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.
Dancing with My Computer
This is Chapter 15 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/.
I write for a living -- painfully, line by line, word by word, endlessly revising under an intense compulsion until finally, by clarifying the words on paper, I succeed in clarifying my own thoughts. And it's true, some of the revising does occur on paper. But I quickly enter the edits on my computer, which is the primary venue for this excruciating “trial by composition.” I can scarcely imagine producing a lengthy manuscript on an old-fashioned typewriter -- every time my revisions got too thick on the pages, I'd have to retype the entire thing. With a computer, I simply enter the changes and print out a fresh copy of the whole. There's something reassuring about this prodigal issuance of clean drafts. After all, scribbling edits on top of edits on top of edits quickly becomes demoralizing -- not to mention illegible.
You might ask, however, whether by now I'd have gained a more disciplined mind if my writing tools were simpler. I might have less editing to do. Necessity would constrain me to think carefully first, and only then commit the words to paper. My thought ...
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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.Julian F.
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.
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.Amir M.
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.