Unix gets lost in translation with the Randall Munroe online comic strip

Still, he does explain that “sudo” is a command in the Unix operating system that temporarily grants godlike powers: “The humor comes from people who have encountered typing a command and having the computer say ‘No,’ and they say, ‘Oh, yeah, sudo says,’ and the computer does it. Kind of like ‘Simon says.’”

Hence the set-up: one stick figure says to another, “Make me a sandwich,” only to be told, “No.” Thinking quickly, stick figure No. 1 says, “Sudo make me a sandwich,” and the once-recalcitrant stick figure No. 2 must comply.

Mr. Munroe, a physics major and a programmer by trade, is good for jokes like this three times a week, informed by computing and the Internet. By speaking the language of geeks — many a strip hinges on crucial differences between the C and Python programming languages — while dealing with relationships and the meaning of a computer-centric life, xkcd has become required reading for techies across the world.

The site, which began publishing regularly in January 2006, has 500,000 unique visitors a day, he said, and 80 million page views a month. (Why “xkcd”? “It’s just a word with no phonetic pronunciation,” his Web site, xkcd.com, answers.) Mr. Munroe has become something of a cult hero. He counts himself as among the fewer than two dozen creators of comic strips on the Web who make a living at it.

Mr. Munroe is clearly still getting used to his celebrity and to running a business. He and his roommate, Derek Radtke, work on the Web site out of their Somerville, Mass., apartment, and they recently hired an employee to handle e-mail.

“People are generally surprised that we make a living from it,” Mr. Munroe said. Without being specific, he said that the sales of xkcd merchandise support the two of them “reasonably well.” He said they sell thousands of T-shirts a month, either of panels from his strip or in their style, as well as posters.

A fan of newspaper comic strips since childhood, Munroe can simultaneously call himself an heir to “Peanuts” while recognising that his quirky and technical humor would never have made it in newspapers. On the Internet, he said, “You can draw something that appeals to 1% of the audience — 1% of United States, that is three million people, that is more readers than small cartoons can have.”

In that way, and many others, the Web has been a salvation. “People doing comics on the Internet are free of all the baggage that goes with being with a syndicate,” he said, “the editorial control, the space limits, the no control over what can be done with your cartoon.”

The Internet has also created a bond between Mr. Munroe and his readers that is exceptional. They re-enact in real life the odd ideas he puts forward in his strip. A case in point was the strip called “Dream Girl.” It recounted a dream in which a girl (stick figure with flowing hair) recites a bunch of numbers into the narrator’s ear.

“The xkcd person is the kind of person who would take that and run with it,” he said. The numbers were coordinates and a date months in the future.

The strip’s narrator says he went there and no one came. “It turns out that wanting something doesn’t make it real,” the strip concludes. But on that day in real life, hundreds of fans met in a park in Cambridge. And then they all ordered sandwiches.

And who needs to know Unix to Know Your Vines

Web: http:www.xkcd.com/
Source:http://www.nytimes.com
Full article: http://tinyurl.com/47emre