William Overington opined: > Yet I am very concerned that I may be in effect being told > here that Unicode is only really intended for people with the very latest > equipment using expensive solutions that are only realistically available > to rich corporations.
I myself am very concerned about issues of economic disparity in the world and access to and control over IT systems and their impact on nations and peoples' lives. But... The concept of Unicode being a wedge issue for the digital divide just strikes me as blowing smoke. The issue is *NOT* hardware. Take a look at www.dell.com. The very, very, bottom-end system, a "Dimension 2200" desktop, comes these days with a 1.3GHz Intel Celeron chip, oodles of multimegabytes of SDRAM, a 20- to 40GB hard drive, a 4MB of video memory. That machine, which can jump circles around even a top-of-the-line PC of just a few years ago, is listed at a base price of $669. These machines are now approaching supercomputer capabilities, at Radio Shack everyday consumer electronics prices. And if you can't afford one yourself, you can rent access to one. The issue is *NOT* the OS. All Dell PC's come pre-loaded with MS Windows XP right now. And guess what -- all that Unicode functionality is packed right under the hood in XP, waiting to go. If you are just talking about word-processing Unicode documents, these combinations of machines and OS are busy bringing these capabilities to the masses -- the only barrier is the educational one of letting people know how to use the stuff right under their fingertips. And if *that* is still too expensive, in another 3 years, *THESE* machines will be sitting in the digital scrapheaps, where they can be picked up by funds-starved organizations for a song, if they use a little ingenuity. No, the digital divide is all about *BIG* systems. Huge database-driven, integrated systems that require millions of dollars worth of software and tens of millions of dollars worth of consulting, to operate enterprise businesses, governments, militaries, and the like. *Those* are the systems that lock out the little guys and concentrate economic power and information control into big organizations. If you are concerned about the digital divide, then Unicode on the web, and all that distributed processing and informational power in those consumer PC's loaded up with Unicode-handling software for a pittance, are your *friends* in the struggle to keep all economic power from concentration in the top 0.01% of the world's hands. --Ken
