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I agree that we regularly fail to learn from history. However, it's worth recognizing that trying to learn from history can be incredibly challenging. There's a
by TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
I agree that we regularly fail to learn from history. However, it's worth recognizing that trying to learn from history can be incredibly challenging. There's a mountains of research to filter through. Sometimes you discover a relevant document, only to find out it's not readily available or that you have to pay an exorbitant amount of money for access. You might pay a lot of money for something that doesn't even end up being useful to your problem. When there have been multiple attempts at solving the problem, each with mixed results, how do you actually identify the good parts from the bad ones?
A lot of tech knowledge isn't easily discoverable. Heck, sometimes things don't even make sense without understanding their historical background. The filesystem layout in the unixes is a great example, on my system I have: /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin.
- komali2 9y agoA good example - I have no idea why unix filesystems are like that, and after some idle googling I still don't know. Can't even figure out where to start to find the history of those decisions. Certainly am finding what kind of stuff goes where.
- nomel 9y agoSome old Unix devs/users ran out of disk space, so they mounted more disk to those points. This caused boot problems since some tools (like mount) needed to be available. All of that together, along with people blindly following convention, and you have the mess of the unix filesystem. Yep... [1] [1] http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074...
- komali2 9y agooh my god, that's awful