All systems have a cost associated with them, well, duh, yeah. So much
so obvious. I guess that can be said without dropping Shannon's name.
As I point out in my previous emails, the cost of the current system
can be ameliorated, if you want. You don't have to follow the herd;
the current system is flexible enough for you to adopt a more
cos-efficient path through the system. Think smart and your life in
the info-jungle can be easier than it is. Although this probably isnt
presented in a flowery enough language to qualify it as a
"philosophy".
The bit about freedom I can't parse; I think it's lacking in some
major structural elements. In my view, "freedom" in the computer
world, is a standard which anybody can implement, not just the Big
Iron companies. That is what is so successful about the intarweb. If
IBM or microsoft had designed the internet, then no one would be able
to build but IBM and it's buddies.
The corporate version of DNS was X500, the deceased competitor to DNS.
If X500 had made it to market saturation, you would have had address
constructs like:
cn=<<name>>, forename=<<name>>,address=<<etc >>,country="UK"
which may be a step up from the DNS form, but probably not much. In
any event, the committee-driven X500 process eventually collapsed
under it's own weight. The implementations were unwieldy, expensive,
designed for and by Big Iron, designed to keep out the small
operators. Instead, the least worse solution prevailed, as it usually
does, and our intarwebs world been defined by UNIX (nowadays LINUX)
administrators and architects. And by America. America still owns the
internet Root. If X500 had made the grade, a more globally equitable
situation would have become the norm. I think.
NT is a descendant of DEC/VMS. In the early eighties, MS poached a
whole bunch of developers from DEC. So the most dominant system by
numbers and users, is Microsoft as nearly all their systems share DNA
with DEC. Praise where praise is due. DEC/VMS was a helluva system in
the day, a real-time system no less, with proper sharing etc. Memory
sharing on a UNIX is still not as sharp as it should be. I guess DEC
is the most dominant surviving. Which probably comes as a surprise to
a lot of people.
Also, please do not confuse LINUX with UNIX; the two are entirely
different beasts. One was corporate-driven, the other isn't. UNIX died
mid-nineties.
Roger
On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 10:06 AM, Christopher C Jones
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Actually, what John Tranter is saying here is very interesting and
> (perhaps for some) worth carrying a little further. (Okay, I may be
> familiar with John's style of polemic and argument and consider it worth
> following up, but even this would be to miss the point.)
>
> This polemic cannot be approached front on or even back on, which would
> be to accept a foreshadowing or back-shadowing narrative flow, a flow
> which is laminar and as such multi-layered, smooth and offering the
> least resistance and hence optimal and least disturbing, which is to say
> tame, everyday and banal and not worthy of any thought other then a
> banal repeated stupidity.
>
> What is being objected to is a multiple redundancy of nine syllables and
> adding the dot after what amounts to a ten syllable redundant speech.
> One needs to go side ways on this to appreciate the force of the
> critique being offered as if as a free gift opposing itself to the lack
> of freedom being offered by a multiple which is redundant. Shannon
> understood in information theory that what is redundancy is noise and
> given that the address style of the internet is in keeping with the file
> structures of the only operating system to date, that is, UNIX, what is
> being said is that computer operating systems are noise against
> information. But, is not this to at least brush against some of the most
> essential elements of poetry? To go a little bit more along this twisted
> deviating track, is it not to say that computer code, and lets be honest
> here and admit that the dominant code is UNIX, despite the commercial
> rip off provided by Microsoft and Apple's version of BSD UNIX, is still
> UNIX and to add to this that UNIX itself is made up of multiple
> redundancy which is to say that open source and GNU is also so and as
> such a multiple lack of freedom (which RMS seems ignorant of, BTW)
>
> So sideways we go to say that what stands in the way of poetic freedom
> is word processor code. This may appear at first as a convoluted twisted
> argument... but certainly not in jest, however, I will have to leave it
> here as I really must cook myself a nutritious evening meal. However, it
> is the turbulence of JT's transitional plane, creating turbulence
> against flow, that needs attending. (And here we may find a triptych.)
>
>
>
> On Mon, 2008-09-29 at 10:43 +0100, John Tranter wrote:
>> What I object to is -- when you are talking to people -- the verbal
>> representation of double-yew-double-yew-double-yew at the front of every web
>> address. Why couldn't he have chosen "net" for example? One syllable instead
>> of nine, multiplied one billion times.
>>
>> In a document I read (on the "net") years ago, Tim Berners-Lee admitted that
>> he should have thought his way through that one, but he was a bit busy that
>> day and didn't really have the time to think it through, so
>> "double-yew-double-yew-double-yew" it has been ever since.
>>
>> PS: I think there's some good reason to use numeric codes for the
>> non-breaking-space character: ampersand-hash-160-semi-colon ( ), though
>> I can't remember exactly what it is.
>>
>> best
>>
>> John Tranter
>
--
My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
"I began to warm and chill
to objects and their fields"
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
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