[KLUG Advocacy] GNOME v. KDE

[Robert G. Brown]

>I read this in an OS/2 retrospective and had to let Adam see this ;-) :
>http://www.linuxandmain.com/features/os2retro.html

>OS/2 was very popular in Europe...[John C.] Dvorak says...
Hardly a poster boy for Globalization, and no one's selection for
historical understanding of forces on other continents.

That's a good thing, too! :)

>that this has historically been the kiss of death, which is why we 
>don't see lots of programs flowing out of that continent, even though
>it is chockablock with fine programmers.
It is an amusing remark, but on par (for deduction) with observations
like "keep away from hospitals, lots of people die there!".

>"The Europeans are always trying to go and do things their own way, and
>sometimes they're actually more objective than we are," he says.
>"They'll go and do an analysis of a number of products and one of them
>will be superior technically, and the Europeans will actually use that
>product, which is not the way we do it. The Europeans fall into the trap
>of buying a lot of offbeat things like Amigas -- which was a good
>machine, there's no question about it -- but they were also the biggest
>Atari supporters. It's always something that just doesn't make any
>sense. They're always coding for screwy platforms that nobody has. I
>mean, these guys never get it together. These Europeans are just out to
>lunch."

I am impressed by this quote, because is so few words it is able to 
demonstrate a number of qualities quite well, notably the parochialism
and lack of historical perspective of the speaker, combine with an ability
to take great big leaps of judgement and a willingness to display these
and other shortcoming is a public place. Other than that, bit manages to 
insult a whole continent and its attitudes by inference (as if that con-
tinent are monolithic in its approach to these things), without indicating
why some other approach (presumably the speakers) is superior.

Rather amusing, I'd say. The article it comes from is prttty good, although
the analogy with Trekkies is a bit stifling after a while...

							Regards,
							---> RGB <---