This story, of a divorcing couple who both ended up dead due to their cellphone system not supporting ‘ı’ (a Turkish letter called ‘dotless’ or ‘closed’ i), shows why proper i18n in software systems is very important. (Warning: story contains very strong language.)
I’m really tired of this political correctness: “Warning: story contains very strong language”
When it comes to murder and death in a story hen strong language is the less important issue.
The fact that there is death in the story was flagged up by my write-up, but the language was not – hence the extra note. Political correctness is changing language so as not to offend people. I think sometimes that is appropriate, but in any case that’s not what I did here. I did precisely the opposite – I didn’t change the language (I just warned people about it).
Gerv
> Political correctness is changing language so as not to offend people
Well, warning about strong language is also political correctness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness
The whole thing goes into the same direction as brutal movies which are ok for the audience as long as no one is using strong language. Ridiculous.
But anyway: your blog, your rules.
Good internationalization is still important, of course, but it seems to me that a culture of stupid violence got the two killed in this case.
Ironically, your RSS feed also mishandles the ‘ı’ and shows it as ‘ı’.
I hope you won’t get killed over that… ;-)
Oh no. Thank you so much for warning me that the article had a swear word in it. If I had seen the word I would go raving mad and kill innocent people. Thank you for watching out for me. I don’t know what I would’ve done without the warning.
mscha: I see the dotless i correctly in Gerv’s post; but sometimes, in other posts, I’ve had to use “View => Reload” before the text was shown correctly, and at other times, even reloading the mail wasn’t enough, but replying to it showed the correct characters in the quoted text above my reply. I would report it as a bug if I could describe it in a not-too-vague manner.
Gerv: What killed them, of course, was not so much (or not only) bad i18n on their phones, but the custom of “settling” disputes with sharp knives.