Absolutely no argument with you there. I remember waiting three or four minutes minimum for Ghostbusters to load off of the disk, and I've not seen a game on my NES that takes longer than thirty seconds or so to load most environments; that's generally for entire levels of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, which can get to be pretty big, and the largest rooms in the Metroid Prime series, such as the artifact temple in the first game. Metroid Prime's graphics are some of the best around, and many of the rooms are incredibly detailed.
I totally agree with you that many modern games are crap, and I can't see how today's children put up with them, either, though I've been quite satisfied with many of Nintendo's games; Metroid Prime, for example, loads as you play, though occasionally you have to wait for a door to open for a few seconds, never waited longer than thirty, though. I've generally come to the decision that PC gaming is useless, as every console I've seen kicks the PC's ass in terms of 'lets make the game as much fun for the user as possible'. As for the Atari, however, if the game in question was cartridge based, there was no loading involved at all; all of the code was on a ROM chip that got accessed directly because both RAM and ROM in those days was faster than the CPU. Also, Atari had a better disk system, as did Commodore; the drives operated on their own, which has some limitations, but allow the computer to perform numerous tasks while the drive does something else entirely (Commodore did have some problems with their drive, however, particularly the DOS's poor use of buffering).
I'll concede your point here regarding WYSIWYG (I was tired when I wrote my original statement). However, WordPerfect files are also significantly easier to edit than MS Word files because of the file structure, and my final point, that WordPerfect can make most formating changes on the fly (without forcing the user to select the text) is very much dependent on the formatting structure. Any HTML or XML editor, and even OpenOffice, if it were written correctly, should be able to do the same thing WordPerfect does with fonts, margins, and many other settings. Another thing I am very disappointed to see missing in other word processors, particularly those that use HTML and XML for their formatting, are WordPerfect features like indent, center on margin, right flush, and several other text positioning features, and the most disappointing missing features I've missed in other word processors are WordPerfect's reveal codes and the properties bar (the latter automatically updates to the task at hand without interfering with the main tool bar, or any others you have open). Reveal codes, or something like it, should be extremely simple to implement in HTML and XML based word processors, since the labels are very much like WordPerfect's binary codes. I also can't see why it should be so hard to implement those positioning features as well, and I'm not at all happy with the way OpenOffice deals with tool bars.
Very well stated. About decade ago, I said that Microsoft would eventually collapse based on what I knew about their business practices and the history of companies and nations that followed that same path in life; it appears the first significant signs of that collapse are finally coming to light. About four years ago, I wrote a paper for an English class explaining why Microsoft would fail; the simple fact that the company doesn't listen. Microsoft includes what they think users are going to want, and their patches are more like 2x4s nailed over the top of cracked support columns because they don't want to make major changes to the Windows architecture.
One example of the result is MS Word vs WordPerfect (I used WordPerfect 9 for years, and it's still useful to me, though at the present, I'm slightly crippled by the lack of a working installation; I need to get a VM running so I can put a version of Windows on that WordPerfect will run on). Both MS Word (OOXML obviously doesn't change this much) and WordPerfect use a binary format, but MS Word piles all of the text into the file as a single string, then has formatting data following that text that somehow tells the document what the text is supposed to look like while WordPerfect adds all of the binary formatting codes into the text, like the way HTML or XML tags are used, and the only extra information is data regarding objects, like images. What this does is leaves MS Word without many useful power features, like true WYSIWYG (necessitating print preview), can't provide users with real time previews, and forces users to select anything they need to have changed. WordPerfect, on the other hand, presents the document exactly as it will be printed (all print preview does is remove formating marks; you can still edit in print preview), provides previews for any change the user contemplates (with certain reasonable limitations), and allows numerous changes, such as font and tab settings, to be changed for the entire document without selecting anything.
When my mother needed to replace her computer nine years ago, the older of my two brothers and I convinced her to purchase an iMac. My reasoning was simple; even with the problems Apple has had over the years, a Macintosh would be a better overall investment. Nine years later, that same iMac is still running perfectly well, though as a game machine for my youngest brother. My mother has since upgraded to two iMacs, one she received from my father's sister, and another that she purchased a few months back because her new printer couldn't run on Mac OS 9, and Mac OS X needed more power than her iMac could provide. All of these decisions have come as a result of my mother's satisfaction with the Macintosh she purchased in 1998; has she had problems? Absolutely. How often have they required major work to correct? Only a few times, and most of those have been hardware related. Our decision then was based on the knowledge that forcing our mother to rely on Microsoft would only lead her to misery. I've been pleased with the knowledge that my foresight then has led to her happiness, regarding computers, now.
I have to disagree with you; my Mac does crash, but only on extremely rare occasions, most often when I'm shutting it down because of sluggish performance. Otherwise, I've run it long periods of time without a reboot; my present record is 87 days. Linux, on the other hand, never crashes, though I do have a problem keeping it up for long periods of time because the AMD drivers don't allow me to put it to sleep.
I live in Orem, Utah (for anyone who sees this comment and wants to know where that is, it's about thirty/forty miles south of Salt Lake and immediately north of Provo), and I'd like to get Utopia myself, but there is one fairly major wrench preventing me, and that is a clause in the land lease agreement that states that the property owner is solely responsible for any damage to the Utopia hardware. My landlord wouldn't sign the agreement for that and also because he was worried that installation would cause damage to his property that wouldn't get repaired. I would love to get service via a company operating through Utopia, but I can understand why my landlord hedged on signing the agreement. To be honest, I'm not all that comfortable with the clause myself. If not for that, I would have ditched Comcast over a year ago.
This is mildly off subject, but is about Comcast. My brother and I have Comcast for our phone, though we'll be dropping it soon, which our sister set up. When she moved out, we tried contact Comcast to have the name on the account changed, but Comcast decided that changing the name would require a reinstall and demanded that we pay them $20 for the name change. Needless to say, we refused to pay and the account is still under our sister's name. What you've gone through with them is significantly different, yes, but both of these examples go to show that Comcast cares nothing for their customers.
I think you missed the main point my post sought to make, and I didn't word it as well as I should have; the hardware, not the software, is where most of the cost in purchasing a new Mac comes from. Purchasing the same hardware on the open market without an OS would cost nearly as much as an equally powered Mac. Also, the only Windows upgrade you can get for less than the OS X upgrade are the 'home' versions, whereas OS X's upgrade is their only, but best version, the equivalent to Microsoft's business versions.
I should have been more clear in my original post. The only Windows upgrade you can get at or below that price is the "home" upgrade, which is usually one of the most limited versions. None of the business quality, full upgrades that Microsoft offers are anywhere near as conveniently priced as $130 (you can rarely get them for less than $200, which is my opinion is way overpriced, especially for software that is as low in quality). My comment about the bulk of the Mac's cost being in hardware is also true; you would be very hard pressed to purchase a raw computer without an OS for much less than it costs to purchase an equally powered Mac.
Come to think of it... why would anyone care about what Bill Gates thinks? Apart from him still being one of the sharpest cookies in the industry that is. Why indeed? The money he has to spend? Is that your criterion?
I have no intention of dissing your well thought out and reasoned comment, but Bill Gates has only ever been good at one thing; marketing. When it comes to computers, I don't think there's anyone at Microsoft who has the vaguest idea how to make a decent kernel, except maybe a few peons whose opinions are about as highly regarded by Microsoft as a their customer's opinions are.
To be honest, I never once figured out what the purpose of the Windows key was in the first place, and found it exceptionally annoying when, while typing, I would accidentally hit it and bring up my start menu, then have to Alt+Tab back into my document. Don't bother responding with any of the valid key combinations, though; I have long abandoned Windows for Ubuntu, and will only ever reinstall Windows again on a VM so I can use the WordPerfect suite again (I can't tolerate OpenOffice or MS Word).
Microsoft is a marketing company that thinks they are a software company.
And thank you for your point on Intel. I agree with you about the architecture. I came up with part of an architectural design for a CPU on my own, based very loosely on the very few useful features of the x86 (just memory protection, though mine puts anything anyone at Intel has ever imagined to shame) and a little more solidly on the 68000 and PPC families (though my design is more easily expandable; no need for backwards compatability modes, except to tell the OS how much of the system registers to store, as operation size is extremely variable, with a limit of 256kbit).
I like your comment. I ran Windows XP SP2 (man that's an unnecessary mouthful) for a couple of years myself. A number of major inconveniences, such as the requirement to install certain drivers (particularly RAID) from a floppy made the installation experience a nightmare, but what finally convinced me to just drop it altogether, I switched to Ubuntu, was when something allowed what I'm pretty sure was newdotnet, though I can't say for sure, though it was opening a corrupt program called NDNUninstall that I couldn't get rid of, destroyed the system's networking capacity. I can say this is what happened because I could tell the drivers were working fine. The computer received an IP address on anything connected and my router showed the computer, but I couldn't ping anything. That convinced me once and for all that Microsoft's security claims were completely bogus, and, as you said, that they are completely incompetent with regards to security. My only regret is I've been without WordPerfect (version 9, which I think is the last relevant version; I tried version 12, but quickly rolled back to version 9) for several months now, and that is, quite literally, the only application I kept Windows for. Anyway, sorry about the rant. Nice post.
While I agree with your analysis that OS X is worth every last cent and your analogy on the parent, I would disagree with your analysis on price; OS X itself only sells for about $130, whereas the only version of Windows you can get for that price is either an upgrade, or a severely hobbled version that can't even begin to stand up against OS X. The bulk of the cost of any Mac comes in the worth of its hardware; the best available for the price you're paying. As Steve Jobs himself has said, Apple refuses to sell crap. Nice comment, though.
Very well made comment. The founders wrote the constitution and the Bill of Rights to limit the power of the United States government in the favor of the citizens. Their intention was to prevent the U.S. from becoming totalitarian by preventing those holding a national office (i.e. President, Senator, Judge, etc.) from taking action against a citizen for their own purposes. The ninth and tenth amendments, probably the most widely ignored of the entire Constitution, further establish those protections by assuring the protection of the people and forbidding the national government from taking control of anything that the Constitution does not explicitly mention, which is what it appears the ACLU seeks to do with the second amendment.
One other point; it is very unfortunate that many people do not understand the English language as well as you do. My understanding is good, but even I have had a difficult time understanding the structure of the amendment. Thank you for clearing that up for me.
I didn't see the Flash advertisement, mostly because of ad-block, but also because I don't want to go through the (unnecessary) pain of installing Flash on my 64 bit Ubuntu system, but I looked over the cluttered page for a moment with a very similar reaction to yours; that page is *ugly*!!!
Not to detract from your fine comment, but your time frame is a little off. Germany invaded Poland in 1939, though in all fairness, Neville Chamberlain didn't kill his political career until 1940, so you're at least partially correct. The war in question ended in 1945. As I said, however, your comment was well constructed.
I believe you're missing one key point. If the use of OSS, even if the end result is saved as a.doc,.xls, or any other MS format, is more efficient than using the MS software, the end result is the employee using the OSS is, in the end, doing more work in the same amount of time. While your arguments are, as a whole, based on a valid premise, the potential that the employee may show his employer that his way is superior, and results in better corporate income, it is possible that the company may rethink their corporate strategy and ultimately decide to rid the company of the wasteful MS software. This, from my point of view, seems to give the author of TFA a valid goal.
Allow me to offer an example. While I attended school, a number of my instructors required that I turn my work in via.doc files, but I had no interest or intention of wasting my time using MS Word. Instead, I produced my work in WordPerfect, then saved the finished result as a.doc file and turned that version in. My instructors never had any complaints with my progress, and I managed to finish my projects very thoroughly because I didn't have the horrid limitations of Word to deal with, so I could spend more of my time concentrating on the quality of the assignment than futzing around with the document to make it look the way I wanted/needed it to. I'll admit WordPerfect isn't OSS, but it is superior to MS Word, which is the basis of my point.
I performed a number of searches with both Cha-Cha and Google to see what came up, and I had varied responses. When I searched the phrase 'Ill Booten Gotty' without quotes, Google showed a M*A*S*H reference as the fourth result, the fifth being a secondary link to the same site, whereas Cha-Cha didn't find a M*A*S*H link until the seventeenth result, though I will admit the next was the nineteenth (there were no sponsored links that I could see, though many of the links seemed very irrelevant to my query).
I also performed a search for M*A*S*H character 'Sidney Freedman', again without quotes, for which both engines first gave me a M*A*S*H result, but Google gave me nine relevant results, none of which included duplicate entries, whereas Cha-Cha gave me eight relevant results, including two references to the same article (the only difference was one link included the title Dr before the name while the other didn't; Google's engine seems to have recognized that both files are identical, except that one of them is a redirected link). The thirteenth link Cha-Cha gave me seemed to have no relevance to my search parameters at all; it referred to another person with the first name Sidney, but showed no reference to Freedman search parameter, while Google's first thirty or more references all referred to people named Sidney Freedman or Sidney Friedman (the latter is an acceptable response to me, as the name is pronounced the same, and therefore Google's engine is simply trying to take all possibilities into account).
Finally, I looked up "White Hole" (including the quotes); Google, which performed its search much faster, found two references to the popular British sci-fi comedy series 'Red Dwarf', which had an episode with that title, among the first six, of which all of the others appeared to be relevant to astronomical theory behind white holes. Cha-Cha's results were similar in failure to the 'Ill Gotten Booty' search; the British series didn't appear until the nineteenth entry, and only three of the first six links pointed to the astronomical theory (two of the first six were ads, and they seemed completely irrelevant to my search criteria).
I'm not sure about the javascript link comment, however, as the main Wikipedia White Hole page, a reference to the astronomical theory, opened as an ordinary link would. Nevertheless, I don't see Cha-Cha as being even half as good as Google, and I don't know why anyone would go to their university's homepage to do research for their projects at school; maybe to the library homepage, but if I need to hunt for relevant internet documents, I just go directly to Google; I've never been particularly disappointed once I figured out what I needed to type in.
Still, by definition, an abomination is a detestable quality, act, or condition, which, in my opinion, is also an adequate description of Patterson's DOS, and the term abomination may also be easier to understand in this context. You make a very good point, however. I won't fault you for your logic.
Not to insult you, just make a minor correction; I think the word you were looking for there was abomination. Calling DOS an abortion doesn't quite fit.
That's a valid point, he didn't check his spam folder.
Not true. Within the comments in the blog itself, the author of the article did point out that he checked his spam folders and did everything under his power to turn spam protection off on the accounts he used to test his thesis; he probably should have mentioned this in the main article, but with the word limitations imposed on his blog, he probably didn't have room, and that was a crucial point of data that unfortunately fell by the wayside. Also, the actual average was 70.4%, not 81%; 81% was simply the maximum number of messages he lost on any one of his twelve tests. I will agree with you regarding his lack of a 'control' group, and in hindsight, he, too, mentioned on his blog that he regrettably failed in that respect.
Not to burst your bubble too much, though you do make a fairly valid point, the article does point out that many of the messages he sent internally failed to arrive; the internal average turns out to be 76%. I find that a curious failure, particularly considering that the messages in question were sent in-house, and should not have even left the hotmail network, except to reach the computer(s) in question from the destination inboxes (the article makes it clear that the messages were generated via webmail, so the only other outside communication should have been from the computer generating the message to the web interface). I made a comment regarding this observation on the blog, which includes an observation that it seems to me that any in-house message leaving the internal network indicates a serious problem with the email server; I have little or no experience with the actual operation of email servers, but I am a technician, so I do know that data transmitted from one part of a computer to another never leaves the computer, which is why I base my theory on the premise that in-house messages should never leave the in-house network.
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Absolutely no argument with you there. I remember waiting three or four minutes minimum for Ghostbusters to load off of the disk, and I've not seen a game on my NES that takes longer than thirty seconds or so to load most environments; that's generally for entire levels of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, which can get to be pretty big, and the largest rooms in the Metroid Prime series, such as the artifact temple in the first game. Metroid Prime's graphics are some of the best around, and many of the rooms are incredibly detailed.
I totally agree with you that many modern games are crap, and I can't see how today's children put up with them, either, though I've been quite satisfied with many of Nintendo's games; Metroid Prime, for example, loads as you play, though occasionally you have to wait for a door to open for a few seconds, never waited longer than thirty, though. I've generally come to the decision that PC gaming is useless, as every console I've seen kicks the PC's ass in terms of 'lets make the game as much fun for the user as possible'. As for the Atari, however, if the game in question was cartridge based, there was no loading involved at all; all of the code was on a ROM chip that got accessed directly because both RAM and ROM in those days was faster than the CPU. Also, Atari had a better disk system, as did Commodore; the drives operated on their own, which has some limitations, but allow the computer to perform numerous tasks while the drive does something else entirely (Commodore did have some problems with their drive, however, particularly the DOS's poor use of buffering).
I'll concede your point here regarding WYSIWYG (I was tired when I wrote my original statement). However, WordPerfect files are also significantly easier to edit than MS Word files because of the file structure, and my final point, that WordPerfect can make most formating changes on the fly (without forcing the user to select the text) is very much dependent on the formatting structure. Any HTML or XML editor, and even OpenOffice, if it were written correctly, should be able to do the same thing WordPerfect does with fonts, margins, and many other settings. Another thing I am very disappointed to see missing in other word processors, particularly those that use HTML and XML for their formatting, are WordPerfect features like indent, center on margin, right flush, and several other text positioning features, and the most disappointing missing features I've missed in other word processors are WordPerfect's reveal codes and the properties bar (the latter automatically updates to the task at hand without interfering with the main tool bar, or any others you have open). Reveal codes, or something like it, should be extremely simple to implement in HTML and XML based word processors, since the labels are very much like WordPerfect's binary codes. I also can't see why it should be so hard to implement those positioning features as well, and I'm not at all happy with the way OpenOffice deals with tool bars.
One example of the result is MS Word vs WordPerfect (I used WordPerfect 9 for years, and it's still useful to me, though at the present, I'm slightly crippled by the lack of a working installation; I need to get a VM running so I can put a version of Windows on that WordPerfect will run on). Both MS Word (OOXML obviously doesn't change this much) and WordPerfect use a binary format, but MS Word piles all of the text into the file as a single string, then has formatting data following that text that somehow tells the document what the text is supposed to look like while WordPerfect adds all of the binary formatting codes into the text, like the way HTML or XML tags are used, and the only extra information is data regarding objects, like images. What this does is leaves MS Word without many useful power features, like true WYSIWYG (necessitating print preview), can't provide users with real time previews, and forces users to select anything they need to have changed. WordPerfect, on the other hand, presents the document exactly as it will be printed (all print preview does is remove formating marks; you can still edit in print preview), provides previews for any change the user contemplates (with certain reasonable limitations), and allows numerous changes, such as font and tab settings, to be changed for the entire document without selecting anything.
When my mother needed to replace her computer nine years ago, the older of my two brothers and I convinced her to purchase an iMac. My reasoning was simple; even with the problems Apple has had over the years, a Macintosh would be a better overall investment. Nine years later, that same iMac is still running perfectly well, though as a game machine for my youngest brother. My mother has since upgraded to two iMacs, one she received from my father's sister, and another that she purchased a few months back because her new printer couldn't run on Mac OS 9, and Mac OS X needed more power than her iMac could provide. All of these decisions have come as a result of my mother's satisfaction with the Macintosh she purchased in 1998; has she had problems? Absolutely. How often have they required major work to correct? Only a few times, and most of those have been hardware related. Our decision then was based on the knowledge that forcing our mother to rely on Microsoft would only lead her to misery. I've been pleased with the knowledge that my foresight then has led to her happiness, regarding computers, now.
Very well made comment.
I have to disagree with you; my Mac does crash, but only on extremely rare occasions, most often when I'm shutting it down because of sluggish performance. Otherwise, I've run it long periods of time without a reboot; my present record is 87 days. Linux, on the other hand, never crashes, though I do have a problem keeping it up for long periods of time because the AMD drivers don't allow me to put it to sleep.
Bart Simpson (possibly paraphrased): I didn't think it was physically possible for something to both suck and blow.
I live in Orem, Utah (for anyone who sees this comment and wants to know where that is, it's about thirty/forty miles south of Salt Lake and immediately north of Provo), and I'd like to get Utopia myself, but there is one fairly major wrench preventing me, and that is a clause in the land lease agreement that states that the property owner is solely responsible for any damage to the Utopia hardware. My landlord wouldn't sign the agreement for that and also because he was worried that installation would cause damage to his property that wouldn't get repaired. I would love to get service via a company operating through Utopia, but I can understand why my landlord hedged on signing the agreement. To be honest, I'm not all that comfortable with the clause myself. If not for that, I would have ditched Comcast over a year ago.
This is mildly off subject, but is about Comcast. My brother and I have Comcast for our phone, though we'll be dropping it soon, which our sister set up. When she moved out, we tried contact Comcast to have the name on the account changed, but Comcast decided that changing the name would require a reinstall and demanded that we pay them $20 for the name change. Needless to say, we refused to pay and the account is still under our sister's name. What you've gone through with them is significantly different, yes, but both of these examples go to show that Comcast cares nothing for their customers.
I think you missed the main point my post sought to make, and I didn't word it as well as I should have; the hardware, not the software, is where most of the cost in purchasing a new Mac comes from. Purchasing the same hardware on the open market without an OS would cost nearly as much as an equally powered Mac. Also, the only Windows upgrade you can get for less than the OS X upgrade are the 'home' versions, whereas OS X's upgrade is their only, but best version, the equivalent to Microsoft's business versions.
I should have been more clear in my original post. The only Windows upgrade you can get at or below that price is the "home" upgrade, which is usually one of the most limited versions. None of the business quality, full upgrades that Microsoft offers are anywhere near as conveniently priced as $130 (you can rarely get them for less than $200, which is my opinion is way overpriced, especially for software that is as low in quality). My comment about the bulk of the Mac's cost being in hardware is also true; you would be very hard pressed to purchase a raw computer without an OS for much less than it costs to purchase an equally powered Mac.
I have no intention of dissing your well thought out and reasoned comment, but Bill Gates has only ever been good at one thing; marketing. When it comes to computers, I don't think there's anyone at Microsoft who has the vaguest idea how to make a decent kernel, except maybe a few peons whose opinions are about as highly regarded by Microsoft as a their customer's opinions are.
To be honest, I never once figured out what the purpose of the Windows key was in the first place, and found it exceptionally annoying when, while typing, I would accidentally hit it and bring up my start menu, then have to Alt+Tab back into my document. Don't bother responding with any of the valid key combinations, though; I have long abandoned Windows for Ubuntu, and will only ever reinstall Windows again on a VM so I can use the WordPerfect suite again (I can't tolerate OpenOffice or MS Word).
Microsoft is a marketing company that thinks they are a software company.
And thank you for your point on Intel. I agree with you about the architecture. I came up with part of an architectural design for a CPU on my own, based very loosely on the very few useful features of the x86 (just memory protection, though mine puts anything anyone at Intel has ever imagined to shame) and a little more solidly on the 68000 and PPC families (though my design is more easily expandable; no need for backwards compatability modes, except to tell the OS how much of the system registers to store, as operation size is extremely variable, with a limit of 256kbit).
I like your comment. I ran Windows XP SP2 (man that's an unnecessary mouthful) for a couple of years myself. A number of major inconveniences, such as the requirement to install certain drivers (particularly RAID) from a floppy made the installation experience a nightmare, but what finally convinced me to just drop it altogether, I switched to Ubuntu, was when something allowed what I'm pretty sure was newdotnet, though I can't say for sure, though it was opening a corrupt program called NDNUninstall that I couldn't get rid of, destroyed the system's networking capacity. I can say this is what happened because I could tell the drivers were working fine. The computer received an IP address on anything connected and my router showed the computer, but I couldn't ping anything. That convinced me once and for all that Microsoft's security claims were completely bogus, and, as you said, that they are completely incompetent with regards to security. My only regret is I've been without WordPerfect (version 9, which I think is the last relevant version; I tried version 12, but quickly rolled back to version 9) for several months now, and that is, quite literally, the only application I kept Windows for. Anyway, sorry about the rant. Nice post.
While I agree with your analysis that OS X is worth every last cent and your analogy on the parent, I would disagree with your analysis on price; OS X itself only sells for about $130, whereas the only version of Windows you can get for that price is either an upgrade, or a severely hobbled version that can't even begin to stand up against OS X. The bulk of the cost of any Mac comes in the worth of its hardware; the best available for the price you're paying. As Steve Jobs himself has said, Apple refuses to sell crap. Nice comment, though.
One other point; it is very unfortunate that many people do not understand the English language as well as you do. My understanding is good, but even I have had a difficult time understanding the structure of the amendment. Thank you for clearing that up for me.
I didn't see the Flash advertisement, mostly because of ad-block, but also because I don't want to go through the (unnecessary) pain of installing Flash on my 64 bit Ubuntu system, but I looked over the cluttered page for a moment with a very similar reaction to yours; that page is *ugly*!!!
Not to detract from your fine comment, but your time frame is a little off. Germany invaded Poland in 1939, though in all fairness, Neville Chamberlain didn't kill his political career until 1940, so you're at least partially correct. The war in question ended in 1945. As I said, however, your comment was well constructed.
Allow me to offer an example. While I attended school, a number of my instructors required that I turn my work in via .doc files, but I had no interest or intention of wasting my time using MS Word. Instead, I produced my work in WordPerfect, then saved the finished result as a .doc file and turned that version in. My instructors never had any complaints with my progress, and I managed to finish my projects very thoroughly because I didn't have the horrid limitations of Word to deal with, so I could spend more of my time concentrating on the quality of the assignment than futzing around with the document to make it look the way I wanted/needed it to. I'll admit WordPerfect isn't OSS, but it is superior to MS Word, which is the basis of my point.
I also performed a search for M*A*S*H character 'Sidney Freedman', again without quotes, for which both engines first gave me a M*A*S*H result, but Google gave me nine relevant results, none of which included duplicate entries, whereas Cha-Cha gave me eight relevant results, including two references to the same article (the only difference was one link included the title Dr before the name while the other didn't; Google's engine seems to have recognized that both files are identical, except that one of them is a redirected link). The thirteenth link Cha-Cha gave me seemed to have no relevance to my search parameters at all; it referred to another person with the first name Sidney, but showed no reference to Freedman search parameter, while Google's first thirty or more references all referred to people named Sidney Freedman or Sidney Friedman (the latter is an acceptable response to me, as the name is pronounced the same, and therefore Google's engine is simply trying to take all possibilities into account).
Finally, I looked up "White Hole" (including the quotes); Google, which performed its search much faster, found two references to the popular British sci-fi comedy series 'Red Dwarf', which had an episode with that title, among the first six, of which all of the others appeared to be relevant to astronomical theory behind white holes. Cha-Cha's results were similar in failure to the 'Ill Gotten Booty' search; the British series didn't appear until the nineteenth entry, and only three of the first six links pointed to the astronomical theory (two of the first six were ads, and they seemed completely irrelevant to my search criteria).
I'm not sure about the javascript link comment, however, as the main Wikipedia White Hole page, a reference to the astronomical theory, opened as an ordinary link would. Nevertheless, I don't see Cha-Cha as being even half as good as Google, and I don't know why anyone would go to their university's homepage to do research for their projects at school; maybe to the library homepage, but if I need to hunt for relevant internet documents, I just go directly to Google; I've never been particularly disappointed once I figured out what I needed to type in.
Still, by definition, an abomination is a detestable quality, act, or condition, which, in my opinion, is also an adequate description of Patterson's DOS, and the term abomination may also be easier to understand in this context. You make a very good point, however. I won't fault you for your logic.
Not to insult you, just make a minor correction; I think the word you were looking for there was abomination. Calling DOS an abortion doesn't quite fit.
Not true. Within the comments in the blog itself, the author of the article did point out that he checked his spam folders and did everything under his power to turn spam protection off on the accounts he used to test his thesis; he probably should have mentioned this in the main article, but with the word limitations imposed on his blog, he probably didn't have room, and that was a crucial point of data that unfortunately fell by the wayside. Also, the actual average was 70.4%, not 81%; 81% was simply the maximum number of messages he lost on any one of his twelve tests. I will agree with you regarding his lack of a 'control' group, and in hindsight, he, too, mentioned on his blog that he regrettably failed in that respect.
Not to burst your bubble too much, though you do make a fairly valid point, the article does point out that many of the messages he sent internally failed to arrive; the internal average turns out to be 76%. I find that a curious failure, particularly considering that the messages in question were sent in-house, and should not have even left the hotmail network, except to reach the computer(s) in question from the destination inboxes (the article makes it clear that the messages were generated via webmail, so the only other outside communication should have been from the computer generating the message to the web interface). I made a comment regarding this observation on the blog, which includes an observation that it seems to me that any in-house message leaving the internal network indicates a serious problem with the email server; I have little or no experience with the actual operation of email servers, but I am a technician, so I do know that data transmitted from one part of a computer to another never leaves the computer, which is why I base my theory on the premise that in-house messages should never leave the in-house network.