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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