[KLUG Advocacy] GNOME v. KDE

[Adam Williams]

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

"but for the fact that a lot of Team OS/2 members were Trekkies in much
the same way that most Ross Perot supporters believe in UFOs."

Is there any kind of source for this tidbit?  That UFO was probably
"clue" flying straight over their heads.

"The Warp Trekkies were at minimum highly distrustful of and sometimes
openly hostile toward the computer press"

The world would today be such a better place if they had just whipped
out their phasers, set to maximum power, and started blasting.  The
computer publication industry is far worse than local TV news. 
Ziff-Davis I think just inserted their publication facility between the
wagon and the band.

"Almost from the beginning, OS/2 had had terrible luck. If no one inside
IBM could be found to mishandle the product at some crucial juncture,
the operating system had plenty of enemies on the outside willing to
fill the gap."

There was a span of time when many IBM products seem plagued by this.  I
recall a version of AIX, just shipped, that hung when someone attempted
a connection to in.telnetd (Ooops!, a UNIX that doesn't support
telnet).  And a version of SNA services that didn't have working support
for RS-232!!  Yikes!  Patches were always available almost immediately, 
but you could count on needing them.  Fortunately this hasn't been true
for quite some time now.

"Soon Compaq and others were cleaning IBM's clockspeed, putting the
hottest chips that Intel made into new, high-quality computers."

Whaaaa! No, cloners provides cheap machines with the hottest chips.  But
lets not call them high-quality.  PCs were junk,  they worked, but they
were junk.  Most still are.

"Microsoft found it all but impossible to develop a useful multitasking
operating system for the 286. This was not Microsoft's fault -- the
design of the chip simply wouldn't allow much useful to be done with it.
Indeed, had there never been an 80286, the computing world would be a
different place today, and the leading players would probably be
different. As it is, the 286, in its only meaningful act of
multitasking, at once tripped up IBM and catapulted Microsoft into a
whole new world of opportunity."

This is sadly very true.  The 80286 was a disaster.  Like a well
designed CPU that subsequently suffered a stroke.

"It didn't help OS/2 any that it could run Windows programs; in fact, it
prevented developers from writing applications for the far more
sophisticated and powerful OS/2 API. Why write for just one when you can
write for both?"

There are some camps in the Linux community that would do well to heed
this historical fact.  History does love to repeat itself.  The fact
that WINE has been (IMHO) a spectacular failure, is one of the best
things they happened for Linux.

"There is, it should probably now be noted, a peculiarity in the
computer industry, a weird turn whereby people who write very good
programs seem talentless as marketers. This seems especially true among
the contrarians who seek to come up with better code than that provided
by Microsoft."

While often cited, I don't think the programmer!=marketer equation is
really true.  Alot of people think their code is great, when in fact it
sucks.  The last sentence is annoyingly perjorative.

"by the goofy Wang ads of "

Ah, Wang....

>"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."

Good old Dvorak,  a true unabashed idiot,  I've always loved this guys
blurbs.  If he'd been sent to Pensacola college after high school,  Rev.
Falwell would probably have real competition for the "biggest loud mouth
prick of the 1990s" award.  At least Dvorak has done the favor of fading
out, or at least I haven't seen his stuff about if awhile.  The Rev's
still going strong.