On Fri, 23 May 2008 12:42:08 +0300 "Dotan Cohen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Exactly. Americans enjoy an extremely low border-length/area ratio, > and are thus exposed to very little outside culture. Add that to their > very diverse landscape, and they have little reason to travel outside > their own country for pleasure. That is why Americans do not > understand different spellings, numerical and date formats, > measurement units, and the like. I say this as a complement, not as a > criticism. I think you are generalizing a bit much on this, but, most educated Americans certainly fully understand the different spellings, numerical formats, date formats, measurement units, et. al. In my case I learned this in high school. I'm probably not a good example here, because I am currently working with the financial software company where we must present our numbers in just about every currency in the world. Different regions of the US are affected by different cultures, such as Mexican/Spanish in the southwest, Cuban/Spanish in Florida, Italian, Irish, Portugese in the Northeast. And, of course the African-American culture. But, up until World War I, the US was very isolated from the rest of the world, and the isolationist mindset still permeates our politics. We must all try to understand other cultures, and where this ties in to OpenOffice is that the product must support not only the languages and formats of different regions, but also needs to embody the cultures and sensitivities, and that is very difficult. People to not want to be dictated to (I know this was improper English) by Microsoft, by the US, or by Kazakhstan for that matter. This is why, FOSS software can be much superior to closed source. With a proprietary package, it is economics that drive the product, so that product might not support some of the minority languages in some areas or languages in some third world countries where they don't think the market is worth the investment, where a FOSS product is more community driven, and volunteers various regions an help with these things. Sorry for the long port, but I think that Dotan did post a very relevant statement. -- -- Jerry Feldman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id: 537C5846 PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846
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