Very common in rural New England as well. This may be common in many other rural areas, I’d guess.
210 karma · joined November 9, 2010
It’d be nice to have Internet way out there. But at the cost of my (and everyone else’s) pure night sky?
Not everywhere has tap water. Some places don't have an aquifer suitable for drilling a well. Other places don't even have a road network suitable for the delivery of water by truck in an economical manner (or at all).
Beyond that, drawing water from the air has benefit in that it does not negatively impact a local aquifer which might already be over-drawn. What is the additional economic benefit per liter of that? That could be subtracted from the $0.02 / liter cost if you care to look at more than just the immediate bottom line.
Process and communication are kind of key, aren't they?
- Walter Sobchak
When I must travel for on-site consultation, I soften the blow of travel time by charging the client 50% of my lowest hourly rate for that time.
"Cloud Atlas" was published in '04. I wonder what systems are in place now?
Through my network an opportunity had come up for a "next move" in NYC.
Went for lunch with the CEO. He was less than pleasant, bordering on rude, with the waitress and left a poor tip. Both unwarranted from my perspective. I found the service to be just fine.
While the compensation and the work I had to look forward to both suited my requirements, I opted to look elsewhere after observing this red flag.
I've often (always?) fallen into the trap of "Let's just use a wildcard. Setting these things up is a pain in the ass!"
The chatter can burn a lot of time though. You're absolutely right there.
This is especially viable if she uses the same machine all the time, i.e. her home computer.
Novel idea, fun UI. If the minor end-of-loop delay (which another commenter mentioned) were eliminated or mitigated, it'd be downright awesome.
Nice work. Thanks to the creator(s) for the entertainment.
If you don't want to spend any money on picks and a tension wrench, street sweeper bristles make great stock for creating your own tools.
A grinding wheel will save you hours with a file, if you opt for this approach. Those bristles are tough!
This is an area ripe for a shake-up. It has been for decades.
Granted, the iBook Author EULA is pretty intense. I'd also venture to say that public school systems are not the ideal institutions for such a play.
Consider private institutions of primary, secondary, and higher education, as well as public colleges and universities: In these venues, the student, or his/her family, is responsible for the cost of textbooks. That amount can be huge. The high cost is the result of a lack of competition. The lack of competition is due to the barriers to entry that are bolstered by the textbook publishers.
Given a student body already well-armed with iBook-compatible devices (likely today), it seems to me the overall cost for educational materials (textbooks) will decrease significantly.
If a given author is unhappy with the iBook Author EULA, then I suggest that he or she publish their content as a PDF document. PDFs can be consumed easily on iOS as well as many other platforms.
In the case of independent PDF publication, the author loses the distribution power of Apple's marketplace, but they gain the right to distribute their work how they see fit, to the best of their ability.
There may be value in the determination of consumer-side article rank by a (weighted) average that encompasses both the net rank of items posted to the article + the rank of the article itself.
I'm sure you've already thought about the item/article interaction in terms of effect on overall article ranking. UI/X-side, the effect (of ranking an item within an article) is unclear now, and I am fine with that as an early user.
Moving forward, developing a ranking formula that weighs article rank against net rank of all of the article's items will be a usage-informed improvement that provides great value to users.
That ranking formula, as well as making the result of a "ranking" interaction obvious to the user, will help the understanding of how such interactions work.
With a social answering/ranking/voting application, creation of, and/or tweaks to, the formula that determines the effect of interactions will have a huge influence in shaping the culture of the individuals that interact with the application.
Given that each item shows a positive or negative number as its rating, it is unclear to me what the effect of a 5-, 3-, or 1- star ratings is against the net score for that item. I'm reasonably certain what the net effect will be, but it isn't totally obvious. The fact that it isn't so obvious is a friction point that makes me somewhat less likely to interact.
Using the familiar pattern of the binary up/down as arturadib has suggested (and taking a page from StackOverflow, Reddit, etc.) would make the interface much more familiar to me.
Though a binary up/down system would make this point irrelevant, I'll add it to the conversation anyway: It seems to me that over a long enough period of time, the rating for many items (using a 5 star system) will average near 3.
Congratulations on getting Listry out in the wild. Looking forward to witnessing future developments!
Adaptability, flexibility (with regard to schema/key structure migration and maturation), as well as ease of partitioning data intelligently ahead of demand are all hugely important factors that can and often should inform the process of selecting a datastore.
If the datastore selected for use: - shortens development time, - provides improved performance for anticipated scale, - better represents the data model needing to be captured, - avoids re-work and "post"-mature optimization of data models & datastores, - or accomplishes any combination of the above ... ... then the selection of that datastore should not be considered premature optimization.
Finding that your traditional RDBMS does not well support the data models you have developed, especially once the product is out of the gate, will not be fun. Having to engage in a refactor and data migration to move to a more appropriate or more performant datastore will be a time- and resource-consuming process.
As soon as the initial synthesis phase of development can begin, it may be well worth the effort to experiment with multiple datastores as a means of evaluating their performance and suitability. Depending on the scope and potential for the project to scale, modularizing distinct pieces of core functionality into separate services, each with their own most-suitable datastore, can also provide great benefit in flexibility of development processes, as well as adaptability of the product to the demands of the end-users.
A quick round of push-ups, or other exercise, can open the mind to new possibilities, opportunities, and solutions. The diversion could very well help to break the road-blocking thought patterns that often crop up when one is faced with tough problems.
Beyond that, it seems to me that such a practice builds solidarity in the team and inspires the participants to push for their best result, and to improve over the course of future sessions (iterations, perhaps?). I cannot see how fostering such a spirit could be a bad thing, especially in the context of a tech startup.
No responsible person would force a co-worker or employee to damage their health through participation, nor to participate if they did not feel comfortable doing so. The implication that the author would advocate or enforce the exercise to the contrary seems nit-picky and contentious.
Isn't the benefit of the push-ups at least a bit greater than that of the often-present case of beers in the office fridge, especially when the practice becomes a regular part of the culture?
The exchange of value outside of the established models (Gov't issued currency / PayPal / Google Checkout / next iteration thereof) has the potential to provide a huge opportunity for those of us involved in the space of online media and web applications.
Mobile implementations to bring the utility of the Bitcoin project into the palm of the hand bridge an intimidating virtual-to-real gap for many potential users.
In my opinion, the development of this mobile application, as well as similar projects, is a first step towards the more widespread adoption of the Bitcoin currency, in whatever (hopefully at least semi-legal, and legitimate) form it may finally take.
I'll observe with great interest.
Dropbox's syncing daemon doesn't quite cut it on the elegance factor for me, though it does serve the purpose well.
All the same, DropBox is an essential tool for me, and I grabbed my free 5 gigs from Amazon this AM. Can't wait to see in what direction cloud storage providers head as the industry grows.
I have some clients, who came onboard very early on in my professional and personal development as a freelance dev, and who are still being billed at their original rates. I notified these clients at the beginning of November that I am working to bring all rates "on par" across the board.
Even clients who are currently receiving the benefit of your older, lower rates will agree to the economics of paying a competitive price for the same quality of service that you provide to your highest paying clients. The dialog that began in November has proven fruitful in terms of developing a strategy to get all of my current, ongoing clients to agree to the new rate structure.
Bottom line: Have too much work, or too many "potential clients" hounding you for proposals? Raise your rates. Want to keep your clients? Give them notice well ahead of time, then raise your rates.