Posts by jake

Re: We need the technological progress...

Are you on a crusade against ICE, or are you on a crusade against atmospheric CO2?

The corn is a great extractor of carbon, only a portion of which is (easily) converted to alcohol.

I'm not extracting fuel from food. I grow the food elsewhere on the farm (I give my excess away. too.), Sometimes I grow food in the same space as the corn, alternating a soybean crop with the corn crop improves the productivity of both.

Yes, the bugs decomposing bio produce methane (itself a fuel; don't think I haven't been thinking about this aspect ... ), however the bulk of the carbon still remains in the ground. Dig into any compost heap, anywhere. and do the analysis for yourself.

I'm doing my part, and this place has effectively become a net carbon sink.

The world's overpopulation problem is WAY outside the scope of my little farm. The only answer that I am aware of is truly effective and freely available birth control, and women being in charge of their own bodies. Sadly, the pandemic called "religion" will never allow either to happen.

Re: Encoders

Turnabout's fair play, no? It's about time the reality of EV's problems were brought to the fore instead of studiously being ignored.

It'll all come out in the wash.

Re: We need the technological progress...

"Making fermented corn mash into 190 proof whiskey -- which is what corn ethanol pretty much is -- takes a lot of energy."

Yep. Fortunately I have a planet full of free energy. I use a GSHP to provide heat for mashing, fermenting and distilling. The various electronic bits are powered by a solar+battery setup.

"after one takes into account fertilization, mechanized field work, harvesting, and conversion to fuel"

My fertilizer is produced by cows, sheep, hogs, horses and chickens, and I alternate soy beans and corn (25 acres of each. The beans are sold to artisan tofu and soy sauce makers). The field work is done by gasoline to ethanol converted tractor (itself a potential hazard, admittedly, especially when it comes to combining), and I've already addressed conversion. Note that I'm only producing about 175 bushels of corn per acre. I could easily up that to around 250 or more with modern seed, fertilizer and pest control techniques ... but I'm experimenting with near-zero input costs. Even my seed is the family varietal, developed by my Grandfather in the 1920s for animal feed and sour mash whiskey.

Bottom line: With the current setup, it takes under 250 gallons of fuel to produce 12,000 gallons of fuel on 25 acres. If I cared enough, I could probably drop that to well under 200 gallons.

"What did the Romans ever do for us?"

Preserved the important bits of the ancient Greeks.

Re: We need the technological progress...

I don't recall you suggesting driving for hours just to get a cup of coffee, either.

The CowHorseFrog entity is inventing things to argue about. There's a word for that ...

Re: We need the technological progress...

WE are doing exactly that.

Grow corn[0]. Corn takes carbon out of the atmosphere. Harvest corn, leave all but the kernels in the field. Plow the trash under, thus sequestering most of the plant's carbon[1]. Mash the corn. Ferment it. Distill it. Presto: Fuel from the atmosphere that virtually any petrol/gasoline engine can be run on.

Not only fuel, but fuel that sequesters far more carbon than it re-introduces to the atmosphere when burned, and is thus a net carbon sink.

[0] In the coming year I'll be experimenting with a corn/sorghum hybrid that promises more fermentables.

[1] Seriously. Try weighing a complete dried corn/maize plant (including roots!) against the kernels produced by that plant. We're talking over 90% being carbon-filled trash. (Perhaps you don't know that most corn stalks, which can easily top 8 feet, only produce a single ear of corn?)

Re: What about the hard of hearing?

"I don’t think it got into any road cars."

That's essentially how a muffler works.

Re: We need the technological progress...

"We could make unnatural petrol with the CO2 from the atmosphere"

That would be ethanol, no?

_{Some prefer methanol, but I'm lazy and have taken the easy route.}

Re: We need the technological progress...

"ICEs will always consume a finite resource"

My over-the-road fleet of formerly petrol/gasoline powered ICEs now all run on ethanol, made from corn/maize grown here.

"but "space" in the atmosphere to put the resulting CO2"

I put far more carbon into the ground (I leave the trash in the fields when combining) than I exhaust out of the vehicles, making the running of those ICE vehicles a net carbon sink. At 175 bushels per acre, each bushel of which can make about 2.75 gallons of alcohol, my little 25 acres of corn can provide about 12,000 gallons of fuel, which is much, much more than we need. Rocket surgery it ain't.

_{To answer the obvious question, no, I'm not aging the excess fuel in oak barrels. Yet. Need the licenses first.}

Re: Every single time

You forgot lawyers.

People calling for true Anarchy will be the first to bitch about the lack of cops ...

Re: Tabs vs Spaces

Note that a proper TAB is NOT a set number of spaces, it is the distance to the next TAB stop on a page.

K&R weren't addicted to TABs for formatting. See original K&R code for init here.

Back in roughly 1975, one of my Big Iron mentors had a bumper-sticker:

Tabs are for typewriters!

A woman from the typing pool who much preferred Fresca to Tab took exception to the comment, so he offered to buy her lunch in compensation for the perceived slight. They are still married.

A few years later, another mentor opined "Feelthy TABs are the devil's work, unless you are using them on your Smith Corona".

Personally, I prefer spaces, but I'll use tabs where required. When in Rome & all that.

Re: Applications

Have you been over to TUHS yet?

https://www.tuhs.org/

Re: Applications

There is a third possibility, to whit they just don't give a shit about your opinion.

The project is for their own amusement and pleasure, not yours.

_{Other reasons also may, or may not, exist, and may come and go at the whims of the contributers.}

Re: As I wrote about something else a month or so ago ...

"Neither was Unix until Mac OS X."

I beg to differ. For example, many Vet clinics ran on SCO Unix[0] starting in the mid '80s. There aren't many groups of professionals that are less computer literate that Vets and their staff, but the PSI/IDEXX Veterinary Practice Management system worked quite nicely for them, with minimal training.

It's all in the wetware of the software's distribution management. They understood what Vet Clinics needed, and provided it. The core OS for most people doesn't matter, it's all about the application software they are running, and proper training for same.

Yes, one could say the same for Plan9 ... once PSI/IDEXX starts making practice management software for it. Which will in all likelihood never happen.

For the record, I actually like Plan9 ... but IMO, it's a solution looking for a problem. I hope it finds one. Or many.

_{[0] Note to the youngsters: That's the proper, original SCO, not the later, perverted SCO of litigation fame.}

Re: As I wrote about something else a month or so ago ...

"The legalistic definition of Unix would exclude research Unixes though, so how good a definition is it really?"

Ah. I see where you are going now.

Linux, BSD, Apple's Darwin-based contributions, Android and ChromeOS are all Unix in scope and feel.

What they are not is examples of UNIX[tm], unless they have paid to use that trademark.

Kind of like the definition of "organic" food, which means the farmer has paid a state agency a fee to verify that said food was grown to a certain standard. Personally, I refuse to pay that rather high fee (which I would have to pass on to my customers), so I can't sell it as "Organic", even though it is, in fact, grown to that exact same standard (some would say better, actually).

However, there is nothing stopping me from marketing it as "organically grown".

UNIX[tm] is "Organic" ... Unix is organically grown. Two like products, one of which has paid money for an additional virtually meaningless tag ... the cost of which needs to be passed along to the consumer.

Re: One of the reasons it's called a "mouse"

"the on-screen cursor was known as the CAT (no, I dunno either)"

The way I heard it (SAIL, early '70s(ish), pre-EST Englebart talk/lecture about TMoAD), it was a shortened form of "caret". His original name for it was "the bug". By this time, he preferred cursor or pointer.

"If you are including the description of bugs in your documentations, don't ship the product!"

On the contrary ... Since time immemorial, I have ALWAYS read the errata/"known bugs" page(s) before digesting the rest of the documentation.

If your major software release's documentation doesn't include such a list, they are doing it wrong.

No hard/firm/soft/wetware, anywhere, is complete and perfect.

Re: No problem

"I can assure everyone that English laws are scrutinised down to the level of individual words"

Of course they are, by those with a vested interest. However, this doesn't address the statement, to wit "Most legislators don't read the Laws they vote for anyway". See those first two words? They are important.

Re: Just

One word: Weight.

Seriously, why ship a human-oriented test rig all the way to Mars when there will be no humans around to interact with it for (realistically) several decades or more?

_{Besides, you then have the problem of testing the test rig ...}

Re: Indeed a good "Who Me?"

For anyone who doesn't know, one doesn't test the wires consecutively, one tests them connector by connector.

It is exacting, but not difficult.

Re: Measure twice, cut once.

"Measure twice, cut once."

Unless you're doing 3-D work, like timber framing.

Measure lots and then cut minimally.

Re: Measure twice, cut once.

Some of us expect it ... since time immemorial, the command I use to turn on new equipment has been "smoke it". For repaired equipment it is always "smoke test".

_{Fortunately the magic smoke usually stays put ...}

Re: The loss of telemetry was not a random event ...

Hard to say as his results weren't very Klein.

Re: Interesting lines from the article

"Ergo, EV sales are rising faster than ICE."

Starting from zero, one can only go up. Sell one car today, and four next week and the Whitehouse will breathlessly proclaim "EV sales up 400%!".

The real question is what percentage of new car sales are EV, and what percentage ICE. Now plot that over the last ten years .... and predict the next ten.

And then there is reality.

"Meanwhile BYD and Tesla are selling all they can produce."

Last time I looked, Tesla, Toyota and Ford all had a bunch of unsold EV inventory and were cutting back on production. It would seem that people who buy one don't want another, and in fact many are trading them in on ICE vehicles.

The only BYD vehicles I am aware of here in the US are busses, and then only a trial fleet in Los Angeles. They have major reliability issues.

Re: Profits or the planet ?

It would seem that most consumers are more savvy than the marketers had hoped.

Re: KDE on X

"I'm yet to see a really coherent criticism of systemd."

Shall we start with the fact that its not housebroken, and leaves little piles of shit all over the filesystem?

Red Hat implemented the systemd-cancer to make their Linux Distribution more Windows-like, which should be a red flag to anyone with a clue. Debian followed along for internal political reasons, the tech involved had nothing to do with its implementation in that space. Another red flag. Most of the rest followed on blindly through ignorance and/or apathy, with a pinch of sheer laziness, because they use one of those two distro's repositories. In no example that I can find did a distribution choose the systemd-cancer because it is demonstrably a technologically better system. Not one. Think about that for a minute, and then ask yourself "Have I been had?".

There is a reason that an init, traditionally, is a small bit of code that does one thing very well. Like most of the rest of the *nix core utilities. All an init should do is start PID1, set run level, spawn a tty (or several), handle a graceful shutdown, and log all the above in plaintext to make troubleshooting as simplistic as possible. Anything else attached to this base is a vanity project that is best placed elsewhere, in it's own stand-alone code base.

Inventing a clusterfuck init variation that's so big and bulky that it needs to be called a "suite" is just asking for trouble. The systemd-cancer is b0rken by design and implementation.

Re: KDE on X

"It's not like a Microsoft project where the company would decide to do something and immediately assign complete teams of full time engineers in all impacted departments and coordinate their work."

No, but it's exactly like a RedHat project where the company decides to do something and immediately assigns complete teams of full time engineers in all impacted departments and coordinate their work. See also GNOME and the systemd-cancer.

And just like GNOME and the systemd-cancer, the powers-that-be at RedHat have decreed from on high that Wayland is The One True Way Forward... despite actual technical folks with technical backgrounds explaining to them why it's not a very good idea from a technical standpoint. And those very same technical folks demonstrating time and time again that the kludge is not ready for prime time, and probably never will be.

And of course Canonical and Debian slurp it up (it's FREE!!!!! What more would Management want?) ... and all the wannabe distros follow along blindly. To do otherwise would mean actually thinking (and spending money), and we can't have that, now can we.

Re: Screensaver

"who really cares ?"

Big Business, who demands their logo moving around and calling attention to itself on all idle surfaces.

Re: One doesn't resign to.

I rather think that when the technical folks all bail out, it will only be legal, financial and HR that's left. (IT will bail with the rest of the techies.)

One doesn't resign to.

One resigns from.

Re: Boostrap problem?

I saw it at SAIL in the '70s.

Other than the size and speed, nothing much has changed.

No, he clearly said it was box-ticking that was at fault.

Think about it ... being forced to tick those boxes means that they can not have an all women Board, EVEN IF they are the perfect set of people for the job.

In this context, box ticking is inherently evil.