Re: Japanese locale and Fascists [was: tlug: Meeting August 2]

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

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tlug note from "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>
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>>>>> "Steve" == Steve Dunham <dunham@example.com> writes:

    Steve> Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

    >> It was determined that FreeDOS (a DOS emulation distributed
    >> with DOSemu) is not ready for prime time (so why is it included
    >> in the Debian distribution?),

    Steve> FreeDOS is included in Debian because they wanted a free
    Steve> version of DOS to run on dosemu.  Really, it was a matter
    Steve> of shipping with nothing or FreeDOS: either way you can add
    Steve> MS-DOS if you have it, and if they ship FreeDOS, you have
    Steve> something you can use if you don't have DOS.

The point is that you don't "have something you can use".  FreeDOS
simply would not recognize redirected drives no matter what I did.
The only drive it found properly was the hdimage.  Even the floppy was
weird.  That's not acceptable IMHO---there are going to be lots of
people out there who haven't built DOSemu themselves and have some
idea what the config file is doing.  It should be a separate package.

    Steve> Ahh, this clears up a few things.  We did ask a Sun
    Steve> representative about it, and he mumbled something about
    Steve> "Sun Japan" wanting a seperate distribution, but I didn't
    Steve> know that seperate entities were involved.

Yeah.  You're not physically located in Japan, are you.  I don't
really remember that on this list.  Here, it's "Fujitsu Sun" (or was
when the terminals in the machine room were bought---and "Fuji-Xerox"
for that matter).  The Japanese are incredibly self-centered about
this, IMHO.  Japanese companies are very good at keeping trade secrets
because of "life-time employment."  They don't trust their foreign
partners to do it as well (for good reason); but what ends up
happening is that most (this is confirmed by real research although
only by MBA students) foreign firms perceive their Japanese partners
as hypocritical (at best) and intellectual thieves by industrial
policy (a vocal minority).

Sad.

Last day or so the Asahi Shinbun ran a front page article indicating
that 40% of large Japanese firms admit (Asahi can't write for shit, I
not sure this is what they meant but my native-speaking wife said it's
the most likely interpretation), off the record, to widespread
internal piracy of business software.  (Given the normal discounting
of unpleasant statistics, I'd guess that means that 80% know it exists
and 97% have it, some without knowing it because the relevant officers
are looking the other way.)  This was policy in my Institute (we had a
"lending library" of proprietary software like MS-Office and
Mathematica, open indiscriminately to faculty, tech staff, and grad
students, as well as undergrads who claimed they were representing one
of the above) until 4 years ago when the University got its act
together and started negotiating site licenses.  (My department is too
small to do it profitably alone; I think it's disgusting that that we
waited until it became cheap to be ethical).

In that kind of environment, I'm not surprised that Sun is having
problems with "ketsu-no-ana-no-chiisai" partners....

    Steve> I don't really need their input method or Wnn6, I just want
    Steve> enough to able to set the locale to "ja", so that X will
    Steve> turn wide characters on.

(1) Does Sun's X localization depend on libc localization?  If so, you 
    could be hosed, but you could try
    (a) the liblocale.so dodge for Netscrap in its original form (this 
        probably requires (2)(a) as well)
    (b) a more sophisticated version in which you take Linux's locale
        support and port it to Sun, then get it linked before libc
        (unfortunately, I don't think Linux libc has a Japanese locale
        yet)
(2) If not,
    (a) copy /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/ja to the relevant place
    (b) copy /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale to the relevant place and take
        XFree86 locale support and get it linked first
(3) If you really truly only need wide characters, why not tell X
    you're in Beijing and Mule/Quail that you're in Tokyo?

OK, (1&2)(b) are too much work, and (3) is quite possibly just
stupid.  What exactly _do_ you want?

YAS

-- 
                            Stephen J. Turnbull
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences                    Yaseppochi-Gumi
University of Tsukuba                      http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tel: +81 (298) 53-5091;  Fax: 55-3849              turnbull@example.com
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