Hello, * Kyle Wheeler <kyle-mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2006-09-06 08:14]: > That statement is trivially false. Virtually every car, airplane, and > microwave out there has a computer in it these days, and very few of > them speak many standard character sets. Not to mention all the > financial systems (like the mainframes that still run the payroll at > several US universities) that nobody wants to upgrade. What I suppose > you meant is that there are few "desktop" systems that cannot handle > several charsets. This depends on your definition of "few", and also > on your definition of "cannot". As to the first, my university still > provides incoming CSE grad students with Sparcstations running Solaris > 8. Maybe they're the only ones in the world with a few Sun boxes still > kicking around, but since I know many of the people using those > machines, that makes it an important demographic to me. As to the > latter, yes you can probably install enough third-party software onto > your Solaris 8 box to handle whatever charset you like, but that's a > pain. Indeed, many of my friends use the pine mailer, which stolidly > refuses to recognize any charset but us-ascii on all of their systems. > I understand that if they got the latest patches, and put some effort > into configuring things just so, they might be able to do better than > us-ascii (and I've told them so, and told them how, on multiple > occasions), but they have no interest. There are several professors in > my department that still use "mh" to read their email, which has no > knowledge of anything non-ascii (heck, just getting some of them to > handle MIME is a battle). Well, your mother tongue is English. So it may be ok for you to have only us-ascii. But I refuse to garble my mother tongue (German, needs äöüßÄÖÜ and also ¤ which makes ISO-8859-1 unusable but only ISO-8859-15 and utf-8) only because some people mean they must use software from the last century. Regards, Bernhard -- Der Mittwoch müsste so heilig gesprochen werden, dass man zwei Tage vorher und zwei Tage nachher nicht arbeiten darf. -- (unbekannt)
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