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I think the asian market is a lot more varied than lets say the European market. Over here we have not just CJK, but also Thai, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Burmese, 2 flavours of Malay... yes, right now I'm just eating hamburgers when it comes to OS', but I think the asians know better what the asians need out of their boxes... or rather, what they would like linux to look like right out of the box, perhaps.

Maybe this is taking it a bit far, but apart from Chinese (Mandarin) and Japanese (Hyojungo aka Tokyo Japanese), there's a whole host of dialects which would need to be localised differently - word-groups (Ci2 Hui4 in Chinese) are dramatically different in these dialects and if you tried typing in these you should find it to be as painful as trying to type Chinese via a Japanese input-method.

AFAIK, people in Windows use special programs to aid Kansai-ben input. it'd be cool if even dialects can be built in.

And yes, let the asians decide for themselves how they would have solved their kanji problem.

Actually, Goundry is technically correct that an early revision of UNICODE allowed less than 2**16 codepoints, since it covered only the Basic Multilingual Plane of ISO/IEC-10646.

However, even at the time this article first came out there was clearly room for future expansion to a 32-bit space. And in any case, BMP is sufficient for all but the most esoteric uses. Sure, linguists studying dead or obscure languages might need special support, but really that's always going to be true. The UNICODE-troll author says he spends all his time spending arcane ancient Chinese texts. That a general-purpose standard is not exactly tailored to his needs is hardly surprising.

So I agree that the UNICODE article seemed pretty poor, and the author's reputation is low as far as I'm concerned. Picking a temporary limitation and blowing it up into an anglocentrist conspiracy is pretty lame.

To be fair though, Nicholas Carroll was only an editor of the UNICODE troll, not the author. I wish he'd edited it with rm, though. Some of his other papers are OK, though unoriginal.

I'd prefer that the books be transcribed now and maybe later we can add some foreign-language books once we figure out a standard that can satisfy the world. Besides, English (European languages, anyway) are the real languages of the Internet.

The main reason seems to be that in East Asia, there are reduced character sets in daily use which contain only a couple of hundred or thousand glyphs, but to read and study classical texts, the number required quickly goes up into the tens of thousands, for each of a number of languages. Not having these glyphs in the Unicode set would be like asking English-speakers to use alphabets reduced by five or six characters (M and N are similar, X, Q, C and Z could be replaced by one character as well) and dictionaries from which three out of four words have been deleted due to redundancy or age.

The reason for this mis-design, the article argues, is political: the nationalities in question have never been asked how many characters they would need together -- for each single language, Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, a scholar would say "Sure! 50,000 characters is enough for us!"

As for Hastings Research : maybe you would like to see a sample of some of their other quality research. When have you ever heard a white paper draw a metaphor between market conditions and a glass being half full? But seriously they do have a six foot magnetic whiteboard to "prototype" their research. (they don't put rookies in center field either.) If you need to know they also provide a list of profitable web sites. (Look to the bottom of the page for their judicious use of "keywords" to help prop up their standing in search engine results.)

This is the worst article ever on slashdot.

As for Hastings Research : maybe you would like to see a sample of some of their other quality research. When have you ever heard a white paper draw a metaphor between market conditions and a glass being half full? But seriously they do have a six foot magnetic whiteboard to "prototype" their research. (they don't put rookies in center field either.) If you need to know they also provide a list of profitable web sites. (Look to the bottom of the page for their judicious use of "keywords" to help prop up their standing in search engine results.)

This is the worst article ever on slashdot.

As for Hastings Research : maybe you would like to see a sample of some of their other quality research. When have you ever heard a white paper draw a metaphor between market conditions and a glass being half full? But seriously they do have a six foot magnetic whiteboard to "prototype" their research. (they don't put rookies in center field either.) If you need to know they also provide a list of profitable web sites. (Look to the bottom of the page for their judicious use of "keywords" to help prop up their standing in search engine results.)

This is the worst article ever on slashdot.

As for Hastings Research : maybe you would like to see a sample of some of their other quality research. When have you ever heard a white paper draw a metaphor between market conditions and a glass being half full? But seriously they do have a six foot magnetic whiteboard to "prototype" their research. (they don't put rookies in center field either.) If you need to know they also provide a list of profitable web sites. (Look to the bottom of the page for their judicious use of "keywords" to help prop up their standing in search engine results.)

This is the worst article ever on slashdot.

This whole discussion reminds me of that (inane?) Unicode article by Hastings Research that got flamed to death here on Slashdot some time ago. Here's the link (to the article) if you're interested in reading it again.