Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

Jason Cohen – Yes, but who said they’d actually BUY the damn thing?: „In a big software project do you tackle the high-risk, ill-defined stuff first, or do you postpone that to the end? Obviously you address the unpredictable stuff first — most of the project risk is due to the unknown, so the earlier…

Kevin Kelly at Wired – Master Planner: Fred Brooks Shows How to Design Anything: „On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing. […] Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his…

Pretty Good Semantics

Paul Graham – The Top Idea in Your Mind: „I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I’d thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I’d go further: now I’d say it’s hard to do a really good job on…

Paul Graham – The Acceleration of Addictiveness: „One sense of „normal“ is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best. […] Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We’re all trying to…

Scott Adams – The Amazingness of Instant: „I’ve discovered that 90% of its usefulness comes from the fact that it’s speedy. Yesterday a fox walked by the window, and I was the only witness. Someone asked what type it was, and I was able to point to a picture on the iPad in less than…

Gartner RAS Core Research Note at Adobe.com – HTML5 and the Future of Adobe Flash [PDF]: „The root causes for a suboptimal user experience consist of lack of appropriate process and governance, and lack of a genuine commitment to a quality user experience. Such a commitment would lead organizations to adopt a user-centered, usability-oriented development…

Tim Bray – Forget the Defaults: „Seriously. I’ve learned a lot of programming languages over the years, and I’ve taken care never to learn the operator precedence rules in any of them. It’s easy to get them wrong and get bitten and why should I require that people reading my code learn those stupid rules.“

Phil Gyford – Finishability: „But those old-fashioned constraints of printing can also be a benefit. There’s something satisfying, predictable and achievable about a more-or-less fixed amount of stuff to read appearing on a regular schedule. For example, when faced with most news websites one of the reasons I don’t spend much time reading them is…

Clay Shirky at WSJ.com – Does the Internet Make You Smarter?: „We are living through a similar explosion of publishing capability today, where digital media link over a billion people into the same network. This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated…