Tag: digital culture

The Cultural Defeat of Microsoft

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Many people (by which I mean “many Windows users”) don’t realize the huge difference between “the Windows way of doing things” and, basically, everyone elses’ way, i.e: the POSIX world which comprises all of the Unices, Linux, BSD and even OS X.

Hugo Landau writes:

From the perspective of POSIX, Windows is “alien technology” […] Windows and POSIX are fundamentally different in many ways, and lead to further “cultural” differences in how software is developed on these platforms. Windows and POSIX, then, are two “cultures”, the technical differences of the core technology itself being only a small part of that.

Read the entire piece at: The Cultural Defeat of Microsoft

What is code? It’s not magic, just work

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It’s very likely that you already know about or even read the latest issue of Bloomberg, entirely dedicated to answer What is Code? — if you haven’t, you definitely should go read it.

The entire piece is informative and fun to read, and there’s probably something new for everyone reading it. My favourite highlight is:

Computing treats human language as an arbitrary set of symbols in sequences. It treats music, imagery and film that way, too.

It’s a good and healthy exercise to ponder what your computer is doing right now […]

Thinking this way will teach you two think about computers: one, there’s no magic no matter how much it looks like there is. There’s just work to make things look like magic. And two, its crazy in there.

Which reminded me something I said to a fresh group of designers on a HTML+CSS+Javascript crash course.