Bob George wrote: > > On Thu, 2004-01-01 at 04:02, Day Brown wrote: > > [...] > > We just live in different worlds. There are a myriad of them. > > Ah, well we've been HERE before. > > ASCII actually MEANS SOMETHING. It's an acronym. It's a 7 bit character > set. You can go on red and stop on green, but the "this" real-world, > you'll get run over. > > [...] > > "The IBM graphics character set" is ten syllables. Most folks in my > > world are content to get by with 2: ask-key. There is jargon like > > 'ascii' all over it. > > But if they start saying things like "the greeks could've written using > only ASCII, they're WRONG. We dont have a pope to lay down the law on what an acronym means. It aint upta you or me; people will use 'ascii' or any other term any way they like, and there aint no way we can stop them. Most people dont know there is any other architecture than x86 either. The 'PC' usta refer to the ISA x86, but most people think a Mac is a PC. They also use 'ascii' and 'ansi' as interchangeable. In a world full of GUI interfaces, hardly anyone cares.
Thucydides commented that revolutions change the meaning of words. And he notes that people get really bent out of shape about it, and that he would prefer to stay out of these fights. But he also saw that he must in fact use words to communicate what it is that he thinks went on, and begged his readers to be tolerant of the ambiguity. Of course, lotsa people have a very low tolerance for ambiguity. To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
