Both!

Why not write in Java or one of the Mono-supported languages and distribute something that will be dynamically compiled on the destination machine. It is fast, convenient and you don't have to have 10 OSs to target them....

m

There is another issue to consider: today electricity is cheaper in the evening, because businesses are using less energy so the grid has more spare capacity. But in a decade, when a significant portion of homes will have solar roofs, and there will be solar farms in the southern states, the timing of cost of energy will flip again: cheaper during the day (and summer) and more expensive during the night.

Will consumers want to readjust again?

m

I noticed that they put the solar panels on rails on top of his roof. What happens when he needs to redo his shingles? This needs to be done every 10-15 years (at least in Toronto, where my parents live).

Who takes the panels down, the rails and then re-installs the whole thing? Or does the fact that the shingles get less exposure to the sun and snow mean that they won't have to be redone for a longer period of time? (which would be another savings)

m

You cannot improve your performance if you cannot measure it. I think that the metric of "time to resolution" is a bad first try, but the direction of thought isn't bad - if you aren't trying to game the system, you generally want to resolve issues quickly.

I think that what you really want is the length of time all tickets were opened. That way closing a ticket after resolving one minor issue only to open another one for the next minor issue does not give you an advantage.

You certainly want to divide that by the size of the group you are supporting. And you probably want to penalize issues that are affecting multiple people.

So something like: sum over all tickets (ticket_open_time * #of_people_affected^1.2) / size_of_group [ the 1.2 is a random # I pulled out of my a** ]

m

While others have pointed out that the article DOES talk about pavement, there is an additional reason to paint roofs before roads: roofs overheat our houses and we use more a/c to cool them off. Roads to not need cooling (though cars on them do, but that is a secondary effect).

m

How will I filter out annoying ads without FlashBlock?!?!

If you had asked me about the distribution of first digits of prime #s yesterday I probably would have guessed logarithmic, regardless of base (except for binary, of course).

Think about it. We know that primary # are distributed logarithmically. A set of N digit #s has equal subsets of numbers starting with 1, 2, 3, etc. Those subsets are equal in size, exclusive and completely ordered with respect to each other. So it follows that the # of prime #s in consecutive subsets would be a logarithmic function. And if you add the sizes of prime subsets for each starting digit, you'll still get a logarithmic distribution.

Nothing to see here, move along.

m