Not a flame. But just want to point out that Taiwan is the 3rd or 4th
largest exporter of PC computers, and not to mention Japan's piece
of leadership in supercomputer design in the world.
Moreover, the Taiwanese have developed hand-written recognization system
that are over 90% accurate, and speech recognizers that are over 80%
accurate (in whole sentences, not word-by-word-speak).
This is not even to mention some of the advanced character input systems
that have been invented for chinese characters. Many trained typists in
Taiwan can input more than 40 to 50 characters per minute. The national
record is over 120 characters per minute. I personally, without being
trained, can type in chinese about 10-20 characters per minute.
There is also a BIG5 chinese character international exchange standard.
Just go to one of the IRC channels with Chinese people in it, you'll see
funny ASCII code going by, and they are BIG5 code. I don't think they are
having as much trouble with computers as you might think. :)
--Ed
PS: Oh yeah, haven't done a self-introduction yet to this group, but have
been on the mailing list for about 6 months. I am the person who is also
on the WebOOGL team at the Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota.
I wrote the Webspace visualizer for WWW, which can be found at
http://www.geom.umn.edu/. I am now a graduate student at the computer
science dept at the U. of Minnesota.