An article entitled "The Ultimate Y2K Filter" in our April issue may have caused some confusion among readers. It somehow slipped past the usually keen perceptions of our crack team of editors that the author of the article was borderline delusional. This misguided wretch was apparently under the mistaken impression that the entire computer field was afflicted with something called the "Y to K" problem, rather than the "Y2K" problem. It was this former "problem" that he attempted to solve, and, to be fair, he did a pretty good job of it. His proposed solution was a program that replaces "Y" with "K" in text documents. Just to be on the safe side, he also had it replace all original "K"s with "Y"s as well. While this should only have made the article worthless, one as-yet-unidentified member of the editorial staff apparently thought that it would be a good idea to pass the article itself through the Y2K, or rather YtoK, filter, rendering the copy not only worthless but also somewhat below our usual standards of readability. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused.
Due to a copyediting error, an article on the Linux operating system in that same issue referred to Linus Torvalds as "that Swedish meatball" and "the illegitimate son of Burgess Meredith." Mr. Torvalds is, of course, from Finland. Furthermore, if the reader will mentally replace "gnome" with "GNOME," "demon" with "daemon," and "eunuchs" with "Unix" throughout the article, it will read more like an essay on operating-systems technology and less like a selection from Grimm's Fairy Tales.
A news item in that issue correctly reported that Hewlett-Packard was splitting into two companies. However, due to that dreamy state of mind that editors get into late Friday afternoon, it went on to say that the two companies that Hewlett-Packard would split into were Burger King and Chrysler. This is, we find on checking our sources, not precisely the case. We bitterly regret the error.
It is not true that the Australian government's decision to require Internet Service Providers to remove Australian sites that have sexually explicit material would "undermine the country's chief export," as another news item in the issue reported. This error was the result of fanatical antiAustralian prejudice on the part of a junior-level editor, who has since been promoted to an executive position where she can do no further harm.
Several errors also crept into that issue's review of Bill Gates' latest bestseller, Business at the Speed of Thought. The book is a guide for companies wanting to get into e-commerce, making the reviewer's characterization of it as "a soft-core romance novel with characters borrowed from Melrose Place" clearly inappropriate. Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft's and Mr. Gates' public relations firm, furthermore denies the reviewer's assertion that "a serial number has been embedded in the book to monitor readers's every movement." We contacted the reviewer during one of his rare sober moments and concluded that he was referring to the barcode that set off an alarm when he attempted to leave the bookstore without having paid for the book.
In addition, we now understand that the kayak on which Hewlett-Packard is supporting Linux is a Kayak workstation, which pretty much invalidates everything contributing editor Al Stevens had to say in his column for that issue about the "seaworthiness" of Linux. Michael Swaine's "Swaine's Flames" column for that issue was nothing more than a thinly veiled attack on all that is good and noble in this world, for which we apologize. And Jonathan Erickson's editorial on installing drywall appears, now that we actually read it, to have been intended for another magazine altogether.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mswaine@swaine.com