Pretty much from our first encounter, Richard Stallman has been asking
me to translate free software and hacker ethos terminology into
Japanese. I have found some interesting solutions in classics.
To explain what a hacker is you first have to understand. Hacker is a
noun derived from the verb "hack." Hackers are good at dividing
problems into smaller parts. They are also good at producing terse
code. In the past, when memory was expensive and small, this was an
essential skill for programmers attempting anything substantial.
Nowadays, with DRAM measured in gigabytes and communication speed
in gigabits per second, this is not true anymore.
Or so it seemed, until the coronavirus came along.
I have been through some strange experiences recently. Certain web
pages take seconds to load. In some instances the communication fails
with a time-out. Pages that Google had ranked top in search result
lists last year are for some reason gone when the same search is
conducted.
I have a theory of what is going on at Google. The traffic load of
live video conferencing and video content download is putting a heavy
load on server and exchanges. As a result page fetch requests
occasionally fail and the relevant content is dropped from the search
results.
Perhaps some fellow list subscribers are going through similar
experiences. I advice any person in charge of maintaining a web server
to take a look.
I am thinking of how to inform ordinary computer users about this
issue. I welcome your opinions.
