Wednesday, March 09, 2005

US Infrastructure Crumbles This does not bode well for how historians will judge Bush. 7:54:08 AM     In the Beginning Was The Command Line In the Beginning Was the Command Line. This 1999 article captures a fascinating view of computing technology in the context of language and culture. Highly recommended reading. A quote from this article: "By using GUIs all the time we have insensibly bought into a premise that few people would have accepted if it were presented to them bluntly: namely, that hard things can be made easy, and complicated things simple, by putting the right interface on them. In order to understand how bizarre this is, imagine that book reviews were written according to the same values system that we apply to user interfaces: "The writing in this book is marvelously simple-minded and glib; the author glosses over complicated subjects and employs facile generalizations in almost every sentence. Readers rarely have to think, and are spared all of the difficulty and tedium typically involved in reading old-fashioned books." As long as we stick to simple operations like setting the clocks on our VCRs, this is not so bad. But as we try to do more ambitious things with our technologies, we inevitably run into the problem of Metaphor Shear." 7:37:42 AM

© Copyright 2005 Steve Land. Last update: 4/21/2005; 8:19:56 AM.