Should Hardware Drivers be Region/Language Locked?

An anonymous reader asks: "Recently, I have purchased Sony's new Hi-MD player. I popped in their driver CD, and instead of installer launching, I was greeted by the message, 'Cannot install for this Windows language.' It seems like it rejected installation, because my default language setting is Japanese, although I am using English version of Windows. I got the response from Sony stating that: 'If you are using a different language set up for your computer, you will not be able to use the software supplied with the product. Unfortunately, currently there is no workaround for this issue. The only option would be to change the language setting of your computer.' Now I'm asking for my money back. The hardware device is practically useless without the software installation, and it seems like they are going too far, especially since this may affect anyone who uses more than one languages on their computer. Isn't this discrimination to multi-lingual people living in the targeted market? And isn't it unfair to impose such restrictions on software that is required to use hardware?"

Comments

it can be other things too

[greywar]

For a while my company would ALSO lock you out of installing on a japanese machine.

As it turns out japanese machines have a different base character set, and the installer [installshield] would crash ALL the time. Even if multiple language packs were installed. Eventually after much head scratching, and installshield saying "wow you are right it doesnt work here either, and we have no idea why" I finally figured out what it was.

Turns out installshield at the time if you had a copyright symbol in a start emnu folder name would always crash.

I've also seen installations that just simply did not support japanese or chinese. They do have different language formats, not every letter can be kept in a single byte of data.

Or the CD-rom is hard coded to a region, and they make assumptions about people in a different regional language trying to install hardware not region specific. hard to say.

Re:But wait...

[MarcQuadra]

Often these devices don't let you just play music stored as regular FAT files. Even the iPod forces you to only play files that are placed there by iTunes in a hidden sparse disk-image. You can copy your MP3s to your player in disk-mode, but then you can't play them on the player, or you can use the tools to put them into the player and no longer have them as files.