Comments on: Summit, evening the first.

By: Francisco

Francisco — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 01:16:34 +0000

By: vika

vika — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 13:23:09 +0000

Granted, multiple copies are good, and indeed that example is a bit misleading: the mail doesn’t actually get lost, a lot of the time. But I think his point was that none of those copies is more “authentic” than the others; each of them is the mail as opposed to some hypothetical mirror image of something real which is to be found elsewhere.

I’ve no idea whether that makes sense outside my own head. :)

By: ethan fremen

ethan fremen — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 12:03:08 +0000

While I don’t necessarily disagree with exploding the false dichotomy of abstract/concrete, I would note that, for the most part, a smtp mail server going down does not result in the loss of actual mail; generally there is a backup mx that handles email for the host until the original comes back up. Even for storage, there is usually a backup of some sort. So it seems to me like the fact that almost every digital artifact has >1 concrete manifestations does somewhat change the nature of things. Not sure that really adds much to the discussion, but I thought I’d mention it.