Sad news - the legendary Arthur C. Clarke has died. He'll be greatly missed; Clarke novels occupy a full shelf of my floor-to-ceiling bookcase, and Rendezvous With Rama stands proud as the finest sci-fi it has ever been my pleasure to read.
Aside from his very visible mastery of sci-fi, however, there is much to remember Clarke for. He is responsible for popularising the concept of geostationary orbit, which is very important for practical global telecommunications. When you watch the Olympics on TV this summer, you can thank Clarke for the fact that you haven't had to go to China to see it.
Perhaps best of all, though, is his now-infamous Third Law:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Clarke's Third Law has been quoted, referenced, and paraphrased copiously since he coined it, and it is almost axiomatic for many technologists. As a software engineer, I get a wry enjoyment from Gehm's Corollary, i.e. "any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced" - a sobering thought when confidently hacking away on the next big thing!
If your users don't think your software is magic, then you have room for improvement. I believe Clarke would have approved of that sentiment. R.I.P.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented."
True, as far as I've experienced. "What does this register bit do?" / "Uh, I'll have to look at the Verilog for it..."
[I must have read the book 2001 twenty times when I was young. Clarke's later works weren't as compelling, and I kind of wish they'd left Rama alone, but he'll be remembered for a long, long time.]
Let's not forget the other two.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
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