“For any given technology, there will exist at least one point in time in which people are simultaneously not trusting it for being too new and unproven, and other people are depending on it in production.”

( — me )

Every decision involves a cost/benefit analysis. Sometimes they are formal; often they …

The resiliency of a system is proven by its behavior in an emergency.

The design of a system is proven by its daily usability.

I collect pocket knives. It’s rare for me to be dressed and not have a knife in my pocket. Knives are useful tools. I usually find a use for one three or a dozen times a day.

Modern production knife makers (the sort of designer/producer/ manufacturer who turns …

Ken MacLeod writes science fiction. His job to write stories that entertain us while, perhaps, presenting some interesting ideas. He doesn’t have to be a prognosticator. Nobody really thinks that the future of humanity will be to separate into fast-thinking, fast-evolving AIs in Jovian orbit versus nanotech-equipped paranoid biological …

“Great question” means “I have a prepared answer.”

“Good question” means “I have an ambivalent answer.”

“Interesting question” means “That’s controversial, and I may not want to commit.”

“What an interesting question”, though, means “I didn’t expect to be asked that and I have no idea.”

Let’s suppose you have a really good idea for a business.

Not just “we’re going to be an easy-to-use centralized middleman for a previously unorganized and possibly unrecognized market” which has been done enough times that half of your success will be in getting customers to recognize you …

We have a general problem in this country, and I think we could use a general solution to solve it.

Health care, Internet carriers (and the wired and wireless telecom which is a smaller part of it), electrical and water utilities, banks - possibly others — should not be for-profit corporations. They …

• The Last Good Man, Linda Nagata
• In Evil Times, Melinda Snodgrass
• The Scorpion Rules; The Swan Riders, Erin Bow
• Kris Longknife: Emissary, Mike Shepherd
• Kangaroo Too, Curtis Chen
• Final Girls, Mira Grant
• Down Among the Sticks and Bones, Seanan McGuire
• Nothing Left to Lose, Dan Wells
• To Fire Called, Nathan …

Suppose that you are unhappy with the way that one of your vendors does business. You are not a dominant customer; that is, you don’t account for so much of their sales that they are willing to change their policies for you. This is the normal situation.

Welcome to …

People are overwhelmed with email.

In response, they declare email bankruptcy — that means that they arbitrarily delete their inboxes and hope the problem will magically fix itself — or adopt strange methodologies.

Here is the one true method of dealing with email. It works. It requires some setup. It requires some …

Definitions:

• A policy is an organization’s stated objectives and methods for accomplishing a goal.

• Sustainable means a model of a system that easily fits into a person’s head and can be used as an accurate prediction of how another person accomplished a goal.

So a sustainable software policy …

I was about to ask the mutt-users mailing list a question, when it occurred to me that I should really google it first. Indeed, my question had been answered about 3 years previously. And it’s really useful.

# .n : limit to only threads with New messages macro index .n "l …

“Non-fiction” is an assertion of hope, not a statement of accuracy.

In farming, monoculture is the practice of raising a single crop over and over again. You can figure out exactly what fertilizers it needs, how much water, and predict your yield accurately, year after year.

Then, one year, a blight or a virus or a bacterium or a weevil comes …

I have a Sansa Clip+. It’s an MP3 player. Remember those?

Physically, it is about the size of a matchbox. Not the tiny model cars, which were always too big for their namesakes, but the actual give-away advertising matchboxes, made of sturdy cardboard with a friction strip on one …