Posts Tagged ‘software’
“Cyberspace undeniably reflects some form of geography”*…
Your correspondent in stepping again into the rapids, so (Roughly) Daily is going into a short hiatus. Regular service should resume on or around Nov 4. Here, something to enjoy in the meantime…
Our old friend Neal Agarwal has created an interactive museum of sorts, a stroll through the history of the internet, as manifest in the artifacts of important “firsts”– the first smiley, the first MP3, the first “LOL.” the first live-steamed concert, and so, so much more…
Browse through Internet Artifacts, from @nealagarwal.
* Sandra Day O’Connor
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As we touch the exhibits, we might send imperial birthday greetings to William Henry Gates III; he was born on this date in 1955. Gates is, of course, best known for co-founding the technology giant Microsoft, along with his childhood friend Paul Allen. He led the company from its packaged software beginnings onto the internet. After leaving the company in 2008, he founded several other companies, including BEN, Cascade Investment, TerraPower, bgC3, and Breakthrough Energy; but he has increasingly turned his attention to philanthropy.
“I like boring things”*…
What’s not to like?…
A Youtube video titled “THE MOST BORING VIDEO EVER MADE (Microsoft Word tutorial, 1989) has accrued over 1.5 million views despite its self-proclaimed boringness. The video, an hour and forty-seven-minute computer tutorial, appears to have been recorded in one long take. It’s a time capsule to the early days of home computers and despite the monotonous, sleep-inducing narration, the instructions are quite thorough. In the video’s comments, viewers point out the mind-blowing drama at minute 59 and the charming quote “no ‘command m’ for ‘miracle.'”
“1989 Microsoft Word tutorial is ‘the most boring video ever made’,” from Annie Rauwerda @BoingBoing
Pair with this 1984 video of Stanley Kubrick discussing his favorite software manuals:
* Andy Warhol
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As we take on tedium, we might send qualified birthday greetings to Edward William Bok; he was born on this date in 1863. An editor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, he is best remembered for his 30-year stewardship of the Ladies’ Home Journal.
Bok’s overall concern was to promote his socially conservative vision of the ideal American household, with the wife as homemaker and child-rearer. At the Ladies Home Journal, Bok authored more than twenty articles opposed to women’s suffrage, women working outside the home, woman’s clubs, and education for women. He wrote that feminism would lead women to divorce, ill health, and even death. Bok viewed suffragists as traitors to their sex, saying “there is no greater enemy of woman than woman herself.”
(See here for a glimpse at his ambitions and impact.)
“Democracy is never a final achievement. It is a call to an untiring effort.”*…
Diagram of U.S. governance, 1862 [source and larger version]
The Roman Empire, the Iroquois Confederacy, and the United States of America are human inventions as surely as airplanes, computers, and contraception are. Technology is how we do things, and political institutions are how we collaborate at scale. Government is an immensely powerful innovation through which we take collective action.
Just like any other technology, governments open up new realms of opportunity. These opportunities are morally neutral: humans have leveraged political institutions to provide public eduction and to murder ethnic minorities. Specific features like explicit protections for human rights and civil liberties are designed to help mitigate certain downside risks.
Like any tool, systems of governance require maintenance to keep working. We expect regular software updates, but forget that governance is also in constant flux, and begins to fail when it falls out of sync with the culture. Without preventative maintenance, pressure builds like tectonic forces along a fault line until a new order snaps into place, often violently…
Widespread adoption renders technology invisible, its ubiquity revealed only when it breaks. That’s why science fiction plots so often hinge on systems breaking, and explains Wired Senior Maverick Kevin Kelly’s approach to futurism: “I’m looking for the places where technology is abused, misused, or unsupervised in order to get a glimpse of its natural inherent leanings. Where the edges go, the center follows later.”
If you’re worried about the demise of democracy because you see how the system is being abused, congratulations! You have just discovered a way to make democracy stronger. Ask any programmer: Nothing clarifies software development like a major bug report. Follow that edge. Sharpen, blunt, or redirect it as necessary. The center will follow…
Critically-acclaimed novelist and essayist Eliot Peper (@eliotpeper) argues for regular maintenance and upgrades: “Government is a technology, so fix it like one.”
* John F. Kennedy
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As we undertake an upgrade, we might spare a thought for Marcus Tullius Cicero; he died on this date in 43 BCE. A Roman philosopher, politician, lawyer, political theorist, consul and constitutionalist, Cicero was one of Rome’s greatest orators and prose stylists. His influence on the Latin language was immense: it has been said that subsequent prose was either a reaction against or a return to his style, not only in Latin but also (after Petrarch’s rediscovery of Cicero’s work) in European languages up to the 19th century.
A champion of Republican government in Rome, he spoke against the second Catilinarian conspiracy, against Julius Caesar, then– even more eloquently– against Mark Antony. He was executed in 43 BCE (his head and hands were amputated and displayed to the public) for his Philippics, a series of speeches attacking Antony and calling (again) for a restoration of the Republic. Sic semper prōtestor?
“It is not enough for code to work”*…
It’s been said that software is “eating the world.” More and more, critical systems that were once controlled mechanically, or by people, are coming to depend on code. This was perhaps never clearer than in the summer of 2015, when on a single day, United Airlines grounded its fleet because of a problem with its departure-management system; trading was suspended on the New York Stock Exchange after an upgrade; the front page of The Wall Street Journal’s website crashed; and Seattle’s 911 system went down again, this time because a different router failed. The simultaneous failure of so many software systems smelled at first of a coordinated cyberattack. Almost more frightening was the realization, late in the day, that it was just a coincidence…
Our standard framework for thinking about engineering failures—reflected, for instance, in regulations for medical devices—was developed shortly after World War II, before the advent of software, for electromechanical systems. The idea was that you make something reliable by making its parts reliable (say, you build your engine to withstand 40,000 takeoff-and-landing cycles) and by planning for the breakdown of those parts (you have two engines). But software doesn’t break… Software failures are failures of understanding, and of imagination…
Invisible– but all too real and painful– problems, and the attempts to make them visible: “The Coming Software Apocalypse.”
* Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
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As we Code for America, we might recall that it was on this date in 1983 that Microsoft released its first software application, Microsoft Word 1.0. For use with MS-DOS compatible systems, Word was the first word processing software to make extensive use of a computer mouse. (Not coincidentally, Microsoft had released a computer mouse for IBM-compatible PCs earlier in the year.) A free demo version of Word was included with the current edition of PC World— the first time a floppy disk was included with a magazine.
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