What makes many people think that Mandrake won't charge for an upgrade service is that Mandrake is not an American company, and yes, there are such things as cultural differences even in the way companies are run. And, more simply, Mandrake is not Redhat, as you can already observe in today's strategies and attitude.
Mandrake won't do that, because it does not make sense, because it does not fit with Mandrake's stance, which is just not "just" PR as it can sometimes be in companies from the other side of the atlantic, because Mandrake has not gone public and does not depend on shareholders, and, above all, because it is long term suicide for the benefit of short term profit.
If Mandrake was to do this someday, this would mean one thing and only one: they are so short of cash that they are about to die if they don't think another source of income in the next months. And, when this point is to be reached, charging for an upgrade service won't save them.
While your comments may be true for Suse, I don't think they still hold on for Mandrake. Mandrake was indeed KDE-centric a while ago, but it's not true anymore. Several things to illustrate:
1- All the Mandrake tools, including the installing program, are Gtk-based, not Qt-based.
2- Mandrakesoft is part of both the Gnome foundation and the KDE league.
3- There is absolutely no difference of quality of support between Gnome and KDE within the Mandrake distro. Indeed, I think the default login manager is kdm instead of gdm when you have both installed, but basically, that's it (and it's understantable since gdm still has major troubleshootings, as Gnome folks reckon themselves).
4- There are many Gnome contributors working at Mandrakesoft. The difference is that there is no Mandrakesoft employee who is officially dedicated to this, while there are one or two KDE-dedicated employees. It is supposed to change.
5- I know many of MandrakeSoft folks, and basically, with the important exception of Gael Duval (the founder) and David Faure (the KDE-dedicated employee), their sympathy seems to lean on the Gnome side, or more accurately on the Gtk side.
6- In the Mandrake distro, a window manager such as Icewm is specifically compiled with Imlib and other goodies in order to be fully Gnome-compliant. This is not the case for most other distros, and this is different from the default distribution of Icewm (however, it recently changed with Icewm 1.0.6).
Back to Ximian and Eazel. Ximian still has no support for Mandrake 7.2, while is has been out for more than 4 months now. It is very surprising, since the platforms of libraries on Mandrake 7.2 is almost the same as in 7.1, and has actually been very stable since 6.0. This is not the same with Redhat, especially considering thei recent wacky upgrade to immature versions of gcc/glibc. Still, Redhat 6.1 and Redhat 7.0, are both perfectly supported. Same thing with Eazel. Really, this is very frustrating.
Last, you may want to have a look at a recent interview of Gael Ducal on these issues (not Redaht, but KDE/Gnome policy within Mandrake soft):
...I'm getting more and more suspicious about this tendency of Ximian and Eazel to be so Redhat centric, and especially careless of Mandrake.
Oh, sure Ximian does some support for Debian. Maybe even for Suse. Maybe because Debian and Suse don't really bother Redhat in the long run. Suse is on a declining path (probably not in absolute numbers, but in relative share). Debian is Debian, most of its users will stick with it, but, for the moment, it's not likely to get a market share that can compare with Redhat or Mandrake.
But, how strange, Mandrake is amazingly neglected. That is, the distro that IS a danger for Redhat, which also happens to be by far the easiest to support once you already support Redhat, is, well, "isolated". Since Mandrake is the only distro whose popularity is comparable to Redhat's, it makes no sense. Except that...
All right, now that trolls have passed by... Is there anyone out there who is competent enough to make a sort of pros & cons comparison between the Linux and NetBSD kernels for handheld/embedded devices? Just curious.
...and it's also a symptom of collective brainwashing.
There is obviously a problem with the fact that, in such a wealthy country, most workers do only have two or three weeks of holidays, a neanderthalian protection in case of disease, and very few days (sometines no days at all, they are considered as "sick days"!) for a woman who's having a baby.
I'm sharing my life between the US and my native country. In my native country (it shouldn't be difficult to guess where I come from), I have 9 weeks of holidays/year, I will get my full salary even if I'm sick for a very long period (that is, much longer than the number of "sick days" in America of than a short-term disablility period -during which you usually lose 25% of your salary in the US-), my wife will strop working three months if she has a kid and get a full salary (she'll even stop 6 months starting with the 3rd kids), etc... I'm not saying it's a panacea, nor that it's not going too far. I'm saying that America is scandalously backward on these issues, because everything has to be sacrificed in the name of competitive business.
In the name of economic competitivity, a preoccupation which really has become hysterical in America under the Reagan-Bush era, American workers have accepted the most extreme sacrifices on their working conditions, their free time, as well as their retirement and healthcare systems. This truly is brainwashing, and could not have happened if strong (and smart, which apparently was the problem in the US) unions had been there.
Good comment, however, you forgot other very important criteria:
- Cost of health insurance/healthcare
- Cost of Retirement savings
- And, the key point, where differences vary by an enormous factor (that is, by an amount of money equivalent to a nice house, for example); cost of kids (ie daycare, good school, good high school, good university, etc...).
On these points, especially the last one, the US force you to spend real fortunes. In other countries, most of these expenses are alrwady covered by the taxes you paid.
I've had a chance to make many real life comparisons in western countries, and my conclusion is: Germany and "backward socialist" France are real bargains.
As far as Paris is concerned, the cost of real estate is at least 2.5 times lower than in NY or London (I happen to live back and forth between NY and Paris), which changes everything. Otherwise, the cost of life are indeed comparable, still NY is slightly more expensive on most consumer goods.
The real question is: do you have kids? In Continental Europe, and France in particular, the cost of kids is incredibly low compared to the fortunes that you have to spend in the US, for their education, healthcare, etc...
What's your point, exactly? Human may not be designed to think in reverse polish and to do recursion, indeed. However, humans were also designed for hunting and polygamy. They were also obviously not designed for using computer, otherwise they should have a hand with 105 fingers and another one with 3 or so.
That thing we humans arogantly call "progress" has always been achieved by forgetting the straightforward applications of our "design" and by using our abstraction capabilities to accomplish unobvious activities. Functional programming is no exception. And it gave us Emacs.
Mr Potter has already shown in the past months he had a serious problem with the French, since its ideological (not to say religious) leanings are simply incompatible with the simple fact that the French system is working. Facing this dilemna, he has two choices: ask himself whether he has to question his own beliefs, of spread FUD on France to persuade himself and others that France sucks. Of course, the second solution is the easiest one, especially since he's definitely not alone, in the Anglo-Saxon countries, to play this game, newspapers will feed him with the FUD and lies he needs.
Now we know he also has a similar psychanalitic issue with Sweden. No wonder, the reasons are approximately the same (although I assume his antipathy towards Sweden is much less viceral).
Will all this being cleared up, Mr Potter, may you please answer this simple question: what is your definition of "spiritually malnourished", how do you measure that, and how do you observe the consequences? I'm sure your answer will bring us plenty of light, and plenty of fun.
Gnome, as a desktop, is regularly second, indeed. Yet you can't deny that it also brought several innovations that were incorporated later in KDE (embedded panel applets, for example, and an independent component system, which KPart was not).
Yet there were REALLY USEFUL AND INNOVATIVE Gtk apps years before useful KDE apps. Actually, and sorry if this is flamebait, as far as I'm concerned, Konqueror is for me the first and only useful KDE application. The only useful Qt-based app before that was Qps, which is not part of KDE.
I support Gnome because of Gtk (and Gimp),and because of Gphoto, Gnumeric, Abiword, Dia, Gtk-XEmacs etc... On these kinds of apps, KDE is not only second, it is way behind.
Still, for some reason, I'm regularly impressed by the talents of these KDE folks. Too bad this does not translate in more original and useful applications. The problem is that Gnome, regardless of the respective technical merits, has been more succesful at creating a dynamic to involve "a priori neutral" talented developers with excellent ideas that give birth to Dia and Gphoto. And I think the key to this dynamic is called Gtk.
Well, this is exactly what I was writing myself. The "politically correct" explanation, as I put it, is wrong. What is new in your article is that you seem to think that the data structures-related problems can and will be fixed. I hope it's true.
Ok, on the one hand, you have mozilla, which is huge. The politically correct opinion is to claim "this is because it incorporates too many functionnalities which are not web-related (mail, news, composer, dildo, XML-dynamic-interface-whatever, etc...), but that gecko, mozilla's rendering engine, is great, light, fast. etc..." The problem is: it's not true. And Galeon brings us the proof. Here we have a lightweight, unbloated, slick gtk-interface, which embeds gecko, and that's it (plus, some functionalities, such as printing and cookies are not implemented yet). And the result is... a web browser almost as big as mozilla, which immediately goes over 20 Megs in RSS (half being shared).
On the other hand, you have Konqueror, with a good rendering engine, almost fully complete, which is less a memory hog than Galeon: it's not everyday that you meet a KDE application which takes less memory than its Gnome counterpart (actually, this is the firt time I see something like this: the empirical rule used to be: if a KDE app takes N megs, an equivalement Gnome app will take Nx0.7 megs on average). What does it mean? It means that if you embed Konqueror's rendering engine in a simple Gtk/Gnome GUI, you may potentially get, at last, a fast, light, good, complete web browser, lighter than Konqueror, without all these silly kdeinit processes that you need to kill with a napalm gun. And Gtk/Gnome based, which may be significant for some. So this move is potentially excellent.
We tried changing the calendar in France...
on
13 Month Calendar?
·
· Score: 2
Just after the Revolution, during this anti-religious and "let's modernise everything" period (this was also when the metric system was launched). Months were called Vendemiaire, Thermidor -the 9th was Robespierre's fall-, Brumiaire -the 18th was Napoleon's coup-, etc.... Year 1 was 1792.
We used it for one decade, then Napoleon dropped it, since it was associated, in the minds of the people, to the most extremist revolutionaries. Too bad, it could have been fun (who cares about Jesus's birth anyway?).
Strange, I still have an old Betamax at home, and several original porn tapes. But it's in France: Maybe the situation was different in the US, possibly because of a "local marketing" approach.
The real problem is that Betamax was proprietary (Sony), while VHS was not.
This is untrue. Not only the French people do not hate Americans (they actually rather love the US), the French also have nothing against the British. There are no Englophobic tabloids in France, for example, or any kind of this crap. All this shit belongs to the past, the 20th century has taught the French the harshest lessons one could imagine, and it worked.
And, by the way, this/. article has absolutely no connection with our so-called cultural and linguistic paranoia, so I really wonder why on earth you guys felt obliged to bring these issues on the table once again. The French are fond of many Anglo-Saxon things, and should not be insulted because a few vocal archaic politicians as well as an historic instituion full of elderly impotents (Academie Francaise) do or say silly things, which are immediately amplified in an unjustified manner in the Anglo-Saxon media.
At least, Corel is just selling it (whatever the price, 30 cents may be a good estimate...), and is not sending an email to their users stating:
"Thank you for participating. These softwares will stop working december 31st. If you have documents produced with these softwares, stop using Linux and go back to Windows, buy the Windows versions of our products. 2nd possibility: fuck off, we don't care, you stupid geek. Sincerly yours."
The Economist has two interesting articles on the gamblings behind the AOL/TW strategy, and the similar situation of Vivendi, the other behemoth. In both cases, the real issue is "Is beting on convergence a smart bet?".
1- The message you're talking about and which was moderated down as "off-topic" has the following content:
"Should we also not teach children about the Holocaust? After all, talking about Nazi's is not good! Should we burn all the war-films and propoganda material from both the Axis and Allied forces, what with all those harrowing scenes of Jews, Gays etc. being murdered?
Personally, i'm inclined to believe that France simply doesn't want to face upto it's past involvment and cooperation with the Nazi's during WWII, much easier to hide it all and pretend it didn't happen isn't it?"
Quite franfly, while I cannot speak in place of the moderator, I do think this message is clearly off-topic in the discussion (which was about, as you remember, a surprising move from Yahoo going Minitel), and I don't think that the moderator was politically-motivated. On the other hand, I think that your reaction to this moderation and your reposting of the message were politically-motivated. So was I, by the way. The three of us are off-topic anyway. But I didn't start the fire.
2- I did not attack you, but the content of this message, which was apparently not written by yourself (correct me if I'm wrong).
3- It may be time to invoke Godwin's law, since you called my tactics "brownshirt", which I find somewhat ridiculous.
Probably not as mush as I enjoy the accumulation of francophobic cliches which seem to be recurrent on slashdot. I had decided, a few years ago, to ignore them and never reply. I changed my mind recently for various reasons, including the feeling that most attacks were unfair, or pointed at the wrong target and at the wrong problem. So I decided to answer en masse.
Now, in case you haven't noticed, my position is always a defensive one. I don't spontaneously attack other countries, since I actually happen to love most of the places where the francophobic feeling seems to be the strongest, including the US, where I'm currently living, the UK, and Sweden. But, well, yeah, I love France too, and I have a problem when I read unfair contributions about it. Now, if you want me to make a very harsch enumeration of the flaws of the French society, I can make a very long one! I'm just asking for some more truth and objectivity, if you see what I mean...
Last, your "Mr Collaborationist" may deserve an explanation. Please feel free to elaborate on it.
And here we go again... One more Francophobic who has such a hard time facing the idea that France can sometimes do interesting things, that he feels obliged to find a twisted interpretation which will give him one more chance to insult them.
This is boring, conformist (especially from a Scandinavian) and predictible.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes many people think that Mandrake won't charge for an upgrade service is that Mandrake is not an American company, and yes, there are such things as cultural differences even in the way companies are run. And, more simply, Mandrake is not Redhat, as you can already observe in today's strategies and attitude.
Mandrake won't do that, because it does not make sense, because it does not fit with Mandrake's stance, which is just not "just" PR as it can sometimes be in companies from the other side of the atlantic, because Mandrake has not gone public and does not depend on shareholders, and, above all, because it is long term suicide for the benefit of short term profit.
If Mandrake was to do this someday, this would mean one thing and only one: they are so short of cash that they are about to die if they don't think another source of income in the next months. And, when this point is to be reached, charging for an upgrade service won't save them.
Send him a dual Athlon motherboard. This should be sufficient.
...systems that channel LAZY behaviours work as well as systems that channel SELFISH behaviours.
Laziness is the mother of intelligence (father unknown). Move to France.
While your comments may be true for Suse, I don't think they still hold on for Mandrake. Mandrake was indeed KDE-centric a while ago, but it's not true anymore. Several things to illustrate:
1- All the Mandrake tools, including the installing program, are Gtk-based, not Qt-based.
2- Mandrakesoft is part of both the Gnome foundation and the KDE league.
3- There is absolutely no difference of quality of support between Gnome and KDE within the Mandrake distro. Indeed, I think the default login manager is kdm instead of gdm when you have both installed, but basically, that's it (and it's understantable since gdm still has major troubleshootings, as Gnome folks reckon themselves).
4- There are many Gnome contributors working at Mandrakesoft. The difference is that there is no Mandrakesoft employee who is officially dedicated to this, while there are one or two KDE-dedicated employees. It is supposed to change.
5- I know many of MandrakeSoft folks, and basically, with the important exception of Gael Duval (the founder) and David Faure (the KDE-dedicated employee), their sympathy seems to lean on the Gnome side, or more accurately on the Gtk side.
6- In the Mandrake distro, a window manager such as Icewm is specifically compiled with Imlib and other goodies in order to be fully Gnome-compliant. This is not the case for most other distros, and this is different from the default distribution of Icewm (however, it recently changed with Icewm 1.0.6).
Back to Ximian and Eazel. Ximian still has no support for Mandrake 7.2, while is has been out for more than 4 months now. It is very surprising, since the platforms of libraries on Mandrake 7.2 is almost the same as in 7.1, and has actually been very stable since 6.0. This is not the same with Redhat, especially considering thei recent wacky upgrade to immature versions of gcc/glibc. Still, Redhat 6.1 and Redhat 7.0, are both perfectly supported. Same thing with Eazel. Really, this is very frustrating.
Last, you may want to have a look at a recent interview of Gael Ducal on these issues (not Redaht, but KDE/Gnome policy within Mandrake soft):
http://www.linuxpower.org/display.php?id=206
...I'm getting more and more suspicious about this tendency of Ximian and Eazel to be so Redhat centric, and especially careless of Mandrake.
Oh, sure Ximian does some support for Debian. Maybe even for Suse. Maybe because Debian and Suse don't really bother Redhat in the long run. Suse is on a declining path (probably not in absolute numbers, but in relative share). Debian is Debian, most of its users will stick with it, but, for the moment, it's not likely to get a market share that can compare with Redhat or Mandrake.
But, how strange, Mandrake is amazingly neglected. That is, the distro that IS a danger for Redhat, which also happens to be by far the easiest to support once you already support Redhat, is, well, "isolated". Since Mandrake is the only distro whose popularity is comparable to Redhat's, it makes no sense. Except that...
All right, now that trolls have passed by... Is there anyone out there who is competent enough to make a sort of pros & cons comparison between the Linux and NetBSD kernels for handheld/embedded devices? Just curious.
And has done so for 15 years (and never touched a PC, of course).
Enough said.
...and it's also a symptom of collective brainwashing.
There is obviously a problem with the fact that, in such a wealthy country, most workers do only have two or three weeks of holidays, a neanderthalian protection in case of disease, and very few days (sometines no days at all, they are considered as "sick days"!) for a woman who's having a baby.
I'm sharing my life between the US and my native country. In my native country (it shouldn't be difficult to guess where I come from), I have 9 weeks of holidays/year, I will get my full salary even if I'm sick for a very long period (that is, much longer than the number of "sick days" in America of than a short-term disablility period -during which you usually lose 25% of your salary in the US-), my wife will strop working three months if she has a kid and get a full salary (she'll even stop 6 months starting with the 3rd kids), etc... I'm not saying it's a panacea, nor that it's not going too far. I'm saying that America is scandalously backward on these issues, because everything has to be sacrificed in the name of competitive business.
In the name of economic competitivity, a preoccupation which really has become hysterical in America under the Reagan-Bush era, American workers have accepted the most extreme sacrifices on their working conditions, their free time, as well as their retirement and healthcare systems. This truly is brainwashing, and could not have happened if strong (and smart, which apparently was the problem in the US) unions had been there.
Good comment, however, you forgot other very important criteria:
- Cost of health insurance/healthcare
- Cost of Retirement savings
- And, the key point, where differences vary by an enormous factor (that is, by an amount of money equivalent to a nice house, for example); cost of kids (ie daycare, good school, good high school, good university, etc...).
On these points, especially the last one, the US force you to spend real fortunes. In other countries, most of these expenses are alrwady covered by the taxes you paid.
I've had a chance to make many real life comparisons in western countries, and my conclusion is: Germany and "backward socialist" France are real bargains.
So? I'm afraid I don't get it.
As far as Paris is concerned, the cost of real estate is at least 2.5 times lower than in NY or London (I happen to live back and forth between NY and Paris), which changes everything. Otherwise, the cost of life are indeed comparable, still NY is slightly more expensive on most consumer goods.
The real question is: do you have kids? In Continental Europe, and France in particular, the cost of kids is incredibly low compared to the fortunes that you have to spend in the US, for their education, healthcare, etc...
What's your point, exactly? Human may not be designed to think in reverse polish and to do recursion, indeed. However, humans were also designed for hunting and polygamy. They were also obviously not designed for using computer, otherwise they should have a hand with 105 fingers and another one with 3 or so.
That thing we humans arogantly call "progress" has always been achieved by forgetting the straightforward applications of our "design" and by using our abstraction capabilities to accomplish unobvious activities. Functional programming is no exception. And it gave us Emacs.
Mr Potter has already shown in the past months he had a serious problem with the French, since its ideological (not to say religious) leanings are simply incompatible with the simple fact that the French system is working. Facing this dilemna, he has two choices: ask himself whether he has to question his own beliefs, of spread FUD on France to persuade himself and others that France sucks. Of course, the second solution is the easiest one, especially since he's definitely not alone, in the Anglo-Saxon countries, to play this game, newspapers will feed him with the FUD and lies he needs.
Now we know he also has a similar psychanalitic issue with Sweden. No wonder, the reasons are approximately the same (although I assume his antipathy towards Sweden is much less viceral).
Will all this being cleared up, Mr Potter, may you please answer this simple question: what is your definition of "spiritually malnourished", how do you measure that, and how do you observe the consequences? I'm sure your answer will bring us plenty of light, and plenty of fun.
I've always wondered why America was so much behind Japan and Europe when it comes to cell phones. Dammit, I know now.
Gnome, as a desktop, is regularly second, indeed. Yet you can't deny that it also brought several innovations that were incorporated later in KDE (embedded panel applets, for example, and an independent component system, which KPart was not).
Yet there were REALLY USEFUL AND INNOVATIVE Gtk apps years before useful KDE apps. Actually, and sorry if this is flamebait, as far as I'm concerned, Konqueror is for me the first and only useful KDE application. The only useful Qt-based app before that was Qps, which is not part of KDE.
I support Gnome because of Gtk (and Gimp),and because of Gphoto, Gnumeric, Abiword, Dia, Gtk-XEmacs etc... On these kinds of apps, KDE is not only second, it is way behind.
Still, for some reason, I'm regularly impressed by the talents of these KDE folks. Too bad this does not translate in more original and useful applications. The problem is that Gnome, regardless of the respective technical merits, has been more succesful at creating a dynamic to involve "a priori neutral" talented developers with excellent ideas that give birth to Dia and Gphoto. And I think the key to this dynamic is called Gtk.
Well, this is exactly what I was writing myself. The "politically correct" explanation, as I put it, is wrong. What is new in your article is that you seem to think that the data structures-related problems can and will be fixed. I hope it's true.
Ok, on the one hand, you have mozilla, which is huge. The politically correct opinion is to claim "this is because it incorporates too many functionnalities which are not web-related (mail, news, composer, dildo, XML-dynamic-interface-whatever, etc...), but that gecko, mozilla's rendering engine, is great, light, fast. etc..." The problem is: it's not true. And Galeon brings us the proof. Here we have a lightweight, unbloated, slick gtk-interface, which embeds gecko, and that's it (plus, some functionalities, such as printing and cookies are not implemented yet). And the result is... a web browser almost as big as mozilla, which immediately goes over 20 Megs in RSS (half being shared).
On the other hand, you have Konqueror, with a good rendering engine, almost fully complete, which is less a memory hog than Galeon: it's not everyday that you meet a KDE application which takes less memory than its Gnome counterpart (actually, this is the firt time I see something like this: the empirical rule used to be: if a KDE app takes N megs, an equivalement Gnome app will take Nx0.7 megs on average). What does it mean? It means that if you embed Konqueror's rendering engine in a simple Gtk/Gnome GUI, you may potentially get, at last, a fast, light, good, complete web browser, lighter than Konqueror, without all these silly kdeinit processes that you need to kill with a napalm gun. And Gtk/Gnome based, which may be significant for some. So this move is potentially excellent.
Just after the Revolution, during this anti-religious and "let's modernise everything" period (this was also when the metric system was launched). Months were called Vendemiaire, Thermidor -the 9th was Robespierre's fall-, Brumiaire -the 18th was Napoleon's coup-, etc.... Year 1 was 1792.
We used it for one decade, then Napoleon dropped it, since it was associated, in the minds of the people, to the most extremist revolutionaries. Too bad, it could have been fun (who cares about Jesus's birth anyway?).
Strange, I still have an old Betamax at home, and several original porn tapes. But it's in France: Maybe the situation was different in the US, possibly because of a "local marketing" approach.
The real problem is that Betamax was proprietary (Sony), while VHS was not.
This is untrue. Not only the French people do not hate Americans (they actually rather love the US), the French also have nothing against the British. There are no Englophobic tabloids in France, for example, or any kind of this crap. All this shit belongs to the past, the 20th century has taught the French the harshest lessons one could imagine, and it worked.
/. article has absolutely no connection with our so-called cultural and linguistic paranoia, so I really wonder why on earth you guys felt obliged to bring these issues on the table once again. The French are fond of many Anglo-Saxon things, and should not be insulted because a few vocal archaic politicians as well as an historic instituion full of elderly impotents (Academie Francaise) do or say silly things, which are immediately amplified in an unjustified manner in the Anglo-Saxon media.
And, by the way, this
At least, Corel is just selling it (whatever the price, 30 cents may be a good estimate...), and is not sending an email to their users stating:
"Thank you for participating. These softwares will stop working december 31st. If you have documents produced with these softwares, stop using Linux and go back to Windows, buy the Windows versions of our products. 2nd possibility: fuck off, we don't care, you stupid geek. Sincerly yours."
Framemaker, anyone?
On AOL-TW
On Vivendi and convergence
Ok, several things here:
1- The message you're talking about and which was moderated down as "off-topic" has the following content:
"Should we also not teach children about the Holocaust? After all, talking about Nazi's is not good! Should we burn all the war-films and propoganda material from both the Axis and Allied forces, what with all those harrowing scenes of Jews, Gays etc. being murdered?
Personally, i'm inclined to believe that France simply doesn't want to face upto it's past involvment and cooperation with the Nazi's during WWII, much easier to hide it all and pretend it didn't happen isn't it?"
Quite franfly, while I cannot speak in place of the moderator, I do think this message is clearly off-topic in the discussion (which was about, as you remember, a surprising move from Yahoo going Minitel), and I don't think that the moderator was politically-motivated. On the other hand, I think that your reaction to this moderation and your reposting of the message were politically-motivated. So was I, by the way. The three of us are off-topic anyway. But I didn't start the fire.
2- I did not attack you, but the content of this message, which was apparently not written by yourself (correct me if I'm wrong).
3- It may be time to invoke Godwin's law, since you called my tactics "brownshirt", which I find somewhat ridiculous.
Probably not as mush as I enjoy the accumulation of francophobic cliches which seem to be recurrent on slashdot. I had decided, a few years ago, to ignore them and never reply. I changed my mind recently for various reasons, including the feeling that most attacks were unfair, or pointed at the wrong target and at the wrong problem. So I decided to answer en masse.
Now, in case you haven't noticed, my position is always a defensive one. I don't spontaneously attack other countries, since I actually happen to love most of the places where the francophobic feeling seems to be the strongest, including the US, where I'm currently living, the UK, and Sweden. But, well, yeah, I love France too, and I have a problem when I read unfair contributions about it. Now, if you want me to make a very harsch enumeration of the flaws of the French society, I can make a very long one! I'm just asking for some more truth and objectivity, if you see what I mean...
Last, your "Mr Collaborationist" may deserve an explanation. Please feel free to elaborate on it.
And here we go again... One more Francophobic who has such a hard time facing the idea that France can sometimes do interesting things, that he feels obliged to find a twisted interpretation which will give him one more chance to insult them.
This is boring, conformist (especially from a Scandinavian) and predictible.