“When Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified. But Dennis had a bigger effect, and the public doesn’t even know who he is,” says Rob Pike, the programming legend and current Googler who spent 20 years working across the hall from Ritchie at the famed Bell Labs.
On Wednesday evening, with a post to Google+, Pike announced that Ritchie had died at his home in New Jersey over the weekend after a long illness, and though the response from hardcore techies was immense, the collective eulogy from the web at large doesn’t quite do justice to Ritchie’s sweeping influence on the modern world. Dennis Ritchie is the father of the C programming language, and with fellow Bell Labs researcher Ken Thompson, he used C to build UNIX, the operating system that so much of the world is built on — including the Apple empire overseen by Steve Jobs.
“Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX,” Pike tells Wired. “The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel — that pretty much the entire Internet runs on — is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they’re not, they’re written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. And all of the network hardware running these programs I can almost guarantee were written in C.
“It’s really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did.”
via Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.
Stigliz Open Economic Forum at Occupy WallStreet!
This is a little old.
I’m a big fan of Joseph Stiglitz work, as an economist and as an economics commentator/activist.
This touched a cord.
“There are too many regulations against democracy and not enough regulation to stop wallstreet.”
Rethrick Construction
And this is the essential broader point–as a programmer you must have a series of wins, every single day. It is the Deus Ex Machina of hacker success. It is what makes you eager for the next feature, and the next after that. And a large team is poison to small wins. The nature of large teams is such that even when you do have wins, they come after long, tiresome and disproportionately many hurdles. And this takes all the wind out of them. Often when I shipped a feature it felt more like relief than euphoria.
via Rethrick Construction.
Haven’t had wins lately. Probably why lately work wise I’ve been down a lot.
Phil Pride :: You Should Grab This New Google Plus Sharing Bookmarklet, It is Oh So Easy
Pinoy-Canadian web developer AJ Batac put together a drop dead simple javascript bookmarklet today that makes it easy to share any webpage you’re visiting in Google Plus, along with a comment. The way it works is that your account publicly +1’s the page, then gives you the option to share it with whatever Circles you choose.
via You Should Grab This New Google Plus Sharing Bookmarklet, It is Oh So Easy.
Too many days saying no…..
Too many days saying no…..
Quote :: Art should be an act of every individual willing to say something new and that which is not quite familiar. ::Maya Lin – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
According to Maya Lin, art should be an act of every individual willing to say something new and that which is not quite familiar.[5] When a project comes her way, she tries to “understand the definition (of the site) in a verbal before finding the form. To understand what a piece is conceptually and what its nature should be even before visiting the site”.[5]
via Maya Lin – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
I’d like to rephrase this as to live should be the act of every individual willing to do something new and is not quite familiar.
Musings 2011 10 12
I’ve been thinking of making a change for about 2 weeks already. (About the same time I’ve been arriving at work by 7am). The two things are different facets of the same thing.
Like a lot of things in this world, if you look then you’ll probably find something. If you try to find flaws in something you will most definitely find it. If you try to find reasons to leave then you will most definitely find it.
More to follow.
Here’s to the crazy ones
http://www.gapingvoidgallery.com/gallerycubegrenades-inmemoriamstevejobs-p-1959.html
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. – Apple Inc.
RIP Steve! You Stayed Hungry, You Stayed Foolish!
rePost::To Cure the Economy – Joseph E. Stiglitz – Project Syndicate
The prescription for what ails the global economy follows directly from the diagnosis: strong government expenditures, aimed at facilitating restructuring, promoting energy conservation, and reducing inequality, and a reform of the global financial system that creates an alternative to the buildup of reserves.
via To Cure the Economy – Joseph E. Stiglitz – Project Syndicate.