Re:My car needs to be rebooted
on
Hack Your Ride
·
· Score: 1
Yes, it's a Picasso! Honestly, the "Overspeed warning off" message (which flashes in a most distressed manner) has come and gone for months, and I've never found out what caused it.
"Dear Slashdot, how do I debug my car?" never seemed a worthy story submission, but now I'm glad I asked. I'm going to go and debutton the Picasso immediately.
It's either amazing how much wisdom there is in Slashdot, or it's scary that there are millions of Picasso owners out there, all unable to manipulate their Overspeed Warning function.
(Incidentally, how do you set the Overspeed Warning function to "on"? On second thoughts, forget that. I don't really want to know anything more about the Picasso User Interface than necessary.)
There is no doubt about it: Xandros is good enough to give to people who know nothing at all about the internals of computers. I put it on an old Dell last month, gave it to my mother, and she did not say anything; the thing got onto the Net, let her edit her documents and send email and browse, print out her papers, and generally did a nice job, well.
Xandros is probably the best of breed, and they are starting to make it available at no cost via channels like Linux magazine covers.
But even so it's well worth the money (and my firm has bought dozens of Xandros licenses) and comes highly recommended.
My car needs to be rebooted
on
Hack Your Ride
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Seriously. It's flashing "Overspeed warning off" at me. But some days it says "Warning engine overheating" just as the car starts on a cold day. Or, "Immobilizer!!" when I try to start it. Then it occasionally acts normal, but switches the display from km/l to km-left-to-pump to average driving speed, randomly.
Perhaps it's because it's a French car and takes itself too seriously.
Anyhow, I'm now going to look for someone who can rechip it and give it a new personality, something a little less brie and baguette, more Yvette Lopez, "where d'ya wanna go today?"
People get cancer because they have a genetic disposition to it. People have sex recklessly because it's in their genes. People drive drunk because alcohol makes them feel smarter than they are. People don't protect their computers because they can't handle the complexity of it.
Blaming the victim is fun, but unfortunatel it's not a way of fixing any of the above problems. Non-smokers also get cancer, non-drinkers car accidents, and the sexually most careful person can get AIDS.
"They deserve it" is a senseless thing to say, it degrades you and sets you on the wrong course for a solution.
Cure cancer by helping the body's natural resistance against cell malfunction. Cure STDs by early detection and treatment. Prevent car accidents by making smarter cars. Prevent computer worms/viruses by creating resistant software.
Hardly. This is just blaming the victim. A poor policy.
Relying on education and technological cures assumes that malware is a static target, but it's not. If you rely on improving people's understanding of viruses, you simply get viruses that act smarter and look like official emails. If you improve technology, you get viruses that actively target that technology itself (look at the BlackIce incident).
Technological solutions just create an arms race, and we've seen how well that works. Look at your inbox... the grim rise of noisemail is hardly a sign of success.
The solution is to acknowledge the nature of the problem: it follows the same laws as those of organic parasites, and the same solutions may be the only ones that work: perpetual change for the sake of change; trading of resistance; variety in place of standardization.
And so we come to the nightmare scenario. A relatively benign parasite has infiltrated the general population and suddenly a very "hot" parasite discovers how to piggy-back that infection. In the blink of an eye - a day, an hour - 50% of Windows PCs around the world are destroyed. It can happen, and therefore, it most probably will.
Laugh, AC, laugh. OS/2 was the last time IBM went up against Microsoft on Microsoft's terms. Since then the rules of engagement have changed.
Software has become a commodity. You understand the term, yes? The OS, the Office Suite, the web server, the database, the user applications... they are no longer products with inherent commercial value. They have become tools for delivering more sophisticated services. IBM knows this and uses the fact strategically. Microsoft is trying to fight it, but it's a battle that it cannot win. You cannot survive by selling commodities at a premium, except by bullying your clients into paying the extra, and it's a self-defeating strategy. Every Microsoft user is at a competitive disadvantage, and eventually will either switch, or go broke. The argument that Microsoft software gives you a competitive edge is unproven and rather goes against all experience.
The software market is truly bizarre because Microsoft continue to make large profits. But past success is no guarantee for future returns.
IBM will beat the living daylights out of Microsoft. This should not be a real cause for joy, because IBM has behaved badly in the past as well.
Hey, it's just a prediction. Feel free to produce an alternative one!
1. Sun will turn anti-Linux 2. IBM will offer to buy Java from Sun (Sun will refuse) 3. The next software war will involve Microsoft and IBM directly 4. IBM will win.
If a mainline vendor like RealNetworks can produce a flagship product that is so close to spyware, consumers can expect rough times ahead.
It's incredible that a company should have to back down from a series of agressive marketing techniques in this way: it suggests they have either seriously misunderstood their market, or that they are under serious pressure to exploit it harder, even at a high cost in credibility.
I suspect that it will eventually become standard procedure for software to become fairly agressive in taking over the desktop, uninstalling or crippling other products, redirecting browsers, etc. The techniques currently used by the most evil spyware trojans (like CoolWebSearch) will probably become mainstream as companies look for a way, any way to keep their software visible on the users' desktops.
Sun has a fundamental problem, one it shares with Microsoft. Both firms live by selling a premium product in a commodity market. Operating systems are no longer rare and valuable enough to pay for. Linux has demonstrated the feasability of a single, free, standard OS for all hardware, and despite ferocious resistance from many quarters, makes inexorable progress towards becoming the eventual standard.
Sun will die if they do not reinvent themselves away from selling proprietary OS products. Moves like the Sun Java Desktop are a sign of hope: Sun must adopt Linux and FOSS and become a services company selling value-added solutions. Then it can survive.
But changing a company like this is incredibly hard and there are few cases where it works. Most likely, Sun is doomed.
Very few people have made a conscious choice for Windows and its UI, and few people will really base their future decisions on this.
95% of the angst most people feel from using Windows comes from one single thing: security. I find it remarkably easy to switch people to a distro like Xandros by telling them: it is safe and will protect your photos and documents from viruses, trojans, and worms.
All that is needed is a reasonable level of compatibility so that people can continue to make their documents & spreadsheets, download their photos from their digital cameras, and email their friends.
Not a single person ever says: "but it looks nothing like Windows!" - the only counter objection is that "certain things do not work".
Emulating XP safely may be an intellectual challenge but it is not part of the Linux sales argument. Distributions like Xandros - which install easily, and handle smoothly - are.
Please don't laugh. This is a true story. It happened to the sister of a friend of a colleague of someone I know.
She logged onto a web site, expecting to find some innocent pop-up p0rn and dialer windows. Instead, she got a popup reading "Click here and get a free pizza!" Like a fool, she clicked on the popup. A few minutes and a registration page later, she got an email titled "Read this, activate your free pizza delivery!".
You know what she should have done. Delete the email. Just delete it and forget about it. But no, what did she do? She opened it and read it. The email read: "Thank you for opening this email. Through the magic of Outlook Security we have run a software agent that has activated your PC's modem and dialed our central computer. Using called-id we have identified your telephone number and we now know your name, street number, and postal code. The pizza you have ordered is SPICY BEEF and will be delivered to your door in TEN MINUTES".
You could tell from the capitals that SOMETHING TERRIBLE was going on.
The pizza arrived. Inexorably, like a hangover on Sunday morning, a small white van drove up to the house and a man stepped out, dressed in white and carrying a flat pizza tray.
What could she do? "Run!" I hear you scream. "Hide", perhaps? "Release the hounds?" No, she calmly opened the door and accepted the pizza box.
Open... the... box...
Open... the... box...
The smell of warm pizza did a BDSM on her conscious mind and she found herself opening the pizza box...
What did she find?
( ) A Hot'n spicy Beef pizza for four ( ) A CD-ROM labelled "Do Not Play" ( ) A mercedes, a portable phone, and a laughing Dutchman ( ) CowboyNeal ( ) Yes ( ) I'm a vegetarian, you insensitive clod!
Well, the answer is stranger than any of these. She found a small piece of paper. Printed on it were the words: "Missing field! Please click back and enter full name!"
I did this, once after my house was burglared, and I got the thieves on the other end. They'd stolen my PC, phone, car, and other stuff. They basically laughed and told me to fuck off and die. I called the phone company and asked them to locate the GSM. They told me to fuck off and die. So when the cops came I gave them the information and said "you can probably find the buggers by driving to the cell location and dialing the number," and they told me to fuck off and die (but nicely, after making me sign a long statement).
Basically the merc is already in Eastern Europe, the PC has been sold in a bar somewhere, and the phone has been rechipped.
Your only hope is to bump up the insurance claim. Surely you also left EUR10,000 in cash under the seat? And your gold Rolex?!
A manager at a company I worked for was presenting figures for the last year. He showed the financial breakdown for each division, with the profit being calculated as a percentage for each division. At the bottom, there was a summary line showing the total figures for the company and including the "average profit" for the company.
Which he had calculated by summing the profit column and dividing by the number of divisions.
I mentioned that this was producing a somewhat unrealistic figure, with a couple of small divisions showing very good profit margins and the largest department showing a slight loss. "No, that's the mathematical definition of 'median'," he answered.
Hot chick: get lost, loser, unless you got something interesting to say!
Guy: I'm going into space next month, gonna cost me $20 mil. I might not come back alive. Look, here's the clipping from the New York Times with my photo. So, want to come for a ride in my Porsche? I got a little time left and a lot of money to burn.......
I reckon it'd be worth 2-3 months of one-nighters with exceedingly pretty but easily charmed women. In purely genetic terms, that $20m could be a pretty good investment.
"Africans can't even stop killing each other, WTF do they need software for"
"Clean water first, then software!"
Even in 2004, some people still don't realize that humanity is largely identical, everywhere. There are tens of millions of African nerds who simply dream of getting their hands on PCs, software, Internet links, hundreds of millions of businessmen who are frustrated by the lack of modern communications, hundreds of millions of students who could contribute seriously to the world economy if they had even minimal access to the online libraries. If it wasn't for the curse of mineral wealth that encouraged local and foreign politicians to treat the continent like a slash-and-burn buffet, Africa would be stable and prosperous.
To a large extent the population of Africa has been held hostage by war and violence waged by those who profit from the rape of the continent. Look at Congo, which until recently was occupied by the armies of no less than 11 different countries. These wars are sustained by keeping the populations intimidated, ignorant, and poor. No-one cares about the locals when the ground is rich with diamonds, oil, and other minerals.
Technology like GSMs and open source are possibly the best chance that African civil society has of creating communities that can escaping and resist the trap of bad local and international politics.
Kiswahili and Lingala are vital starting points because these two languages join the whole belt of central Africa from Congo to Kenya.
None of these are peculiar to Africa. They are all, however, made worse by a lack of access to reliable information. Open source is the key to delivering the Internet to African civil society, and on the back of the Internet, the reliable information people need to combat famine, civil wars, AIDS, and dictatorships.
Africa has easily the most complex localisation problem of any market, with more languages than the rest of the world combined but a market that can hardly afford traditional localization costs (e.g. the top down model used by commercial vendors).
Open source makes it possible to build entire packages - OS, Office, Web - for groups that are not even on the commercial software radar.
It's true that for many educated Africans, a European language is a necessary skill - French, English, Portuguese. But for a schoolkid in Kasai, it has to be Chiluba or Lingala.
Long after the problems of internetworking and materials have been resolved, open source will be the basis for widespread adoption of software in African society.
It's a common mistake to confuse choices with decisions. Decisions are what confuse and annoy people, not choices.
Some simple illustrations of this. Choice: "these are the desktop themes you can play with". Decision: "please choose a desktop theme to continue installation.
Choice: "tired of your wife? Here are ten more girls to choose from." Decision: "you gonna marry me or what?!"
Choice: "choose from fifty different fabric colors for your car interior". Decision: "what color interior do you want your next subway car to have?"
Basically a good designer maximises choice but minimizes the decisions needed to get started.
I believe the article has made the error of confusing the two.
It's a standard part of the evolutionary curve
on
The Paradox of Choice
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
There's only a lot of choice in areas where there is still a lot of experimentation into the possible solutions. In areas where a suitable and economic solution has been found, choice is really rather limited.
It's a standard aspect of evolution: early forms show extraordinary variation and complexity; as time goes on the simplest and most economical solutions get standardized and the bizarre varieties get killed off.
The same happens in technology, which is why we converge on mature standards such as TCP/IP and (dare I say it) Linux.
Getting speakers of English as a foreign language to repeat a standard English phrase. It's highly unlikely that this produces accents in the sense of two speakers of the same language would recognise. I.e. would a Flemish Dutch speaker recognise the accent of a Dutch speaker from Amsterdam when mangled through an English phrase? Somehow, I don't think so.
It might be useful for tracing people's origins when they are in an Anglosaxon country. But you might as well just ask them.
What would be more useful, perhaps, is a study of the relative differences in accents between native speakers of the "same" language, and how these differences come about.
It's true that the internet is not the cornucopia of freedom it was hyped up to be.
But the underlying premise, that information is essential to liberty, remains true, and the internet as a technology (perhaps not as a product) is the best way of getting accurate and timely information.
The very fact that the author was unable to access websites belonging to dissident groups proves the point. If the internet was irrelevant, these sites would not be blocked.
In the past, a dictatorial regime would progressively close off the flow of free information to its populace, the better to feed them the diet of lies that sustain such regimes. These days, that is harder than it has ever been, and this is largely thanks to the internet, including humble email.
I believe the internet has brought liberty to many people, it's just that the process is incomplete.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's a Picasso! Honestly, the "Overspeed warning off" message (which flashes in a most distressed manner) has come and gone for months, and I've never found out what caused it.
"Dear Slashdot, how do I debug my car?" never seemed a worthy story submission, but now I'm glad I asked. I'm going to go and debutton the Picasso immediately.
It's either amazing how much wisdom there is in Slashdot, or it's scary that there are millions of Picasso owners out there, all unable to manipulate their Overspeed Warning function.
(Incidentally, how do you set the Overspeed Warning function to "on"? On second thoughts, forget that. I don't really want to know anything more about the Picasso User Interface than necessary.)
There is no doubt about it: Xandros is good enough to give to people who know nothing at all about the internals of computers. I put it on an old Dell last month, gave it to my mother, and she did not say anything; the thing got onto the Net, let her edit her documents and send email and browse, print out her papers, and generally did a nice job, well.
Xandros is probably the best of breed, and they are starting to make it available at no cost via channels like Linux magazine covers.
But even so it's well worth the money (and my firm has bought dozens of Xandros licenses) and comes highly recommended.
Seriously. It's flashing "Overspeed warning off" at me. But some days it says "Warning engine overheating" just as the car starts on a cold day. Or, "Immobilizer!!" when I try to start it. Then it occasionally acts normal, but switches the display from km/l to km-left-to-pump to average driving speed, randomly.
Perhaps it's because it's a French car and takes itself too seriously.
Anyhow, I'm now going to look for someone who can rechip it and give it a new personality, something a little less brie and baguette, more Yvette Lopez, "where d'ya wanna go today?"
Given the previous story on increasing virus/worm activity, whether the DOD has any rules concerning the use of Windows in military settings.
People get cancer because they have a genetic disposition to it. People have sex recklessly because it's in their genes. People drive drunk because alcohol makes them feel smarter than they are. People don't protect their computers because they can't handle the complexity of it.
Blaming the victim is fun, but unfortunatel it's not a way of fixing any of the above problems. Non-smokers also get cancer, non-drinkers car accidents, and the sexually most careful person can get AIDS.
"They deserve it" is a senseless thing to say, it degrades you and sets you on the wrong course for a solution.
Cure cancer by helping the body's natural resistance against cell malfunction. Cure STDs by early detection and treatment. Prevent car accidents by making smarter cars. Prevent computer worms/viruses by creating resistant software.
Hardly. This is just blaming the victim. A poor policy.
Relying on education and technological cures assumes that malware is a static target, but it's not. If you rely on improving people's understanding of viruses, you simply get viruses that act smarter and look like official emails. If you improve technology, you get viruses that actively target that technology itself (look at the BlackIce incident).
Technological solutions just create an arms race, and we've seen how well that works. Look at your inbox... the grim rise of noisemail is hardly a sign of success.
The solution is to acknowledge the nature of the problem: it follows the same laws as those of organic parasites, and the same solutions may be the only ones that work: perpetual change for the sake of change; trading of resistance; variety in place of standardization.
A quote from a journal entry from last September:
And so we come to the nightmare scenario. A relatively benign
parasite has infiltrated the general population and suddenly a very
"hot" parasite discovers how to piggy-back that infection. In the
blink of an eye - a day, an hour - 50% of Windows PCs around the
world are destroyed. It can happen, and therefore, it most probably
will.
Oh, you mean like OS/2 vs. Windows 95.
Laugh, AC, laugh. OS/2 was the last time IBM went up against Microsoft on Microsoft's terms. Since then the rules of engagement have changed.
Software has become a commodity. You understand the term, yes? The OS, the Office Suite, the web server, the database, the user applications... they are no longer products with inherent commercial value. They have become tools for delivering more sophisticated services. IBM knows this and uses the fact strategically. Microsoft is trying to fight it, but it's a battle that it cannot win. You cannot survive by selling commodities at a premium, except by bullying your clients into paying the extra, and it's a self-defeating strategy. Every Microsoft user is at a competitive disadvantage, and eventually will either switch, or go broke. The argument that Microsoft software gives you a competitive edge is unproven and rather goes against all experience.
The software market is truly bizarre because Microsoft continue to make large profits. But past success is no guarantee for future returns.
IBM will beat the living daylights out of Microsoft. This should not be a real cause for joy, because IBM has behaved badly in the past as well.
Hey, it's just a prediction. Feel free to produce an alternative one!
Timeline 2004-2007:
1. Sun will turn anti-Linux
2. IBM will offer to buy Java from Sun (Sun will refuse)
3. The next software war will involve Microsoft and IBM directly
4. IBM will win.
It takes one monopolist to beat another.
If a mainline vendor like RealNetworks can produce a flagship product that is so close to spyware, consumers can expect rough times ahead.
It's incredible that a company should have to back down from a series of agressive marketing techniques in this way: it suggests they have either seriously misunderstood their market, or that they are under serious pressure to exploit it harder, even at a high cost in credibility.
I suspect that it will eventually become standard procedure for software to become fairly agressive in taking over the desktop, uninstalling or crippling other products, redirecting browsers, etc. The techniques currently used by the most evil spyware trojans (like CoolWebSearch) will probably become mainstream as companies look for a way, any way to keep their software visible on the users' desktops.
Or maybe I'm just being pessimistic.
Sun has a fundamental problem, one it shares with Microsoft. Both firms live by selling a premium product in a commodity market. Operating systems are no longer rare and valuable enough to pay for. Linux has demonstrated the feasability of a single, free, standard OS for all hardware, and despite ferocious resistance from many quarters, makes inexorable progress towards becoming the eventual standard.
Sun will die if they do not reinvent themselves away from selling proprietary OS products. Moves like the Sun Java Desktop are a sign of hope: Sun must adopt Linux and FOSS and become a services company selling value-added solutions. Then it can survive.
But changing a company like this is incredibly hard and there are few cases where it works. Most likely, Sun is doomed.
And resists such attempts to regulate its behaviour.
By the same token, producers will continue to try to force their consumers into certain directions.
It's just part of the grand evolutionary struggle between producers and consumers that has resulted in such wonderful things as P2P and the DCMA.
Very few people have made a conscious choice for Windows and its UI, and few people will really base their future decisions on this.
95% of the angst most people feel from using Windows comes from one single thing: security. I find it remarkably easy to switch people to a distro like Xandros by telling them: it is safe and will protect your photos and documents from viruses, trojans, and worms.
All that is needed is a reasonable level of compatibility so that people can continue to make their documents & spreadsheets, download their photos from their digital cameras, and email their friends.
Not a single person ever says: "but it looks nothing like Windows!" - the only counter objection is that "certain things do not work".
Emulating XP safely may be an intellectual challenge but it is not part of the Linux sales argument. Distributions like Xandros - which install easily, and handle smoothly - are.
We will, as quickly as possible, remove minister Helene Scherre from office.
(/me dreams of being Canadian just for a while)
Please don't laugh. This is a true story. It happened to the sister of a friend of a colleague of someone I know.
She logged onto a web site, expecting to find some innocent pop-up p0rn and dialer windows. Instead, she got a popup reading "Click here and get a free pizza!" Like a fool, she clicked on the popup. A few minutes and a registration page later, she got an email titled "Read this, activate your free pizza delivery!".
You know what she should have done. Delete the email. Just delete it and forget about it. But no, what did she do? She opened it and read it. The email read: "Thank you for opening this email. Through the magic of Outlook Security we have run a software agent that has activated your PC's modem and dialed our central computer. Using called-id we have identified your telephone number and we now know your name, street number, and postal code. The pizza you have ordered is SPICY BEEF and will be delivered to your door in TEN MINUTES".
You could tell from the capitals that SOMETHING TERRIBLE was going on.
The pizza arrived. Inexorably, like a hangover on Sunday morning, a small white van drove up to the house and a man stepped out, dressed in white and carrying a flat pizza tray.
What could she do? "Run!" I hear you scream. "Hide", perhaps? "Release the hounds?" No, she calmly opened the door and accepted the pizza box.
Open... the... box...
Open... the... box...
The smell of warm pizza did a BDSM on her conscious mind and she found herself opening the pizza box...
What did she find?
( ) A Hot'n spicy Beef pizza for four
( ) A CD-ROM labelled "Do Not Play"
( ) A mercedes, a portable phone, and a laughing Dutchman
( ) CowboyNeal
( ) Yes
( ) I'm a vegetarian, you insensitive clod!
Well, the answer is stranger than any of these. She found a small piece of paper. Printed on it were the words: "Missing field! Please click back and enter full name!"
I did this, once after my house was burglared, and I got the thieves on the other end. They'd stolen my PC, phone, car, and other stuff. They basically laughed and told me to fuck off and die. I called the phone company and asked them to locate the GSM. They told me to fuck off and die. So when the cops came I gave them the information and said "you can probably find the buggers by driving to the cell location and dialing the number," and they told me to fuck off and die (but nicely, after making me sign a long statement).
Basically the merc is already in Eastern Europe, the PC has been sold in a bar somewhere, and the phone has been rechipped.
Your only hope is to bump up the insurance claim. Surely you also left EUR10,000 in cash under the seat? And your gold Rolex?!
A manager at a company I worked for was presenting figures for the last year. He showed the financial breakdown for each division, with the profit being calculated as a percentage for each division. At the bottom, there was a summary line showing the total figures for the company and including the "average profit" for the company.
Which he had calculated by summing the profit column and dividing by the number of divisions.
I mentioned that this was producing a somewhat unrealistic figure, with a couple of small divisions showing very good profit margins and the largest department showing a slight loss. "No, that's the mathematical definition of 'median'," he answered.
Guy: hey, baby, what's up?
....
Hot chick: get lost, loser, unless you got something interesting to say!
Guy: I'm going into space next month, gonna cost me $20 mil. I might not come back alive. Look, here's the clipping from the New York Times with my photo. So, want to come for a ride in my Porsche? I got a little time left and a lot of money to burn...
I reckon it'd be worth 2-3 months of one-nighters with exceedingly pretty but easily charmed women. In purely genetic terms, that $20m could be a pretty good investment.
"Africa is just war and famine"
"Africans can't even stop killing each other, WTF do they need software for"
"Clean water first, then software!"
Even in 2004, some people still don't realize that humanity is largely identical, everywhere. There are tens of millions of African nerds who simply dream of getting their hands on PCs, software, Internet links, hundreds of millions of businessmen who are frustrated by the lack of modern communications, hundreds of millions of students who could contribute seriously to the world economy if they had even minimal access to the online libraries. If it wasn't for the curse of mineral wealth that encouraged local and foreign politicians to treat the continent like a slash-and-burn buffet, Africa would be stable and prosperous.
To a large extent the population of Africa has been held hostage by war and violence waged by those who profit from the rape of the continent. Look at Congo, which until recently was occupied by the armies of no less than 11 different countries. These wars are sustained by keeping the populations intimidated, ignorant, and poor. No-one cares about the locals when the ground is rich with diamonds, oil, and other minerals.
Technology like GSMs and open source are possibly the best chance that African civil society has of creating communities that can escaping and resist the trap of bad local and international politics.
Kiswahili and Lingala are vital starting points because these two languages join the whole belt of central Africa from Congo to Kenya.
None of these are peculiar to Africa. They are all, however, made worse by a lack of access to reliable information. Open source is the key to delivering the Internet to African civil society, and on the back of the Internet, the reliable information people need to combat famine, civil wars, AIDS, and dictatorships.
Africa has easily the most complex localisation problem of any market, with more languages than the rest of the world combined but a market that can hardly afford traditional localization costs (e.g. the top down model used by commercial vendors).
Open source makes it possible to build entire packages - OS, Office, Web - for groups that are not even on the commercial software radar.
It's true that for many educated Africans, a European language is a necessary skill - French, English, Portuguese. But for a schoolkid in Kasai, it has to be Chiluba or Lingala.
Long after the problems of internetworking and materials have been resolved, open source will be the basis for widespread adoption of software in African society.
It's a common mistake to confuse choices with decisions. Decisions are what confuse and annoy people, not choices.
Some simple illustrations of this. Choice: "these are the desktop themes you can play with". Decision: "please choose a desktop theme to continue installation.
Choice: "tired of your wife? Here are ten more girls to choose from." Decision: "you gonna marry me or what?!"
Choice: "choose from fifty different fabric colors for your car interior". Decision: "what color interior do you want your next subway car to have?"
Basically a good designer maximises choice but minimizes the decisions needed to get started.
I believe the article has made the error of confusing the two.
There's only a lot of choice in areas where there is still a lot of experimentation into the possible solutions. In areas where a suitable and economic solution has been found, choice is really rather limited.
It's a standard aspect of evolution: early forms show extraordinary variation and complexity; as time goes on the simplest and most economical solutions get standardized and the bizarre varieties get killed off.
The same happens in technology, which is why we converge on mature standards such as TCP/IP and (dare I say it) Linux.
Getting speakers of English as a foreign language to repeat a standard English phrase. It's highly unlikely that this produces accents in the sense of two speakers of the same language would recognise. I.e. would a Flemish Dutch speaker recognise the accent of a Dutch speaker from Amsterdam when mangled through an English phrase? Somehow, I don't think so.
It might be useful for tracing people's origins when they are in an Anglosaxon country. But you might as well just ask them.
What would be more useful, perhaps, is a study of the relative differences in accents between native speakers of the "same" language, and how these differences come about.
It's true that the internet is not the cornucopia of freedom it was hyped up to be.
But the underlying premise, that information is essential to liberty, remains true, and the internet as a technology (perhaps not as a product) is the best way of getting accurate and timely information.
The very fact that the author was unable to access websites belonging to dissident groups proves the point. If the internet was irrelevant, these sites would not be blocked.
In the past, a dictatorial regime would progressively close off the flow of free information to its populace, the better to feed them the diet of lies that sustain such regimes. These days, that is harder than it has ever been, and this is largely thanks to the internet, including humble email.
I believe the internet has brought liberty to many people, it's just that the process is incomplete.