licentious radio

Friday, February 8, 2002
[1:39:15 PM]

The hundred millionth monkey. This is a parable, a fable, a legend, and a true story (honest), about the way behavior changes and spreads, and when it reaches some critical mass, the entire population changes.

Once upon a time all the web monkeys used tiny type on their web pages. Most used font size=2. The artistic and the long-winded used font size=1. The forward-thinking, standards-compliant web monkeys used stylesheets: text-size: 11px.

But one day a web monkey said, "the users spent thousands of dollars on their computers, why not let the *users* decide how big the text is?" That monkey was ostracized and ridiculed.

But on another day, a different web monkey was tired of having to redesign the website whenever the big-boss monkey got a new computer or a different browser. The little-boss monkey was tired of spending half his time adjusting the big-boss's settings so the website would look good, and the other half lobbying IT to force all employees to use the same browser and browser settings.

They made a website that looked good in any browser, even if the user had their fonts set to a readable size.

Sure enough, the whole idea spread.

The important thing is that at one point -- we don't really know if it was exactly the 100 millionth web monkey, or maybe already the 97 millionth monkey -- all the rest of the monkeys decided to let the user choose the font size... even the monkeys that weren't reading the same weblogs.

And that's the true story of how we got to where we are today.

[10:59:57 AM]
WASHINGTON DC (UPI) -- The Department of Justice will use the internet to publish public comments on the proposed Microsoft settlement. According to one DOJ lawyer, it would otherwise cost at least $6 million to print and distribute. "Under President Bush's budget, that $6 million is earmarked to be refunded to Enron, because they had to pay taxes one time, a few years ago."

When asked why the DOJ chose Microsoft Word format to distribute the comments, Smith got a dumb look on his face, and eventually said, "Well, I mean, everybody has Word. What other format could we use, anyway?"

Attorney's for the dissenting nine states and District of Columbia were standing right there: after thinking about it, they all agreed that made sense.

The DOJ is also required to reply to each comment. Smith said it was absolutely untrue that a Microsoft employee had written a Word macro to insert "Yeah, right...." or "Duh!" after each negative comment. Smith said a DOJ employee wrote the script with help from the Microsoft helpline set up especially for the DOJ, because "everyone knows normal customers can't get any actual help from Microsoft technical support".