artlogic

Long term laziness and short term laziness aren't the same thing. Good programmers are willing to sacrifice in the short term (work really hard) to be lazy in the long term (have the computer work really hard for them). Like learning Emacs or VIM - you work hard in the short term to work less in the long term. Like almost all things in life, having a long term view of things makes short term sacrifices seem less painful.

I have seen a great deal of wiki-phobia, even among so called techies. No matter how many wikis I deploy, this inevitably occurs. Here's my take on the problem:

- Wikis require a heroic effort to keep organized. Most people, when faced with creating a new category, or even a new page would rather send an e-mail and forget it. The fact that you have to not only post something, but also decide where it belongs makes the job of posting feel much harder. "You mean I have to categorize my content before I post?"

- Wikis require more cognitive effort on the part of the poster. With e-mail or a message board, you can essentially dump your brain and hit send. With a wiki, you have to integrate your post, not only into the organization, as I mentioned above, but also into an existing post(s). "You mean I have to read and understand other content before I post?"

- Most wiki markup is based on the ideas behind the semantic web and should remain readable and understandable even in markup mode - unfortunately, people don't like to cede control of the way their document looks. I have seen non-techies spend hours jumping through HTML/WYSIWYG hoops simply to achieve a particular look - not realizing the nightmare of editing such a page (think word generated HTML pasted into the page). "You mean I have to sacrifice my format before I post?"

- Finally most wiki software doesn't have a easy to use e-mail notification system. Many times you have to manually "watch" a page instead of just watching the whole wiki or a whole category. When you do get an update e-mail - you have to actually go to the wiki - no hitting reply - this again interrupts cognitive flow for a lot of folks. "You mean I have to keep track of all the changes myself?"

I love wikis, and certainly think that they can increase productivity - but they require a greater cognitive effort on the part of the poster, and a lot of folks are unable to make the short term sacrifices to achieve the long term gain a wiki can offer.

Actually The Plague (the bad guy) was just trying to determine how much of the "garbage file" they had - how much they knew... I have to admit that the movie sort of is a guilty pleasure...

Sneakers may be corny - but it's actually based on some serious math. Essentially one of the characters has developed a way to solve a prime factorization in what appears to be constant time (i.e. O(1)). Once you do that - well that's the end of basically all public key cryptography based on the RSA algorithm (pretty much everything in common use). Much more realistic than say, Hackers.

Anyone else wondering if the mass exodus from Pownce had something to do with this? I am a former Powncer and strongly considered Posterous as a replacement.

I actively play guitar and electric bass - I fool around on banjo, mandolin, and drums. I'm also currently learning to play cello. I find that playing/writing music often times gets me through a tough coding problem more quickly than thinking about it directly. I'm also likely one of those people who Knuth mentioned as I have pretty serious interests in the mathematics behind computation.

Took me about an hour or so using only logical reasoning - no guessing.