Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

“‘And that’s how I learned to use iMovie,’ he said. And I’m all ‘Ohmygod. His poor iMac.’”

   –A girl on the bus

From In Passing an amusing blog of stuff people overheard other people saying.

Good editorial from the WSJ on how this summer may provide mankind a chance to eradicate SARS, just one chance.

In what I find a deeply disturbing irony the journal has that editorial behind their profit making wall; interesting counter point to China’s problems. I can’t believe anybody is taking the Chinese numbers seriously. The first reports of SARS in China were apparently last fall. It has spread fast in both Hong Kong and Toronto. How can it possibly be credible that it hasn’t spread far and wide in China by now?

Worse of all it appears the damn thing is more fatal than previously thought. One in ten, one in seven? Bleck.

If it’s true, and my presumption about China is correct then there must be areas in China which have already been decimated, how could you possible keep that secret? It doesn’t quite add up.

Very nice short essay by Tim Bray on the end game in standards for character sets.

Back in the 1970s Brian Reid wrote in one of the earliest versions of the manual for a text formating program called Scribe that the Stanford extensions to the ASCII character set where either innovation or terrorism depending on where you stood. A quote I always find ironic since Brian went on to help found alt.* on usenet.

Some of my favorite stories about standards involve slime-balls and other criminals. For example the international airline industry had to set a standard for a sandwich because some of their members were passing off such low quality things as “sandwiches” the rest of the industry needed to write rules to standardize a minimal “airline sandwich”. Another nice example is that there was a time when people making shoe leather would add salts to the leather until they reached the physical limit on how much salt could be added. That became the standard. This pattern, where the standard is in fact a floor onthe acceptible behavior is a surprisingly common form of standard.

But this is this story is a whole different example of criminals and standards. In this case the criminals would prefer that their victums adopt the standard. So when their victums take the bait the crooks redirect those who were not up-to-date with the latest standards to the the web site of an advocacy group. That in turn slanders the reputation of the advocacy group.

Thanks to the most excellent Dive into the Mark.

Someone once wrote “Apache doesn’t need money. Apache needs high unemployment rates, then everyone will have lots of time to sit around and work on Apache.” I don’t think we can blame this on him.

He’s one of my heros and I’m happy to see he’s got a blog.