In comp.os.linux.advocacy, 7
<website_has_email@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote
on Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:24:02 GMT
<6mxrh.32681$k74.1834@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>> BBC World Service: In this edition Peter Day explores a computer
>> revolution.
>>
>> ,----[ Quote ]
>> | Software is the bundle of complex algorithms that makes your computer
>> | tick. In the past 20 years, some of the very richest people in the world
>> | have made their money out of software whose secrets they protected with
>> | patents and guarded with lawsuits. But now here comes a wave of so
>> | called open source software, with no secrets, open to anyone to use and
>> | modify, the product of thousands of brains working together. It?s a
^
>> | powerful new way of doing computing, and there?s a lot of money to be
^
>> | made out of it.
>> `----
>>
>> http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/global_business.shtml
>
>
> Someone should send them bottles of baby milk.
> They seem to write as if they were born yesterday.
>
Note the question marks. You'd think we'd have gotten
character encodings straightened out by now. :-)
But nooooo....instead of using ascii U+0027
(apostrophe), they are probably using U+2019,
which got mangled somewhere in the process of
composition-to-Webpage-to-browser-to-Usenet-post.
(Sorry Roy. :-) )
And this is on an *Apache* server (2.0.54, to be precise).
Were they using IIS and a Word-converted document they'd
at least have a ready excuse. :-)
After downloading the page through wget, my suspicions
are confirmed; the source code shows:
[...] with no secrets, open to anyone to use and
modify, the product of thousands of brains working
together. It’s a powerful new way of doing
computing, and there’s a lot of money to be made
out of it. [...]
(’ = U+2019)
Why U+2019 should be the preferred form is slightly
beyond me; why not get it right when ASCII was defined
way back when?
It gets more interesting. Firefox renders it more or
less properly, and I can even paste it (vim understands
unicode fine), but those that can't handle Unicode (SLRN
prior to 0.9.8.2, which for some reason Gentoo hasn't made
available yet AFAIK) might see
It
there
instead of
Itâs a powerful new way of doing computing, and
thereâs a lot of money to be made out of it.
and I can see the difference in my font as well, if I
do a 'y1<space>' and then type the apostrophe manually.
To BBC's credit, the HTML doesn't look like it was
Word-mangled, though it doesn't look all that neat
and tidy.
As for software -- I'll admit, it's an interesting
multilayer problem, which I rail against on occasion. Even
Windows has layering, though it's not as readily visible:
one has NTLDR to load the kernel, NTOSKRNL to start things
up, various DLLs to implement the GUI, interface with the
file system, etc., and of course application wrappers
and the occasional script.
In Linux, the layering is somewhat clearer, though it's
getting a little twisted in there -- however, one big
advantage of Linux is that one can swap out many of the
layers (yea, even the kernel! Gentoo has a FreeBSD option,
though I've yet to try it, for example).
As for making money -- maybe for distro providers such
as RedHat. I'm not sure about the rest of us.
--
#191, ewill3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Insert random misquote here.
--
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