"Not too long ago, ad agencies, design firms and other creative companies were about the only businesses that widely deployed Macintosh computers to their employees. But for a number of reasons, word of the benefits of Apple hardware - and software - on enterprise desktops is now spreading."
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Member since:2006-10-08
Allthough I'm going off ttopic more and more (sorry for this), your post deserves a reply.
"I can't help but notice how you keep bringing up the german localization and general illiteracy of the average german citizen often on this forum."
It's because of (1) it is a fact and (2) I'm very critical in regards of language, especially if it's my own native language. See "functional illiteracy" below.
"Both assessments are somewhat surprising to me given that Germany is a very wealthy country and that SuSE used to put up one of the best distros around on its day."
SuSE's Linux distribution is a high quality product, but has several i18n issues as well. Most of them are related to KDE, but I found this situation improving over the years. For example, KOffice and OpenOffice 1 still are able to use standard german, while I think OpenOffice 2 does not support it anymore.
"Also, with KDE being started mainly by german developers, one would think that its german localization would be nearly perfect."
I'm very sad this is not the case. But maybe it's because some of the applications are not developed by german developers. But this does not matter beacuse the demand of high quality german language is not very high, even in Germany it isn't.
"I thought that SuSE, which was well known for funding KDE development, had taken care of that."
The problem is: Only very few people in Germany have the knowledge needed to make a judged statement.
"The illiteracy problem is a huge problem here in Brazil, but as a third world country under development, that is practically taken for granted. I simply can't imagine Germany with such a problem!"
To make it clear: The term I usually use is "functional illiteracy", which describes difficulties in reading and generating text. This does not refer to the unability to read or write in general, but to the proper use of the means of the language. Visit a school in Germany, see the PISA results. Pupils are not able (at an adequate grade relating to their age) to get the content from a text by reading it. Reading abilites also refers to reading diagrams, statistics etc. which is not as good as it should be. The same goes for writing. If you read the daily newspapers, you're getting mad about the amount of mistakes. I even read a lease contract that was full of errors which affected the content (!) in a way that you had effectively two (!) possibilities of what a certain paragraph would mean; in one possible interpretation, the obligation was on the hirer's side, in the other, it was on the lessor's side - you could not tell which was ment!
The society is not interested in language matters. "Oh, it doesn't matter as long as you get a clue of what the text means" is a typical statement. As I mentioned before, the freedom of orthography is granted by law (by constitution), so there's no regulative mechanism anymore. Standardized orthography has been completely abolished in Germany in 1996.
To create an analogy in english: Thatt woult be so, as, iff I all One to One oversit woult and the hegivenis is bad. So a Overrushing! (That would be as if I would translate everything directly. What a surprise!) :-)
Member since:
2006-01-09
I can't help but notice how you keep bringing up the german localization and general illiteracy of the average german citizen often on this forum. Both assessments are somewhat surprising to me given that Germany is a very wealthy country and that SuSE used to put up one of the best distros around on its day.
Also, with KDE being started mainly by german developers, one would think that its german localization would be nearly perfect. I thought that SuSE, which was well known for funding KDE development, had taken care of that.
The illiteracy problem is a huge problem here in Brazil, but as a third world country under development, that is practically taken for granted. I simply can't imagine Germany with such a problem!
And by the way, looks like we both had nearly the same (what some people call) anedoctal evidences so that's why I think we share nearly the same point of view.
Edited 2007-03-11 19:19