Archive for the 'The Gap' Category
How compassion saved and broke the internet
March 19th, 2008Jon Postel, the late computer science guru pictured above, is widely credited with the following dictum:
Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
This has come to be known as Postel’s Law, and it’s not explicitly about how people should treat one another.
Instead, Dr. Postel was talking about the problem […]
E-mail: “But in reality, can it really work? Yes it can.”
July 23rd, 2007
Here’s a story from ‘89 about one of the first public demonstrations of the x.400 e-mail standard, which helped e-mail move across platforms. As with all old tech articles, the beauty is in the enthusiastic descriptions of what the new technology will bring.
[I]n a series of tests between Hughes Aircraft Company in Los Angeles, […]
Redesigning Earth.
June 10th, 2007One of the things we do as engineering psychologists is help predict the consequences of changes to existing systems, for example by creating Failure Modes and Effects Analyses (FMEA).
I thought I had pondered this kind of risk management on a very large scale until I heard NASA Administrator Michael Griffin’s comments about Global […]