lerouxb

100% free: sure. 1000% more powerful: debatable at best.

You stole my idea for "solving" the middle east!

^THIS

The difference in user experience between HTML apps that don't even _try_ to cache anything locally vs mobile apps that sync in the background and cache things locally is night and day and it just gets bigger and bigger as your bandwidth quality gets worse.

This is the biggest reason why I'm concerned for the future of the open web.

I agree 100% with your general sentiment, but just to nitpick:

You would have to really cherry pick the worst case possible scenario to be paying R1 per GB and even then R1024 is $82.44.

Contracts come with data included, all the networks have data bundles, most of them run frequent 2-for-1 style promotion deals and you could always shop around.

Once you factor in all of that, mobile bandwidth is pretty on par with most of the world. Really expensive when you take into account people's incomes, though.

ADSL and other fixed line / point-to-point options are much cheaper once you require anything more than a tiny amount of data, but still really expensive considering the typical South African's income.

Things are very different from the first world, but you have to factor in physics too - we're at the opposite end of the world of just about anything you would want to connect to (latency!), our neighbours didn't all have connections already set up that we could just piggy-back off, etc.

It all got a LOT better in recent years.

I still really want to get a few bags full of Zimbabwean notes and use it to wallpaper a room one day. You'd think that would be easy living in a country right next to them..

As opposed to 10*100GiB that can be uploaded over a 56.6K modem, right? ;)

I'm pretty convinced that self driving cars can fix this. Reaction times will be much faster and they can network together to spread out the braking and acceleration. Possibly even merging at high speed.

Feels like we're finally living in the future.

Same thing applies to any content type. Images, CSS, video support, etc. Why pick on JS specifically?

There is a LOT of lithium in the world and that's just near the surface - you can always dig down.

But at that scale you don't have to use lithium anyway. When it comes to grid or off-grid storage, you don't need the best energy density as cost per watt-hour is probably the most important factor and there are already other chemistries on the market that will work just fine with many more on the way. Sodium or Aluminium based batteries seem particularly promising.

I think we're lucky in Cape Town, yes. "Maintenance festival" coming up, though! http://www.sabc.co.za/news/a/79d21000481a5710803fc078423ca9a...

I've actually been looking into playing with some LiFePO4 batteries and trying to see how big of a UPS you can build for, say, R5000 or R10000. LiFe batteries have longer lifetimes, are safer (less likely to catch fire or explode), are less finicky about how they get charged (more like lead-acid), seem to be potentially a bit cheaper, easier to use in multi-cell configurations (cell-balancing issue related), etc. You can also source or sink more current, so faster to charge/discharge. Downside is 14% less energy density which is why they don't get used in laptops or smartphones and (in Tesla's case) sometimes also not in cars. But that's not much of a downside for (off-)grid storage..

Pretty sure there's a gap in the market there just waiting for someone to jump into. And once you already have a giant battery it is probably that much easier to convince yourself of covering your roof in solar panels, getting a gas stove and disconnecting yourself from the grid entirely :)

I'm really interested in how much this will cost.

In South Africa we're having rolling blackouts called "load shedding" because we don't have enough power. Exactly why is a long and obviously controversial story, but in short: Mega projects that were supposed to fill in the gaps are being delayed, maintenance on existing infrastructure was delayed in the hope that the new projects would come online in time, but that's now causing cascading failures and maintenance cannot be avoided any longer, causing even more outages..

The blackouts are zoned and 2.5 hours at a time. Here's Cape Town's map, for example: http://ewn.co.za/assets/loadshedding/capetown.html

So we don't have grid power 24/7 anymore and our electricity prices (that used to be some of the cheapest in the world) are now skyrocketing. So I would imagine that many many people here might be in the market for something like this at the right price.

The wikipedia article makes it look like the design was inherently flawed. Entirely possible that venture capital was (at least subjectively) allocated badly AND this project shouldn't have received more funding anyway.

You mean there's a chance that this might render him immortal?

Are we talking about water or costs?

"The Tesla Gigafactory", "A battery factory".

Solar is cheaper per watt in many parts of the world, assuming you don't care when you get those watts. You can build more solar capacity than what's needed during daylight hours in which case you can't sell the energy due to there being too much of it, so high price of energy becomes irrelevant.

(or: you can't build a large number of solar power plants without affecting the market price of electricity)

Maybe for base load, but desalination can run intermittently during sunlit hours only. You only have to stay ahead on average..

Maybe consider a different currency? The USD is really strong at the moment, causing the price to be really expensive for most countries.

It isn't a replacement for Grunt/Gulp. It is a replacement for browserify or perhaps require.js.

It builds your javascript and css (and images!) into one or more bundles which does overlap with what people often use grunt for. In my experience it generally obviates the need for grunt because what's left to do once you've packaged and minified your js, css and images and you have your source maps, etc.?

I suppose the rest can be done with npm scripts, but simple tasks like running tests could even be done from bash or a makefile anyway.

Here's a good recent presentation on webpack: http://adrianrossouw.github.io/webpack-uber-alles/

Looks like he just traded grunt/gulp for browserify which is also a build tool with lots and lots of configuration and plugins and I'd rather be using webpack in that category.

Just switch to webpack and you don't have to bend npm or browserify to your will either.

Relevant presentation: http://adrianrossouw.github.io/webpack-uber-alles/

If I could vote you up 10000 times, I would.

Have you read anything about what's been happening at Microsoft? I don't think that private organisations are necessarily better.

Here's a direct link to the preview it kicks out: http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/thisarmy/fo...

The fonts link straight to Google's Specimen pages and the features link to Microsoft's OpenType documentation. http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/featurelist.htm

It can't really be even, though. Otherwise how did all the fossil fuels form? Over geological time periods the co2 and o2 levels vary greatly. Maybe if not for mankind the atmosphere would actually have eventually ended up co2-poor over time ;)

But I guess that timeframe isn't very relevant to any climate change we'll be experiencing in the near future.

Also: where was all the carbon hundreds of millions of years ago before it was turned into fossil fuels? I guess "steady state" is a relative term when you get to long time periods.

Your ever-growing compost pile might be analogous to peatlands, but on the other hand it will probably just be returned back to the atmosphere in the next 100 years. The future occupants of your property are unlikely to continue your experiment :)

My guess is that anything we gain in that regard is more than offset by all the land that's covered in asphalt and concrete and also modern farming techniques and general deforestation. Very little carbon sequestration going on in the modern world..

Hilarious local TV footage from 1996 about what these "hacker kids" are getting up to at night: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzKHa3BYemI

So upset that I missed this kickstarter. I've been obsessively refreshing the homepage to see if I can buy a micropython board yet.

I think it makes sense to take the time to get it right. Every version of HTTP will effectively have to be supported by just about every server and client forever or otherwise the web will break.

An incredible aspect of the web is that Tim Berners-Lee's first website back at CERN still works in modern browsers. Same with things like basically the entire Geocities archive.

When it gets to core infrastructure like HTTP you can't just iterate quickly and expect the entire internet to constantly upgrade along with you.

What works for early stage lean startups won't work here.

I don't live in America and haven't seen a Tesla charging station, so maybe some of these obvious ideas are already happening, but:

* You'll have at least 20 minutes of waiting for your car to charge, during which time Tesla could be selling you snacks and/or fast food. Filling stations in most countries already follow that proven business model.

* These charging stations have solar panels on the roof, so they presumably already have the necessary inverters and whatever other infrastructure to pump electricity back to the grid. Tesla could make some deals to put panels up on nearby buildings who could save on capital costs by just piggybacking off Tesla. They could become a power utility company over time.

* Teslas are quite expensive, so Tesla owners (and therefore drivers) are generally affluent, which are the kind of customers local businesses would want to attract. So having a charging station nearby could be something malls might even pay for or want to subsidise. Similarly the land around a supercharger station in what is otherwise "the middle of nowhere" could become significantly more valuable, so if Tesla purchases extra cheap land around stations placed along interstate highways they could stand to make quite a bit of money selling that to property developers afterwards.

I guess what I'm saying is if Tesla plays their cards right, then Tesla cars could be like giving away razor handles for cheap.