It’s time for the Linguist List’s annual appeal for financial support (which started on Monday). Go to the main site and follow the instructions there; even small contributions help to maintain this valuable resource in linguistics.
As usual, the staff have prepared all sorts of entertainments. Starting tomorrow, there will be weekly installments in the “LingQuest” saga (modeled roughly on quest games, and ultimately, on The Lord of the Rings). This week,
the Adventure begins at The Metafortress!
Yes, a portmanteau of metaphor and fortress.
Meanwhile, there’s the Metaforic company, which offers a MetaFortress product:
MetaFortress enables software developers to easily protect applications against subversion, piracy, and other forms of abuse.
At its heart, MetaFortress is a self-checking anti-tamper system that automatically injects a web of thousands of interlocking, self-referencing checks into the source code of a target application.
On the company:
Metaforic develops and markets a range of security products based on revolutionary new anti-tamper technology, protecting and hardening software applications in a variety of markets on a wide range of platforms. In the modern world, shipping or operating unprotected software is tantamount to an invitation for exploitation or infection.
Metaforic’s flagship products, MetaFortress and MetaSure, armor applications from the inside out, preventing and protecting against known (and unknown) forms of subversion, piracy, and the most sophisticated hacking attacks.
It’s not clear to me what metaphors have to do with any of this, beyond the word metaphor‘s sounding scientific and ton(e)y.
I trust that the Metaforic people won’t be going after the Linguist List for its use of Metafortress.
March 1, 2012 at 10:14 am |
Seems like Metaphorgotten got out of hand at Metaforic.
March 2, 2012 at 4:04 am |
“Starting tomorrow, there will be weekly installments in the “LingQuest” saga (modeled roughly on quest games…” – I would like to see this saga-quest.
March 2, 2012 at 4:40 am |
First installment here.
March 2, 2012 at 12:28 pm
Mr. Arnold, do you find this fragment interesting? I found it difficult to read the text up to the half of it as I find many linguistic terms unknown and (shame) forgotten since the Institute. What could you suggest me to learn the terms?
March 4, 2012 at 6:16 am
I’d say “entertaining” rather than “interesting”. It’s stitched together from plays on technical terminology from all areas of linguistics — some very theory-specific and/or recent and not likely to be in dictionaries of linguistic terminology (though there are several of these on-line, in particular the one from SIL).
March 4, 2012 at 2:00 pm |
So you`ve sent me up-front into the avalanche of linguistic terms. Thanks.
March 4, 2012 at 2:59 pm |
Hey, I gave you some signposts. I’m not here to give you an education.
March 5, 2012 at 2:59 pm
I think there are many people who ask you questions. Anyway, you educate with your posts. I know I`m not your linguistic level but I try to understand. And thanks for signposts. I`ll go there and try to understand. Listen, Mr. Arnold, I`m really saying thanks and what I meant was that so much of complicated information could break my neck by its newness – like an avalanche.
March 4, 2012 at 2:46 pm |
In computer science the term meta carries a few different meanings, one of which is data:
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_meta.asp
Also, I’ve heard the term being used for self referential properties. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=meta
March 4, 2012 at 2:58 pm |
Ok, but the question is whether these meanings are to be found either in the Linguist List use or in the Metaforic company’s use.
March 5, 2012 at 3:19 pm |
I would like the heroes to go to The Data Graveyard. I`d like to see how the Graveyard could influence the diachronic damage.