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Bart Decrem on the Linux Business
Anonymous Hero writes "Co-founder of Eazel and now vice president of Hancom Linux, Bart Decram gives his views on a whole lot of things related to desktop Linux in an interview at Linux and Main. He talks abour what went wrong with Eazel, why everyone should work together to build Microsoft Office filters, how anti-U.S. sentiment can be used to promote Linux throughout the world, and how he thinks KDE is 'butt-ugly.' Long read, but worth it."
Bart Decram?
Don't have a penguin, man!
qslack.com
'anti-U.S. sentiment can be used to promote Linux throughout the world,'
Finally, my flag-burning software will get some use! Time to work on my anthrax algorithm.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
we all know his spelling couldn't of went wrong =)
...considering Hancom's close partnership with theKompany. Perhaps someone can point him to kde-look.org where he can find all sorts of eye candy goodness for KDE.
Or have I been trolled?
:Peter
...why everyone should work together to build Microsoft Office filters, how anti-U.S. sentiment can be used to promote Linux throughout the world, and how he thinks KDE is 'butt-ugly.' Long read, but worth it.
:) :)
Hmm, I seem to remember a site with a bunch of essays like that. It's something like Slashdot or something similar.
qslack.com
Come on KDE is anything but butt ugly! Look and Feel is sure subjective but it shows his extreme bias when he says KDE is butt ugly. That alone will make me not read what he has to say. If he thinks KDE is ugly then what about CDE/Motif ? ;)
I'm not quite sure if that is the right route to go. As MS continues down the sprial path of proprietary software, shouldn't the open source community develope open standards for documents, spread sheets, and presentations rather than endlessly chasing after the newest service release that "fixes" compatibility issues?
how anti-U.S. sentiment can be used to promote Linux throughout the world
..
Oh yeah, nothing like selling it on it's merits or anything
My big gripe about KDE is I think it's butt-ugly. The main reason I keep using GNOME is that the icons on KDE are aesthetically offensive to me. And the letter K is kind of offensive, it's not very elegant. There's an elegancy missing in the thing. The underlying thing is pretty darn good, no argument with that.
I think "K" is as offensive as the rest of the letters "F", "U", and "C"!
Serious things in the article... The maturing of Star Office (it should rather be OpenOffice, right?), KDE, and GNOME. How, WinXP bootleg CDs cannot be found in Korea.
I believe the "anti-US sentiment" mentioned in the summary is not fully representative of the interview -- the point seems to be more like "if a single source for product is present, the Koreans should rather have a Korean source rather than an American source". That is very different from "K" (and the other offensive letters) USA
S
Yes, step right in to kde-look.org. We have 1000s of KDE themes!
Now would you like the Aqua or XP ripoff?
Its just like those rednecks who like both kinds of music -- country AND western.
He may be "riding out the storm" but he's just helping another one along. Why did the dotcom crash happen here? Well, I'm sure the economists could give me all sorts of answers, but the simple facts are that innovative solutions and products are not always good products to profit off of. No one really needs a "mobile computing solution" we might need a cellphone that can message or get email, but for all our other needs, all one really needs is a desktop, or a laptop. All these portable devices are wonderful toys, but they don't provide services that persons desperately need or want. They won't sell profitably. Period.
-=The Dude=-
I use KDE because it has a lot of features. But nevertheless, KDE's style looks ugly.
And the name KDE is even more ugly. K always reminds me to Kmart. Can't they come up with a better name?
And KDE folks should take a look on OS X. This style looks really professional.
Just like slashdot. Only two percent of readers subscribe. Two percent! Do the other 98 percent just think they can get it all for free forever? That the bandwidth they consume is just there? Two percent. Ridiculous.
Anyway, th
Pay the fuck up!
I have to agree, that's one thing that's turned me off about KDE, the gradients feel weird, and that alpha blending can really look bad. Gnome's no spring chicken either, but I must say nautilus impresses me. For the record, I'm a Window Maker man myself, it is simplicity itself. Run a little Gnome panel, and I'm set. Though I'm very excited about Enlightenment 17
I was a little surprised that the interviewer didn't turn up the heat a bit and ask just how Eazel managed to burn through all the investment money so fast. My question, for all you armchair pundits out there, is why was Eazel so dependent upon the reports of IDC? For those that didn't read the article, Bart basically said that IDC revised their forecasts for the desktop to one third the original number, the investors got scared, and Eazel failed to get funded and promptly died. Then IDC turns around a couple of months later and revises those forecasts once again, tripling their prediction (remember, 48.2% of all forecasts are pulled ourt of thin air). By my (admittably simple) mind, it would be good business practice to always have a little nest egg to help tide you in such times.
:)
Of course, it was nice of them to release Nautilus under the GPL, so that the community could take a bloated and slow program and actually make it work.
:Peter
Why can't Linux be pro-American? I consider myself a patriotic American, and think that Linux is a good thing for our country. For every country. Many of the open source contributers who have made GNU/Linux what it is today happen to be -- you guessed it -- Americans.
Why not package Linux as anti-Woman instead? That would have a tad better ring of truth. How about anti-Gay and anti-Black distributions. Wouldn't that be just fine and dandy?
By the way, has any other superpower in the history of the world been as positive for other countries as America? Look at the U.S.S.R. What a great neighbor. Look at the British Empire. Look at France under Napolean. Go back as far as you want.
Who are our enemies? Well, they are governments that are generally aggresive towards us or towards their neighbors. Or even towards their own people. And what to we do with our enemies after we conquer them. Do we colonize? Do we hold mass executions? No, we do our best to democratize and rebuild.
It's fun to moan about American power. But hot damn, if those American carriers out there on the oceans of the world were to disappear tomorrow, the world would not be a better place for freedom in the morning.
Besides, I'm willing to bet that Bin Laden uses Microsoft Outlook to send his hate spam.
What business? Are you telling me that giving something away for free is business? Sounds more like economic suicide to me.
Linux buisness? Business of something free? Wow. I'm starting a sunlight buisness.
For some reason, I always like to get a visual of who is being interviewed... so I searched around and found his home page with some pictures here
I know I'm feeding the troll, but this is fun...
He also takes a shower every day and gets a haircut once a month... another problem you dirty hippies haven't figured out how to solve
Actually, BillG didn't used to shower everyday -- at least up until about a decade or so ago (long after he was becoming the most significant businessman in the world). His publicists had to remind him to groom when he was scheduled to go into the public.While Bart was quoted out of context, I think that one of Linux's main selling points is that it is good for all countries. It shouldn't be marketed because it strikes a blow at that Evil American MegaCorp(TM), but because it is Open and Free to all, a gift from hackers of many nations, many religions, and many politics. Out of many, one? :) Sorry, couldn't resist.
:Peter
...and Gnome is beautiful. Uh huh. And some people actually like rap music too.
LOL I think we are a little past the KDE isn't themeable flames. As anyone who has used both kde and gnome can tell you, they are more alike than different when it comes to both appearance and use. They are both graphically based on Win95 and I have yet to meet someone who uses windows who can't sit down at either kde or gnome and do basic things like manager and open files.
But then again sour grapes are sour grapes.
I've never seen a proper study of why people hate America. Seems to be simple jealousy and ignorance of what made this country great.
Let them develop.. we can call it "3rd Rate Linux".
I dunno, guys. I think linux users have a very strange aesthetic.
KDE (in KDEstep mode), to me, is one of the cleanest-looking window managers around. The icons are pixel-perfect, there's no distracting eye candy, and the window management doesn't get in the way of what actually matters -- the programs. (In this respect I think KDE learned some good things from Windows.)
There's no accounting for tastes, I guess, but we don't all feel this way. Keep it up, KDE!
Well we think he's ugly!
Huh I don't understand how someone can be offended by an icon not looking "nice" to him. Nor do I understand how one letter can be more offensive than any other.
That being said, seeing a foot on my desktop makes me think that something stinks.
Perhaps this guy shouldn't be bashing the main platform that his company's software runs on anyways. Better yet, maybe he should do something about it instead of complaining.
...Bart Decrem and Bill Gates attended the same high school.
Spoken English, transcribed literally, is nearly indecipherable.
Although the US does not colonise in the old way, it still does the postmodern version of colonisation.
And yes there have been mass executions as a result of that. Chile under Pinochet is an example.
"we've got this big contract with the Korean government -- that's 120,000 seats -- and we've got a big bundling deal with Sharp, every Zaurus that moves, we're moving a copy of our product, and Sharp has big plans for the thing."
Sounds like Microsoft...
Maybe they want to be the next MS?
You guys pulled your heads our of your collective arses for a few days, and the style (sic) here was better. But you fell right back once again...
- Long read (maybe I read better and faster than you, and to me it's short...don't bother with your off base opinion on how long it takes to read)
- good read (I'll be the judge of that)
- fast read
- short read
- must read (I hate this one the most...the only 'must' around here is you 'must' show up for work or your advertizing $$ are all for naught.)
- fun read (click thru bait)
- interesting read (how the hell do you know what interests anyone? or why should my interests be similar to yours?)
..all of these say one thing. You don't think we can think for ourselves. Cut the crap and post the stupid link for Christ sake.
That's not what official propaganda says. Everybody in the world loves McDonald and Hollywood. Some people just don't understand us. They are confused.
Please tell me if I'm wrong ? Are you confused ?
I lost any respect for this guy. First he is asking to unite everybody to develop MS office filters and then he challenges anyone who is using KDE. what the hell is that. Until this ideology is completely gone from the Linux community nothing is going to be accomplished.
What's money behind Linux? Let's see IBM, Intel, Redhat, HP ...
All American companies last time I checked.
The main reason I keep using GNOME is that the icons on KDE are aesthetically offensive to me. And the letter K is kind of offensive, it's not very elegant Oh really, i think you better change your name Decrem rhymes with god awful things Seriously, this guy is dememted. These type of people who are way to radical bring bad publicity to open source. Due to these handful of war mongers, open sourcers and called communists athiests and what not. What is this guy trying to do! Be the next stallman? Well he is sadly mistaken, stallman is not all rants, that guy is a genius too, and this is sorely lacking in this chap. but I think maybe one or two of them are going to make it. And hes got some arrogance, so similar to Gates
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Gnome is the axis of Eazel people. Oh yeah!
Nottub het eus verpeiw!
Or at least that's what the advertisers think. Anyone with a clue filters them out.
Decrem: That's the beauty of it.
Not true! The beauty of StarOffice is in the load time -- it gives me a moment to reflect...clean under my keybord...wash the car...take the kids to soccer practice...eat dinner...call my mom...watch Farscape...sleep. Then I wake up refreshed with no chores or distractions and StarOffice is ready to go!
sure the hard core computer users don't care about looks but to get into the average persons desktop you need to make it look nice. Do you think Friends would of been a succesful tv show if jennifer aniston wasnt so damn hot? (or any of the other ladies) Take a hint and beautify linux. Oh and one other rant: I absolutely HATE how most distros arrange their K/Gnome menus. Theres almost no logic to them. Lycoris on the other hand does a pretty good job with the k menu.
Decrem: That's the beauty of it. That's the importance of Mozilla and StarOffice. Those are kind of mission-critical applications, and as you switch to those, the operating becomes all but irrelevent. That's the beauty of the Internet, frankly. It commodifies the operating system to a large extent.
This is an very interesting point. MS Office is the MS cash cow so Microsoft needs to take this issue very seriously. The intelligent way to do this is to port MS Office to Mac OS X and wait until there is a move into Linux by the market.
Does anybody know the status of MS Office on Mac OS X?
You Gnome people out there, you always talk big about how "ugly" KDE is. Yet, you never have any specifics. What exactly is so "ugly"?
I'm sure the KDE would love to know. Seriously. They actually do listen to their users a whole lot than most projects I've seen. If you have a real suggestion, and not just another lame-ass flame, let's hear it.
Software is being pirated here. Just not out in the open.
You can get it from your friend, or co-worker, or boss, or off the office server. One CD can see dozens of 'owners'. They either copy and give away, or share the original. Either way, the effect is the same. You can also have a system built in one of the techno marts and they will load on anything you want. He made the mistake of thinking they would admit this to him as a foreigner. It's not that simple and they're not that stupid. Besides, it's game software (Star Craft) they want to pirate, not word processors.
Also, plenty of game (console) software for +/-$5.00 per disc. Saying there is no pirated ware is inaccurate. You can buy PS2 MGS2 for $5.00 or the original for $60.00. Take you pick, they are both under the counter.
Want computer software on the street for cheap? Go to Malaysia.
Bart needs to come back and spend a bit more time out on the streets in YongSan, me thinks.
If Bart Decrem fires a Hancom programmer, could you say that he Decrements their staff by one?
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Hi folks,
/. editors for singling out this colorful statement, I hope that you guys will read the entire article and realize that that particular line does not summarize my opinion about the KDE project. As I say in the article, I think KDE is a terrific project. Also, Qt is the building block for my employer's software, and it's a great piece of software. Please note also that the entire point of the "KDE is butt-ugly" line was to then state that Lycoris has done a wonderful job polishing KDE.
I want to apologize to anyone who was offended by my line about some of the artwork in KDE. I do stand by the substance of my statement, but I could and should have said this a bit more delequately.
In any event, while I can't blame the
But I do think that icons and other look & feel work ARE very important. At the end of the day, KDE is a DESKTOP and the artwork and look & feel is a key part of the desktop. It's what we look at all day long. Everyone's opinion about artwork is highly subjective of course, but in my opinion, the default icons and some of the other look & feel elements really are KDE's biggest weakness and the default icons that ship with KDE need a make-over. They're just not competitive with other desktops that regular folks (my wife, my parents) are used to looking at.
Cheers,
Bart
Just because they don't sell it on the streets and cater to foreigners doesn't mean it's not happening. Look at the statistics on how many burners are in use and how many blanks are sold. You can get if off the office server or borrow an original just by asking.
Bart needs to understand he's not a local and they're not going to offer up illegal ware just because he asks. You can buy a BTO box in YongSan and they will load it up with pirated copies of whatever you want. They're not so stupid as to sell CD's out on the street and make it easy for the police.
In addition, they're hot for games, not for applications. StarCraft:Brood War, etc. And PS2 game copies are only +/-$5.00 Ask to see the book and pick out what you want and wait for them to burn one next door...takes only minutes. As soon as you decide, he punches it into his cell phone and a runner is standing by. No inventory..all on demand, and demand is hot.
Piracy is as piracy does and Bart failed to remember the rule....when you come to Asia, you need to leave your personal concepts about how things are at home. Read between the lines if you want to know how things are here...take time to blend in and forget about what you thing you already know.
Office v.X has been available for ages. It's still Office, mind you.
Such misinformation! Compaq paid no more than 12.4 ba-jillion dollars last year, not even close to a zillion...
Never never never smoke crack before geometry class!
I thought we had such a high income because most of the world's Jews live here.
In Mexico and Nicaragua the US killed democracy plain and simple, and that was before the excuse of the Cold War.
The US at one time or another supported people like Fulgencio Batista, Anastasio Somoza, Augusto Pinochet, the Argentinian miltary junta, the Duvaliers, the Guatemalan golpists (to prompt up a fruit company of all democratic causes).
Other freinds had included Mobuto, and o yes Saddam.
Get your idiotic rethoric out of here and keep it in that dreamland where the US are champions of freedom and democracy and not slaves of their interests.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
All those places that are banking in the vanity of mostly women that want the perfect tan, they are selling something that one can get for free, they just offer it in a convenient, stilyzed environemnt.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'm sorry about the pun. Any sarcasm from your side is well waranted.
Seriously, though, I think you are somewhat on the money about KDE, but not in the way that you intended. KDE has more usability problems than GNOME (although both environments have quite a few of these). Among KDE's worst usability problems are the multitude of tiny, undescriptive icons whose tinyness makes them far slower to access with a mouse (via Fitts' Law) and whose action is hard to decipher because the icons are so non-descriptive and tiny. And mind you that because KDE does not have button-labelling turned on by default, the lack of a label makes button even smaller and slower to access, and the lack of a label means that the user has to basically guess what the icon does, or find out the hard way by doing something that might possibly destroy their work. Or they can wait a painful 3-5 seconds for the tooltip label to come up. The end result is that most of the buttons are going to go unused, just like what happens in programs authored by Microsoft, who KDE bases most of their designs off of. The problem with doing a carbon copy of microsoft is that many of Microsoft's designs are flawed in one way or another, and many of those flaws have found their way into KDE. Good artists create, great artists steal, bad artists steal crap.
Re aesthetics: be sure to remember that just because something is aesthetically pleasing does not mean that has greater usability, and a lot of linux geeks who've tried for the desktop (and who don't have a lot to show for it) equate usability solely with aesthetics, I once talked to a distribution installer author about the usability problems in his installer. He couldn't understand what the problem was; he assumed I thought that "it wasn't pretty enough".
You should also not place any serious bets on the Zaurus as far success with the non-geek community(unless TrollTech will get their act together with Qtopia, which I highly doubt). From what I've seen of the UI design and some of the initial reports from reviewers, Sharp has fallen into the same trap as many other linux PDA developers/manufacturers where they design the hardware/system software first, and only after they've got that all done do they design the interface and come up the user interaction model.You can't do that with a PDA. People will put up with inefficient and bad interfaces on desktops because they budget several hours a day to kludging through their task. They grow surprisingly less tolerant of ill-designed interfaces when the screen is shrunk down to 240X320 and they have only 20 seconds to get down an important phone number. You might have good marketing; you might get some people to buy the PDA, but if the interface doesn't work, those people will subconsciously try to find every excuse they can to use the PDA as little as possible.If that happens, you can forget about selling those people hardware add-ons and software after the first several months. The chance that they'll upgrade to the next latest and greatest thing, or that they'll convince a friend to buy one of the PDA's, drops down to 0% as well.
With PDA graphic toolkits based on desktop toolkits (i.e. qt & Qtopia), there's also that fatal trap of thinking "with this mobile version of this widget toolkit, I can easily port over all the desktops to the PDA and everything will be good". Again, apps with UI's that work with full sized mouse and keyboard and a 17" monitor will often not translate very well into a PDA with a small screen and a stylus. Microsoft made this mistake with WinCE, and I saw Agenda make the same mistake with FLTK. Agenda is dead, and PalmPC's only survive because PalmOS isn't yet running on equivalent hardware.
If you take nothing else from my PDA advice, understand that the most successful PDA in history, the Palm, was fashioned after a block of wood that Palm creator Jeff Hawkins carried around with him to use in pondering what a good PDA should act like. Before the dies had been tooled or the system software was finished, he designed the interaction. There has been no block of wood involved in the creation of the Zaurus.
You're welcome to either take my advice or drag it to trash and empty. But I've seen too many linux companies get splattered across the industry because they said "to hell with good design". Yes, it really is that important.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Funny, to my eye, KDE is good looking and professional, while Gnome looks like a mid-90s Amiga MUI/MWB nightmare in grey and beige.
He mentions something in this interview which bothers me is how Linux businesses who strive to push a product effectively end up killing themselves because their effort is just immediately absorbed by the larger players due to the fact that they cannot protect themselves from the GPL. So where is the motivation for businesses to innovate if they can't at least reap monetary benefits from their work?
Also, why is Hancom Linux considered special because of it's handling of multibytes? Unicode has only been around for about a decade, and it's something Microsoft was able to fully embrace in Windows NT almost since it's inception. Shouldn't Linux be more global friendly than Microsoft out of the gate?
Barely worth reading, IMO. He waffles so much it's hard to understand what exactly he's saying, and even appears to contradict himself:
:)
"We cleaned up KDE and made it look pretty. It's a pretty decent desktop,..."
but later...
"My big gripe about KDE is I think it's butt-ugly"
Huh? Does *he* even know what his opinion is? And what kind of drugs do you have to be on to think that saying:
"the letter K is kind of offensive, it's not very elegant"
relates in any way to a question about marketing applications with a distribution?
An awful interview -- next time find someone articulate and coherent to talk to!
A distribution name Licoris, and office suite name OpenOffice and KDE 3.0 isn't out yet. I'm guessing what happen for the pass weeks were a dream. Ouch, I think I'm dreaming now, after all, I have KDE 3.0 on my laptop...
My biggest gripe about the current state of the KDE UI design is clutter. This is something that loading fancy eye-candy from kde-look.org cannot easily fix.
Load, e.g. KWord, and then pause for a moment
to reflect on how many toolbar buttons there are, and how much one can accomplish with them.
And last time I checked, it wasn't easy to rearrange things to get rid of the things you use least.
My take on the use of toolbars comes from the common (RISC era) maxim: optimise the common case.
Commonly used operations should go on the toolbar. More transient widgets should be used for less common things (e.g. menus, context specific sidebars, etc.), and it should be possible for someone to, with a few clicks in the right place, pick up a button, or grab a shortcut to something and place it on a toolbar themselves.
A second comment regarding clutter is palettes for this and that. I'd personally like to see them used a little more, and there needs to be some standard (i.e. already written, well integrated, etc.) way for an application to create palettes for various operations, and have them organised. Note that this sort of thing presents problems in the face of the big fat invisible line drawn between window management and an applications widgets.
p.s. One should take note of that flat button on MacOS X, allowing one to show and hide all toobars with the click of a mouse.
John_Chalisque
Excuse the pun. :)
Moderation isn't to reward you for being a good boy. People have and should continue to moderate your comments up when they're worthy of special note. In other words, when Joe Slashbot moderates you up, it's to benefit me, not you. It's to tell the rest of us that you just said something more worth reading than the average comment.
The world... mostly America, which is the most important part of the world right now, is better for all of it.
Well, between gnome and kde, I definitely think gnome is better looking, appealing to desktop users. I just don't like the fact that gnome is not object-oriented so I tend to prefer KDE albeit having to live with an eyesore of a GUI enviroment. Not that object-orientedness does anything for the end-user, mind you...
> in the case of Brazil, passing legislation forcing people to use open source
Only some states and municipalities are requiring free software in Brazil. The mostly important sphere of government, the federal (Union) one, still is deeply commited to Microsoft, to the point of preferring it to Brazil’s own Conectiva GNU/Linux. You can read more about it at CIPSGA’s old stories.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
read the headline as "Butt Cream on the the Linux Business"??
This is so wrong, that it is really hard not to correct this in a way that does not sound like an ad hominem attack. Please forgive the following rant, I've tried to include facts.
The British and Spanish were both bigger and more intrusive than the U.S. ever was (especially the British). Have you never heard the saying "The sun nver sets on the British Empire."?
And if you want to go further back, Alexander the Great, and Ghengis Khan and the Romans had some big empires too. The Soviet Union had a nice empire going at one point as well.
Sorry for the rant but this guy seriously needs some education
no wonder korea is for bush a part of the axis of evil. if they produce an arab version of linux. hell, maybe they should make an arab version of windows 3.1 to avoid being bombed ;)
Every release I download it and try it again(just for fun) and spend a few hours trying to tweak it to make it look nice, then switch back to gnome immediately. Partly because of how ugly it is, partly because it is quite quirky. I think they need to spend more time squashing serious bugs, there are some things that simply don't work properly.
Not that Gnome is perfect or anything, it's got problems of it's own. For one, I'd really like to be able to use alpha blended tiles in the panel. Gnome could also use some more work in the window manager area, Sawfish is great, but it'd be nice if there would be a bug fix release some time within the next 10 years. An Office Suite would be nice too. At least KDE has Koffice, which is ok, but still extremely buggy.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
the main reasn is mexico has no middle class. democracies fail without this. a good example is russia
Nothing could be uglier or more distasteful than that smelly foot icon on the Gnome desktop.
I find the name Bart Decrem awkward and offensive. "Bart" is a very abrupt name, and its final "t" combines with the following "D" in an indistinct and wishy-washy way when spoken. The last name is ambiguous, leaving me wondering if I pronounced it correctly (hard or soft "c", and short or long "e"s) or whether I placed the emphasis on the correct syllable. The spelling is questionable and unmemorable, and is likely to cause confusion in the US and Asian markets. Therefore, I propose we retire these names, do not speak them anymore, and stop naming people with them. Bart Decrem is clearly a man good for the Linux world, but he deserves a better name, if only for marketing and aesthetic reasons.
Bart, naming aside, that was an insightful interview. Thanks.
That Marcello Tosartti was deported from the US? It was on the web page noted above to go read the original story. What's up with that?
I think KDE looks fine w/o it, but try Mosfet Liquid style engine for KDE3 and tell me it's ugly.
Mac user == gay faggot.
Lets face it, WindowsXP's default look looks like a 6 year old who just learned about primary colours got out of hand with his crayons.
KDE certainly isn't as good looking as Aqua, but its definitely a lot better looking than XP.
I wonder why you believe that.
In that sentence you make the assertions:
Notice that the first assertion makes no distinction between economic and military variants of colonialism. In fact this "clarification" is actually a modification of the statement of the first post, not simply explanatory.
The second assertion describes the economic impact of the colonialism but not the mechanism. The colonialism examples in my previous post were also lucrative for the colonising powers. Your clarification may have some valid points, but these points are not directly evident in your original post. In fact all the things attributed to the US described in the remainder of the post
No they hate us because of a bad relationship and the fact that neither side is willing to make a reasonable level of accomodation. The fact that the U.S. happens to be the more powerful partner in this relationship, does not mean that if the roles were reversed that we could expect equitable treatment from these leaders, and many problems in addition to inconveniences to the U.S. would arise.
This hypothesis is hard to test, but it just does not seem true. If you are referring to the situation in and around Afghanistan, you have got to be kidding if you think any country in the world would sit still for having a terrorist attack not only on a world class finanacial center (the towers) but have attacked the military headquarters (the Pentagon) of one of the world's most powerful armed forces. I'm sorry but no matter what the rhetoric is, No matter what kind of wrong real or imagined that these guys werre trying to redress, these guys miscalculated and escalated it to a point where the U.S. must step up and handle this situation. We were lucky that the U.S. did not resort to some real unpleasant weapons, this is just about threshold for many people to call for them to be deployed (I'm glad they were not). Regardless of the past behavior of the U.S. and other countries in this region, rather than pretending like it never happened, stability can only occur if the solution employed works given these relationship issues.
And regarding your last remark:
Of course I'm open to learning. However, it may be that English is your second language, and that your original post did not quite clearly state what you wanted it to. In any event, I think given your original position statement, your statements did not ring true and my analysis holds.
I'm not that familiar with Nicarauguan history, but Mexico's problem stems from not having a large enough middle class (as noted by the other poster) and having a deeply instilled sense of corruption in the government (perhaps left over from Spanish Colonialism). Interestingly, Mexico has one clearly great leader Benito Juarez , who was a self educated poor Indian who rose to power and imposed a more equitable government. He is such a cool guy, he is worth knowing about even if you aren't Mexican. He said (loose translation) "Respect for the rights of others is the peace.", a great quote. Unfortunately his successor was a harsh dictator, and noone of his caliber has ever reached high office since. In Mexico, candidates that go against the will of the rich and powerful (and the military) are often assassinated rather than make it to the polls.