Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

People check into hotels these days with high expectations. Whether their stay is for business or pleasure, guests want to be able to control their room’s temperature, lighting, and curtains, create a variety of ambiences, and summon services, all with the convenience of a personal device or in-room tablet. Put another way, they are seeking comfort and contentment via a frictionless digital experience. And no matter what their experience is, they are likely to tell the world about it on social media, which can have a huge impact on a hotel’s business. Hoteliers are paying attention – and for good reason. Studies show that issues with guest rooms represent 42% of all hotel complaints and decrease loyalty by more than 11%. On the other hand, if a hotel can increase its review scores by just one point on a five-point scale, it can raise prices by 11.2% and still maintain the same occupancy or market share. Hotel operators know that earning five stars on Google can have as positive an i...

Integrated Power and Process Systems The benefits of integrated power and process systems on capital expenditure savings and on operational expenditure savings are very evident and have been acknowledged by engineering companies as well as by end users equally. Developing Human Capital Human Capital Management is defined as the process of acquiring, training, managing, retaining employees for them to contribute effectively in the processes of the organization. Developing Human Capital is central to most of oil & gas companies. Oil & gas companies roll out many initiatives for the overall development of the workforce that helps employees to keep up with the current technology as well as business and soft skills. In the past 10 years, companies have started to increase the average time and budget allocated for training per employee. Employee training strengthens the workforce and makes it easier for your company to promote internally. You have control over what your employees...

Facing Criticism from All Sides, EU’s Terrible Copyright Amendments Stumble into the New Year Today, EU negotiators in Strasbourg struggled to craft the final language of the Copyright in the Single Digital Market Directive, in their last possible meeting for 2019. They failed, thanks in large part to the Directive’s two most controversial clauses: Article 11, which requires paid licenses for linking to news stories while including more than a word or two; and Article 13, which will lead to the creation of error-prone copyright censorship algorithms that will block users from posting anything that has been identified as a copyrighted work — even if that posting is lawful. This means that the Directive will not be completed, as was expected, under Austria’s presidency of the European Union. The negotiations between the European Parliament, representatives of the member states, and the European Commission (called “trilogues”) will continue under the Romanian presidency, in late Janua...

Gigi Sohn, Renowned Public Advocate and Net Neutrality Pioneer, Joins EFF’s Board EFF is honored to announced that Gigi Sohn , a leading public advocate for the concept that broadband Internet should be open, affordable, and competitive, has joined our board of directors. A lawyer and innovator who has both counseled and stood up to the Federal Communications Commission—albeit not always at the same time—Sohn has fearlessly worked for over 30 years to make U.S. communications networks accessible to all consumers and protective of user privacy.  Gigi has focused throughout her career on defending competition and innovation policies to advance net neutrality and broadband access and affordability. As counselor to former FCC commissioner Tom Wheeler from 2013 to 2016, Gigi played a big role in the FCC’s adoption of the strongest-ever net neutrality rules, earning recognition in the tech press as one of the “Heroes Who Saved the Internet.” Gigi helped co-found Public Knowled...

Privacy Coalition to Congress: Don’t Dismantle Stronger State Data Privacy Laws After years of claiming self-regulation would keep them in line, big tech companies spooked by new state data privacy safeguards are now calling for a national privacy law—one that would roll back these vital state protections . We are one of sixteen consumer privacy and civil rights groups to remind Congress that while we support federal baseline data privacy legislation that provides basic protection for all Americans, such a law must not come at the price of dismantling (or as lawyers say, “preempting”) the legal rights of people who live in states with stronger data privacy protections. State governments across the country have stepped up in the fight to strengthen privacy, with laws that grant their citizens important protections—such as a right to know what personal information companies collect about them ( California ), the right to decide whether to share biometric information with companie...

How HTTPS Everywhere Keeps Protecting Users On An Increasingly Encrypted Web Way back in 2010, we launched our popular browser extension HTTPS Everywhere as part of our effort to encrypt the web . At the time, the need for HTTPS Everywhere to protect browsing sessions was as obvious as the threats were ever-present. The threats may not be as clear now, but HTTPS Everywhere is still as important to users as ever. In 2010, HTTPS Everywhere was a novel extension. It allowed users to automatically use the secure version of websites that offered both insecure HTTP and secure, encrypted HTTPS. Sites such as Google had only recently exposed to users the option to search using HTTPS . Facebook had not yet allowed users to browse the site securely. The dangers of insecure browsing were demonstrated by the powerful browser extension Firesheep , which intercepted HTTP packets and allowed attackers on the same WiFi network as their victims to hijack browsing sessions when logged in to po...

The very first computers used vacuum tube analog technology and gave off tremendous amount of heat. In the 1960’s mainframe computers switched to transistor technology that required many of them to circulate liquid inside the computer to cool them. The super computers of the 70s and 80s (Crays, for example) used complex liquid cooled technology. However, microprocessor technology advancements have led to very high performance at more reasonable heat output. Servers today can be cooled by moving air and rejecting the heat through cooling towers and chillers and do not need liquid in the servers or on the processors to cool. The power profile of mainstream 2U servers has stayed around 150W. This thermal design power (TDP), sometimes called thermal design point, has been in place for roughly the last 10 years. This is because it’s reasonable to get the heat out of a 2U chassis and it’s possible to cool them with traditional data center design of precision cooling technologies. Launch ...

Nearly all household appliances that work with air, water or another fluid, such as dishwashers and vacuums, have a filter that keeps particles from penetrating into the machine’s moving parts. This helps avoid clogging of those parts, as well as the cost and inconvenience of replacing them. What’s more, the filter ensures the machine – like a vacuum cleaner – works as it should. In the case of control cabinets, thermal solutions often have filters. For example, ventilation grilles that let in air may have filters. The same is true for fans and even air conditioners, which in locations with a high rate of pollution need filters to protect their internal mechanisms. The purpose of an air filter in a grid or fan is to ensure that: The air quality flowing into the cabinet meets specifications regarding cleanliness and temperature. The cooling function works, thanks to the entrance of outside air that is cool enough – typically less than or equal to 30 o . The effects of a dirty fi...

At Schneider Electric, we are committed to uncovering new opportunities for energy efficiency and sustainability, and transforming the way our customers manage their most critical resources — from employees’ time and energy to facilities. That’s why we’re excited to announce that Schneider Electric has been named the market leader in the 2017 Navigant Research Leaderboard Report: Energy Service Companies (ESCOs). ESCOs are instrumental in providing access to energy efficiency technologies and services that certain organizations wouldn’t normally be able to afford. How do they do this? A key component for success is the energy savings performance contract (ESPC) model which helps publicly funded organizations make much-needed infrastructure improvements using energy and operational savings that are guaranteed by an ESCO. This means that schools and municipalities can finally tackle the long list of deferred maintenance projects that grows larger each year as budgets continue to shri...

Once upon a time, becoming a billion dollar business was a unique feat, which coincidentally took a little time to achieve. IBM, a global brand formed in 1911, took over 50 years until 1957 to reach over a billion dollars in revenue . Mind you, by then it had survived two world wars, pioneered computing and artificial intelligence, and was growing in leaps and bounds as it emerged as the world’s leading technology company. The internet changed that sort of timescale, setting a new level of expectation altogether. As business transformed and globalized, technology has provided the platform on which the stuff of dreams has been built by imaginative entrepreneurs. I’m not just talking about the likes of Amazon, Uber and Airbnb. How about Lyft, Jet, Snapchat, Draft Kings and Blue Apron? Today, when market capitalization and valuation are perhaps more prestigious than revenue, these companies offer a range of services from ride sharing, online shopping and mobile messaging to fantasy spo...

FISC Assurances on Spying Leave Too Many Questions Unanswered Last week, FBI Director Christopher Wray faced questions from the House Judiciary Committee about how his department is implementing one of the government’s most powerful surveillance tools. Despite repeated bipartisan requests, Director Wray refused to tell the Members of the Committee how many Americans have been impacted by Section 702, enacted as part of the FISA Amendments Act. This isn’t the first time the FBI has refused to answer to Congress. EFF has long held that Section 702 is being used to violate the privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. Section 702 authorizes the acquisition of foreign intelligence information; however, because many Americans communicate with foreign persons outside the United States every day, our communications are also being captured and read without a warrant.  How many Americans have had their communications “ incidentally collected ” under Section 702? We don’t know. In fa...

Uninterruptible Power Supplies ( UPSs ) are designed to provide power protection in the event of a utility power disruption or failure. But some applications are so sensitive to downtime that they require redundancy in the UPSs and associated components. In this post, we’ll look at two of the five basic UPS configuration options that offer the greatest protection. The five UPS design configurations, listed in order of increasing levels of redundancy, are: Capacity or N design Isolated redundant Parallel redundant (N+1) Distributed redundant System plus system (2N, 2N+1) While the capacity or N configuration is by far the most common, it won’t pass muster for large data centers or financial organizations that simply can’t afford downtime. For them, it’s typically either distributed redundant or system plus system. Distributed redundant Distributed redundant designs were developed in the late 1990s to provide the capabilities of complete redundancy at a lower cost as compared...

This post previously appeared on ARC’s Viewpoints Blog With ever increasing competition, tighter margins and growing consumer demand for more personalized products, it’s no surprise that the industry is continuously searching for the next big competitive advantage. This is precisely where digital transformation and the industrial internet of things (IIoT) offers tremendous opportunity. With a broad range of use cases including remote monitoring and diagnostics for asset reliability, advanced energy management , production performance and quality improvement, it’s clear there are some impressive benefits to be gained. That said, many industrial companies are struggling to advance these digital efforts.  In my experience, these issues often stem from the pure hype of the IIoT and the need to “do something”: businesses recognize that they should transform, but they don’t often know how, what areas to target or even where to start. This typically results in no action at all or a r...