Cybernethics / Cybernéthique

At the request of an Indian student, I have worked out a formal document containing my term project proposals for students completing a Masters in Computer Science, specializing in Distributed Systems: http://fare.tunes.org/computing/term-project-proposal.html.

For a long time, I've considered it an awful practice that students should have term projects consisting of toy programs and rigged demos following the MWRO principle: many write, run once. Instead, they should be encouraged to systematically participate in actual useful real-world projects, and if possible free software projects, that make academic peer review possible. I never could do anything about it when in French universities, so maybe this is a godsend opportunity to move things in the right direction.

Since I'm beginning to get seriously interested in SNAIL, that is, Slow Networking with Atrocious Interchange Latency, I've done a bit of research as to decentralized replacements for CVS. After a liminary consultation of my pineal gland, here is what I've found, thanks notably to Rick Moene: There is indeed a package based on monotonic logic, appropriately named monotone (doh!). There are also several other promiseful software packages, including the following ones that attracted my attention: Arch, Codeville, DARCS, Meta-CVS. If you anything about these software projects and their rivals, I'm curious about you opinion. Meanwhile, I'll investigate these, and see which is most hackable.

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