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Leave it to the Swedes who still can't spell 'iPod' or 'iTunes' - they can't stop running their MS Word that keeps correcting their efforts into 'Ipod' and 'Itunes' - to even get the name of Linus Torvalds' OS wrong.

The Swedish dailies are OK - SvD arguably more so than the competition - but after that it's open season on inebriated proofreaders and snobbish journalists who don't really give a shit.

Not really good PR for the country that gives the world Absolut, dynamite, and the Nobel Prize.

Actually some of the other details in this 'top 10' list of Internet pioneers aren't much more flattering. Amongst the casual cavalier - and highly curious - claims:

  • Linus led the way to the use of 'open source code'.
  • Tim Berners-Lee is 'one of the developers of the Internet'.
  • Seymour Cray is 'one of the men behind the supercomputer'.
  • Marc Andreessen 'developed Mosaic' and 'gave Microsoft hiccups'.
  • Grace Hopper who 'during World War II developed a compiler that transformed text into computer languages'.
  • Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce who 'each on his own invented the integrated circuit'.
  • Alan Turing - 'one of the founders of computer technology. His discoveries lead to amongst other things the saving of millions of lives during the second world war'.
  • Richard Stallman - 'further developer and spokesperson for free software and open source code'.
  • Paul Allen - 'worked with Bill Gates to build up Microsoft. According to Vnunet he's a significantly sharper programmer than Gates'.

And this isn't your traditional Swedish slimy tabloid either - this is the venerable Dagens industri whose website has the most remarkable design ever seen. The following is the link to the above article. They even use Bill Gates backslashes in their RRLs - as well as good old Microsoft web server software. Can't live without that!

http://di.se/Nyheter/?page=/Avdelningar/Artikel.aspx?ArticleID=2008\11\14\311570&SectionId=Dinapengar

Oh - and did you know Linus is known around the world as 'Doctor Linux'?

And you know the worst insult? They didn't even do their own research! They copied straight from Vnunet - who are going to know some obscure Swedish language site ripped them off?

The Vnunet article is a real article - several pages long - with details that clarify what comes off as either dumb or clumsy in the Swedish article. It's just as vacuous - but it did require actual work. What you see above is more or less the entire Swedish article.

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2230107/top-ten-greatest-geeks

Note: not all Swedes are this stupid because not all Swedes are journalists. Most of the criminal gaffes in the article have already been commented on by readers. Not that these Swedish journalists would bother correcting them of course. Drink Absolut, Drive Volvo. But not at the same time. Ed.

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