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Remember the Computer Science Past Or Be Condemned To Repeat It?
theodp writes "In the movie Groundhog Day, a weatherman finds himself living the same day over and over again. It's a tale to which software-designers-of-a-certain-age can relate. Like Philip Greenspun, who wrote in 1999, 'One of the most painful things in our culture is to watch other people repeat earlier mistakes. We're not fond of Bill Gates, but it still hurts to see Microsoft struggle with problems that IBM solved in the 1960s.' Or Dave Winer, who recently observed, 'We marvel that the runtime environment of the web browser can do things that we had working 25 years ago on the Mac.' And then there's Scott Locklin, who argues in a new essay that one of the problems with modern computer technology is that programmers don't learn from the great masters. 'There is such a thing as a Beethoven or Mozart of software design,' Locklin writes. 'Modern programmers seem more familiar with Lady Gaga. It's not just a matter of taste and an appreciation for genius. It's a matter of forgetting important things.' Hey, maybe it's hard to learn from computer history when people don't acknowledge the existence of someone old enough to have lived it, as panelists reportedly did at an event held by Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us last Friday!"
It's worth pointing out that Columbus thought he was discovering a path to the East Indies, that he enslaved friendly natives, and that it was the English colonists, and not the French or Spanish (who both had claims in North America) who "effected change in the world" in the area Columbus "discovered"; by which you mean that small part of the world I assume, since the French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and many others effected many changes in other parts of the world at exactly the same time. Did I mention that Columbus was Italian and funded by the Spanish?
So, if by domain range-mapping in the mathematics functional sense, you mean that the lesson is "changing the world by software" by the function of greedy funders then that is also true......MS, Oracle, Apple, Google all have changed the world via software :)
Sorry, didn't mean to be rude or nit-picky about mmaps, but it's just so ironic