How do you expect Windows to have drivers for hardware that's newer than it? Though things are definitely better now, generally if you can get networking going, head over to Windows Update and it'll figure the rest of the drivers you need and install them for you.
Actually, it probably would have been fine if they just killed the generators when they saw the water coming. Instead the generators were running when they were flooded and thus ruined. The plant had pretty big batteries as another source of back up power, so they would have had plenty of time to wait for the water to recede and restart the generators.
Some of those meters are pretty smart. They could monitor the power factor, and from there they know what kind of load is being drawn (resistive, inductive) and then can guess at what the power is being used for. They could easily tell your electric water heater (resistive load) apart from the air conditioner (inductive load). They could probably figure out whether you primary use CFLs or incandescents for lighting. They can also monitor the different phases so they can tell the 115 V and 230 V loads apart.
As far as I can tell those devices don't report back to the power company whether the load they are controlling is actually drawing power. The power company just cycles a bunch of them at random, and since some of them are bound to be running at the time the power usage goes down. I've seen the box controlling my AC compressor kill the power to it when I didn't even have the AC turned on at the thermostat.
A short snippet of electricity usage may be hard to tell, but keep in mind that the smart meter is monitoring the house 24/7, so it has plenty of time to gather trends. Say for example the electricity usage suddenly spikes around 6:30 am every M-F probably indicates that someone is taking a shower before they go to work at their 8-5 job, and so forth. Though that still assumes an electric water - mine is gas and isn't even hooked to the mains.
Apparently those batteries put out 3.6V. I doubt the device would run off of standard 1.5V D-cells. However, I could probably wire up enough AA cells to get the proper voltage and shove them in there if I had to.
I can't feel too sorry for the employer, as they always have the option of increasing their employee's salary to match market rates. Though typically the people in an organization who realize that someone is about to jump ship for reasons like this aren't the ones who are empowered to do anything about it.
It's pretty obvious that the malware exploited some holes in OS X to get that far. Is there any reason to believe that the installer will suddenly play nice and not exploit more holes to infect the system without having to click on it and provide a password? Pwn2Own pretty much proves that OS X is full of security holes, so the only way to be completely sure is to nuke it and start over.
I've had large items delivered to my work, then swung by with my car after hours to pick them up (I have keycard access). It's more convenient than driving out tho UPS/Fedex facility and I have all evening/night to do it. But it sounds like even that wouldn't work for you.
In a virtual machine, you have the advantage that the host caches the disk image in ram, so hitting the page file is not nearly as penalizing. Try to run Windows 7 on bare metal with 96MB of ram and you'd be in for a completely different experience.
It's probably easier just to leave the camera powered all the time, and just grab images from it when you're interested in looking at it. On the other hand, if it's a laptop it might be worthwhile to be able to turn if off to save a minute or two of battery life.
Nowadays, it can make sense to buy a new car in some situations. The demand for used cars is high due to people cutting back and the supply is low, which means that often the slightly used car is not that much cheaper than the new car. Then there is financing. He mentioned a 0.9% interest rate. You can get something like that on a new car, but the loan terms on a used car usually aren't nearly as good.
The obvious solution, of course, is to turn the machine off when it's not being used. In an office, that will cut the power usage by 2/3 right there. Besides, you really have to count the difference between the new computer and the old computer. Most P4's don't really use that much more power than a modern machine. The gains in efficiency have been eaten up by tacking on more and more cores. The Atom is an exception, but on the other hand the Atom isn't any faster than a P4 anyway.
Also, I have a pretty good feel for how fast a P4 is, because I use them everyday. For running office applications and browsing the web, they are perfectly fine.
It can make sense in some situations. For example, you know how you plan on using your laptop, whereas they can only assume you are going to follow a typical usage pattern. You can use this to your advantage. If you are going to use your laptop for many hours a day, constantly on the go, etc. it's more likely that your laptop will need servicing than the average laptop, so in your case it may make sense to buy a policy that's designed to cover a laptop that will only see "typical" use. Of course, this only works because the warranties only cover a certain amount of time, and not a certain amount of usage, unlike auto warranties which also have a mileage limit.
With that said, I still decline the warranty and take my chances.
I don't think m0n0wall would work well for this. It does track usage on the interfaces, but it does it with a 32-bit unsigned int so the counters roll over at 4GB.
Other than that though, it's a solid firewall/router package.
Depends on the computer you use. I use an old P-IIIE system that draws about 30W. Granted, it's more than a dedicated router, or an Atom system, but it's not that much more and it was free.
Even if you assume that the PC uses 150W constantly (which is high for most P4 systems unless it's loaded down with lots of drives or a high-end graphics card), and is never turned off, you're talking like $10 of electricity every month. Not a big deal deal.
And there is the machines that have some kind of bios limit in them too. I have a P3 that only accepts up to 512MB of ram. It has two memory slots. You can either put in 2 256MB sticks, or one 512MB stick and leave the other slot empty, and it will be happy. The 512MB stick + any thing else and it won't post. Thanks HP.
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How do you expect Windows to have drivers for hardware that's newer than it? Though things are definitely better now, generally if you can get networking going, head over to Windows Update and it'll figure the rest of the drivers you need and install them for you.
Actually, it probably would have been fine if they just killed the generators when they saw the water coming. Instead the generators were running when they were flooded and thus ruined. The plant had pretty big batteries as another source of back up power, so they would have had plenty of time to wait for the water to recede and restart the generators.
Some of those meters are pretty smart. They could monitor the power factor, and from there they know what kind of load is being drawn (resistive, inductive) and then can guess at what the power is being used for. They could easily tell your electric water heater (resistive load) apart from the air conditioner (inductive load). They could probably figure out whether you primary use CFLs or incandescents for lighting. They can also monitor the different phases so they can tell the 115 V and 230 V loads apart.
As far as I can tell those devices don't report back to the power company whether the load they are controlling is actually drawing power. The power company just cycles a bunch of them at random, and since some of them are bound to be running at the time the power usage goes down. I've seen the box controlling my AC compressor kill the power to it when I didn't even have the AC turned on at the thermostat.
A short snippet of electricity usage may be hard to tell, but keep in mind that the smart meter is monitoring the house 24/7, so it has plenty of time to gather trends. Say for example the electricity usage suddenly spikes around 6:30 am every M-F probably indicates that someone is taking a shower before they go to work at their 8-5 job, and so forth. Though that still assumes an electric water - mine is gas and isn't even hooked to the mains.
Apparently those batteries put out 3.6V. I doubt the device would run off of standard 1.5V D-cells. However, I could probably wire up enough AA cells to get the proper voltage and shove them in there if I had to.
As far as I'm aware, the only thing they can't do is have the cameras issue tickets. They can still leave them on to track you if they wanted.
Probably nothing as effective as visually inspecting the underside of your car for strange objects attached to it.
I can't feel too sorry for the employer, as they always have the option of increasing their employee's salary to match market rates. Though typically the people in an organization who realize that someone is about to jump ship for reasons like this aren't the ones who are empowered to do anything about it.
It's pretty obvious that the malware exploited some holes in OS X to get that far. Is there any reason to believe that the installer will suddenly play nice and not exploit more holes to infect the system without having to click on it and provide a password? Pwn2Own pretty much proves that OS X is full of security holes, so the only way to be completely sure is to nuke it and start over.
Speculating is buying something with the intent of selling it later for a profit. Hedging is buying something now to lock in the price.
I've had large items delivered to my work, then swung by with my car after hours to pick them up (I have keycard access). It's more convenient than driving out tho UPS/Fedex facility and I have all evening/night to do it. But it sounds like even that wouldn't work for you.
In a virtual machine, you have the advantage that the host caches the disk image in ram, so hitting the page file is not nearly as penalizing. Try to run Windows 7 on bare metal with 96MB of ram and you'd be in for a completely different experience.
You use yours for an alarm? I have a HP48g, and the clock in it is terrible. It must lose several minutes per month.
Other than that, it's an awesome machine.
It's probably easier just to leave the camera powered all the time, and just grab images from it when you're interested in looking at it. On the other hand, if it's a laptop it might be worthwhile to be able to turn if off to save a minute or two of battery life.
By the time you notice that the light has come on, it's already too late.
Especially the Escalade EXT (for those that don't know, it's the ugly as fuck Chevy Avalanche with a Cadillac badge on it).
Nowadays, it can make sense to buy a new car in some situations. The demand for used cars is high due to people cutting back and the supply is low, which means that often the slightly used car is not that much cheaper than the new car. Then there is financing. He mentioned a 0.9% interest rate. You can get something like that on a new car, but the loan terms on a used car usually aren't nearly as good.
The obvious solution, of course, is to turn the machine off when it's not being used. In an office, that will cut the power usage by 2/3 right there. Besides, you really have to count the difference between the new computer and the old computer. Most P4's don't really use that much more power than a modern machine. The gains in efficiency have been eaten up by tacking on more and more cores. The Atom is an exception, but on the other hand the Atom isn't any faster than a P4 anyway.
Also, I have a pretty good feel for how fast a P4 is, because I use them everyday. For running office applications and browsing the web, they are perfectly fine.
It can make sense in some situations. For example, you know how you plan on using your laptop, whereas they can only assume you are going to follow a typical usage pattern. You can use this to your advantage. If you are going to use your laptop for many hours a day, constantly on the go, etc. it's more likely that your laptop will need servicing than the average laptop, so in your case it may make sense to buy a policy that's designed to cover a laptop that will only see "typical" use. Of course, this only works because the warranties only cover a certain amount of time, and not a certain amount of usage, unlike auto warranties which also have a mileage limit.
With that said, I still decline the warranty and take my chances.
I don't think m0n0wall would work well for this. It does track usage on the interfaces, but it does it with a 32-bit unsigned int so the counters roll over at 4GB.
Other than that though, it's a solid firewall/router package.
Depends on the computer you use. I use an old P-IIIE system that draws about 30W. Granted, it's more than a dedicated router, or an Atom system, but it's not that much more and it was free.
Even if you assume that the PC uses 150W constantly (which is high for most P4 systems unless it's loaded down with lots of drives or a high-end graphics card), and is never turned off, you're talking like $10 of electricity every month. Not a big deal deal.
You'll only find Rambus in P4's up to 2.0Ghz, as that's the fastest Socket 423 P4 they made. A 2.4Ghz is likely DDR, or maybe PC133.
And there is the machines that have some kind of bios limit in them too. I have a P3 that only accepts up to 512MB of ram. It has two memory slots. You can either put in 2 256MB sticks, or one 512MB stick and leave the other slot empty, and it will be happy. The 512MB stick + any thing else and it won't post. Thanks HP.