I must admit, I think of webservers as hard-pressed servitors; "the
website is too busy to show the webpage" sounds to me like "give us a
break, guv, I'm up to my eyeballs". More plangent than arrogant,
although phrased in aspie-factualist style - I can imagine the person
who wrote the error message responding to a chugger on the
high-street, "my stack is full - I have at least three things I am
thinking about at the moment - I am unable to service your request".
You may think I'm exaggerating; a colleague of mine recently described
a personally dislocating experience, not as having occasioned a period
of reflection, but as having required him to recompile his entire
operating system. Partly this is a fanciful way of speaking, a display
of credentials, a bit of in-crowd lingo. But some people would find it
strange and uncomfortable to describe their inner workings in such
terms, and some - evidently - would not. Delight in the machine-like
quality of unconscious processes, their absurd automatism, is not a
widely-spread sentiment.
Dominic
On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 6:59 PM, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> ALl I can say, L, is OMG!
>
> D
> On 2012-08-01, at 8:15 AM, Lawrence Upton wrote:
>
>> I apologise for having no snapshot again
>>
>> That has to be said. It's said. & I am sorry
>>
>> Now what I want is --
>>
>> I don't know if I have ever remarked, I probably have, that the message we
>> used to get from Windows "It is now safe turn off your computer" always
>> sounded sinister to me, as if it meant "but wait a few years"
>>
>> Since then various incidents have confirmed the wisdom of my concern
>>
>> And so to today when I just received the arrogant message
>>
>> "The website is too busy to show the webpage"
>>
>> Well, I'll try again now
>>
>> Actually, this machine nonsense is to be distinguished from the human
>> version -- I tried recently to access a bSkyb facility and got "I'm afraid
>> that's gone with the clouds" and nothing more
>>
>> I approached bSkyb suggesting that this is intolerable arrogance and I
>> didn't find it at all funny. A human replied and wearily explained that it
>> meant they couldn't do what they wanted to because cookies were disabled
>>
>> There was a tone of _obviously_ about it
>>
>> L
>>
>> -----
>> Lawrence Upton
>> Visiting Fellow, Music Dept,
>> Goldsmiths, University of London
>> New Cross, London SE14 6NW
>> ----
>>
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
> http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations & Continuations 2 (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=962
> Wednesdays'
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
>
>
> Why can’t words mean what they say?
>
> Robert Kroetsch
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
--
Shall we be pure or impure? Today
we shall be very pure. It must always
be possible to contain
impurities in a pure way.
--Tarmo Uustalu and Varmo Vene
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