Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Living Software...

Here is something that I noticed that I am sure will unnerve a few people.

With the sources-based Linux that I am using, I see updates all the time... Buttons shifting, colors changing. Dynamic. My desktop is almost never the same two days in a row. The most stable thing is my desktop background... it has not changed in more than a year!

I remember not too long ago that software felt like it was cast in stone. Windows 95 was just that... sure, you could move your icons around on the desktop, but generally the thing stayed the way it was made, and any update is a major disruption.

These days, I pull updates at least once a week, and I see small, incremental changes all over the place as developers fine-tune the applications that have taken their fancy.

I'm starting to wonder what the next constant is... What are all these people coding to? Why does my computer still feel useful, even though it's changing all the time? It's like there is a deeper intuition going on, and that everyone subtly share it, even without knowing.

Or is it simply that humans are basically all made the same way, and that the place a developer puts a new button is just where I would look for it? Maybe we are all getting a sense of a computer mind....


;)

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