saljam

Nader Khalili's other design, the Geltaftan[0], is worth mentioning. These are essentially clay buildings which are then fired to produce ceramic houses.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_houses#Forms_and_techni...

What's stopping git from storing large files using Merkle trees + a rolling hash?

I'm probably missing something since there this, and git-annex, and git-bigstore, and others...

I recognise Sanea's story from all the spam about it that I received. Searching in my inbox reveals 6 of them in lists mostly about programming languages.

I wonder if they're what inspired Nicholas Schmidle to write about this.

What's wrong with their git repo?

This is precisely the reason many of these huge projects are built. The Gulf countries have been and are still doing them (KAUST, KAEC, KAFD, huge mosque expansions, etc.) with a huge number of contracts going to Saudi Oger or the Binladin group. These contracts are rarely even negotiated properly.

The difference here is that Egypt can hardly afford this so they have to blag the money off of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

That might also be related to how they're now encrypting messages on the handset after partnering up with Open Whisper. https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp/

Edit: this is also pure speculation.

Musicians have made similar demands in 2008[1]. That includes Christopher Cerf, one of the Sesame Street composers. He features in a documentary Aljazeera made about this[2]. I seem to remember he also asked for royalties but was unsuccessful, but I can't find a reference to that.

[1] http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google...

[2] http://www.dummymag.com/videos/watch-al-jazeera-s-songs-of-w...

R=dmr

RIP Dennis.

Guess I'll join in. My first computer was also an MSX. They were very popular in the Arab World because of an Arabic branded version made by (for?) a company called Sakhr. It played all the MSX games and that's what mattered. I'm pretty sure there's still a Metal Gear cartridge in my parents house somewhere.

I wonder what Sakhr is up to now, if they're still around...

Yep, I thought it sounded like Camlistore, but as a library.

That would be cool. Are there any? I'm aware of sta.li, but it doesn't seem to be there yet.

As a matter of fact, is it possible to get stuff like nsswitch working without dynamic linking on Linux?

I was under the impression ChromeOS used upstart.

I'm personally quite excited about this space. If the Internet of Things is going to happen, we need better languages than C/C++.

I'm guessing it's in the Freudian psychoanalysis sense, rather than the more literal one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anal_retentiveness

Frankly, I'm not sure which is worse.

Static linking is practically impossible on modern Unix because of bullet point 4 in nopaste7's linked page.

> all kinds of features in the libc (locale (through iconv), NSS, IDN, ...) require dynamic linking (...)

These are all features which have been shoehorned into libc on Linux, but only work when it's a shared library because they rely on shared state. I would argue a cleaner way of implementing them would have been as services, but alas, you have what you have.

There's a caveat with process substitution; the command can't seek() on the input file.

If if a command, for example, needs to do 2 passes, it'll will either have to be 'smart' enough to stick the output in a buffer or fail.

I love this game. Ottoman Empire, Bolivia [1], China [2], Philippines, Mozambique.

1: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim%C3%B3n_Bol%C3%ADvarl 2: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Chin

Here's another idea: why not use Namecoin [1] to keep the data? It's fair, no one owns it, and everyone can query it.

[1] http://bluishcoder.co.nz/2011/05/12/namecoin-a-dns-alternati...

Nice idea! Would it be crazy to just use an email address as the pointer? It's easier to remember than a random string of numbers and it means they don't have to worry about name spacing. They can initially verify it by emailing you, like everything else.

And who would curate the mapping? A government department? USPS/Royal Mail? And is it public information, or should some 'privacy' laws apply? If it's the latter, how is sharing that with e.g. FedEx going to be regulated? We don't want to recreate the zip/post code mess!

(A bit off-topic)

Locally hosted web apps are on the rise (Mailpile, Camlistore, etc.) and remembering which app runs on which port is neither user-friendly nor scalable. More so if you start to consider multiple users on the same machine.

Maybe there's a need for a usable reverse proxy just for local web apps?

It would also be neat if browsers could speak HTTP over some IPC that isn't TCP on some random port. Maybe UNIX sockets in ~/.run? This would delegate read/write permissions to the OS.

Almost every year, I reread the famous Goldberg paper, What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating Point Arithmetic[1]. And with every time I'm more astonished at how the hell can anyone do anything nontrivial with floats and trust it.

[1] http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.ht...

These tunnels were man-made. But yeah, obviously the scale these worked at was more towards villages and small towns.

What's particularly sad is how the vernacular architectural features, which have evolved over thousands of years to deal with these issues, have been largely abandoned over the 20th century. Only to be replaced by ugly concrete buildings and AC units. These include the Malqafs[1] (windcatchers) once found all over Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia. Also the use of underground streams[2] to cool buildings. And generally not building huge south-facing glass windows when you live in a place that reaches 45°C in the summer...

Also, a personal architect-hero of mine is Hassan Fathy[3]. This man inspired generations of environment-friendly architects.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_tower [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat#Cooling [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan_Fathy

That's what I said. :-) BUILD had an influence on Go. Go is influenced by BUILD. One sentence is in the active voice, the other in the passive.

Judging by his description of BUILD, it sounds like was a big influence on Go's build system.

Well, no surprises there!

That's almost certainly a different one. It's described as a scripting language and that it appeared in 92. This C-- only came around 97...

It's quite an obvious name, I'd expect there to be many more called C--!

I don't know about EC2 but Linode provide you with a web based console you can use to set stuff up.

It's not a good thing. Only a handful of nations are capable of producing weaponized drones, and that's not likely to change anytime soon. This is very susceptible to abuse. The numbers here show my point exactly: http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drone...

These hardware KV interfaces are still fairly low-level. Fixed-size values, etc. So you'll still need to have some abstraction layer that handles that. You might not call it a filesystem but I bet it'll look a lot like one.

Fair point. They make an effort with the Browser Bundle but I just tried it and it broke on the second run...

Now I want to write a Tor compatible client that 'just works'. Just one static binary that implements the proxy. It embeds a static firefox binary and a prepared profile, which gets extracted into a visible location so the user can delete it if desired.

Basically minimize its dependence on the environment as much as possible.