Skip to main content

(Insert Your Encryption Key Here)

I'm not going to post The Number, but I'm going to talk about it.

What another big shouting match the interwebs have found themselves in. Is it wrong to post The Number on public sites? I don't think so. Anyone who can use it already has to write software that the regular Joe will grab. The Number is just a political/social status symbol now. Publishing is the The Number is the anti-crypto1 parallel to the eye-liner high schooler shopping at Hot Topic. The point is making the point, more than what point exactly is being made.

So did the lawyers overreact? Of course they did, and consulting their clients before making moves on their behalf might be a decent idea. Maybe someone at the companies would actually realize the PR mess they might be stepping into. Maybe someone would say "Is the new technology stable enough to shake up our customers, yet?" Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are a techy's toy at this point, alongside wealthy status symbol usage. So, the large portion of the consumers who even use the technology are precisely those who know of and care about this story. When your ratio of Geek to Joe is that high on the Geek side, you need to act a little differently. Joe didn't even notice.

We sure noticed. Some of us noticed too much. I wish Joe noticed more.

Does anyone else mentally picture the AACSLA as Gollum and the The Number has their precious?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Software Job Transition Strategies?

I’ve been spending a good deal of the last two days preparing mentally for starting a whole new challenge as a developer. New things aren’t new to me, but this is different and big enough really call for some Deep Thoughts ™. For one thing, I’ve made a big move from the world of Python web development to totally other Python work and while web development has never been the only thing I do, it has been the only work that paid the bills. That transition isn’t one that bothers me or daunts me, though. Instead, I’m thinking about transitioning to the scope of the work I’m getting into. For a long time, I juggled multiple clients and client projects every day, so no single project usually took up most of my time. Every developer juggles time through the day, but exactly how that works in each company and on each project varies a lot. I was looking for a place that I could really focus in a way that I haven’t for a long time. I think I found that, but now I have to deal with the consequen...
Post a Comment
Read more

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...
1 comment
Read more

The Snake Pit is About to Burst

The signs are all over the place. I can count at least five implementations of Python today: CPython, CL-Python, Jython, IronPython, and PyPy. The use of the language is sky rocketting and set to grab real mind-share as the hype over Ruby subsides. Things are looking good for a favorite green snake and british comedy troop reference, aren't they? Trouble is on the horizon in the very ingredients that could push us into true success. Our community and our very language is in danger of segregation, unless we all do something about it and learn to get along. One of the most visible dangers (to me) is being ignored for various political, cultural, and non-technical reasons. IronPython's users are increasingly pushing IronPython-only recipes, libraries, and tutorials. No one is talking about the transition of the alternative implemenations to CPython 3.0 compatability. To make matters worse, we still can not define the language without refering to an implementation. This is very un...
11 comments
Read more