My world on the web
So our systems are sociotechnical. What do you do about this? I think it’s clear that you start by investing in the social parts of the system. If you want to understand why your systems perform the way they do, it’s necessary to know how expertise is created and distributed amongst the people in your organization. The single best way to do this is to invest in incident analysis.
In the mid-late 1990s and into the early 2000s, you could purchase CD-ROM discs containing thousands of shareware apps, games, pictures, and otherwise. These CDs were gateways to numerous hours of cheap entertainment. Here’s a look back at their origins and impact.
TidalCycles (or ‘tidal’ for short) is free/open source software, that allows you to make patterns with code, whether live coding music at algoraves or composing in the studio.
via Chris Beckstrom
A discussion of the ways that large tech companies helped to define the evolution of computer typography. One battle made the CEO of Adobe really mad.
VCV Rack is an open-source virtual modular synthesizer.
In a lecture in 1997, Nathan Myhrvold, who was once Bill Gates’s chief technology officer, set out his Four Laws of Software. 1: software is like a gas – it expands to fill its container. 2: software grows until it is limited by Moore’s law. 3: software growth makes Moore’s law possible – people buy new hardware because the software requires it. And, finally, 4: software is only limited by human ambition and expectation.
I remember when software didn’t require an internet connection.
