Anyone besides me still have a copy of the original plastic-box set (and expansion sets I and II), with the dinky cards and the tissue-paper money? When the game was going badly, one could always fake a sneeze and blow everyone's money all over the table (we often played with elaborate rules controlling such events, not to mention set rules for cheating for the banker).
INWO made some playability improvements to the original game, but i still think the original was more fun. The more wildly varying winning requirements for the different Illuminati helped. It led to each player being treated very differently... like when the Assassins were encouraged to kill groups early in the game, but radically opposed later. Or the tilting-at-windmills attacks on the Gnomes of Zurich to get them to spend money.
I suspect they *sound* a lot alike.:} In some ways, Fripp has done to music what Knuth has done to algorithms... subjected both to deep technical and aesthetic scrutiny.
"Discipline is never an end in itself, only a means to an end". -Fripp
Does this article not remind you of the gadfly ivory tower pinhead debate scene in _Cryptonomicon_?
Communism is no more applicable to Internet culture of free information than capitalism is. Both of those socio-economic models are outdated crap based on Malthus' original fallacy of scarcity - the idea that there is only so much stuff to go around, so we must all fight each other for our share. Rather than looting the threadbare intellectual corpses of Karl Marx and Adam Smith, they should try reading something *relevant*, like R. Buckminster Fuller's _The Critical Path_.
Ivory tower leftists declaring victory on the 'net is as irrelevant and silly as Wall Street capitalists declaring victory. Neither side won - WE won. They just don't know it yet. ---
And, after heavy market research, consultation with Gartner Group, email to Jesse Berst, a double espresso, an Altavista search and three hits of acid, i found the name of this project - Elizamiga.
Apparently, it's an experiment in marketing Darwinism by a bored MIS/marketing double major with his finger perpetually on the fast-forward button.
The 2.0 beta release will go into IPO later in Q4.
Remember the article in Wired News about a computer generating better ad copy than human writers?
Well, they hooked that computer up to the Internet, and have it generating "buzz".:}
Really, has anyone ever met an actual human being who works for "Amiga"? Or are they just randomly generating press releases based on buzzwords and standard IT industry plotlines?
I think JavaDoc was pretty clearly inspired by Knuth's _Literate Programming_. Although it isn't quite as thorough as WEB, i think Knuth probably deserves the credit for the concept of embedding documentation (as opposed to comments) within source code, and compiling documentation as a combination of code analysis and editorial comments.
"Imagine a tiny factory that could duplicate itself using only water. Now drop it in the ocean... "
Read _Zodiac_, by Neal Stephenson (same one who wrote _The Diamond Age_). Imagine a plasmid that could convert PCBs (organic chlorine compounds; toxic waste) into CO2 and salt water. Now, imagine one that does the reverse. Now drop THAT in the ocean... *shiver*
How about nearly 4000 C source files and nearly 14,000 files (over 17,000 if you count differently) in a complete build directory? That's my daily work environment. How about making it cross-platform for 9 or so Unix platforms, plus NT? Does the cool IDE allow unattended cron job builds? Can it integrate our homegrown version control system? Does it support all our platforms (including NT)? Can its build system do things like kick off internal database processes during the build that are needed for other parts of the build?
Other than occasional use of Source Insight (an inexpensive and excellent commercial source code index/analysis tool), i rarely need anything more than find, grep, and one-liner custom greps written with perl -e. With a project of this size, i find the "knowledge... of regexps" and "ugly makefiles" not just useful, but priceless. The bigger the project, the more useful the Unix command line becomes. ---
It's called a Unix shell. It includes choice of editors, build tools, version control, multiple scripting languages, etc. It can work in very little desktop space (i'm currently using just an xterm), is language-independent, etc.
My question is, what does the "Integrated" environment get me that i can't already get with my Unix shell, and how much of the flexibility of the Unix shell must i surrender to get it?
-dave, who is currently hacking Perl over a WAN in an xterm)
MS TO OPEN IM SOURCE MS says it will publish the protocols for its instant messaging program. http://www.zdnn.com/a/zdnn081899/2316354/
Of course, it's not the source released, it's just the protocols. But either ZD's reporters are too dumb to tell the difference, or are deliberately confusing the issue.
When in doubt, i *always* remind myself to never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. The advantage is that i hardly ever blame anyone for anything now. The disadvantage is i've come to think the average human is about as bright as a cabbage.
Apparently, the author does not understand this significant distinction. Secrecy != obscurity. In this article, "obscurity" is defined so broadly as to be useless... anything that isn't spammed out across the 'net is "obscurity".
In the world of serious computer security, "obscurity" refers to keeping the *mechanism* for storing information secret, not the information itself. In practice, the mechanism should be able to keep the information secret even if the inner workings of the mechanism are known.
For example, the algorithms used in the US government's ill-fated "Clipper chip" were kept secret - security by obscurity. When, under pressure from industry, the algorithms were finally released, significant weaknesses were immediately discovered. RSA, on the other hand, is not obscure. Even having the source code for the actual program used to encrypt data with RSA does not significantly reduce the time required to decrypt it (consider that a PGP-encrypted message states its nature in plaintext, right at the top of the message!)
Another, more MS-vs-OSS example is buffer overflow attacks on daemon programs. The "security through obscurity" approach is to hide the source code, so potential buffer overflows are not obvious. But hiding the source does not *eliminate* them... it just hides them. With patience and educated guesses, they can and will be discovered. By opening the source, potential overflows can be found and discovered. One need look no farther than the recent security reports on the most popular closed-source web server (IIS) and the most popular open-source web server (Apache). Which one has had multiple severe, easily exploitable security holes reported lately? In other words, the obscurity of the IIS source made it harder to find weaknesses, but not impossible. In Apache's case, thousands of eyes have pored over every line of source, and the potential weaknesses were found and eliminated long ago. Which makes you feel safer - code thoroughly studied for weaknesses by thousands of programmers, or code where only the authors have examined it?
If you think combining a girlfriend with a tech career is tough, try having children! My marriage and my children are FAR more important to me than any career rewards.
That's why i work a 40 hour a week job. Yeah, i know i could make more money doing the all-work-no-life thing. But money and the thrill of geeking pale in comparison to the joys of actually having a *relationship* with my children. I've seen the 70-hour-week execs, and the sort of dysfunctional family lives they get. I don't want that.
Think about what this implies... the author suggests that when (not if!) Linux becomes the dominant OS, all the original Linux users will abandon it for something new. Why? Because it will no longer be elitist (31337?).
This implies that the *only* reason we use Linux is because it's elitist. When it is no longer elitist, we will no longer be motivated to use it. Now ask yourself... why do YOU use Linux? Is it to be cool? Or do you have other reasons?
I can think of two important reasons for using Linux that were totally ignored or handwaved away in the article. First, it doesn't suck, or at least it doesn't suck much - certainly, it sucks less than almost all other OSs. Second, it is based on politically correct Open Source licenses, particularly the GPL.
It is quite true that many Linux newbies are using it to get away from Windows - some for the elitism of it, but most for its technical and emotional superiority, imho. I do expect Linux to beat Windows in the end, but not because it's elite. Rather, it will win because it doesn't suck (much), and the license terms are better.
The fact is, neither *BSD nor any other Unix variant is going to offer significant technical superiority. Linux, at heart, is Unix. Using and programming it is a Unix experience. So the technical elitism of *BSD (etc) is very marginal compared to the elitism of Linux/Unix over Windows, which sucks mightily. And license-wise, BSD et al is at best equivalent, and arguably worse than Linux, but both are a huge leap over Windows.
I should mention BeOS here... technically, it may be significantly superior to Linux, but its license is still proprietary, and the source is closed. If anything, i can see Be getting lucky and becoming dominant, and Linux hanging on as a server OS and license elitism tool.
To sum it up, Linux is a HUGE technical and political win over Windows, and i believe it will ride to victory on those rails. But no alternative to Linux offers a sufficient leap in technical superiority, along with a politically equivalent license, to really take Linux' place as the elitist OS. Therefore, i conclude that the vast majority of current Linux users will remain with Linux, even when Linux becomes the dominant OS.
That's not quite true... although _Dr Adder_ was written in 1970 (and is one Class A heavyweight badass motherfucker of a book. If you like cyberpunk, read it!), it did not make it to print until 1984, after _Neuromancer_ launched the mainstream cyberpunk movement. This despite the fact that Philip K Dick worked for years to get it published (and all the more amazing because the novel brutally parodied Dick as the radio station KCID, playing old German opera and irrelevant news).
Yes, _Dr Adder_ technically predates _Neuromancer_. But that's just because it was so far ahead of its time.
I have to disagree with this assessment, if only because it conflicts with Lenin's greatest contribution to practical communism - the concept of the revolutionary vanguard. The basic idea is simple... get a hard core cadre who will show up at the small, boring party functions where party officials are elected. It doesn't take many to take over internal control of any political party. A recent version of this, although they would take great umbrage at being linked to Leninist practice, is the fundamentalist Christian takeover of the Republican Party, simply by showing up at those boring party meetings and voting on the leadership. Needless to say, i don't see many giant corporations being secretly taken over by open-source fanatics.
A better analogy would be the anarcho-syndicalists, based on the writings of Bakunin and Kropotkin. The anarcho-syndicalists rejected structured leadership altogether, choosing instead to select leaders locally for a given farm, factory, or other work unit. Leaders are thus chosen for their leadership, not their political skills, and have no authority over those they do not work with directly. This much more closely parallels the structure of open source software projects.
Using a CGI-based dynamic content benchmark bothered me, too. CGI is very inefficient on NT due to the process model, not some evil MS conspiracy (i won't go into the technical merit or lack thereof of the NT process model here). If you're going to do dynamic content on an NT box, you SHOULD use ASP or some other MS-designed dynamic content method. Using CGI as a benchmark is just as unfair as some of the methods Mindcraft used.
How about developing a benchmark for dynamic content output, say, querying a RDBMS and producing results from that. Use Oracle on both systems, and whatever mechanism for querying Oracle data seems most efficient for either platform. That would be a much fairer test of dynamic content, and i suspect Linux would still come out on top.
Right now, i feel ashamed to be a part of the/. community. I don't know which is worse: the racist stereotyping, or the illogical cost/benefit analysis. Bigotry and stupidity.
First, the racism. Not all Africans are primitives living in huts. Not all African nations are embroiled in civil war. Famines are a result of war and the resultant refugees, not poverty. Africans are not cannibals. Et cetera.
Second, the cost/benefit analysis of the undersea cable. Aren't slashdotters supposed to be technology experts who understand the value of electronic communications? Don't you think phones and the Internet are useful for something other than downloading porn and Quake betas? Africa's economic growth is hampered mostly by the lack of a modern communications infrastructure. Inexpensive bandwidth is the most critical feature of any modern economy. Until it is available throughout most of Africa, the African economies will be unable to modernize and compete with the rest of the world.
Think of Buckminster Fuller's formula: Wealth equals Energy times Information. And, as Fuller pointed out, Information can be replicated at whatever bandwidth is available, so the better the bandwidth, the more quickly wealth will increase. It really dismays me to see people saying that Africa shouldn't spend money on creating (not expanding, CREATING!) a modern communications infrastructure, because there are other pressing needs. That sounds like obsolete liberal crap to me, a guaranteed means to keep Africa broken and dependent forever. I can't think of a more pressing need than to be able to communicate freely with each other and the rest of the world.
Which reminds me... many of the more creative pseudo-intellectuals here suggest that Africa cannot get, should not get, or does not deserve a good communications infrastructure because of its corrupt governments. Think about it... what's the most effective tool for fighting government corruption and abuse yet devised? Communication! Governments cannot control widely available phones, much less the Internet. Governments that allow open communications cannot oppress effectively; governments that suppress communications will not benefit effectively from communications, and will fall behind. It worked in the USSR, and it will work in Africa.
This undersea fiber optic cable project is an incredibly useful venture, which if it succeeds will reap rewards far in excess of its initial cost. Personally, i'm thrilled for Africa.
But i'm more disappointed than ever in the supposedly intelligent, considerate, and technologically savvy denizens of Slashdot.
I once got the crap flamed out of me for saying the exact same thing as the original AC, years ago on BUGTRAQ. Ghod forbid anyone should question the Language of Choice... if you can't drive a car with square wheels, you just aren't a good enough driver. If you aren't willing to ditch the C stdlibs and start over from scratch, you're just not a serious programmer.
What a load of crap!!! It's the sort of snotty elitism that compares well to, say, Custer's Last Stand.
How about if your NT box isn't secure, you're just not a good enough administrator? No suggestion that if you used Unix, you might not have to DEAL with some of these problems?
C is a beautiful, wonderful language for writing operating system kernels and low-level utilities. But it's a lousy language for writing security-sensitive code... it's nearly impossible to prevent buffer overflows without years of experience and studious avoidance of what are and should well be standard coding practices (sprintf(), for example).
C++ not only saddles you with the same buffer overflows, but often buries them deep inside classes, behind badly mangled names, hidden from the probing of debuggers. Of course, if you don't throw out all standard libraries and start from scratch, you're not a good C++ programmer either, right?
Dylan is a solution, but not the only solution. Even Perl is basically immune to buffer overflows, at some performance penalty. Most languages designed for use other than writing OS kernels do automatic bounds checking, and even garbage collection (getting rid of all those pesky memory leaks you admit to in the process).
What do you think drives Bill Gates (or any big-shot computer CEO) anyway? Money? If the game were just about money, it's over. Bill won, the first person in history worth a hundred billion dollars.
No, what drives Bill and other authoritarians is some fundamental psychological insecurity, a need for "respect", perhaps driven by a domineering father or some high school bully. Who knows? We'll leave that to the posthumous shrinks.
How many times have we seen industry pundits at a loss to explain Free Software, because they simply cannot imagine a motivation other than fiscal profit? The same is true of Bill Gates. If you think greed drives him, you've underestimated him.
A friend just pointed this out in email... MP3 singles could serve much the same function for indie musicians that the radio does now. Remember, radio is largely promotional advertising for the record industry. They encourage radio stations to play singles so people will go buy CDs. Of course, this only benefits those lucky artists and pseudo-artists who get heavy label promotion. But for those who don't get promoted, buying a CD without hearing any of it first is a bit of a gamble for the consumer. MP3 changes that, giving the indie musicians a way for consumers to check it out at their leisure before committing to a purchase. And of course, the CDs can be purchased online, away from the brick-and-mortar selection-limiting mechanism known as record stores...
Why is Open Source doing so well? Because software SHOULD be emotionally as well as financially rewarding. Programming can be a high art form, in the right environment. Writing free software is a chance to care about our code, not our paychecks.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone besides me still have a copy of the original plastic-box set (and expansion sets I and II), with the dinky cards and the tissue-paper money? When the game was going badly, one could always fake a sneeze and blow everyone's money all over the table (we often played with elaborate rules controlling such events, not to mention set rules for cheating for the banker).
INWO made some playability improvements to the original game, but i still think the original was more fun. The more wildly varying winning requirements for the different Illuminati helped. It led to each player being treated very differently... like when the Assassins were encouraged to kill groups early in the game, but radically opposed later. Or the tilting-at-windmills attacks on the Gnomes of Zurich to get them to spend money.
Ah, so many happy memories...
---
I suspect they *sound* a lot alike. :} In some ways, Fripp has done to music what Knuth has done to algorithms... subjected both to deep technical and aesthetic scrutiny.
"Discipline is never an end in itself, only a means to an end". -Fripp
---
Does this article not remind you of the gadfly ivory tower pinhead debate scene in _Cryptonomicon_?
Communism is no more applicable to Internet culture of free information than capitalism is. Both of those socio-economic models are outdated crap based on Malthus' original fallacy of scarcity - the idea that there is only so much stuff to go around, so we must all fight each other for our share. Rather than looting the threadbare intellectual corpses of Karl Marx and Adam Smith, they should try reading something *relevant*, like R. Buckminster Fuller's _The Critical Path_.
Ivory tower leftists declaring victory on the 'net is as irrelevant and silly as Wall Street capitalists declaring victory. Neither side won - WE won. They just don't know it yet.
---
And, after heavy market research, consultation with Gartner Group, email to Jesse Berst, a double espresso, an Altavista search and three hits of acid, i found the name of this project - Elizamiga.
Apparently, it's an experiment in marketing Darwinism by a bored MIS/marketing double major with his finger perpetually on the fast-forward button.
The 2.0 beta release will go into IPO later in Q4.
---
Remember the article in Wired News about a computer generating better ad copy than human writers?
:}
Well, they hooked that computer up to the Internet, and have it generating "buzz".
Really, has anyone ever met an actual human being who works for "Amiga"? Or are they just randomly generating press releases based on buzzwords and standard IT industry plotlines?
---
I think JavaDoc was pretty clearly inspired by Knuth's _Literate Programming_. Although it isn't quite as thorough as WEB, i think Knuth probably deserves the credit for the concept of embedding documentation (as opposed to comments) within source code, and compiling documentation as a combination of code analysis and editorial comments.
---
"Imagine a tiny factory that could duplicate itself using only water. Now drop it in the ocean... "
Read _Zodiac_, by Neal Stephenson (same one who wrote _The Diamond Age_). Imagine a plasmid that could convert PCBs (organic chlorine compounds; toxic waste) into CO2 and salt water. Now, imagine one that does the reverse. Now drop THAT in the ocean... *shiver*
---
How about nearly 4000 C source files and nearly 14,000 files (over 17,000 if you count differently) in a complete build directory? That's my daily work environment. How about making it cross-platform for 9 or so Unix platforms, plus NT? Does the cool IDE allow unattended cron job builds? Can it integrate our homegrown version control system? Does it support all our platforms (including NT)? Can its build system do things like kick off internal database processes during the build that are needed for other parts of the build?
Other than occasional use of Source Insight (an inexpensive and excellent commercial source code index/analysis tool), i rarely need anything more than find, grep, and one-liner custom greps written with perl -e. With a project of this size, i find the "knowledge... of regexps" and "ugly makefiles" not just useful, but priceless. The bigger the project, the more useful the Unix command line becomes.
---
It's called a Unix shell. It includes choice of editors, build tools, version control, multiple scripting languages, etc. It can work in very little desktop space (i'm currently using just an xterm), is language-independent, etc.
My question is, what does the "Integrated" environment get me that i can't already get with my Unix shell, and how much of the flexibility of the Unix shell must i surrender to get it?
-dave, who is currently hacking Perl over a WAN in an xterm)
---
From my ZDNN daily email this morning:
MS TO OPEN IM SOURCE
MS says it will publish the protocols for its instant messaging program.
http://www.zdnn.com/a/zdnn081899/2316354/
Of course, it's not the source released, it's just the protocols. But either ZD's reporters are too dumb to tell the difference, or are deliberately confusing the issue.
When in doubt, i *always* remind myself to never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. The advantage is that i hardly ever blame anyone for anything now. The disadvantage is i've come to think the average human is about as bright as a cabbage.
---
Apparently, the author does not understand this significant distinction. Secrecy != obscurity. In this article, "obscurity" is defined so broadly as to be useless... anything that isn't spammed out across the 'net is "obscurity".
In the world of serious computer security, "obscurity" refers to keeping the *mechanism* for storing information secret, not the information itself. In practice, the mechanism should be able to keep the information secret even if the inner workings of the mechanism are known.
For example, the algorithms used in the US government's ill-fated "Clipper chip" were kept secret - security by obscurity. When, under pressure from industry, the algorithms were finally released, significant weaknesses were immediately discovered. RSA, on the other hand, is not obscure. Even having the source code for the actual program used to encrypt data with RSA does not significantly reduce the time required to decrypt it (consider that a PGP-encrypted message states its nature in plaintext, right at the top of the message!)
Another, more MS-vs-OSS example is buffer overflow attacks on daemon programs. The "security through obscurity" approach is to hide the source code, so potential buffer overflows are not obvious. But hiding the source does not *eliminate* them... it just hides them. With patience and educated guesses, they can and will be discovered. By opening the source, potential overflows can be found and discovered. One need look no farther than the recent security reports on the most popular closed-source web server (IIS) and the most popular open-source web server (Apache). Which one has had multiple severe, easily exploitable security holes reported lately? In other words, the obscurity of the IIS source made it harder to find weaknesses, but not impossible. In Apache's case, thousands of eyes have pored over every line of source, and the potential weaknesses were found and eliminated long ago. Which makes you feel safer - code thoroughly studied for weaknesses by thousands of programmers, or code where only the authors have examined it?
---
Dear Microsoft:
I want an operating system that can run under significant load without crashing. Until you can produce that, you can kiss my assessment.
Sincerely,
dave
---
If you think combining a girlfriend with a tech career is tough, try having children! My marriage and my children are FAR more important to me than any career rewards.
That's why i work a 40 hour a week job. Yeah, i know i could make more money doing the all-work-no-life thing. But money and the thrill of geeking pale in comparison to the joys of actually having a *relationship* with my children. I've seen the 70-hour-week execs, and the sort of dysfunctional family lives they get. I don't want that.
---
Think about what this implies... the author suggests that when (not if!) Linux becomes the dominant OS, all the original Linux users will abandon it for something new. Why? Because it will no longer be elitist (31337?).
This implies that the *only* reason we use Linux is because it's elitist. When it is no longer elitist, we will no longer be motivated to use it. Now ask yourself... why do YOU use Linux? Is it to be cool? Or do you have other reasons?
I can think of two important reasons for using Linux that were totally ignored or handwaved away in the article. First, it doesn't suck, or at least it doesn't suck much - certainly, it sucks less than almost all other OSs. Second, it is based on politically correct Open Source licenses, particularly the GPL.
It is quite true that many Linux newbies are using it to get away from Windows - some for the elitism of it, but most for its technical and emotional superiority, imho. I do expect Linux to beat Windows in the end, but not because it's elite. Rather, it will win because it doesn't suck (much), and the license terms are better.
The fact is, neither *BSD nor any other Unix variant is going to offer significant technical superiority. Linux, at heart, is Unix. Using and programming it is a Unix experience. So the technical elitism of *BSD (etc) is very marginal compared to the elitism of Linux/Unix over Windows, which sucks mightily. And license-wise, BSD et al is at best equivalent, and arguably worse than Linux, but both are a huge leap over Windows.
I should mention BeOS here... technically, it may be significantly superior to Linux, but its license is still proprietary, and the source is closed. If anything, i can see Be getting lucky and becoming dominant, and Linux hanging on as a server OS and license elitism tool.
To sum it up, Linux is a HUGE technical and political win over Windows, and i believe it will ride to victory on those rails. But no alternative to Linux offers a sufficient leap in technical superiority, along with a politically equivalent license, to really take Linux' place as the elitist OS. Therefore, i conclude that the vast majority of current Linux users will remain with Linux, even when Linux becomes the dominant OS.
---
That's not quite true... although _Dr Adder_ was written in 1970 (and is one Class A heavyweight badass motherfucker of a book. If you like cyberpunk, read it!), it did not make it to print until 1984, after _Neuromancer_ launched the mainstream cyberpunk movement. This despite the fact that Philip K Dick worked for years to get it published (and all the more amazing because the novel brutally parodied Dick as the radio station KCID, playing old German opera and irrelevant news).
Yes, _Dr Adder_ technically predates _Neuromancer_. But that's just because it was so far ahead of its time.
---
I gotta take the kids. Too bad he's only five, and short for his age... he can't ride so many things.
---
I have to disagree with this assessment, if only because it conflicts with Lenin's greatest contribution to practical communism - the concept of the revolutionary vanguard. The basic idea is simple... get a hard core cadre who will show up at the small, boring party functions where party officials are elected. It doesn't take many to take over internal control of any political party. A recent version of this, although they would take great umbrage at being linked to Leninist practice, is the fundamentalist Christian takeover of the Republican Party, simply by showing up at those boring party meetings and voting on the leadership. Needless to say, i don't see many giant corporations being secretly taken over by open-source fanatics.
A better analogy would be the anarcho-syndicalists, based on the writings of Bakunin and Kropotkin. The anarcho-syndicalists rejected structured leadership altogether, choosing instead to select leaders locally for a given farm, factory, or other work unit. Leaders are thus chosen for their leadership, not their political skills, and have no authority over those they do not work with directly. This much more closely parallels the structure of open source software projects.
---
How about developing a benchmark for dynamic content output, say, querying a RDBMS and producing results from that. Use Oracle on both systems, and whatever mechanism for querying Oracle data seems most efficient for either platform. That would be a much fairer test of dynamic content, and i suspect Linux would still come out on top.
---
It'd give a whole new meaning to flushing your output buffers. :}
---
Right now, i feel ashamed to be a part of the /. community. I don't know which is worse: the racist stereotyping, or the illogical cost/benefit analysis. Bigotry and stupidity.
First, the racism. Not all Africans are primitives living in huts. Not all African nations are embroiled in civil war. Famines are a result of war and the resultant refugees, not poverty. Africans are not cannibals. Et cetera.
Second, the cost/benefit analysis of the undersea cable. Aren't slashdotters supposed to be technology experts who understand the value of electronic communications? Don't you think phones and the Internet are useful for something other than downloading porn and Quake betas? Africa's economic growth is hampered mostly by the lack of a modern communications infrastructure. Inexpensive bandwidth is the most critical feature of any modern economy. Until it is available throughout most of Africa, the African economies will be unable to modernize and compete with the rest of the world.
Think of Buckminster Fuller's formula: Wealth equals Energy times Information. And, as Fuller pointed out, Information can be replicated at whatever bandwidth is available, so the better the bandwidth, the more quickly wealth will increase. It really dismays me to see people saying that Africa shouldn't spend money on creating (not expanding, CREATING!) a modern communications infrastructure, because there are other pressing needs. That sounds like obsolete liberal crap to me, a guaranteed means to keep Africa broken and dependent forever. I can't think of a more pressing need than to be able to communicate freely with each other and the rest of the world.
Which reminds me... many of the more creative pseudo-intellectuals here suggest that Africa cannot get, should not get, or does not deserve a good communications infrastructure because of its corrupt governments. Think about it... what's the most effective tool for fighting government corruption and abuse yet devised? Communication! Governments cannot control widely available phones, much less the Internet. Governments that allow open communications cannot oppress effectively; governments that suppress communications will not benefit effectively from communications, and will fall behind. It worked in the USSR, and it will work in Africa.
This undersea fiber optic cable project is an incredibly useful venture, which if it succeeds will reap rewards far in excess of its initial cost. Personally, i'm thrilled for Africa.
But i'm more disappointed than ever in the supposedly intelligent, considerate, and technologically savvy denizens of Slashdot.
I once got the crap flamed out of me for saying the exact same thing as the original AC, years ago on BUGTRAQ. Ghod forbid anyone should question the Language of Choice... if you can't drive a car with square wheels, you just aren't a good enough driver. If you aren't willing to ditch the C stdlibs and start over from scratch, you're just not a serious programmer.
What a load of crap!!! It's the sort of snotty elitism that compares well to, say, Custer's Last Stand.
How about if your NT box isn't secure, you're just not a good enough administrator? No suggestion that if you used Unix, you might not have to DEAL with some of these problems?
C is a beautiful, wonderful language for writing operating system kernels and low-level utilities. But it's a lousy language for writing security-sensitive code... it's nearly impossible to prevent buffer overflows without years of experience and studious avoidance of what are and should well be standard coding practices (sprintf(), for example).
C++ not only saddles you with the same buffer overflows, but often buries them deep inside classes, behind badly mangled names, hidden from the probing of debuggers. Of course, if you don't throw out all standard libraries and start from scratch, you're not a good C++ programmer either, right?
Dylan is a solution, but not the only solution. Even Perl is basically immune to buffer overflows, at some performance penalty. Most languages designed for use other than writing OS kernels do automatic bounds checking, and even garbage collection (getting rid of all those pesky memory leaks you admit to in the process).
Don't turn your nose up at using the right tools.
What do you think drives Bill Gates (or any big-shot computer CEO) anyway? Money? If the game were just about money, it's over. Bill won, the first person in history worth a hundred billion dollars.
No, what drives Bill and other authoritarians is some fundamental psychological insecurity, a need for "respect", perhaps driven by a domineering father or some high school bully. Who knows? We'll leave that to the posthumous shrinks.
How many times have we seen industry pundits at a loss to explain Free Software, because they simply cannot imagine a motivation other than fiscal profit? The same is true of Bill Gates. If you think greed drives him, you've underestimated him.
A friend just pointed this out in email... MP3 singles could serve much the same function for indie musicians that the radio does now. Remember, radio is largely promotional advertising for the record industry. They encourage radio stations to play singles so people will go buy CDs. Of course, this only benefits those lucky artists and pseudo-artists who get heavy label promotion. But for those who don't get promoted, buying a CD without hearing any of it first is a bit of a gamble for the consumer. MP3 changes that, giving the indie musicians a way for consumers to check it out at their leisure before committing to a purchase. And of course, the CDs can be purchased online, away from the brick-and-mortar selection-limiting mechanism known as record stores...
So a technology that has been around for 20 years will take another 20 to get rid of, right? Hmm... NT has only been around for 5 years or so. :}
Why is Open Source doing so well? Because software SHOULD be emotionally as well as financially rewarding. Programming can be a high art form, in the right environment. Writing free software is a chance to care about our code, not our paychecks.