Yes we on/. got it but most MSM reporting on it failed to get it even in the US.
Perhaps the OLPC folk clearly conveyed their new education method. Perhaps the "they" who don't read slashdot understood what that method was and how it might work.
Perhaps the fault doesn't lie with OLPC not clearly stating their new method, nor does it lie with the "MSM" either. Perhaps the real fault is that the idea just sucks.
Kinda like Ron Paul supporters. Always blamed the "MSM" for failing to convey his "brilliant" message when in fact maybe, just maybe, we all knew what his message was, but thought that it wasn't a good one.
Blaming the MSM for failure to communicate is usually a sign of denial. Perhaps we all know your message, but we just don't agree with it. Either tune your ideas and message so they are acceptable by more people, or simply accept being the underdog and live with it. But never deny what is reality--it isn't the media's fault nobody agrees with whatever it is you are trying to sell.
I'm not a big fan of Negroponte, but both Intel and Microsoft went out of their way to kill this project
This is only according to those stricken with Linus's so-called Microsoft-Hater Disease. It is my understanding that both of those companies *and* apple offered to hook them up with stuff and were declined. Why? Politics. It would be seen as selling out to the other backers--the free software crowd. That would make their Slashdot Karma go down. So rather than except the offer, he declined and when all the other players wisely decided to make their own products, rather than realizing his mistake he choose to shift blame and pin it on those "big evil corporations trying to screw the little guy".
If they'd had any heart at all, they'd have said, "Great! How can we help?" and turned it into a big PR bonus for themselves.
By my recolection, they did say "how can we help" and were declined. The OLPC guys tryed to turn it into their own PR bonus.
In other words, OLPC was its own worst enemy. It had no clearly defined goal. Was its goal playing politics for Free Software? Was it playing high-stakes international politics with so-called developing nations? Was it a laptop company? Was it an education company? Who knows. They sure didn't.
If I was on that board, I would have tried my hardest to force them to pick one and go with that. Obviously they aren't a political football for Free Software, so they should go with whatever OS their customers want installed. Now the question is should they be a hardware manufacturer or an education provider? If they are hardware? Build their own rig from scratch and install Linux, OSX or Windows and let others do the software. If they are education? Outsource the engineering and work on sugar and good software. Doing all at once while wasting time worrying about their slashdot karma was what did them in.
Saying Microsoft and Intel is solely to blame is letting your disease take control. Not good.
"Bloat" is a myth perpetuated by a certian sect of technical people that seem to think that anything that isn't done in assembly and can be sqeezed into 640kb of memory is "bloat". Good sir, nobody cares about "bloat". We don't have tape drives and ram isn't $400 a meg. Bloat is a myth.
There is no such thing as "bloat". There is only applications whos feature set is poorly organized. The more features you add, the more attention you have to give to how said features are accessed and how they relate to the goals and tasks the user is trying to accomplish at any time.
A flight to Titan in ten years would be about as difficult as going to the moon in 1965
I think Brooks of The Mythical Man-Month fame has a name for that--"The Second System Effect". Rather than paraphrase, I'll just quote the book:
An architect's first work is apt to be spare and clean. He knows he doesn't know what he's doing, so he does it carefully and with great restraint.
As he designs the first work, frill after frill and embellishment after embellishment occur to him. These get stored away to be used "next time." Sooner or later the first system is finished, and the architect, with firm confidence and a demonstrated mastery of that class of systems, is ready to build a second system.
This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. When he does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will confirm each other as to the general characteristics of such systems, and their differences will identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not generalizable.
The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile."
Yes, the Lunar Kung Pao Chicken is out of this world!
Well, there is something to be said about "local"
on
The Laptop, Circa 1968
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Look at why facebook is popular. I wager almost your entire friends list is people you know (or knew) in person.
If I were a betting man, my hunch would be that we'll figure out people dont really like socializing with random people on in the internet and what we really want is ways to better communicate with the people geographically and socially close to us. In otherwords, we'll go from "random people scattered across the globe talk about Linux" (slashdot) to "random people scattered across my city talk about technology in general".
...Maybe. But facebook isn't popular because of hype. It is popular because it lets us put an online face to people we already knew offline. Before "social networking" was the rage, for the most part the internet was "online people talk with other online people" or "people trying to put an offline face to people we only knew online". In short--facebook is popular because it lets us enhance the experiences we have with people we met face to face.
Because we haven't figured out how to make it take less. We even have a name for what you describe--"information overload". We've got access to limitless amounts of information now days. Your brain can't handle it. Our technology can barely handle it.
If you could somehow take all the information we have on the internet and "BBS-ize" it, I promise you it would take a hurculean effort for you to find anything.
I gave examples like "IC schematics" and "wiring diagrams" because I'm posting on slashdot. You and I probably both know somebody in our network who knows how to get some bit of tech related info/w-out modern search engines. But back then, what if you wanted to find the best sewing needle to use for nylon fabric--which of your BBS going friends would know the right phone number to dial to get information about that?
What is funny is I was contemplating how to make a statement like yours and get it +5 funny! You aren't insightul, you are forgetful.
BBS's didn't have wikipedia. 99% of your BBS buddies were local. You couldn't order books on your BBS. You couldn't book a vacation to some far off land online--you'd have to use a travel agent. You couldn't play any kind of game with 10,000 other users at the same time. You couldn't be on a bus, a coffee shop, a library, or a park and instantly connect to any BBS in the world all at the same time. Elections weren't won or lost in part because of the effectiveness of a candidates BBS strategy. You didn't have entire political revolutions organized using BBSes either. If Iran was in the midst of a revolution during the BBS era, the US government wouldn't be telling some random BBS not to perform system maintenance because so many iranians were relying on it for communication!
Information? Forget it! You couldn't "google" a BBS and pull up schematics for some random IC. Which BBS did you dial into when you wanted to get a corporations SEC filings? Which BBS had information about the number of legs on a centipede? Which BBS contained streaming, real-time video coming from the olympics and for that matter, which BBS had the scores for every olympic game updated by the second? Which BBS had the wiring digram for a vintage VW bug?
I'm sure right now, some dillegent Slashdotter is going to post some BBS who did those things, but let me ask them this--how did you know of that BBS's existance? There was no Google, Bing or Yahoo for BBSes, and if there was, you'd have to know its phone number (which would probably be non-local).
No sir, you aren't insightful. You are my "+5 Funny" comment only serious. I had fun with BBSes too--but we have moved on. The amount of information available *instantly* at my fingertips is many, many orders of magnitude higher than the sum of all information found on all BBS systems that ever existed.
It is okay to be nostalgic about ANSI art, ACID draw, renegade BBSes, and 16 color gifs of madona in her swimsuit, but don't fool yourself into thinking you are feeling anything else.
The MIME type sent in the headers never mattered. If you fed IE7+ a XHTML doctype, it would pretty much render XHTML. Ditto with every other browser.
As has been said, XHTML is basically well formed HTML (with "depreciated tags" that you'd use anyway). When HTML5 rolls around, I expect many people including myself to just use the new tags and attributes and still produce well formed XML. Same as we've done for XHTML--take HTML4 and make it valid. All the browsers will take it and I bet it won't even violate whatever DTD this new thing uses.
In otherwords, there never was a standard and there never will be. The closest standard you can get is "is this valid XML"... if you can get valid XML, all the browsers will *parse* the thing in the same way. Of course, how they render said parsing isn't quite standard. The "rendering differences" is where the fun starts.
Guess what, most criminals* are a drain on society. That is why they are criminals. They do things that harm all of us for their own benifit. No matter what we do with them, they are a drain on taxpayer money--not to mention the damage they do to the victims.
Madoff is a pointless drain on society. You should be pissed he exists and we have to spend our taxpayer money to lock the son of a bitch up. It isn't the government or societies fault he is costing us a bagillion dollars. It is his own selfish nature.
The only reason we don't burn these people at the stake is this thing we call civilization. The fact we get a fair trial and *dont* get burnt at the stake on the whims of random people costs a lot of money. Personally, I'll pay my taxes and avoid being burnt at the stake and having a fair trial. Wouldn't you agree?
* Obviously there are exceptions... are dudes busted for smoking a joint really a drain on society? I'd argue not.
Package managers are a bug, not a feature. They are a byproduct of the way open source is developed--one where everything can be compiled from scratch. If open source somehow had everything shipped as binaries, you would never have a package manager.
In other words, I wouldn't brag about package managers if I would you. You should work your ass off to get rid of them and replace them with installers or how the Mac does it. They are nothing at all to be proud of. They are a (sometimes rather elegant) hack to work around the (sometimes rather useful) nature of open source.
Give me one good reason a device shouldn't automatically flip from portrait to landscape based on how it is oriented in your hand. I'd say if the device doesn't know how it is oriented in your hand, the said device is pretty... well.. stupid.
So they have click-to-focus between windows and sloppy focus between subwindows.
Like all engineering, it is a tradeoff. I'm sure there have been many of whiteboard meetings to discuss this behavior. If you had sloppy focus between windows, yes it might be consistent, but it could also cause confusion of its own. You've got people like me who will play with the mouse wheel or people who are click/scroll happy and would accidentally alter the state of applications that they are not using "aka out of focus".
If you really want to bitch about inconsistent behavior, btich about what I assume are third party widget sets that dont even get the "sloppy focus within subwinows" bit right and require you to click on the widget before the scroll wheel works. Or worse, poorly implemented combo boxes that hog the mouse input while the mouse is outside of the widget so when you fidget with the scroll wheel, the combo box/list box changes the selected item when you didn't want it to.
In other words, the devil is in the details, and there is a *lot* of details to get right on something "simple" like handling the scroll wheel. If you read my post carefully, you see I contradict my own statement about when to accept scroll wheel events. Most UI design is like that. *Lots* of details with lots of things that conflict.
I'm not familiar enough with the history of OSS projects but are there examples of projects that started with a design process?
If you broaden the scope beyond "end-user software" and dive into things like protocols you might find some things. Usability doesn't just apply to the GUI--it helps when you have a well designed protocol or file format. Is EXT3 well designed? What about the FreeBSD ports tree--did that start with code or with design?
UI design isn't dirt work; it is actually very fun and rewarding. The thing is it is hard to wear both a "UI Design Hat" and a developer hat at the same time. Why? The UI guy in you wants a usable UI and the programmer wants a usable codebase--those two goals are often highly conflicting. Good UI design often requires code that often needs to deal with crazy edge cases, or code that has to turn fuzzy human illogic into clean, elegant programming. If you try to wear both hats, the developer in you will fight the UI guy in you because the UI guy wants you to create a feature that the programmer in you knows will be a messy pain in the ass.
Once an organization gets large enough, you can have different people wearing the hats. This works great in an environment where there is a communication process for the two to talk to eachother. In the open source world, such communication channels typically donâ(TM)t exist--there is no process that has really been established. You might get UI guys dropping golden nuggets on the project mailing list from time to time, but you donâ(TM)t have the UI guy meeting up with the developers on a daily basis.
If you want the UI guys to be in on the party, the culture of open source development will have to shift to make use UI guys are not only included in the entire development cycle, but more important--they are seen as equals in the process. If the UI guys says "this design sucks", the developers don't implement it. I dunno if that is part of the culture nor am I sure how or if such a thing could ever be pulled off. UI guys get the props they deserve in paid jobs simply because there is a financial incentive to listen to them. Without that financial incentive, the only incentive to spend your time working on open source is the joy of programming. When you are doing programming for the joy of it, you donâ(TM)t want some UI guy (even if it you) raining on your pretty looking, well designed code:-)
insist on obtaining adequately documentation for the hardware.
This made me laugh because I guess "good documentation" must only apply to hardware. The GNU utilities have horrid documentation. Well, unless you "info" stuff because, after all, "Man pages are obsolete"... Obsolete my ass.
I've kept that quote for ages and I have yet to figure out what the hell he is talking about. It does fit with his MO though. I mean, its either him or ESR who insists on the whole hacker/cracker thing. I think he uses cracker only to water down and soften the idea there could be computer "criminals" (I use the scare quotes assuming he would use them).
Somebody else said it, and I'll repeat it. Nothing personal, but the guy gets more attention then he deserves. He validates a whole swath of people who think our computing golden age was in the 80's when the "unwashed masses" weren't using computers and we didn't have to concern ourselves with usability,security or good design. Toss in the classic cypherpunk attitude and you got quite a character. It is so naive it is almost cute.
Why GNU su does not support the wheel group (by Richard Stallman)
Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keep- ing it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)
However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.
I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a leftie and my writing looks like absolute shit. The worse is writing on a whiteboard. I'll smudge the hell out of whatever it is I write.
or worse says "sheeple", god kills a kitten.
Perhaps the OLPC folk clearly conveyed their new education method. Perhaps the "they" who don't read slashdot understood what that method was and how it might work.
Perhaps the fault doesn't lie with OLPC not clearly stating their new method, nor does it lie with the "MSM" either. Perhaps the real fault is that the idea just sucks.
Kinda like Ron Paul supporters. Always blamed the "MSM" for failing to convey his "brilliant" message when in fact maybe, just maybe, we all knew what his message was, but thought that it wasn't a good one.
Blaming the MSM for failure to communicate is usually a sign of denial. Perhaps we all know your message, but we just don't agree with it. Either tune your ideas and message so they are acceptable by more people, or simply accept being the underdog and live with it. But never deny what is reality--it isn't the media's fault nobody agrees with whatever it is you are trying to sell.
This is only according to those stricken with Linus's so-called Microsoft-Hater Disease. It is my understanding that both of those companies *and* apple offered to hook them up with stuff and were declined. Why? Politics. It would be seen as selling out to the other backers--the free software crowd. That would make their Slashdot Karma go down. So rather than except the offer, he declined and when all the other players wisely decided to make their own products, rather than realizing his mistake he choose to shift blame and pin it on those "big evil corporations trying to screw the little guy".
By my recolection, they did say "how can we help" and were declined. The OLPC guys tryed to turn it into their own PR bonus.
In other words, OLPC was its own worst enemy. It had no clearly defined goal. Was its goal playing politics for Free Software? Was it playing high-stakes international politics with so-called developing nations? Was it a laptop company? Was it an education company? Who knows. They sure didn't.
If I was on that board, I would have tried my hardest to force them to pick one and go with that. Obviously they aren't a political football for Free Software, so they should go with whatever OS their customers want installed. Now the question is should they be a hardware manufacturer or an education provider? If they are hardware? Build their own rig from scratch and install Linux, OSX or Windows and let others do the software. If they are education? Outsource the engineering and work on sugar and good software. Doing all at once while wasting time worrying about their slashdot karma was what did them in.
Saying Microsoft and Intel is solely to blame is letting your disease take control. Not good.
"Bloat" is a myth perpetuated by a certian sect of technical people that seem to think that anything that isn't done in assembly and can be sqeezed into 640kb of memory is "bloat". Good sir, nobody cares about "bloat". We don't have tape drives and ram isn't $400 a meg. Bloat is a myth.
There is no such thing as "bloat". There is only applications whos feature set is poorly organized. The more features you add, the more attention you have to give to how said features are accessed and how they relate to the goals and tasks the user is trying to accomplish at any time.
When there is a serious error detected via SMART, Vista will bug the hell out of you trying to get you to back up.
I think Brooks of The Mythical Man-Month fame has a name for that--"The Second System Effect". Rather than paraphrase, I'll just quote the book:
Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
The Mythical Man-Month
Does this parallel? Dunno. But it might.
PS: Slashdot needs to support unicode. Sheesh.
Yes, the Lunar Kung Pao Chicken is out of this world!
Look at why facebook is popular. I wager almost your entire friends list is people you know (or knew) in person.
If I were a betting man, my hunch would be that we'll figure out people dont really like socializing with random people on in the internet and what we really want is ways to better communicate with the people geographically and socially close to us. In otherwords, we'll go from "random people scattered across the globe talk about Linux" (slashdot) to "random people scattered across my city talk about technology in general".
Because we haven't figured out how to make it take less. We even have a name for what you describe--"information overload". We've got access to limitless amounts of information now days. Your brain can't handle it. Our technology can barely handle it.
If you could somehow take all the information we have on the internet and "BBS-ize" it, I promise you it would take a hurculean effort for you to find anything.
I gave examples like "IC schematics" and "wiring diagrams" because I'm posting on slashdot. You and I probably both know somebody in our network who knows how to get some bit of tech related info /w-out modern search engines. But back then, what if you wanted to find the best sewing needle to use for nylon fabric--which of your BBS going friends would know the right phone number to dial to get information about that?
What is funny is I was contemplating how to make a statement like yours and get it +5 funny! You aren't insightul, you are forgetful.
BBS's didn't have wikipedia. 99% of your BBS buddies were local. You couldn't order books on your BBS. You couldn't book a vacation to some far off land online--you'd have to use a travel agent. You couldn't play any kind of game with 10,000 other users at the same time. You couldn't be on a bus, a coffee shop, a library, or a park and instantly connect to any BBS in the world all at the same time. Elections weren't won or lost in part because of the effectiveness of a candidates BBS strategy. You didn't have entire political revolutions organized using BBSes either. If Iran was in the midst of a revolution during the BBS era, the US government wouldn't be telling some random BBS not to perform system maintenance because so many iranians were relying on it for communication!
Information? Forget it! You couldn't "google" a BBS and pull up schematics for some random IC. Which BBS did you dial into when you wanted to get a corporations SEC filings? Which BBS had information about the number of legs on a centipede? Which BBS contained streaming, real-time video coming from the olympics and for that matter, which BBS had the scores for every olympic game updated by the second? Which BBS had the wiring digram for a vintage VW bug?
I'm sure right now, some dillegent Slashdotter is going to post some BBS who did those things, but let me ask them this--how did you know of that BBS's existance? There was no Google, Bing or Yahoo for BBSes, and if there was, you'd have to know its phone number (which would probably be non-local).
No sir, you aren't insightful. You are my "+5 Funny" comment only serious. I had fun with BBSes too--but we have moved on. The amount of information available *instantly* at my fingertips is many, many orders of magnitude higher than the sum of all information found on all BBS systems that ever existed.
It is okay to be nostalgic about ANSI art, ACID draw, renegade BBSes, and 16 color gifs of madona in her swimsuit, but don't fool yourself into thinking you are feeling anything else.
The MIME type sent in the headers never mattered.
If you fed IE7+ a XHTML doctype, it would pretty much render XHTML. Ditto with every other browser.
As has been said, XHTML is basically well formed HTML (with "depreciated tags" that you'd use anyway). When HTML5 rolls around, I expect many people including myself to just use the new tags and attributes and still produce well formed XML. Same as we've done for XHTML--take HTML4 and make it valid. All the browsers will take it and I bet it won't even violate whatever DTD this new thing uses.
In otherwords, there never was a standard and there never will be. The closest standard you can get is "is this valid XML"... if you can get valid XML, all the browsers will *parse* the thing in the same way. Of course, how they render said parsing isn't quite standard. The "rendering differences" is where the fun starts.
Guess what, most criminals* are a drain on society. That is why they are criminals. They do things that harm all of us for their own benifit. No matter what we do with them, they are a drain on taxpayer money--not to mention the damage they do to the victims.
Madoff is a pointless drain on society. You should be pissed he exists and we have to spend our taxpayer money to lock the son of a bitch up. It isn't the government or societies fault he is costing us a bagillion dollars. It is his own selfish nature.
The only reason we don't burn these people at the stake is this thing we call civilization. The fact we get a fair trial and *dont* get burnt at the stake on the whims of random people costs a lot of money. Personally, I'll pay my taxes and avoid being burnt at the stake and having a fair trial. Wouldn't you agree?
* Obviously there are exceptions... are dudes busted for smoking a joint really a drain on society? I'd argue not.
That is an implementation detail, not a valid reason against the idea. Give me a real reason.
Package managers are a bug, not a feature. They are a byproduct of the way open source is developed--one where everything can be compiled from scratch. If open source somehow had everything shipped as binaries, you would never have a package manager.
In other words, I wouldn't brag about package managers if I would you. You should work your ass off to get rid of them and replace them with installers or how the Mac does it. They are nothing at all to be proud of. They are a (sometimes rather elegant) hack to work around the (sometimes rather useful) nature of open source.
Instead you dismissed it. Again, give me *one* good reason why the damn thing *should not* orient itself to how I hold it.
Dismissing it as a gimmick or cool trick makes you a developer who doesn't understand anything but coding.
Give me one good reason a device shouldn't automatically flip from portrait to landscape based on how it is oriented in your hand. I'd say if the device doesn't know how it is oriented in your hand, the said device is pretty... well.. stupid.
Like all engineering, it is a tradeoff. I'm sure there have been many of whiteboard meetings to discuss this behavior. If you had sloppy focus between windows, yes it might be consistent, but it could also cause confusion of its own. You've got people like me who will play with the mouse wheel or people who are click/scroll happy and would accidentally alter the state of applications that they are not using "aka out of focus".
If you really want to bitch about inconsistent behavior, btich about what I assume are third party widget sets that dont even get the "sloppy focus within subwinows" bit right and require you to click on the widget before the scroll wheel works. Or worse, poorly implemented combo boxes that hog the mouse input while the mouse is outside of the widget so when you fidget with the scroll wheel, the combo box/list box changes the selected item when you didn't want it to.
In other words, the devil is in the details, and there is a *lot* of details to get right on something "simple" like handling the scroll wheel. If you read my post carefully, you see I contradict my own statement about when to accept scroll wheel events. Most UI design is like that. *Lots* of details with lots of things that conflict.
If you broaden the scope beyond "end-user software" and dive into things like protocols you might find some things. Usability doesn't just apply to the GUI--it helps when you have a well designed protocol or file format. Is EXT3 well designed? What about the FreeBSD ports tree--did that start with code or with design?
UI design isn't dirt work; it is actually very fun and rewarding. The thing is it is hard to wear both a "UI Design Hat" and a developer hat at the same time. Why? The UI guy in you wants a usable UI and the programmer wants a usable codebase--those two goals are often highly conflicting. Good UI design often requires code that often needs to deal with crazy edge cases, or code that has to turn fuzzy human illogic into clean, elegant programming. If you try to wear both hats, the developer in you will fight the UI guy in you because the UI guy wants you to create a feature that the programmer in you knows will be a messy pain in the ass.
Once an organization gets large enough, you can have different people wearing the hats. This works great in an environment where there is a communication process for the two to talk to eachother. In the open source world, such communication channels typically donâ(TM)t exist--there is no process that has really been established. You might get UI guys dropping golden nuggets on the project mailing list from time to time, but you donâ(TM)t have the UI guy meeting up with the developers on a daily basis.
If you want the UI guys to be in on the party, the culture of open source development will have to shift to make use UI guys are not only included in the entire development cycle, but more important--they are seen as equals in the process. If the UI guys says "this design sucks", the developers don't implement it. I dunno if that is part of the culture nor am I sure how or if such a thing could ever be pulled off. UI guys get the props they deserve in paid jobs simply because there is a financial incentive to listen to them. Without that financial incentive, the only incentive to spend your time working on open source is the joy of programming. When you are doing programming for the joy of it, you donâ(TM)t want some UI guy (even if it you) raining on your pretty looking, well designed code :-)
I love that! "Paranoia compatible". I'm gonna steal that :-)
They just dont hang out in your echo chamber. Check out places like codeplex. Tons of stuff pull in Mono libraries.
This made me laugh because I guess "good documentation" must only apply to hardware. The GNU utilities have horrid documentation. Well, unless you "info" stuff because, after all, "Man pages are obsolete". .. Obsolete my ass.
I've kept that quote for ages and I have yet to figure out what the hell he is talking about. It does fit with his MO though. I mean, its either him or ESR who insists on the whole hacker/cracker thing. I think he uses cracker only to water down and soften the idea there could be computer "criminals" (I use the scare quotes assuming he would use them).
Somebody else said it, and I'll repeat it. Nothing personal, but the guy gets more attention then he deserves. He validates a whole swath of people who think our computing golden age was in the 80's when the "unwashed masses" weren't using computers and we didn't have to concern ourselves with usability,security or good design. Toss in the classic cypherpunk attitude and you got quite a character. It is so naive it is almost cute.
su manpage - GNU Shell Utilities
Then why is he pimping his own c# implementation in the very same article? Their project sounds exactly like Mono.