One thing that really impressed me is that they didn't try to reinvent the wheel with their contracts. Good examples are the $PORT environment variable and sending all logs to stdout. It takes design maturity to do the wise thing instead of the fun thing, which would have been to force everyone to conform to a "Heroku Contract" API of some sort, which would really be no contract at all.
I've never understood this argument. I mean, yes, I get that all you're doing is moving the energy production somewhere else; but isn't that a GOOD thing?
My response to the "you're just moving" argument is that you're doing more than moving it, you're CENTRALIZING it. It's much easier to replace one coal plant with a nuclear plant or a wind farm (or 10) than it is to replace the thousands of cars that plant powers.
There's two sides to the argument. On the one hand, centralizing is big. It allows huge gains in efficiency- steam plants fueled by coal are 99% efficient, and by the time the power reaches the wheels of your car you're still probably around 60-80% (Otto cycle is 25% at absolute best, not counting drivetrain losses) It allows flexibility in source- nuclear, coal, wind, solar- and the source can be 'hot-swapped'.
At the same time, it is important to remember the energy has to come from somewhere, and this is something politicians, media, and industry has made a habit of carefully ignoring, so it does seem like a good idea to remind less inquisitive folks electric cars are not powered by free, unlimited energy. (Crazy as it may sound, folks believed that was the case for anything driven by 'renewable energy' a handful of years ago. That's what they were taught; renewable = free/unlimited)
It’s a good idea to say that but many people will then immediately go to the next extreme: electric cars cannot possibly be useful at all unless all our energy production is already carbon neutral†. The right way to approach this is to offer a detailed explanation, not to only say that electric cars burn coal. It’s a true statement, but it leads to misconceptions.
I will say what I always say at this point: electric cars are about enabling large scale infrastructure change. A gas powered car will burn gas now and in twenty years. An electric car burns (mostly) coal now but it doesn’t have to in twenty years. That’s what electric cars are all about.
Now, an electric car you buy now likely won’t survive until a large portion of our energy comes from carbon neutral sources. We don’t even know whether we will be able to pull that off at all. Why then buy electric cars? Why sell them? Why subsidize them? The reason for this is that changing every gas powered car to an electric car takes time and requires a lot of infrastructure and testing. We really shouldn’t start building electric cars only in forty years, we should start right now.
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† Whether we should work towards being carbon neutral, whether that’s possible at all and makes sense is certainly controversial. For the purpose of this article I just assumed that we should.
There are other possible benefits of switching to electric cars. For one it makes us less dependent on oil. Oil is not unlimited (so is coal but it is at least less limited), being dependent only on energy and not one specific energy source makes it easier to react to changing energy source prices.
A gas powered car will burn gas now and in twenty years. lectric car burns (mostly) coal now but it doesn’t have to in twenty years. That’s what electric cars are all about.
This is really the key point. Right now, if all cars were electric, in Netherlands you would be driving on natural gas, in Austria renewable energy, and in Spain Nuclear energy (http://bit.ly/m25JwE).
Each country / region has good reasons for basing their current energy supply on a particular resource, and they can adapt over time as new options become available, old ones less attractive, market incentives change, or democracy pushes for something new.
Not totally wrong. However, I don't like the idea of having my mobility tied to the grid at all times. Yes, oil comes from an economic grid of sorts as well (you can't easily produce it in your backyard) - but you can store gasoline more readily than electricity.
I liken it to the problem w/ Walmart, i.e. the middle-men and distributed warehouses have been replaced by just-in-time (efficient) inventories. These systems are more efficient, but when/if they fail - they fail in epic fashion.
I swear, one of these days I'm going to write an IDE that doesn't look like it was made in 1992. I may be a techie, but gosh darnit, I'm spoiled by iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps. I want the stuff I'm using every day to LOOK nice.
(No offense intended, I just looked at the screenshots and my first reaction was "oh no, not again!")
Thanks for pointing that out; your comment led me to read the Ars article. I was then compelled to go Nature and read the article and its accompanying News and Views. Interestingly, the News and Views opens with the same profound point (that the unit of sleep appears to be single neurons) that you referred to in your post. My point is only to note that the Nature folks address in the first line what it took the Ars reporter an entire article to get at.
Quoted for reference:
"An accompanying perspective makes a separate suggestion: the fundamental unit of sleep may be a single cell. When an animal is sleep deprived, individual cells are more likely to take themselves offline. By chance, that will eventually start producing the clusters that produce local sleep events. Over time, the frequency of local events goes up, and the neurons begin to coordinate their activity, ultimately producing the large-scale rhythms seen in sleep."
I had this, err, idea! Congrats for doing what I wouldn't do and implementing it. Perhaps I should have just put the idea on CaptainObvio.us and let someone else implement it ;-)
Haiku icons are actually stored in a vector format instead of bitmap. That means all icons are resolution-independent and antialiased. Also, since the format was designed for icons, the filesize is so small that the data will usually fit in the same block as inode data, so the file takes effectively 0 space on the HD!
The current Iridium looks like it has focused its marketing to the segments that actually make sense: maritime, explorers, and military.
But the infrastructure is up there and, sure, a bunch of people lost a lot of money, but it's THERE now. I could think of some products they could introduce that might be promising.
Here's an idea: a small piece of plugin hardware for iPhones, Droids, etc. This would be something you take with you (for example, on road trips or vacations to far-flung places). You would buy the unit for $149 and then prepay, say $30 for 10 minutes of service. The idea is that it's "there when you need it, wherever you are." It could even go in your first aid kit... it's there for emergencies.
Most of my emails are short. When I must write a long one, it's usually because it includes technical content. In that case, I do this:
Bob,
I discovered why the frobnostication terminal was slow and submitted a fix. It will be QA'd tomorrow. Please find the technical details below.
Regards,
tophat02
<A bunch of newlines so Bob can see it's a short email with some appendix-type stuff below>
Now here's where I get into the technical details of the blah blah blah. This can span several paragraphs if I want. I don't worry about because I know Bob got the point up there -^
My personal opinion: if you can REALLY do what you claim then you should get every country's equivalent of the CDC working with you to MANDATE that this be part of every phone, and then of course you get the revenue from IP licensing.
In fact, I would broaden the scope a bit: make it like the "Emergency Broadcast System" for phones, only two-way.
Lots of privacy implications and the carriers and handset manufacturers would hate it, but I can certainly see it doing long term good.
