Time (was: Character set wars (was: In defense of Google))

[Fred]

On Monday 30 January 2006 22:42, Ben Scott wrote:
> On 1/30/06, Michael ODonnell <michael.odonnell at comcast.net> wrote:
> > ... it could also be argued that it's weird and unconventional
> > for your mailer to be specifying your messages as requiring
> > a UTF-8 font.

I checked Kontact, and it has a few character sets it uses, but it seems to 
choose them automatically in a priority order. Not much I can do about that 
other than rearrange the order. So, I put an ISO character set ahead of the 
rest. Doubt if that will do much. Sorry.

...
>   As far as "unconventional" goes... well, believe me, I pine (no pun
> intended) for the nice, safe old world of 7-bit ASCII as much as the
> next guy, but there are over six billion people on this planet, and
> most of them don't use the Latin character set.  Unicode is coming --
> nay, it is already here.  It's going to make things really interesting
> in the computer world for the next several years.  Y2K ain't got
> nothing on this.
>
> -- Ben

If I had my way, *everything* would be Unicode and the entire problem would 
become moot overnight. Alas, I don't see that happening anytime soon. I 
actually would like to be a polyglot in *human* languages as well as 
computer ones. At best I only expect to pick up 1 or 2 more *human* 
languages in my lifetime. French is the current one I am working on, and 
Mandarin will probably be the next just for the challenge. One of my 
daughters is learning Japanese, so we really could use Unicode around here!

As far as the Y2K fiasco, that was kind of a non-event. Much hype, much 
scare, but the real problems were not as great as we were led to believe. 
Quite frankly, I just had a bit of a problem with all the alarmist attitudes 
going on at the time, and yet I was sucked up in it too as Cisco made it its 
mandate that all of its software would be Y2K-compliant. I came across and 
fixed a number of problems, but it was nothing that would've brought the 
world to an end. Meanwhile, many were stocking up on canned goods, water, 
survival gear, and the like, and I thought that was just plain silly. There 
were a few glitches here and there, but all were quickly fixed and all was 
well with the world.

What will be interesting to see, and most of us will be around when it 
happens, is the time the Unix clocks run to an end in 2038. I would like to 
think by then all timers will be 64-bit (or similar), but you'll never know 
for sure.

And interesting site on the problem:
http://www.deepsky.com/~merovech/2038.html

-Fred