[MD] Quality computing

[david buchanan]

dmb asked about the term "booting":
"How is defying gravity LIKE starting the first program?"

Ian replied:
Consider this How does an object subject to gravity defy gravity by it's own 
will? How does a device that needs a programe to run other programs run the 
first program? You see the metaphor?

dmb says:
My three answers to these three questions would be (1) It can't. (2) I 
wouldn't know, but apparently it can. (3) No, not really. Not only does the 
metaphor refer to an invisible operation, it seems to bear only the vaguest 
relation to that unseen event. I get the general idea that something tricky 
is going on in both situations, but I still maintain that the term is 
unnecessary and only tends to be misleading.

And of course this little problem is nothing all by itself. There must be 
hundreds or even thousands of similar examples. Recently, not too long after 
I'd pulled this computer out of the box, I was fishing around for 
definitions and explanations to preform some particular task. I forget what 
the task was. Anyway, there was one particularly crucial sentence that 
really seemed to address my questions but it had 3 or 4 terms that had no 
meaning as far as I knew and several others that weren't entirely clear. I 
decided that it would be worth the effort to decode this sentence. I found 
detailed explantions for all of the mystery terms but in each case these 
explanations needed explanations. In one case, the term finally became clear 
to me only after six generations of explanations.

Some of this stuff makes Heidegger look like Hemmingway.

Three hours later the sentence finally made sense to me and I could preform 
the task.

That's three hours I could have used to preform the task or bang drums and 
smoke dope, you know? I don't mind learning a few new words but this is 
seriously cutting into my free-love schedule. Sigh. It was nearly dark by 
the time I made it out of my teepee and all the sledgehammers were already 
taken. As a result, I had to smash machines with a rock. Who wouldn't resent 
that?

dmb

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