On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 12:26:00AM +0800, Adrian Chadd exclaimed:
The internet has a bunch of technical standards which we loosely agree to. There's no law stating "thou shalt speak English if connected via BGP4 to thy internet".
And are _any_ of those technical standards written in a language other than English? Think about the acronyms we use in network-speak every day - how many of them stand for phrases in a language other than English? I'm not saying that it's good, bad or indifferent that English is the primary language of the Net, but I _am_ saying that we need to be realistic: the Net was created as an American project, by American engineers, on American dollars, and likewise for the protocols and standards that run it. I'm 100% in favor of internationalization, but at a certain level, there must be an agreed-upon standard of communcation - BGP needs to be BGP everywhere in the world, not some other acronym depending on whatever the operator's local language happens to be. Again, I'm not saying that communication shouldn't (or cannot) be attempted or encouraged in a multitutde of local language - I'm just observing that those who try to deny the English basis of the Internet and the protocols that drive it are ignoring its history. -- Scott Francis scott@ [work:] v i r t u a l i s . c o m Systems Analyst darkuncle@ [home:] d a r k u n c l e . n e t West Coast Network Ops GPG keyid 0xCB33CCA7 illum oportet crescere me autem minui