Slashdot Mirror
On the Humble Default
Hugh Pickens sends along Kevin Kelly's paean to the default. "One of the greatest unappreciated inventions of modern life is the default. 'Default' is a technical concept first used in computer science in the 1960s to indicate a preset standard. ... Today the notion of a default has spread beyond computer science to the culture at large. It seems such a small thing, but the idea of the default is fundamental... It's hard to remember a time when defaults were not part of life. But defaults only arose as computing spread; they are an attribute of complex technological systems. There were no defaults in the industrial age. ... The hallmark of flexible technological systems is the ease by which they can be rewired, modified, reprogrammed, adapted, and changed to suit new uses and new users. Many (not all) of their assumptions can be altered. The upside to endless flexibility and multiple defaults lies in the genuine choice that an individual now has, if one wants it. ... Choices materialize when summoned. But these abundant choices never appeared in fixed designs. ... In properly designed default system, I always have my full freedoms, yet my choices are presented to me in a way that encourages taking those choices in time — in an incremental and educated manner. Defaults are a tool that tame expanding choice."
More and more are taking the choice to default than ever before.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
We might not have called it that, but default solutions and default products have been around since the invention of mass production. From then on, there was a "default" product, a standard product that works as the default if you didn't order something specifically different.
Hell, even the spanish inquisition had a default verdict.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"He's just writing for the sake of reading his own words."
That's default motivation for writing.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
No real geek/nerd would ever even consider using the default settings. Only real men use the default, real geeks use their own settings. Thats why none of their shit works.
As a French person, I resent what the author is implying. Defau(l)t is a french word. It means "inaction", "failure", or "inactive state". And if anybody invented "inaction", we certainly did. We have prior art. It's part of our cultural heritage. And you guys, you were just lucky that we even taught it to Great Britain in the twelve century, for without that specialized knowledge, that special concept of defaults would never even have arrived in America!!
Heaven's no, that nasty word comes from Old English. We had nothing to do with that one.