The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling
May 24, 2007Some thoughts after the reading
When we are talking or thinking about the Internet and everything concerning to that, we can’t ignore the fact that Internet did not born on the empty place. More accurate would name and accuse the telephone and its “father”, Mr. Alexander Graham Bell on this situation we are living in - era of information.
With a bit more than a hundred years, changing an information has gone more faster, reliable, cheaper, wide spreaded, and complexed. At the moment we are able to make free of charge phone calls all over the world, calls can last for hours without dropping down and we can call to or friends, no matter where we are. That’s fantastic as long there is no need to explore inside to those technologies. Why?
Approximately 100 years of the invention of the first phone, almost everything has gone to the level of software. Although the software is created and controlled by the humans, they are not require physical maintenance. Software update will be done regularly (or sometimes not so regularly) and that’s it. But let’s face it, in software development process it is much easier to make mistakes than making a cable connection between two analog telephone. One example is mentioned in the Hacker Crackdown as well: on January 15, 1990, AT&T’s long-distance telephone switching system crashed. Reason was hiding itself in the piece of software and it wasn’t physical. And the backup system didn’t work as well as it supposed to too.
My point is, that for ordinary user, systems are so complexed and getting more and more towards to mathematical world and further from the physical world. In the popular TV show “Saved by the Bell” we can see how physical world controls over the mathematical world (Slater vs. Screetch). If there would be “Saved by the Bell 2007″ we could see, how Screech is the most popular character in the show and everyone is teasing poor Slater over and over again. And going a bit further, we can imagine how those big-headed aliens (that we are seeing in the movies and reading about from the computers) are nothing more than humans, who are leaving their needs for physical world and instead of it are collecting knowledge to their brain as much they can.
Men Who Use Computers Are The New Sex Symbols Of The `90s
by Scott Adams (Dilbert comics)
http://interweavers.com/brett/humor/scott-adams.html
Comment by Ivo — May 25, 2007 @ 8:14 am