Some notes from around the edges:

As a former long-time Unix Systems Admin, I would say the 17 pts in the “Unix Philosophy”, while they were not followed as often as they were celebrated, Unix-types always had them in mind. Often the most used Unix applications did not follow the principles too much (e.g. Bind, Sendmail) though over time they got closer to the ideal.

Bloom's Global Mind was a very interesting book. His writing often push me around mentally and make me re-evaluate things. I read it about 2 months ago. I have queued it to read again in a few months. Years ago I read his The Lucifer Principle and I have been meaning to do so again.

By coincidence, I had read God's Debris about 2 months ago (right after Global Brain). It really pushed my brain around also. I need to read it again in about 6 months. I did not know the background in the ideas and I will look into those.

I never made the connection between Unix philosophy and evolutionary strength. I always just thought of it as an efficiency issue.

In my IT career I always try be efficiency/effectiveness driven (think personal IT Kaizen). I always described it a “lazy philosophy”:
1) Automate (don't do mundane tasks more then once);
2) Re-use (don't keep re-inventing the wheel);
3) Improve (spend time now to get better, to save time and rework over the long term);
4) Clarity (of procedures/code/documentation/configuration – assume you will need to so something 6 months from now when you don't remember anything);
5) Close and Move-on (finish the task or project fully and move on).

“Even if you aren't a bearded Unix administrator, “

Shades of Scott Adams !

Eunuchs in the Ottoman Empire and Imperial China could be rather ruthless and domineering on occasion. Or perhaps they were simply more effective at gathering power because they weren't as -ah- distracted as their unmarred competitors in the hierarchy

Scott Adams is a first-rate author. “God's Debris” stays with me [1] — and I just found out by reading its wikipedia page that it's based on analogical thinking and Hindu philosophy (so you may enjoy it). Likewise, his spekticism towards “skeptics” (near the end of The Dilbert Principle) [2] is import reading.

As far as eunuchs — the “practice makes perfect” bent of my seminar on creativity [3] would imply that by giving up romance, one has more time to purposefully practice other interpersonal skills. Likes, by demonstrating extreme cooperativeness with the existing regime, one is given more authority to compete for the group in other ways.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God's_Debris
[2] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0887308589?v=glance
[3] http://www.tdaxp.com/unl_creativity_and_expertise/

Thanks for the fixed link! I updated it in my comment, too.

I agree with your common about common unix application. The evolutionary process seems to take advantage of entropy, breaking up large products and running from their. For instance (while the are both cross platform), both OpenOffice and Mozilla started as huge, integrated, “do everything” products. Yet, both have been torn apart into component parts (Firefox, Thunderbird, etc for Mozilla, the various “projects” for OOO [1], etc). This allows things that would have been impossible before, such as OOo's fileformat, OpenDocument — why may become the standard file format of Google!

One question: how practical is “close and move-on”? In my experience a long process of maintenance is needed for anything big & new. After the Leviathan of code-writing, the SysAdmin of Phase IV implementation….

[1] http://projects.openoffice.org/accepted.html
[2] http://platformwars.blogspot.com/2006/03/writely-microsofts-pearl-harbor.html

There are system development methodologies that take an evalutionary approach: Extreme Programming, and Scrum among others. They allow a big monolith project to broken down into smaller iterations. Also, work on it can become more interchangeable. These methods themselves are being refined over time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Programming
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCRUM

http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2005/07/20/dreaming-5th-generation-war.html

Check it out — it discusses iterative programming and the future of war