> But please don't use this 60% figure as proof that Vista will suck. > Because it doesn't necessarily mean that.
No. It does, however, mean a couple of things...
First, the first release will be a bit buggy, until the first service pack comes out. We probably could have predicted this anyway, but with a 60% rewrite it's a given.
Second, it's gonna be late. The summary seems to imply that 60% _remains_ to be rewritten; if that's the case, we can expect it to get pushed back at *least* three more times, probably into 2009 at the earliest. However, if we're talking more about a 60% rewrite as compared to XP, that could be mostly done already, so that 2007 or 2008 would still be possible. This is a point worth clarifying.
> By what standard is Windows a mature product compared to any other OS?
It is much more mature than HURD. HTH.HAND.
OS X is a rather special case, for a couple of reasons. First, it's actually older than it appears because Apple didn't start shipping it the instant they thought they could get away with doing so, and when they did start shipping it, it was still not their primary OS product for the first while, so while you think of it as about five years old in terms of its position in the market, it's more like eight or ten years old, in terms of development. Second, a lot of the technology in OS X is much older than the OS per se, so some parts (as it happens, some critical parts) of it are rather more mature than the whole. However, on the _whole_ I think I would have to agree with the other poster that NT is a more mature codebase than OS X, especially if we're talking about desktop-oriented things. By "more mature" here I don't mean "better", but in terms of how far along the cycle it is toward the eventual point where, like Win9x/Me (and the Classic MacOS on the Apple side of things) before, the codebase will need to be retired.
Most of the server-oriented OSes, of course, are clearly more mature than both. VMS epitomizes the sort of maturity I'm talking about, and most of the commercial unices are not far behind.
> As it stands, Windows XP was released 4.5 years ago. In comparison, people constantly > complained about Debian Woody being ancient, but the lapse between Woody and Sarge > was almost exactly 3 years.
This is partly related to fundamental differences in the development cycle of the software people run on top of those respective platforms.
If Windows goes six years between releases, and you download (or buy) some new Windows software, it'll run on your six-year-old system. (I'm not saying six years between releases is reasonable; I'm only explaining why it would be much worse for a Linux distro than it is for Windows.) On the other hand, when Debian goes past about two years or so between releases, you get into a situation where if you try to download and install some new software, it requires newer versions of things than are included in your distribution. For instance, if you had heard good things about Inkscape, and wanted to try it out, you'd go and download it and find that it required (as of shortly before Sarge was released) GTK 2.6 or higher, but on Woody you had GTK 1.2 or so. Upgrading GTK to the next minor version, let alone across major versions, is a dependency nightmare only marginally less painful than switching to a different vendor's C library, and involves recompiling everything on your system that depends on GTK (i.e., half the software on the system) as well as everything GTK depends on (i.e., most of the rest of the software on the system), so then you'd look through the "old versions" of Inkscape to see if you could find a version that would compile against GTK 1.x, but you'd be completely out of luck, because Inkscape did not yet *exist* when GTK 2.0 came out. So if you want to run Inkscape on Woody, it's _theoretically_ possible, but in practice, forget it.
So when people complained about Debain going too long between releases, it wasn't just because they wanted a shiny new kernel every couple of years.
It's true that five years is too long to go between major releases for any OS, including Windows, but the comparison with Debian is not entirely fair.
> That's exactly what I'm saying, I've yet to find a link on the net to confirm it, but > at developer meetings I've heard verbal confirmation from a developer at Microsoft > that they are in fact in the process of porting Office to.NET.
Even assuming that verbal confirmation is reliable -- which is a mighty big assumption -- being in the _process_ of doing something is a very long way from having done it. Eight years ago 3D Realms was in the _process_ of developing Duke Nukem Forever. Ad interim, Microsoft has been in the _process_ of working on many projects that were later cancelled.
> I think.NET has been very successful
It has been very successful at becomming a major industry buzzword, certainly.
> The graphic designer is Microsofts Photoshop killer
Yeah. Photoshop is _soooooo_ dead. I bet Adobe is shaking in their boots.
Here's a tip: calling something a Foo killer, when Foo is still the industry leader, is just so much hot air, wild speculation, meaningless.
Whether Vista is a major Windows release, comparable in scope to the changes from Windows 3.x to Windows 95, is impossible to predict at this point. When Vista has been out for a couple of years, then we'll be able to evaluate such claims.
I would not consider XP to be a major release, from a technological standpoint. Setting aside the new visual theme (and OEM deals that forced hardware vendors to write drivers for NT finally), the original release of XP was a very minor improvement over Windows 2000; frankly, the differences between XP as released and XP with SP2 are more important than between Windows 2000 and the initial XP release.
On the other hand, from a non-technological standpoint, XP was a *huge* release, the largest since Windows 95, because with it Microsoft was able to move the ordinary users over to the NT side of things and terminate the 9x/Me product line. This was a very major thing.
The latter is not something Vista will likely be able to rival. However, it may well be more technologically significant than XP, or even than 2000 (as compared to NT 4). There have been rumours of deep under-the-hood changes, kernel rewrites, and such, that could prove very significant.
I'm sure the Enterprise edition will have some kind of volume licensing. The Home Basic and Home Premium editions presumably will not. I don't care to predict whether Business and/or Ultimate editions will.
> Here's hoping to a WinBSD or GNU/Windows or something...
Unlikely. BSD and Gnu are Not Invented Here, and in any case they're even older than NT. I think Microsoft will build something from the ground up.
I'm just hoping they include enough basic facilities that things like CPAN can work on their platform without installing an entire POSIX emulation environment (e.g., Cygwin) just to provide basic OS features that ought to have been included. Wasn't NT supposed to *provide* a POSIX layer? What happened to that? If VMS (which is *way* more dissimilar to Unix than NT is, in terms of underlaying architecture and design paradigm) can provide such features, why can't Microsoft?
That, and the taskbar needs a major overhaul. First, it needs to be split off from explorer.exe into separate a program, so that the taskbar doesn't disappear when the file manager crashes. Second, the new taskbar should hopefully be rather more configurable, e.g., the user should be able to have a task list on one edge of the screen and put other things on another edge. Applets and drawers would also be nice, here. These things could be done for Blackcomb/Vienna, or even in a service pack for Vista. The default, of course, should be a single taskbar locked to the bottom edge of the screen with a start button, a task list, and a system tray, in that order, just like in XP, but the user should be able to change that if desired.
> Has Microsoft EVER released anything that was ON TIME?
Yes. In terms of the NT product line, the most notable time this happened was with Windows NT 4.0, which was released about two years after Windows NT 3.5. Most folks would consider two years to be a reasonable timeframe for a major revision of an operating system, and there were service packs in between.
However, the codebase has rather grown, as have the demands on what needs to be done for each new release, and the total amount of entropy in Microsoft's organization, so you don't expect that kind of timeframe for a release today.
Eventually, Microsoft will have to discard the NT codebase, as they had to do already with Win9x/Me, and as happens eventually to virtually all software. One supposes that they know this and are already and have a small team somewhere secretly working, unbeknownst to most of their own employees much less the public, on a ground-up new OS. However, I don't think we'll hear about it publically until after Blackcomb has been released, and possibly not until after the next release after Blackcomb. Predicting what decade that will be is left as an exercise.
> I predict a 99% chance that illegitimate copies will be widespread before February 2007
I find your ability to see patterns and predict obvious things about the future to be...
lacking. How can there be widespread illegitimate copies if the thing hasn't even been finished yet? I don't give it anywhere near a 99% chance of even being *done* by February 2007.
Last month Vista was ahead of schedule and was definitely going to be ready for the holiday season. Uh-huh. Now it's going to be published in January. Sure, maybe. Or not.
Bear in mind, it was originally supposed to come out circa 2003. It's been pushed back about six or eight times. It can easily get pushed back again, possibly a couple more times. My shot-in-the-dark guess of 2008, which I first made circa 2004, is looking better all the time.
As long as the predicted release date is more than three months away, it's meaningless. You don't figure the thing's actually finally going to be released until they say it's coming out _this_ quarter. As long as they're still saying _next_ quarter or the quarter after, the truth is they don't actually know when it'll be done. When they say, "we need a few more weeks", and they're talking about a few more weeks from _today_, then it means they need a few more weeks. When they say, "we need a few more weeks", and they're talking about a few more weeks from six months from now, they're just stringing people along.
According to the article, it installs, among other fine jewels, Flash (just in case you *like* gratuitous blinky flashy animations), "several file sharing programs" (no doubt along the lines of KaZaA and its ilk, just in case your computer was previously performing too responsively for your tastes), RealPlayer (my vote for Most Heinous User Interface Design Ever, and that's in addition to its undisputed status as nagware of the most persistent kind), and, umm, "more". At the rate the list was going so far as it was stated, I can only assume that "more" is largely composed of utterly superfluous dross.
It does also install a couple of potentially useful things, such as Java. Also, Opera, which comes in handy if you create any web pages and want to test them out in multiple browsers, since Opera uses a different rendering engine than anything else and so is always good to include in such test batteries.
Then there's "an ftp client". I'm quite sure that Ubuntu comes with several of those right out of the box, so maybe they just had to pad the list out a bit. I'd be curious to know which ftp client it installs, and whether it's decently usable.
Eh. All that borderline-malware is a pretty heavy price to pay just to get Java and Opera, when you could just get those things on their own and have done.
The idea of automatically installing a bunch of stuff is a good idea, but I don't much care for their list of stuff.
> As it was, Essah's wives came from Egyptian and Ishmalite descent
Hmmm... I was thinking he married Caananite women. Lesse... [Checks.]
Oh, we're both partly right. He did marry a daughter of Ishmael, but his first wives were Caananite women. See Gen 28.
The Caananites IIRC are another group that no longer exists as a distinct ethnic group, having been mostly wiped out and any remnant assimilated into other peoples.
Well, the word 'Arab' gets used in a lot of ways and has in some ways been rather expanded. A lot of those people did not used to be considered Arabs, but it seems these days the're applying it to anyone who speaks Arabic and adheres to Islam. Whatever. When I think of Arabs I still think of Arabian Bedouins, who are mostly Ishmaelites.
As for Essah, are there actual Edomites left alive on the Earth? The last ones I'm aware of in recorded history are Herod the Tetrarch and his brother, both of whom died in the first century. I thought they were gone or completely assimilated into other peoples.
> Someone sussed out the earth was round a long time before Galileo / Columbus.
Educated people wouldn't have anything to do with funding Columbus because his figures for the circumference of the Earth were far too low to be credible. (The article claims that the circumference was calculated by Muslims, but in fact the ancient Greeks had calculated it a thousand years before Muhammed.) If going round the south of Africa was too far to go to reach India, going clear round the world would be *much* too far.
Occasionally you will hear the idea that everyone except Columbus believed the Earth was flat. This is nonsense. The first sponsors Columbus approached turned him down flat because they did not believe the Earth was small enough to sail around. They were right. Given the navigation technology of the time, the Atlantic was nearly too wide to sail across, unless you took the northern route. If there weren't a bunch of islands south of Florida, the voyage would have ended in failure, because the men would have mutineed before the ship got near the coast of what is now Mexico, and if they hadn't mutineed they'd have died of vitamin deficiencies.
Actually, the article is pretty much just nonsense.
The idea that light enters the eye is right properly ancient, much older than Islam (although whether the invention of the camera is credited correctly I do not know). The article consistently claims anything Persian as Islamic, even in ancient times, which is patent nonsense. Distillation is older than writing, and the idea that a Muslim invented it is just plain surreal. Surgical stitching comes from ancient Egypt and is older than Judaism, to say nothing of Islam. Arabic numerals do indeed come from the Hindu world (although, algebra is I believe correctly attributed), as do decorative gardens and the style of carpets in question (though rugs in general are far too ancient to be claimed as an invention by anyone). The circumference of the Earth was calculated by the ancient Greeks, a thousand years before Muhammed, with accuracy and a reasonable amount of precision.
Also, what kind of invention is the three-course meal? That's just an odd cultural convention; it hardly counts as a meaningful invention.
Muslims have invented many things, but this article is not one of the better ones.
Yes. Jews. Christins, and Muslims agree on the following points: * Ishmael and Isaac were sons of Abraham by different mothers. * Ishmael was older than Isaac. * Ishmael was the ancestor of the Arabs * Isaac was the father of Jacob (i.e., Israel) and Essau (i.e., Edom).
However, if you start talking about details, then the viewpoints diverge somewhat.
> A burning question... does this call into question the carbon dating methods > that "proved" this creature was 11 million years old?
No. There are issues with the radioactive dating, but this isn't one of them.
What this *does* demonstrate is that the absense of any evidence (for instance, no known fossils, or no known living specimens) does *not* mean a creature is extinct; it just means there's no evidence. It is possible to know that a type of creature is *not* extinct, if you find living specimens, but it's generally not possible to know for certain that one *is* extinct, and it's *certainly* not possible to know that a particular thing was extinct X number of years in the past.
In this context the correct spelling is "discontinue". HTH.HAND.
Seriously, I assumed the use of [sic] had more to do with word choice than spelling, considering the article is (ab)using "deprioritise" as a euphemism.
> I wonder if this is due to laziness, maliciousness, or a combination of both?
I think it was false hubris. False laziness is why Vista didn't ship on schedule. False impatience is why it won't have some of the other promised features. Microsoft has corrupted all three of the programmers' virtues.
> > "XP running under VMWare in Linux on an Intel iMac..." > Wow. Are they sure they can't get DOS and OS/2 involved in that process somehow?
Sure, no problem. All you need to make that work is an EFI-emulator written in Java; there's already an x86 emulator written in Java, so then we hook that up together with the EFI emulator and basically what we have then is an Intel-Mac emulator, which runs on the JVM. The JVM is available for OS/2, so we'll have XP running under VMWare in Linux on an emulated Intel iMac running on the JVM under OS/2, running in VirtualPC on OS X, which is running on PearPC under FreeBSD, which is running under bochs on DOS in domain2 on Xen. That'll be much faster and more convenient than dual-booting, since at least three of those emulation layers promise near-native execution speeds.
> Cars were't that much cheaper back then either; maybe 15k for a low end model
You could get a subcompact, such as a Plymouth Horizon, for about six grand. There were even cheaper models than that, but they weren't large enough to seat a family. Of course, you could get a _used_ car for rather less.
However, cars are one of the notable things that has inflated rather more than the average product. Education is another. In some locations real estate has too, but that varies quite a bit from place to place.
Computers, of course, have actively gotten cheaper in absolute pricetag, but a lot of things have inflated their cost by less than average and so come out cheaper in real terms.
This is all neither here nor there. People these days want more than they've got? Well, sure, and there's nothing new about that. Of COURSE they want more than they've got. People have *always* wanted more than they've had, ever since Adam and Eve decided living in a perfect garden wasn't good enough, they also wanted to be like God. You name any time period in history, and any history buff can immediately start rattling off examples of people wanting more than they had. There's even a name for this: it's called the "Fundamental Economic Problem", and it's covered the first day in every introductory economics class.
As far as big budget movies are concerned, yeah, there's a bit of an economic crunch, but the quality of the movies is also a major factor. I mean, come on, the example he gives is King Kong, for crying out loud. Can you say "reruns"? What a thing to blow a big budget on It's not even been ten years yet since the last big-budget remake of King Kong (i.e., Mighty Joe Young), and so instead of maybe being more original, what do they do? They decide to be even _less_ original and go back to the old title. Honestly, what were they thinking? I don't know a single person who is really eager to see a remake of King Kong. What's next year's big-budget blockbuster going to be, the Blob? The Birds? My Mother The Car: The Motion Picture?
Maybe they should learn to save the big budgets for movies with good, original scripts. Maybe they should spend 10% less on computer animation and spend the savings hiring some more talented writers. I mean, if people aren't going to go out to the theater, how are you gonna stop 'em?
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> But please don't use this 60% figure as proof that Vista will suck.
> Because it doesn't necessarily mean that.
No. It does, however, mean a couple of things...
First, the first release will be a bit buggy, until the first service pack comes out. We probably could have predicted this anyway, but with a 60% rewrite it's a given.
Second, it's gonna be late. The summary seems to imply that 60% _remains_ to be rewritten; if that's the case, we can expect it to get pushed back at *least* three more times, probably into 2009 at the earliest. However, if we're talking more about a 60% rewrite as compared to XP, that could be mostly done already, so that 2007 or 2008 would still be possible. This is a point worth clarifying.
> I could be wrong, but his spamming and his current indictment seem unrelated.
They're related in the sense that they are both symptoms of his personal ethical system, which is, apparently, messed up.
Either that or part of the Windows Precipitate.
> By what standard is Windows a mature product compared to any other OS?
It is much more mature than HURD. HTH.HAND.
OS X is a rather special case, for a couple of reasons. First, it's actually older than it appears because Apple didn't start shipping it the instant they thought they could get away with doing so, and when they did start shipping it, it was still not their primary OS product for the first while, so while you think of it as about five years old in terms of its position in the market, it's more like eight or ten years old, in terms of development. Second, a lot of the technology in OS X is much older than the OS per se, so some parts (as it happens, some critical parts) of it are rather more mature than the whole. However, on the _whole_ I think I would have to agree with the other poster that NT is a more mature codebase than OS X, especially if we're talking about desktop-oriented things. By "more mature" here I don't mean "better", but in terms of how far along the cycle it is toward the eventual point where, like Win9x/Me (and the Classic MacOS on the Apple side of things) before, the codebase will need to be retired.
Most of the server-oriented OSes, of course, are clearly more mature than both. VMS epitomizes the sort of maturity I'm talking about, and most of the commercial unices are not far behind.
> As it stands, Windows XP was released 4.5 years ago. In comparison, people constantly
> complained about Debian Woody being ancient, but the lapse between Woody and Sarge
> was almost exactly 3 years.
This is partly related to fundamental differences in the development cycle of the software people run on top of those respective platforms.
If Windows goes six years between releases, and you download (or buy) some new Windows software, it'll run on your six-year-old system. (I'm not saying six years between releases is reasonable; I'm only explaining why it would be much worse for a Linux distro than it is for Windows.) On the other hand, when Debian goes past about two years or so between releases, you get into a situation where if you try to download and install some new software, it requires newer versions of things than are included in your distribution. For instance, if you had heard good things about Inkscape, and wanted to try it out, you'd go and download it and find that it required (as of shortly before Sarge was released) GTK 2.6 or higher, but on Woody you had GTK 1.2 or so. Upgrading GTK to the next minor version, let alone across major versions, is a dependency nightmare only marginally less painful than switching to a different vendor's C library, and involves recompiling everything on your system that depends on GTK (i.e., half the software on the system) as well as everything GTK depends on (i.e., most of the rest of the software on the system), so then you'd look through the "old versions" of Inkscape to see if you could find a version that would compile against GTK 1.x, but you'd be completely out of luck, because Inkscape did not yet *exist* when GTK 2.0 came out. So if you want to run Inkscape on Woody, it's _theoretically_ possible, but in practice, forget it.
So when people complained about Debain going too long between releases, it wasn't just because they wanted a shiny new kernel every couple of years.
It's true that five years is too long to go between major releases for any OS, including Windows, but the comparison with Debian is not entirely fair.
> That's exactly what I'm saying, I've yet to find a link on the net to confirm it, but .NET.
.NET has been very successful
> at developer meetings I've heard verbal confirmation from a developer at Microsoft
> that they are in fact in the process of porting Office to
Even assuming that verbal confirmation is reliable -- which is a mighty big assumption -- being in the _process_ of doing something is a very long way from having done it. Eight years ago 3D Realms was in the _process_ of developing Duke Nukem Forever. Ad interim, Microsoft has been in the _process_ of working on many projects that were later cancelled.
> I think
It has been very successful at becomming a major industry buzzword, certainly.
> The graphic designer is Microsofts Photoshop killer
Yeah. Photoshop is _soooooo_ dead. I bet Adobe is shaking in their boots.
Here's a tip: calling something a Foo killer, when Foo is still the industry leader, is just so much hot air, wild speculation, meaningless.
Whether Vista is a major Windows release, comparable in scope to the changes from Windows 3.x to Windows 95, is impossible to predict at this point. When Vista has been out for a couple of years, then we'll be able to evaluate such claims.
I would not consider XP to be a major release, from a technological standpoint. Setting aside the new visual theme (and OEM deals that forced hardware vendors to write drivers for NT finally), the original release of XP was a very minor improvement over Windows 2000; frankly, the differences between XP as released and XP with SP2 are more important than between Windows 2000 and the initial XP release.
On the other hand, from a non-technological standpoint, XP was a *huge* release, the largest since Windows 95, because with it Microsoft was able to move the ordinary users over to the NT side of things and terminate the 9x/Me product line. This was a very major thing.
The latter is not something Vista will likely be able to rival. However, it may well be more technologically significant than XP, or even than 2000 (as compared to NT 4). There have been rumours of deep under-the-hood changes, kernel rewrites, and such, that could prove very significant.
> Perhaps 2006 is the year that the linux desktop catches and passes MS.
I think that was 2000. Unless you mean market share, in which case, it won't be 2006, either.
I'm sure the Enterprise edition will have some kind of volume licensing. The Home Basic and Home Premium editions presumably will not. I don't care to predict whether Business and/or Ultimate editions will.
Ultimate Edition is the one with everything from both Home Premium and Enterprise, and will no doubt be priced in an excruciating fashion.
> Here's hoping to a WinBSD or GNU/Windows or something...
Unlikely. BSD and Gnu are Not Invented Here, and in any case they're even older than NT. I think Microsoft will build something from the ground up.
I'm just hoping they include enough basic facilities that things like CPAN can work on their platform without installing an entire POSIX emulation environment (e.g., Cygwin) just to provide basic OS features that ought to have been included. Wasn't NT supposed to *provide* a POSIX layer? What happened to that? If VMS (which is *way* more dissimilar to Unix than NT is, in terms of underlaying architecture and design paradigm) can provide such features, why can't Microsoft?
That, and the taskbar needs a major overhaul. First, it needs to be split off from explorer.exe into separate a program, so that the taskbar doesn't disappear when the file manager crashes. Second, the new taskbar should hopefully be rather more configurable, e.g., the user should be able to have a task list on one edge of the screen and put other things on another edge. Applets and drawers would also be nice, here. These things could be done for Blackcomb/Vienna, or even in a service pack for Vista. The default, of course, should be a single taskbar locked to the bottom edge of the screen with a start button, a task list, and a system tray, in that order, just like in XP, but the user should be able to change that if desired.
> Has Microsoft EVER released anything that was ON TIME?
Yes. In terms of the NT product line, the most notable time this happened was with Windows NT 4.0, which was released about two years after Windows NT 3.5. Most folks would consider two years to be a reasonable timeframe for a major revision of an operating system, and there were service packs in between.
However, the codebase has rather grown, as have the demands on what needs to be done for each new release, and the total amount of entropy in Microsoft's organization, so you don't expect that kind of timeframe for a release today.
Eventually, Microsoft will have to discard the NT codebase, as they had to do already with Win9x/Me, and as happens eventually to virtually all software. One supposes that they know this and are already and have a small team somewhere secretly working, unbeknownst to most of their own employees much less the public, on a ground-up new OS. However, I don't think we'll hear about it publically until after Blackcomb has been released, and possibly not until after the next release after Blackcomb. Predicting what decade that will be is left as an exercise.
> I predict a 99% chance that illegitimate copies will be widespread before February 2007
I find your ability to see patterns and predict obvious things about the future to be...
lacking. How can there be widespread illegitimate copies if the thing hasn't even been finished yet? I don't give it anywhere near a 99% chance of even being *done* by February 2007.
Last month Vista was ahead of schedule and was definitely going to be ready for the holiday season. Uh-huh. Now it's going to be published in January. Sure, maybe. Or not.
Bear in mind, it was originally supposed to come out circa 2003. It's been pushed back about six or eight times. It can easily get pushed back again, possibly a couple more times. My shot-in-the-dark guess of 2008, which I first made circa 2004, is looking better all the time.
As long as the predicted release date is more than three months away, it's meaningless. You don't figure the thing's actually finally going to be released until they say it's coming out _this_ quarter. As long as they're still saying _next_ quarter or the quarter after, the truth is they don't actually know when it'll be done. When they say, "we need a few more weeks", and they're talking about a few more weeks from _today_, then it means they need a few more weeks. When they say, "we need a few more weeks", and they're talking about a few more weeks from six months from now, they're just stringing people along.
> You do, of course, have the choice of which of the jewels you would like to install.
Ah. Well, that's good.
According to the article, it installs, among other fine jewels, Flash (just in case you *like* gratuitous blinky flashy animations), "several file sharing programs" (no doubt along the lines of KaZaA and its ilk, just in case your computer was previously performing too responsively for your tastes), RealPlayer (my vote for Most Heinous User Interface Design Ever, and that's in addition to its undisputed status as nagware of the most persistent kind), and, umm, "more". At the rate the list was going so far as it was stated, I can only assume that "more" is largely composed of utterly superfluous dross.
It does also install a couple of potentially useful things, such as Java. Also, Opera, which comes in handy if you create any web pages and want to test them out in multiple browsers, since Opera uses a different rendering engine than anything else and so is always good to include in such test batteries.
Then there's "an ftp client". I'm quite sure that Ubuntu comes with several of those right out of the box, so maybe they just had to pad the list out a bit. I'd be curious to know which ftp client it installs, and whether it's decently usable.
Eh. All that borderline-malware is a pretty heavy price to pay just to get Java and Opera, when you could just get those things on their own and have done.
The idea of automatically installing a bunch of stuff is a good idea, but I don't much care for their list of stuff.
> As it was, Essah's wives came from Egyptian and Ishmalite descent
Hmmm... I was thinking he married Caananite women. Lesse... [Checks.]
Oh, we're both partly right. He did marry a daughter of Ishmael, but his first wives were Caananite women. See Gen 28.
The Caananites IIRC are another group that no longer exists as a distinct ethnic group, having been mostly wiped out and any remnant assimilated into other peoples.
> Arabs are mostly descended from [big long list]
Well, the word 'Arab' gets used in a lot of ways and has in some ways been rather expanded. A lot of those people did not used to be considered Arabs, but it seems these days the're applying it to anyone who speaks Arabic and adheres to Islam. Whatever. When I think of Arabs I still think of Arabian Bedouins, who are mostly Ishmaelites.
As for Essah, are there actual Edomites left alive on the Earth? The last ones I'm aware of in recorded history are Herod the Tetrarch and his brother, both of whom died in the first century. I thought they were gone or completely assimilated into other peoples.
> Someone sussed out the earth was round a long time before Galileo / Columbus.
Educated people wouldn't have anything to do with funding Columbus because his figures for the circumference of the Earth were far too low to be credible. (The article claims that the circumference was calculated by Muslims, but in fact the ancient Greeks had calculated it a thousand years before Muhammed.) If going round the south of Africa was too far to go to reach India, going clear round the world would be *much* too far.
Occasionally you will hear the idea that everyone except Columbus believed the Earth was flat. This is nonsense. The first sponsors Columbus approached turned him down flat because they did not believe the Earth was small enough to sail around. They were right. Given the navigation technology of the time, the Atlantic was nearly too wide to sail across, unless you took the northern route. If there weren't a bunch of islands south of Florida, the voyage would have ended in failure, because the men would have mutineed before the ship got near the coast of what is now Mexico, and if they hadn't mutineed they'd have died of vitamin deficiencies.
Actually, the article is pretty much just nonsense.
The idea that light enters the eye is right properly ancient, much older than Islam (although whether the invention of the camera is credited correctly I do not know). The article consistently claims anything Persian as Islamic, even in ancient times, which is patent nonsense. Distillation is older than writing, and the idea that a Muslim invented it is just plain surreal. Surgical stitching comes from ancient Egypt and is older than Judaism, to say nothing of Islam. Arabic numerals do indeed come from the Hindu world (although, algebra is I believe correctly attributed), as do decorative gardens and the style of carpets in question (though rugs in general are far too ancient to be claimed as an invention by anyone). The circumference of the Earth was calculated by the ancient Greeks, a thousand years before Muhammed, with accuracy and a reasonable amount of precision.
Also, what kind of invention is the three-course meal? That's just an odd cultural convention; it hardly counts as a meaningful invention.
Muslims have invented many things, but this article is not one of the better ones.
Yes. Jews. Christins, and Muslims agree on the following points:
* Ishmael and Isaac were sons of Abraham by different mothers.
* Ishmael was older than Isaac.
* Ishmael was the ancestor of the Arabs
* Isaac was the father of Jacob (i.e., Israel) and Essau (i.e., Edom).
However, if you start talking about details, then the viewpoints diverge somewhat.
> why isn't this thing walking on two legs, wearing glasses and solving quadratic equations ?
Because rodents only do that sort of thing in children's literature and cartoons. HTH.HAND.
> A burning question... does this call into question the carbon dating methods
> that "proved" this creature was 11 million years old?
No. There are issues with the radioactive dating, but this isn't one of them.
What this *does* demonstrate is that the absense of any evidence (for instance, no known fossils, or no known living specimens) does *not* mean a creature is extinct; it just means there's no evidence. It is possible to know that a type of creature is *not* extinct, if you find living specimens, but it's generally not possible to know for certain that one *is* extinct, and it's *certainly* not possible to know that a particular thing was extinct X number of years in the past.
In this context the correct spelling is "discontinue". HTH.HAND.
Seriously, I assumed the use of [sic] had more to do with word choice than spelling, considering the article is (ab)using "deprioritise" as a euphemism.
> I wonder if this is due to laziness, maliciousness, or a combination of both?
I think it was false hubris. False laziness is why Vista didn't ship on schedule. False impatience is why it won't have some of the other promised features. Microsoft has corrupted all three of the programmers' virtues.
> > "XP running under VMWare in Linux on an Intel iMac..."
> Wow. Are they sure they can't get DOS and OS/2 involved in that process somehow?
Sure, no problem. All you need to make that work is an EFI-emulator written in Java; there's already an x86 emulator written in Java, so then we hook that up together with the EFI emulator and basically what we have then is an Intel-Mac emulator, which runs on the JVM. The JVM is available for OS/2, so we'll have XP running under VMWare in Linux on an emulated Intel iMac running on the JVM under OS/2, running in VirtualPC on OS X, which is running on PearPC under FreeBSD, which is running under bochs on DOS in domain2 on Xen. That'll be much faster and more convenient than dual-booting, since at least three of those emulation layers promise near-native execution speeds.
HTH.HAND.
> Cars were't that much cheaper back then either; maybe 15k for a low end model
You could get a subcompact, such as a Plymouth Horizon, for about six grand. There were even cheaper models than that, but they weren't large enough to seat a family. Of course, you could get a _used_ car for rather less.
However, cars are one of the notable things that has inflated rather more than the average product. Education is another. In some locations real estate has too, but that varies quite a bit from place to place.
Computers, of course, have actively gotten cheaper in absolute pricetag, but a lot of things have inflated their cost by less than average and so come out cheaper in real terms.
This is all neither here nor there. People these days want more than they've got? Well, sure, and there's nothing new about that. Of COURSE they want more than they've got. People have *always* wanted more than they've had, ever since Adam and Eve decided living in a perfect garden wasn't good enough, they also wanted to be like God. You name any time period in history, and any history buff can immediately start rattling off examples of people wanting more than they had. There's even a name for this: it's called the "Fundamental Economic Problem", and it's covered the first day in every introductory economics class.
As far as big budget movies are concerned, yeah, there's a bit of an economic crunch, but the quality of the movies is also a major factor. I mean, come on, the example he gives is King Kong, for crying out loud. Can you say "reruns"? What a thing to blow a big budget on It's not even been ten years yet since the last big-budget remake of King Kong (i.e., Mighty Joe Young), and so instead of maybe being more original, what do they do? They decide to be even _less_ original and go back to the old title. Honestly, what were they thinking? I don't know a single person who is really eager to see a remake of King Kong. What's next year's big-budget blockbuster going to be, the Blob? The Birds? My Mother The Car: The Motion Picture?
Maybe they should learn to save the big budgets for movies with good, original scripts. Maybe they should spend 10% less on computer animation and spend the savings hiring some more talented writers. I mean, if people aren't going to go out to the theater, how are you gonna stop 'em?