Day: December 26, 2011

The Carbon Footprint of Carbon Bikes

The Carbon Footprint of Carbon Bikes:

“Right now, you can’t recycle the carbon back into a bike, but we’d love to see that happen someday,” says Bjorland. He says that completing the circle is still the holy grail, since obviously an aluminum or steel frame can, at least in theory, be turned back into another bike — and more to the point, can be repaired rather than junked post almost any crash. Carbon’s obviously never going to be as mendable as metal.

[At least people are paying attention… And all but one of my bikes are metal, and mostly have no paint. What little I can…]
Source: adventure journal

Who wants to break the Internet? (Companies that support SOPA)

Who wants to break the Internet?:

It’s not the struggling artists, it’s corporations, lawyers and boards who are in favor of such a shortsighted law . Here’s the list of companies behind one of the lobbying groups pushing for SOPA (here are three links about the law). Now you know who to call:

ABC
AFTRA – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists
AFM – American Federation of Musicians
AAP – Association of American Publishers
ASCAP
BMG Chrysalis
BMI
CBS Corporation
Cengage Learning
DGA – Directors Guild of America
Disney Publishing Worldwide, Inc.
EMI Music Publishing
ESPN
Graphic Artists Guild
Hachette Book Group
HarperCollins Publishers L.L.C.
Hyperion
IATSE – International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States, its Territories and Canada
International Brotherhood of Teamsters
Kaufman Astoria Studios
Macmillan
Major League Baseball
Marvel Entertainment, LLC
McGraw-Hill Education
MPA – The Association of Magazine Media
NFL – National Football League
National Music Publishers’ Association
NBCUniversal
News Corporation
New York Production Alliance
New York State AFL-CIO
Pearson Education
Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
The Perseus Books Group
Producers Guild of America East
Random House
Reed Elsevier
SAG – Screen Actors Guild
Scholastic, Inc.
Silvercup Studios
Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Sony Music Entertainment
Sony/ATV Music Publishing
Time Warner Inc.
United States Tennis Association
Universal Music Group
Universal Music Publishing Group
Viacom
Warner Music Group
W.W. Norton & Company
Wolters Kluwer

[Disclosure. I worked for or have been a member of various entities on this list over the course of my career.]
Source: the domino project

3D printing needs to be Apple’ized

Now imagine you had a good 3D printer, like a polished version of this: MakerBot.

Imagine a lost Lego piece… Now imagine that it could scan in 3D as well. If I have one, but need two, no problem. Scan the original I have, and churn out a new one. Or anyone in the world who has that piece could send me the data that would allow me to recreate it. Or Lego themselves could set this up with some nominal charge per replacement. Or sell whole kits. Or…

That would be cool.

Recently my parents broke a knob on their oven. You can only buy replacements as a set and the company wants an incredible $100 (Six plastic knobs. $100? Seriously). Or. They take a whole knob. They place it in their 3D printer. It scans it, and creates a replacement in an hour.

That would be cool.

3D Printing, Teleporters and Wishes:

And as just one parting example of why this stuff’s exciting, I loved this video from The Verge, showing how Microsoft’s hardware group (long one of the company’s undersung overperformers) makes smart use of 3D printing in their everyday work:

Related Reading

Source: Anil Dash

InfoQ: Riak NoSQL Database: Use Cases and Best Practices

InfoQ: Riak NoSQL Database: Use Cases and Best Practices:

InfoQ: Can you talk about some limitations about the Riak databases and what use cases it’s not the best solution to use?

Basho: Applications that require ad-hoc querying and heavy analytics tend to be less of a good fit for Riak. Since we are a key/value store at the core, applications that require ad-hoc queries and/or heavy analytic processing can be difficult to implement on top of Riak. Our main focus is predictability and scale, and there are some tradeoffs that have to be made with data model and queryability to stay faithful to this focus.

That said, we plan to enhance Riak in various capacities to address these use cases in 2012. Riak already exposes deeper query possibilities via our MapReduce, Secondary Indexing, and Search components, and we’ll continue to make these more robust in future releases.

[Good stuff.]
Source:

‘Gamification’ sucks

‘Gamification’ sucks:

It should be obvious that one conclusion respects people and one doesn’t. It should also be obvious that the first conclusion is correct and the second is incorrect, cynical, and low.

I can’t prove that good software respects people, but I can look at good software and show how it respects people. I can look at bad software and show how it doesn’t respect people.

“Gamification” treats people like children — children who need to be manipulated, who need to be tricked into doing what’s good for them.

And it makes bad software.

[Just because something feels like a game doesn’t mean that you should make it more like a game.]
Source: inessential.com

The End of the Web? Don’t Bet on It. Here’s Why

The End of the Web? Don’t Bet on It. Here’s Why:

I think there’s a TCO argument to be made against the proliferation of the App Internet. The more companies build their own apps, the more maintenance work they’ll need to do, the more employees they’ll need to maintain their apps and the further the innovation drain. I know this is a harder concept to quantify and intellectualize but I’ve seen it first hand in 20 years of working with large corporation on “legacy” IT projects. The App Internet opens the door to many more legacy apps.

This argument never features into any young developers mind because it takes years to see the decaying effect of legacy infrastructure in corporations (plus, many app developers prefer the sexy world of consumer apps).

To be clear … I think that the App Internet won’t disappear overnight. I also think certain apps will always be more effective built natively. But the same is true of today’s non-mobile computing. Still, most apps need not exist. Long live the Mobile Web.

[I agree.]