33 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981
Copyright © 2014 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.
The Telecom Digest for Sep 19, 2014
Volume 33 : Issue 162 : "text" Format
33 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981Copyright © 2014 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.The Telecom Digest for Sep 19, 2014 |
| Messages in this Issue: | |
|---|---|
| Re: Basic fiber optic phone service vs. Fios phone service | (Gary) |
| Re: Is it time for a new charset in the Digest? | (David Scheidt) |
| Re: Is it time for a new charset in the Digest? | (MotoFox) |
| Re: Is it time for a new charset in the Digest? | (Adam Sampson) |
| Re: Is it time for a new charset in the Digest? | (Mark Smith) |
| Re: Is it time for a new charset in the Digest? | (tlvp) |
| Re: Is it time for a new charset in the Digest? | (Mike Spencer) |
| Re: Is it time for a new charset in the Digest? | (Telecom Digest Moderator) |
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy - John Adams
See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details.
| Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 13:02:08 -0400 From: Gary <bogus-email@hotmail.com> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Basic fiber optic phone service vs. Fios phone service Message-ID: <lvf386$2jq$1@dont-email.me> On 9/15/2014 10:40 PM, Fred Goldstein wrote: > They are not obligated to use copper, but the ONTs have batteries. > > BTW this gives them one up over Comcast, whose XFINITY Voice service now > is delivered via cable modems that do not come with a battery. Be > forewarned -- this truly sucks big time, and should not be allowed. > Comcast has apparently been taken over by accountants who emulate the > old Chrysler, taking value out faster than they can remove cost, and > wonder why customers go elsewhere. Earlier this year (2014), Verizon started charging new customers for ONT batteries. Customer do not have to buy one to get FiOS installed. I believe the price is $39.95, but I may be wrong. Comcast does the same thing. In short, Verizon and Comcast are equal in this regard. Verizon also started charging rental fees for the FiOS router if you don't purchase one or already own one. There are other changes as well that make it clear to me that Verizon has moved into the "milk the cow" phase of business management. Oh Well. -Gary |
| Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 00:57:11 +0000 (UTC) From: David Scheidt <dscheidt@remove-this.panix.com> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Is it time for a new charset in the Digest? Message-ID: <lv81t7$qk3$1@reader1.panix.com> Telecom Digest Moderator <telecomdigestsubmissions@remove-this.telecom-digest.org> wrote: :I've been using the ISO-8859-1 "Latin1" character set in the Digest :for a few years now: we adopted it as the standard after a reader made :me awaare that there are no accented characters in ASCII, so I figured :that I'd implement a way for him to spell his name properly, and also :be able to add "Internationalization" to my résumé. :I'm wondering if it's time for another change, either to one of the :"transitional" Unicode formats, such as UTF-8, or perhaps to a :permanent solution such as UCS-16. There's no good reason to use anything other than UTF-8. It is universally supported by modern software, including web servers, browsers, email servers and clients, and news readers and servers. That covers all the ways that the digest is distributed, I believe. Most antiquated software copes with it by ignoring it, which gets good results a surprising amount of the time, even when the text presented is not ASCII, nor even largely ASCII. -- sig 47 |
| Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 17:05:37 +0000 From: MotoFox <dvbugz@remove-this.removethezfrom.sdfz.org> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Is it time for a new charset in the Digest? Message-ID: <pan.2014.09.18.17.05.35.637107@motofox-rules.dont-email.me> > I've been using the ISO-8859-1 "Latin1" character set in the Digest for a > few years now: we adopted it as the standard after a reader made me awaare > that there are no accented characters in ASCII, so I figured that I'd > implement a way for him to spell his name properly, and be able to add > "Internationalization" to my résumé. Keep using it... > I'm wondering if it's time for another change, either to one of the > "transitional" Unicode formats, such as UTF-8, or perhaps to a permanent > solution such as UCS-16. ...because even though Unicode is hawked as the "universal" character set, ISO is supported by, like, everything. Client Unicode support is more widespread than it was 10 years ago but still far from universal. If you absolutely have to use Unicode, stick with the zeroth page of UTF8 (mirrors the standard charset). Many softwares (e.g. I occasionaly access this newsgroup directly via Eternal-September in a telnet session at a full-screen command line) react strangely to characters in higher-number pages. Lynx, for example, parses those stupid "curly quotes" as ~R, ~S and ~T, respectively. (A lesson I wish the Wordpress bozondos would learn!) > I'd like to hear opinions from you, particularly if you have expertise in > choosing character sets for online publicatoins such as The Telecom > Digest. TIA. Strictly my own opinion, of course. But if what you're using works, has proven itself and is an industry standard yet, why change it? |
| Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 12:11:39 +0100 From: Adam Sampson <ats@remove-this.offog.org> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Is it time for a new charset in the Digest? Message-ID: <y2ay4tjlt04.fsf@cartman.at.offog.org> Hi Bill, telecomdigestsubmissions@remove-this.telecom-digest.org (Telecom Digest Moderator) writes: > I'm wondering if it's time for another change, either to one of the > "transitional" Unicode formats, such as UTF-8, or perhaps to a > permanent solution such as UCS-16. It's probably not pressing unless you often find yourself wanting to use characters that aren't in ISO-8859-1 (e.g. the Euro currency symbol, or accents in Turkish or Gaelic names). If you want to move to Unicode, then use UTF-8 -- pretty much everything supports it these days, and it remains backwards-compatible for the ASCII range for people using ancient mail clients. UCS-2 ("UCS-16") is obsolete, because there are more than 2^16 characters in modern Unicode, and horribly inefficient for mostly-English text. Cheers, -- Adam Sampson <ats@offog.org> http://offog.org/ |
| Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 20:01:14 -0700 From: Mark Smith <marklsmith@remove-this.yahoo.com> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Is it time for a new charset in the Digest? Message-ID: <1410836474.50240.YahooMailNeo@web122301.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> I face this with Windows all the time. You have to use alternate Font types. But windows does not have standard characters. Worse a lot of Fonts are incomplete and show boxes for unsupported characters. Mark L. Smith marklsmith@yahoo.com http://smith.freehosting.net Http://marksfolkmusicphotos.shutterfly.com On Monday, September 15, 2014 5:58 PM, Telecom Digest Moderator <telecomdigestsubmissions@remove-this.telecom-digest.org> wrote: > I've been using the ISO-8859-1 "Latin1" character set in the Digest > for a few years now: we adopted it as the standard after a reader made > me awaare that there are no accented characters in ASCII, so I figured > that I'd implement a way for him to spell his name properly, and also > be able to add "Internationalization" to my résumé. > I'm wondering if it's time for another change, either to one of the > "transitional" Unicode formats, such as UTF-8, or perhaps to a > permanent solution such as UCS-16. > I'd like to hear opinions from you, particularly if you have expertise > in choosing character sets for online publicatoins such as The Telecom > Digest. TIA. > Bill Horne > Moderator ***** Moderator's Note ***** A. Because it disturbs the normal top-to-bottom blow of a written conversation. Q. Why is Top-Posting bad? Bill Horne Moderator |
| Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 01:15:38 -0400 From: tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@remove-this.att.net> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Is it time for a new charset in the Digest? Message-ID: <z4clh58r3dww$.9llzndvhz49a.dlg@40tude.net> On Mon, 15 Sep 2014 17:37:29 -0400 (EDT), Telecom Digest Moderator wrote: > I'm wondering if it's time for another change, either to one of the > "transitional" Unicode formats, such as UTF-8, or perhaps to a > permanent solution such as UCS-16. my vote? -- yes, time to change again, probably to the UTF-8 that the w3c has set as default for HTML files not declaring otherwise of themselves. Cheers, -- tlvp -- Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, S'il vous plaît. |
| Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 12:26:46 -0300 From: mspencer@remove-this.tallships.ca (Mike Spencer) To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Is it time for a new charset in the Digest? Message-ID: <201409161526.s8GFQkG04426@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> Unclear if you want personal replies or Digest posts. Whatever. > I'm wondering if it's time for another change, either to one of the > "transitional" Unicode formats, such as UTF-8, or perhaps to a > permanent solution such as UCS-16. No. I18n is fine for infrastructure. Telecom Digest is an English language venue. No one who expects to be read will be posting in Chinese, Hindi or Klingon. It's cool, in a hipper-than-thou, scholarly sort of way, to be able to drop into English prose quotations from classic texts in proper Greek or Arabic or Japanese characters but it's a frippery outside the formal academic context. > ...and also be able to add "Internationalization" to my résumé. I'm sure that was tongue in cheek but all too close to the mark for why UTF-8 is adopted in many instances. On a practical level, if you use an 8- or 16-bit charset, Windows will in all probability base64 encode posts and send them in at least two formats as MIME multipart/alternative. That would be the point at which I just give up and move on. > I'd like to hear opinions from you, particularly if you have > expertise in choosing character sets for online publications. No such expertise. Just a humble reader with an opinion. Tnx for your efforts on the Digest, - Mike -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ mspencer@tallships.ca /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ ***** Moderator's Note ***** I had to modify this post so that the word résumé showed with accented characters, and that is the crux of the matter: even if I publish a post using the ISO-8859-1 character set, when readers quote the original post using closed-source software, it usually comes back in a variety of other character sets, none of which seem to share the same binary-values for the same character glyphs.. I haven't found any way to automate the process, and doing it by-hand is too time-consuming to sustain. Bill Horne Moderator |
| Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 19:26:00 -0400 From: telecomdigestsubmissions@remove-this.telecom-digest.org (Telecom Digest Moderator) To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Is it time for a new charset in the Digest? Message-ID: <201409181929010@telecom.csail.mit.edu> Well, the comments confirm what I suspected: there's no easy answer. Long story short: there is no way to reliably convert character sets by automatic processing, and I'm tired of doing it by hand. The solution? Sorry, I haven't got one: 1. If I change to UTF-8, then Digest contributors lose some "native mode" flexibility in using common phrases which have accented characters. Since ISO-8859-1 is "more or less" the Windows character set, I think that makes it easier to copy-and-paste quotes with accented characters from onlie sites. 2. Even though the Digest is written in English, those with accented characters in their names are entitled to see those characters printed accurately. Especially in Canada, where French-speaking citizens have the right to use accented characters in legal records - something computer databases in various U.S. states do not allow to this day - the Digest needs to reflect the audience it is being delivered to. After all, Côté is the fourth-most common surname in Quebec. The Digest's FAQ spells out the policy: 1. Your post must be written in English. Although it may contain words or phrases that are commonly used by non-English speaking peoples, such entries must be generally acceptable in the English-speaking online world. I don't know if there's a perfect situtation, but ISO-8859-1 is showing its age, and I feel it's time for a change. What change will best reflect our readers' needs, I'm not sure. What I AM sure of is that no one solution will please everyone. I'm going to wait and see if there are other opinions, and do some more research. And, if you're thinking that I know all the answers, I'll just shrug and write "Après moi, le déluge". Bill Horne Moderator P.S. Anyone who wants to see the current list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) need only use the link below to send an email to majordomo@telecom-digest.org, with the words "faq telecom" in the BODY of the message (the subject line will be ignored). If your mail client supports automatic conversion of plain-text, then the link here will be useful as-is, but otherwise you'll have to write the line yourself: mailto:majordomo@telecom-digest.org?body=faq%20telecom |
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