gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (12/19/86)
I took my copy of the draft proposed standard down to the local Krishna
Copy shop and used their Kurzweil reading machine to try reading it
in. Basic result is no luck.
It would get much of the text of a page, especially on the 3rd or 4th
page after it had gotten used to the text, but there was no page on
which it didn't make at least 10 or 20 errors. On some lines, it
didn't recognize a single character, though it had read the previous
line and the next line without trouble. It would be faster to retype
the damn thing than to go back and try to fix the errors.
I have not tried it on a Palantir scanner yet; if I get the time, I
will. But it appears that technology is not going to save us from
brain damaged policies in our standards bureacracy; I guess we'll have
to reform the bureacracies instead, which is a lot less fun than building
good technologies.
--
John Gilmore {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa
Call +1 800 854 7179 or +1 714 540 9870 and order X3.159-198x (ANSI C) for $65.
Then spend two weeks reading it and weeping. THEN send in formal comments! barmar@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU (Barry Margolin) (12/21/86)
In article <1525@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes: > But it appears that technology is not going to save us from >brain damaged policies in our standards bureacracy; I guess we'll have >to reform the bureacracies instead, which is a lot less fun than building >good technologies. ANSI is basically a publishing house. Do you know of any other major publishing house that would be in favor of you copying their books onto the net? Why is this brain damage? The only possible brain damage is that private companies manage the standards process, rather than having standards managed by the government. This makes sense, though, since the standards are just voluntary agreements among groups of busnesses. The only part the government plays is that of a user of standards, so the National Bureau of Standards has representatives on many standards committees. Considering how the government tends to screw things up, I'm pretty happy that they don't control the standards arena. The price we pay for this is that capitalist concerns affect some of the procedures. -- Barry Margolin ARPA: barmar@MIT-Multics UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar
gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (01/02/87)
In article <4350@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU>, Barry Margolin writes: > In article <1525@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes: > > But it appears that technology is not going to save us from > >brain damaged policies in our standards bureacracy; I guess we'll have > >to reform the bureacracies instead, which is a lot less fun than building > >good technologies. > > ANSI is basically a publishing house. Do you know of any other major > publishing house that would be in favor of you copying their books onto > the net? Why is this brain damage? If ANSI is a publishing house, let's eliminate it and contract to Prentice-Hall or Doubleday to publish our standards. They do a better printing job, bind their books well, and sell them for cheaper. And when they publish a book where machine readable copy makes sense, they make machine readable available (e.g. P-H sells the Xinu tape). I wouldn't object to paying $65 to get a tape of the proposed ANSI C standard, which is what the printed version costs. The trouble is that ANSI makes the rules for how standards are created, *in addition to* publishing them. And they warp the rules, which warps the standards, so they can make money. And we get to live with the resulting standards. See my .signature below. -- John Gilmore {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@ingres.berkeley.edu I forsee a day when there are two kinds of C compilers: standard ones and useful ones ... just like Pascal and Fortran. Are we making progress yet? -- ASC:GUTHERY%slb-test.csnet