Category Archives: software

Copy

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Software can be copied; hardware cannot.

— Me@2011.04.02

Software is what can be copied; hardware is what cannot.

— Me@2013-08-03

2013.08.03 Saturday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

Free Software 5

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自由軟體 5 | Consultant 2

Paying represents a recognition of value. Paying is a declaration of commitment.

Without enough payment, people in general will not commit enough time to fully utilize a product. 

— Me@2011.03.17

Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer.

— Richard Stallman

Free software does not have to be free. Free software does not have to be cheap.

Free Software Foundation sold each Emacs copy for 100 dollars.

— based on my memory of a Richard Stallman’s speech in Hong Kong

[The “$100” may be incorrect. But spirit of the whole paragraph is intact.]

— Me@2013.07.17

2013.07.19 Friday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

似水流年 2

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隨時間走過 你變了幾多?

– 李克勤 白紙鶴

1994-1997 理科學生
1997-1999 數學學生
1999-2002 工程學生
2002-2004 工程研究生

2005-2008 數學老師
2008-2010 物理學生
2010-2013 小作家
2013-

— Me@2008.09.07

— Me@2013.06.26

2013.06.26 Wednesday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK

Oceanographers

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In any intellectual field, one can reach greater heights by standing on the shoulders of others. But that is no longer generally allowed in the software field — you can only stand on the shoulders of the other people in your own company.

The associated psychosocial harm affects the spirit of scientific cooperation, which used to be so strong that scientists would cooperate even when their countries were at war. In this spirit, Japanese oceanographers abandoning their lab on an island in the Pacific carefully preserved their work for the invading U.S. Marines, and left a note asking them to take good care of it.

Conflict for profit has destroyed what international conflict spared. Nowadays scientists in many fields don’t publish enough in their papers to enable others to replicate the experiment. They publish only enough to let readers marvel at how much they were able to do. This is certainly true in computer science, where the source code for the programs reported on is usually secret.

— Why Software Should Be Free[1]

— Richard Stallman

[1] Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer. — Richard Stallman

2013.06.25 Tuesday ACHK

SICP, 3

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Just as every day thoughts are expressed in natural language, and formal deductions are expressed in mathematical language, methodological thoughts are expressed in programming languages. A programming language is a method for communicating methods, not just a means for getting a computer to perform operations – programs are written for people to read as much as they are written for machines to execute.

— Lisp: A language for stratified design

— Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman

— SICP distilled

— jao 

2013.05.31 Friday ACHK

Investment, not expense

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What really impresses me most about what Robert’s done is that he’s realized that by selling the outcome that most clients want to hear (higher conversion rates, more leads) instead of what designers tend to emphasize (clean design, HTML5 compliance, etc.) [H]e’s pitching himself as an investment, not an expense.

— bdunn 4 days ago

— Deleted my portfolio, made $30k in my first six months

— Hacker News

2013.05.28 Tuesday ACHK

Hacker-Centric Culture

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But startups can learn an important lesson from the second one. In the software business, you can’t afford not to have a hacker-centric culture.

Probably the most impressive commitment I’ve heard to having a hacker-centric culture came from Mark Zuckerberg, when he spoke at Startup School in 2007. He said that in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing.

— What Happened to Yahoo

— August 2010

— Paul Graham

2013.05.26 Sunday ACHK

Customers 2

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Customers Don’t Know What They Want. Stop Expecting Customers to Know What They Want. It’s just never going to happen. Get over it.

– The Iceberg Secret, Revealed

– Joel Spolsky

… ignore what customers ‘say’ and focus on what they ‘do’ with the product.

… it is extremely important to measure and understand how your customers interact with your product. That is the signal. What they say about your product, is mostly just noise.

— Don’t Listen To What Your Customers Say, Look At What They Do

—

2013.05.23 Thursday ACHK

Array indices

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Should array indices start at 0 or 1?

My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.

— Stan Kelly-Bootle

2013.05.21 Tuesday ACHK

The Internet

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心靈互聯網 3

I’d read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I’d begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the internet was “doing to me,” so I could fight back. But the internet isn’t an individual pursuit, it’s something we do with each other. The internet is where people are.

— I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet

— By Paul Miller on May 1, 2013 10:40 am

2013.05.06 Monday ACHK

Quantum Mechanics 3

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At the beginning, the author also says that quantum mechanics (the general postulates etc.) is “somewhere in between maths and physics in the hierarchy of scientific disciplines that continue with chemistry and biology”. It’s more physical than just maths and the ordinary probability theory in maths; but it’s less physical than particular physical theories. It’s an operating system on which particular physical models run as applications. I couldn’t agree more.

— Democritus on the QM operating system

— Lubos Motl

2013.05.02 Thursday ACHK

Hardware designers 3

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I worked with Mike for a couple of years on Newton. I had tremendous respect for his breadth of understanding of systems, from transistors and batteries all the way up to user interaction. He was a hardware designer who really understood software, too; in my experience, that’s rare.

— kabdib 2 days ago

— Hacker News

2013.04.24 Wednesday ACHK

The Killer Question

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And if the Labs leadership believes a researcher is too attached to an idea in the exploration phase, they’ll make sure that individual isn’t involved in the company’s founding.

Why? Because in Afeyan’s view, entrepreneurs who get attached become afraid to ask the “killer question” that will expose the flaw in their idea. At Labs, where the idea is to get to No as quickly as possible, that’s not OK.

— No Founders Required: How Flagship Starts Companies

— Walter Frick

2013.04.21 Sunday ACHK

The Great Server Farm

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It’s probably more appropriate to call it, as techie Ryan Singel quickly did, the Google Death Manager. The Death Manager lets you tell Google what to do with the data from all of your Google accounts, including most intimately, your Gmail messages, if your account goes inactive, presumably because you have gone to the great server farm in the sky. You can have the data simply deleted after a set period of inactivity or you can, will-style, hand it over to trusted contacts.

— Will You Use Google’s Death Manager To Let Loved Ones Read Your Email When You Die?

— Kashmir Hill, Forbes Staff

2013.04.14 Sunday ACHK