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/Drivel/%20%20%20/Drivel/%20%20%20/Drivel/%20%60-/Drivel/* Microsloth Announces New Naming Convention


Microsloth Announces New Naming Convention

- BILGATES.GOD declares darkness an industry standard. (Warning: computer humor)

 

Industry giant and controller of the world, Microsloth, have announced another sweeping change in human behavior. Because of increasing congestion on the information superhighway, all human names will be reduced to 8 characters with an optional 3 character extension. "This will save as many as 20 bytes, every time a name is mentioned", BILGATES.GOD, CEO of Microsloth stated. "Since names form such an integral part of our communication, this will result in megabytes of savings in a very short period of time." Microsloth will make a full-screen, 20 minute AVI digital video detailing the savings available on it's web site later this month.

While it has been suggested that it will be difficult for people to have unique names with such limitations, Microsloth analysts have calculated that with the 26 letters of the alphabet (uppercase only), ten digits, and the additional allowed characters of "~", "`", "'", "!", "@", "#", "$", "%", "^", "&", "(", ")", "{", "}" there are 5011 = 4.882 Quintillion unique names available, although not all will be easily pronounceable.

The convention also includes methods of indicating family tree structures, and for finding all people in a given category. Thus, "all my siblings" can be replaced with "./*.*" and "all my grandparents" by "../../*.*". Microsloth expects these conventions to be adopted worldwide by 1999.

Microsloth finally rejected it's earlier preferred proposal that people be named by an IP-address-like protocol, on the basis that it is not mathematically sound to have more than one decimal place in a number.

[ This Drivel is copyright Mark Whybird ]

 


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