The Drill Down 121 – A Punctuation For Sarcasm. Terrific!…/s

Posted on January 25, 2010, 5:30 am, by andy, under Show Notes, The Drill Down.

This week the guys discuss Google’s updated maps for Haiti, a Microsoft security flaw that compromised Google in China, YouTube charges for movie rentals with an updated interface, Apple’s (allegedly) upcoming tablet, the ongoing Twitterfication of Facebook & Digg, Bill Gates on Twitter, Twitter revamps its Suggested User List, Conan O’Brien’s farewell to NBC, the Playstation 3 gets hacked after three years, and just what the world really needs (/s)…a new punctuation mark for sarcasm.

The Drill Down 121 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (101)

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  • http://www.softmachinecubed.com/ reechard

    Apologies for only giving negative feedback – I do like the show very much. Lydia will be missed – I'm reminded of the Lydia song in The Fisher King http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0101889/

    That said, your discussion of SarcMark was pretty irritating as it lacked any mention of codeset standards ISO 8859 (8-bit ASCII) and Unicode.

    SarcMark should have “overloaded” existing punctuation glyphs and done this as a “single glyph drop-in” or some other trick which would make some sense as far as character encodings.

    For example, they could have said that the two-character combination of upside-down exclam and question mark would be automatically recognized as the “overloaded” new SarcMark glyph. Not everyone has experience with internationalization issues, which is fine, but you should stay away from topics that betray a lack of hard-core geek cred. You did pretty well dancing around the main issue – that they are decades too late, and they are selling at best a special one-symbol font, or graphic, which has zero meaning to existing text processing code.

    -Richard

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