[lg policy] Microsoft Google spoof invokes Esperanto as metaphor

[Slavomír Čéplö]

Dear Dave,

thanks for beating me to the punch, I was just about to post the link.
One tiny nitpick, though: the H.264 codec the support for which will
be removed from Chrome is not just favored by MS (and Apple and
Amazon), but rather by the Internet as such - as one of the links
points out, some 60% of all video on teh intert00bz is encoded in
H.264, including most of Google's very own YouTube. In light of its
status as an evolved quasi-standard, the comparison of H.264 to
English is more than apt.
In any case, I think it the 'Open Letter' is a fine piece of satire
and its idea to discuss issues of language policy using software
terminology and scifi geek/nerd vocabulary is nothing short of
brilliant. In fact, several of my programmer friends have approached
me requesting comment on this story and as you can imagine, the
ensuing discussion was quite fun. At this point, we're trying to come
up with a good analogy for endangered languages and why they matter.
Any thoughts from the assembled multitudes?

Yours sincerely,

bulbul

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 16:07, Dave Sayers <dave.sayers at cantab.net> wrote:
> There's trouble a-brewin' on that interweb....
>
> This is a bit technical, but basically Google have a web browser called
> Chrome, and Google have decided only to support a particular format for web
> video, rejecting another widely used format. This will have implications for
> anyone wanting to show videos online (Chrome currently has about 12% market
> share). Microsoft are unhappy about this, and in a blog post by an MS
> evangelist, used Esperanto as a metaphor for the Google-favoured video
> format, and English as the MS-favoured one. Here's a report on it, including
> the blog post in question:
>
> http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/011211-html5-microsoft-google.html
>
> It's an interesting comparison; maybe something to share with tech-savvy
> students.
>
> Dave
>
>
> --
> Dr. Dave Sayers
> Honorary Research Fellow
> School of the Environment and Society
> Swansea University
> dave.sayers at cantab.net
> http://swansea.academia.edu/DaveSayers/About
>
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