Million Monkey Software-- Our code sucks, but you should see this thing we wrote called Hamlet. (unknown, from a random friend's .sig) A million monkeys on the net, and I ain't seen no Shakespeare yet. (unknown, ditto) Sisyphean MicroRant of the Day: Most people blindly interpret the "million monkey" argument as something akin to the ever-growing project team in Brooks' classic _The Mythical Man-Month_. "Of course you won't get Hamlet from a million monkeys", (or AOL users, or whomever the speaker wants to pick on) they say. That's not the point at all-- the point is that the Internet makes it more likely that you will find the good stuff among the junk. How many Shakespeares have kept their stories in their heads, not written them down, written them but never performed them, etc? We will still miss those, and the ones that never post or publish anything to the net, but at least we now have a chance to discover some of them. Statistically, it is much more likely that there will be a few interesting monkeys among the million than among a few thousand. They may even collaborate. It's not a given. It's not a dependency. It's just that they're out there, and we can find them better with a net than without them. Finis. _SRC PS- Picorant of the day: I wish that I felt confident enough of the rendering of <STRONG> and <EMP> to use them instead of <B> and <I>. I guess I'll have to put philosophy ahead of usability in my next blogging and just go ahead and use 'em. I'm tired of misapplied tagging. It's not even clear if the markup of the delimiter tags themselves will display properly. Sigh.