AK
World Island Kybernetik
Commodity Software Engineering
|
 The Origins
World Island Kybernetik/North American Kybernetik is my dba. 'Cybernetics' was coined by Norbert Wiener in his book of the same name[1]. The name style first occured to
me circa 1981 XE, was U.S. incorporated in '91.
XASP™, XSQL™ and XQMS™ are designations we've used for some years (cf: X-Projects). For the record this was after a summer course in classical greek at Stanford, and I distinctly remember American Cyanamid as being a partial inspiration for some reason. In 2007 XE, 'World Island' replaced 'North American' as the English dba.
Commodity
 oftware Engineering
Manifesto (CSM)
The original and "long-standing" policy
statement form, formulated circa 1997..
.
Excellence in programming for specific corporate interests in
wage labor situations has it's counterpart in the development of generic
software suitable for commercial uses and realizing the current state of the art
and science of computing, what I call "commodity software
engineering".
"State of the Art" for me refers to the current
body of public knowledge contained in recognized publications of computer
science and practice such as those published by the ACM and other high caliber
professional organizations and in projects implementing same, not in what it is
currently being pushed by various commercial interests. Finding a highly
practical synthesis of work done in this generally non-commercial arena with the
aforementioned corporate interests can improve both and result in truly superior
information technology. Realizing this synthesis is the goal and charter of
American Kybernetik.
A license to any products developed by juan@acm.org is implicitly granted
to all fully paid buyers of significant amounts of my labor, at no additional charge.
The form of the product to which the buyer is entitled is the same as the one
generally offered to the public and may be subject to third party licensing
constraints. The buyer of my consulting services is normally granted a license
to all future versions as well, but this is not implicit nor is any service.
Buyer means a Principal, an end-consumer, not a middleman or agent. All other
rights and priviledges to commodity software developed by American Kybernetik
are reserved.
 The Odyssey
...
... of
Wage Labor Programming Situations and Speculations about Alternative
Organizations of Commercial Software Development .
[1] Subtitled "Control and Communication in the
Animal and the Machine"
From a Unix QOTD:
Norbert Weiner was the subject of many dotty professor stories. Weiner was,
in fact, very absent minded. The following story is told about him: when they
moved from Cambridge to Newton his wife, knowing that he would be absolutely
useless on the move, packed him off to MIT while she directed the move. Since
she was certain that he would forget that they had moved and where they had
moved to, she wrote down the new address on a piece of paper, and gave it to
him. Naturally, in the course of the day, an insight occurred to him. He reached
in his pocket, found a piece of paper on which he furiously scribbled some
notes, thought it over, decided there was a fallacy in his idea, and threw the
piece of paper away. At the end of the day he went home (to the old address in
Cambridge, of course). When he got there he realized that they had moved, that
he had no idea where they had moved to, and that the piece of paper with the
address was long gone. Fortunately inspiration struck. There was a young girl on
the street and he conceived the idea of asking her where he had moved to,
saying, "Excuse me, perhaps you know me. I'm Norbert Weiner and we've just
moved. Would you know where we've moved to?" To which the young girl replied,
"Yes, Daddy, Mommy thought you would forget." The capper to the story is that I
asked his daughter (the girl in the story) about the truth of the story, many
years later. She said that it wasn't quite true -- that he never forgot who his
children were! The rest of it, however, was pretty close to what actually
happened...
-- Richard
Harter
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Other Users
|
Other domain users:
no users logged in
|
|
|
workspace info
|
9 Vintage, 4708 公元
Thu 08:57:39 BSTNot in workspace
|
|
|
