The problem stems from completely short term thinking. If you're a publically traded corporation, the shareholders will have your head for trying to maintain long term profitability over immediate profits. Today it's cheaper to buy fresh Uranium and enrich it than it is to reprocess so... we'll just wait to start reprocessing until it's too late to actually do that. Same for any nuclear revolution -- natural gas is cheap now and we have a 100 year supply at current uses, so let's quadruple our use of it and it'll still last 100 years right!!! PROFIT. Nevermind that we're sitting on centuries of fuel if we used, and have already invented an energy source that could power man for almost as long as recorded history... and at this rate we're going to de-fund fusion because nearly infinite power just isn't worth waiting another 30 years for (that's sooooo far away, they've already had 30 years jeez you'd think those scientists would work faster if they were really smart!)
I am not looking forward to being 50 when the serious energy crisis starts. I think we should just revoke voting rights and the ability to sit on the board of any corporation from everyone over 60 and/or turn them into fuel, because it appears the at least the U.S. is pre-sacrificing the youth so that some old farts can continue existing in 1950s la-la land without all of the technology that enabled that magical reality...
There are no yeast involved in the mashing process... I'm talking about the part where you convert the starches in malted grain into sugars. I am pretty certain that amylase enzymes aren't alive, and there is *definitely* chemistry going on that you have to deal with. Interactions between the mineral content in your water and meladonins in the malt lead to differing pH; you have to adjust the buffering capacity of your water using various salts (usually chalk, but you can get real fancy with phosphate salts and whatnot) to avoid the pH going into a range where the enzymes are no longer active for example. Then there's temperature maintenance (knowing what denaturing an enzyme means is helpful here, since you're screwed if you go too hot), but that's not quite as fancy. Without basic chemistry, things become a lot harder (reliance upon folk-engineering charts and such...) since the whole balancing reactions skill is helpful and knowing what things like buffering capacity are takes you from "I throw in the magic crap the chart told me to" to "I am confident this will work since I know what is actually happening."
Also, for wine, ideally post-fermentation you don't have any yeast left. So you're using chemistry to create conditions that will prevent spoilage through the use of various preservative chemicals, particular ranges of acidity, etc.
None of this is "hey I'm cooking up some LSD in my bathtub" level of whizbang chemistry, but that's the point: it's an actual application where just those high school chemistry skills let you master the craft with ease.
Thanks! I got stuck in traffic and edited this up real quick (I blame traffic, I thought I had an extra hour). Just a quick tip: if you tag the story typo or typoinsummary, a jabber bot complains at the entire editorial team.
Conversion of the starches in malted grain to sugar is certainly a chemical process: you have to maintain the pH just so, the temperatures just right, to encourage particular kinds of conversion by various enzymes. Adjusting mineral concetrations and such in the water is also (not really intense) chemistry. Making wine involves even more chemistry: free SO_2 testing, pH adjustments, total acidity control, etc. involve lots of reagents and I found the basic recollection of even just learning how to e.g. do titrations from high school chemistry made things a lot easier.
There's biology involved too in the fermentation process itself, and hey! Encourages 'em to learn that too;)
The flipside: why should the kernel developers be constrained by the needs of proprietary driver developers?
The reality is that the kernel API is really stable from necessity (you can't go around rewriting all of the thousands of drivers every other weekend). Forcing a strict in-kernel ABI would result in massive pain for everyone. E.g. a few years ago the kernel started using a gcc feature to pass more arguments in registers, changed the default stack size, etc. If there were a stable ABI... well then, can't change the calling convention and get this speed up without a major ABI change. Since the source to every driver is available and kernelspace is self-contained, there's no technical reason for having a stable ABI. I mean, if you're going to develop your kernel as a monolithic tree, you may as well exploit the advantages.
Userspace is a completely different story. There is already a stable interface between the kernel and userspace, because you can't go around assuming that you can rebuild user space on every update. And libc maintaining binary compatibility? Userspace is on an entirely different scale than kernel space! You have to support millions instead of tens of thousands of programs! The complexity of making ABI changes outweighs any flexibility gained. Still, a lot of non-C languages don't pretend to maintain a stable ABI. E.g. Common Lisp, Haskell, SML,... and it doesn't seem to have too much of a detrimental effect for their users. And there's a lot of churn on so-versions for everything but libc that doesn't seem to harm anything.
In any case, it's a total straw man. NVIDIA already implements a shim to the kernel API that provides a stable ABI for their proprietary driver. This is not an unreasonable situation (it's worked for fifteen years after all).
I'll stand corrected. And when I said "kind of crap" I didn't mean to disparage the work of the Free drivers authors, given the manpower limitations and whatnot I think they're great. I'm one of those folks who didn't buy any new graphics hardware during the Bad Times (tm) before Intel graphics and when ATI and NVIDIA were both only doing proprietary drivers... glad that Radeon 9100 made it the entire way. So know that the Free driver effort got at least one customer back.
If you're really from AMD and see this, I demand that you guys make AGP Radeons work with SMP again >:O I discovered that my venerable Radeon 9100 wasn't working quite right, figured it was because it's a decade old and grabbed an X1650pro and... ack, turns out Accelerated DFS + SMP = computer locked up. Go directly to complete hardware lockups. Do not pass NMI watchdog, go directly to the power switch... I've been living without CPU1 on my ol' AthlonMP rig, but it's turned a machine that's still damn useful into one that's marginally useful (I can watch movies and play zsnes without any filtering, but that's about it... oh, to have CPU1 restored). Either that, or please... oh please, let us disable Accelerated DFS again...
The Intel drivers are a better example: they are rock solid, Intel has contributed tons toward advancing the graphics stack, etc. AMD has maintained a split development effort: hiring external companies and providing some docs for the Free drivers, all the while putting their main development effort into their proprietary FGLRX driver. I suspect that's the real reason their drivers are kind of crap.
Actually, it was ES4 (ES3 is implemented in all browsers, sorry for the misremembering there!) ; But: slashdot did a post a story on it dying. Short version: politics. Less short version: the type annotations and inference system were being pushed by people from the functional programming camp, and some of the other ECMAScript editors thought the features would be difficult for Javascript programmers and were ultimately useless (because there were existing, seriously more hackish ways, to achieve similar ends). I still think it would have been useful: at the very least the core language and libraries would have been well typed (and more clearly defined)... This mailing list post has a lot of details, but it's written from the side of the victors.
You can definitely make great cider that way (I've done it!). Instead of Champagne yeast, try Cote Des Blanc or an English ale yeast to get a bit of extra complexity (Champagne yeast is really neutral... an estery yeast really helps in a cider), and bump the gravity up to around 1.070-80 (maybe even 1.100 if you want to make an Applewine instead). You have to let it ferment for around 3 months (and rack it at least once! Sulfites are your friend), but the end result is pretty great with not much more effort than "try to forget that it exists for a while".
Starting off that way, I've gotten into making a lot of Cysers (think mead, but with apple cider instead of water diluting the honey)... super simple brewing process compared to beer, but the whole "it really does only start tasting great at 12-18 months after you made it" part is so painful (well, it's certainly good well before then, but once you've tasted a wine you've let properly age you realize how much you were missing... ignorance, unfortunately, proves yet again to be bliss). I'm on my third year so I have a reasonable stock built up, but boy was it hard at first...
A cheap and easily available analog temperature controller that a lot of homebrewers use with repurposed fridges. Or, genericized, any external temperature controller that you hack onto a fridge for keeping femermenters or kegs at the proper temp.
See Beer Advocate. American beer isn't all crappy lager in cans... we have an incredibly vibrant craft beer and homebrewing scene. I drink the former and make the latter myself, and these lips shall never meet swill! Mostly because it's cheaper to brew up a quick ten gallon batch of pale ale than to buy a vomit-inducing Budweiser. I guess it speaks to the power of marketing that folks outside of (or even inside!) the US think so lowly of our beer.
Amtrak supposedly requires that you show ID to ride, and when they first implemented the policy a few years ago conductors checked. But it's been about two years since I've shown any form of ID aboard a train.
God bless apathetic government employees basically.
Of course, good luck looking under 35 and buying booze without an ID. I think drinking age laws are how they tricked everyone into this...
This is an implementation of the freedesktop notification protocol. The second part (overhauling notifications) presumably would become an fd.o standard after all of the kinks were worked out and the KDE/GNOME folks finished battling to the death over the details;)
It's pretty surprising too, since the talk at HOPE given by their lead developer was all about how open source/hardware would conquer the world (lots of mentions of reprap, and how Makerbot evolved from reprap).
The best part is that, unlike Atom, these things are usably fast. I have a 2x1.3Ghz core2 process shrunk or something with a TDP of 12W (total system is about 26W... under full load). I mostly live in Emacs but I like a compositing window manager (wobbly windows are fun alright) and GL screen hacks... the thing does great and can handle my regular abuse of PostgreSQL/SBCL/mlton/... all while getting about 8-9 hours of realistic use (ok, closer to 7 now that the battery is down to 72Wh from its 84Wh theoretical max when it was new) and all under 10W generally. Sign me up for something that uses about the same power and is just a bit slower than the current Ivybridge processors... (come on laptop, don't die until next summer).
And it all Just Works (tm) with Debian testing (it even worked with Squeeze, but GL was a bit slow since it predated the existence of the graphics hardware and all). Now, if only someone would make one of these low voltage things with a danged Pixel Qi display or whatever Qualcomm has so that I can use it outside... not having to worry about finding power every 2 to 3 hours is great, but if you're still stuck indoors it's not half as great as it could be.
I'm not sold on malware for GNU/Linux yet, just because distros are pretty good at quickly patching security vulnerabilities and pushing the software out. In the Windows/Mac worlds you just have the core OS components auto-updated whereas in e.g. Debian all of the software comes from once place and that place has a security team tirelessly working to make sure everything is patched.
I mean, the US Government even funded the development of multiple hop cultivars (descended from the very varities in use in this recipe)... the UK Fuggle could be switched with Willamette, there is a US Golding (but it's not quite the same... oh well, at least we have a global economy eh), and I've had good luck subbing Mt Hood for Hallertauer.
Munich malt can easily be sourced from the US (in fact, I'm not sure my LHBS carries non-US stuff), it's just the originating area applied as a name to a particularly processed malt.
Quick! Someone create the Americanized Version of this Commie Liberal Beer REcipe!
People like to pretend that Windows and OS X don't have their own unique problems... computing environments in general are still overly difficult to use and all have their own obnoxious quirks (given enough time and people think of them as features).
My Grandmother runs KDE on Debian testing... she couldn't fix Windows when it broke, and at least Debian breaks less often... and the solitare game is better I hear. And when my cousins visit her I don't get the "the kids broke the computer with their stupid websites" calls any more;)
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The problem stems from completely short term thinking. If you're a publically traded corporation, the shareholders will have your head for trying to maintain long term profitability over immediate profits. Today it's cheaper to buy fresh Uranium and enrich it than it is to reprocess so ... we'll just wait to start reprocessing until it's too late to actually do that. Same for any nuclear revolution -- natural gas is cheap now and we have a 100 year supply at current uses, so let's quadruple our use of it and it'll still last 100 years right!!! PROFIT. Nevermind that we're sitting on centuries of fuel if we used, and have already invented an energy source that could power man for almost as long as recorded history... and at this rate we're going to de-fund fusion because nearly infinite power just isn't worth waiting another 30 years for (that's sooooo far away, they've already had 30 years jeez you'd think those scientists would work faster if they were really smart!)
I am not looking forward to being 50 when the serious energy crisis starts. I think we should just revoke voting rights and the ability to sit on the board of any corporation from everyone over 60 and/or turn them into fuel, because it appears the at least the U.S. is pre-sacrificing the youth so that some old farts can continue existing in 1950s la-la land without all of the technology that enabled that magical reality...
Burn baby burn.
But Barack Romney told me that they're bringing manufacturing back to the US!!!
There are no yeast involved in the mashing process... I'm talking about the part where you convert the starches in malted grain into sugars. I am pretty certain that amylase enzymes aren't alive, and there is *definitely* chemistry going on that you have to deal with. Interactions between the mineral content in your water and meladonins in the malt lead to differing pH; you have to adjust the buffering capacity of your water using various salts (usually chalk, but you can get real fancy with phosphate salts and whatnot) to avoid the pH going into a range where the enzymes are no longer active for example. Then there's temperature maintenance (knowing what denaturing an enzyme means is helpful here, since you're screwed if you go too hot), but that's not quite as fancy. Without basic chemistry, things become a lot harder (reliance upon folk-engineering charts and such...) since the whole balancing reactions skill is helpful and knowing what things like buffering capacity are takes you from "I throw in the magic crap the chart told me to" to "I am confident this will work since I know what is actually happening."
Also, for wine, ideally post-fermentation you don't have any yeast left. So you're using chemistry to create conditions that will prevent spoilage through the use of various preservative chemicals, particular ranges of acidity, etc.
None of this is "hey I'm cooking up some LSD in my bathtub" level of whizbang chemistry, but that's the point: it's an actual application where just those high school chemistry skills let you master the craft with ease.
Thanks! I got stuck in traffic and edited this up real quick (I blame traffic, I thought I had an extra hour). Just a quick tip: if you tag the story typo or typoinsummary, a jabber bot complains at the entire editorial team.
Conversion of the starches in malted grain to sugar is certainly a chemical process: you have to maintain the pH just so, the temperatures just right, to encourage particular kinds of conversion by various enzymes. Adjusting mineral concetrations and such in the water is also (not really intense) chemistry. Making wine involves even more chemistry: free SO_2 testing, pH adjustments, total acidity control, etc. involve lots of reagents and I found the basic recollection of even just learning how to e.g. do titrations from high school chemistry made things a lot easier.
There's biology involved too in the fermentation process itself, and hey! Encourages 'em to learn that too ;)
The flipside: why should the kernel developers be constrained by the needs of proprietary driver developers?
The reality is that the kernel API is really stable from necessity (you can't go around rewriting all of the thousands of drivers every other weekend). Forcing a strict in-kernel ABI would result in massive pain for everyone. E.g. a few years ago the kernel started using a gcc feature to pass more arguments in registers, changed the default stack size, etc. If there were a stable ABI... well then, can't change the calling convention and get this speed up without a major ABI change. Since the source to every driver is available and kernelspace is self-contained, there's no technical reason for having a stable ABI. I mean, if you're going to develop your kernel as a monolithic tree, you may as well exploit the advantages.
Userspace is a completely different story. There is already a stable interface between the kernel and userspace, because you can't go around assuming that you can rebuild user space on every update. And libc maintaining binary compatibility? Userspace is on an entirely different scale than kernel space! You have to support millions instead of tens of thousands of programs! The complexity of making ABI changes outweighs any flexibility gained. Still, a lot of non-C languages don't pretend to maintain a stable ABI. E.g. Common Lisp, Haskell, SML, ... and it doesn't seem to have too much of a detrimental effect for their users. And there's a lot of churn on so-versions for everything but libc that doesn't seem to harm anything.
In any case, it's a total straw man. NVIDIA already implements a shim to the kernel API that provides a stable ABI for their proprietary driver. This is not an unreasonable situation (it's worked for fifteen years after all).
I'll stand corrected. And when I said "kind of crap" I didn't mean to disparage the work of the Free drivers authors, given the manpower limitations and whatnot I think they're great. I'm one of those folks who didn't buy any new graphics hardware during the Bad Times (tm) before Intel graphics and when ATI and NVIDIA were both only doing proprietary drivers... glad that Radeon 9100 made it the entire way. So know that the Free driver effort got at least one customer back.
If you're really from AMD and see this, I demand that you guys make AGP Radeons work with SMP again >:O I discovered that my venerable Radeon 9100 wasn't working quite right, figured it was because it's a decade old and grabbed an X1650pro and ... ack, turns out Accelerated DFS + SMP = computer locked up. Go directly to complete hardware lockups. Do not pass NMI watchdog, go directly to the power switch... I've been living without CPU1 on my ol' AthlonMP rig, but it's turned a machine that's still damn useful into one that's marginally useful (I can watch movies and play zsnes without any filtering, but that's about it... oh, to have CPU1 restored). Either that, or please... oh please, let us disable Accelerated DFS again...
I think "Bob" is winning the debate.
The Intel drivers are a better example: they are rock solid, Intel has contributed tons toward advancing the graphics stack, etc. AMD has maintained a split development effort: hiring external companies and providing some docs for the Free drivers, all the while putting their main development effort into their proprietary FGLRX driver. I suspect that's the real reason their drivers are kind of crap.
Well, obviously, we have to ban water too.
Actually, it was ES4 (ES3 is implemented in all browsers, sorry for the misremembering there!) ; But: slashdot did a post a story on it dying. Short version: politics. Less short version: the type annotations and inference system were being pushed by people from the functional programming camp, and some of the other ECMAScript editors thought the features would be difficult for Javascript programmers and were ultimately useless (because there were existing, seriously more hackish ways, to achieve similar ends). I still think it would have been useful: at the very least the core language and libraries would have been well typed (and more clearly defined)... This mailing list post has a lot of details, but it's written from the side of the victors.
The type annotations/inferences are features that would have been in ES3, had it not been tanked by committee.
You can definitely make great cider that way (I've done it!). Instead of Champagne yeast, try Cote Des Blanc or an English ale yeast to get a bit of extra complexity (Champagne yeast is really neutral... an estery yeast really helps in a cider), and bump the gravity up to around 1.070-80 (maybe even 1.100 if you want to make an Applewine instead). You have to let it ferment for around 3 months (and rack it at least once! Sulfites are your friend), but the end result is pretty great with not much more effort than "try to forget that it exists for a while".
Starting off that way, I've gotten into making a lot of Cysers (think mead, but with apple cider instead of water diluting the honey)... super simple brewing process compared to beer, but the whole "it really does only start tasting great at 12-18 months after you made it" part is so painful (well, it's certainly good well before then, but once you've tasted a wine you've let properly age you realize how much you were missing... ignorance, unfortunately, proves yet again to be bliss). I'm on my third year so I have a reasonable stock built up, but boy was it hard at first...
A cheap and easily available analog temperature controller that a lot of homebrewers use with repurposed fridges. Or, genericized, any external temperature controller that you hack onto a fridge for keeping femermenters or kegs at the proper temp.
See Beer Advocate. American beer isn't all crappy lager in cans... we have an incredibly vibrant craft beer and homebrewing scene. I drink the former and make the latter myself, and these lips shall never meet swill! Mostly because it's cheaper to brew up a quick ten gallon batch of pale ale than to buy a vomit-inducing Budweiser. I guess it speaks to the power of marketing that folks outside of (or even inside!) the US think so lowly of our beer.
Amtrak supposedly requires that you show ID to ride, and when they first implemented the policy a few years ago conductors checked. But it's been about two years since I've shown any form of ID aboard a train.
God bless apathetic government employees basically.
Of course, good luck looking under 35 and buying booze without an ID. I think drinking age laws are how they tricked everyone into this...
This is an implementation of the freedesktop notification protocol. The second part (overhauling notifications) presumably would become an fd.o standard after all of the kinks were worked out and the KDE/GNOME folks finished battling to the death over the details ;)
It's pretty surprising too, since the talk at HOPE given by their lead developer was all about how open source/hardware would conquer the world (lots of mentions of reprap, and how Makerbot evolved from reprap).
The best part is that, unlike Atom, these things are usably fast. I have a 2x1.3Ghz core2 process shrunk or something with a TDP of 12W (total system is about 26W ... under full load). I mostly live in Emacs but I like a compositing window manager (wobbly windows are fun alright) and GL screen hacks... the thing does great and can handle my regular abuse of PostgreSQL/SBCL/mlton/... all while getting about 8-9 hours of realistic use (ok, closer to 7 now that the battery is down to 72Wh from its 84Wh theoretical max when it was new) and all under 10W generally. Sign me up for something that uses about the same power and is just a bit slower than the current Ivybridge processors... (come on laptop, don't die until next summer).
And it all Just Works (tm) with Debian testing (it even worked with Squeeze, but GL was a bit slow since it predated the existence of the graphics hardware and all). Now, if only someone would make one of these low voltage things with a danged Pixel Qi display or whatever Qualcomm has so that I can use it outside... not having to worry about finding power every 2 to 3 hours is great, but if you're still stuck indoors it's not half as great as it could be.
I'm not sold on malware for GNU/Linux yet, just because distros are pretty good at quickly patching security vulnerabilities and pushing the software out. In the Windows/Mac worlds you just have the core OS components auto-updated whereas in e.g. Debian all of the software comes from once place and that place has a security team tirelessly working to make sure everything is patched.
I mean, the US Government even funded the development of multiple hop cultivars (descended from the very varities in use in this recipe)... the UK Fuggle could be switched with Willamette, there is a US Golding (but it's not quite the same... oh well, at least we have a global economy eh), and I've had good luck subbing Mt Hood for Hallertauer.
Munich malt can easily be sourced from the US (in fact, I'm not sure my LHBS carries non-US stuff), it's just the originating area applied as a name to a particularly processed malt.
Quick! Someone create the Americanized Version of this Commie Liberal Beer REcipe!
People like to pretend that Windows and OS X don't have their own unique problems... computing environments in general are still overly difficult to use and all have their own obnoxious quirks (given enough time and people think of them as features).
My Grandmother runs KDE on Debian testing... she couldn't fix Windows when it broke, and at least Debian breaks less often... and the solitare game is better I hear. And when my cousins visit her I don't get the "the kids broke the computer with their stupid websites" calls any more ;)
Engineering time and it started life as perl written in 1997 by a college student.
Slashdot's lack of unicode support strikes again! There should have been a mu there, oops.
He's certainly guilty of having bad taste.