i feel that the answer lies in the sentence "the internet is driven by c". if you want direct performance, executable compactness as well as operational efficiency (that is also massive step up from assembly language), you have *one* option available to you: c. that means that apache, wine, postgresql, openldap, cups, samba, libc6, the python interpreter itself, the linux kernel, the windows NT kernel and many more OSes: they're written in c.

only when some of those constraints - performance, compactness and operational efficiency - may be relaxed in favour of, for example, a higher bang-per-buck ratio in the expressive power behind the lines of code written (python dict), or where code-resuse is critical without too much inconvenience (templates and objects of c++), *then* you begin to choose alternative programming languages.

but as a general rule, if ever you see the word "system" or "service" in a sentence (operating "system", web "service"), automatically that implies "high performance" which automatically implies "high efficiency needed" and that means "c".

so i feel it is therefore much more interesting to note the situations in businesses where c is *not* used despite there being circumstances where performance is critical. when people choose java for web services, for example.

in the turkey lexicon written by bruce sterling to help new sci-fi writers, there's a special phrase to describe the type of book where "laser pistol" replaces the word "six shooter" and "steed" replaces "six-legged mounted alien beast". it's called "The Western"!

http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/tu...

there are many more: you are not alone in encountering badly-written sci-fi by novelists who quotes want to get in on the sci-fi genre act quote. but one that really really surprised me: a book in the "Eve Online" universe. it begins *literally* with the "White Room Syndrome" and i was like "OH NOOO! the white room syndrome!!" - that's where the main character wakes up in a white room, with only one (white) door, and no furniture, with no memory of past events, and it symbolises the author's own total lack of imagination at being able to begin the story even from page one - but i kept reading and found that, actually, there was a heck of a lot of good in it. it was the author's first and only book, and he was extremely brave to attempt it, and, apart from being semi-starwars-esque in places and "film-drama-queen-esque" in others, the story worked really _really_ well, kept my attention and made really good use of advanced biotech, cloning, machine consciousness, wormhole technology and much more to actually *tell a story*.

bruce sterling wrote an extremely funny and valuable guide to sci-fi writers which i've mentioned here before on slashdot, and it has been expanded ever since. ah yeah here we go: http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/tu... it's well-worth reading just for amusement value. the ironical thing is that this well-known sci-fi author, charles stross, is telling us that many sci-fi authors today are falling into some of the traps outlined by that lexicon and valuable guide.

whilist it seems flippant therefore to be telling them "write better sci-fi!" it has to be said that sci-fi writers have set themselves a much harder task than any other writing genre. first and foremost: they need to be good story tellers! and almost secondary to that, they need to be extremely knowledgeable about technology... *because their readers are*. whenever i read a new sci-fi novel by an author that i've never heard of before - and i do not do that often because it is a risk - i often find myself critiquing the author's style. anything where they assume i am an idiot (by doing things like explaining cloud computing to me), that's when the magic of the story is lost, and i know i just read a story by someone who is not going to ever be a successful sci-fi writer. it's a fine line to walk.

" The kind of phone that only freakin' astronauts had in 1994." .... and only grandmothers and the *really* discerning geeks who have seen exactly the effects that the OP describes, and have decided to do something about it.

my advice on an old phone: get a nokia 6310i. that one is still amazing, and they sell out within an hour at market stalls. on a new phone: get a cheap PAYG nokia. they're still made, they now have a 30-day (30 DAY!!) standby, they still run the same OS as the 6310i (just upgraded to colour), and they're actually lighter. my partner has one, whilst i have a 3310.

i've taken up tennis in a big way: nearly every day now for over 20 months i do at least... something. i practice on a wall on days i don't have a regular partner, and when i remember i do the TM asanas routine (use google image search to find it) to counteract the intensity of the exercise i do. and drink a huge amount of water: i get through about a litre an hour. this is *important* because otherwise i find i really really suffer the next day (which shows in my inability to do the yoga, which is precisely why i do it, to check that my body's not full of toxins. as far as yoga's concerned: spirituality be buggered, i want to know if my body's ok!!)

but the reason why i took up tennis is not because it's physical exercise, it's because it's *complex* physical exercise, and, when played properly, also requires strategic thinking. i am training both left-handed and right-handed in order to make it more challenging, and also so as to be

then also i am eating marmite (high in B vitamins) without which i swear i become much more tired and unable to remeber things day-to-day. i'm also taking green-lipped mussel extract - the lower-priced stuff when i am low on funds and the really *really* good stuff (like this - http://teamfrezzor.com/truewis...) when i can afford it. without it, within days my knuckles start to ache and the arthritis in my right hip starts to be painful again.

the only other piece of advice i can give is that habits typically take between 30-40 days to break. for example smoking is *not* addictive in the ways that people think. nicotine only takes 36 hours to become addictive,.. and 36 hours to completely clear your system. the *psychological* addiction however - the craving to visit the same restaurants, bars and haunts [where others also happen to smoke].... *that's* what keeps people hooked.

this is really really important: anyone wishing to make a difference in the world really REALLY needs to read the book written by Professor Yunus, the joint winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Price, "Creating a World Without Poverty".

in his book, Professor Yunus describes how he naively studied Economics because he believed that he would be able to change his country's financial situation through studying first world economies. after graduation he set out just after one of the worst natural disasters his country had experienced and realised how completely pointless his studies had been. however he did not give up, and set out to work out what the problem actually was.

he learned that the poor are first and foremost incredibly resourceful... mostly because they have to. he also learned that many of them are, because there are no enforceable usury laws, permanently kept in debt to money-lenders. this shocked him so badly that once he freed an entire village from debt just from the small change in his wallet: something like $USD 15 was all it took to pay off a decade of usury.

what he discovered is that the gratitude of these people when freed from their former situation is immeasurable. the Grameen Bank doesn't have lawyers or debt collectors. the people that they lend money to are so GRATEFUL that they work non-stop to turn their lives around and pay off their loan. in fact, the repayment success rate is around NINETY EIGHT percent. it's so high that the *GRAMEEN BANK* considers it to be THEIR FAULT if one of their customers is ever in default. by contrast in the western world the default rate is 88%. i'll repeat that again in case it's not clear: only TWELVE PERCENT of creditors in the western world pay their debts on time, every time, and in full.

but the main reason why anyone wishing to help the emerging markets and the third world should read his book is because he patiently, with all the knowledge from his economics background, outlines why NGOs, Charity and the "Corporate Social Responsibility" clauses of standard profit-maximising Capitalist Corporations are all worse than doomed but are guaranteed to be ineffective at best and invariably seriously damaging and counter-productive.

right at the start of his book he outlines a surprising offer by Danone to work with him (follow his advice) to actually be effective. it was Professor Yunus's first experience of having been "under the microscope" of people with both big resources and heart. in other words the team at Danone were huge fans of what Yunus was trying to achieve: when he explained to them the financial structure that was needed, they listened, and they did it. they did not go in with a charity, or with donations: they set up a "non-loss, non-dividend" business, selling *locally-produced* yoghurt that happened to have the nutritients that the local population happened (by a not-coincidence) to be chronically deficient in.

the yohurt was sold not at a loss but at an affordable financially sustainable price because the focus was on remaining *stable*, not on exploitation through maximisation of profits: the focus was on allowing people to feel proud of what they achieved, and to take responsibility for their own wealth. they were EMPOWERED through the enormous generous resources of Danone's, but it was a successful venture because they LISTENED to what Professor Yunus had to say.

this is a completely wrong analysis. if (2) was true those people would have been dead centuries or millenia ago. the fact that they are still alive tells you that they get by, and that, honestly, is good enough.

there was an attempt a few decades ago to do exactly what DuPont is doing [again]. i do not understand why 1st world countries do not leave the 3rd world alone to grow their own food. 1st world conditions are NOT THE SAME as 3rd world conditions.

the study that i heard about was exactly the same situation. a 3rd world country which had extremely poor yields was interfered with by a 1st world country providing donations of high-yield maize. for three to four years the success of the trials resulted in bumper crops and the surrounding farmers clambered onto the 1st world genetic variety maize.

then there was a drought.

the high-yield 1st world maize died, and the entire area went into famine. next year, because nothing had grown, nobody had any food the year after, either.

basically it turned out that the low-yield maize had a MASSIVE genetic diversity. some variants thrived in good conditions, some grew successfully *EVEN IN DROUGHT CONDITIONS*. no matter what happened, those people always got some food. not necessarily a lot, but enough so that they didn't die.

now the problem was with this stupid, stupid interference by a 1st world country was that because everyone in the area had converted over to this wonderful high-yield maize, NOBODY HAD ANY OF THE OLD GENETIC VARIETY LEFT.

it was a decade before the country properly recovered, and that was just from one drought.

so the conclusion is, unescapably, that DuPont is intent on killing people just to make a profit, as this isn't the first time that providing 1st world maize to 3rd world countries has gone very very wrong.

just leave them alone. we *DON'T* know better.

this is pure speculation here, but my guess is that the people (politicians) protesting this research are quite likely to be the ones in charge of classified funding efforts for military, espionage and CIA equivalent research... and deployment of those same tools. if you've ever read Neal Stephenson's book "Cobweb" you'll know exactly what is most likely to be going on.

so, in essence, those people (politicians) know damn well that the espionage, domestic and political manipulation tools that they funded are quite likely to show up as anomalous activity should there ever be any tools (such as Truthy) provided to the general public, or any kind of research done to ascertain which "memes" *should* spread and which should not. for if there is anything that is detected which is *different* from normal expectations (a meme spread when it shouldn't have, and oh incidentally what was the source of that disruptive influence again?) it's really not going to go down too well with the people who *already* manipulate us from the shadows.

so i think you'll find that the people (politicians) protesting most loudly are the ones who are using media manipulation tools, and they're afraid that this research will be used to identify them, basically.

yes, i definitely have a question. i heard the statistic that the concentration of heavy and rare earth metals is now *higher* in landfill sites than it is in the original mines that they came from, which, if true, is a global disgrace for which all of us are responsible. firstly, is this actually true, and secondly, is anyone doing anything about the extraction of rare earth metals from the electronics in which they were originally embedded?

systemd violates the principles of unix, adding massive amounts of completely unnecessary complexity. there is absolutely nothing good to say about it.

wasn't NT 3.5 available for ARM, DEC Alpha, Power PC *and* x86? wasn t the core of the NT kernel based on the Mach kernel, and written almost exclusively in c? so what the hell went wrong??

i think at some point some scientists somewhere will work out that the statistical evidence is growing to show, more and more, that dark matter *doesn't* exist...

:) i'd love to but sadly it's one of the [few] contracts where i was in a proprietary environment. if i meet a software libre project some time in the future that needs that kind of stuff i'll certainly attempt to recreate it but it would need to be at least a year before i consider that.

oo, thank you very much for that tip, i'll try to pass it on and will definitely remember it for the next projects i work on. thank you.