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Ask About Life, Blogging and Linux in the Middle East
Isam Bayazidi is about as far from the current U.S. media stereotype of an Arab as you can get. He's worked on the Arabeyes (Unix/Linux in Arabic) project, helped start the Arabic Wikipedia, co-founded the Jordan LUG, is a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), works as a senior software developer for Maktoob, an online community that boasts more than four million members, and created Jordan Planet, a blogging community whose members have many different religious and political viewpoints. Isam is also a long-time Slashdot reader, so he's the perfect person to ask what's going on in the Arab (cyber)world today. One question per post please. Isam will answer 12 of the highest-moderated questions. We'll run his answers verbatim as soon as he gets them back to us.
Yeah, here in Egypt we have a lame joke regarding this topic.
Q: How does an English person iron his clothes?
A: From left to right!
*ducks*
I heard that in the middle east, Egyptians are often regarded as having a sense of humour. I saw a quote from a reporter interviewing people in Egypt after 9/11 asking them what they thought about the fact that it was an Egyptian who lead the attacks. One person shook his head and said something to the effect of, "No way the ringleader could have been Egyptian. These attacks required planning and coordination..."
I was watching this thing on TV about some guy named Hitler. Someone should stop him!
Is there any power infrastructure advancements that are being made to better support the growing rise of computer use in the middle east?
They'd like to move to nuclear power, but have hit some snags.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"