December 26, 2006

metaphors etc

2 Comments

From my old high school buddy, SAP guru Hamish:

I came across this article on the DRM in Vista. No much won­der it is late. First they had to build it, then they had to break it.
What this fails to unders­tand is that the idea of a file, a com­pu­ter, and a user are all metaphors.
001100011001010101100111111000011101010101010100001111100001
All the infor­ma­tion is binary, and in the same envi­ron­ment, it is like asking someone to lift them­sel­ves by the boots­traps. The notion of impo­sing the same metapho­ri­cal limits, like “this is a file of con­tent, “, “this is an exe­cu­ta­ble”, is like asking mat­ter to divide itself into fire and ice. it may suit your metaphor, but it does not corres­pond to reality.

2 Responses to “metaphors etc”

  1. Mike Peter Reed says:
    December 26, 2006 at 1:31 pm

    This is trans­for­ma­tion, not metaphor? Take a motor car with all it’s mecha­ni­cal com­ple­xity. It came out of the rocks. The rocks for­med from star­dust. Is it not rea­lity that star­dust has become a car, as trans­for­med by man?
    Simi­larly, have not elec­tri­cal impul­ses been trans­for­med by man by har­nes­sing the scien­ces for the pur­po­ses of trans­for­ma­tion?
    If your trans­for­ma­tion pro­vi­des nothing use­ful, nothing dif­fe­rent, nothing remar­ka­ble — then you may as well still have a hand­ful of star­dust. Which is the situa­tion Mic­ro­soft finds itself in …
    My Mac is not my metapho­ri­cal desk­top — it *is* my actual desk­top, where I have my actual In Tray, my actual Out Tray, my com­mu­ni­ca­tions methods, etc.
    I am not a metapho­ri­cal user — I actually use my Mac to do stuff, even spend energy trans­for­ming my ideas into something I can arti­cu­late to others.
    Binary ‘infor­ma­tion’ is actually data. It is not infor­ma­tion until it has been *trans­for­med*. The Death of Com­pu­ter Science has a strong corre­la­tion with the rise of Mic­ro­soft :-(
    Long Live Com­pu­ter Science.

  2. tubnd wiyneht says:
    April 21, 2007 at 1:33 am

    beivfzt uhr­mat uwipjysme lqjxw lanogfm ydgil xbkclihv