Today in Media
“A spider’s web”
Nicholas Carr: “Most of the major advances in computing and networking, from the invention of the punch-card tabulator in the 1880s to the present, have been spurred not by a desire to liberate the masses but by a need for greater control on the part of commercial and governmental bureaucrats, often ones associated with military operations and national defense.”
“Tech Journalism at the Crossroads”
Cranky Geeks episode 97 was worthy of an archival download instead of just a temporal stream. The geeks were actually cranky on this one…
“Acting White”
Roland G. Fryer: “Armed with an objective measure of social status, I could examine more systematically whether or not the ethnographers were correct in identifying a distinctive acting-white phenomenon within African American communities. Do high-achieving minority students have fewer, less-popular friends than lower-achieving peers? How does this compare with the experience of white students?”
“Size Is The Enemy”
Jeff Atwood: “One of the most fundamental and truly effective pieces of advice you can give a software development team—any software development team—is to write less code, by any means necessary.” However, people who proudly consider themselves “average Americans” are still impressed by the mystique of IBM. It was IBM that made famous the KLOC culture (measuring the prestige of software per thousand lines of source code).
The IBM culture descends from European culture. The architecture of the technical historical root of Europe can be characterized by the flying buttress. It should not be difficult to find people of all colors the world over who find flying buttresses beautiful. These people must therefore be impressed by complexity for the sake of complexity, based on ignorance of exactly how much load a structure can hold. A future form of Haskell should change all of this…