Programming and coherence

I like taking on problems that are too difficult for me because it always gives a new way to deal with complexity. I don't think I always get a good result. I do learn how to learn though.

Yesterday I spent most of the day going over shell scripting. It is a continuous process and I have incorporated some of the basic methods and they serve me well. I learned UUoC which is probably a little elegant. I am able to "see" the underlying mechanism of the bash shell and this allows me to produce some faster and more complex shell scripts. I think that the adoption of Microsoft has set back the computer world by at least 20 years. It is obvious that it was a coherent effort on the part of Intel and Microsoft to work together to set this standard. Much attention has been placed on the M$ contribution to that monopoly, but I think Intel gained much more in that partnership. The Wintel steamroller was at one time a common expression.

The biggest problem with the growth of M$ is that it virtually stopped innovation in hardware. It requires a software that can run on many different platforms to allow hardware to innovate.

Good ideas have a way of supplanting bad eventually however, and as the technology becomes more elegant, there comes a point where all that effort is seen to be counterproductive. I realized this fact 10 years ago and it is difficult to transition from a silly simplistic OS to a complex and versatile OS like Linux. I struggle at it every day. It kind of makes me sad that when I was younger, I chose to take the big buck job at the expense of what I should have seen as a fools game.

A good example of flexibility and usability that cannot be achieved with W$ is the creation of self replicating hardware and the use of unusual and effective systems. The advent of a system which can replicate itself is another step in the exponential growth of technology. I know that corporations want everybody to buy from them and the fear is that if they don't make stuff, everything will fall apart. I saw a movie about the people who have lived by the Arctic circle for thousands of years and they have no money, no government, no military and very little structure to their society. Also they have little crime, no war, no war lords, in fact they seem to function vastly better than those who seem to depend on the society to feed them truth. The people who control the world do not want peace. They want continuous conflict, because this is where they derive their power. In the process, many evil things can be concealed by the fog of war.

The powers of this world are beginning to see the pressure of complexity consume them. It requires a peaceful and contemplative spirit to manage the complexity which exists today. Brute force does not solve a riddle. When you are lost in a maze of twisty little passages, you better hope you are an adventurer :)