• palordrolap@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    12 hours ago

    Updating databases to support anything other than that which would run on a 1970s mainframe costs the sort of money that eats into C-level’s yacht funds, so it won’t happen. These are the people who when faced with the “pick two from done right, done quick and done cheap” will never pick the first one.

    Or in other words, if your name contains something outside the English alphabet’s A-Z, you’re out of luck. They’ll give you an approximation you don’t want and you’ll like it. Lower case? What’s that? You’re Irish and your surname has an apostrophe? F**k you, that’s in the bin, you’re OBRIEN now.

    I was about to suggest SHXWMATHKWAYAMASAM as something that would be bound to work, but it’s 18 characters, and, being two more than a power of two, that all but guarantees that someone will truncate it at 16. Sigh.

    • A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      12 hours ago

      Updating databases to support anything other than that which would run on a 1970s mainframe costs the sort of money that eats into C-level’s yacht funds, so it won’t happen.

      Even so, multiple strategies to include unicode characters in ASCII exist. *sigh*

      • deegeese@sopuli.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        6 hours ago

        Putting it in a DB is the easy part.

        It’s support in a thousand other systems that deal with addresses that’s the real problem.

        For something like a street address, interoperability is a hell of a lot more important than culturally preferred spelling.