>>6
Unicode is misunderstood, underrated, and underused. Anybody criticizing Unicode 4.0 like that surely doesn't understand it at all. Please refer to
www.unicode.org and read the Unicode papers before saying it sucks, and see how much work and respect was put in our universal character set. Oh and it's several times more complete than your beloved Shift_JIS.
From a programmer's perspective, locales and different character sets are a pain in the arse, and multibyte character sets with shift states (i.e. Shift_JIS) make your ass burn. It's better to go the "a hundred cultures, one single charset" philosophy.