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A home online is about as essential as it gets. But we need to make that easier. Where are we heading to build this new web together? The post Our Online Homes Need Infastructure appeared first on The History of the Web.
The earliest work with selling things online was all about reaching a shopping public ready to log on and start. But along the way, they found a whole new audience for shopping, which changed the way we think about commerce on the web.. The post Expanding Access: The History of Ecommerce Part 1 appeared first on The History of the Web.
The breakthroughs of the web are often compared to the printing press. But could the former exist without the latter? The post Would the internet exist today if the printing press didn’t come before it? appeared first on The History of the Web.
Early computers faced unexpected failures, and that gave us graceful degradation. But on the web, we needed something different. We needed progressive enhancement. The post Progressive enhancement brings everyone in appeared first on The History of the Web.
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A large part of our civilisation rests on the shoulders of one medieval monk: Thomas Aquinas. Amid the turmoil of life, riddled with wickedness and pain, he would insist that our world is good. And all our success is built on this belief. Note: Before we start, let’s get one thing out of the way: Thomas Aquinas is clearly a Christian thinker, a Saint even. Yet he was also a brilliant philosopher. So even if you consider yourself agnostic or an atheist, stay with me, you will still enjoy his ideas. What is good? Thomas’ argument is rooted in Aristotle’s concept of goodness: Something is good if it fulfills its function. Aristotle had illustrated this idea with a knife. A knife is good to the extent that it cuts well. He made a distinction between an actual knife and its ideal function. That actual thing in your drawer is the existence of a knife. And its ideal function is its essence—what it means to be a knife: to cut well. So everything is separated into its existence and its ideal essence. And this is also true for humans: We have an ideal conception of what the essence of a human […] The post Thomas Aquinas — The world is divine! appeared first on Ralph Ammer.
My April Cools is out! Gaming Games for Non-Gamers is a 3,000 word essay on video games worth playing if you've never enjoyed a video game before. Patreon notes here. (April Cools is a project where we write genuine content on non-normal topics. You can see all the other April Cools posted so far here. There's still time to submit your own!) April Cools' Club
Everyone wants the software they work on to produce quality products, but what does that mean? In addition, how do you know when you have it? This is the longest single blog post I have ever written. I spent four decades writing software used by people (most of the server
The Ware for March 2025 is shown below. I was just taking this thing apart to see what went wrong, and thought it had some merit as a name that ware. But perhaps more interestingly, I was also experimenting with my cross-polarized imaging setup. This is a technique a friend of mine told me about […]
