Saturday, October 4, 2003

Bill Joy's interview with Fortune is full of thoughtful nuggets. Here are a few: Spam is a different matter. It is mainly the result of the Internet having no friction. As long as e-mail is free, you're going to get a lot of spam because there's no disincentive to send it. A simple thing like requiring every Internet service provider to charge for sending mail could be a limiting factor. [...]here's a simple way to find out if an operating system has been well designed. When you get an error message, go to the help system and look up the exact words in that message to see if there was enough of a concept of an architecture that they have a consistent vocabulary to talk about what's broken. So what does it mean to apply design to the choice of our future? I don't have a good answer for that. It's an existential question: If we don't choose, the choice will be made for us in a way we won't likely want. The Soviet Union collapsed not because of communism or central planning, but because of corrupt accounting. They couldn't organize the means of production because everybody was lying about everything. It was a game of fake numbers, and when you do that, you get crap for answers. 3:37:48 PM