Re: tlug: Re: MagicPoint (was: VFLib Documentation)

["Jonathan Byrne" <jpmag@example.com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: craigoda@example.com <craigoda@example.com>

>BTW, Ruby is supposed to be pretty kick-butt and gaining
popularity
>fast.  However, because it was developed in Japan, it is
not widely
>known outside of Japan.

I'm inside Japan and don't know it either :-)  What is it?

>since I'm online, on an unrelated subject.  Does anyone
know how to
>fix the majordomo digest so that it correctly decodes the
base64
>encoded subject headers?


Gee, I don't know how to make anything correctly read
base64.  The few times I've ever gotten anything that was
sent to me in base64, it never became anything but the
mojibake it arrived as :-)

Jumping back to the original subject of your post again, I
think your comments on involvement in Japanese software for
Linux are right on.  I don't quite have the grounding yet in
Linux to do decent translations of the documentation yet (I
don't think so, anyway) and I'm also stacked to my eyeballs
with stuff right now, but this is something I hope to
involve myself in in the future.

Another area that may emerge is what might be called
"reverse localization."  That is, taking software that was
originally written in Japanese and localizing it to English
or other languages, while retaining it's Japanese input
capability.  Right now, Applix is being localized to
Japanese (currently beta 2), but what if the best <insert
software here> for Linux were a Japanese software product?
(And in the case of Magicpoint, it may well be, from what
people are saying about it.)  Not that many people in the
world could use it as-is, so groups like TLUG may find
themselves helping with producing English versions of
Japanese software in the future.  If the very high quality
of the Japanese Linux books that are coming out these days
is any indication (they are surpassing the English titles),
it is bound to happen that there will be a corresponding
quality and quantity boom in Japanese Linux software.  If
English versions are also produced, Japanese Linux software
authors may come to dominate large segments of that field
the way U.S. software houses dominate the field for other
platforms.

Jonathan

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