♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪
I bought a digital download of the Naxos CD you see at the left the other week.
As with most downloads I purchase these days, the music files I bought came pre-tagged with all sorts of pieces of metadata. Which is kind of the record companies, I guess -in this case, Naxos. [...]
In the world of computer systems that I used to work in, there are two general approaches to building and maintaining computer systems that are sometimes distinguished as the “Pets or Cattle” approach. That is, do you build each of your computers individually and with tailored care, naming each one with nice, human-friendly names …or do you build them according to a template, naming them with robot-like names whose specifics are neither relevant nor particularly human friendly?
For example: all the computers in my house are called things like MAHLER, BRITTEN, RVW, JSB and so on: each one, a composer’s name or abbreviated set of initials. Each is uniquely built, tended and cared for. It’s definitely ‘pet world' here! [...]