Our legacy "computer industry" was a lend/lease styled business model industry. Our legacy "computer companies" were financing companies. Not "computing" companies. That lends/lease financing business model justified the sales forces operating on commissions. All that is over now.
Everything has changed now. Computer automation (CPU, RAM, Storage, I/O) is now priced in the mere 100's of dollars. That signifies "stuff" you can buy at Best Buy or even 7/11. Stuff you can "buy" signifies "stuff" that cannot be sold on commission. There is no more role for financing (lend/lease). There are no roles for sales forces operating on commissions.
Great article. Read all of it twice. Don't fixate on one or two sentences.
I once worked in Fed Govt IT system. Remember the 2015 OPM (Office of Personnel Management) data breach? If not, read up on that (use a search engine). Over 22 million government personnel records were released into the wild. The Wikipedia article "blames China," but some folks told me that multiple agency personnel and multiple agency contractors had simply put everyday Fed Govt OPM spreadsheets on everyday Web sites to make them easy to share.
"Experts" rarely grasp the everyday 1. incompetence, 2. indifference, 3. recklessness and 4. even corruption pervasive across and thriving in all our "elite institutions."
We need to take Robert Salow's Productivity Paradox (look it up) very seriously. All the incentives line up for "experts" to sell more things and sell newer things. But we are often (always?) selling bandaids for the previous bandaids, while users (customers) are swallowing birds to catch the spiders to catch the flies. Solved problems cease being problems. That's sadly bad for the IT business.
I enjoy making photographs on black and white films. Different films are something like different musical instruments. A C# played on a guitar and a C# played on an oboe sound different. The lens, the exposure, the developer and the processing ritual also all make a difference.
Years ago, I threw away my coffee maker, espresso maker, microwave, toaster oven and most other kitchen "appliances." I did keep a few electric grinders/mixers. But I also have some manual grinders.
I make coffee in a glass jar (gravity filter) or with a moka pot and concentrate on the ingredients now and brew coffee with cardamom and ceylon cinnamon.
The last thing I want in my kitchen are devices with blinking lights and clocks. My cast iron, carbon steel, stainless steel and glass gear have no moving parts. They are magically "compatible" with serial, parallel and USB cables. I'm the moving parts.
Sorry to ask, but where do you get your "facts" ????
China developed, organized and promotes Kylin (Linux based) with a high degree of desktop penetration with the express purpose of replacing Windows and Apple desktops (laptops, etc.).
Russia funds, promotes and standardized Astra Linux. Same express purpose.
India promotes BOSS (Bharat Operating System Solutions) with the same intentions. BOSS also has a standardized server configuration.
You can read more about national Linux/OSS endeavors all over the Web.
Garbage collecting interpreters are (mostly) for wimpy scripting kiddies. The obvious historically documented exceptions are the "Symbolic AI Researchers."
In 1990, SQL (and dBASE and Excel) was a "computer language" for secretaries. Now in 2023, we suffer uneducated halfwits manically typing in endless repugnant "ad tech" and "SEO" with our "Bioinformatics Researcher" hacks inflicting delusions based on Excel #Err cells (look it up) upon an unwitting populace.
Somewhere, we went wrong. We have GREAT and WISE Software Engineering (Prescriptive and Historical) guidance available in the public domain now. Our mercenary "job hoppers) don't seem to be interested in accessing that.
Going forward, some combination of ASM and Forth in Open Source incarnations and with type-checking hints will wring the most computation out of energy resources (CPU cycles).
This article makes sense and explains a great deal. Learning and training trigger dopamine release. Both "learning how" and "learning that." The photography example they use (tool mastery) is a great example. Amateur photographers will regularly change their tools and subject matter to maintain the "sense of wonder." Meanwhile, wedding photographers will be bored with their professions.
We can see this with software engineers routinely trying out new languages and tools and hobby projects.
Does anyone follow British domestic politics? They can't stand Polish (et al) immigrants amongst their numbers, much less browner skinned Indians and muslims. Brits are an increasingly irrelevant, racist, and post-Imperial bitter and reckless island nation (the size of Morocco) that can't feed itself. As an American citizen, I advocate a 2nd 1776, whereupon we set their miserable Brit "ship of state" adrift forever. Our future is better secured by a fully reciprocal "nationalism" that does not sanction racist jingoism. Consult John Mearsheimer for broader exposition of a fruitful and respectful reciprocal nationalism without pretenses to "universalism."
These bills are self-defeating. I suffer no affections for narcotics dealers and human traffickers seeking anonymity, but I also suffer no affections for "Western" bankers fixing LIBOR and NSA tapping phones of our NATO "allies." As is, our USA "cloud" is already a Trojan Horse. At this point, Open Source and strong encryption are already prerequisites of any imaginable national sovereignty. If we can't "export" strong encryption, we'll just "export" strong encryption engineers.
I doubt it. Mastering an instrument and music reading/writing trains linguistic, focus and cooperation skills. Acting in plays trains memory and cooperation skills and performance skills. Field sports trains spatial reasoning and competition skills. Camping and hiking trains preparation, map reading and cooking skills. And so on. We know what we know and live our lived out metaphors.
BTW, notice how our very phrase "counter-intuitive" largely indicates credible consensus contradicting TV narratives, commercial advertising, news "headlines" and fragment's of yesterday's propaganda. Credible consensus is not even "counter-intuitive."
HN itself is full of wonderful "counter-intuitive" narratives. College is the road to riches? We've heard Peter Thiel and others explain otherwise. "Health food bars" aren't just candybars? Whey protein doesn't just ruin kidneys? Daiquiri mix isn't just (overpriced) kool aid? DNC/GOP (partisans) correlates to "conservative/liberal" and also "right/left." Journalists stringing together "southern, conservative, Christians" seem to forget MLK and his kindred churches (I worked for Unitarians at Harvard). Might we consult George Lemaitre (Big Bang) and Gregor Mendel (Genetics) (both Christians monks) about the "Science vs. Religion" conflict? We can go on and on about "what everyone knows" that was never and shall never be the case. And Darwin himself wrote that Herbert Spencer's fictitious "Social Darwinism" was pure idiocy. I wish I could red pen correct all of TV and old wives tale "common sense" here, but I can't :/
First, eliminate advertising. Next, eliminate anonymity. Next, focus on teaching things that can be taught. For one example, the old (pre .com) comp.lang Usenet forums were fantastic. For another example, Consumer Reports is a blissfully dull but useful publication. B2B commerce at least comes with contracts and credible threats of legal retaliation. Broadcast consumer marketing is fully toxic.
This is nonsense. Fools "debating" and babbling "what the TV said" are liabilities. What's more, what 7.7B fools "like" and "don't like" never matters. Simpler facticities, such as design and organic anatomies, are all documented. Probabilistic functional consequential facticities are also mostly Globally Credible Consensus Narratives (GCCN). Now, we can finger jerks selling something at expense of others. They must be silenced. Same for "bar drunks" and "team seekers" and attention seeking "2-sides debaters." All wastes of time. All noise, no signal. In any case, written narratives with some pretenses to formal completeness dominate babblers and texters. Focus on sets of propositions worth writing down. Ignore restaurant reviews. Focus laserlike on recipes.
First, it would certainly depend on as many sample variations we can find. Second, you are approaching tautological nonsense where patents and copyrights are nothing more than excuses for undeserved "outsized returns." Maybe that is true now or in countries with "first-to-file" patent regimes. There are no guarantees of ANY future outsized returns, no matter how much people might desire them. Low-margin might just equal "useful and fair."
There is nothing obviously wrong with copying things and nothing obvious right with "inventing" them first. DOS was not first but beat CPM. Microsoft even went on to PROMOTE its "fast follower" modus operandi. VC's seeking exits have very sound reasons for wanting something "first" and preferably "license protected." But those wins do not obviously confer to either nation states or even all industries or companies. Making things over and over for expanding markets is the best source of innovation. Any delusions of "labs" as "heads" and "making things" as "mere hands" are in fact pure delusions. [Edit: sp]
I don't understand the appeal. We used to call this "slipstreaming" changes. I understand a variety of methodologies going back decades. Is this for content or entertainment applications where users are victims and data integrity is not sacrosanct?
My own model for software is tooling that enjoys infrequent highly stable releases, priorities on backward compatibility and iron tight accurate documentation. Where exactly is rapid incremental code delivery at such a premium? Why are these articles not contextualized to domains?
It is easier today than ever before to share a basic great books history and philosophy "story" today. We can include our primate biology, geology, food history and organizational and strategic narratives from Sun Tzu to Aristotle to Schelling's game theory to Robert's Rules of order.
If we're going to live to 100, we should should share some tooling for how to get there better together. Education is not the problem. Constant crop dusting on filmic conflict fictions and staged sport conflicts is the problem. Living together in an industrial world secreted behind walls or even continents away on 1-way broadcast communications is foolhardy.
Nerds are raised on sci-fi. I was. They keep waiting for the future to happen. Scouring for "new technologies" is sometimes called "scouting." It's really important for a company to appoint "scounters." Then everyone else knows "scouting" is not in their job descriptions. Then they start to focus. Many organizations never graduate from future fetishism.
That's your team's problem. Optimizing single developers for "getting their part over" is not contributing. Software delivery is not like taking tests in school. It's team delivery over multiple release. The only wins are group delivery.
Great piece. 1) The title might be "Incidental Complexity is Killing Software." 2) Typing speed of scripting languages is truly a HIGHLY deceptive metric. Server resources are not free, and unit testing is wasted on type checking which compilers do cheaper. 3) For different sad reasons, software organizations CANNOT manage to do cradle-to-grave resource planning and schedule assessments all the way through sales, training, help-desk and MRO. 4) Why software ENGINEERS fetishize tool and equipment purchases like consumers I'll never understand. The application wins are cool. The tools are tools. 5) The developer stovepipe desire to "have their part work" is another contributing pathology. Software delivery is a team marathon styled sport.
This is true. Ancient USENET was once fantastic before SPAM and trolls invaded. The stores of free non-fiction books and journal articles in PDF is also a giant treasure few could have imagined a few decades ago.
I was not saying it was lacking those features. Feature plans are aces up sleeves for new releases. Multi-release planning turns out to be a great way to "time box" the current release.
Great idea and great general model as a recipe or planning tool. The possibilities seem endless - adding structure (popular sequences of groups of exercises, complements or foci, etc.), adding voting, comments or open signup to plans, adding consequent metrics, expectations or cautions. Time reasoning and sequencing are hard for people. Workable representations can be challenging too. This excites the imagination in other application eras. Great stuff.
Our lack of universal and convenient primary care hinders the formation of small or new large businesses. Our medical care quality is low due to lack of data sharing that national health services enjoy for free. Our oddly expensive but low performing healthcare is a pathetic vestige of our apartheid racist labor history here in the USA. These issues do not concern fancy elective medicine we also sadly fetishize amidst our ongoing dysfunctioning. We prefer endless pitches of futuristic delusions than reliable heartbeat services. We will continue to suffer this needless hamstringing until we catch up with civilized people who can add, subtract, multiply and divide.
I played a tiny part in debugging early XML-RPC implementations. XML-RPC had most of the efficiency and representational flexibility of JSON today. Then SOAP came barreling in. Software is full of heartbreaks :/
I was going to mention RMI, but couldn't recall the TLA. Does anyone else remember LANS and Windows NetDDE? That got end user machines involved in "distributed" computations.
I've waited 50 years for an organization like Strong Towns to combine a) sound accounting and b) urban architecture in a USA context. These guys are sobering consequentialists, testing principles against their realized potential. That's a breath of fresh air cutting across party electioneers, subsidy seekers, wishful thinkers and noisy promoters. Great publication.