David Brake's blog
Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

Archive forMay 29th, 2001 | back to home

29 May 2001
Mathematician humour: “WARNING: Do NOT
Filed under:Copyright,Humour & Entertainment at5:14 pm

Mathematician humour: “WARNING: Do NOT calculate Pi in binary. It is conjectured that this number is normal, meaning that it contains ALL finite bit strings…

“If you compute it, you will be guilty of:

* Copyright infringement (of all books, all short stories, all
newspapers, all magazines, all web sites, all music, all movies,
and all software, including the complete Windows source code)
…
* Possession of everyone’s SSN, everyone’s credit card numbers,
everyone’s PIN numbers, everyone’s unlisted phone numbers, and
everyone’s passwords
…
Also, your computer will contain all of the nastiest known computer
viruses. In fact, all of the nastiest POSSIBLE computer viruses.”

Linux Journal on the Digital Divide in Africa
Filed under:Digital divide (developing countries),Open source at4:30 pm

Wayne Marshall, who has been involved in development work in Africa, writes about his experiences. He has some important lessons to impart about building skills instead of parachuting in equipment and about the need to provide clean water before bandwidth in desperately poor regions.

I have my doubts about his belief that Linux is a suitable operating system to provide to needy Africans, however. It may be “ideologically pure” and, more importantly, useful on low-spec systems, but I imagine that because it is still not fully user-friendly it may be difficult to train non-computer literate (or indeed semi-literate) people to use. I also worry about whether the skills Linux users learn will continue to be useful once they have to inter-operate with the wider world of Windows PCs.

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