Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 244.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2003 06:31:15 +0100
From: lachance@origin.chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: Narratives and Plagues
Willard
In Humanist 17.240, Mr. Gray traces a narrative of contamination that
invokes image of the clsoure of a frontier:
<quote>
spring of do-it-yourself servers is
probably over.
[...]
bewailing this next step in the net's
arch from wilderness to goldtown to sheriff to ... silicon valley?
</quote>
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v17/0240.html
I wonder if cybernauts who have an appreciation of interoperability
and cross-platform behaviour are as likely to invoke the shrinking of the
wild and bemoan traffic congestion.
Is there not a cycle similar to that between hardware capacity and size of
software? More machines, more routes for traffic to get through a jam?
More machines of the same kind, more chances of more routes being jammed?
One could readily draw conclusions in favour of cyber-diversity of
operating systems. Rather than a recession of the wild.
At least that is one story that has been told in realiton to AIDS and
safe-sex practices by analogy could apply to the machine security.
BTW home users can often deploy patches more quickly than certain large
scale enterprises that need to do a lot of pretesting to ensure that the
patches do not cause compatability problems with mission critical
applications.
Small and distributed can still be beautiful. Lag or no lag.
-- Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
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