Check out the Areca 1160 or 1260 controller card; it's also sold under the Tekram brand. I supports RAID6 (as well as the standards 0, 1, and 5), SATA II (or SATA 3.0Gb/s; whatever), and NCQ. As far as drives go, I'm very happy with the Hitachi 7K500, just make sure you turn on SATA II support and other advanced features that they ship turned off. It has good support under Linux and Windows (probably OS X, too), and is real hardware RAID. It supports a BBM (72 Hours, IIRC) that will allow you to turn on writeback caching for extra performance. The cache is a standard laptop SODIMM; it ships with 256M cache and expandable to at least 1G; I believe it will support a 2G SODIMM if you can find it.
I'm running 1 TB (RAID 5) of data in this setup right now, soon to expand to 2.5 TB (RAID 5). At some point I'll upgrade to RAID 6, but the card supports 16 drives, so that will still give me 7TB of data. If you need more data than that, I believe Areca also sells versions of the controller that support 23 or 32 drives.
(If you wanna do SCSI, Areca has controller cards for that, too.)
I'm running amd64 gentoo as well (~amd64 actually). Unfortunately, 1.2_rc2 wasn't in portage last time I checked. A version-bump bug has already been filed at b.g.o. Don't waste you time with 1.2_rc1 it can't cap upload speed and doesn't support importing torrents with already downloaded data. E.g. to seed something you've downloaded previously. I completed downloads in 1.2_rc1, but 1.2_rc2 is much faster, and doesn't suffer some of the lock up issues I had in 1.2_rc1.
Ogg/vorbis does not require a powerful system to decode. My iRiver iFP-799 (1GB flash) plays VBR ogg/vorbis from 64Kbps to 230Kbps and is usable as a USB mass storage device. (It plays the oggs/mp3s/wavs from the filesystem, too, unlike an iPod.) iRiver also used to make the H340, a 40GB HD player, that plays the same range of ogg/vorbis. They don't seem to be shipping these anymore, but you may be able to find one 2nd hand. Hell, I haven't check their website in a while, so they might have an even better HD based player now. (Careful, not all iRiver products play ogg/vorbis.)
Also, coming around to be article topic, iRiver provides an FM transmitter for the iFP-7xx series, or you could just hook as generic FM transmitter to the headphone jack.
Actually, running KDE is easier than running linux. KDE runs on virtually every linux platform, many of the BSDs, to some degree under cygwin, and, IIRC, on OS X.
Now when I reboot over to windows, that's when my laptop really feels the hurt of only 1G of memory.
The lameness filter is the worst part about/. Here I am trying to just post some statistics and it gripes abou the number of characters I have per line, I mean really, does it expect everyone to have nice big screens that are wider than 19.4 characters on average. That ludicris! Really, I've been caught by the lameness filter way to many times when my post would be accetable is the vast majority of forums. Instead of using a lameness filter, why not just give out more mod points?
Now, here's some lorem ipsum, copyright (c) 2005 www.lipsum.com
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. In elit. Quisque accumsan. Cras elementum. Curabitur condimentum placerat ante. Cras auctor quam quis ante. Sed sed risus. Suspendisse vulputate, mi at rhoncus rhoncus, massa lectus congue ante, eu aliquet arcu nunc non elit. Mauris tempus. Etiam rhoncus. Quisque et lacus non est imperdiet pretium. Sed aliquet quam ut lacus. Proin varius viverra enim. Duis a mauris nec quam consectetuer suscipit. Sed arcu est, sodales eget, suscipit sed, elementum ac, quam.
Maecenas enim dui, venenatis vitae, mattis vitae, auctor eu, diam. Suspendisse potenti. Aenean sed leo. Nullam tempus, diam non facilisis semper, purus magna semper nisl, ac facilisis lectus nisi et massa. Nunc vel metus sed ligula lobortis viverra. Vestibulum leo lectus, gravida non, luctus in, congue nec, nunc. Vestibulum interdum dui vestibulum risus. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Nam justo ligula, viverra a, volutpat eu, vulputate sed, orci. Cras risus lectus, suscipit vitae, blandit non, facilisis at, eros. Proin ac nisi ut justo hendrerit convallis. Suspendisse potenti. Sed viverra dolor id ante. Donec at diam. Integer porttitor aliquam enim. Suspendisse vitae tellus sit amet dui porttitor eleifend.
Fusce posuere. Nunc eget risus. Praesent vitae lacus aliquam neque semper porttitor. Nullam id justo. Suspendisse purus nisi, imperdiet a, sodales vel, faucibus sed, metus. Vivamus ultricies, tellus et molestie mollis, libero mi luctus arcu, vitae pharetra dui nibh sed tortor. Quisque sagittis suscipit lectus. Mauris id massa in erat commodo ultricies. Aliquam risus lorem, porttitor ac, pulvinar sed, sollicitudin pulvinar, ipsum. Vestibulum velit. Nullam rhoncus, eros at lobortis vulputate, la
I'm pretty sure that the general TSP is NP-Complete, but TSP on the Euclidean plane (or in any metric space that satisfies the triangle inequality [1]) actually has a (severely complicated) solution in ploynomial time.
[1] Crap, I've forgotten my definition of metric spaces from Advanced Cal.; maybe they have to satisfy the triangle inequality?
Want to get involved with some competitive programming, right now?
TopCoder is always looking for more members. The algorithm compeitions only take a few hours, and can pay good money. Plus discussion of the algorithms afterwards with the other members can be quite enlightening.
They also do design and development competitions, which take a bit longer, but pay a lot better. You can also pick up cash by being a reviewer for these compeitions, if you pick up enough "scratch" in the compeitions themselves.
You get individually rated on each of the 3 competitions and TC also provides some measure of employment services.
Back when algorithm competitions always paid, I earned my 1/2 of rent through them. After I graduated from college I paid my bills through a combination of design / development / reviewing. Now I work for TopCoder as a salaried employee.
Check it out, and look me up. My member handle is the same as my/. handle, just without the spaces.
TopCoder can be very rewarding. I hope every programmer that reads this at least looks at the website.
Re:Microsoft Scared of Open Source?
on
Microsoft Sues EU
·
· Score: 1
Replacing one monopoly with another is hardly sensible is it, regardless of how that new monopoly behaves?
I repectfully disagree, on statistical grounds.
Suppose we have a population of entities, and in the population 30% have desirable quality X. Suppose futher that a sample will have desireable quality X if the majority of entities in the sample have quality X. If we take a random sample of size 1, that sample has a 30% chance of having quality X. If we take a random sample of size 3, that sample has a.3^3 + 3*.3^2*.7 =.027 +.189 =.216 = 21.6% change for having quality X. As the size of the sample increases, the chance that it will have quality X decreases.
This means that we are better off having a random monopoly than a random non-monopoly situation, if looking for desirable trait X to be widespread. Of course, if desireable quality X has a test associated with it, it's better to/choose/ your sample.
Now take quality X to be "good"-ness (subjective, I know, but the math still works under an extension that takes this into account, I think). That an entity to be a software provider, and our sample to be server OS providers.
Now, it's clear that it's better to have a random company have a monopoly until it's clear that they don't have "good"-ness. I think it's clear that windows doesn't not have "good"-ness; the jury is still out on linux having the quality or not.
Of course it's not spyware for a linux power-user. We tweak our kernels all the time: "Oh, damn it, my new bluetooth device need the module bt_frobniz, guess I'll just make menuconfig, etc. to install it."
However, linux is growing up. We have a number of distros out there that are supposedly targeting new or casual users, those that might never fiddle with their.config (even if they do upgrade their kernel, it's probably through an automated tool).
As an option in the kernel, it's not spyware.
As an option turned on by default, hidden from users, and tweaked (via a small patch) to also send the information elsewhere in IcyHotLindows, it is spyware.
Now, sure with (or without) the patch, Linus and any other linux defender can point out that the kernel is not to blame, the distro is, but that may not amount to much if the "Linux is Spyware" "headline" gets any amount of press. That kinda crap gets on the "front page"; retractions/clarification are "buried in small print in a random position of page 3b". It doesn't matter the veracity of linux's deferenders claim if they don't catch the same amount of "mindshare".
If I was to throw my.02$ into the arena on LKML, I'd be against a kernel option, or at/least/ one that requires a userland application [1] to take advantage of. Not because of technological issues, but because of polical ones.
[1] Yes, this could also be packged by a distro, but then, hopefully, the "headline" would be "<userland-application> is Spyware". People confuse applications with linux less often than they confuse distros with linux
You'd still lack the accelerations needed to make the flight real. For example, if you turned the sim-plane upside down [1], you wouldn't fall out of your seat, or even be pressed against your seat belt.
[1] I'm not even sure if you can turn a 777 upside-down.
You forgot GNUNet-AFS. GNUNet is a completely secure transport system built on top of the internet (IP/UDP, v6 version of these, and one other packet-level protocol) with a handful of applications on it. One of these application is Anonymous File Sharing (AFS) which works like freenet or mnet and includes an arbitrary level of anonymity.
GNUNet is GPL licensed and the design documents are avilable for review via the web. GNUNet-AFS strives to make it computationally infeasible to discover the (original) source of a file on the network, even under the assumption that you attacker could watch every packet transferred on the internet. GNUNet does work behind a NAT.
GNUNet is still a work in progress. [In particular this thing needs a decent GUI!] Please constribute if you have time.
YASD PDA BTW TMI FWIW RTFA: Yet
another
software
development
project
decidedly
acceptable,
but
the
want
to
make
it
free
will
independently
waste
real
time
found
absent.
In order words: Sounds fun but I don't have the time to program and promote it, seeing as I'd like it to be software libre.
I was only 4 when my father first introduced me to computers. He had taken some programming courses in college, but ran the family store and didn't really do much programing.
He knew enough BASIC and MS-DOS 5.0 batch to get me started, and still had the manuals around which I was able to digest fairly quickly. [I was already reading at a second-grade level, but there's nothing that will improve your reading skills better than practice, at that level.]
On a trip to EPCOT center (I was 8-9 by now), I was able to pick up a book on game programming in BASIC. It was at this point I realized how screwed-up source-level portability was. The more complicated games actually had 4-5 different source code listing for the various variants of BASIC, none of which I had available on our TI IBM-compatible. Luckily my school had some Apple IIe systems available, so I could use the techniques found in that book.
By the time I hit my early teens, I thought I could do everything I would ever want to do in (Q(uick))BASIC and the VC 1.0 programmers guide did not interest me. [How sorely wrong I was!--I did not realize that until I hit college.]
Now, onto the suggestions:
If you child is very young but enthusiastic, show him/her what any programming knowledge you have can do. Just little things: A calculator run by prompts (What do you want to do (+,-,*,/)? First number? Second number?) or game to play hangman (Executtioner what's the word? [Draws ASCII gallows] Accused, the word is *******, what letter next?, etc.) I does NOT have to the pretty or efficent, just cool enough to get them to expend the effort reading code.
Now, provide them with any documentation you still have, and maybe even buy some beginner's books for them. It doesn't matter what language, as long as your have a compiler/interpreter for that language available. I suggest something that doesn't hide too much of the hardware; if you know enough assembly and can get a beginner's guide on it, start there. Starting close to machine teaches fundamental concepts (2's compliment, etc.) and also builds an appreciation and understanding of higher level concepts and abstraction. As much as you can be there to answer any questions the child may have and appreciate any programs they create.
With older children, you don't have to spend so much time on them, as long as you provide good documentation and it does the stuff they want it to. Depending on the child, they might want to be able to connect to the 'net or play music, or a hundred other things. In this case, is better to start with a language + library where these things are easy and well documented. Perl and Java can both be recommended. It's difficult to start with assembly at this point (unless it's a formal education) because it doesn't give enough reward / effort. Once they get really interested, you may be able to guide them to the fundamentals via multiple paths (history of computing, mathematical background, efficiency issues, security issues, or simply hard-core bug-workarounds).
Also, at some point, buy them their own computer (no OS), provide them with a gentoo live CD, and make sure they know about EFF, FSF, GNU and software libre in general.
But, not for any of the reasons you say..Net is not the SDK that Microsoft lets you download for free..Net is a ECMA standards that establish the format for.Net assembilies and the library profiles for.Net. [This includes, but is rather more than the C# language standard.]
If developers program against that, it will run on mono, ms.net, possibly even Portable.Net.
If you write code that uses Windows.Forms or Microsoft.Blah, it's basically like using the sun.* classes in java with one important difference: Microsoft, relishing the idea of further developer and user lock-in, does not warn you away from these classes but, rather, encorages developer to take advantages of Microsoft's.Net platform, in stark contrast to Sun's warnings to not use sun.* classes or you are not writing "100% Java".
On a related, but different topic: Applications written using Gtk#, Qt#, or wxWindows# on top of the.Net standards are cross platform, they simply have a library dependency. All those windowing (etc.) toolkits are available for, at least, the 3 major desktop OSes: WinXP, OS X, and X.Org on Linux.
The same could be said of Swing applications on Java 1.1 or J2EE applications now.
First let me state that I like and use both Java and.Net daily.
Same here; I wish gentoo supported them a bit better. For example, Tao and Axiom (.Net) and jalopy (Java) are not in portage and checkstyle (Java) has an emerge that doesn't create a cli script to run it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean square brackets "[]", curly brackets "{}", and round brackets "()". You also left out angle brackets "".
Check out the Areca 1160 or 1260 controller card; it's also sold under the Tekram brand. I supports RAID6 (as well as the standards 0, 1, and 5), SATA II (or SATA 3.0Gb/s; whatever), and NCQ. As far as drives go, I'm very happy with the Hitachi 7K500, just make sure you turn on SATA II support and other advanced features that they ship turned off. It has good support under Linux and Windows (probably OS X, too), and is real hardware RAID. It supports a BBM (72 Hours, IIRC) that will allow you to turn on writeback caching for extra performance. The cache is a standard laptop SODIMM; it ships with 256M cache and expandable to at least 1G; I believe it will support a 2G SODIMM if you can find it.
I'm running 1 TB (RAID 5) of data in this setup right now, soon to expand to 2.5 TB (RAID 5). At some point I'll upgrade to RAID 6, but the card supports 16 drives, so that will still give me 7TB of data. If you need more data than that, I believe Areca also sells versions of the controller that support 23 or 32 drives.
(If you wanna do SCSI, Areca has controller cards for that, too.)
I'm running amd64 gentoo as well (~amd64 actually). Unfortunately, 1.2_rc2 wasn't in portage last time I checked. A version-bump bug has already been filed at b.g.o. Don't waste you time with 1.2_rc1 it can't cap upload speed and doesn't support importing torrents with already downloaded data. E.g. to seed something you've downloaded previously. I completed downloads in 1.2_rc1, but 1.2_rc2 is much faster, and doesn't suffer some of the lock up issues I had in 1.2_rc1.
1.2_rc2 can, via the import existing download dialog. Give it the .torrent and the data and seed away. I've done it a couple of times since upgrading.
No coverage of ktorrent? It's still a work in progress, but 1.2_rc2 is a pretty slick kde application.
Ogg/vorbis does not require a powerful system to decode. My iRiver iFP-799 (1GB flash) plays VBR ogg/vorbis from 64Kbps to 230Kbps and is usable as a USB mass storage device. (It plays the oggs/mp3s/wavs from the filesystem, too, unlike an iPod.) iRiver also used to make the H340, a 40GB HD player, that plays the same range of ogg/vorbis. They don't seem to be shipping these anymore, but you may be able to find one 2nd hand. Hell, I haven't check their website in a while, so they might have an even better HD based player now. (Careful, not all iRiver products play ogg/vorbis.)
Also, coming around to be article topic, iRiver provides an FM transmitter for the iFP-7xx series, or you could just hook as generic FM transmitter to the headphone jack.
No, but *I* was waiting for this Opportunity: /boot, RAID 5 lvm: / /home /var, RAID 0 swap) /usr /opt) /tmp)
2x Opteron 275
3x Hitachi 500G (RAID 5
2x 10,000 RPM 74G (RAID 0 lvm:
4G RAM (2G
2x nVidia 7800 PCIe
<imitation who="Peter Griffin (Family Guy)">It's freakin' sweet.</imitation>
Actually, running KDE is easier than running linux. KDE runs on virtually every linux platform, many of the BSDs, to some degree under cygwin, and, IIRC, on OS X.
I don't know WTF you are talking about. I'm running a bunch of KDE crap:
and I'm hardly using any memory!
Now when I reboot over to windows, that's when my laptop really feels the hurt of only 1G of memory.
The lameness filter is the worst part about /. Here I am trying to just post some statistics and it gripes abou the number of characters I have per line, I mean really, does it expect everyone to have nice big screens that are wider than 19.4 characters on average. That ludicris! Really, I've been caught by the lameness filter way to many times when my post would be accetable is the vast majority of forums. Instead of using a lameness filter, why not just give out more mod points?
Now, here's some lorem ipsum, copyright (c) 2005 www.lipsum.com
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. In elit. Quisque accumsan. Cras elementum. Curabitur condimentum placerat ante. Cras auctor quam quis ante. Sed sed risus. Suspendisse vulputate, mi at rhoncus rhoncus, massa lectus congue ante, eu aliquet arcu nunc non elit. Mauris tempus. Etiam rhoncus. Quisque et lacus non est imperdiet pretium. Sed aliquet quam ut lacus. Proin varius viverra enim. Duis a mauris nec quam consectetuer suscipit. Sed arcu est, sodales eget, suscipit sed, elementum ac, quam.
Maecenas enim dui, venenatis vitae, mattis vitae, auctor eu, diam. Suspendisse potenti. Aenean sed leo. Nullam tempus, diam non facilisis semper, purus magna semper nisl, ac facilisis lectus nisi et massa. Nunc vel metus sed ligula lobortis viverra. Vestibulum leo lectus, gravida non, luctus in, congue nec, nunc. Vestibulum interdum dui vestibulum risus. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Nam justo ligula, viverra a, volutpat eu, vulputate sed, orci. Cras risus lectus, suscipit vitae, blandit non, facilisis at, eros. Proin ac nisi ut justo hendrerit convallis. Suspendisse potenti. Sed viverra dolor id ante. Donec at diam. Integer porttitor aliquam enim. Suspendisse vitae tellus sit amet dui porttitor eleifend.
Fusce posuere. Nunc eget risus. Praesent vitae lacus aliquam neque semper porttitor. Nullam id justo. Suspendisse purus nisi, imperdiet a, sodales vel, faucibus sed, metus. Vivamus ultricies, tellus et molestie mollis, libero mi luctus arcu, vitae pharetra dui nibh sed tortor. Quisque sagittis suscipit lectus. Mauris id massa in erat commodo ultricies. Aliquam risus lorem, porttitor ac, pulvinar sed, sollicitudin pulvinar, ipsum. Vestibulum velit. Nullam rhoncus, eros at lobortis vulputate, la
New apple stategy:
<flamebait>Oh, wait, I guess that's not a new strategy; it's just what they did with KHTML.</flamebait> ;)
Of course, unless you have developers on the box that need to run their executeables
Or, a power-user that wants to automate a few things with a bash script. Sure, you could always make them, do '/bin/bash <script>'
Oh, wait! I guess the developers could just do '/lib/ld-linux.so <executable>'. Er wait, doesn't that mean the attacker could too!?
noexec annoys your users and doesn't stop dedicated attackers. Best not to use it.
I'm pretty sure that the general TSP is NP-Complete, but TSP on the Euclidean plane (or in any metric space that satisfies the triangle inequality [1]) actually has a (severely complicated) solution in ploynomial time.
[1] Crap, I've forgotten my definition of metric spaces from Advanced Cal.; maybe they have to satisfy the triangle inequality?
Want to get involved with some competitive programming, right now?
TopCoder is always looking for more members. The algorithm compeitions only take a few hours, and can pay good money. Plus discussion of the algorithms afterwards with the other members can be quite enlightening.
They also do design and development competitions, which take a bit longer, but pay a lot better. You can also pick up cash by being a reviewer for these compeitions, if you pick up enough "scratch" in the compeitions themselves.
You get individually rated on each of the 3 competitions and TC also provides some measure of employment services.
Back when algorithm competitions always paid, I earned my 1/2 of rent through them. After I graduated from college I paid my bills through a combination of design / development / reviewing. Now I work for TopCoder as a salaried employee.
Check it out, and look me up. My member handle is the same as my /. handle, just without the spaces.
TopCoder can be very rewarding. I hope every programmer that reads this at least looks at the website.
I repectfully disagree, on statistical grounds.
Suppose we have a population of entities, and in the population 30% have desirable quality X. Suppose futher that a sample will have desireable quality X if the majority of entities in the sample have quality X. If we take a random sample of size 1, that sample has a 30% chance of having quality X. If we take a random sample of size 3, that sample has a .3^3 + 3*.3^2*.7 = .027 + .189 = .216 = 21.6% change for having quality X. As the size of the sample increases, the chance that it will have quality X decreases.
This means that we are better off having a random monopoly than a random non-monopoly situation, if looking for desirable trait X to be widespread. Of course, if desireable quality X has a test associated with it, it's better to /choose/ your sample.
Now take quality X to be "good"-ness (subjective, I know, but the math still works under an extension that takes this into account, I think). That an entity to be a software provider, and our sample to be server OS providers.
Now, it's clear that it's better to have a random company have a monopoly until it's clear that they don't have "good"-ness. I think it's clear that windows doesn't not have "good"-ness; the jury is still out on linux having the quality or not.
Of course it's not spyware for a linux power-user. We tweak our kernels all the time: "Oh, damn it, my new bluetooth device need the module bt_frobniz, guess I'll just make menuconfig, etc. to install it."
However, linux is growing up. We have a number of distros out there that are supposedly targeting new or casual users, those that might never fiddle with their .config (even if they do upgrade their kernel, it's probably through an automated tool).
Now, sure with (or without) the patch, Linus and any other linux defender can point out that the kernel is not to blame, the distro is, but that may not amount to much if the "Linux is Spyware" "headline" gets any amount of press. That kinda crap gets on the "front page"; retractions/clarification are "buried in small print in a random position of page 3b". It doesn't matter the veracity of linux's deferenders claim if they don't catch the same amount of "mindshare".
If I was to throw my .02$ into the arena on LKML, I'd be against a kernel option, or at /least/ one that requires a userland application [1] to take advantage of. Not because of technological issues, but because of polical ones.
[1] Yes, this could also be packged by a distro, but then, hopefully, the "headline" would be "<userland-application> is Spyware". People confuse applications with linux less often than they confuse distros with linux
First Post BTW, This is really ironic. How can the person most affiliated with privacy invasion be good at data integrity?
You'd still lack the accelerations needed to make the flight real. For example, if you turned the sim-plane upside down [1], you wouldn't fall out of your seat, or even be pressed against your seat belt.
[1] I'm not even sure if you can turn a 777 upside-down.
You forgot GNUNet-AFS. GNUNet is a completely secure transport system built on top of the internet (IP/UDP, v6 version of these, and one other packet-level protocol) with a handful of applications on it. One of these application is Anonymous File Sharing (AFS) which works like freenet or mnet and includes an arbitrary level of anonymity.
GNUNet is GPL licensed and the design documents are avilable for review via the web. GNUNet-AFS strives to make it computationally infeasible to discover the (original) source of a file on the network, even under the assumption that you attacker could watch every packet transferred on the internet. GNUNet does work behind a NAT.
GNUNet is still a work in progress. [In particular this thing needs a decent GUI!] Please constribute if you have time.
Yeah, but drug dealers have a lot in common with the other side, too.
Both Linux and drug dealers:
PS: I'm not trolling!
YASD PDA BTW TMI FWIW RTFA:
Yet another software development
project decidedly acceptable,
but the want
to make it
free will independently waste
real time found absent.
In order words: Sounds fun but I don't have the time to program and promote it, seeing as I'd like it to be software libre.
Made with 95% recycled acronyms
I was only 4 when my father first introduced me to computers. He had taken some programming courses in college, but ran the family store and didn't really do much programing.
He knew enough BASIC and MS-DOS 5.0 batch to get me started, and still had the manuals around which I was able to digest fairly quickly. [I was already reading at a second-grade level, but there's nothing that will improve your reading skills better than practice, at that level.]
On a trip to EPCOT center (I was 8-9 by now), I was able to pick up a book on game programming in BASIC. It was at this point I realized how screwed-up source-level portability was. The more complicated games actually had 4-5 different source code listing for the various variants of BASIC, none of which I had available on our TI IBM-compatible. Luckily my school had some Apple IIe systems available, so I could use the techniques found in that book.
By the time I hit my early teens, I thought I could do everything I would ever want to do in (Q(uick))BASIC and the VC 1.0 programmers guide did not interest me. [How sorely wrong I was!--I did not realize that until I hit college.]
Now, onto the suggestions:
If you child is very young but enthusiastic, show him/her what any programming knowledge you have can do. Just little things: A calculator run by prompts (What do you want to do (+,-,*,/)? First number? Second number?) or game to play hangman (Executtioner what's the word? [Draws ASCII gallows] Accused, the word is *******, what letter next?, etc.) I does NOT have to the pretty or efficent, just cool enough to get them to expend the effort reading code.
Now, provide them with any documentation you still have, and maybe even buy some beginner's books for them. It doesn't matter what language, as long as your have a compiler/interpreter for that language available. I suggest something that doesn't hide too much of the hardware; if you know enough assembly and can get a beginner's guide on it, start there. Starting close to machine teaches fundamental concepts (2's compliment, etc.) and also builds an appreciation and understanding of higher level concepts and abstraction. As much as you can be there to answer any questions the child may have and appreciate any programs they create.
With older children, you don't have to spend so much time on them, as long as you provide good documentation and it does the stuff they want it to. Depending on the child, they might want to be able to connect to the 'net or play music, or a hundred other things. In this case, is better to start with a language + library where these things are easy and well documented. Perl and Java can both be recommended. It's difficult to start with assembly at this point (unless it's a formal education) because it doesn't give enough reward / effort. Once they get really interested, you may be able to guide them to the fundamentals via multiple paths (history of computing, mathematical background, efficiency issues, security issues, or simply hard-core bug-workarounds).
Also, at some point, buy them their own computer (no OS), provide them with a gentoo live CD, and make sure they know about EFF, FSF, GNU and software libre in general.
What's about GNU's own GPL'd freenet "clone" GNUNet?
I've successfully used it to get some pr0n, at decent speeds. You might also search it for "Billy Joel" to see my additions to the network.
But, not for any of the reasons you say. .Net is not the SDK that Microsoft lets you download for free. .Net is a ECMA standards that establish the format for .Net assembilies and the library profiles for .Net. [This includes, but is rather more than the C# language standard.]
If developers program against that, it will run on mono, ms.net, possibly even Portable .Net.
If you write code that uses Windows.Forms or Microsoft.Blah, it's basically like using the sun.* classes in java with one important difference: Microsoft, relishing the idea of further developer and user lock-in, does not warn you away from these classes but, rather, encorages developer to take advantages of Microsoft's .Net platform, in stark contrast to Sun's warnings to not use sun.* classes or you are not writing "100% Java".
On a related, but different topic: Applications written using Gtk#, Qt#, or wxWindows# on top of the .Net standards are cross platform, they simply have a library dependency. All those windowing (etc.) toolkits are available for, at least, the 3 major desktop OSes: WinXP, OS X, and X.Org on Linux.
The same could be said of Swing applications on Java 1.1 or J2EE applications now.
Same here; I wish gentoo supported them a bit better. For example, Tao and Axiom (.Net) and jalopy (Java) are not in portage and checkstyle (Java) has an emerge that doesn't create a cli script to run it.
First post?
As the WordIQ entry posted with the article states:
Without peer review, studies like this a easily fabricated or simply mistakes.