Hardware: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.
— Jeff Pesis
Alphabetization is a lazy designer’s out — it tells me that the design team isn’t interested in finding out what users are really doing on the site.
Developers can do their work without designers, put it out there, and the end result is that it will be, particularly to the eyes of designers, poorly designed. For the purposes of the developer, the poorly designed aspect may not be all that important, for any number of reasons. But for the designer, this becomes critical.
And the converse isn’t true. The designer can’t go out there and make improvements to the codebase without the help of the developer. Design isn’t as easy to abstract and make into reusable components the way code can. Designers, in general, have less to contribute not because they do less, but because the volume of work that designers do isn’t reusable. There’s no point to contributing non-reusable work. That isn’t what open source does.
So, let’s imagine how [the September 11th attacks] could have been worse for example. Suppose that on September 11, Al-Qaeda had bombed the White House and killed the President, instituted a murderous, brutal regime which killed maybe 50,000 to 100,000 people and tortured about 700,000, set up a major international terrorist center in Washington, which was overthrowing governments all over the world, and installing brutal vicious neo-Nazi dictatorships, assassinating people. Suppose he called in a bunch of economists, let’s call them the ‘Kandahar Boys’ to run the American economy, who within a couple of years had driven the economy into one of the worst collapses of its history.
Suppose this had happened. That would have been worse than 9/11, right? But it did happen. And it happened on 9/11. That happened on September 11, 1973 in Chile. The only thing you have to change is this per capita equivalence, which is the right way to look at it. Well, did that change the world? Yeah, it did but not from our point of view, in fact, who even knows about it? Incidentally, just to finish, because we [the U.S.] were responsible for that one.
— Noam Chomsky
