Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 383.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
[1] From: François Crompton-Roberts (11)
Subject: Re: 17.380 anti-Irish computing
[2] From: "Jim Marchand" <marchand@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> (18)
Subject: anti-Irish computing
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2003 07:45:09 +0000
From: François Crompton-Roberts
Subject: Re: 17.380 anti-Irish computing
The inanities of the automatic processing of personal information are,
thankfully, too numerous and varied to list exhaustively. My favourite I
encountered at a conference on electronic typesetting in the 1980s. One
of the participants, the MD of a printing firm here in the UK, had
filled-in the registration form with his name "Sir Peter whatever" (I
forget the surname). The organisers had produced a lapel badge from this
information with software which did know about Doctors and Professors
but didn't know about knighthoods. So he went proudly about with a badge
that read "Call me Sir"! Could we say this was being anti-British?
François (the cedilla often causes problems) Crompton-Roberts (so does
the hyphen on occasion).
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2003 07:45:51 +0000
From: "Jim Marchand" <marchand@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Subject: anti-Irish computing
I know what JO'D means. Being half-Irish and half-French, I get a
double whammy of incompatibles. As Pogo says, however, the enemy
is us. Many people seem to think that whatever they see on their
screens is what their correspondents will see on theirs. I get
messages with exclamation points for all extended ASCIIs, with =E1
(equal cap E, 1) for a acute, szet for a acute, etc. etc. At
present there is little one can do, other than use SGML codes (e.g.
äaut;) and hope your correspondents can global. The answer, it
seems to me, is that offered by several people: Everybody (every
program and every operating system) should go to Unicode, which
intends to enable all writing systems. You remember that Microsoft
tried that with WindowsNT. Of course, that will work only if we
all adopt it. If somebody sends you a message in Japanese and you
do not have Unicode, it looks like one big cussword. As Willard
says, it looks like those big companies would get it right, but
they have no way of determining what mail-program you are using or
what systems the mail may have gone through before it got to you.
Nemo sine crimine, no matter where you find him.
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