs to know that no power is anywhere in there, so he removes the key and keeps it in his pocket. Now he knows he's safe.
I like to think of us as one of the good guys. We try to do what's right for the client every time, not necessarily what's right for our bottom line.
At what point do you consider they may have just ripped you off, and how do you know when to file complaints and withhold payment
If you're asking yourself that, it's time to withhold payment and start addressing your concerns. I would recommend an e-mail to them, then a third party arbitrator, then court.
And some of these points have been mentioned here but this is my general advice when it comes to outsourcing:
1. You get what you pay for. We've been told by our clients that we charge nearly 3 times as much as some of our competitors. We've also been told that it's worth that to them to know the project is going to be done on time and to spec.
2. You own all project collateral, and payment is contingent on receiving it. This should be a contractual agreement before work is started.
3. Requirements should be clear and measurable. No requirements should be implicit.
4. Most outsourcers right shitty code. The Gartner Group estimates that 90% of the cost of an application comes after its initial release. Writing good code can greatly reduce that cost. But the economical reality is if I give you a project estimate that costs 4 times as much and will take 150% as long as the other guys, you are more likely to accept their contract. Even if, in the long run, you'd probably be better off going with us. How do you mitigate this risk? Meet the developers, talk to them, understand their viewpoints. And do code reviews. Unfortunately there's no objective way to say that a piece of code is good or not. However there's no reason you couldn't make it a contractual obligation that their code has to pass an internal code quality and standards audit before payment.
A good outsourcer will require you to sign an End User Acceptance Test Approval or some such document at the end of the project; if they don't, require that they do. And don't sign it (or pay them) until you're satisfied that all project collateral has been received, that all the requirements have been satisfied, and that the code passes your quality standards.
You would be surprised how many times we bid on a project, lose it to the lowest bidder, and then a few years later hear from that same company again because the relationship went south and the person's code is completely unmaintainable. Many times they end up paying us to rebuild the app at that point...
Slashdot Mirror
Is that it is (like nearly every other system out there) an economical system; it's all about supply and demand.
I this case there's a supply of plenty of clocks. There's an (existing) demand for a certain level of performance; if the supply outstrips that demand, then the supply is devalued, and consequently the programmers don't spend as much time conserving that resource.
Or to put it another way, programs behave like a gas with respect to responsiveness and user expectation; they expand to fill the available space.
Or to reword it another way (quoting from the article): computers are, in fact, doing more than they used to. A lot of the things computers do are fairly subtle, happening beneath the radar of a user's perception. Many functions are automatic and, as discussed in last month's column, you could probably do without some of them.
a dual core architecture is two processors on the same chip, which should theoretically double the computing power.
And in true multithreaded apps that might even be possible. But the sad reality is that the number of instructions you can run per second in the real world is related more to how many bits you can move in and out of the processor than the actual speed of the processor.
Most instructions can be executed in a handful of clocks. adding AND multiplying can generally be done in the same clock. On some procs you can add in ZERO clocks (that's how the add+multiply in one clock trick is accomplished)
So for maximum performance, you need a memory bus that can keep up with that demand. But we're seeing multi-GHz processors on sub-GHz memory buses.
Screw dual core. Give me dual-bus!!!!!!!
I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet.
Absolutely none. I feel perfectly safe with anything we can possibly do to Mars as far into the foreseeable future as possible.
You know why?
I don't live there.
That gives you a lot of room for experimentation.
Mars' only value to me, other than scientific curiosity, at this point in time is as a future liveable planet. Which value can only be realized by terraforming. Therefore any terraforming plan which seems at all likely is not only "safe" from my perspective, but "valuable" as well.
My only caution is one I tell my project manager when we're moving code into production; have a rollback plan, just in case.
What a stupid patent! This is why patents should not be allowed to exist in software.
No, this is why patent examiners for software patents should be required to have a certain amount of knowledge of the current state of the art in the field...
Use 802.11 or wired networking within each greenhouse with bridges between.
The bridges can be a variety of technologies depending on the needs and setup. Visible light / infrared / laser repeaters are pretty good for line of sight apps but have problems in extremely severe weather.
The cantennas are a good choice. From all accounts homemade can be as good as commercial easily, if you build them with precision. Just use wired to 802.11 bridges, set each bridge to a different channel. If you use wireless inside the greenhouses, that whole network is on one channel with the same SSID. That way any mobile devices have only one network configuration to worry about.
for your transmitters I would highly recommend a commercial two antenna router for any greenhouse that can transmit to two different locations; I'm assuming the greenhouses aren't all in a line but spread apart across a property, in which case you want a tree-style hierarchy. The fewer transmission points the more reliable the whole network...
Total you're talking about three to four thousand in equipment, and that's if you buy consumer grade wireless equipment and make your own cantennas. For receiving the network traffic from another greenhouse there are wireless ethernet bridges available for about $80. I believe Linksys makes one specifically for gaming consoles, that has an antenna input. Not sure if it can do WEP or not. A slightly more attractive option is diskless Linux routers with wireless receivers. Customize a LiveCD, give each one an IDE-Flash adapter and use a small Flash card for configuration information. Use Mini-ITX boards with DC-DC power supplies if you do it... those can be made totally fanless and somewhat ruggedized for the condition they're in. I'm not sure if greenhouses are this way, but I know a lot of industrial facilities have 12V DC power as well as line power, so you might even be able to save on the AC-DC bricks to convert 120V down.
You can build a diskless fanless headless Mini-ITX computer for $200 - $250. The advantage is if you want to run a VPN or something like that and completely not have to worry about wireless security, it's possible with these devices. And in the future with some minor instrumentation purchases, each device can monitor temperature, humidity, whatever might be important throughout the greenhouses and report to a monitoring application...
if it can light up an LED with the juice it's pouring into the air, what else might it be doing that we're not aware of yet?
Did you even bother to look at the prototype? It's mostly battery. I mean come on, you click the link, and there is ONE, count them ONE image on that page.
Let's not make fear inciting "radiation is bad" posts without AT LEAST reading the story first? Just a suggestion...
So, if you habitually browse armadillo porn, the system will know about it. And if you go a day *without* browsing armadillo porn, the system will think something's up and lock you out.
But do you really want the system to record the fact that you browse armadillo porn?
More importantly do you want to feel compelled to compulsively look at armadillo porn daily out of fear that if you don't it'll raise a red flag and you'll be "caught with your pants down"
That's a funny phrase to use here considering that you're getting caught for NOT looking at porn...
that monitors usage activities and alerts suspicious activity seems like a good idea...
But think about it. How often do your usage patterns change. I might be an atypical user, but my network packets don't keep the same pattern for now; I have a meta pattern that shifts every new project. This week I've been exchanging a lot of packets with our file server, talking with source safe, access databases, and collaborative UML modelling.
Last week nearly all my packets were terminal services to the production environment for one of my clients.
The week before that I was almost pure database.
I think if you tried to monitor usage activities, there would be enough users like me to break the security model completely...
Because the AARP is one of the most powerful lobbying groups there is, and they fight tooth and nail against anything that even resembles competency testing.
Which is quite ironic, considering who we're talking about here
Really? Can counter-rotating flywheels store as much energy as 1900 tons of rocket fuel?
In theory, sure. In reality, probably not... but that's not the point. The point is that you need some sort of high capacity energy storage medium to make electromagnetic propulsion feasible. And in this case we're not trying to bring up energy to slow down... we're using the relative velocity of the ship in the earth's magnetic field to CREATE energy, decreasing that velocity.
After that, do with that energy what you will. Fire it out of a laser for propulsion or communications, use it to crack CO2 into oxygen, run a forward-pointing ion engine, make your tv dinners. Doesn't really matter. Though the ion engine and the laser are my two favorite options.
The point of the counter rotating flywheel is, if you've gotta store the energy anyways, why not store it in a form that also provides you dynamic attitude control for (practically) free? And in this case the cost isn't propellent gases, but electrical system losses... that same electricity you're skimming out of the earth's magnetic field in the first place...
ask any Microsoftie about the "FYIFV" buttons that early employees wore when their options suddenly made them millionaires
7 30
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/7/16/13635/2
If you can find a Microsoftie that personally saw such a shirt or button (and not the one mentioned in the article) I'll give you my copy of Duke Nukem Forever
oic.
Jokes and frogs have one thing in common...
Are all of the puzzles tetris-ish? Is it possible to play the game without doing any puzzles?
Can anyone offer some of their experience with it?
while there are a few dropping blocks puzzles, I would hesitate to call them tetris-ish. The main puzzle for swabbies, sailing, is very reminiscent of Dr. Mario, however.
I've found the puzzles to be quite varied and engaging.
It is not possible to play the game without doing any puzzles. Practically any task you want to do is based on a puzzle. And how well you do on the puzzle is reflected, both in how productive you were at the task, and in your personal reputation in the game.
Though you can freelance, a lot of people join a crew. Whether you've joined a crew or not, there are temporary crew positions open pretty much all the time. However if you are not in a permanent crew, you can't become an officer, which means no ships for you.
A ship needs a crew of from 6 to about 30 to operate. Any spots not filled by a person can be filled by a (generally average) AI bot, at the discretion of the captain. There are three main duties on a ship, sailing, bilging, and carpentry. In addition, you have the more advanced duties of gunning and navigation. I would highly recommend going on a naval ship to practice gunning as that's a skill that's in high demand, especially since if you need someone to gun on a ship, you need them to do it well. Kind of a chicken and egg problem.
Landside there are plenty of crafting type puzzles to do. Most pirates have a few landside jobs as well as their piratical duties. In fact, the economy is based on it. I personally love distilling.
There are a few versus mode puzzles, swordfighting and the drinking game can be played for a wager (swordfighting is also played between two ships when one intercepts the other) plus there's some in-game card games.
I've been a subscriber for a few months, logging on maybe twice a week. Every time I go in it seems like they've improved a part of the game. Updates are frequent, but relatively speedy over my broadband connection.
P.S. I'm Mrln in the game if anyone wants to say hi real quick.
Well, a tear in a windsail actually effects INefficiency, which is another way of saying that it greatly affects efficiency.
Efficiency = amount of input energy applied to doing useful work
Inefficiency = amount of input energy not applied to doing useful work
Anything that affects one will affect the other equally...
Your statement is like saying "a stove burner affects cold, which is another way of saying that it greatly affects heat."
I wonder how susceptible this sail would be to space dust, meteorites and space junk?
Not that susceptible. You design it to tear on impact, leaving an impact hole only marginally larger than the impact object.
This sail isn't like a wind sail; wind sails work off of a pressurized fluid, which will tend to flow through holes and tears, meaning even a small tear can greatly effect efficiency.
This sail works off of photon pressure, which does not flow like a fluid, so a small hole means you only lose thrust in proportion to the area of the hole...
So you're going faster than any interplanetary craft to date, and your only propulsion system requires you to be moving away from the sun (or the Earth, if they're using a laser to push you)
As I've previously discussed on slashdot, you do not need to be moving outward from your energy source in a solar sail, you can achieve thrust vectors in any direction from full away to orthogonal (perpendicular for the 2D vector peeps)
And orbital mechanics isn't of the form of "thrust straight at where you want to go" it's more like "thrust in the direction of orbit to move away from primary, thrust against the direction of orbit to move towards primary"
The only time a solar sail would even find it efficient to thrust directly away from the inner solar system is if it was an interstellar sail, after it reached escape velocity... before then thrust away from the primary doesn't change the mean orbit distance, it changes the eccentricity of the orbit.
The trick to doing it with wax is to hold the entire sample at the freezing point and let it cool slowly enough that the thermal energy has time to move through the system and be very nearly equal when those last few calories of heat are removed and the phase change occurs. You want the phase change to be a smooth continuous travelling wave. The barrier to that is that solids have different heat conductivities than liquids, when you try to remove too much heat at once, you remove from a continuous area, then the phase change stops while conduction does it's thing, you get a very staccato rhythym, and that's where the ripples come from.
Next time they'll find most Roman emperors died of Occupational Overuse Syndrome because they kept using their thumbs on gladiators or lions.
It can be assumed that using your thumb on a lion, in any manner, is an inherently dangerous activity...
Yeah the electromagnetic engine is simple too; a mile steel cable was used in the tests. You put electricity into it, you speed up (w.r.t the earth's magnetic field), you take electricity out of it, you slow down.
Think if it as being kind of like the regenerative braking systems on hybrid / electric cars...
You are right in thinking that the delta v would be low. But just like you can increase an electromagnetic motor's force by adding more windings of wire, you could increase this system's effectiveness by adding more cables.
And for energy storage, you can use counter-rotating flywheels and get rid of all the gyros and whatnot that the shuttle uses for attitude correction.
Step 1. Build a quantum factoring computer
ok that was in jest. But seriously, how much good is a field manual going to do you when its possible for handheld computers to encrypt data to such a strong degree that it's theoretically impossible to decrypt with any likelihood of success that's indistinguishable from zero in the lifetime of the universe?
I mean even if the guys at the NSA use different theories from the rest of us, I can only imagine that the methods they use still require vast amounts of hardware...
Have you seen the rocket boosters they use to launch the shuttles? They'd need the same boosters to slow it down again. And then they'd need way, way bigger rockets just to lift those boosters into orbit in the first place. The total amount of fuel required is staggering.
Not necessarily. Electromagnetic braking against the earth's field is possible. There are some practical limitations to the technology right now... but we've only tried it once! The biggest barrier is making it efficient enough to make a big difference in the entry velocity. The second biggest is figuring out what to do with all that energy you're creating, though since it's already high voltage a forward-pointing ion engine might be a possibility.
The third problem is resistive wire heating. If we could make a spoolable paintable superconducting wire, we could solve that easily too. Why paintable? Give it white paint to reflect sunlight and you can probably keep it at liquid nitrogen temperatures with a moderate heatsink system...
Actually that happens fairly often too.
The bottom line is, shopping on price isn't the best in this industry. Shop on philosophy. Find a development organisation that obviously has your best interests at heart. Call previous clients and references.
As far as the low end of the spectrum, let me put it this way, you need to charge 3 times your people's salary to turn a profit in this industry. That's not a hard and fast rule but its about right. So if you've got a bid that looks to be about $30 an hour, the question you need to ask yourself, is why are their programmers willing to work for $10/hour?
On the other side of the fence, there's a lot of corruption and gouging in this industry too. And a lot of big companies that couldn't care less whether you come back for more business or not later. Don't assume just because someone's charging you $100,000 for a website that you're going to get a website worth $100,000 when you're done.
I don't know how to solve it... One of the approaches I've seen is to hire multiple outsourcers; hire the one with the best project team to do the work, and hire a different one to provide project oversight for you. There are obviously some conflict of interest issues here but if you can manage those, it should provide pretty good benchmarks and performance measurements that, if you could do it yourself, you wouldn't need to outsource...
This also raised the all-important "Why do we even have that button?" question.
Those buttons are generally maintenance devices; it's usually less of a button and more of a keyswitch though. So the guy comes in to service something, he needs to know that no power is anywhere in there, so he removes the key and keeps it in his pocket. Now he knows he's safe.
I like to think of us as one of the good guys. We try to do what's right for the client every time, not necessarily what's right for our bottom line.
At what point do you consider they may have just ripped you off, and how do you know when to file complaints and withhold payment
If you're asking yourself that, it's time to withhold payment and start addressing your concerns. I would recommend an e-mail to them, then a third party arbitrator, then court.
And some of these points have been mentioned here but this is my general advice when it comes to outsourcing:
1. You get what you pay for. We've been told by our clients that we charge nearly 3 times as much as some of our competitors. We've also been told that it's worth that to them to know the project is going to be done on time and to spec.
2. You own all project collateral, and payment is contingent on receiving it. This should be a contractual agreement before work is started.
3. Requirements should be clear and measurable. No requirements should be implicit.
4. Most outsourcers right shitty code. The Gartner Group estimates that 90% of the cost of an application comes after its initial release. Writing good code can greatly reduce that cost. But the economical reality is if I give you a project estimate that costs 4 times as much and will take 150% as long as the other guys, you are more likely to accept their contract. Even if, in the long run, you'd probably be better off going with us. How do you mitigate this risk? Meet the developers, talk to them, understand their viewpoints. And do code reviews. Unfortunately there's no objective way to say that a piece of code is good or not. However there's no reason you couldn't make it a contractual obligation that their code has to pass an internal code quality and standards audit before payment.
A good outsourcer will require you to sign an End User Acceptance Test Approval or some such document at the end of the project; if they don't, require that they do. And don't sign it (or pay them) until you're satisfied that all project collateral has been received, that all the requirements have been satisfied, and that the code passes your quality standards.
You would be surprised how many times we bid on a project, lose it to the lowest bidder, and then a few years later hear from that same company again because the relationship went south and the person's code is completely unmaintainable. Many times they end up paying us to rebuild the app at that point...
Actually, I've switched to Gmail web access nearly exclusively for my personal mail.
:)
The yahoo and hotmail accounts are pretty much just for mailing lists these days.