solaris_7

There are already a number of existing alternatives:

http://fixer.io

https://openexchangerates.org

https://www.exchangerate-api.com

http://www.xe.com/xecurrencydata

If this shift takes place - what would be the best 10 year investment strategy be? Long electric utilities, renewable generation, charging networks, smart grid companies & lithium miners. Short oil companies, petrodollar denominated govt. bonds & gas station networks.

Is there a "massive shift to electric cars within 10 years" ETF I can buy?

I think the expectation is that as the grid slowly gets "smart" this will reduce the peaky-ness of demand generated by electric car charging. If the price of a kWh is dynamic based on current use then the combination of smart charging stations & locally installed batteries should even things out a lot.

Obviously the total consumption will increase dramatically. If this shift takes place the society-wide energy mix will include a lot less petrol/gasoline/diesel and lot more electricity.

Hopefully the prices of solar & wind will continue to fall and the shift in this mix will be massively to the advantage of the environment - and to the quality of life in our cities.

The obsession for open plan offices continues to amaze me. Companies that invest huge amounts in staffing and other strategic programmes don't seem to spend much time challenging the default suggestion that 'openness = collaboration'.

This article mentions high performance employees - but most knowledge workers (designers, programmers etc.) that I know all struggle with open plan office environments irrespective of their performance level. If anything, an open plan office is maybe less worrisome to the more executive people I know - their core work processes of communication & meetings are less negatively impacted by the inability to regularly get large blocks of quiet productive space.

Some companies obviously get this need (e.g. FogCreek) but it really feels like sugar consumption or smoking. Once people really interrogate the status quo they are quick to realise how negative it is - but despite this the sub-optimal default approach has an unbelievable amount of momentum.

My condolences to all the 'high performance people' surveyed who are desperately wishing for less disturbed work spaces!

Is anyone using Snaps in production - or even regularly on their development machine?

I'm still on 14.04 and would be interested to know what the most popular uses for Snaps might be.

I'm always intrigued by this desire for integration. Even if you want to have one device that is mainly a phone but also a PC when you connect it to an external 24" screen and keyboard - why can't it have totally different UX experiences optimized for each state? Is that really so bad?

Windows 8 was a UX disaster - so maybe that's just coloring my judgement. I haven't used Ubuntu on mobile yet so guess I need to try it.