August 22, 2004

International woes for Microsoft
posted by Jerry Garcia 20 years ago
  • It cost them millions? Holy crap they won't make that back for another twenty minutes!
  • Whew! Twenty minutes are up. The world is safe again.
  • Yeah, OK, maybe it's a tempest in a teapot, but this is really funny: A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between "not specified," "male" or "bitch," because of an unfortunate error in translation. Unfortunate! Ha! Thanks JG.
  • Yes, MS financial losses are not really the point of the post. :-)
  • I got you. I was just trying to support pete.
  • yeah I just remember someone telling me if M$ shut down today that current licensing alone would earn billions per month. with a "B" billions. I don't know *how* true that is, but I'm sure they are in a position to not give a crap either way about anything. Oh and they're a monopoly. Go figure.
  • As I understand it, the "bitch" thing was a regional dialect issue -- i.e., the word doesn't mean "bitch" to all Spanish speakers, just certain countries. My wife told me of a similar story when she heard a radio interview with a woman who's evidently the Spanish-speaking world's Oprah. She said the differences are such that she's had to create her own Spanish dialect that everyone can understand, but is spoken nowhere. (I think the example she gave was that a certain phrase meaning "catch the bus" in one country means "fuck the baby" in another, though that could be my fucked-up memory.)
  • Its like when I tried to bum a fag while in America...
  • In Canada you'd be A-OK. :-) We're used to faggots as well.