Designers - Are You Influenced By What You Read?

Silent_E asks: "A student of mine is writing a paper on how Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_ offers a good educational model for distance learning. She has been asked by publishers to justify looking at fiction as a way of talking about 'the real world.' That dialogue made me wonder whether Slashdot folks currently or recently coding or doing hardware design are, or have been, directly inspired by what they've read in Science Fiction?"

Comments

Definitely

[Anonymous Coward]

My boss has definitely been influenced by the world of literature. Most of the things he promises people are straight from science fiction although the schedules are more of a pure fantasy.

TOP SEKRET PROJECT

[windlord]

Hush.... I am currently working on a big project called... The METAVERSE.

Sure, I'm influenced by science fiction,

[Mordant]

I make decisions every day based upon what I read on Slashdot!

The real world...

[(H)elix1]

I know one guy who claimed he was trying to decipher a morris code message from the HDD activity light but claimed it only worked if you used nasty font contrasts and coded in perl or something... We suspected drugs, but you would never see this kind of behavior in fiction. (grin)

Linux Shell

[SHEENmaster]

cat /dev/urandom | /usr/games/morse > /dev/hda

Try it, it really works. You must be root of course.

stupid?

[SHEENmaster]

Did you just call my comment stupid!?

As the greatgrandparent of this post mentioned, many of us are better at expressing emotion and nuance through the written word than through facial expressions.

The lack of emotion involved keeps people from taking offense, and IMHO leads to less confusion. Flamewars aren't really arguments, but rather jokes.

Re:stupid?

[plover]

Flamewars aren't really arguments, but rather jokes.

You might want to qualify that with "...but rather jokes to those who appreciate them." I know too many people who are now online (that shouldn't be, but I'm just being l33t) who cannot take a joke, and who cannot even recognize a joke when the cream pie hits them in the face.

I got marked down on a review two years ago because the vendor I was exchanging email with could not recognize sarcasm (or at least went crying to his boss and my boss with my "immature" letter.) I had mistakenly thought that relationships with this vendor had progressed to the point where they could successfully be included in some good natured kidding. The kidding wasn't malicious, nor was it directed at a person (for performance reasons I was questioning the use of their setting the no-alignment flag on our compiled project) but this guy got all bent out of shape.

I got my revenge, however. Last year, this same humorless fool just totally lost his cool in a conference call involving his team and my boss. My boss dropped her jaw, and came over to me to both laugh at this schmuck and apologize for marking me down. The following review was much better...

Re:IRC is better than spoken discussion

[EpsCylonB]

Geeks comunicate better through striaght forward written words. If we had social skills we wouldn't be geeks.

Re:Robots

[bsartist]

How many robotics engineers haven't been influenced by Azimov?

I highly doubt that very many roboticists have heard of this Azimov guy. I certainly haven't, and I read *tons* of scifi. There was a guy with a similar name, though - Asimov - who was very, very influential in the field of robotics.

FUNNY

[SHEENmaster]

not informative!

This writes morse code out in ascii text directly onto the primary ide hard disk. I figured /.ers would understand it, but no.

/me thanks goodness that bsdgames isn't installed in Mandrake by default.