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A. W. Burks, H. H. Goldstine, and J. von Neumann, "Preliminary discussion of the logical design of an electronic computing instrument", Report to the U.S. Army Ordinance Department, 1946. This on-line version was downloaded from University of North Carolina. These guys got nearly everything right for today except floating point. This was written over 50 years ago!

What will they sell us once their magic potions no longer work?

Well, there's always the Chicken Pox vaccine. Merck is making a killing (sorry) by preying on the fears of parents. Despite the fact that 99.99% of children recover from the disease (caveat emptor on that link), the vaccine is being pushed with FUD directed at health professionals (leading to news articles like this one). These tactics have been wildly successful -- now, schools are requiring students to be vaccinated against Chicken Pox as though it were as deadly as measles or whooping cough.

This despite the fact that your child is more likely to die on the way to the doctor to get the shot, than to die of Chicken Pox.

My wife is a clinical tech at a major Dallas children's hospital, and the off-the-record opinion among all the health workers there is that the vaccine is nothing but a boondoggle for its manufacturer. Meanwhile, she and the rest of the team are dealing with bugs like MRSA -- Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus. In fact, this BBC article from last month details the fear that MRSA staph would pick up Vancomycin resistance because of antibiotic overuse.

Gee... I wonder who stands to gain the most from both the current overuse of antibiotics and from the development of the "next generation" of overprescribed medications?

It's kinda like this.

This is an interesting [mis]perception. I'm not about to judge how you came to such a conclusion, but my experience was quite different. I graduated from UNC Chapel Hill, a public flagship state university not necessarily renowned for engineering. The types of acquaintances I made were highly-educated and quite knowledgeable across the board. Certainly there was a strong current of "non-techiness" among certain student groups, but generally the students are quite well-informed.

Dinosaurs were the prehistoric form of birds. If you've ever had your Porsche® automobile or other expensive motor vehicle shat on by a flock of pigeons [google.com], you have been attacked by the descendants of dinosaurs.

Actually, the base unit for mass IS the kilogram, at least in the modern MKS version of the metric system, adopted in 1954. The older CGS system did use grams as the base unit for mass, but the base unit for length in CGS is the centimeter. There has never been a metric system where both meters and grams were base units. A reference can be found here .

• LightSpeed Chick
• Hacker Barbie

• Linux chicks
• More Linux chicks
• Even more

I worked for a couple networking depts on campus during my undergraduate "career" at UNC, among which was ResNet. I've learned a _ton_ during my years at UNC, and I continue to learn at work and in external studying. I worked with some truly great people in ATN and computer science, namely my bosses in ResNet and the security folks.

Early in my college stint, one of my Red Hat machines was hacked literally minutes after I ifup'ed eth0. Needless to say, I took an immense amount of heat because that computer was subsequently used as a waypoint to launch a DoS. What a turning point. Those who've interacted with me since have known me to be extremely critical of standard security procedures at universities; I've been very outspoken in pushing the use of strict ssh2, strong passwords, forced password expiration, keeping current with application and service updates, reading and generally being security-conscious, and other what I consider security essentials from an administrator's viewpoint. I say this because most students don't care about the difference between ssh2 and telnet; they just want to check their email and download mp3s.

Which brings me to my second point. During my junior year, I was part of one of the first large OpenNap networks. Although the particular server I operated had the enable_share parameter disabled, the nature of the network setup allowed information transfer over the entire network and thus anyone--even on a host with sharing disabled, like mine--could retrieve search results for a song search. The RIAA wasn't too happy (I don't doubt this was discovered through napigator), and in the end I had to sign a number of documents promising I would never infringe copyrights again, use excessive network resources, etc. This is despite the fact that I was operating a completely legal OpenNap server--my boss at ResNet affirmed that I wasn't sharing.

What this goes to show is that universities with _competent_ security and copyright-aware folks will throw up a safety net for you _if you're doing the right thing_. The EULA for ResNet at UNC and various links already cited in the posting above make explicit the methodology of dealing with suspected copyright violation. While I wasn't happy at the time, I have to acknowledge that UNC gave me a lot of support for which I'm grateful. The basic point is "don't do any stupid, and you won't regret it." If however, the RIAA decides to chase you down as they did me, as long as you're within your proper use, you should be ok.

I've heard separate stories about mistreatments on separate protests, but those are unfortunately not things for which I can vouch.

help.unc.edu, UNC-Chapel Hill's technical support website, uses Docbook (and XML) extensively. The publication framework is Cocoon 2 under Tomcat, but I'm sure if you like Perl you could use Axkit too =)

Sssshhh!

Actually, having surround sound in an "office of the future" will be extremely important. I think the problem a lot of people have when thinking about something like this is they are thinking surround sound coming out of their computer speakers. But that is not the only place audio will be important in the "office of the future".

What will be great about these proposed offices is teleconferencing and immersive environments. And that is where surround sound (i.e. directional sound) will be incredibly important. If you are teleconferencing with several people, who will be spread out across a wall or several walls, you need audio to help you figure out who is talking. Without it, things will both feel weird and strain your brain. Think watching a movie with left and right channels reversed and both speakers on one side of your head instead of in front.

The same thing goes for video, BTW. You want eye contact to be there, so when you are talking to person A, you better be looking into person A's camera view.

Access Grid nodes encourage stereo sound and camera placement in-line with eye contact. Cool concept images and actual working prototypes of an "office of the future" can be seen at the UNC Office of the Future research site.

If I took the novel Moby Dick and shifted every letter one to the right, could I publish that?

Yep. Moby Dick is in the public domain. You just oculdn't claim authorship.

Damn you Froot!!

Check out the class thesis I did on the history of United States copyright. Pages 10+ are at least somewhat relevant.

Java was supposed to be a small, open platform for writing clients that are delivered through the web browser.

Java was never supposed to run in a Browser or the Internet at all; see a short history here. It was started 1991 without any special purpose in mind and was then focussed 1993-1994 to run on these "Interactive Television" set top boxes. After this failed there were some plans to use it as CD-ROM/online multimedia platform. Finally two guys wrote a Browser in Java (remember HotJava?), and only in 1995 Netscape licensed it for the Browser.

IMO Java is far from dead anywhere and is here to stay, as many mediocre technologies that were present at the right time with a successfully balanced set of tradeoffs. My language of choice is C++ and programming Java is like typing with one Hand in my pocket and half of my brain asleep, but it is the best choice for a beginner's language.

C# has no justification between Java and C++, and as a Visual Basic substitute it might succeed only in the long run.

Microsoft does not have the power to kill a programming language or guarantee it's success, as the end user does not care about what programming language something is written in, and the programmer will pick and stay with the one that he feels comfortable with.

p.

However, I have to wonder what makes people think that the instructors of these courses have neither discretion in how they teach a course, nor well-formed opinions of their own.

I am an instructor. I teach web development for one of the trade schools, which is heavily Microsoft-oriented. You think I don't tell them what I really think? Please.

On a related note, one of the faculty volunteers leading a discussion group for the much-debated freshman reading assignment on the Quran at the University of North Carolina is a guy you may have heard of.

However, I have to wonder what makes people think that the instructors of these courses have neither discretion in how they teach a course, nor well-formed opinions of their own.

I am an instructor. I teach web development for one of the trade schools, which is heavily Microsoft-oriented. You think I don't tell them what I really think? Please.

On a related note, one of the faculty volunteers leading a discussion group for the much-debated freshman reading assignment on the Quran at the University of North Carolina is a guy you may have heard of.

While you're correct that the effects used by current graphics cards are cheap hacks. I think you may be missing the meat of the issue. These little GPUs we have sitting in our machines are streamlined, dedicated SIMD processors, capable of performing some functions (especially matrix operations) more efficiently than Intel's general purpose processors.

The genius of the newest concepts being discussed by Peercy (commented here on slashdot by Carmack) is envisioning an OpenGL machine, and compiling high-quality renderman language to this new "OpenGL instruction code".

This is no crude hack, but rather the harnessing and redirecting of current GPU power to produce models and details from a professional realm.

And I'm sorry, adagioforstrings, but UNC actually had students first.

From your own links: UNC actually started its first building on October 12, 1793, and..."Opened to students on January 15, 1795, The University of North Carolina received its first student, Hinton James of New Hanover County, on February 12."

UGA..."was actually established in 1801 when a committee of the board of trustees selected a land site." No mention of the first class or student. Either way, my math (curtesy of a UNC education) says that UNC had students for six years before Georgia even decided where to locate their campus.

Now, for those of you not in on the UNC/UGA argument, this very same thing has been going on for a couple of hundred years. UGA has the oldest public charter; UNC has the oldest campus and has had students for the longest. We both claim to be the first (and are both right, depending on what you think is the beginning of a university).

I just didn't want any 'dawgs to go confusing the general public and making them think the Tarheels are younger ;)

and, UNC is, of course, the best ;)

I'm afraid UNC is not the original...That would be The University of Georgia, chartered in 1785 as opposed to UNC's 1789.

And UGA is, of course, the best. ;-)

In general how supportive have you found the producers of such content to be of your services? Do many if any really believe that something like this will cause them to starve to death?

I'm one of those content providers. Checks self: Nope, not starving. In fact, I love ibiblio:

They give me unlimited non-commercial space in ftp and html (and that really is unlimited. I have zipfiles of herbal forums online, from 1992 onwards... couldn't do that if I had to pay monthly fees for the space.)

Ibiblio is in all the search engines.

You can still get my main page with the same URL as that used back in 1995 - how many sites can you say that about?

There's smaller perks, too, like a shell account, setting up mailing lists (no ads!), and such.

So here's a big Thank You to both ibiblio.org and unc!

Cheers
Hetta

My application is for information retrieval, I'm using some software that utilizes BerkeleyDB files at the back end. I spent the last week trying to figure out why I wasn't getting better throughput, and eventually figured out it's related to BerkeleyDB's handling of lots of tree duplicate pages. But that's not why I wanted to post.

One thing people didn't mention: The file system. The file system can make a big difference. For larger files, think about ext2 or XFS. For lots of small files, think ReiserFS. ext3 does journaling and is supposed to have comparable throughput. There's a lot of information out there about filesystems, including a filesystem HOWTO at ibiblio.org. Pick the right filesystem for your application.

Here's what I found. I was copying an 8GB file back and forth (this was one of my DB files; yes, it was sparse, I used "cp --sparse=always"). This was on a Dell 530 with dual 1.7Ghz Xeons, 2GB of PC800 RAM, an Adaptec 39160 controller (U160 SCSI) and JBOD (just a bunch of disks=no raid). Linux kernel is 2.4.18-64GB-SMP on a SUSE 8.0 distribition. The experiments were between different drives on separate channels on the same controller. The drives are 73GB 10KRPM Cheetahs.

I copied the 8GB file and a few other multi-gig files, and used "vmstat" to track progress. This is NOT the way to benchmark for files of just a few meg or even a few hundred meg, because it only samples every few seconds. But for long-running processes, I would "vmstat 10 10000" (resample every 10 seconds; 10000 times) and watch as the files copied in the background on a quiescent system. The "bi" colums is blocks in (typically 4KB blocks, but you can tune this on your system); "bi" is blocks out.

I did XFS to ext2 and back again. I also copied off a ReiserFS drive.

Both XFS and ext2 were comparable for reading & writing. They peaked at about 35,000 bi or bo. 35,000 * 4096 bytes per block =~ 143MB/second. In other words, I was getting close to the max transfer rate for the SCSI bus (160MB/sec per channel). Long-term average was closer to 25K blocks or ~100MB/second.

With a ReiserFS, either for reading or writing, the pattern was that it could peak at ~18K blocks bi or bo, but generally was far lower, on the order of 3000-8000 (i.e., sustained rates of about 12-35MB/sec). What seemed to be happening was the other drive (XFS or ext2) would outpace the ReiserFS' ability to read or write, then wait. If you read the ReiserFS info, they admit this is part of the design (ReiserFS is *great* for loads of small files, really really great). For longer files, they end up needing to basically chain it across a lot of blocks in their B-tree.

I know the question was about IDE, not SCSI, but I'm sure that the filesystem matters for IDE as well, especially if very large files are involved. If you're working with large files and are willing to lose a percentage to block roundoffs, some filesystems let you choose a block size > 4096 (though I think Linux ends up chunking in 4K blocks anyway).

Here are graphs of ibiblio.org's bandwidth usage

* Try this at home: Count the time until lightning arrives. It's about 5 seconds per mile (3 seconds per kilometer), so divide the number of seconds by 5 and you get the lightning's distance in miles (by 3 for km). If you know the distance to the lightning (without the direction), you know that the lightning struck somewhere on a circle with that radius and you at the center.

[BTW: For more unit conversions than you can shake a stick at, visit Russ Rowlett's Units of Measure site which helped me check the numbers above.]

LINK

I was very interested to find out that this work was considered a Droste picture. Without the center, there is no clear definition between recursions, so it appears to be one continuous drawing, whereas you can clearly see a repeated picture in most every other Droste effect.

My favorite Escher piece is Up and Down . The symmetry is very easy to see, although it never ceases to amaze me how he drew 2 point of perspective of the same scene in one fluid picture, a ceiling and a floor existing as one and the same. If he had drawn the sketch as if he was halfway up/down the tower, the top and bottom portion of the picture could be taped together in a loop, connecting the floor to the ceiling again!

But he needs a tan..
Linus "Topless"
Not lets not let this happen again!

What steps to raise funding have you undertaken in this time of state budget constraints, given the enormous resources that are devoted to running this site?

Theres only one True tetris in my eyes, the 1989 IOCCC Best Game winner, A true classic.

of course, it has been cleaned up and improved, and is now included as tetris-bsd in the BSD games collection.

My god, I was going to start with a pitch for a non-GPL solution (I'll end with it instead) ... but did you not follow your own link? There are THREE IPX tunnel packages on that page, not one. Sure, the other two are not much more recent, but the situation is hardly as dire as you make out.

LSM links:
ipxtunnel by Andreas Godzina, from May 2000 (free for non-commercial purposes)
ipxtund by Hinrich Eilts, from August 1998 (GPL) - the one you referenced
& ipxbridge by Kir Kostuchenko, from January 2000 (GPL)

And, to be sure, any IPX-compatible VPN will also solve your problem, permitting IPX traffic to traverse an IP-only link.

But if it were me, I'd go to the source. If you are using IPX, you are most likely using Novell's Netware. Any recent version (5.x, 6.0) will support IPX tunneling using CMD (Compatibility-mode) drivers. This solution has the advantage of being commercially supported (an important consideration for an ISP), relatively easy to configure, and, if you are running the appropriate version of Netware already, won't cost you anything additional.

Out of curiosity, what is the application? Doom? Not many applications (aside from old IPX-only Netware clients and compatibles such as ncpfs) require IPX exclusively.

My god, I was going to start with a pitch for a non-GPL solution (I'll end with it instead) ... but did you not follow your own link? There are THREE IPX tunnel packages on that page, not one. Sure, the other two are not much more recent, but the situation is hardly as dire as you make out.

LSM links:
ipxtunnel by Andreas Godzina, from May 2000 (free for non-commercial purposes)
ipxtund by Hinrich Eilts, from August 1998 (GPL) - the one you referenced
& ipxbridge by Kir Kostuchenko, from January 2000 (GPL)

And, to be sure, any IPX-compatible VPN will also solve your problem, permitting IPX traffic to traverse an IP-only link.

But if it were me, I'd go to the source. If you are using IPX, you are most likely using Novell's Netware. Any recent version (5.x, 6.0) will support IPX tunneling using CMD (Compatibility-mode) drivers. This solution has the advantage of being commercially supported (an important consideration for an ISP), relatively easy to configure, and, if you are running the appropriate version of Netware already, won't cost you anything additional.

Out of curiosity, what is the application? Doom? Not many applications (aside from old IPX-only Netware clients and compatibles such as ncpfs) require IPX exclusively.

My god, I was going to start with a pitch for a non-GPL solution (I'll end with it instead) ... but did you not follow your own link? There are THREE IPX tunnel packages on that page, not one. Sure, the other two are not much more recent, but the situation is hardly as dire as you make out.

LSM links:
ipxtunnel by Andreas Godzina, from May 2000 (free for non-commercial purposes)
ipxtund by Hinrich Eilts, from August 1998 (GPL) - the one you referenced
& ipxbridge by Kir Kostuchenko, from January 2000 (GPL)

And, to be sure, any IPX-compatible VPN will also solve your problem, permitting IPX traffic to traverse an IP-only link.

But if it were me, I'd go to the source. If you are using IPX, you are most likely using Novell's Netware. Any recent version (5.x, 6.0) will support IPX tunneling using CMD (Compatibility-mode) drivers. This solution has the advantage of being commercially supported (an important consideration for an ISP), relatively easy to configure, and, if you are running the appropriate version of Netware already, won't cost you anything additional.

Out of curiosity, what is the application? Doom? Not many applications (aside from old IPX-only Netware clients and compatibles such as ncpfs) require IPX exclusively.

It has been interesting to see all the tricks needed to keep up with the GPU performance growth curve. The growth curve is so much steeper than the CPU growth curve (double every 18 months) because graphics processors can take advantage of more parallelism.

But the parallelism has mostly just happened on chip for consumer GPU's. It will be interesting to see how well it works between chips. This sounds awfully similar to UNC's PixelFlow, which used object-parallelism (GPU-parallelism) and image composition to construct the final image. And between chips parallelism is more feasible than the between-computers solution of WireGL.

GLUI, though. Yech. That's a crappy toolkit. You have to modify the guts of the thing to add new widgets, the architecture is a mess, and it has problems synchronizing the front and back buffers. GLOW is much better. I've used both. Both are menu and widget toolkits built entirely on top of OpenGL. This gives cross-platform portability. Doing 2D widgets through the 3D OpenGL engine seems inefficient, but it works well. If you have 3D hardware, you may as well use it. It's an relatively clean way to program.

This could have some really awesome uses in Teleimmersion and Virtual Reality.

Think about the last videoconference you attended: it was probably a far cry from being face to face. Adding simple stereo vision to that probably would not do much for interacting with your peers. However, a system like the following might change things.

Here's what I'd propose, if I could build my "dream system":

Set up the following:
*Two conference rooms equipped with the cameras mentioned in the article
*Optical See-through HMDs that the users would wear
*A very fast network connection between the two locations
*Software to make it work.

This way, individuals in disparate locations could walk around, talk to each other, and do everything but shake hands. Actually, get one of these and that might even be possible :)

You would also somehow do a similar trick with the audio to enable "private" conversations between individuals sitting next to each other.

This could be the first really useful immersive application. Think about how much travel time would be saved.

Any thoughts?

Linux Mandrake is just the latest in a long line of quirkily christened versions of Linux. Previous versions of Linux have been named Red Hat, Slack Ware, Storm and Coral. In stark contrast to the mundane names such as 98, ME or NT preferred by Microsoft, the crazy names of each Linux release hint at its renegade nature.

My foray into the world of Linux began by downloading a "CD image" from the Linux web site. But don't worry, this isn't software piracy, it's perfectly legal! Linux is shareware, meaning that it can be freely redistributed without fear of a visit by the Business Software Alliance. The free availability of Linux is a major reason for its popularity among cash-strapped students and self-styled anti-capitalist hackers.

Before installing new software, it is always advisable to read the documentation. Unfortunately, an unpleasant surprise was in store for me in the "required configuration" section of the manual. I was shocked to learn that Linux Mandrake only runs on Pentium processors, meaning that my hopes of testing the water with my old Gateway 486 were dashed. Furthermore, a whopping 32 megabytes of memory are required to run Linux! Although the advocates of Linux self-righteously boast the efficiency of their chosen operating system and deride the "bloatware" produced by Microsoft, it appears that their claims are blatantly incorrect. Although my humble 486 will happily run Windows 95, it seems that Linux requires far more powerful, and more expensive, computer hardware. Is this really the sign of a lean, mean operating system? Of course not.

Sadly, not even being able to install Linux is just the first of my many complaints. A brief perusal of the features of Linux Mandrake reveals that Linux is sorely lacking many crucial productivity applications. For example, why isn't the industry standard web browser, Internet Explorer, included with Linux? Despite the best efforts of the experts at the Internet Engineering Task Force to encourage adoption of the Internet Explorer standard, the creators of Linux seem to think that they know better. By refusing to adhere to recognised standards, Linux is simply undermining its own credibility.

Similarly, almost all of the world's most popular and widely used software is completely incompatible with Linux! It may surprise you to learn that your copy of Microsoft Office, Outlook Express, or Lotus Notes will not work under Linux. Those who wish to use their computer for recreational purposes are also out of luck, for almost all of the most popular games are unavailable for Linux. Although a wide range of software is freely available for Linux, these pitiful offerings are mostly unfinished, unreliable and do not bear comparison to their commercial counterparts.

Computer security is also an area that seems to have been overlooked by the developers of Linux. In these times when hacking and viruses are commonplace, it defies belief to learn that no anti-virus software is available for Linux. To add insult to injury, there is no Linux version of the popular ZoneAlarm firewall. By using Linux, you are issuing an open invitation to the hordes of ne'er-do-wells on the Internet.

The shortcomings of Linux are obvious. Without even installing Linux Mandrake, I have exposed several fundamental flaws. Surely it is not too much to expect that, after ten years of development, the creators of Linux would have addressed these problems? The real question that the prospective Linux user must ask himself is, "Why bother?" After all, Microsoft Windows comes free with most PCs and there simply isn't a need to replace it, particularly not with a product of inferior quality.

Although it is always tempting to support the underdog, Windows XP will be the deserved victor in the battle ahead. I recommend that those Adequacy readers who are hoping to upgrade their operating system patiently wait for the release of Windows XP, rather than foolishly wasting their time, effort and money on Linux.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has an interesting project on using Haptic Brushes for virtual painting, which is pretty neat.

They have something called Interactive Haptic Painting with 3D Virtual Brushes which was also presented at Siggraph. Very cool.

When works pass into the public domain

Growth rate of the public domain

Not whoring, at 50, yadda yadda, just thought this may be useful

Here is a site that explains a little more about 6-D Haptics. Cool stuff.

Haptics could offer the magical possibility of changing the average gamer from a large cholesterol repository into a lean mass of muscle. Well, maybe not, but it's a neat idea.

Well here is a pdf (google html) lab experiment that looks to be fairly simple. It certainly isn't that hard.

The files are also mirrored here.

would require only an area of one square yard per person in the developed world

I did a google search and found this site that says "The population of the developed world is about 1.13E(9)". By my math this works out to a 365 square mile requirement.

If we can build a square mile per day (cough cough) we can have this sucker done in a year!

-

And as for the alleged benefits, how is lack of accountability ("VERY hard to get laid off/fired.") a good thing? It means the morons you work with will be rewarded for being morons and you're stuck with them. What self respecting techie would want that? Being stuck surrounded by ineptitude is too high a price to pay, no matter what the benefit.

And we won't even talk about 'lots of management' and how rewarding and satisfying *that* makes a job. You're arguing how nice it is to be put out to pasture and not have much asked of you, but dear God I hope most of us don't need that yet. And when we do someday, no need for the feds - there is always SAS Institute.

I do wish mutt did this by itself. It can use POP or IMAP without fetchmail, it seems like a double standard that it can't do SMTP (pine can).

Slashdot had an interview with David Korn that covers the Microsoft/Korn shell here. Just scroll down to question 5. There's another story here. Just think that in August 98 MS wanted to let users run a few UNIX apps on NT.

When I got to grad school at UNC in 1988, our custom built machine, Pixel planes would draw 30,000 triangle a second! How about that? And it only took several thousand ASICs. dave

Allow me to explain.

Alan Cox; Richard Stallman; Bruce Perens; Wichert Akkerman; Miguel DeIcaza.

What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a self-respecting black person would have! No Maurice, no Luther, no Lil' Kim. There are many other lists such as this, you can see one here. Flip through each page, do you see anything other than white faces? Of course you don't, because Open Source and its adherents are ardent racists and they absolutely forbid access to the sacred 'kernel' by any person of color.

Lets look at another list, this time a compendium of the companies using Linux. Are there any black owned companies on that list? Nooooooo. How about these companies? They all have something to do with Open Source software, any of them owned by an African-American? No again. Here is an extensive collection of photographs from a LUG (Linux User Gathering) meeting, more can be viewed at that link. What is odd about these pictures, and every other photograph I have ever seen of a LUG meeting, is that there is not one single black person to be seen, and probably none for miles.

More racist overtones can be found by examining the language of Open Source. They often refer to 'white hat' hackers. These 'white hats' scurry about the Internet doing good, but illegal, acts for their fellow man. In stark contrast we find the 'black hat' hackers. They destroy the good works of others by breaking into systems, stealing data, and generally causing havoc. These two terms reflect the mindset of most Linux developers. White means good, black means bad. Anywhere there is black, there is uncontrollable destruction and lawlessness. Looking further we see black lists that inform other users of 'bad' hardware, Samba, an obvious play on the much hated Little Black Sambo book, Mandrake, which I won't explain except to say that the French are notorious racists. This type is linguistic discrimination is widespread throughout the Open Source culture, lampooned by many of its more popular sites.

It is also a fact that all Unix 'distros' contain a plethora of racist commands with not so hidden symbolism.

It can hardly be coincidence that the prime operating system of choice of the 'open source supremacists' - Linux, features commands which are poorly disguised racist acronyms. For example: 'awk' (All White Klan) , 'sed' (shoot nEgroes dead), 'ln' (lynch negroes), 'rpm' (raical purity mandatory), 'bash' (bring a slave home), 'ps' (persecute sambo), 'mount' (murder or unseat nubians today), 'fsck' (favored supreme Christian klan). I could go on and on about the latent racist symbolism in Linux, but I fear it would take weeks to enumerate every incidence.

Is there a single unix command out there that does not have some hidden racist connotation ? Suffice it to say that the racism pervades Linux like a particularly bad smell. Can you imagine the effect of running such a racist operating system on the impressionable mind ? I don't have to remind you that transmitting subliminal messages is banned in the USA, and yet here we have an operating system that appears to be one enormous submliminal ad for the Klan!

One of the few selling points of Open Source software is that it is available in many different languages. Browsing through the list I see that absolutely none are offered in Swahili, nor Ebonics. Obviously this is done to prevent black people from having access to the kernel. If it weren't for the fact that racism is so blatantly evil I would be impressed by the efforts these Open Sourcers have invested in keeping their little hobby lilly white. It even appears that they hate the Japanese, as some of these self proclaimed hackers defaced a web site with anti-Japanese slogans. Hell, these people even go all the way to Africa (South Africa mind you, better known as White Africa) and the pictures prove that they don't even get close to a black person.

Of course, presenting overwhelming evidence such as this is a bit unfair without some attempt to determine why these Open Sourcers are so racist. Much of the evidence I have collected indicates that their views are so deeply held that they are seldom questioned by the new recruits. This, coupled with the robot-like groupthink that dominates the culture allows the racist mindset to continue to permeate the ranks. Indeed, the Open Source version of a Klan rally, OSDN (known to the world as Open Source Developer's Network, known to insiders as Open Source Denies Negroes) nearly stands up and shouts its racist views on its demographics page. It doesn't mention the black man one single time. Obviously, anyone involved with Open Source doesn't need to be told that the demographic is entirely white, it is a given.

I have a sneaking suspicion as to why their beliefs are so closely held: they are all terrible athletes.

Really. Much like the tragedy at Columbine High School, where two geeks went on a rampage to get back at 'jocks', these adult geeks still bear the emotional scars inflicted upon them due to their lack of athletic ability during their teen years. As African-Americans are well known for their athletic skills, they are an obvious target for the Open Source geeks. As we all know, sports builds character, thus it follows that the lack of sports destroys character. These geeks, locked away in their rooms, munching on stale pizza and Fritos, engage in no character building activities. Further, they interact only with computers and never develop the level of social skill that allows normal people to handle relationships with persons of color.

Contrasted with the closed source, non-geeky software house Microsoft, Open Source has a long, long way to go.

Join me in my next article where I will lay bare the rampant anti-semitism in the Open Source community.

I suppose this is where I'm supposed to be apologetic for my desire to live and distrust of nations that have shown time and time and time again that they aren't really very nice people.

But, I'm not sorry. In fact, I'm quite happy about this. Let's say we find a small pox lab in Iraq. We know they have it. They know we know. What's to stop them from using it?

A 50-megaton nuke pointed at Baghdad, that's what.

For fuck's sake wake up and smell the truth. The world is not , has never been, nor probably ever will be a nice place. Peace is purchased with superior firepower.

NEVER forget that.

Knunov

B.S. in Comp. Sci from UNC@Chapel Hill - Oracle DBA, Novell CNE, and UNIX/Linux/BSD administrator/user/enthusiast. I was also a Captain in the U.S.M.C., MOS - Infantry - Force Recon, 1st Battalion.

So, unlike the vocal majority of computer geeks here, this geek actually has a clue about warfare.

British billions have been one thousand million for some time now

Europe still sticks with Billion=10^12 though,