While there is truth in what you are saying on complexity, as someone who has invested a lot of time understanding why Bosch has some fuel pumps failing in a non-passive fashion on stationary engines... there are a lot of assumptions built in, and many problems are only found by trial and error.
What you give up in central generation is security of availability. On-site generation can do wonders for improving your electrical reliability if done correctly. Unfortunately, these fuel cell systems almost uniformly do not support islanding, so they don't do much good there... but there are ways around that.
A fuel cell is useless for backup power; it takes 4-8 hours to get up to temperature depending on the size and technology. Incremental size increases for a diesel engine are a rounding error.
Companies are doing this in anticipation of carbon offsets and to tell their shareholders that they are working to be more green. Occasionally, you can do something useful with the "waste heat" from the units which makes them slightly more attractive... but not often.
It means that they need to phase out copper over the next 10 years, effectively. From where I sit, the telcos should be planning to do this anyway; all that mandating it does is reduce the artificial scarcity argument.
In many ways it is easier to do for a small community than a large city; more organizations are capable of providing service to a small community. The problem with major telcos is that for similar effort (due to their overhead structure), they can provide service to 2-3x customers at a 30% higher margin.
The artificial barriers to entry that prevent a local co-op, city council, or entrepreneur from pulling it off are the main problems.
Using your example, a dedicated camera is clearly better, but which do people use to take more photos? The iPad will fall into the same category: great at some things and good enough at others.
The colo can have a number of benefits, but from a cost and complexity perspective it will fail. 2x20kW UPSs with a transfer switch for each rack will pay for itself in under a year. The only exception to this is if you need a backup generator and are in a leased, multi-level building. Then the payback period might hit 3-5 years, especially if you can get cheap gigabit links to a colo.
How many organizations pay for google for domains? It started as a 25-user cap, but they will up the free limit to 100 just for asking. I don't think they are charging educational institutions either.
Likewise, how many search appliances do they sell, or any of their fee-based services? They don't make a dent in revenue.
As a stockholder, I wish they could capitalize on more than just advertising, but haven't seen it yet.
Every time I think of textbook debates, I think back to "What would the Tasady do?"
There was a lengthy chapter on the Tasady in my 4th grade social studies textbook. In 9th grade I learned that it was just an invention of Ferdinand Marcos' regime that fooled researchers for a little over a decade.
The goal of school should be learning to learn, and learning to think through an issue or problem.
Have you tried the Pilot G2 pens? Hands down, best writing utensil in my book. The fountain pens are a pain from a practicality sense. The gel pens work better.
Over theyears, you learn what info the government collects. For anybody who makes the majority of their money by means other than W2, there are plenty of ways to game the system. That flexibility is needed, as expenses offset the income.
That class of people are also pretty well screwed by the system, increasing incentives to cheat. Knowing how the system works facilitates this...
Depending on who you are, an Intel may very well bring you back to a suite to show you new things.
Trade shows are in decline because of the challenges here: The big players have less of an incentive to do them (as they can make their own events), and for the smaller guys, the ROI just doesn't warrant the expense.
One of the kludges you see with 2-digit input years is assuming that if a number is less than x, you add 2000 to the number for the correct year; else add 1900 for correct year. People (apparently) assumed that by 2010 all the Y2K kludges will be worked around... or just didn't care.
BCD issues are also much more common than I (as a non-programmer) would have ever expected.
More importantly, how do you deal with the fact that humid air is lighter than dry air? You would need one hell of a temperature difference to overcome that fact...
A mile up, you would be lucky to find air that is 60F and 10% RH, which would be about 13.25 cubic feet per lb dry air +8 grains. If you fully saturate it by evaporating water, you only end up with 53F air and you have added 52 grains of water...
Wow... if I continue to fly 100k miles per year for the next 30 years I stand a 1:3800 chance on being on a plane with a terrorist incident! And here I thought I was safe!
To expand on that relative to GP's bickering, as an adblock/flashblock/noscript user I do appreciate reasonably balanced advertising. The only cost is my eyeballs, and sometimes the information is actually useful.
Newspaper advertising is too expensive relative to the value it provides. This is dangerous for newspapers and sites like Monster where they have long been able to charge a significant premium due to limited access.
If they want to be able to charge a premium (relative to Craigslist), they had better offer an improved product.
I'd have to disagree on this one; true the legal protection is almost negligible, but the formality of an S-Corp helps to simplify some things and keep personal and business finance separate. If you have a 50%+ net margin and less than $200k in gross income, maybe it would make sense... but anything that you can't keep track of on a single sheet of paper really needs the formality.
Meeting minutes for a C or S corp are actually more important than one would expect. You are always asked to provide them for things like a line of credit or even some business certifications. Meeting minutes shouldn't really tell anything, just be a record of having a meeting. Corporations are required to have periodic meetings... and the meeting minutes are there to prove you met that obligation. (You also need to issue notice of meeting or waiver of notice documents as well...) Having everything electronic makes it easier... but the format is irrelevant.
NoLo have several books that are marginally useful for this; "Legal Forms for Starting & Running a Small Business is staring at me from the shelf across the office. They were helpful for us in our 6-months to a year, but that is about it. (You grow out of that kind of stuff pretty quickly.)
The most cost-effective way we have found to deal with this stuff (if your time is worth anything) is to out-source it. Send your W2s and 1099's through ADP and the like. Small regional banks will often give you deals in doing payroll through them-- it really goes to the big guys for processing. Or, have an accountant do it. Big leap of faith for a bunch of Type-A's like ourselves, but a hell of a lot easier than doing it yourself (and safer).
One of the biggest hassles for us was actually developing our document templates, but we found someone who would do it for us on a contract basis and make it fairly pain-free.
We haven't made the jump yet to an outsourced HR department, but there are a number of things that really get tricky over time. Just today the question was if you pay part-time employees for holidays. We wasted about $3k paying people we didn't need to this year.
New here? It is a glider, changing bouyancy to go up and down, and using the lift of it's wings to provide horizontal motion. I understand it has a small prop to generate power for the electronics and hydraulics.
If you have project deliverables that require OT, good luck with that. The least qualified are the first to go when you scale back after a deadline, and people with your attitude generally fit that bill.
Scheduled, long-term OT doesn't get anything done, but to keep your workforce utilization up it is unlikely that you won't have 90% utilization 3/4 of the year, and 110-115% for the balance....And then there is the challenge of finding the right people with the right skills and attitudes to build a team over the long-haul. You don't want to hire un/underqualified people, so until you get the right people (and get them up to speed) you might need to get OT from your team.
Furthermore, customers can actually benefit from using their phone beyond the mortgage period! The current system is designed to scam consumers, as you pay the same price for service if you bring your phone or get one subsidized by the carrier.
An early termination clause is reasonable for some non-subsidy costs, but since they already charge you an activation fee, it is pretty hard for me to believe there is residual customer acquisition costs. (Customer retention costs should not be paid by a departing customer...!)
Slashdot Mirror
While there is truth in what you are saying on complexity, as someone who has invested a lot of time understanding why Bosch has some fuel pumps failing in a non-passive fashion on stationary engines... there are a lot of assumptions built in, and many problems are only found by trial and error.
What you give up in central generation is security of availability. On-site generation can do wonders for improving your electrical reliability if done correctly. Unfortunately, these fuel cell systems almost uniformly do not support islanding, so they don't do much good there... but there are ways around that.
A fuel cell is useless for backup power; it takes 4-8 hours to get up to temperature depending on the size and technology. Incremental size increases for a diesel engine are a rounding error.
Companies are doing this in anticipation of carbon offsets and to tell their shareholders that they are working to be more green. Occasionally, you can do something useful with the "waste heat" from the units which makes them slightly more attractive... but not often.
It means that they need to phase out copper over the next 10 years, effectively. From where I sit, the telcos should be planning to do this anyway; all that mandating it does is reduce the artificial scarcity argument.
In many ways it is easier to do for a small community than a large city; more organizations are capable of providing service to a small community. The problem with major telcos is that for similar effort (due to their overhead structure), they can provide service to 2-3x customers at a 30% higher margin.
The artificial barriers to entry that prevent a local co-op, city council, or entrepreneur from pulling it off are the main problems.
Using your example, a dedicated camera is clearly better, but which do people use to take more photos? The iPad will fall into the same category: great at some things and good enough at others.
e-ink is good in many ways, but far from perfect.
The colo can have a number of benefits, but from a cost and complexity perspective it will fail. 2x20kW UPSs with a transfer switch for each rack will pay for itself in under a year. The only exception to this is if you need a backup generator and are in a leased, multi-level building. Then the payback period might hit 3-5 years, especially if you can get cheap gigabit links to a colo.
How many organizations pay for google for domains? It started as a 25-user cap, but they will up the free limit to 100 just for asking. I don't think they are charging educational institutions either.
Likewise, how many search appliances do they sell, or any of their fee-based services? They don't make a dent in revenue.
As a stockholder, I wish they could capitalize on more than just advertising, but haven't seen it yet.
Every time I think of textbook debates, I think back to "What would the Tasady do?"
There was a lengthy chapter on the Tasady in my 4th grade social studies textbook. In 9th grade I learned that it was just an invention of Ferdinand Marcos' regime that fooled researchers for a little over a decade.
The goal of school should be learning to learn, and learning to think through an issue or problem.
Have you tried the Pilot G2 pens? Hands down, best writing utensil in my book. The fountain pens are a pain from a practicality sense. The gel pens work better.
Just a shame the "digital pens" aren't gel.
Over theyears, you learn what info the government collects. For anybody who makes the majority of their money by means other than W2, there are plenty of ways to game the system. That flexibility is needed, as expenses offset the income.
That class of people are also pretty well screwed by the system, increasing incentives to cheat. Knowing how the system works facilitates this...
Depending on who you are, an Intel may very well bring you back to a suite to show you new things.
Trade shows are in decline because of the challenges here: The big players have less of an incentive to do them (as they can make their own events), and for the smaller guys, the ROI just doesn't warrant the expense.
...so, what do you do when you wrote a program on a 32-bit platform 10 years ago, and it is still running?
One of the kludges you see with 2-digit input years is assuming that if a number is less than x, you add 2000 to the number for the correct year; else add 1900 for correct year. People (apparently) assumed that by 2010 all the Y2K kludges will be worked around... or just didn't care.
BCD issues are also much more common than I (as a non-programmer) would have ever expected.
More importantly, how do you deal with the fact that humid air is lighter than dry air? You would need one hell of a temperature difference to overcome that fact...
A mile up, you would be lucky to find air that is 60F and 10% RH, which would be about 13.25 cubic feet per lb dry air +8 grains. If you fully saturate it by evaporating water, you only end up with 53F air and you have added 52 grains of water...
Credit reporting agencies would be a better example.
Wow... if I continue to fly 100k miles per year for the next 30 years I stand a 1:3800 chance on being on a plane with a terrorist incident! And here I thought I was safe!
To expand on that relative to GP's bickering, as an adblock/flashblock/noscript user I do appreciate reasonably balanced advertising. The only cost is my eyeballs, and sometimes the information is actually useful.
Newspaper advertising is too expensive relative to the value it provides. This is dangerous for newspapers and sites like Monster where they have long been able to charge a significant premium due to limited access.
If they want to be able to charge a premium (relative to Craigslist), they had better offer an improved product.
Hey, why do you have to bully Mikey?
I'd have to disagree on this one; true the legal protection is almost negligible, but the formality of an S-Corp helps to simplify some things and keep personal and business finance separate. If you have a 50%+ net margin and less than $200k in gross income, maybe it would make sense... but anything that you can't keep track of on a single sheet of paper really needs the formality.
Meeting minutes for a C or S corp are actually more important than one would expect. You are always asked to provide them for things like a line of credit or even some business certifications. Meeting minutes shouldn't really tell anything, just be a record of having a meeting. Corporations are required to have periodic meetings... and the meeting minutes are there to prove you met that obligation. (You also need to issue notice of meeting or waiver of notice documents as well...) Having everything electronic makes it easier... but the format is irrelevant.
NoLo have several books that are marginally useful for this; "Legal Forms for Starting & Running a Small Business is staring at me from the shelf across the office. They were helpful for us in our 6-months to a year, but that is about it. (You grow out of that kind of stuff pretty quickly.)
The most cost-effective way we have found to deal with this stuff (if your time is worth anything) is to out-source it. Send your W2s and 1099's through ADP and the like. Small regional banks will often give you deals in doing payroll through them-- it really goes to the big guys for processing. Or, have an accountant do it. Big leap of faith for a bunch of Type-A's like ourselves, but a hell of a lot easier than doing it yourself (and safer).
One of the biggest hassles for us was actually developing our document templates, but we found someone who would do it for us on a contract basis and make it fairly pain-free.
We haven't made the jump yet to an outsourced HR department, but there are a number of things that really get tricky over time. Just today the question was if you pay part-time employees for holidays. We wasted about $3k paying people we didn't need to this year.
New here? It is a glider, changing bouyancy to go up and down, and using the lift of it's wings to provide horizontal motion. I understand it has a small prop to generate power for the electronics and hydraulics.
If you have project deliverables that require OT, good luck with that. The least qualified are the first to go when you scale back after a deadline, and people with your attitude generally fit that bill.
Scheduled, long-term OT doesn't get anything done, but to keep your workforce utilization up it is unlikely that you won't have 90% utilization 3/4 of the year, and 110-115% for the balance. ...And then there is the challenge of finding the right people with the right skills and attitudes to build a team over the long-haul. You don't want to hire un/underqualified people, so until you get the right people (and get them up to speed) you might need to get OT from your team.
Furthermore, customers can actually benefit from using their phone beyond the mortgage period! The current system is designed to scam consumers, as you pay the same price for service if you bring your phone or get one subsidized by the carrier.
An early termination clause is reasonable for some non-subsidy costs, but since they already charge you an activation fee, it is pretty hard for me to believe there is residual customer acquisition costs. (Customer retention costs should not be paid by a departing customer...!)