I've ornamented this month's allocation of random ramblings with a random selection of subheads from my extensive collection of clever subheads. You should consider these a form of clip art. Feel free to use them anywhere they work for you: in your e-mail sig file, in comments in your code, or in memos to the boss. Naw, don't thank me. That's just the kind of big-hearted guy I am.
Now there's a nice subtitle. It almost suggests a whole essay on the need for consensus on some as-yet unstandardized standard. Unfortunately, I don't have such an essay handy, but as Voltaire said, "Si Pangloss n'avait pas ete pendu, dit Candide, il nous donnerait un bon conseil dans cette extremite, car c'etait un grand philosophe. A son defaut, consultons la vieille."
Regarding my recent essay on speleology and spelunking, technology and technunking, John F. Goyvaerts writes to ask, "According to an IBM ad (DDJ, December 1995, page 63) 'Kevin invented automatic 16/32-bit thunking.' What does IBM have to do with theology?" Sorry, John, I refuse to rise to such obvious bait. Make your own joke.
Like one in seven Webmasters, I turned my Web site black on February 8 to protest the Communications Decency Act. I also hung a blue protest ribbon on the site and felt righteous. Then I read what the citizens of Billings, Montana, did not long ago. It was at a time when, according to Christopher Hitchens, writing in the April 1 Nation, "Aryan supremacists and Christian Identity types tried to move in.... After the stoning of a Jewish home...the local paper printed a cut-out menorah and asked readers to take the yellow-star example to heart by placing one in every window. The response was enormous." Mere symbols are cheap, but it takes real courage to paint a target on your chest.
This subhead, a reference to an early microcomputer game, is a nice metaphor for any pointless, convoluted quest. It also sounds like a definition of searching the Internet. Speaking of pointless quests and searching the Internet, a number of readers solved April's computer history quiz with a quick Web search. Others did just as well by relying, so they claim, only on their memories. The quiz asked for the correct chronological order for the arrival of several computers. The correct order, with dates, is:
F 1938 Zuse Z1 8 1961 DEC PDP-1 5 1976 Cray-1
1 1941 Atanasoff-Berry 2 1964 CDC 6600 7 1978 DEC VAX 11/780
Computer
3 1943 Colossus Mark I A 1965 IBM 360/50 4 1980 Commodore VIC-20
9 1945 ENIAC 6 1969 Data General Nova E 1981 Xerox Star 8010
D 1959 Sperry Rand C 1975 MITS Altair 8800 B 1982 IBM PC/AT
UNIVAC 1103
Or, in the short form I requested, F139D82A6C574EB.The first correct answer (and the first answer, for that matter) came from Michael Passer. A Dr. Dobb's t-shirt is winging its way to him now. Several entrants objected to the small-print clause stating that by entering the contest they were ceding their immortal souls to Miller Freeman, Inc., so we've dropped that condition. After examining some of the souls, it was an easy call.
This subhead only makes sense if you've read Roger Zelazny's Amber series. It has nothing whatever to do with, for example, how England's problem with mad cow disease produced a bull market for beef this year. Mad cows? At least now we know what made all those crop circles a few years back.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mswaine@cruzio.com