On Sun, 19 May 2002, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote: > Ely Levy wrote: > > > actualy I know a LOT and I mean a LOT of people who doesn't use linux > > cause of lack of docs/native reading-writing/mailing lists > > hebrew support. > > That's a whole 'nother thing. At this time if you want Linux, you need > English literacy. The reason you don't need it for windows is that > Microsoft spend lots of money making THEIR product accessable to the > Hebrew speaking masses. Unless someone does it to Linux, you will never > see that depth of "market penetration".
What do you mean by that? Do you call the locallized Hebrew Windows 95 "ready for use by a Hebrew speaker"? I dare say that KDE has gone far beyond this. Another thing you forget is that someone may be able to read English, but feel uncomfortoble with it, because his/her Hebrew is better. I know that this is the same for me. לקוראי העברית: האם המשפט הזה היה הדבר הראשון שקראתם? Translation: "Hebrew readers: was this sentence the first thing you read [in this post]?" Apologies for the Hebrew content, but it is Here to make a point. > > > people who actualy NEED hebrew can't use linux. > > That's the bottom line. Changing this malling list to Hebrew is not going > to magicaly make it happen. If anything it will keep our problems local. > Which they are not. They are almost the same problems that the Chinese, > Japanese, Koreans, etc users plus all of the Arabic users out there. > And most of the problems are not even that, they are the same for > all users of linux. > > It's simple. The only way to share programs with other people is to present > them in a language they understand. 200 years ago it would have been French. > 100 years ago German or Russian. Now it's English. > > If you want to have a job, you had better read and write English well. > Otherwise your company will be passed over for that development contract > for Indians, who are native English speakers. Especially since "Made In > Israel" is begining to mean "Not for sale in the E.U.". :-( Then why are so many "web forums" thriving? web forums are more "accessble" to common people. They solve the technical problems of Hebrew usage and archiving by providing an inferior client and one centralized (non-scalable) server. This whole method s screwed-up. This is why I rather use newsgroups and mailing lists. Mail and news clients have evolved enough. (If you want me to refer you to another Elm user who reads and writes Hebrew email, let me know) the percieved lack of Hebrew support in them is no longer an excuse. As for newsgroups: try looking at archives or russian newsgroups in google. I believe that google's newsgroup archive is a good example to a charset-aware messages archive. Any idea how to "archive" a mailing list there? > > (Sucks, dosen't it?). > > IMHO the only way Linux will "take off" here is if people use it at their > job. A nice chicken-and-egg^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbootstrapping problem, right? But we don't want all the people here who use linux at work to reply with me-too. -- Tzafrir Cohen mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir ================================================================To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
