Archive for the ‘ Software ’ Category

The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Invent It

Human Computer Interaction video – The Birth of HCI (select video 1.4) Here I am again, like a stuck record. If you know one thing about me, it is that I am very skeptical about the advantages of technology. It seems to me that technology (combined with our natural gullibility) has destroyed our world. But this [ READ MORE ]

The Flame

SECURELIST Duqu and Stuxnet raised the stakes in the cyber battles being fought in the Middle East – but now we’ve found what might be the most sophisticated cyber weapon yet unleashed. The ‘Flame’ cyber espionage worm came to the attention of our experts at Kaspersky Lab after the UN’s International Telecommunication Union came to us for [ READ MORE ]

Prototyping

Computer Human Interaction video (select lecture 1.2) This is a software development concept that has much wider applicability. Any new social endeavor (such as software) should be tried out first, and experimented with (or prototyped), before any serious implementations are attempted. I wish I could tell you that software developers have used this process successfully. But [ READ MORE ]

An Empty Black Box

This is what people have become. In software terms: an object whose operations and states are known – not completely yet, but since everyone is focused figuring out what remains to be figured out, the unknowns are becoming less and less important. Now that I have said that – in my opinion, quite a mouthful [ READ MORE ]

Loosely Coupled Components

I continue my explanation of how software has influenced people. This influence continues a process that began with civilization: we became like our technologies – or from their perspective: they become like us. Each influenced the other, until it became difficult to separate the two. Our fundamental technology, all along, has been the machine. And we have [ READ MORE ]

Modeling a Domain

This posting is about software – something I am determined to learn, but most are determined not to learn. Take your pick. The latest thing in software development are application frameworks - which describe the architecture of internet software – how it is put together. The one I am studying now is the Model/View/Controller (MVC) architecture. Everything is oriented toward the Domain the application [ READ MORE ]

Very Serious Bots

NY Times – Paul Krugman I had to look up the word bots myself: it is short for robot, a computer program that runs automatically. Krugman says: — But I do know that this is one of the most exquisitely refined examples of globollocks that I’ve ever seen. It’s as beautifully resistant to the intellect [ READ MORE ]

Abstraction of the Object

I am quoting again from The Condition of Man by Lewis Mumford, page 246. The text is accompanied by a series of paintings. I have chunked up the text into more paragraphs. — Interest in the external world was not confined to the scientist. What the physicist observed in terms of matter and motion, the [ READ MORE ]

Expensive Programmers and the Cheap Ones

This is a difference I learned early on when I worked as a programmer. I could crank out as much code as anyone, but I could see there were programmers with skills I could hardly conceive of. They may not have been much good as people, but as programmers they were in a different league. [ READ MORE ]

Googlenomics

Wired Magazine This is super-important, but most will probably not be able to understand it. Progress has left them in the dust, where they wonder what hit them. You want to advertise on the Net? Here is how it is done. You will have to roll up your pants, and even think a little, but [ READ MORE ]

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