November 1995
Beginner
502 pages
11h 11m
English
Content preview from The Future Does Not Compute
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Things That Run by Themselves
This is Chapter 8 of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, by Stephen L. Talbott. Copyright 1995 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved. You may freely redistribute this chapter in its entirety for noncommercial purposes. For information about the author's online newsletter, NETFUTURE: Technology and Human Responsibility, see http://www.netfuture.org/.
The peer-to-peer connectivity we celebrate on the Net is not a recent invention. Within groups of restricted size -- small companies, intentional communities, old-fashioned neighborhoods -- it is common to find individual communicating freely with individual across the entire group.
As communities grow larger, however, the significance of peer-to-peer connectivity becomes uncertain. We cannot simply extrapolate from the small group. After all, the telephone gives us near-perfect connectivity across the entire country. But if we were all to begin calling each other, chaos would ensue. That is why structure is inevitably imposed: conventions and etiquette, social boundaries, personal interests, connection costs, privacy laws, time constraints -- innumerable factors lead to patterns of network use that look quite different from any naive ideal of peer-to-peer connectivity. Try reaching the CEO of your telephone company. (Or just try penetrating the computerized, automated answering system to reach a customer- service agent.)
The need, then, is to develop some sense for ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.