Dr. Dobb's Journal March 2000
Every so often, you stumble across one of those "what if" situations. Such is the case with Simon Winchester's wonderful book The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (HarperPerennial Library, 1999; ISBN 006099486X). As its title suggests, The Professor and the Madman is the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary -- a 70-year long project that culminated in one of the great achievements in English letters. With over 59 million words, nearly 300,000 entries, and more than 2 million illustrative quotations, the 20-volume OED is probably the most comprehensive English-language dictionary in the world.
But just as impressive is how the dictionary came into being. The creation of the OED was, in essence, a 19th-century open-source project. Led by OED editor James Murray (I just love it when the hero is an editor), thousands of volunteers contributed illustrative quotations of words used in the dictionary. What makes the story fascinating, however, is that one of the main contributors was Dr. William Minor, a brilliant, but bull-goose loony, American surgeon locked up in England's harshest asylum for the criminally insane, located just miles from the editor's office. (Of course, some would argue that asylums for the criminally insane and editors' offices are one and the same). For more than 20 years, Minor submitted thousands of handwritten quotations from inside the walls of the institution.
Of course, you can't help but speculate on the impact that, had it been around, the Internet would have made on the project. From data collection to compilation, the job would have been infinitely easier and faster using computers and the Internet. Back then, submissions from tens of thousands of volunteers were mailed in from around the world, then categorized and entered into the appropriate definition, as Murray and his team of editors worked through the alphabet. That it took only 70 years is probably amazing.
Today, lexicographers at the Oxford University Press, led by OED editor James Simpson, are undertaking the first complete revision of the OED and, once again, are looking for volunteer submissions. This time around, however, the Press is using (you guessed it) the Internet to solicit, accept, and categorize submissions. Although the tools have changed, the process appears to be more or less the same. You can find out more and become a contributor at http://www.oed.com/readers/. Coincidentally, March 2000 marks the Oxford University Press's step into the digital world, with its online version of the OED. From http://www.oed.com/, you can search all entries and display them according to pronunciation, etymologies, variant spellings, quotations, and the like.
Speaking of stuff way back when, you probably recall that when videotapes first appeared, Hollywood predicted the demise of movie theaters. In retrospect, just the opposite has happened, with the number of theaters increasing by nearly 25 percent over the last decade and movie attendance at record levels. We're now hearing the same old whining, this time from the DVD industry, which has launched lawsuits against programmers and web-site operators for posting -- or even linking to -- software that enables DVD copying for personal use.
What started the brouhaha was an open-source project in Norway to bring DVD support to Linux. When an open backdoor in Xing Technology's DVD Windows player was discovered, a group of programmers reverse engineered the playback software and the resulting program, called "DeCSS," was being posted on relevant web sites. Other sites, including Slashdot.org, recognizing the positive benefits of DeCSS to both the Linux community and DVD industry, provided links to DeCSS. In a classic case of shortsightedness and stupidity, the DVD Copyright Control Association (http://www .dvdcca.org/) first filed suits it knows can't be won, then sought injunctions against web sites. The courts quickly dismissed the injunction requests and will deal with the merits of the lawsuits shortly.
What the DVD industry surely knows, but refuses to fess up to, is that most of us don't have hard disks big enough to store one or more 10-GB DVD movies even if we wanted to. Nor is anyone with 33-Kbps dial-up Internet access likely to download such files anyway. It comes down to this: The DVD industry can bluster and bully and go the way of buggy whips and 8-track audio tapes, or it can prosper by meeting the needs and demands of the consumers it is professing to protect.
Finally, take a look at the programming competition described in this month's "News & Views" (page 18). Coordinated by DDJ contributor Gregory Wilson, this open-source design competition has prizes totaling $100,000. The aim of the project, which is sponsored by the Advanced Computing Laboratory at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory and administered by Code Sourcery LLC, is to encourage adoption of better software engineering practices. For more information on the project and competition, see http://www.software-carpentry.com/.
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief
jerickson@ddj.com