Unicode? Character Sets? UTF-what?

I was inspired to add this note after recent frustrations about the complete ignorance of character sets in both Commercial & Open software…
I seriously recommend everyone reads the following, less ISO-blahblahblah and more UTF-8, no excuses!
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html