Re: tlug: kanji or romaji for Japanese? (was: parallel-port IDE)

[Jonathan Byrne - 3Web <jq@example.com>]

On Thu, 15 Oct 1998, Rex Walters wrote:

>>>>>> John De Hoog writes:  (on 15 Oct 98)
>
>>             Rather than telling people to adjust to computers, you must
>> make computers adjust to people.
>
>Here, here!
>
>Extremely well written.
>
>Frankly, some of this thread strikes me as borderline xenophobia ....

Agreed.  Telling people to pitch the writing system of their language because
it's harder to set up a computer to use it would be like Snap-On Tools telling
mechanics that rather than having Snap-On go to all the trouble of designing 
and manufacturng quality, comfortable tools, the mechanics should instead have
their hands amputated and replaced with prosthetic devices optimized for
gripping rectangular objects, since those are a lot easier to make.

Once upon a time, computers only had line editors, not visual editors.
Imagine if the decision had been taken to never make a more advanced editor,
since it required more memory, more CPU more, more disk space, more programmer
hours to created and maintain.  After all, just let the users adapt to the
tool, rather than improving the tool to better meet their needs.  People would
have thought that ridiculous.  And so would doing away with kanji just because
early computers didn't have them be ridiculous.

And finally, there's that choice thing: if you don't want to use/view kanji on
your computer, don't.   You're free to only visit web sites that use the
Latin-1 character set (and maybe we ought to do away with parts of it in order
to save memory?) and have no double-byte fonts, IMEs, etc. on your machine.
You don't have to ever localize any of our products for Japan or China.  And
you're completely to not be able to sell them here :-)

Jonathan Byrne
Media and Content Section
3Web - Your Internet Solution! <URL:http://www.threeweb.ad.jp/index.en.html>
3Web Channel <URL: http://www.3web.co.jp/index.en.html>

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