Sustaining an imaginative grasp of posterity!
on
Computer Historian?
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· Score: 3
I guess I shouldn't be surprised at the often overly-pragmatic replies of many of the posters here, but there would seem to be more to this issue than transcribing old code and keeping 20 year old machines running.
Historians not only analyze the past; they also often catalogue the present. This is vital in a field in which massive change over small amounts of time is a matter of course.
As a designer, I'm fascinated by the effect the internet has had on the history of my discipline. When there is no physical record, there is little in the way of history beyond oral tradition. When websites are redesigned (all of them every day, it seems:P), there's no record of the progression of style or theory beyond what we remember and can tell one another. That's a far cry from the abundant paper trail design has left through the 20th century.
I imagine everyone who works with, on or around computers has similar issues to face.
How will future students investigate history without a physical record? The answer would seem to be found in people like the kid who asked the topic question, people who can archive, catalogue, analyze and synthesize information about the information age as it happens. There's no time for traditional history, in which we sit back years later and disect a great battle or read through ancient manuscripts in search of insight... because the record will be gone after the next daily big breakthrough.
I think there's a great deal of promise for this pursuit. Computer historians will ensure that we will continue to be able to learn from "the experience of our predecessors, [and] to sustain an imaginative grasp of posterity*"
I imagine the "no clutter" policy will last as long as it takes for the architect to get his shots for Architectural Review, and then the workers can get back to filling their workspaces with faxed cartoons and stuffed aminals.;)
With this configuration I can visit my bank, transfer money and make payments, I can visit my two stockbrokers and make deals of up to 100,000 USD but I can't go to Tesco and buy cat food.
Of course, Bart's bank and his two stockbrokers already have a bountious and terrifying amount of information about Bart, far beyond the type of browser he uses. While I can appreciate a certain reservation about allowing "personal" information to be extracted unwillingly, this particular contrast isn't very useful.
Perhaps, "I can buy things without user agents at Grocery Store X but not at Tesco," would make more sense, since neither Grocery Store X nor Tesco knows anything at all about Bart to begin with, while his financial history and records are an integral part of his online banking and brokering experiences, even if those records aren't being pulled from his client machine.
You can hear Carmack say all the same things, sometimes nearly verbatim, in the recordings of his QC workshop (especially in recording #1). Beware the murky sound quality, though it's a vast improvement over the first attempt to release these.mp3s.
In response to some of the standard comments in this thread:
1. The "Social shame will keep porn to a minumum" argument.
Laundromats are strange places. They attract strange people. And they seem to make ordinary people lose a lot of their inhibitions. I've seen people take off their pants and throw them into a washing machine, as if it were perfectly normal to get nekkid in public. That some dirty old man won't immediately begin to hunt for porn seems like wishful thinking, even if he's got an enormous audience.
2. The "Supervisory staffing will be a burden" caveat.
Laundromat employees are hardly burdened as it is. Maybe there's some secret work that they do that I've never noticed, but it seems like most of the time they sit around and watch TV or read or stare at people. Once in a while they'll clean a lint trap or yell at someone for using too much detergent. Asking them to keep an eye on the internet terminals, or even to man an administrative terminal to process un-blocking requests, seems like no big deal to me.
3. The "Stick to your ideals! Screw the Man!" exhortation.
We're talking about a laundromat. Nothing noble has ever happened in a laundromat. Stop quoting Camus and making wild comparisons to great moments of integrity throughout history.
Apparently there is an endless supply of engineers willing to participate in the mass production of crap. Any given toaster is a piece of crap. Any given computer is a piece of crap. There are of course exceptions, but by and large the mass-produced output of engineers the world over is crap.
That's all beside the point, anyway. You're still thinking in terms of the individual machine: the glorious, brilliantly-designed, complex, expensive failure. Ten thousand simple, stupid machines can act to produce a net effect where one complicated smart machine is likely to fail.
There's also no reason to say that simple, stupid machines have to be poorly designed. Neurons are nothing compared to the dream they helped create for me last night, but I couldn't build one... could you? Further, a neuron is useless by itself, but lots of them working together is something else entirely... and I can lose hundreds of thousands of them before my brain "fails." That's true redundancy in a system, not two bloated space-machines fumbling toward Mars.
This was modded as funny, but it makes a good point.
If the probes aren't manned, there isn't any reason why they have to be individual technological marvels. Flowers seed the environment by sending out thousands of simple spores... insects thrive by reproducing in a massively exponential way... likewise, we should be bombarding Mars with individually stupid and simple probes with a distributed network of information-gathering sensors. If a hundred of them crash and burn, or fail during the journey, or are eaten by Martians, the mission itself is far from compromised, which at the very least avoids the massive PR bungle.
The current probes are rendered fragile by virtue of their complexity. Why bother? The current approach is like strapping a BMW into a catapault and slinging it into the sky, all the while hoping our fancy, complicated, expensive car won't get dented. It makes no sense at all.
Hmmm.... crt and co. have chosen to rely heavily on client-side.dll's to control their bells and whistles (like the.mp3 controller), rather than adhere to the vm model advocated by id software. In practical terms, this means that, though Rocket Arena 3 was built to run on the Q3A platform, it won't work on my machine. RA3 is, from my perspective, broken unless it works consistently on the Q3A platform, regardless of underlying OS or hardware. The standard reponse to this comes in two flavors: 1. It's the developer's choice to not develop cross-platform, so stfu. Of course, if the developer were to poke me in the eye with a sharp stick, that too would be his choice. I'm not sure that I would be expected to stay quiet in that case. The relative free will of the developer is unrelated to the fact that his decisions have frustrated a large subset of the Q3A community. While nobody should expect a developer to please everyone all the time, and while there may be significant obstacles to accomplishing a truly cross-platform RA3, the lack of even a public announcement on the subject is disturbing in its implicit show of bias. 2. RA3 is a free mod, made by amateurs, so stfu. RA3 is a huge, lavish production. Every effort has been made by its producers to ensure that the public sees it as something far beyond a basement hack's powerup tweaks. I think that the slashdot community in particular may well wonder what it means when the *price* (or lack thereof) or the *employment status* of the developers of a piece of software are used to get those developers off the hook in matters of quality. Just thought I'd throw these thoughts into the ring. Is there a standard for development we should expect from mod developers? What does it mean to say software is "modified" when the modifications themselves naturally exclude a large portion of that software's user base? tableandchair
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I shouldn't be surprised at the often overly-pragmatic replies of many of the posters here, but there would seem to be more to this issue than transcribing old code and keeping 20 year old machines running.
:P), there's no record of the progression of style or theory beyond what we remember and can tell one another. That's a far cry from the abundant paper trail design has left through the 20th century.
Historians not only analyze the past; they also often catalogue the present. This is vital in a field in which massive change over small amounts of time is a matter of course.
As a designer, I'm fascinated by the effect the internet has had on the history of my discipline. When there is no physical record, there is little in the way of history beyond oral tradition. When websites are redesigned (all of them every day, it seems
I imagine everyone who works with, on or around computers has similar issues to face.
How will future students investigate history without a physical record? The answer would seem to be found in people like the kid who asked the topic question, people who can archive, catalogue, analyze and synthesize information about the information age as it happens. There's no time for traditional history, in which we sit back years later and disect a great battle or read through ancient manuscripts in search of insight... because the record will be gone after the next daily big breakthrough.
I think there's a great deal of promise for this pursuit. Computer historians will ensure that we will continue to be able to learn from "the experience of our predecessors, [and] to sustain an imaginative grasp of posterity*"
*quote from Rick Poyner
There's some interesting research into this subject going on at Herman Miller, which has led to things like Resolve and Aeron.
;)
I imagine the "no clutter" policy will last as long as it takes for the architect to get his shots for Architectural Review, and then the workers can get back to filling their workspaces with faxed cartoons and stuffed aminals.
You'll notice that the linked file in this article is in a directory named /today/
Since it is no longer today, the file in question has moved to the 17th of August directory.
The robot has crawled over here.
Please don't let him get away.
hey did you think that the show was *really* based on homer's life too?
No, I imagine that Homer's life is very little like the show.
There won't be more than one more season of the Simpsons anyway (they said as much in an episode this spring, and it's no surprise, really).
A feature film is probably more about going out with a bang than it is attempting to boost merchandise sales.
With this configuration I can visit my bank, transfer money and make payments, I can visit my two stockbrokers and make deals of up to 100,000 USD but I can't go to Tesco and buy cat food.
Of course, Bart's bank and his two stockbrokers already have a bountious and terrifying amount of information about Bart, far beyond the type of browser he uses. While I can appreciate a certain reservation about allowing "personal" information to be extracted unwillingly, this particular contrast isn't very useful.
Perhaps, "I can buy things without user agents at Grocery Store X but not at Tesco," would make more sense, since neither Grocery Store X nor Tesco knows anything at all about Bart to begin with, while his financial history and records are an integral part of his online banking and brokering experiences, even if those records aren't being pulled from his client machine.
You can hear Carmack say all the same things, sometimes nearly verbatim, in the recordings of his QC workshop (especially in recording #1). Beware the murky sound quality, though it's a vast improvement over the first attempt to release these .mp3s.
In response to some of the standard comments in this thread:
1. The "Social shame will keep porn to a minumum" argument.
Laundromats are strange places. They attract strange people. And they seem to make ordinary people lose a lot of their inhibitions. I've seen people take off their pants and throw them into a washing machine, as if it were perfectly normal to get nekkid in public. That some dirty old man won't immediately begin to hunt for porn seems like wishful thinking, even if he's got an enormous audience.
2. The "Supervisory staffing will be a burden" caveat.
Laundromat employees are hardly burdened as it is. Maybe there's some secret work that they do that I've never noticed, but it seems like most of the time they sit around and watch TV or read or stare at people. Once in a while they'll clean a lint trap or yell at someone for using too much detergent. Asking them to keep an eye on the internet terminals, or even to man an administrative terminal to process un-blocking requests, seems like no big deal to me.
3. The "Stick to your ideals! Screw the Man!" exhortation.
We're talking about a laundromat. Nothing noble has ever happened in a laundromat. Stop quoting Camus and making wild comparisons to great moments of integrity throughout history.
Apparently there is an endless supply of engineers willing to participate in the mass production of crap. Any given toaster is a piece of crap. Any given computer is a piece of crap. There are of course exceptions, but by and large the mass-produced output of engineers the world over is crap.
That's all beside the point, anyway. You're still thinking in terms of the individual machine: the glorious, brilliantly-designed, complex, expensive failure. Ten thousand simple, stupid machines can act to produce a net effect where one complicated smart machine is likely to fail.
There's also no reason to say that simple, stupid machines have to be poorly designed. Neurons are nothing compared to the dream they helped create for me last night, but I couldn't build one... could you? Further, a neuron is useless by itself, but lots of them working together is something else entirely... and I can lose hundreds of thousands of them before my brain "fails." That's true redundancy in a system, not two bloated space-machines fumbling toward Mars.
This was modded as funny, but it makes a good point.
If the probes aren't manned, there isn't any reason why they have to be individual technological marvels. Flowers seed the environment by sending out thousands of simple spores... insects thrive by reproducing in a massively exponential way... likewise, we should be bombarding Mars with individually stupid and simple probes with a distributed network of information-gathering sensors. If a hundred of them crash and burn, or fail during the journey, or are eaten by Martians, the mission itself is far from compromised, which at the very least avoids the massive PR bungle.
The current probes are rendered fragile by virtue of their complexity. Why bother? The current approach is like strapping a BMW into a catapault and slinging it into the sky, all the while hoping our fancy, complicated, expensive car won't get dented. It makes no sense at all.
Hmmm.... crt and co. have chosen to rely heavily on client-side .dll's to control their bells and whistles (like the .mp3 controller), rather than adhere to the vm model advocated by id software. In practical terms, this means that, though Rocket Arena 3 was built to run on the Q3A platform, it won't work on my machine. RA3 is, from my perspective, broken unless it works consistently on the Q3A platform, regardless of underlying OS or hardware. The standard reponse to this comes in two flavors: 1. It's the developer's choice to not develop cross-platform, so stfu. Of course, if the developer were to poke me in the eye with a sharp stick, that too would be his choice. I'm not sure that I would be expected to stay quiet in that case. The relative free will of the developer is unrelated to the fact that his decisions have frustrated a large subset of the Q3A community. While nobody should expect a developer to please everyone all the time, and while there may be significant obstacles to accomplishing a truly cross-platform RA3, the lack of even a public announcement on the subject is disturbing in its implicit show of bias. 2. RA3 is a free mod, made by amateurs, so stfu. RA3 is a huge, lavish production. Every effort has been made by its producers to ensure that the public sees it as something far beyond a basement hack's powerup tweaks. I think that the slashdot community in particular may well wonder what it means when the *price* (or lack thereof) or the *employment status* of the developers of a piece of software are used to get those developers off the hook in matters of quality. Just thought I'd throw these thoughts into the ring. Is there a standard for development we should expect from mod developers? What does it mean to say software is "modified" when the modifications themselves naturally exclude a large portion of that software's user base? tableandchair