Ken's Techno Tidbits

One of my favorite posts to the Unicode mailing list came during a heated debate about “simplifying” certain character sets. I believe it was Joe Becker who re-posted Mark Twain’s humorous proposal for simplifying English spelling:

In year 1, that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s;” and likewise, “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” ould be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealth with later. Year 2 might reform the “w” spelling so that “which” and “one” would take the same konsonant wile year 3 might well abolish “y,” replasing it with “i;” and iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all. Jeneraly, then the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants; and iears 6-12 or so modifaiiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist kononants. Bai iear 15, it wud be fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez “c,” “y,” and “x” — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu replais “ch,” “sh,” and “th,” rispektivli. Finali, xen, ater sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling iniuse xrewawt xe Ingliy-Spiking werld.

I wonder what Mark Twain would have to say about the MacBook Air…

A Plan for the Improvement of the PowerBook G4 12″ Laptop

For example, that useless Ethernet port would be dropped to be replaced by wireless only, and likewise the second USB and FireWire would no longer be available. The hard disk will be retained, but only the very slow iPod version or the very expensive flash version, as most people will no longer need to keep files other than system software on their computer.

Continuing our optimization, the DVD/CD-ROM drive is now useless, because there’s no space on the hard disk to install anything. And with the slower processor, the option to expand memory to 4GB is also unneeded as who would now do any heavy processing work with this computer?

Once the device has been tuned for email writing executives, the price can be increased to match their signature authority, thus eliminating problems caused by most other customers buying the product and complaining about limitations.

Finally, then, after extensive optimizations, we would have the perfect computer for our target customer, Steve Jobs.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 7:48 am and is filed under don't do this, random, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.