[greedo]

Nah, it's really akin to the debate historians have over Great People or Inexorable events. Would calculus have been discovered had Liebniz and Newton died in a duel? Would the Panama Canal still have been built had Teddy Roosevelt not been its primary proponent? The Apollo project shows that Big Events can still happen even when it's most eloquent proponent gets a bullet to the head.

[randmeerkat]

> Apollo project shows that Big Events can still happen even when it's most eloquent proponent gets a bullet to the head.

If Sergei Korolev didn’t die suddenly and unexpectedly, the Soviets may have actually won the race to the moon. Their space program atrophied afterwards and struggled to succeed.

I really wonder at the modern obsession with associating people with cattle.

[greedo]

Cattle?

[gregw2]

I’m guessing this is a techie reference.

Computer servers can be divided into two roles in modern technical architectures… they are either “cattle” or “pets”. Pets are computer servers that have names and are always up. Cattle are servers that are transient, spun up and down as needed and do not necessarily have any long running identity/name as a component of a larger system.

http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of-...

The poster is making a critiques of how by treating historical persons contributors as cattle, we are considering them a dispensable, unnamed, a commodity that is easily replaced and interchangeable and missing their very real contribution, value, and humanity.

[greedo]

I thought also that he was making the docker/container reference, just didn't see how it applied. Thanks for your expansion.

I do find the Great Person theory and its critiques fascinating. I think of how Kennedy navigated the Cuban Missile Crisis and avoided nuclear war, then I think of how the sheer consensus of the US military after WW2 was to build a huge nuclear arsenal and use it any possible chance.

[randmeerkat]

> The poster is making a critiques of how by treating historical persons contributors as cattle, we are considering them a dispensable, unnamed, a commodity that is easily replaced and interchangeable and missing their very real contribution, value, and humanity.

Beautifully said.