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As Pragmatic Programmers, our base material isn't wood or iron, it's knowledge. We gather requirements as knowledge, and then express that knowledge in our designs, implementations, tests, and documents. And we believe that the best format for storing knowledge persistently is plain text. With plain text, we give…
What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist…
Assuming good faith is a fundamental principle on Wikipedia. It is the assumption that editors' edits and comments are made in good faith. Most people try to help the project, not hurt it. If this were false, a project like Wikipedia would be doomed from the beginning. ...When doubt is cast on good faith, continue to…
Assume good faith. Treat others as you would have them treat you--even if they are new. We were all new once. ...raw text may be ambiguous and often seems ruder than the same words coming from a person standing in front of you...Be careful of how you interpret what you read: what you understand might not be what the…
"No," sighs Violent J. "I figured most people would say, 'Wow, I didn't know Insane Clown Posse could be deep like that.' But instead it's, 'ICP said a giraffe is a miracle. Ha ha ha! What a bunch of idiots.'" He pauses, then adds defiantly, "A giraffe is a fucking miracle. It has a dinosaur-like neck. It's yellow…
Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) internet customers lost access to Fox.com and Fox programming on Hulu for a time Saturday afternoon--the result of a misguided effort on News Corp.'s part to cut off online viewing as an alternative in its standoff with the cable operator over retrans fees. Fox stations in NYC, Philadelphia and…
We are beholden to countless Internet fantasies: It's quicker than the speed fo ligth; it appears and dissolves at whim; it's guarded by big strapping men friendly to our own interests and hostile to the interests of others; it's magical, evanescent, as portable as our own bodies and imaginations; it looks like a…
We need suppose no linguistic impediments to intercourse. The whole world will surely have a common language, that is quite elementarily Utopian, and since we are free of the trammels of convincing story-telling, we may suppose that language to be sufficiently our own to understand. Indeed, should we be in Utopia at…
In space and time the pervading Will to Live sustains for evermore a perpetuity of aggressions. The fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life, and all our Utopias no more than schemes for bettering that interplay.
Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University
For the globe as a whole, the ocean is the great regulator, the great stabilizer of temperatures. It has been described as 'a savings bank for solar energy, receiving deposits in seasons of excessive insolation and paying them back in seasons of want.' Without the ocean, our world would be visited by unthinkably harsh…
The divers of ancient times who carried oil in their mouths to release beneath the surface when rough water made their work difficult were applying what every seaman today knows--that oil appears to have a calming effect on the free waves of the open ocean. Instructions for the use of oil in emergencies at sea are…
Why do we choose to approach the most cutting-edge computer technologies of our brave new world using the language and concepts of cavemen? We talk of loading data "up" to somewhere--but where do we mean? Heaven? We transfer data via ethernet cables as if data were "ethereal." Developers of tomorrow's computers talk…
When people first sit down to design and architecture or write a program, things tend to be linear. That's the way most people think--do this and then always do that. But thinking this way leads to temporal coupling: coupling in time. Method A must always be called before method B; only one report can be run at a…
The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing the early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all the boundaries between men--nationality, race, religion, wealth--were rendered invisible and irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo…
The new industrial revolution which is taking place now consists primarily in replacing human judgement and discrimination at low levels by the discrimination of the machine. The machine appears now, not as a source of power, but as a source of control and a source of communication. We communicate with the machine and…