Ask About Life, Blogging and Linux in the Middle East 286
Isam Bayazidi is about as far from the current U.S. media stereotype of an Arab as you can get. He's worked on the Arabeyes (Unix/Linux in Arabic) project, helped start the Arabic Wikipedia, co-founded the Jordan LUG, is a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), works as a senior software developer for Maktoob, an online community that boasts more than four million members, and created Jordan Planet, a blogging community whose members have many different religious and political viewpoints. Isam is also a long-time Slashdot reader, so he's the perfect person to ask what's going on in the Arab (cyber)world today. One question per post please. Isam will answer 12 of the highest-moderated questions. We'll run his answers verbatim as soon as he gets them back to us.
Which is more important to develop... (Score:5, Interesting)
Arab and Israeli communities (Score:5, Interesting)
Arabic hacker food (Score:5, Interesting)
Straight Outta Casablanca (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know if you're living in the Middle East.. (Score:5, Interesting)
After living in Egypt for a year, the biggest frustration I can recall with computers is how unreliable the power was. Due to the spikes and surges, the school I taught at would normally go through about 5 power supplies a month (for a building with about 200 computers). Any serious business who wants to protect their computer from an unwanted surge has at minimum a voltage regulator, and at maximum a UPS. Our school paid a company in Europe to host their website, as most Egyptian businesses did.
Is there any power infrastructure advancements that are being made to better support the growing rise of computer use in the middle east?
Cartoons and website defacement (Score:3, Interesting)
So, what's your opinion on the arabic kids who are defacing websites [yahoo.com] in protest to the Mohammed cartoons?
Stereotypes and those who would further them... (Score:5, Interesting)
1)As an Arab in today's world, how do you deal with those in the Western world who further the stereotype of "Arabs As Radicals"?
2) In addition how do you, as a forward-thinking Arab, address the issue of those in the Middle Eastern world that would seek to further the radical elements of Islam for thier own purposes, regardless of the consequences or the stereotypes this may create in the West? In other words, how does one function as a concientious objector in Middle Eastern Society?
Stereotypes (Score:3, Interesting)
The article itself, in this case, is very leading regarding an opinion of treatment of Arabs by the US media.
My question is, what do you feel that the stereotypes reinforced by major media outlets are? Certainly they reported that there were Arabic hijackers on 9/11, that Al Quaida has attacked the US many times, and has reported acts such as beheadings and suicide bombings. Unfortunately, the fact is that these events all happened.
Do you believe that there is an undercurrent of racism and bigotry in the media's portrayal or Arabs? Do you believe that the image of the Arab has been charicatured by the US?
As a follow-up. How do you feel that recent world events, such as the riots in Paris, riots over Danish comics, and even the actions of terrorist organizations or Arabic origin have influenced this view, by relation to media portrayal.
Do you see this adversely affecting your career, or have major business outlets mostly overlooked this?
Dilbert (Score:3, Interesting)
Credible Sources for Arab Bloggers (Score:5, Interesting)
Exportation of Technology (Score:3, Interesting)
Are their any technologies that the government of Jordan specifically mandates not be exported outside of its borders?
OR
How common is it that encryption technology that the U.S. Government asks not be used overseas is actually implemented "against their will"?
MS Dominance (Arabic Edition) (Score:1, Interesting)
Mo'toons (Score:5, Interesting)
I accept the cartoons are blasphemy and deeply offensive. Yet I hear no acknowledgment that freedom-of-expression is religiously venerated in the West. Worse, official (pandering?) reaction (sanctions) holds large unrelated groups responsible rather than the tiny right-wing newspaper that did the wrong. The many must pay for the misdeeds of the few. This implies responsibility for their own extremists!
I know media everywhere is seriously distorted. In the West, fear sells ink, photons and electrons. I wanted to understand the feeling on the ground. What are the people feeling?
Down to earth... how does it feel? (Score:4, Interesting)
My questions are (really it is the same LONG question:)
Now that online communities and computer volunteering (especially OSS) is growing on the highest rate in the western part of the glob, how do you see participation and understanding of such participation in Jordan in specific, and the middle east in general?
Do you see the Arab population is going toward a more active role, or maintaining a technology consumer role as it used to be in the old days? Do you feel that you are a loner in what you do and contribute? Or do you get a whole lot of "Hey man that is soo cool, how would I start contributing like you do?"
Last but not least, from your day-in-day-out interaction with the local-online-communities, when do you see us (Arabs) technologically maturing to a level where we can be a major contributing force in the OSS global community... is it happening now?
May be one of those days we'll meet... after all Jordan is a small place
Answer: Sometimes (Score:3, Interesting)
It's quite the opposite, in fact, there have been many attempts to create an 'Arabic programming language' that used Arabic keywords and identifiers, but none of them became popular even if the language itself was good.
The problem, IMO, is with learning, not developing.
Some of my students are not very good English speakers. They have no problem with basic programming constructs like for or while, but when it comes to high level abstractions, they have trouble.
For example, we have to spend quite some time explaining the difference between