Seriously?

An hour in the supermarket once a week, and half an hour every night to cook is somehow "incredibly difficult and time consuming"? You probably spend more time on facebook.

Even better, if you learn to love cooking, it will become one of those "enjoy other things in life". Cooking can be immediately gratifying, as well as eating better you'll be happier and will impress others.

Agreed, but the article isn't about "home use", its about a brewery. Even with a microbrewery, just about anything else will cost way more than $100 (stainless vessels and fittings arent cheap), so in context a cheap PLC is quite resonable. If you have a larger brewery, then an expensive PLC is even more justified.

For the record, I'll be using a $12 arduino clone for my home brewery to do temperature/mash control. I struggle to see how you'd do it using a PC - linux or otherwise - without paying as much or more for an I/O interface.

Still struggling to see the "Obvious" part.

Yeah but separating the control from the visualisation is a a good idea and generally considered best practice. Keep your control code small, fast and bug free; move the complex visualisations somewhere else.

If you want to hack together some automation around a linux PC then go nuts..... but to then make a website and video about how awesome it is? Really??

PLC's have a been around for years and many are dirt cheap - $100 CPU's and less than $10 per I/O. You wont hit memory limits in them (not in a brewery anyway) and they will run all day everyday doing one thing only, but doing it really well. The modules are easily replaceable which minimises downtime, and most of them use a standardised language (ladder logic) so that the next guy that comes along can understand it too. Now that is obvious.

If you want to fiddle more than that - and most poeple do - PLC's integrate with PC's just fine via Modbus (serial or ethernet) so that you can read or write data from them. Common packages to integrate with them are supervisory control systems (SCADA) or a data historians. There are plenty of commercial packages out there - Wonderware, Citect, InSQL, PI etc, and even some open source ones - http://openhistorian.codeplex.com/ and http://openscada.org/

Beyond PLC's/SCADA is the world of DCS (Distributed Control Systems), but you'd better have a spare million dollars and tens of thousands of I/O to justify putting one in.

It's great to tell your mates about how Linux is awesome but don't get too carried away.

I agree.

Also, we dont fully understand how a bird flies, and how the complex interactions between feathers creates lift and thrust. We should never attept to simulate flight using such crude models as fixed wings and propellers.

And dont get me started on locomotion....

Have you ever thought that maybe starting a simulation using our limited knowledge of how neurons work will help us to refine our understanding? Even a failed experiment provides useful data that we can use to improve our models.

Give the kid a bath whilst dinner is being cooked. You could shave off half an hour that way.

Wow. He was smart enought to go to college but not smart enough to use earplugs and an eye mask?

Let me know when you can grow a solar panel, batteries, charge controller and an LED from a seed.

Efficiency is irrelevant if the components are cheap/renewable and the input power would be wasted anyway.

And yet still twice as much as a coal fired power plant, 100 times as mich as a gas fired powerplant, and a million times more than a wind turbine.

How do you failover when road conditions exceed the thresholds of the car? Uh... slow down or stop maybe???

Just because you might need to transfer control to the driver doesnt mean you need to do it at 100 miles per hour.

Computers are far better at understanding their limitations that human drivers, and when they start getting reduced sensor data or confusing conditions will be programmed to be conservative, unlike the human drivers that keep barreling on until they are at the edge of disaster.

This laser is probably in the 10's of kilowatts, and even including inefficiencies, it's a pretty small load. The air conditioning in the bridge probably consumes more power.

A two litre diesel engine generator would produce enough power and run for hours on a jerry can of fuel. That's pretty good going for a weapon.

I was under the impression that the 45 minutes is there to allow for bag screening - all of the checked baggage gets x-rayed or similar.

And somehow desktop shortcuts, quicklaunch bars, favourite apps, and pinned apps didnt help you???

Yes, you are missing a clue.

If I got 50Gbps out of 6 x 10Gbps links I'd be ecstatic. That's pretty good efficiency considering the sheer throughput processing requited and overheads involved.

Plus it may be difficult if not impossible to get multiple high speed interfaces via one internet carrier - however what if 3 or 4 fibre providers went past your datacenter? Buy bandwidth from all of them and use them simultaneously and add redundancy.

You're missing the point. One of the big reasons to have multiple interfaces is for redundancy - with a company's internet interface, redundancy would be vastly improved by choosing two different providers, and even better with different mediums. The subnets will definitely be different.

Having both of these links acting simultaneously would be great and I could see a lot of people being excited about it.