WSU Trumpet

According to the news media, Bill Gates is going to be stepping down from his full-time position at Microsoft in two years' time. He will focus more of his energy on his charity organization, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I think this is admirable. I mean, seriously, what does he need with continuing to work full-time with Microsoft? He's got enough compensation to buy a few healthcare providers. So I can't say that he's in it for the insurance benefits. He also doesn't need a company car seeing as he could probably buy a couple of automakers, too.

But, really, I do think this is admirable because of all the good he can do for the world. With all that wealth, he can help so many people.

Now, on to a more cynical note... I've been looking more seriously at standards. I came to the decision that we have standards organizations (ANSI, ISO, etc.) so that we'll know just how big an inch is (or centimeter if you're anywhere but the U.S.) It's so that when someone orders a 3/4-inch wrench, it's a 3/4-inch wrench no matter where you buy it from. I mean, that's pretty standard if you ask me. I mean, think of the problem enforcing speed limits if you left the miles and hours up to personal interpretation. :) "That depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is."

Standards exist in the computing world, too. Groups like ANSI, ISO, W3C, and others help to create standards to govern how computers will work. Now, you might think, "Wait, I thought the Internet and computing was a free speech place. If there are these governing bodies, then aren't our freedoms being trampled on?" Well, not really. You see, to be truly free, people have to have limits placed on them. Otherwise, it's anarchy and he who has the biggest stick rules. So it's really a good thing that we have standards and that, for the most part, we all abide by them. However, some organizations do better at complying with the standards than others. One historically bad example of standards compliance has been the Microsoft corporation.

Way back in the misty days of history (~1979) Microsoft had created a BASIC interpreter for the Altair computer. The main computing platforms of the time were Unix-based systems with their set filesystems that could be easily mapped to the "Internet." For instance, when you visit a website, the web STANDARD is that the directories on the server are demarcated by a forward slash (/). So when you see http://www.website.com/newsite/index.html, that file, index.html, is located in the newsite directory of the web server. Simple enough. However, Microsoft was eyeballing the potential of creating (or licensing from another company) an operating system. This operating system, previously known as CP/M was copied, stolen, and resold by Microsoft as MS-DOS. It became the 900-lb gorilla of PC operating systems for over a decade. However, there were incompatibilities between MS-DOS and the extand Unix variants of the day. For instance, in MS-DOS, directories are demarcated by a backslash (\) rather than the more standard forward slash. Also, instead of being based on a root node, as Unix variants are, DOS was a top-level-based operating system, bound to different drive letters (A:, C:, D:, etc.) So, if you wanted to run a server on a DOS machine (which was practically impossible), there had to be translation programs running to set up a root node somewhere in the DOS structure and then translate the forward slashes used by clients to backslashes used by the host. This current structure of drives (C:, D:, etc.) and backslash-demarcated directories continues to this day in Windows XP/2003 and even Windows Vista. For Windows people, it seems that it's very important what physical hard disk they are writing their data to. For Unix guys, we trust that the operating system (and the sysadmin) is smart enough to write the data effectively to the hard disk. The only time we care where it's going is when we write to a floppy or some other removable device. And even then, it's just a node in the filesystem (/mnt/floppy, or /mnt/cdrom.) This way, we can have gazillions of disk drives attached to the system and mount them however we want. It's great. And, to top it off, the web agrees with us.

One of the most blatant violation of computing standards is allowing spaces in filenames. I hate dealing with people's files when they have spaces in them. You see, I still do a considerable amount of work on a command line and the STANDARDS have said for years that spaces delimit command line arguments, not filenames. If I want to copy a file from one location to another, I'll type "cp , where each of the arguments to the command "cp" is delimited by a space. When my filenames have spaces in them, I have to trap each space by a backslash (\) before I can proceed. It makes for a really ugly statement.

So, for the sake of humanity, please don't put spaces in your filenames. If you have multi-word filenames, use a character like a dash (-) or an underscore (_) to represent the space.

Now, on to Internet Explorer. I believe, along with John C. Dvorak, that Microsoft should abandon the Internet Explorer project. It's a dead cow, guys. Bury it and focus your unquenchable energies on developing a better operating system. It burns me up to no end when I find that the source of most of the patches that Microsoft issues to fix holes in Windows stems from Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer is supposed to be a browser. An Internet browser SHOULD NOT be a vital part of the operating system. It should be something supported by the OS, but not an integral part of it, which Internet Explorer is. IE is inextricably bound to Windows. Don't believe me? Try deleting the iexplore.exe file from Windows. Now, launch the My Computer window and type a web address into the address bar of My Computer. Ta Da! You have a browser, ladies and gentlemen. And, it's that pesky old IE browser.

Anyhow, yeah, I have commented enough about standards. I think it's wonderful when people follow them. So, follow them!

Amen.

Here is an example of a very poorly-designed webpage: http://stillatruqtea.blogspot.com/