FSF Campaign against Microsoft's Plan to Enforce "Secure Boot"

[Nadav Har'El]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011, Steve G. wrote about "Re: FSF Campaign against Microsoft's Plan to Enforce "Secure Boot"":
> at least  MS are not openly anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic,
> or anti 'the bad Jews/Israeli'.

Indeed. I still remember very vividly a meeting held 11 years ago in the
ISOC-IL offices, about the sad state of Hebrew support on the Web.
The conclusion was that, sadly but truely, Microsoft was the only one that
bothered fixing its browser (IE 5, at the time) to support new standards
that will help Israeli users - namely "logical order" Hebrew text (Unicode's
bidi, see http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/tr9-1.html).

Our knight in shiny armor, Netscape, did nothing to solve the our (Israelis')
problems, and forced us to use the ridiculous "visual order" method.
Mozilla, the recently announced free spin-off from Netscape, also didn't help.
IBM, that volunteered to solve this problem in Netscape, proposed a patch,
but Netscape didn't even care enough about us Israelis to apply it.
It would take several more years until Isralis finally had a free browser that
supported logical-order (bidi) Hebrew.

So despite all its other flaws, Microsoft does indeed care about Israel and
Israelis.


-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |                    Monday, Oct 24 2011, 
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Seen on a box of animal crackers: "Do not
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |eat if seal is broken."