text:
Taking a Whirl Tour on the GameCube
Table of Contents
Game Data #
Publisher: Crave Entertainment and Vivendi Universal
Release Date: November 2002 (US) and March 2003 (Europe)
Number of Developers: 15
Number of Contractors: 2
Length of Project: 15 months (plus 4 months for European SKU)
Development Hardware: 1.5GHz PC's with GeForce 3 video cards running Windows 2000. GameCube devkits, test consoles and disc burners.
Development Software: Microsoft Visual C++, SN Systems ProDG, Havok, 3D Studio Max, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, CoolEdit, cvs.
Project Size: 360,000 lines of source code. 900MB of compiled data.
Introduction #
Papaya Studio's Whirl Tour was released on the Nintendo GameCube and Sony Playstation 2 platforms in November 2002 and March 2003, for North America and Europe, respectively. The game, published by Crave Entertainment and Vivendi Universal, combines a story-based adventure with Tony Hawk style extreme sports play on scooters. Although Whirl Tour is a multi-platform title and the merging of genres poses intriguing game design questions, this article focuses solely on the GameCube development. We started work on the GameCube in July 2001, a few months after the Whirl Tour prototype was completed and running on a PC. Crave received milestone deliveries every two months — the first one involving a GameCube build took place in January 2002. We delivered a build to Nintendo of America (NOA) the following April for concept review, and Crave demoed the game at E3 in May. That summer, Crave forwarded our beta release as a presubmission build to NOA lot check, the group responsible for verifying compliance with Nintendo guidelines. The final submission was approved in September 2002 for the North American release. Over the next few months, under the aegis of Vivendi Universal, we undertook localization for the European release of Whirl Tour, which was submitted to Nintendo of Europe (NOE) and approved in January 2003.
What Went Right #
1. Development Tools #
When we started GameCube development, five months before the console showed up on retail shelves, development hardware was scarce and software tools were still under development. But we minimized the impact of this problem by getting started with Nintendo's software based emulator and obtaining the tools as early as possible and in sufficient quantities.
The GameCube emulator provides API-level emulation on a PC. Our team was already working with a PC reference implementation of the game using Visual C++, so while we waited for devkits (programmer version of GameCube hardware that contains twice the usual memory and loads data from the developer's PC instead of disc), we incorporated code that called the emulated video, graphics, disc and controller API's. In six weeks, we had a pseudo-GameCube version of our title running, albeit at 5fps.
We applied some optimizations to get the game running up to a slightly less painful 10fps, but there was always a nagging suspicion that time spent optimizing with emulator wouldn't result in anything useful on the real hardware. It was a relief when the first devkit arrived, two months after we started work with the emulator, but it took three months to really get the game built with the compiler (SN Systems ProDG) and running on the hardware. We had to wait for a GameCube port of the physics middleware, and we needed to update our offline data preprocessor to convert the little-endian data produced on the PC into big-endian data readable by the GameCube CPU (a custom PowerPC called Gekko).
Although we had to wait for a port of the physics middleware, it was still important that we received the devkits as soon as we did. Aside from the endian issue, there were a number of subtle differences between the emulator and actual hardware that had to be resolved, including differences between the Visual C++ and ProDG compilers. Likewise, we reaped benefits from obtaining the test consoles and disc-writer as soon as they became available. They arrived shortly before our first schedule GameCube milestone, so we were able to make that delivery to Crave on a test disc instead of a bunch of development files for a devkit.
Besides getting all the tools as early as possible, we obtained redundant quantities of each. The extra units saved time and provided peace of mind. For example, we ran 24-hour-plus smoke tests concurrently on multiple test consoles — when one console occasionally reported a fatal error and the others didn't, we concluded it was a hardware problem and didn't lose sleep over it (while were were losing sleep over other things). And when we had to return devkits for repairs (video card damage) and upgrades (PAL support), we could send back one unit at a time without stalling development. We also ordered hundreds of blank test discs in anticipation of daily burns and crunch time. The last thing we wanted was to miss a deadline for lack of discs.
2. Developer Support #
We were fortunate in receiving thorougly good support from all our licensors and vendors — Havok for our physics middleware, SN Systems for our compiler and IDE, and Nintendo Software Developer Support Group (SDSG) for just about everything else. SDSG resources got us started on a lot of code. Our preliminary implementation of dynamic shadows, using shadow volumes, was guided by an SDSG white paper and refined based on ideas exchanged in the developer newsgroups. The final shadow implementation used shadow maps and was initially based on one of the SDK demos. For a screen snapshot function, we reused the source from a utility posted on the SDSG web site.
Access to SDSG was helpful throughout the project but proved especially so during the submission period. Our US submissions were rejected twice by Nintendo lot check, and our publishers wanted fast turnaround for each resubmission. Email and phone queries to SDSG resulted in quick clarification of guideline items and evaluation of proposed solutions. This enabled us to get the first resubmission out in less than a week and the second resubmission out in one day. Combined with lot check turnaround of a few days for each submission, the total time from first submission to final approval was just under a month.
The delay in getting a port of the physics middleware could have been serious, but a few weeks after we got our devkits, Havok sent us a linkable library that allowed us to complete a build. When it became apparent that we needed endian-conversion for our collision surfaces, they quickly sent us a run-time solution, and eventually a preprocessor solution that we integrated into our offline data converter. The GameCube port was basically complete in five months and we received incremental updates throughout the rest of the project.
We opted for SN Systems ProDG over Metrowerks Codewarrior because we were already using ProDG for the PS2. This minimized compiler differences between the two platforms (we already had differences in code acceptance between Visual C++ and ProDG), but meant starting out with a beta compiler. The few bugs we encountered were addressed quickly by SN Systems support, and the official compiler release was ready a few months before the first GameCube milestone. After that, patches and upgrades were readily available on the SN Systems support site, and they had quick responses to questions sent via email or posted to the gamecube.snsystems newsgroup on the SDSG site.
3. GameCube Architecture #
Another reason we got the game running quickly on the GameCube is the friendliness of the architecture. The graphics hardware (Flipper) supports multiple dynamic lights, multitexturing, mipmapping, blending, and fog, so most of our basic renderer features were easy to implement (though optimization required some work — see What Went Wrong). The GameCube combines a unified memory architecture (UMA) with fast 1T-SRAM, allowing flexibility in managing textures and the video framebuffer.
The hardware features a generous 16MB of auxiliary RAM (ARAM). We used half of the ARAM for sound effects — given more time, we would have used the remaining ARAM to increase the fidelity of our sound samples. For songtracks, we used the hardware streaming direct from disc. The disc is small and fast, so we never had a problem with load times. The disc capacity is lower than a standard DVD, but at 1.5GB, it was plenty for our 900MB of data.
4. Memory Management #
Although fast, the GameCube main memory (MRAM) is limited in size (24MB) compared to the PS2 (32MB). We stayed within the memory limitation by agressively keeping on top of that issue. By running on the test consoles as soon as possible, we forced ourselves to reach the 24MB target early, within the first six months of the schedule. The UMA meant the video framebuffer occupied MRAM. Since PAL resolution is higher than NTSC, we sized the framebuffer for PAL in all builds to ensure we wouldn't have memory problems later. We configured all of the devkits to use only 24MB, so the programmers would know immediately if any level didn't fit. Testers went through all levels in each daily build and in their email report listed any levels that didn't load.
Flipper supports S3 texture compression, so we compressed as many textures as possible. Any such textures that didn't look good after compression were reworked. This considerably reduced memory usage (and as a side effect improved performance and load time) and didn't seem to degrade the visual quality noticeably. After E3, new assets pushed us over the memory limit, so we turned mipmap generation off until we had more space and a more selective procedure for mipmapping.
5. Testing #
We made a point of testing early and often. Starting about a month before the first GameCube milestone, we released daily builds on test discs for our QA group. The builds were created from the latest code and data checked into cvs. Our testers issued a daily test report noting new bugs, verifying fixes, and listing minimum single-player and multi-player frame rates for each level (the build included an on-screen fps display).
Crave provided us with a tester from their staff who worked on-site with us and tested our daily build. At first, we sent our Friday build every week to the rest of their QA group, but in the last two months before submission we Fedex'ed them our builds, daily. We also set up remote access to their bug database and used that as our sole bug reporting and resolution mechanism. Since changes to the database would show up on the client GUI instantly, we would be alerted to the new bugs as they arrived and could investigate and update the database entry immediately with comments or requests for closure.
The Crave QA group provided valuable console testing expertise, including experience with a recent GameCube title, and were familiar with the Nintendo developer guidelines. Soon after they started testing Whirl Tour, their GameCube bug database contained about 200 entries, many of them memory card and disc error handling issues that would have been flagged by lot check at submission. By the end of the project, we had around 700 bugs logged and resolved for Whirl Tour GameCube.
6. Schedule #
Originally, we estimated the GameCube development of Whirl Tour would trail the PS2 by one to three months, for reasons including the expected delay for hardware and middleware and less in-house familiarity with the newer GameCube platform versus the PS2. But that meant we would at least partially miss the critical holiday retail season. When it appeared that we could deliver our first GameCube milestone on disc, it made sense to synchronize the GameCube schedule with that of the PS2. This allowed us to target September for our North American submission, which would allow the game to arrive on the retail shelves in November. And it greatly simplified our overall project schedule, since we didn't have to track different milestones on each platform.
The decision to sync the schedules was consistent with our approach of top-down milestone-driven scheduling. Instead of building the schedule bottom-up by summing up low-level tasks, a method which accumulates error over time, we built the schedule top-down, placing the most importance on critical deadlines like E3 and the target submission date, followed by our milestone commitments to the publishers, and then juggling tasks to accomodate those dates. Adhering to the big-picture deadlines proved even more important later in the project, when Papaya was gearing up for the next project — any delay in this title would have just propagated to the next.
The schedule was tracked with Microsoft Project. Milestones were marked as such using the milestone task annotation in Project, and features required for each milestone were listed as subtasks, down to a granularity of no less than one week per task. We marked only real dependencies between tasks, no artificial links to force a nice-looking sequence, and we let Project calculate the expected dates. When a task was completed, we filled in the date for the finished task and let Project recalculate the dates for the remaining tasks. Thus we used the schedule not so much as a micro-management and task-scheduling tool than as a schedule feasibility tracker and early warning system.
We had weekly team meetings that initially involved only the leads and proceeded in a go-around-the-table-and-report fashion. Eventually, the format changed to include all team members and followed an announced agenda. This resulted in more focused and shorter meetings, sometimes lasting only fifteen or twenty minutes and rarely lasting more than an hour. Minutes were distributed by email afterwards. The meeting time was also minimized by requiring each team member to send a company-wide status report every Friday on his area of the project.
What Went Wrong #
1. Performance #
The biggest disappointment was our failure to achieve our original performance target of 60fps for all levels in single-player mode. We did achieve the desired 30fps for multiplayer mode in all levels, but for single-player mode we could only maintain a consistent 60fps in two-thirds of the levels. The remaining levels alternated between 30fps and 60fps, so we had to lock them to the lower frame rate to keep the visuals smooth.
We made a mistake in not achieving and maintaining the target frame rate early. We started with a consistent 30fps in our first GameCube milestone, and the code performance improved all the way through the project. We planned on achieving 30fps for the first milestone and reaching 60fps by E3. The fact that we only had a few levels running at 60fps by E3 should have been a wake-up call, but we succumbed to wishful thinking and hoped that further optimization techniques would get us to our goal. We did improve code performance by about 50 percent between E3 and submission, but with more NPC's, water effects, particle effects, dynamic shadows, and so on, we just kept pace with the additional assets. In the end, we still left a third of the levels below target in single-player mode.
It became apparent, too late, that many of our optimization techniques did not improve the worst-case performance in our problematic levels. If we had recognized this earlier, we may have been able to restructure the levels to exhibit more balanced performance. There were some architecture-specific optimizations that we did not fully explore, but again, we ran out of time.
2. Submission (and Resubmission) #
The NOA submission was rejected twice before approval. That isn't a particularly bad showing, but there was a lot of pressure to get each resubmission out quickly, and it wasn't fun. We cut it close in terms of getting the release out in time for the holiday retail season, so it would have been more comfortable if we could have knocked it down to one or two submissions.
The most persistent problem areas that kept showing up on our lot check submission reports included memory card error handling and on-screen depictions of controller buttons. We could have gotten a pass on the button graphics, but we updated the button graphics several times anyway in hopes of making them more acceptable to lot check. The memory card issues for the most part were not negotiable — there are comprehensive guidelines involving error-handling flow and messages. These are not very exciting features to implement, but they are required, and we should have tried to get that stuff done earlier.
Our programmers and testers were not familiar with the GameCube submission issues, and as a result, we were overly reliant on Crave's QA team to identify the problems. Once Crave started testing the game, we basically had two months to rewrite our memory card, disc error, and reset-handling code, while simultaneously adding our shadow code, performance optimizations, and trying to fix all other bugs before submission. This was complicated by a couple of attempts in the last few weeks to advance the submission, which, in retrospect, now seems unrealistic.
We should have educated ourselves on the submission issues much earlier by reading up on the guidelines and examining other games, and we should have scheduled completion of all the guideline requirements by our beta release early summer. Crave sent the beta to lot check, but we didn't receive the results until two weeks before the final submission. The presubmission report from lot check was useful, but would have been more so if we had tracked it down earlier, and if didn't have so many violations (too many to fix in one pass).
We complicated the memory card situation by attempting to share much of the framework with the PS2. We delayed much of the GameCube-specific implementation until the PS2 code was nearly done, so most of the work was completed in the last three months before submission. The code sharing seemed convenient initially, but there were significant differences between memory card guidelines for the two platforms. The resulting error-checking and error-handling flow was somewhat atypical for a GameCube title, requiring clarification among the QA groups, lot check, and programmers. After hasty code mangling during the resubmissions to accomodate QA and lot check objections, the shared code was a mess. It seems obvious now that we should have completely separated the memory card code for the two platforms.
3. Manual Builds #
Although we had a daily build, it was not automated. We performed the build on a developer station using the ProDG/Visual Studio envronment. This allowed us to make quick fixes before releasing the build to QA, but it was not the type of clean and reproducible build that good configuration management practices mandate. An overnight batch build would have saved time (each build took anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours, depending on fixit attempts), been reproducible, and, if we set it up properly, automatically logged and emailed build results.
Moreover, an automatic build could have helped to establish a sense of regularity and process. The team members were never sure when the next build would be available, so eventually we had to send email every day announcing the build. Aside from the testers, most of our team members were still overly reliant on the PC version on the game and there was a slightly disruptive tendency to go straight to the programmers instead of checking the latest official build. And the fact that the build took place manually and not at any designated regular time made it too tempting to request new builds at increasing and irregular intervals, particularly during crunch times.
We had our data converter running every night by the end of the project, allowing us to check the latest art and sound effects changes. But the data build did not include processing of songtrack and FVM data, which were provided by external sources as WAV and AVI files requiring lengthy (hours to do a whole set) conversion to GameCube-specific compressed streaming formats. The FMV conversion was particularly involved, as we required versions for NTSC and PAL, and we had to extract the audio, resample and merge it back in to the converted FMV files. Unfortunately, the songtrack and FMV sources arrived fairly late in our schedule, so we were processing iterations of this data well past our attempted one-month data freeze before submission.
4. Wanted: Tool Programmer #
We could have used a tool programmer. Our data converter was augmented by several different programmers in an ad-hoc manner, so new features were not consistently implemented with all the target platforms in mind. For example, although mipmapping and texture compression were technically multi-platform features, the code ended up in an "ngc-utils" file, and triangle-strip generation and texture palettization ended up in PS2-only code. A dedicated tool programmer could have developed the converter with more of a big-picture approach and taken some of the load off the other programmers, particularly the console programmers and lead programmer. A dedicated tool programmer could also have addressed the artists requests for previewing tools, which we just didn't have time to work on.
5. Lengthy Localization #
The localization process for the European release took a lot longer than expected. Crave's QA group was regularly testing our PAL builds well before the NOA submission, so we expected to have a submission to NOE ready as soon as we had the text translations. The game engine modifications turned out to involve new texture fonts for the extended character set, additional character selections for text entry screens, resized GUI elements so longer European words would fit, and proper synchronization of the in-game language with the console ROM language setting. The code changes took a while, but a greater delay was incurred by an initial one-month wait for the first set of translations from Vivendi, then several iterations with Vivendi's QA group to fix translations, typos, and text trailing off screen. We made our submission to NOE three months after the NOA submission, and then it took an additional three weeks for NOE to reject the first submission and approve the second.
6. A Mild Case of Featuritis? #
We didn't completely meet our performance targets, and we had a crunch time involving a flurry of fixes and resubmissions. So any work that didn't result in obviously necessary functionality warrants reevaluation:
Audio Effects #
We had audio reverb and delay effects on our requirements checklist, but they were used in only one area in the game. It was gratifying to say we used the audio effects hardware on the GameCube, but it made our audio code layer significantly more complex and took several weeks to get it right. Compounding this, we were worried about the audio DSP dropping voices when oversubscribed, so after E3 we rewrote the system to handle this eventuality. But the rewrite took two to three weeks, the resulting code was messier, and once we had all the sounds in the game, the built-in GameCube metering hardware indicated that we were only using twenty five percent of the DSP cycles in the worst case.
Screen Capture #
We had a publisher requested for a screen snapshot function, which we implemented shortly after the first GameCube milestone. It worked only on a devkit and was used by our testers for their bug reports. But it's unlikely that it was used by anyone else, internally or externally. Submission releases were not supposed to include debug code, so we ended up removing the screen snapshot code before the presubmission. All in all, we spent five months maintaining that feature.
Video Modes #
Nintendo recommended but did not require support for progressive scan. We implemented it, but neither we nor our publisher's QA group had progressive scan monitors, so we relied on informal testing off-site using personal equipment. Our progressive scan support was noted by some reviewers, but there was a cost in coding, testing, and added risk to the submission, as Nintendo has guidelines on proper implementation of progressive scan.
Similarly, Nintendo recommended but did not require support for 60Hz mode in PAL releases. The number of users who can take advantage of this feature is probably higher than with progressive scan, and this feature was testable in-house and by the publisher's QA group, so it is a more justifiable feature But again, there was a development and QA cost, code complexity to handle both 50Hz and 60Hz modes, e.g. in selecting the appropriate FMV to play, and additional localization required for text displayed when switching modes.
Shadows #
We implemented detailed dynamic shadows for player characters and enemy bosses. If we had limited the detailed shadows to just the player characters and used blob shadows for the bosses, at least two more of the levels would have run at 60fps instead of 30fps. It wouldn't have looked as good, but would have been no worse than many high-profile games that have recently appeared. We used higher-resolution shadow maps for the player characters, while allowing the boss shadows to have a more jagged appearance. The hi-res maps looked good, but the effect was subtle, and there may have been a performance penalty. Late in the project, we combined the shadow map blending with a location-based shadow value so the dynamic shadows would blend with pre-shadowed areas. Yet again, this looked good, but the effect was subtler still, and it was risky to make such a change right around submission.
Our server crashed right around E3, and although we had an automatic tape backup running every night, it turned out the data was unrecoverable. Fortunately, we had local copies of the working data distributed around the office, and we had performed periodic manual backups on DVD. It took a while to piece together all our code and assets, and some of the work done just before E3 was lost. It could have been worse, but we did pay a the price for failing to ensure the integrity of our backup system.
After the server crash, we spent the next several months upgrading our IT infrastructure. This didn't distract too much from the ongoing development work, but we could have done a better job of minimizing disruptions by communicating and coordinating the IT plans. For example, switching from local accounts to domain-based accounts made some development tools unusable until some Windows registry values were updated. Even then, we were unable to upgrade our ProDG installation, which meant we were unable to upgrade the Nintendo SDK. And we had to use the original local account for our disk burns. We could have attempted to diagnose the problems or at worst perform a complete reinstallation, but with crunch time starting and the submission deadline looming, we really didn't want to take the time. This might have been avoided if we had discussed the IT planning in our weekly meetings and coordinated some upgrade tests and fallback policies.
Lessons Learned #
This article focused on the GameCube development of Whirl Tour, but most of these issues are applicable to console development in general. As a console developer, many things are outside of your control, so control what you can. Get the development tools as soon as possible, and get more than enough. Make full use of developer support. Achieve memory and performance targets early and maintain them. Establish daily automated builds and testing early. Take care of the requirements before working on bonus features. Schedule around the really important milestones and then stick with the schedule. Do early and multiple presubmissions if possible. Plan for a few resubmissions in the end — allow a month. And localization will take longer than you think.


text: 1The Linux Kernel Driver Interface 2(all of your questions answered and then some) 3 4Greg Kroah-Hartman <email@example.com> 5 6This is being written to try to explain why Linux does not have a binary 7kernel interface, nor does it have a stable kernel interface. Please 8realize that this article describes the _in kernel_ interfaces, not the 9kernel to userspace interfaces. The kernel to userspace interface is 10the one that application programs use, the syscall interface. That 11interface is _very_ stable over time, and will not break. I have old 12programs that were built on a pre 0.9something kernel that still work 13just fine on the latest 2.6 kernel release. That interface is the one 14that users and application programmers can count on being stable. 15 16 17Executive Summary 18----------------- 19You think you want a stable kernel interface, but you really do not, and 20you don't even know it. What you want is a stable running driver, and 21you get that only if your driver is in the main kernel tree. You also 22get lots of other good benefits if your driver is in the main kernel 23tree, all of which has made Linux into such a strong, stable, and mature 24operating system which is the reason you are using it in the first 25place. 26 27 28Intro 29----- 30 31It's only the odd person who wants to write a kernel driver that needs 32to worry about the in-kernel interfaces changing. For the majority of 33the world, they neither see this interface, nor do they care about it at 34all. 35 36First off, I'm not going to address _any_ legal issues about closed 37source, hidden source, binary blobs, source wrappers, or any other term 38that describes kernel drivers that do not have their source code 39released under the GPL. Please consult a lawyer if you have any legal 40questions, I'm a programmer and hence, I'm just going to be describing 41the technical issues here (not to make light of the legal issues, they 42are real, and you do need to be aware of them at all times.) 43 44So, there are two main topics here, binary kernel interfaces and stable 45kernel source interfaces. They both depend on each other, but we will 46discuss the binary stuff first to get it out of the way. 47 48 49Binary Kernel Interface 50----------------------- 51Assuming that we had a stable kernel source interface for the kernel, a 52binary interface would naturally happen too, right? Wrong. Please 53consider the following facts about the Linux kernel: 54 - Depending on the version of the C compiler you use, different kernel 55 data structures will contain different alignment of structures, and 56 possibly include different functions in different ways (putting 57 functions inline or not.) The individual function organization 58 isn't that important, but the different data structure padding is 59 very important. 60 - Depending on what kernel build options you select, a wide range of 61 different things can be assumed by the kernel: 62 - different structures can contain different fields 63 - Some functions may not be implemented at all, (i.e. some locks 64 compile away to nothing for non-SMP builds.) 65 - Memory within the kernel can be aligned in different ways, 66 depending on the build options. 67 - Linux runs on a wide range of different processor architectures. 68 There is no way that binary drivers from one architecture will run 69 on another architecture properly. 70 71Now a number of these issues can be addressed by simply compiling your 72module for the exact specific kernel configuration, using the same exact 73C compiler that the kernel was built with. This is sufficient if you 74want to provide a module for a specific release version of a specific 75Linux distribution. But multiply that single build by the number of 76different Linux distributions and the number of different supported 77releases of the Linux distribution and you quickly have a nightmare of 78different build options on different releases. Also realize that each 79Linux distribution release contains a number of different kernels, all 80tuned to different hardware types (different processor types and 81different options), so for even a single release you will need to create 82multiple versions of your module. 83 84Trust me, you will go insane over time if you try to support this kind 85of release, I learned this the hard way a long time ago... 86 87 88Stable Kernel Source Interfaces 89------------------------------- 90 91This is a much more "volatile" topic if you talk to people who try to 92keep a Linux kernel driver that is not in the main kernel tree up to 93date over time. 94 95Linux kernel development is continuous and at a rapid pace, never 96stopping to slow down. As such, the kernel developers find bugs in 97current interfaces, or figure out a better way to do things. If they do 98that, they then fix the current interfaces to work better. When they do 99so, function names may change, structures may grow or shrink, and 100function parameters may be reworked. If this happens, all of the 101instances of where this interface is used within the kernel are fixed up 102at the same time, ensuring that everything continues to work properly. 103 104As a specific examples of this, the in-kernel USB interfaces have 105undergone at least three different reworks over the lifetime of this 106subsystem. These reworks were done to address a number of different 107issues: 108 - A change from a synchronous model of data streams to an asynchronous 109 one. This reduced the complexity of a number of drivers and 110 increased the throughput of all USB drivers such that we are now 111 running almost all USB devices at their maximum speed possible. 112 - A change was made in the way data packets were allocated from the 113 USB core by USB drivers so that all drivers now needed to provide 114 more information to the USB core to fix a number of documented 115 deadlocks. 116 117This is in stark contrast to a number of closed source operating systems 118which have had to maintain their older USB interfaces over time. This 119provides the ability for new developers to accidentally use the old 120interfaces and do things in improper ways, causing the stability of the 121operating system to suffer. 122 123In both of these instances, all developers agreed that these were 124important changes that needed to be made, and they were made, with 125relatively little pain. If Linux had to ensure that it will preserve a 126stable source interface, a new interface would have been created, and 127the older, broken one would have had to be maintained over time, leading 128to extra work for the USB developers. Since all Linux USB developers do 129their work on their own time, asking programmers to do extra work for no 130gain, for free, is not a possibility. 131 132Security issues are also very important for Linux. When a 133security issue is found, it is fixed in a very short amount of time. A 134number of times this has caused internal kernel interfaces to be 135reworked to prevent the security problem from occurring. When this 136happens, all drivers that use the interfaces were also fixed at the 137same time, ensuring that the security problem was fixed and could not 138come back at some future time accidentally. If the internal interfaces 139were not allowed to change, fixing this kind of security problem and 140insuring that it could not happen again would not be possible. 141 142Kernel interfaces are cleaned up over time. If there is no one using a 143current interface, it is deleted. This ensures that the kernel remains 144as small as possible, and that all potential interfaces are tested as 145well as they can be (unused interfaces are pretty much impossible to 146test for validity.) 147 148 149What to do 150---------- 151 152So, if you have a Linux kernel driver that is not in the main kernel 153tree, what are you, a developer, supposed to do? Releasing a binary 154driver for every different kernel version for every distribution is a 155nightmare, and trying to keep up with an ever changing kernel interface 156is also a rough job. 157 158Simple, get your kernel driver into the main kernel tree (remember we 159are talking about GPL released drivers here, if your code doesn't fall 160under this category, good luck, you are on your own here, you leech 161<insert link to leech comment from Andrew and Linus here>.) If your 162driver is in the tree, and a kernel interface changes, it will be fixed 163up by the person who did the kernel change in the first place. This 164ensures that your driver is always buildable, and works over time, with 165very little effort on your part. 166 167The very good side effects of having your driver in the main kernel tree 168are: 169 - The quality of the driver will rise as the maintenance costs (to the 170 original developer) will decrease. 171 - Other developers will add features to your driver. 172 - Other people will find and fix bugs in your driver. 173 - Other people will find tuning opportunities in your driver. 174 - Other people will update the driver for you when external interface 175 changes require it. 176 - The driver automatically gets shipped in all Linux distributions 177 without having to ask the distros to add it. 178 179As Linux supports a larger number of different devices "out of the box" 180than any other operating system, and it supports these devices on more 181different processor architectures than any other operating system, this 182proven type of development model must be doing something right :) 183 184 185 186------ 187 188Thanks to Randy Dunlap, Andrew Morton, David Brownell, Hanna Linder, 189Robert Love, and Nishanth Aravamudan for their review and comments on 190early drafts of this paper. 191

subset: commoncrawl


text:
They started dating a month ago. Now Geri has agreed to marry him. Confirmed her reps:
"We are delighted to announce the engagement of Geri Halliwell and Fabrizio Politi." Fabrizio is apparently a yacht tycoon. Not sure what that is but his job is unimportant. His looks are secondary too. What's essential is that he's very, very wealthy. Like not just pop star wealthy but boat people wealthy. Boat people wealthy tends to be obscenely wealthy. For girls like Geri and girls like Posh, money is akin to kindness in a man. Geri's done well.
Here they are over the course of their courtship, from London to the Maldives, truly a whirlwind romance. But no rush to marriage. Apparently they'll enjoy a long engagement before making it official. Because everyone knows engagement means trial period…right? Isn't that the new definition?
Photos from Flynetonline.com and Wenn.com


text:
Best Succulents For Interior Decorating
11 Awesome-Looking Succulents To Spruce Up Your Home Or Office
Succulents have been a white-hot interior decorating commodity for several years now and are only continuing to increase in popularity, as evidenced by this google search data: (and the millions of artfully-shot succulent photos you'll find on Instagram). Small, unique-looking and easy to care for, succulents have captured the hearts of young urban dwellers looking to add some greenery to their space.
So, first of all, what is a succulent? Well, plants that are considered succulents are characterized by their thick, fleshy leaves, which they use to retain water in dry conditions (the succulent that most people are familiar with is the aloe plant). This ability to retain water is part of what makes them such awesome house plants. Plop them in a window sill (they tend to like a lot of light), then water them about once a week (and only once every two weeks in the winter) and you're good to go.
They're hearty, so even a serial plant killer would have a hard time screwing up with succulents and this heartiness also means they make great pseudo-pets for people who travel.
Succulents tend to be small — perfect for your office desk or a shelf — but they pack huge personalities in terms of their look. When I started diving into the world of succulents, I couldn't believe how many crazy-looking species there are. They're fairly inexpensive, AND they offer a return on your investment because once they're big enough, you can propagate more succulents via cuttings!
If you're not 100% sold on succulents yet (and if not, what kind of plant snob are you??), check out these examples of some of the coolest-looking varieties out there.
Burro's Tail
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Look at this incredible thing! What is it? Alien tentacles? "Burro" for those of you who aren't up on your Spanish, means donkey, so that's the idea behind the name. Only thing to be mindful of with this one is that those little fat leaves are quite delicate and will fall off if jostled too much, so keep this guy in a safe place.
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Another great thing about succulents is they have great names. The "hen" in this name refers to the large plant in the middle and the "chicks" are the smaller plants that shoot off from it and eventually grow to be the same size. Fractal plant! Trippy!
Panda Plant
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See what I mean about the names? They just keep getting better and better. The brown-tipped leaves of this Madagascar native are covered in fuzzy white hairs — like a panda!
Jade Plant
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The thick, glossy teardrop-shaped leaves are what give the jade plant its name. You can groom the jade plant like a bonsai to keep it sleek and desk-friendly and use the branches and leaves you remove to propagate new plants!
Purple Echevaria
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This desert plant comes in a variety of colors from purple to blue to black to green and red.
Graptopetalum (Ghost Plant)
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Native to Mexico and Arizona, Graptopetalum come in a variety of species that range in color, petal shape and flowers. Graptopetalum paraguayense or "ghost plant" is characterized by rosettes made up of thick leaves with petals that end in a rounded point.
Graptopetalum amethystinum (Lavender Pebbles)
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Another member of the Graptopetalum family, Graptopetalum amethystinum (also called Lavender Pebbles or Jewel-leaf plant) has bulbous, light purple leaves and grows incredible star-shaped flowers in the spring.
Crassula Muscosa
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Crassula Muscosa, also known as Rattail Crassula, Watch Chain, Lizard's Tail, or Zipper Plant is native to South Africa and Namibia. Its tightly-packed tentacles of leaves seem to have a mind of their own, growing in every direction.
Senecio Rowleyanus (String Of Pearls)
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This unique vine plant native to Southwest Africa prefers the shade and will grow small white flowers in the summer. It looks wicked spilling out of a hanging pot or pitcher, but keep it away from pets as it can be toxic if ingested.
Flat Cacti
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Flat cacti like Opuntia (or "Prickly Pear") can be pretty cool. The leaves tend to twist and turn, so even though they're sort of "2-D", they tend to look awesome from any angle. New "leaves" on a flat cactus like this start out as tiny little balls that sprout up like pimples from its edges.
Christmas Cactus
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The Christmas cactus is so named for the time of year at which it bursts into bloom with bright pink or orange hanging flowers.
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Army defectors ambushed dozens of Syrian troops, and regime forces gunned down civilians during one of the bloodiest days of the country's 8-month-old uprising, which appeared Tuesday to be spiraling out of President Bashar Assad's control.
Up to 90 people were killed in a gruesome wave of violence Monday, activists said. The extent of the bloodshed only came to light Tuesday, in part because corpses lying in the streets did not reach the morgue until daylight.
As the bloodshed spiked, Assad's former allies were turning on him in rapid succession, a sign of profound impatience with a leader who has failed to stem months of unrest that could explode into a regional conflagration.
Pressure From Neighbors
Turkey, Jordan and the 22-member Arab League all signaled they were fed up with Assad's response to the uprising and were ready to pressure him to go.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday he no longer has confidence in the government led by Assad, a 46-year-old eye doctor who inherited power from his father 11 years ago.
"No regime can survive by killing or jailing," said Erdogan, who cultivated close ties with Assad before the uprising began in March. "No one can build a future over the blood of the oppressed."
Erdogan, who disrespectfully addressed Assad by his first name, warned Assad that his brutal crackdown on opponents threatens to place him on a list of leaders who "feed on blood."
Turkey also canceled plans for oil exploration in Syria and threatened to cut electricity supplies to the country, which is burning through the $17 billion in foreign reserves the government had at the start of the uprising. Turkey provides around 7 percent of Syria's total electricity consumption.
A day earlier, Jordan's king said Assad should step down, the first Arab leader to publicly make such a call. In an interview with the BBC, King Abdullah said it's time for Assad to make way for a new phase in Syrian political life.
"I believe if I were in his shoes, I would step down," he said.
After the interview aired, the Jordanian Embassy in Syria's capital was attacked by an angry mob.
I think what we're seeing here and continue to see is that the drumbeat of international pressure is increasing on Assad.
The U.S. and its European allies have already called for the Syrian president to step down. They hope pressure from Arab countries will force Russia and China to back a U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria. Russia and China previously vetoed such a resolution.
Over the weekend, the Arab League took a near-unanimous vote to suspend Damascus from the regional body as early as Thursday if steps aren't taken to end the violence. The decision has enraged Syria, which considers itself a bastion of Arab nationalism.
Syria's foreign minister branded the decision "shameful and malicious," and accused other Arabs of conspiring with the West to undermine the regime.
The only other Arab countries to be suspended from the League were Libya, in recent months, and Egypt, after it made peace with Israel back in 1979.
The Arab League has been meeting with members of the Syrian opposition this week. League officials are expected to convene again in Morocco on Thursday, with Syria at the top of the agenda.
In a sign that Saudi Arabia's rulers now foresee an end to Assad's rule, the former Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Turki Al Faisal, told reporters in Washington that it was "inevitable" that Assad would step down.
"I think what we're seeing here and continue to see is that the drumbeat of international pressure is increasing on Assad," said U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner.
Despite the widespread condemnation, Assad was unlikely to put an end to the crackdown, said Fadia Kiwan, a political science professor at Beirut's St. Joseph University. The reason is simple: Assad's regime would almost certainly fall if the crackdown ends, she said.
Violence Against Security Forces
Although activists say the anti-government protesters have remained largely peaceful, an armed insurgency has developed in recent months targeting Assad's military and security forces.
Thirty-four soldiers were killed Monday in an ambush in Daraa, the birthplace of the uprising, said Rami Abdul-Rahman, head of the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The brazen attack by army defectors suggests a new confidence among troops who have sided with the protesters, and highlights the potential for an armed confrontation to escalate.
The army defectors claim to be protecting unarmed civilians who go out to protest against the government. But this latest violence has many analysts in the region concerned that what has been a mostly unarmed protest movement is turning into a civil war.
Amateur video provided by activists showed what appeared to be an army tank and other military vehicles engulfed in flames in Daraa. "God is great!" a voice cried out. "This is an armored vehicle with a machine gun from Assad's brigades. God is great!"
Other footage showed a fire at the end of an alley sending up a plume of smoke, followed by an explosion. "That's the free army!" a man shouted as gunshots rang out. "That's a sniper," another voice said. "There's a sniper at the school."
Other videos showed tanks on urban streets firing their cannons, and crowds of people running from the sound of automatic gunfire.
An activist in the area said he counted the bodies of 12 civilians killed by security forces' fire. "I saw two army armored personnel carriers, totally burnt," he told The Associated Press by telephone.
A resident near the town of Khirbet Ghazaleh in Daraa province said he heard more than four hours of intense gunfire. Both witnesses asked that their names not be used for fear of government reprisals.
As many as 90 people were killed nationwide Monday, including 19 civilians whose bodies were collected from the streets of Homs and delivered to the morgue.
The U.N. estimates the regime's military crackdown has killed 3,500 people in the past eight months. November is shaping up to be the bloodiest month of the revolt, with well over 300 people killed so far. A recent Human Rights Watch report says abuses by the Syrian regime amount to crimes against humanity.
The latest death toll was compiled by sources including the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the Local Coordination Committees activist coalition and morgue officials.
In many ways, the violence against security forces plays directly into the regime's hands by giving it a pretext to crack down with overwhelming force, analysts say.
Assad says extremists pushing a foreign agenda to destabilize Syria are behind the unrest, not true reform-seekers aiming to open the country's autocratic political system.
Assad has responded with once-unthinkable promises of reform in one of the most authoritarian states in the Middle East. But he simultaneously unleashed the military to crush the protests with tanks, gunfire and snipers.
On Tuesday, the regime announced an amnesty for 1,180 prisoners who were arrested over the past eight months but whose "hands have not been stained by blood." Earlier this month, Assad freed 533 prisoners to mark Eid al-Adha, the Muslim feast of sacrifice.
The regime also released Kamal Labwani, 54, one of the country's most prominent detainees, according to the observatory for human rights. Labwani was serving a 12-year sentence on charges of anti-government activities after he met White House officials. He was detained in 2005.
Sectarian Tensions
Still, the gestures ring hollow alongside the mounting death toll and amateur videos posted online every day that appear to show random gunfire and shelling.
The Syrian government has largely sealed off the country, barring most foreign journalists and preventing independent reporting. But details gathered by activist groups and witnesses, along with the amateur videos, have become key channels of information.
The bloodshed also has laid bare Syria's long-simmering sectarian tensions, with disturbing reports of Iraq-style sectarian killings.
Syria is an overwhelmingly Sunni country of 22 million, but Assad and the ruling elite belong to the minority Alawite sect. Assad, and his father before him, stacked key military posts with Alawites to meld the fates of the army and the regime — a tactic aimed at compelling the army to fight to the death to protect the Assad family dynasty.
To a large degree, the military has remained loyal. Most of the defectors appear to be lower-level Sunni conscripts, not officers. But observers say the tide could change if the military continues to be called upon to shoot unarmed protesters.
NPR's Kelly McEvers contributed to this report, which contains material from The Associated Press.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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(Video) Announcer: Threats, in the wake of Bin Laden's death, have spiked. Announcer Two: Famine in Somalia. Announcer Three: Police pepper spray. Announcer Four: Vicious cartels. Announcer Five: Caustic cruise lines. Announcer Six: Societal decay. Announcer Seven: 65 dead. Announcer Eight: Tsunami warning. Announcer Nine: Cyber-attacks. Multiple Announcers: Drug war. Mass destruction. Tornado. Recession. Default. Doomsday. Egypt. Syria. Crisis. Death. Disaster. Oh, my God.
Peter Diamandis: So those are just a few of the clips I collected over the last six months -- Could have easily been the last six days or the last six years. The point is that the news media preferentially feeds us negative stories because that's what our minds pay attention to. And there's a very good reason for that. Every second of every day, our senses bring in way too much data than we can possibly process in our brains.
And because nothing is more important to us than survival, the first stop of all of that data is an ancient sliver of the temporal lobe called the amygdala. Now the amygdala is our early warning detector, our danger detector. It sorts and scours through all of the information looking for anything in the environment that might harm us. So given a dozen news stories, we will preferentially look at the negative news. And that old newspaper saying, "If it bleeds it leads," is very true. So given all of our digital devices that are bringing all the negative news to us seven days a week, 24 hours a day, it's no wonder that we're pessimistic. It's no wonder that people think that the world is getting worse.
But perhaps that's not the case. Perhaps instead, it's the distortions brought to us of what's really going on. Perhaps the tremendous progress we've made over the last century by a series of forces are, in fact, accelerating to a point that we have the potential in the next three decades to create a world of abundance. Now I'm not saying we don't have our set of problems -- climate crisis, species extinction, water and energy shortage -- we surely do. And as humans, we are far better at seeing the problems way in advance, but ultimately we knock them down.
So let's look at what this last century has been to see where we're going. Over the last hundred years, the average human lifespan has more than doubled, average per capita income adjusted for inflation around the world has tripled. Childhood mortality has come down a factor of 10. Add to that the cost of food, electricity, transportation, communication have dropped 10 to 1,000-fold. Steve Pinker has showed us that, in fact, we're living during the most peaceful time ever in human history. And Charles Kenny that global literacy has gone from 25 percent to over 80 percent in the last 130 years. We truly are living in an extraordinary time. And many people forget this.
And we keep setting our expectations higher and higher. In fact, we redefine what poverty means. Think of this, in America today, the majority of people under the poverty line still have electricity, water, toilets, refrigerators, television, mobile phones, air conditioning and cars. The wealthiest robber barons of the last century, the emperors on this planet, could have never dreamed of such luxuries.
Underpinning much of this is technology, and of late, exponentially growing technologies. My good friend Ray Kurzweil showed that any tool that becomes an information technology jumps on this curve, on Moore's Law, and experiences price performance doubling every 12 to 24 months. That's why the cellphone in your pocket is literally a million times cheaper and a thousand times faster than a supercomputer of the '70s. Now look at this curve. This is Moore's Law over the last hundred years. I want you to notice two things from this curve. Number one, how smooth it is -- through good time and bad time, war time and peace time, recession, depression and boom time. This is the result of faster computers being used to build faster computers. It doesn't slow for any of our grand challenges. And also, even though it's plotted on a log curve on the left, it's curving upwards. The rate at which the technology is getting faster is itself getting faster.
And on this curve, riding on Moore's Law, are a set of extraordinarily powerful technologies available to all of us. Cloud computing, what my friends at Autodesk call infinite computing; sensors and networks; robotics; 3D printing, which is the ability to democratize and distribute personalized production around the planet; synthetic biology; fuels, vaccines and foods; digital medicine; nanomaterials; and A.I. I mean, how many of you saw the winning of Jeopardy by IBM's Watson? I mean, that was epic. In fact, I scoured the headlines looking for the best headline in a newspaper I could. And I love this: "Watson Vanquishes Human Opponents." Jeopardy's not an easy game. It's about the nuance of human language. And imagine if you would A.I.'s like this on the cloud available to every person with a cellphone.
Four years ago here at TED, Ray Kurzweil and I started a new university called Singularity University. And we teach our students all of these technologies, and particularly how they can be used to solve humanity's grand challenges. And every year we ask them to start a company or a product or a service that can affect positively the lives of a billion people within a decade. Think about that, the fact that, literally, a group of students can touch the lives of a billion people today. 30 years ago that would have sounded ludicrous. Today we can point at dozens of companies that have done just that.
When I think about creating abundance, it's not about creating a life of luxury for everybody on this planet; it's about creating a life of possibility. It is about taking that which was scarce and making it abundant. You see, scarcity is contextual, and technology is a resource-liberating force. Let me give you an example.
So this is a story of Napoleon III in the mid-1800s. He's the dude on the left. He invited over to dinner the king of Siam. All of Napoleon's troops were fed with silver utensils, Napoleon himself with gold utensils. But the King of Siam, he was fed with aluminum utensils. You see, aluminum was the most valuable metal on the planet, worth more than gold and platinum. It's the reason that the tip of the Washington Monument is made of aluminum. You see, even though aluminum is 8.3 percent of the Earth by mass, it doesn't come as a pure metal. It's all bound by oxygen and silicates. But then the technology of electrolysis came along and literally made aluminum so cheap that we use it with throw-away mentality.
So let's project this analogy going forward. We think about energy scarcity. Ladies and gentlemen, we are on a planet that is bathed with 5,000 times more energy than we use in a year. 16 terawatts of energy hits the Earth's surface every 88 minutes. It's not about being scarce, it's about accessibility. And there's good news here. For the first time, this year the cost of solar-generated electricity is 50 percent that of diesel-generated electricity in India -- 8.8 rupees versus 17 rupees. The cost of solar dropped 50 percent last year. Last month, MIT put out a study showing that by the end of this decade, in the sunny parts of the United States, solar electricity will be six cents a kilowatt hour compared to 15 cents as a national average.
And if we have abundant energy, we also have abundant water. Now we talk about water wars. Do you remember when Carl Sagan turned the Voyager spacecraft back towards the Earth, in 1990 after it just passed Saturn? He took a famous photo. What was it called? "A Pale Blue Dot." Because we live on a water planet. We live on a planet 70 percent covered by water. Yes, 97.5 percent is saltwater, two percent is ice, and we fight over a half a percent of the water on this planet, but here too there is hope. And there is technology coming online, not 10, 20 years from now, right now. There's nanotechnology coming on, nanomaterials.
And the conversation I had with Dean Kamen this morning, one of the great DIY innovators, I'd like to share with you -- he gave me permission to do so -- his technology called Slingshot that many of you may have heard of, it is the size of a small dorm room refrigerator. It's able to generate a thousand liters of clean drinking water a day out of any source -- saltwater, polluted water, latrine -- at less than two cents a liter. The chairman of Coca-Cola has just agreed to do a major test of hundreds of units of this in the developing world. And if that pans out, which I have every confidence it will, Coca-Cola will deploy this globally to 206 countries around the planet. This is the kind of innovation, empowered by this technology, that exists today.
And we've seen this in cellphones. My goodness, we're going to hit 70 percent penetration of cellphones in the developing world by the end of 2013. Think about it, that a Masai warrior on a cellphone in the middle of Kenya has better mobile comm than President Reagan did 25 years ago. And if they're on a smartphone on Google, they've got access to more knowledge and information than President Clinton did 15 years ago. They're living in a world of information and communication abundance that no one could have ever predicted. Better than that, the things that you and I spent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for -- GPS, HD video and still images, libraries of books and music, medical diagnostic technology -- are now literally dematerializing and demonetizing into your cellphone.
Probably the best part of it is what's coming down the pike in health. Last month, I had the pleasure of announcing with Qualcomm Foundation something called the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize. We're challenging teams around the world to basically combine these technologies into a mobile device that you can speak to, because it's got A.I., you can cough on it, you can do a finger blood prick. And to win, it needs to be able to diagnose you better than a team of board-certified doctors. So literally, imagine this device in the middle of the developing world where there are no doctors, 25 percent of the disease burden and 1.3 percent of the health care workers. When this device sequences an RNA or DNA virus that it doesn't recognize, it calls the CDC and prevents the pandemic from happening in the first place.
But here, here is the biggest force for bringing about a world of abundance. I call it the rising billion. So the white lines here are population. We just passed the seven billion mark on Earth. And by the way, the biggest protection against a population explosion is making the world educated and healthy. In 2010, we had just short of two billion people online, connected. By 2020, that's going from two billion to five billion Internet users. Three billion new minds who have never been heard from before are connecting to the global conversation. What will these people want? What will they consume? What will they desire? And rather than having economic shutdown, we're about to have the biggest economic injection ever. These people represent tens of trillions of dollars injected into the global economy. And they will get healthier by using the Tricorder, and they'll become better educated by using the Khan Academy, and by literally being able to use 3D printing and infinite computing [become] more productive than ever before.
So what could three billion rising, healthy, educated, productive members of humanity bring to us? How about a set of voices that have never been heard from before. What about giving the oppressed, wherever they might be, the voice to be heard and the voice to act for the first time ever? What will these three billion people bring? What about contributions we can't even predict? The one thing I've learned at the X Prize is that small teams driven by their passion with a clear focus can do extraordinary things, things that large corporations and governments could only do in the past.
Let me share and close with a story that really got me excited. There is a program that some of you might have heard of. It's a game called Foldit. It came out of the University of Washington in Seattle. And this is a game where individuals can actually take a sequence of amino acids and figure out how the protein is going to fold. And how it folds dictates its structure and its functionality. And it's very important for research in medicine. And up until now, it's been a supercomputer problem.
And this game has been played by university professors and so forth. And it's literally, hundreds of thousands of people came online and started playing it. And it showed that, in fact, today, the human pattern recognition machinery is better at folding proteins than the best computers. And when these individuals went and looked at who was the best protein folder in the world, it wasn't an MIT professor, it wasn't a CalTech student, it was a person from England, from Manchester, a woman who, during the day, was an executive assistant at a rehab clinic and, at night, was the world's best protein folder.
Ladies and gentlemen, what gives me tremendous confidence in the future is the fact that we are now more empowered as individuals to take on the grand challenges of this planet. We have the tools with this exponential technology. We have the passion of the DIY innovator. We have the capital of the techno-philanthropist. And we have three billion new minds coming online to work with us to solve the grand challenges, to do that which we must do. We are living into extraordinary decades ahead.
Thank you.


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You can have no idea how badly I wanted to taste that tart when I was 10. |
A few things:
1. The asparagus and rice soup from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook is great. Make it. Owen said it was "pretty good" and Mark gave it a 7 out of 10, but I would give it a 9.5 out of 10 and I'm the one to listen to. It's easy and inexpensive and the recipe is here. It's a very brothy so if you have homemade chicken stock in the freezer, use it.
2. On Friday we had a party and I made pulled pork from Make the Bread, Buy the Butter. The first glitch I noticed was that I didn't specify whether the pork shoulder should be bone-in or boneless. BONE-IN. Actually, that was the only glitch. Otherwise, the recipe worked pretty well. Next time you have 12 hours to babysit some coals, consider pulled pork.
3. I'm going to cook from the Time-Life Foods of the World series next. Vintage, out-of-print, still enthralling. These were my first cookbook love and probably, even after all these years, my greatest. I recently started flipping through the books again and wondered why I never thought of doing this before. I'm very, very excited. I was going to make the Tunisian brik from A Quintet of Cuisines tonight, but it looks like I'm going to a high school drama production instead. Like, right this second. Brik tomorrow.
brik |


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Used 2021 Grand Design Momentum 397TH
The very best adventures are waiting for you with the Grand Design Momentum toy hauler!- Dual Entry
- Two Full Baths
- Kitchen Island
- 12' 6" Separate Garage
- Island with Bar Stools
- Walk-In Closet
This Momentum toy hauler provides the maximum entertainment with its 49" LED TV in the living area, 32" LED TV in the private bedroom, 32" LED TV in the 12' 6" separate garage, and exterior LED TV! You can choose to add the optional Super Sofa which will create an amazingly comfortable area to sit down across from the electric fireplace. The two full bathrooms are one of the most impressive features found on this unit, and the three power awnings are another shocking addition. Within the kitchen, you'll be able to prepare all of your family's favorite dishes when you use the chef-inspired range and oven, and the window behind the range allows you to view the campsite while you cook. If you would prefer to have a residential refrigerator, you should check out model 397TH-R!
The very best adventures are waiting for you with the Grand Design Momentum toy hauler! The Momentum combines extreme play with extraordinary living so that you can have the best of both worlds. You won't have to miss out on any of your favorite features from home because the Momentum has just about everything. With the Weather-Tek insulation, you won't have to let anything hold you back from getting out and taking an adventure during any season, and the Tuff Ply gas-and-oil-resistant garage flooring is a quality base for your toys. The flush-mount tie-downs rated for 2,500 LBS will keep your gear in place as you travel, and there is a protective diamond plate on the garage sidewalls for additional protection. Some of the options that you can choose to add to your Momentum are the Solitude solar system and Rockford Fosgate speaker package.
Just thought you'd like to know that since my purchase of a Freedom Express in April 2019 we have traveled in all lower 48 states averaging 29,000 miles a year. No issues with the camper! - James from Magazine, AR
Stock# 14410-119
Exterior Color: Burnt Orange, Silver, Blue, Burgundy
Sleeps | 3 |
Slides | 3 |
Length | 43 ft 1 in |
Ext Height | 13 ft 5 in |
Exterior Color | Burnt Orange, Silver, Blue, Burgundy |
Hitch Weight | 3375 lbs |
GVWR | 20000 lbs |
Dry Weight | 15600 lbs |
Fresh Water Capacity | 155 gals |
Grey Water Capacity | 104 gals |
Black Water Capacity | 104 gals |
Tire Size | 16" |
Furnace BTU | 40000 btu |
Fuel Capacity | 60 gals |
Available Beds | Queen |
Refrigerator Size | 18 cu ft |
Cooktop Burners | 3 |
Number of Awnings | 3 |
Axle Weight | 7000 lbs |
Garage Size | 12 ft 6 in |
LP Tank Capacity | 60 lbs |
Water Heater Capacity | 12 gal |
Water Heater Type | Gas/Electric |
TV Info | LR 49" LED TV, BR 32" LED TV, Garage 32" LED TV, Ext. LED TV |
Awning Info | 14', 10', & 12' Power w/LED Lights |
Axle Count | 3 |
Washer/Dryer Available | Yes |
Shower Type | Sunken Tub/Shower |
Electrical Service | 50 amp |
Crabtree RV is not responsible for any misprints, typos, or errors found in our website pages. Any price listed excludes sales tax, registration tags, and delivery fees. Manufacturer pictures, specifications, and features may be used in place of actual units on our lot. Please contact us @479-632-0829 for availability as our inventory changes rapidly. All calculated payments are an estimate only and do not constitute a commitment that financing or a specific interest rate or term is available.
Manufacturer and/or stock photographs may be used and may not be representative of the particular unit being viewed. Where an image has a stock image indicator, please confirm specific unit details with your dealer representative.


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Universal Extractor is a program do to exactly what it says: extract files from any type of archive, whether it's a simple zip file, an installation program (like Wise or NSIS), or even a Windows Installer (.msi) package.
This application is not intended to be a general purpose archiving program. It will never replace WinRAR, 7-Zip, etc. What it will do is allow you to extract files from virtually any type of archive, regardless of source, compression method, etc. The original motivation behind this project was to create an easy, convenient way to extract files from installation packages, such as Inno Setup or Windows Installer packages, without pulling up a command line every time.


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Marijuana Eradication is Down But Seizures are Up
USA — Federal data shows the number of live marijuana plants eradicated in outdoor and indoor grow operations has dropped in most states over the past three years, while the amount of bulk processed marijuana seized has doubled in that time. And authorities can't pinpoint exact reasons.
One thing is known: California, which provides the lion's share of the millions of plants eradicated every year in the United States, saw a 46.5 percent drop in plants eradicated between 2010 and 2011, bringing down the nation's overall numbers.
"You can't attribute it to one factor," said Casey Rettig, spokeswoman for Drug Enforcement Administration in San Francisco.
Shifts in tactics from growers, weather patterns and budget cuts to local and state enforcement agencies have played roles in the significant decrease in eradication, DEA and local officials said.
In 2010, authorities seized 10.32 million marijuana plants from outdoor and indoor growing operations, according to DEA data. By 2011, that number had dropped to 6.7 million plants — a 35 percent decrease.
Those numbers are amplified by California, where 7.3 million plants were eradicated in 2010. The number dropped to 3.9 million plants in 2011, a 46-percent decline.
In that same time span, 37 states saw their eradication results drop. Data for 2012 is not yet available.
One of the most dramatic shifts came from Idaho, which saw its eradication results shrink by more than 98 percent between 2009 and 2011 — from 77,748 plants to just 786. Although, the Caribou County sheriff's office reported raiding a farm in southeast Idaho with 40,000 plants this week.
In order for a marijuana plant to be counted, it has to have a root structure, even if the plant is just inches tall, and be mature enough to yield the buds that contain the drug, said Doug James, DEA spokesman for the Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska region.
But while the number of plants eradicated has dropped, the number of pounds of bulked processed marijuana confiscated has increased from 53,843 pounds in 2009 to 113,167 pounds in 2011, the data collected by the DEA shows.
Some of this was seized along with eradications at growing locations. But DEA officials said the data also includes marijuana seized during traffic stops and other operations, and it's hard to pinpoint where marijuana comes from.
"You can't necessarily measure what's out there," Rettig said.
Teams of local, state and federal authorities have focused for years on finding clandestine marijuana growing operations in forests and wild lands around the country, using helicopters to search for plants hidden beneath the natural canopy.
These marijuana grow operations, authorities have said, feature irrigation systems from nearby creeks and fertilizers that damage the local habitat. Authorities believe some of the growing operations are operated by branches of Mexican drug organizations using the forced labor of immigrants to tend the plants. Others are tended by locals.
"On a professional level, I like to believe that we're pushing them out of the area," said Washington state Patrol Lt. Mark Brogan, who is in charge of narcotics investigations. Washington state saw its number of plants eradicated dip from over 600,000 to just over 325,000 between 2009 and 2011.
But Brogan said lingering cool spring weather has also affected the crop over the past couple of years.
"They're growing in areas where they need very good conditions to cultivate a lot of plants," he said.
In California, Rettig said growers are switching from largescale forest farms with many plants to smaller, less visible plots where they can grow fewer, but bigger and higher yielding plants.
There has been a change in where these plots are grown, too, with many operations moving to the agricultural region of the Central Valley, Rettig added.
"Most of the smart people moved down … and a lot of them decentralized their gardens where it's less likely to be seen and eradicated," said Dale Gieringer of the California chapter of National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which advocates for legalization of marijuana.
Gieringer said street prices for marijuana have dipped recently, which suggests that there is plenty of it to go around, despite the DEA's efforts.
"I would argue that, in large part, many of these formerly outdoor grows have moved indoors," said Paul Armentano, deputy director of NORML. That marijuana "commands a higher price in the market. There seems to be greater preference for indoor grown versus outdoor grown. It could be simple market forces at work."
Budget cuts to California's Campaign Against Marijuana Planting are also a factor, Rettig said.
Recently, articles in the magazine GQ and the online magazine Daily Beast suggested that the Obama Administration is changing its priorities on marijuana enforcement. The Daily Beast pointed to cuts to the National Guard program that provides helicopters for marijuana searches.
Rettig said the DEA's priorities have not changed, and that they do not expect budget cuts.
Source: Associated Press (Wire)
Published: August 6, 2012
Copyright: 2012 The Associated Press


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Cervical cancer vaccines may cut need for screening
Using GlaxoSmithKline's Cervarix vaccine to protect girls against the HPV virus that causes cervical cancer is so effective that health authorities could reduce the need for later cervical screening, scientists said on Wednesday.
Researchers from Finland and the United States who published two studies in The Lancet Oncology journal found Cervarix "offers excellent protection" against two key strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV), particularly when given to young adolescent girls before they become sexually active.
The studies also found the vaccine partially protects against several other cancer-causing HPV types that it is not specifically designed to target, giving protection against a group of strains that together cause about 85 percent of cervical cancer worldwide.
"Provided that organised vaccination programs achieve high coverage in early adolescents before sexual debut, HPV vaccination has the potential to substantially reduce the incidence of cervical cancer, probably allowing the modification of screening programs," said Matti Lehtinen from the University of Tampere in Finland, who worked on the studies.
He said that as a result of the findings health experts in Finland, one of the first countries to introduce nationwide HPV vaccination campaigns in 2007, should consider cutting cervical screening programs down to just a once-in-a-lifetime test at around the age of 25 to 30 to check the vaccine has been fully effective.
"You should not have two measures on top of each other if one is already efficient enough," he said in a telephone interview. "This could certainly mean lots of savings in terms of costs of screening."
GSK's two-strain vaccine targets HPV types 16 and 18 that are responsible for about 70 percent of cervical cancers. Rival drugmaker Merck also makes an HPV vaccine called Gardasil which protects against 16, 18 and two other strains of the virus.
Cancer of the cervix is the second most common cancer in women worldwide, with about 500,000 new cases and 250,000 deaths each year, according to the World Health Organization.
Virtually all cases are linked to genital infection with HPV, the most common viral infection of the reproductive tract.
Several developed nations have in recent years introduced nationwide HPV vaccination programs for girls and young women.
In the United States, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently recommends girls and women aged between 11 and 26 should get either Cervarix or Gardasil.
Lehtinen said these vaccinations could eventually cut the need for nationwide cervical smear screens that are usually done every few years in women from around the age of 25 onwards.
The two Lancet Oncology studies both looked at Cervarix.
The first, which included almost 20,000 healthy women aged between 15 and 25 from 14 countries across Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America, found the shot gave high rates of protection against high-grade cervical precancers, early development of a condition called adenocarcinoma, and 12 other cancer-causing HPV types.
In a second study the vaccine showed increased cross-protection against other cancer-causing HPV types 31, 33, 45, and 51 in different groups of women.
"Our results show that cross-protective efficacy might provide substantial additional protection against cervical cancer," said Cosette Wheeler from the University of New Mexico in the United States, who co-led the second study.
In a commentary about the findings published in the same journal, Mark Schiffman and Sholom Wacholder from the U.S. National Cancer Institute said that increasing coverage, particularly of as yet sexually-naive young girls, "is now the most important public-health issue in HPV vaccination efforts."
by Kate Kelland


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Memorial service on Baylor campus honors fallen heroes from West explosion
The 12 first responders who died battling the fire that led to last week's explosion in West, Texas, were remembered during a memorial service in the Ferrell Center Thursday afternoon. Baylor University was honored to provide the site for the service, which was organized by the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation and the Texas LODD Task Force.
Following a processional down University Parks Drive that included 300+ fire trucks from all over the country, a capacity crowd filled the Ferrell Center, including President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, 4,000 uniformed responders, and thousands of other citizens paying their respects from the West, Waco and Baylor communities and beyond. Many more watched from other venues; on campus, in Waco Hall, the Bill Daniel Student Center and McLane Student Life Center, as well as at Baylor Ballpark, Getterman Stadium, and the Hurd Tennis Center, which were all opened and carried the broadcast for the overflow crowds.
[VIDEO: U.S. President Barack Obama || Baylor President Ken Starr || Governor Rick Perry || Memorial processional]
"No words adequately describe the courage that was displayed on that deadly night," said President Obama, the 7th sitting U.S. President to visit Baylor, following Harry S Truman, 1947; Dwight Eisenhower, 1956; Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965; Gerald Ford, 1976; Ronald Reagan, 1988; and George W. Bush, 2002. "What I can do is offer the support and the love and prayers of the nation. We may not all live here in Texas, but we're neighbors, too. We are Americans, too. And we stand with you and will not forget."
[PHOTOS: From the processional and ceremony, courtesy Baylor Photography]
Together, the entire Baylor family honors those who died last week in West and prays for all those whose lives have been affected by the tragedy.


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It usually happens when it is very cold outside because the solubility of air in water increases as water pressure increases and/or water temperature decreases. Cold water holds more air than warm water.
In the winter, water travels from the reservoir which is very cold and warms up during its travel to your tap. The air that is present is no longer soluble, and comes out of solution.
In addition, once water from our reservoir enters the transmission and distribution pipes, the water is pressurized. Water under pressure holds more air than water that is not pressurized.
Once the water comes out of your tap, the water is no longer under pressure and the air comes out of solution as bubbles (similar to a carbonated soft drink). The best thing to do is let it sit in an open container until the bubbles naturally disappear.
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Monday through Friday, 7AM – 3:00PM, call the Water Department at 781-259-2669. If there is no answer, or after hours, call the Lincoln Police Department at 781-259-8113, and they will page the on-call operator.
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If you had an identifiable water leak during the billing period, submit an abatement request along with documentation of the repair (i.e. contractor's receipt) to the Water Department. The Superintendent will review the request and, if approved, will reduce the charges for all the used water to the lowest tiered rate paid by the customer during the last 3 years. The abatement request must be received within 30 days of the bill's issue date in order to be processed prior to the due date. In some cases the request may not be reviewed until after the bill date, at which point the customer should pay the water bill and any approved requests will have monies credited toward their account.


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The Women Of Idinthakarai
People's Movement Against Nuclear Energy
Thirunelveli District
Tamil Nadu
Dear Friends.
Today, April 16,2013, we women, men and children, young and old will assemble under the leadership of our Village Committee to address a matter of urgent concern for us and our movement. As you all would remember, we have been raising questions about the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant based in Idinthakarai, the village closest to the plant for the past 600 days. Our questions and concerns have not been answered, our peaceful protests have been dealt with violence and suppression and we have been treated like enemies and anti-nationals.
Since yesterday we have been discussing the Department of Environment's audacity in giving clearance to the impacts of water being discharged back to our life- giving oceans at high temperature and salinity. Don't we all know that it will kill and harm the vital fisheries which provide food and livelihood to us all? We have also been very worried about the deal between the notorious Russian Company Zio Podolsk and Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd which has led to the use of substandard materials in the making of KKNPP.
Last night as many of us tried to sleep in the Samara Pandal in the courtyard of the Lourdes Church we were disturbed by the sight of armed men entering the premises and loitering around. Not wanting to provoke them, we were able to understand by midnight that there is a drinking brawl happening just outside our village with the connivance of some local leaders and police. This is a matter of urgent concern for us as we see the beginning of violence and strife that they will instigate and nurture.
As you all know, our strength has been the steadfast commitment to peace and non-violence and we have chosen the path of informed and reasonable resistance after days of preparation and thought. One spark is enough to ignite the smoldering anger and frustration within us at the callous indifference, the criminal neglect and planned avoidance that we have been subjected to for years. We do not want to be victims of the divisive, annihilative forces of caste and religion, non-secular forces and criminalization of politics that has been happening in our country. We do not want to be branded terrorists and sacrifice our youth to become uncreative rebels whose life will languish behind bars.
This is what we want to reiterate today as we prepare for the crucial meeting. Our struggle is for justice and peace, for participation in democracy, for pursuing our livelihoods and life in this seashore village, for true development and progress.
Do stand by us and use all your capacity and contacts to build networks by which this message will reach the world
From Idinthakarai 16.04.2013
Anitha.S in conversation with friend in PMANE.


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Jim Cornette returned to WGD Weekly with Steve and the Scum. You can read some highlights below.
Triple H and his involvement in the current WWE product: "…Well, I would love to give you an opinion, but I am clean and sober from WWE programming for several years now, and I do read what is going on, but it seems like it's more of the same. In my opinion, he was never the star, he was always the guy that worked with the guy that drew the money, and he continues to push his boring self down the people's throats. You know, what more can I say, I haven't seen it first hand, but at least he got a haircut…"
Vince Russo's time writing TV for WWF, WCW, and TNA: "…I had to spend eleven months in the same room with Vince Russo and Vince McMahon, that's where I really got to hate life in general…they put Bruce (Prichard) in the office and put Russo on the writing team. At first, it was sort of like the Donald Pleasence line in the original Halloween, 'For the first six years, I tried to reach him, and then I spent the next eight trying to make sure that he would never escape being locked up. Because what I saw behind those eyes was pure and simple evil.' For the first few months I thought, 'ok, he is a nice, energetic guy, who doesn't know anything about wrestling, we're going to try to teach him. Then I figured out he didn't want to learn, because he though he knew what the f@*k he was doing and that we were all crazy…and that he wasn't ever going to learn anything about wrestling and didn't want to. Then, I made it my life's mission to somehow keep anything that he did from actually seeing the light of day to the detriment of the wrestling business. Finally it got to the point, where all we did was argue with each other…But, Russo's problem, besides the fact that he is from New York and he's the worst stereo type of just an obnoxious Yankee is also that he was not a wrestling fan. He watched wrestling and liked angles and liked gimmicks. He wasn't enough of a wrestling fan to watch and understand that all those things he saw as a child, like Piper hitting Jimmy Snuka with a coconut or whatever, those things happened every few months and then you followed up on them, so they made sense when you did them because you told the story leading up to them, telling why these people would do these things. All Russo would remember, because he had the attention span of a f@*king junkie with a clicker on a morphine drip, was the actual incidents themselves, so he wanted to write two hour television shows full of people hitting people over the head with coconuts, and f@8cking he loved the Jerry Springer show and he thought that the wrestling fan's IQ was that of a flea and there attention span was like his, and all they wanted to see was mayhem and carnage. He didn't believe in baby faces and heels, because there is no such thing as good people and bad people, everybody knows that, f@*cking idiot. So, he put matches together where people didn't know who to cheer, they didn't know whose side, who was on. In TNA when he didn't have Vince McMahon to edit him and calm him down, it was even worse. That was when you would see those Impact's, where people would be screaming at each other and then it would go to people brawling in the arena, to people brawling backstage by the dressing room trailers, to women brawling in the f@*cking bathroom, to more people screaming at each other and by the end of the show, you didn't know what the f@*ck had gone on and you didn't care about anybody…That was the problem, Russo remembered all the highlights, in his little pea brain that he had seen growing up in wrestling, but he didn't understand how they were done, why they were done, how they were led up to and how they were followed up on. So, as a result, all you got was the trailer for the movie. You can make a really good one minute trailer out of a really stinky two hour movie…that's been proven. But he didn't know how to write the movie, he only knew how to write the trailer and that was his biggest problem…So, Russo pretty much had a cup of coffee in the WWF, where he had a few good ideas and took credit for everything else. He then followed that up by bankrupting the most well-funded wrestling company in the history of the world and then he destroys Vince McMahon's only competition to the point that a lot of people in TNA at points in time thought that Vince McMahon was still paying Vince Russo to not come back to the WWF…"
Working alongside and constantly being ribbed by Owen Hart and the British Bulldog: "…You know Owen and Davey together, Davey Boy Smith, they were like two children. They just had to top each other. We would be doing promos, we would be standing there in front of the camera and all of a sudden I'd look to the left of me and Owen all of a sudden was two inches taller than both me and Davey, and we were all sort of the same height. You would look down and he would be standing on a roll of duct tape. Then you look over and Bulldog would be about three inches taller and he'd be standing on a box. Then I'd look down because I'd feel something and while we were standing there staying concentrated on the camera, Owen had one of those spray bottles and he would spray the front of my pants, so it would look like I had pissed myself on camera…If Owen or Davey, either one if they came to you and gave you a million dollars, you'd be looking for the printing press. It had to be a rib. It got to the point where they ribbed so much, that nobody would believe anything…"
Jokes about the current state of TNA Wrestling: "…You know they are changing their website, you haven't heard about this? You haven't heard about TNA changing their website? Instead of TNAWrestling.com it is going to be TNAWrestling.org because it's a non-profit organization. Actually they have come up with a new strategy for 2014, Dixie keeps teasing these big, major ideas. She finally hit on a genius idea that I think is going to turn TNA around in 2014. Starting on the first, they are going to let all of the fans in the shows for free and charge them to get out…"
A memorable WCW booking meeting run by Jim Herd: "…The best stupid idea that Jim Herd had, there is so many of them that we could go on and on, but the best one I ever heard was when he wanted to introduce the team of the Hunchbacks. I'm sitting there in a room, and Flair had already quit as booker and I was shortly after to follow, but I was still there. I was sitting there in a room, with Jim Barnett, Jim Ross, Jim Herd, Kevin Sullivan, myself, Jody Hamilton, Terry Funk may or may not have been there, and Ole Anderson. So, Jim Herd goes off on this ten minute soliloquy of how he has come up with the greatest idea for a tag team ever, the Hunchbacks. 'They got the big hump on their back, you know, and ya' get 'em in there and ya' can't pin 'em, because they got the hump on their back. So, they are an unbeatable tag team and that's how we'll sell 'em, you can't beat these guys, because they've got humps on their backs.' He was deadly serious, because remember, the Ding Dongs made it to television and that was Herd, so he was deadly serious about this. Finally, Ole let him get it all out of his system, and Ole, bless him, wrestling's cantankerous old man. He says, 'All right, Jim, you book the Hunchbacks, build them up, they're undefeated. Then you book them with me and Arn. As soon as I tag in, I'm going to take one of them down, I'm going to slap an arm bar on him and I'm going to make him submit. He is going to give up. I just beat your unbeatable team.' 'Well, god dammit, Ole, you know what I mean!'… Thankfully, the Hunchbacks did not make their appearance in WCW, but by the time Herd got finished with WCW it wouldn't have really mattered anyway…"


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LOS ANGELES (AP) — LaVar Ball has brought his Big Baller Brand from the basketball court to the wrestling ring.
The outspoken father of NBA draft No. 2 pick Lonzo Ball showed up with the newly minted Los Angeles Laker and another son, 15-year-old LaMelo, for a live segment on Monday's "WWE Raw" at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
During the segment, LaMelo Ball twice used a racial slur that was broadcast over the air.
WWE says in a statement to the Los Angeles Times that the language "was not scripted nor reflects WWE's values."
For LaVar Ball's appearance, the ring was decorated with mannequins displaying his Big Baller Brand clothing line. He got in a heated confrontation with WWE wrestler The Miz, and took his shirt off to cheers from the crowd.
Read the full story at Associated Press