Say what?

It’s not often that I just can’t parse an article in the Wall Street Journal. However, I was baffled by an article in yesterday’s edition about a company named Culturecom. The article, by Evan Ramstad, claims that Culturecom has “found a way to put Asian characters in a position to command binary code… because instructions inside chips are written in English, Asian-language input and output must contain layers of translation”. I’m not sure what Mr. Ramstad is getting at; from looking at Culturecom’s page, it looks like Culturecom has an x86-compatible CPU that includes a Chinese-language character generator. Given Culturecom’s previous announcements, this seems likely. While an impressive feat, this isn’t the same as making the CPU start executing instructions in Pinyin or ideograms. I’d love to know if I’ve missed a detail, though; the article doesn’t help, since it doesn’t make any mention of whether Culturecom has also ported compilers, editors, debuggers, and so on to use the new CPU. I’ve asked Mr. Ramstad to comment; maybe he can shed some light on what’s really up with this.