Pointers

Guardian: Interview with “history’s most generous philanthropist”, Sir William Henry Gates III, Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. #

OpenVPN: “…an easy-to-use, robust, and highly configurable VPN (Virtual Private Network) daemon which can be used to securely link two or more private networks using an encrypted tunnel over the internet.” I haven’t actually tried this, but it looks pretty good. #

Bochs: A portable IA32 emulator. Also on Sourceforge. (Via Slashdot)  #

The Glass Engine: “enables deep navigation of the music of Philip Glass. Personal interests, associations, and impulses guide the listener through an expanding selection of over sixty Glass works.” (Via Raymond Chen)

Pointers

Seymour Hersh: The Stovepipe. How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq?s weapons. #

Indymedia UK: Who Is Hutton? (Via Adam Curry) #

K5: Why your Movable Type blog must die. “All of your blogs talk about the same crap.” Heh heh. #

Time Sneath is building a list of UK .net bloggers. #

Individual Preparedness and Response to Chemical, Radiological, Nuclear, and Biological Terrorist Attacks. From the scary guys at RAND. (Via Kevin Kelly) #

The Mountain and the Clock. Stewart Brand on building the Clock of the Long Now. (Via WorldChanging)

Pointers

WorldChanging: “Reuters reports that the Danish company Aresa Biodetection has developed genetically-modified flowers which change color when their roots come in contact with Nitrogen Dioxide in the soil. Explosives used in mines produce NO2 as the chemicals gradually decay.” Very cool. #

NY Times: In Online Auctions, Misspelling in Ads Often Spells Cash. 

Pointers

John Perry Barlow writes movingly about his friend’s suicide, and responds to some incredibly spiteful comments. Blogging at its best. #

Shelley Powers on Bush’s state of the nation speech. #

For those who care about such things: information about the DNS Root Servers. #

This is just too freaky. If I wasn’t at work right now (just doing some lunchtime surfing, okay) then I’d play with this some more. (Via Bruce Sterling)

Pointers: Cluetrain

The full text of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Quote: “ Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning, a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back, where joy was not a dirty word, where play was not forbidden after your eleventh birthday. Imagine a world in which the business of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday. Imagine a world created by the people, for the people not perishing from the earth forever.” #

Angry Coder: Going Independent part 1 and part 2. (Via Mike Gunderloy)

Minus 100 points

Microsoft’s Eric Gunnerson, who AFAIK “owns” C#, describes how features are added to the language (or not): “So, we decided on the additive approach instead, and worked hard to keep the complexity down. One way to do that is through the concept of ?minus 100 points?. Every feature starts out in the hole by 100 points, which means that it has to have a significant net positive effect on the overall package for it to make it into the language.”

This is an unusual and refreshing approach in these days of bloatware; where huge numbers of features are forced into an app (think: Word) so that marketing can produce a longer tick-list than the competition. Its kind of hard to imagine the Work team (to pick on them again) saying “Hey – the built-in spreadsheet feature is really neat but it just doesn’t have a net positive effect. Lets leave it out.” marketing would /terminate/ them.

It seems to me that the C# can get away with this because, uniquely in shrink-wrapped software, the programming language component just isn’t marketed on the basis of its features anymore. Layered stuff like RAD designers, IDEs, and components, are – and they have the feature lists to prove it, but languages themselves havn’t been since the Turbo Pascal era. Funny, that.&nbsp