Windows 7 Ultimate insult to Tablet owners

Sometimes ago, I reported that Microsoft  has decided not to provide tablet recognizers for other languages unless you pay them more money by buying either Ultimate Edition or Enterprise Edition.

The other day, I have the pleasure of using a Tablet running English Windows 7 Home Premium and sadly the pleasure quickly turned sour when I discovered that the TIP was locked into a keyboard when I selected Traditional Chinese. This confirms that Microsoft's early annunciation is true.

On my old P1510 running the trusty XP Tablet edition, I can use the TIP to write TChinese or any other foreign language. Now greedy Microsoft is giving their user an Ultimate insult by forcing them to buy expensive edition so that they can write in foreign language.

No wonder Microsoft is losing market shares on tablet to Apple's iPad as Microsoft's is blinded by chasing money rather than providing their supporters with better support. Now Micro$oft has taken away something that their supporters naturally expect would be in all editions of Windows 7 as they are in XP. Who would have guessed a supposedly 'better' and 'newer' Operating System has fewer supports, unless you pay more? It is just pure greed.

If you are one of those victims of M$ greed and only wanting to write Chinese, by-pass Micro$oft and buy one of this fantastic tool - Penpower Junior. Don't let Microsoft hold you hostage. This tools can be used in Tablet or non-Tablet.

gpg4win 2.1.0-rc1 making progress

It is nice to report that Gpg4Win 2.1.0-rc1 has made small progress in fixing some of issue unearthed previously with respect to its problem in running in TChinese XP. Now a user running TChinese can use the GPA's user interface to submit passphrase to create a key.

However, the Windows Explorer integration is still failing as reported. Sadly Kleopatra.exe still does not run when the "Language Settings for Non-Unicode Programs" is not set to English.

This Unix-Windows program still has a long way to go to achieve the environmental correctness of Firefox, Thunderbird, or TrueCrypt.

As a result, it is recommended users not to install GpgEX (the Windows Explorer integraion) as it is the very flaky and only works when your "Language Settings for Non-Unicode Programs" is set to English.

GPA is surprisingly usable if you can put up with some very foreign UI and appears to be unaffected by the "Language Settings for Non-Unicode Programs". It also works in TChinese Windows but not internationalized.

It stands out like a sore thumb when other programs in the TChinese XP have localized menu. Surely Unix/Linux is capable of handling Internationalization.