Microsoft Windows in our language
Some websites and main-stream media have reprinted the news that our government wants to design its own Belarusian operating system which is supposed to be a big rival to Microsoft Windows, without really knowing what they are reporting about. The original source of the news was a press conference organized by the Ministry of Information. That conference was ridiculous. The answers clearly indicated that the guy had no clue what he was talking about, he had no idea what’s the difference between an open source movement and source code, between a programming language and an operating system, and even between a programming language and a GUI interface language! He was a complete moron. I really don’t believe there’ll be an operating system of any sort coming from them.
On the other hand, journalists seem to have missed a much more important announcement. The chief of Microsoft office in Ukraine who’s also responsible for Belarus’ market said during a recent press conference that Microsoft is planning to make a Belarusian localization of Windows. He said this is not a final decision yet, but they are seriously thinking about it.
I think that would be wonderful. Though I frankly don’t know how they are going to make money off it, because 99% of Belarusan computer users use illegal pirate versions of Windows, in Russian or English.
December 15th, 2005 at 12:16 am
Well dont forget that the idiots that dont have a clue are usually the ones doing the funding and decision making. Programmers and engineers somehow have to manage to put something together that works… I do wonder what the motives are behind making a Belarusian operating system…
Economically : it’s near impossible to compete against Microsoft, even less considering Belarus simply doesn’t exist to most of the world.
Practical : Most computers are fitted with either Windows (workstations etc) or a flavor of linux / unix (servers mostly), which is highly unlikely to change. Macs are rigged by default with MacOS or OSX… or whatever it’s called.
I am thinking of something a bit more grim… forcing every computer being sold to have this new OS… and since its a state-designed system… I wouldn’t be surprised if it were to be loaded with keyloggers and spyware… and completely incompatible with any current software, forcing users to use Belarusian software only… See where this is going? Complete information control. Incidentally… China did a similar thing with DVD’s by creating a Chinese only DVD format to prevent people from importing foreign disks.
Best way to control the flow of information is to make it incompatible with the rest of the world…
About a localized version of Windows, I believe it is already possible… atleast on Windows 2003, it’s possible to change the default (system) language to Belarusian. If you don’t believe me… this picture will show you : http://x.lanfanatics.nl/bel.gif
I’m not surprised that 99% of Belarusian computers have a pirated version of Windows, hell I do too. Quite logical considering you’d have to cough up between $150 and $600 as license fee (even more for servers). You can buy a second computer with that kind of money.
Time to continue writing my self-hacking IM client. Hell no that I’m going to allow the people I care about to end up in jail.
December 15th, 2005 at 10:23 pm
That picture u sent is just an input language so you can print “i” and “Ñž” it’s not language of interface.
And that “belarusian” OS … there was big interview with that guy who started all that buzz, where he told that this OS would be some Linux child and not completely new program. And all that talks were for finding funds to launch project - to get some european grant for development. It’s not that our government will pay for the project…
December 16th, 2005 at 4:50 pm
Not quite, if you set the default language from English to something non-standard like… say Japanese… your system will no longer boot as it cannot find windows\system32 (since it was ASCII encoded and its looking for the unicode version of it)… thats what happened to me on windows 2000… not sure if it does the same on XP/2003.
Ah… so it’s going to be a side branch of Linux? Sorry, I haven’t heard anything about it at all. I live pretty much in a Belarus news blackout here… actually in a foreign news blackout… they find the latest local farmer fashion more important than people dying due to earthquakes and polluted rivers… This article does say “our government wants to design its own Belarusian operating system”…
September 1st, 2006 at 10:50 pm
Are you there?
Nice speech. I’m curious how it went over.
September 18th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
Hi everybody!
Can the open source software movement defeat (or severely cripple) Microsoft in the marketplace? Thank you :)