#clippings

Now reading Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning… Was the Command Line. It’s very different from what I expected when I ran against a reference to it in Eric Raymond’s Open Minds, Open Source. Had I a better idea what it was, I probably wouldn’t have started reading it in the first place, but once there I can’t leave it halfway. It’s worth checking out the SF writings of Neal Stephenson too. [Read More]

Open Minds, Open Source … How can giving up on central control, pre-planning and the vertical command organization of software development produce better results? The answer is implicit in the way that cost nonlinearities associated with scaling change the tradeoffs of complex systems. Ask any architect. Have you ever wondered what the practical limit on the height of skyscrapers is? Turns out it’s not strength of materials, nor our ability to design very tall structures that are stable under load. [Read More]

A Fan of Freedom: Thoughts on the Biography of RMS … All of us narratize our lives; we all reinvent our own histories to some extent. But one of the perils of reinventing yourself as a prophet/visionary is that you can end up forgetting who you were before the vision. … Again, one of the most interesting things about RMS’s story is the respects in which it is not unique, but representative of themes which recur constantly in the lives of people like us. [Read More]

Link Ladies and gentlemen, CPSR incautiously invited me to say a few words about social responsibility in computing tonight. And my first words are these: when I hear someone speak of “social responsibility”, that’s when I reach for my revolver. In point of fact, I don’t actually own a revolver; but I do believe the rhetoric and the very concept of “social responsibility” have become badly corrupted by political abuse. All too often, people who invoke “social responsibility” are demanding that we give up individual liberty — that we accept just a bit more taxation, just a bit more regulation, just a bit more governmental intrusiveness, all for the the supposed good of society. [Read More]