An anonymous reader tipped us to an interview with Phillip Lee, author of Brewtarget, one of the best pieces of Free brewing software available (it's even in Debian). The interview discusses some of the technical decisions made (why Qt and Cmake?), and mentions a bit of the plans for future development: "The way the database was designed previously really hadn't been changed since the my first code in 2008, and we were running into a brick wall with some of the features we wanted. After we move to SQLite, there will be quite a lot of new features like being able to search through the ingredients in the database and stuff like that. I also plan to add some water chemistry tools for people that like to alter the ions and salts to fit a particular profile." (The last bit about water salt modifications come as a relief to at least this brewer.)
Hugh Pickens writes "The U.S. Bill of Rights guarantees the accused basic safeguards, including a fair and speedy jury trial, but in this era of mass incarceration — when our nation's prison population has quintupled in a few decades — these rights are, for the overwhelming majority of people hauled into courtrooms across America, theoretical. More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury, in part because the Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. 'The truth is that government officials have deliberately engineered the system to assure that the jury trial system established by the Constitution is seldom used,' says Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the libertarian Cato Institute. Now Susan Burton, head of 'A New Way of Life' (PDF), is helping to start a movement to demand restoration of Americans' basic civil and human rights by asking people who have been charged with crimes to reject plea bargains, and press for trial. 'Can we crash the system just by exercising our rights?' Burton says if everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation."
jfruh writes "Marten Mickos, ex-head of MySQL, was discussing his new open source cloud initiative with the New York Times when he mentioned in passing that 'Some people in open source think it is immoral to make a profit. I don't.' This has set off some predictable hand-wringing within the movement. While some community members are ideologically opposed to profit-making, that attitude isn't held by a majority, or even a plurality."
ananyo writes "In another victory for crowdsourcing, gamers playing Phylo have beaten a state-of-the-art program at aligning regions of 521 disease-associated genes form different species. The 'multiple sequence alignment problem' refers to the difficulty of aligning roughly similar sequences of DNA in genes common to many species. DNA sequences that are conserved across species may play an important role in the ultimate function of that particular gene. But with thousands of genomes likely to be sequenced in the next few years, sequence alignment will only become more difficult in future. Researchers now report that players of Phylo have produced roughly 350,000 solutions to various multiple sequence alignment problems, beating the accuracy of alignments from a program in roughly 70% of the sequences they manipulated."
New submitter An dochasac writes "Everyone knows incandescent lights are inefficient little space heaters which happen to convert 5% of their incoming energy to light. Compact Fluorescents (CFLs) are more efficient, but they contain toxic, brain-eating mercury and emit a greenish light. LEDs are also efficient and last longer, but if their blueish 'white' light doesn't mess up your melatonin balance, their price is high enough to wreck your checking account balance and give you the blues. A company called Vu1 has come up with something called Electron Stimulated Luminance (ESL) lights which claim to solve the mercury and price problem with a light based on Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) technology. These lights have the warm color balance of incandescents and are compatible with dimmer switches. The article has further ESL details along with an explanation of why it's still a bad idea to say these are 'trash can safe.'"
kenekaplan writes "Standard CT scanners can generate images of patient's body in less than five minutes today, but the radiation dose can be equal to about 70 chest X-rays. Lower-powered CT scans can be used in non-emergency situations, but it can take more than four days to produce those images. Intel and GE created an algorithm that speeds up a computer's ability to process the low radiation dose scans by 100x, from 100 hours per image to one hour."
Stowie101 writes "Kaleidescape has lost its drawn-out legal battle with the DVD CCA. A judge has issued a permanent injunction that prohibits the sale and support, including product updates, of existing DVD movie servers. 'As part of the injunction, Kaleidescape and its dealers can no longer offer technical support for products that are already in the field, meaning existing servers can receive no updates or repairs.' Kaleidescape has filed an appeal and 'believes that under California law the injunction order should not come into effect unless the California Court of Appeal affirms Judge Monahan's decision.'"
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology have managed to perfect 3D printing at the nanoscale. What may look like a grain of sand to the human eye could in fact be a detailed racing car model, a reproduction of a famous church, or London Bridge. The 3D printer relies on a laser beam directed by mirrors through a liquid resin onto a surface. It can print at 5 meters per second, which is a world record, and the end result is only a few hundred nanometers in size. The next hurdle: printing with bio-material so we can start making our own body parts/organs."
eldavojohn writes "The hacktivist group Anonymous has claimed another victim by taking down Islamist sites in Tunisia. Similar to an earlier attack on Turkish government sites, #optunisia has resulted in several government blogs and sites being replaced with 'Payback is a b****, isn't it?' The message lists censorship as the motivation behind this activity. The AFP is reporting that this is also in response to the reintroduction of Salafist laws and the caliphate. An additional Anonymous message read, 'We are not against religion, we are Muslims, but we are defending freedom in our country.' Censorship continues wholesale in Tunisia."
PerlJedi writes "A few months ago, a Tweet from Randal Schwartz pointed me to a YouTube video about 'Triangle Parties' made by Vi Hart. My nerdiness and my love of math made it my new favorite thing on YouTube. Now, with Pi Day coming up later this week, I thought it would be an appropriate time to point people to another of her YouTube videos: Pi is Wrong. The website she mentions at the end, Tauday, has a full explanation of the benefits of using Tau rather than Pi. Quoting: 'The Tau Manifesto is dedicated to one of the most important numbers in mathematics, perhaps the most important: the circle constant relating the circumference of a circle to its linear dimension. For millennia, the circle has been considered the most perfect of shapes, and the circle constant captures the geometry of the circle in a single number. Of course, the traditional choice for the circle constant is pi — but, as mathematician Bob Palais notes in his delightful article "Pi Is Wrong!", pi is wrong. It's time to set things right.'"
New submitter period3 writes "The latest mission of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is defending itself in a workplace lawsuit filed by a former computer specialist. The man claims he was demoted and then let go for promoting his views on intelligent design, the belief that a higher power must have had a hand in creation because life is too complex to have developed through evolution alone."
christoofar writes "Gawker founder Nick Denton says online comments have proven themselves to be not worth the trouble, a waste of resources, and contribute nothing to online conversation or even capture the intelligence of readers. From the article: 'In the early days of the Internet, there was hope that the unprecedented tool for global communication would lead to thoughtful sharing and discussion on its most popular sites. A decade and a half later, the very idea is laughable, says [Denton]. "It didn't happen," said Denton, whose properties include the blogs Gawker, Jezebel, Gizmodo, io9 and Lifehacker. "It's a promise that has so not happened that people don't even have that ambition anymore. The idea of capturing the intelligence of the readership — that's a joke."'"
Why can't the IT guy fix your latest tech problem? Odds are, he's ignorant. In a recent survey of over five hundred US business and IT managers conducted by CompTIA -- a non-profit IT trade association -- 93 percent of respondents said there's a gap between the skill level of their IT staff and where they want that skill level to be. Only 56 percent of respondents said the skills of their staff were "moderately close" to where they need to be.
There's no doubting the cloud invasion. But the research firm Gartner believes the personal cloud will replace the personal computer as the center of our digital lives sooner than you might think: 2014.
Marvel Comics is blowing up the printed page with its upcoming line of Infinite Comics, the publisher¿s first stab at creating a digital comic with tablets like the iPad in mind.
For every spacecraft that rocketed from its launch pad, dozens were conceived but never flew. In his new blog at Wired Science Blogs, space historian David Portree will explore the seldom-visited corners of more than 50 years of spaceflight history.
Firebug, a developer extension for Firefox, has long been an open source project, but now the project is making it even easier to contribute by hosting its code on GitHub.
Users will be able to connect Thunderbolt-equipped peripherals to remote hosts using optical cabling in 2012. The company reaffirmed its commitment to get optical cabling on the market this year, which will allow much longer cable runs beyond the current three-meter limit. This, in turn, will allow the technology to achieve higher transmission speeds in the future.
What if you could step into a room, touch the walls, and transform them into something entirely different: One second they¿re displaying data you can manipulate with taps and swipes, the next you¿ve got an immersive, 360-degree video of someone skydiving surrounding you. Another tap, and the walls practically disappear, turning transparent. This is basically what PepsiCo is showing off at its Zeitgeist phone booth during the South by Southwest festival.
Darpa director Regina Dugan will soon be stepping down from her position atop the Pentagon's premiere research shop to take a job with Google. The Pentagon inspector general investigation into Darpa's relationship with her company has nothing to do with Dugan's departure, her spokesman insists.
If you were planning to order a new iPad and hoping it would land on your doorstep this coming Friday, you have waited a bit too long. Shipping times for Apple's new tablet have been pushed back by two to three weeks.
Want to tap into the artificial intelligence (AI) power of IBM's Jeopardy!-winning Watson supercomputer? In the age of the cloud, there's only one way: Watson-as-a-Service. WellPoint, for one, is sending Watson to medical school. Is WaaS just what the doctor ordered?
The U.S. government¿s treatment of WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning was cruel, inhuman and degrading, according to a report from the United Nations special rapporteur on torture.
Identifying a need for better cybersecurity is the easy part. Getting the relevant parties to agree on what to do, and getting that done, is like the proverbial sausage factory. It will take legislation, and laws that accomplish anything meaningful will require a public/private partnership of historical efficiency.
LucasArts showed off new modes from , including one that puts you in control of a hulking rancor monster, during a media briefing earlier this month.
Microsoft Azure customers will receive a 33% refund for their cloud services for February following the Leap Day outage, "regardless of whether their service was impacted." The move seems designed to fend off any shying away from Microsoft's cloud. But there's a bigger question for cloud watchers: Will there be any lasting collateral damage to the cloud's overall cred because of the Leap Day outage?
Microsoft's Windows 8 is still just a preview release, but Mozilla is already working hard to ensure Firefox will be part of the new touch-friendly Metro environment when Windows 8 arrives.
Archeology may be an old profession, but it's not one hesitant about using the latest gizmos to uncover the past. LiDAR, or "light detection and ranging," is a relatively new tool archeologists use that can pull off non-destructive 3-D scans of rooms and objects.
Using a pre-release video of , Dot Physics blogger Rhett Allain deduces some basic physical properties of the Angry Birds' new off-planet war zone.
It sounds like something out of a darkly satirical science-fiction dystopia. But it's absolutely real ¿ and a completely problematic treatment of a problem that otherwise probably wouldn't be mentioned in any of the panels at South by Southwest Interactive.
At 3:00 on Sunday morning, a U.S. Army staff sergeant reportedly left a coalition outpost in Afghanistan's Kandahar province, walked to a cluster of home compounds, and began slaughtering the inhabitants. The fallout from the killings could be greatest in the villages that are most vital to NATO's endgame strategy.
The military is developing a huge milimeter-wave cannon, able to burn someone's skin with a blast of energy and heat without killing him. One of our reporters got burned by it -- twice. And we filmed it.
If you play -- and apparently anyone with a smartphone and a willingness to pull it out on the toilet does -- you may not realize that you're passing up a lot of awesome words on the grounds that they're slang, or neologisms, or just too nerdy to ever be legal. You could not be any more wrong if you got a B.A. in Wrongness from Misinformed University. Here are just a few of the cutting-edge and often completely archaic words you already know and could be playing:
IBM's Watson may have trounced former champion Ken Jennings in , but now it's facing an even bigger challenge: proving that it can make money for its creators. It's well on the way. Last week, IBM said that it was working with Citi to "explore how the Watson technology could help improve and simplify the banking experience," but for the past six months, Big Blue has also teamed up with health insurer WellPoint to turn Watson into a machine that can support the doctors of the world.
Reporters get to see the first successfully synchronized sound-on-film moving pictures.
Cartoon creator looks to Dungeons & Dragons, anime for inspiration on the popular cartoon.
What's the future of deeply interactive entertainment? Punchdrunk's shows one way forward, and if you're at SXSW, you can learn more during Monday's panel on "Immersion 101: Inventing the Future of Entertainment."
A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Mar. 12
Construction trucks are rumbling at Apple's Maiden, North Carolina, data center. But nobody seems to know exactly what they're building.
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.