How the iPad fired my building Watchman | Hacker News Reader

How the iPad fired my building Watchman

therodinhoods.com

15 pointsrodinhood12 comments

I'm specially appalled by learning the fact that all magazine maps are officially rubber-stamped to inform the reader about the usage of the map !

More on this subject : http://www.indianexpress.com/news/foreign-magazine-map-is-st...

This has been an issue for many software companies as well. The Windows 95 launch was delayed because of this,

"Although this was a minor oversight on the part of the product group, which used United Nations maps not officially recognized by India, the Indian government was extremely upset that the region had been omitted and demanded that the problem be fixed before Windows 95 could be distributed in India." http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2000/Dec00/12-06...

Wasn't The Economist available online long before the iPad was even a twinkle in Job's eye?

Yeah, I'm wondering what the holdup was. I've been reading Economist articles online, without a subscription, for years.

Also, it seems an odd Peculiarity of Indian people that they tend to Capitalize the first Letter of random Words. I'm not Sure why this is.

Probably something to do with the level of exposure. It seems most Indians know English pretty well, but not as many have taken that last step from "know" to "fluent". It's difficult and probably not strictly necessary.

Also, en_IN and en_SG are just different from en_US and en_UK. Apparently in southeast asia, "do the needful" is a perfectly cromulent phrase. (My main complaint is the seeming lack of consistency when using "the". Sometimes they use it, but most of the time, they don't. This makes emails very hard to read. Just when you were enjoying the literary experience, a "the" is missing and it jars you back to reality. But I digress.)

:-) There is so many 'english' versions spoken and written in India, those who are not exposed to our country will be baffled. The big big move is 'Hinglish' - Hindi meets English. And yes, I do admit a lack of consistency or rather attention to the capitalization of words.

I am from India. I noticed it too, and I do it reasonably frequently as well. Some reasons I can think of,

* Hindi (and AFAIK, most other Indian languages) dont have a concept of capitalization.

* Many Indians you meet maybe programmers who use CamelCase, Microsoft_Case, CONSTANTS, and it Might be Hard TO switch context.

* In my case, I am learning German, and all nouns are capitalised, so sometimes things like that can come in play.

Various dialects of Indian English are still quite similar to British English during the 18th/19th centuries, which is why sometimes Indian English sounds quite archaic (do the needful, etc.).

Emphasised nouns are capitalised in some of the older 19th century books I own, so I suspect this is just another characteristic that remained in some places.

What's the value of using 18th century English in the 21st century? It just confuses the people using the current version.

(I do admit that I like the expression "do the needful", though.)

Sure, but it wasn't a native client app. What good is an app if it doesn't take up storage space? The once newfangled Internet with it's lightweight footprint, and on-demand access to content only when you need it is clearly outdated. I'm afraid it's the revenge of the fat clients.

I'm mighty happy with it. Much better than the National Goegraphic apps etc

It was.. The challenge was then lugging a laptop always online and reading it. Now the app makes it offline and easily readable on the move.

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