17.244 narratives and plagues

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk)
Date: Fri Sep 12 2003 - 01:39:07 EDT

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                   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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