Proliferation

[bill_sheehan]

Once upon a time, Jerry Pournelle was a regular columnist for Byte magazine. He is the author of Pournelle's Law - that the ideal distribution of computer resources was One CPU Per Person. This was in a time when my large office had a handful of IBM PC clones, and we had to share them. (For some strange reason, the one nearest my office crept

Comments

[gwendally]

I read, and am responding to, this blog post on my smartphone. But we are still unusual, the winners on the right side of the digital divide. Most people will never hear Siri's voice.

[bill_sheehan]

I'll bet they will. Oh, it might not be Siri, but they'll be hearing voices soon. Most mobile phones sold are now smartphones. The iPhone is a big seller, of course, but Samsung makes more phones than anybody. They run Android, which now has its own voice interface.

Tomorrow arrives faster than we think. This is not always a good thing, but I'll save my jeremiads for another day.

[peristaltor]

I'm not sure what to make of Pournelle's computer writing career, simply because he wrote such poor sci-fi (at least when Larry Niven wasn't involved). West of Honor? Gag me.

Then again, he did correct a common phonetic corruption. A slap-dash machine or organization is "jerry rigged," not jury rigged." Niven started using the proper term only after writing with Pournelle.

[bill_sheehan]

The original term is "jury-rigged," referring to a temporary mast and rigging structure ingeniously built of spare parts to replace an original destroyed in a storm or in enemy action back in the days of sail.

Jerry-built refers to cheap and shoddy construction, a different shade of meaning.

"Jerry-rigged" and "jury-built" are both questionable usages. Such is English, a promiscuous language born on the wrong side of the blanket.

[peristaltor]

Interesting. Niven, though, used "jury rigged" as the cheap and shoddy, and changed in later books to jerry-rigged after collaborating with, well, Jerry. It's quite a jarring change as you read through the books in order of publication.