What blocks Africa from global participation are the tariffs, subsidies and other trade barriers in the 'developed' world; specially theinsane farm subsidies in Europe and the US.
Financial institutions on the other hand have little if any incentive to block Africa from global participation as Africa does not represent a threat to their business and actually represents an opportunity to expand.
> And this is the reason why you shouldn't use CGI scripts these days - the interface sucks and forking a process for each request is very expensive.
No it isn't. This is a common myth that just never dies.
I have built a whole web framework with the rc shell that does dozens of forks per request (calling commands like sed, awk, grep, echo, cat, etc), it is much faster than some php frameworks using fcgi, and certainly many magnitude order faster than perl or python takes to even start up.
You can do many thousands of forks per second on modern *nix systems even when running on a crappy virtual host or ancient hardware.
But note that I *statically* link all the binaries, when fork/exec-ing dynamically linked binaries things are considerably slower, but still much faster than what people assume.
But then, it doesn't use a database either and instead uses the file system to store and organize data, which also many claim is slower than a 'proper database', except that (as git and hg show) it is faster.
In short, the problem is not fork, bu ridiculously bloated and overly complex software.
> Don't ask me if it's right or wrong. I don't think it's that simple a question, with black and white answers for every case.
Actually it is pretty black and white and very simple: Freedom is about being able to do things that are unpopular and others don't approve of. Anything else is not freedom at all.
"The only freedom which counts is the freedom to do what some other people think to be wrong. There is no point in demanding freedom to do that which all will applaud. All the so-called liberties or rights are things which have to be asserted against others who claim that if such things are to be allowed their own rights are infringed or their own liberties threatened. This is always true, even when we speak of the freedom to worship, of the right of free speech or association, or of public assembly. If we are to allow freedoms at all there will constantly be complaints that either the liberty itself or the way in which it is exercised is being abused, and, if it is a genuine freedom, these complaints will often be justified. There is no way of having a free society in which there is not abuse. Abuse is the very hallmark of liberty." -- Lord Chief Justice Halisham
We have gone from a system where (supposedly) the best products at the lowest price were successful, to one where the company with the best lawyers can shut down anyone else and where serving consumers is a lower and lower priority because so called 'intellectual property' can be used to limit their options.
The programming environments by Rob Pike use proportional fonts by default. Both Acme (also used by Dennis Ritchie) and Rob's previous text editor Sam (still used by Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan and Bjarne Stroustrup).
The rio terminal windows also use proportional fonts.
At first (like many other things from the Plan 9 world) the lack of precise control about how everything spaced can be a bit frustrating, but once you learn to stop worrying about it, it can be rather pleasant and liberating to use (good) proportional fonts for writing code.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
You are referring to Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (aka "utah2000"), but I think you miss the point, just because Unix being "good enough" killed all progress doesn't mean that it was a good thing, quite the contrary.
And BTW, Plan 9 has a Unix compatible subsystem called APE(A Posix Environment), but it is rarely used, because Unix is 30 years rotten shit, and all that was worthwhile keeping from Unix has been in Plan 9 from the start, all that others have added to Unix in the last 30 years have been hacks by people that never understood Unix and its philosophy.
The true Unix spirit is still alive and well, in Plan 9, but not in any of the bastard sons of Unix or its numerous clones.
It was originally developed for Plan 9 as the replacement of the dedicated fs kernel that used WORM jukeboxes, but now you can use it under Linux, BSD and other Unix systems because it's part of the Plan 9 from User Space" port of Plan 9 tool to Unix systems.
The "D" name is misleading: it has absolutely nothing to do with the creators of B or C at Bell Labs. The successor of C was Alef(the first latter of a different alphabet) which was used for the original edition of Plan 9[1], and a later descendant by the same team was Limbo(Introduction paper by no other than Dennis M. Ritchie) for the Inferno.
Both Alef and Limbo are much more interesting languages than "D", they keep the clarity and simplicity of C while providing a high level framework for concurrent systems. The only other language with a good concurrency model I know of is Erlang which is quite different but also very interesting and sadly rather under valuated.
uriel
[1] To avoid having to maintain Alef compilers for many architectures Plan 9 is ported to, it was replaced with a C library, libthread, that provides the same concurrency model, for high level programming Limbo replaced it. Libthread, despite it's name is completely different from other threading models and uses CSP to handle concurrency while avoiding locks and many other problems with traditional "threading" systems. Libthread is part of Plan 9 from User Space so you can use it in "legacy" Unix/Linux/BSD systems too(of course Inferno runs on all those systems too...)
% grep [Ss]tandard/sys/games/lib/fortunes Multilevel standards are like onions. They're smelly and make you cry a lot. -Ron Natalie That's the nice thing about standards -- there's so many to choose from. -trb This is a full standard Kernighan & Ritchie C compiler. We don't need a standard; Kernighan & Ritchie completely defines the language. Is there no room for competition in the standards industry? -R. Hardin X is a temporary standard, like FORTRAN. - Andries van Dam Happiness is just gymnastics--and I hate programs that read standard output. -Boyd Oh! It's one of those programs that reads standard output. - boyd Geez, you'd think standards were a continental disease or something. - Brian Reid No UNIX system on the market supports more standards than DEC OSF/1. Standards is an area that is constantly changing. -Carl Cargill (ed. ACM StandardView) If there was [sic] a single standard for the English language it would not be necessary to support redundant spellings. - OSF1 ls(1) man page First off, I'd suggest printing out a copy of the GNU coding standards, and NOT read it. Burn them, it's a great symbolic gesture. - Linus Torvalds gcc -Isomenonstandardplace -Dverylongoption -Wpleasedontcomplainaboutmyprogramiknowhatimdoing ilikethingstobeclearsoigivemyfileslongnames.c /us r/include/c++/3.2/backward/backward_warning.h:32:2 : warning: #warning This file includes at least one deprecated or antiquated header. Please consider using one of the 32 headers found in section 17.4.1.2 of the C++ standard. Examples include substituting the <X> header for the <X.h> header for C++ includes, or <sstream> instead of the deprecated header <strstream.h>. To disable this warning use -Wno-deprecated. We lead by following standards. - sape
Standards can be useful, but they can also make your life miserable; Rob Pike wrote a great paper which among other things, explains how standards can make research and innovation difficult: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant
First of all, Linux is just an Unix clone, and it never had many fans at Bell Labs.
And Bell Labs gave up Unix _long_ ago: Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad. -- Rob Pike circa 1991
Bell Labs moved from Unix to Plan 9 in the late 80' and then went on to work on Inferno.
Both Plan 9 and Inferno are Open Source now and live on outside Bell Labs, but their developers like to be very quiet, they rather code than talk or maintain websites.
And also many of the ideas of Plan 9 and Inferno live on as part of other projects like v9fs(9P distributed file system protocol support for Linux), Plan 9 from User Space(a port of many Plan 9 components to Unix), and wmii(a window manager partially inspired by Acme.)
Some years ago the great guys at the Advanced Computing Lab of Los Alamos National Laboratory built this very cool setup with a bunch of Thinkpads running Plan 9:
Why have a userspace based in a 30 years old dead[1] operating system, when you can have the userspace from it's successor that is actively maintained, and was developed by the same team following the same principles and philosophy.
[1] "Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad." -- Rob Pike circa 1991
How much bullshit, XML is not a "standard data format", it's an "standard for the (very lousy and almost completely useless) 'definition' of data formats". An XML file without documentation is as useless as a big binary BLOB; some day you should check the XML MS word generates, and I have seen much worse from other proprietary XML tools.
UTF-8 is a real standard data format, infinitely easier to parse and read than XML, and I got the best tool set to work with it just under/bin
So, when will you be adding the -X option to gnu/grep so it understands XML? No, wait, it will be --parse-XML-files-and-be-slower-than-g++, because you, like all GNU fools, can't live without verbosity.
If you excuse me while I wait I will go back to work in a XML-free system.
> GNU made most of the core programs that Linux normally uses, and they are universally considered excellent In my universe they are considered junk; that BTW, is the same "universe" of the inventors of Unix and C(and many other things).
RMS and GNU never understood Unix and the Unix philosophy, and it shows; they can't code in C either, take a look at the source of gnu-core-utils some day... I did it, and I'm still recovering from the trauma. And gcc and other gnu "tools" are not better.
The only original "contribution" GNU did to Unix was info, a documentation system so hideous that even most GNU zealots don't use it.
Slashdot Mirror
that it doesn't take this long for all other non-solid-state storage to die.
The day when hardisk crashes and unreadable disks are things of the past is long over due.
What blocks Africa from global participation are the tariffs, subsidies and other trade barriers in the 'developed' world; specially theinsane farm subsidies in Europe and the US.
Financial institutions on the other hand have little if any incentive to block Africa from global participation as Africa does not represent a threat to their business and actually represents an opportunity to expand.
> And this is the reason why you shouldn't use CGI scripts these days - the interface sucks and forking a process for each request is very expensive.
No it isn't. This is a common myth that just never dies.
I have built a whole web framework with the rc shell that does dozens of forks per request (calling commands like sed, awk, grep, echo, cat, etc), it is much faster than some php frameworks using fcgi, and certainly many magnitude order faster than perl or python takes to even start up.
You can do many thousands of forks per second on modern *nix systems even when running on a crappy virtual host or ancient hardware.
But note that I *statically* link all the binaries, when fork/exec-ing dynamically linked binaries things are considerably slower, but still much faster than what people assume.
But then, it doesn't use a database either and instead uses the file system to store and organize data, which also many claim is slower than a 'proper database', except that (as git and hg show) it is faster.
In short, the problem is not fork, bu ridiculously bloated and overly complex software.
> Don't ask me if it's right or wrong. I don't think it's that simple a question, with black and white answers for every case.
Actually it is pretty black and white and very simple: Freedom is about being able to do things that are unpopular and others don't approve of. Anything else is not freedom at all.
Or, as one of my favorite quotes much more eloquently put it:
"The only freedom which counts is the freedom to do what some other people think to be wrong. There is no point in demanding freedom to do that which all will applaud. All the so-called liberties or rights are things which have to be asserted against others who claim that if such things are to be allowed their own rights are infringed or their own liberties threatened. This is always true, even when we speak of the freedom to worship, of the right of free speech or association, or of public assembly. If we are to allow freedoms at all there will constantly be complaints that either the liberty itself or the way in which it is exercised is being abused, and, if it is a genuine freedom, these complaints will often be justified. There is no way of having a free society in which there is not abuse. Abuse is the very hallmark of liberty." -- Lord Chief Justice Halisham
until so called 'intellectual property' is exposed for the oxymoron that it is.
that the patent system is a monster completely out of control.
We have gone from a system where (supposedly) the best products at the lowest price were successful, to one where the company with the best lawyers can shut down anyone else and where serving consumers is a lower and lower priority because so called 'intellectual property' can be used to limit their options.
The programming environments by Rob Pike use proportional fonts by default. Both Acme (also used by Dennis Ritchie) and Rob's previous text editor Sam (still used by Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan and Bjarne Stroustrup).
The rio terminal windows also use proportional fonts.
At first (like many other things from the Plan 9 world) the lack of precise control about how everything spaced can be a bit frustrating, but once you learn to stop worrying about it, it can be rather pleasant and liberating to use (good) proportional fonts for writing code.
The Inferno Documentation Archive is a good place, specially:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive
property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an
individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the
moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and
the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is
that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it.
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening
mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the
moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to
have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them,
like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any
point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being,
incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in
nature, be a subject of property.
-- Thomas Jefferson
Plan 9 from Bell Labs, the OS for people with good taste.
You are referring to Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (aka "utah2000"), but I think you miss the point, just because Unix being "good enough" killed all progress doesn't mean that it was a good thing, quite the contrary.
And BTW, Plan 9 has a Unix compatible subsystem called APE(A Posix Environment), but it is rarely used, because Unix is 30 years rotten shit, and all that was worthwhile keeping from Unix has been in Plan 9 from the start, all that others have added to Unix in the last 30 years have been hacks by people that never understood Unix and its philosophy.
The true Unix spirit is still alive and well, in Plan 9, but not in any of the bastard sons of Unix or its numerous clones.
For WORM oriented storage Venti is really good, for the details see the paper "Venti: a new approach to archival storage"
It was originally developed for Plan 9 as the replacement of the dedicated fs kernel that used WORM jukeboxes, but now you can use it under Linux, BSD and other Unix systems because it's part of the Plan 9 from User Space" port of Plan 9 tool to Unix systems.
The "D" name is misleading: it has absolutely nothing to do with the creators of B or C at Bell Labs. The successor of C was Alef(the first latter of a different alphabet) which was used for the original edition of Plan 9[1], and a later descendant by the same team was Limbo(Introduction paper by no other than Dennis M. Ritchie) for the Inferno.
Both Alef and Limbo are much more interesting languages than "D", they keep the clarity and simplicity of C while providing a high level framework for concurrent systems. The only other language with a good concurrency model I know of is Erlang which is quite different but also very interesting and sadly rather under valuated.
uriel
[1] To avoid having to maintain Alef compilers for many architectures Plan 9 is ported to, it was replaced with a C library, libthread, that provides the same concurrency model, for high level programming Limbo replaced it. Libthread, despite it's name is completely different from other threading models and uses CSP to handle concurrency while avoiding locks and many other problems with traditional "threading" systems. Libthread is part of Plan 9 from User Space so you can use it in "legacy" Unix/Linux/BSD systems too(of course Inferno runs on all those systems too...)
... and that is a good thing.
See: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview.
Metadata is just data with a non-standard interface. If you get rid of the non-standard interface you will live much happier.
And Bell Labs gave up Unix _long_ ago:
Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad. -- Rob Pike circa 1991
Bell Labs moved from Unix to Plan 9 in the late 80' and then went on to work on Inferno.
Both Plan 9 and Inferno are Open Source now and live on outside Bell Labs, but their developers like to be very quiet, they rather code than talk or maintain websites.
But here are a couple of links:
And also many of the ideas of Plan 9 and Inferno live on as part of other projects like v9fs(9P distributed file system protocol support for Linux), Plan 9 from User Space(a port of many Plan 9 components to Unix), and wmii(a window manager partially inspired by Acme.)
You mean like CSP that has been around for 20 years?
Both Inferno and Plan 9 allow CSP-style concurrent programming, and it's pure joy.
uriel
Some years ago the great guys at the Advanced Computing Lab of Los Alamos National Laboratory built this very cool setup with a bunch of Thinkpads running Plan 9:
The Powerwall
From a conversation with a friend earlier today:
"OpenBSD was my first *NIX, and I thank God for initiating me to Unix with the only barely sane *NIX at the time."
Of course this days I know of better things.
Solar-sails do not use solar-wind at all. This is a common misconception, but the appealing analogy does not apply.
See Henry Spencer comments for more details.
On the other hand, magnetic-sails do use the solar wind, but they are a completely different beast.
I think that project is obsoleted by plan9port.
Why have a userspace based in a 30 years old dead[1] operating system, when you can have the userspace from it's successor that is actively maintained, and was developed by the same team following the same principles and philosophy.
[1] "Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad." -- Rob Pike circa 1991
Start here.
You can continue here.
That should get you going, then you can read The UNIX Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming
How much bullshit, XML is not a "standard data format", it's an "standard for the (very lousy and almost completely useless) 'definition' of data formats". An XML file without documentation is as useless as a big binary BLOB; some day you should check the XML MS word generates, and I have seen much worse from other proprietary XML tools.
/bin
UTF-8 is a real standard data format, infinitely easier to parse and read than XML, and I got the best tool set to work with it just under
So, when will you be adding the -X option to gnu/grep so it understands XML? No, wait, it will be --parse-XML-files-and-be-slower-than-g++, because you, like all GNU fools, can't live without verbosity.
If you excuse me while I wait I will go back to work in a XML-free system.
The Plan 9 license is "OSI approved(Open Source), and accepted by FSF and RMS as Free Software; what more do you want?
If that is not enough, complain to Lucent with a clear explanation of why the LPL is not good enough for you.
> GNU made most of the core programs that Linux normally uses, and they are universally considered excellent
In my universe they are considered junk; that BTW, is the same "universe" of the inventors of Unix and C(and many other things).
RMS and GNU never understood Unix and the Unix philosophy, and it shows; they can't code in C either, take a look at the source of gnu-core-utils some day... I did it, and I'm still recovering from the trauma. And gcc and other gnu "tools" are not better.
The only original "contribution" GNU did to Unix was info, a documentation system so hideous that even most GNU zealots don't use it.