"If Microsoft did not have Windows the Amiga and Atari ST would have duked it out until one of them won."
Or, given the string of dreadful business decisions both companies made, somebody else with more marketing savvy would have come along and taken the market from them.
"because Amiga and Atari duked it out, Microsoft eventually won."
Microsoft eventually won because they didn't behave in the bone-headed way that Commodore and Atari did.
"Dealers and customers weren't happy with the Amiga because Microsoft made software developers sign an agreement not to develop business software for the Amiga or Atari ST and only for Windows or the Macintosh."
There was still plenty of software for both machines. In many cases it was the same software, especially with business packages, which were easy to port from one machine to the other because they didn't depend on any special hardware or OS features. They were especially well supported in Europe, where both systems enjoyed far more success than they did in the US (Commodore's German and UK operations were still profitable after the parent company went bust).
"Microsoft won because PC clones were cheaper than Amiga and Atari ST systems, mostly because they were sold almost at "cost" with that Microsoft MSN or AOL $500 rebate in agreement with 2+ years of $22/month dial-up Internet access to turn a $800 PC Clone with Windows into a $300 PC Clone with Windows"
1) The Amiga 500 and Atari 520ST were launched in 1985, six years before AOL existed.
2) Microsoft Windows didn't have any notable commercial success until version 3.0, which came out in 1990, and had no real multimedia capabilities until 1991, when 3.0A came out.
So PC clones were not cheaper than either the Amiga 500 or ST for several years, and had no Windowing system to compete with either of them until six years later (anybody who thinks running Windows 1 or 2 or GEM on an 8088 with a CGA could compete with anything hasn't experienced it, and a PC/AT clone with an EGA in it was much more expensive than either system).
"Amiga and Atari did not bundle in an "Internet Rebate" with their computer systems"
The Internet quite simply wasn't a factor in any buying decisions made during the mid to late 1980s, which was the time when Commodore and Atari stood a chance of attaining a dominant market position. Microsoft didn't ship a TCP/IP stack with any Windows prior to Windows/NT, and the first domestic one to have it as part of the installation was Windows-95. There were a variety of commercial add-on systems with their own distinct APIs, but the first one that was accessible to ordinary users (i.e. didn't cost an arm and a leg or ship with a piece of software that cost an arm and a leg) was the shareware Trumpet for Windows 3.X, which appeared in 1994. Commodore was already in serious financial difficulties by this time, and Atari ceased manufacturing all forms of the ST in 1993.
"That's not been my experience, have had a blast in Paris. Just try to speak a little French, it's not that hard."
Ditto for me. My bad attempts at French also revealed that a surprising number of Parisians (a) can speak at least some English, and (b) will actually do so to people who bother to at least attempt to talk to them in their own language. What they don't react well to is English speakers who think that foreigners will magically understand if they manage to shout loudly and slowly enough while stabbing a finger at a map, menu, or item in a shop.
So do I, hence the fact that I know it is indeed in the EULA.
"Microsoft has allowed the installation onto differing hardware on several occasions from this copy."
If you say so. This doesn't however change the fact that the OEM EULA specifically says OEM copies are licensed to a single machine (MS say this is actually a motherboard, despite the fact that changing other components can require re-validating the installation) which is the first one they're installed on. It also says they're non-transferable, which means they have to be removed if the machine is sold or given away, and may not be installed on any computer other than the one they came with. MS tightened the license up even further in 2006 by stipulating to OEMs that all copies must be now pre-installed and come with restore media / partitions rather than being supplied on full installation media.
NB: Microsoft have sued companies for selling (or giving away) second-hand PCs that came with OEM copies of Windows installed on them.
"Furthermore, when I bought it, neither MS nor the store I got the OEM copy from had ANY idea what my initial hardware ever would be."
1) OEM copies are specifically prohibited from being sold without hardware (although the fact that they didn't specify what they meant by "hardware" meant that dealers often sold them along with a cable, memory stick, etc). The wording changed in 2006, so it now says they can't be sold without a qualifying computer.
2) MS know what hardware is being used the moment you validate, because the process sends identifying information to them, hence the fact that changing certain pieces of hardware in the same machine re-triggers validation.
Note that I'm not saying this is the way things should be, or that people who can get away with it should refrain from installing OEM stuff on other gear because of a clause in a EULA.
"Nowadays, fundamental research in physics is big money, while in the past, it's not quite so expensive.
Maybe, fundamental research should be taken in some other area other than physics. Maybe some area where it's less expensive."
All research (fundamental or otherwise) increases in cost, because the easy (i.e. cheap) problems get solved first, so the unsolved ones become progressively more difficult, and therefore expensive, as time passes.
"Take the space race for example. Certainly the progress made in the 1960s was incredible, and I doubt any private sector effort can match. But what have we done since then? How many of us remember a man walking on the moon?"
You're overlooking the fact that research for "the space race" and other NASA (i.e. government funded) projects were directly responsible for many, many technologies that have directly benefited thousands of companies and hundreds of millions of consumers. I suggest you check up on all of the many things you and all Westerners take for granted that would either not exist at all or be significantly more primitive and expensive without NASA having the need to solve completely new problems, and being given the funds to do it.
The ROI of NASA has been enormous, as has its impact on the modern world, which would be a very different one indeed if everyone had waited for the private sector to come up with many of the NASA-derived technologies that are now an integral part of our lives.
"If you hear of a government which still believes that basic research is important, I'd like to know too."
The current British government says it's so incredibly important that they're going to ensure Britain becomes a "research powerhouse". Their plan for this amazing transformation goes thus:
1. Say you're going to ensure that Britain becomes a research powerhouse.
2. Spend lots of government money on products and services from foreign companies who don't do any research in Britain.
3. Help big British companies buy goods and services from foreign companies who do no research in Britain.
4. Cut back on all government funding for British research whenever possible.
"Round about that time I started marveling at how cool UNIX (and BSD and SunOS) were getting, right around the time they got squashed by the Microsoft marketing machine."
What actually squashed them was high prices and a lack of compatibility between UNIX implementations from different vendors.
"Women are the biggest show-offs of all; hair, makeup, clothes, shoes, purses, etc."
Female competition is however different from the sort young males engage in, hence the fact that grinding and spending real money on virtual weapons is something women don't go in for (although there are of course exceptions).
"And women are frequently the most vocal "motivators" in top-level guilds."
That's because, like women throughout history, they know that it's far easier to let some bunch of testosterone-soaked males do all the work for them.
"My guess is that the RPG has experienced a surge in popularity thanks to WoW making it "ok" for non-geeks to play, and some of the other developers were in the right place at the right time to capitalize on the new celebrity status of RPGs"
The games I'm talking about appeared years before WOW existed.
"Despite their stereotype, Germans tend to be nearly as sloppy about spelling as the rest of the world."
And they're just as likely to get into debates about those spellings as the rest of the world. There are for example plenty of Germans who think that the spelling reforms of the early 20th century shouldn't be applied to place names that already existed for historic reasons, while lots of others say that consistency is more important than retaining archaic spellings for what amount to little more than emotional reasons.
"My impression is that they mostly consider it a somewhat silly discussion, sorta like how most astronomers view the "raging debate" over whether Pluto is a planet. Several admit to mixing the two spellings intentionally, just to keep the pot stirred."
Germans who live around the Neander Valley nowadays (Neandertals) don't consider it to be a silly debate, especially given the negative connotations about Neanderthals that have persisted in popular culture since the discovery of Neanderthal-1.
"They do mostly seem to understand that the taxonomic name has the obsolete 'h', while the German place name doesn't."
Peking isn't called that anymore either, so by that yardstick we should rename Peking Man to "Beijing Man", or insist that they're both equally valid names which can be used interchangeably.
"The main comments can probably be summarized as "Yeah, so?" I like to omit the 'h', on the grounds that it saves typing time and bandwidth."
The same can be said for omitting the 'h" from the taxonomic name, yet nobody seems to do this.
"But it's always fun to have pseudo-debates on such inconsequentiae on forums like/."
Agreed, although that was probably obvious from the fact that I'm continuing with it.
"MS's spell checker is hardly an authority for either scientific or German spelling"
I didn't say it was. My point was about your discovery of the fact that Firefox's spelling checker didn't know the word, whereas those from Apple, MS, and the one supplied with Open Office do.
"Germans often like to use what are now deprecated spellings like "Thal", much like we do in English with words like "ye olde" instead of "the old""
"Ye" as in "Ye olde" isn't a deprecated spelling of anything, but a misrepresentation of an artefact of early printing, which substituted a lower-case "y" (but _never_ an upper-case Y!) for the letter thorn, a part of the English alphabet of the time (along with other runic symbols such as the wen), but not the character sets that were available to printers, which were primarily intended for printing Latin texts.
"Some writers like to omit the 'h' in English text to encourage the correct pronunciation, since to German-speaking ears (;-) the English "th" sounds distinctly odd. ("Why do Americans lisp like that?")"
I've never heard anyone working in archaeology, palaeontology, or palaeoanthropology pronounce it with a lisp, and IMO they're the relevant ones, not others who are prone to mispronounce all sorts of things (read "nuclear" as "nukular" for example).
"if you're writing about the valley where the first skeleton was found, the correct spelling is "Neantertal""
It's actually "Neander Tal". Both the valley and the small river which runs through it get their names from Joachim Neander, a 17th century theologian and poet who spent a lot of time in the valley and its caves. Interestingly, the name "Neander" isn't actually German; it's a Greek translation of the real family name of Neumann (using foreign translations of family names was a popular affectation at the time).
"This may be partly because archaeologists and paleoanthropologists tend to be familiar with the German language"
I very much doubt that this is the case with anything beyond a very tiny minority of them. IMO a more significant factor is likely to be the fact that Americans tend to favour slightly more phonetic spellings of words, whereas the UK and some other native English speaking countries use "British" forms which often contain more silent letters and diphthongs, hence the fact that most decent electronic dictionaries for spelling checkers distinguish between UK English and US English (and some also have other variants of English too).
"Where is NewYorkCountryLawyer when you need him?"
Probably throwing up in a bucket because of stench from all the BS here on Slashdot from people who claim that anti-trust laws apply to Apple because they're the only company who makes Apple products.
"Its about time someone counter-sued Apple for this monopolistic behavior."
Monopolistic behaviour isn't illegal unless one happens to be a monopoly.
"When Microsoft does it, everyone jumps up their seat"
Because Microsoft has been adjudged to be a monopoly by at least three different legal entities (the US, the EU, and S. Korea), whereas Apple with their 4% or so of the world PC market are obviously not a monopoly. Monopolies are bound by laws that don't apply to other companies.
"Microsoft did the same thing to Apple, Amiga, Atari, Be Inc., and even NeXT."
Microsoft didn't do anything to Amiga (Commodore) or Atari, both of whom would have destroyed themselves through bone-headed management decisions if the IBM PC and MS-DOS had not existed.
The OEM version definitely is tied to the hardware it comes with. Check the EULA -- it's there in black and white.
"Your license is limited in how many systems it can be on at the same time, but from my experience you are not restricted to stick with the original hardware you installed it on."
You can do this with full retail versions of Windows, but not OEM ones. Upgrade versions use the same license as the original install, i.e. an upgraded OEM version is still and OEM version which is tied to the hardware, and an upgraded retail version continues to be a retail version that's licensed to a person rather than a machine.
"As for Portuguese and Romanian people, I don't know if the study included them. Their physical appearance could just be a case of parallel evolution such as the similar appearance of sharks and dolphins."
The mixed-trait skeletons found were tens of thousands of years old, and the fact that they were found in those two countries doesn't mean that they didn't exist elsewhere (early human remains are extremely rare, so absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence). Current populations of Portugal and Romania are modern humans both genetically and morphologically.
Slashdot Mirror
"HP doesn't compete so well in the low end market"
This makes one wonder how HP manage to ship more PCs and laptops than anyone else in the world.
"Patents on what? Apple hasn't invented anything substantial."
US patents are granted for all sorts of things that the holders didn't invent.
"Multitouch and all that comes from others."
So do all those thousands of "use the Internet to do something that's been a common practice for centuries" patents.
"Linux cut Windows off at many top end server spheres"
What it actually cut off was commercial closed source server-side UNIX, which is now all but extinct.
"If Microsoft did not have Windows the Amiga and Atari ST would have duked it out until one of them won."
Or, given the string of dreadful business decisions both companies made, somebody else with more marketing savvy would have come along and taken the market from them.
"because Amiga and Atari duked it out, Microsoft eventually won."
Microsoft eventually won because they didn't behave in the bone-headed way that Commodore and Atari did.
"Dealers and customers weren't happy with the Amiga because Microsoft made software developers sign an agreement not to develop business software for the Amiga or Atari ST and only for Windows or the Macintosh."
There was still plenty of software for both machines. In many cases it was the same software, especially with business packages, which were easy to port from one machine to the other because they didn't depend on any special hardware or OS features. They were especially well supported in Europe, where both systems enjoyed far more success than they did in the US (Commodore's German and UK operations were still profitable after the parent company went bust).
"Microsoft won because PC clones were cheaper than Amiga and Atari ST systems, mostly because they were sold almost at "cost" with that Microsoft MSN or AOL $500 rebate in agreement with 2+ years of $22/month dial-up Internet access to turn a $800 PC Clone with Windows into a $300 PC Clone with Windows"
1) The Amiga 500 and Atari 520ST were launched in 1985, six years before AOL existed.
2) Microsoft Windows didn't have any notable commercial success until version 3.0, which came out in 1990, and had no real multimedia capabilities until 1991, when 3.0A came out.
So PC clones were not cheaper than either the Amiga 500 or ST for several years, and had no Windowing system to compete with either of them until six years later (anybody who thinks running Windows 1 or 2 or GEM on an 8088 with a CGA could compete with anything hasn't experienced it, and a PC/AT clone with an EGA in it was much more expensive than either system).
"Amiga and Atari did not bundle in an "Internet Rebate" with their computer systems"
The Internet quite simply wasn't a factor in any buying decisions made during the mid to late 1980s, which was the time when Commodore and Atari stood a chance of attaining a dominant market position. Microsoft didn't ship a TCP/IP stack with any Windows prior to Windows/NT, and the first domestic one to have it as part of the installation was Windows-95. There were a variety of commercial add-on systems with their own distinct APIs, but the first one that was accessible to ordinary users (i.e. didn't cost an arm and a leg or ship with a piece of software that cost an arm and a leg) was the shareware Trumpet for Windows 3.X, which appeared in 1994. Commodore was already in serious financial difficulties by this time, and Atari ceased manufacturing all forms of the ST in 1993.
"That's not been my experience, have had a blast in Paris. Just try to speak a little French, it's not that hard."
Ditto for me. My bad attempts at French also revealed that a surprising number of Parisians (a) can speak at least some English, and (b) will actually do so to people who bother to at least attempt to talk to them in their own language. What they don't react well to is English speakers who think that foreigners will magically understand if they manage to shout loudly and slowly enough while stabbing a finger at a map, menu, or item in a shop.
"Interesting point, but I think morph contributes quite a bit to science as well as engineers."
I would answer your point if I knew what definition of "morph" you are referring to.
"Though widely regarded as the most pure of the sciences (except mathematics, of course), not everyone is a physicist."
I completely agree, although the fact that I didn't mention physicists anywhere in my post means that I fail to see what point you're answering.
"Not true. I actually own an OEM copy of XP Pro."
So do I, hence the fact that I know it is indeed in the EULA.
"Microsoft has allowed the installation onto differing hardware on several occasions from this copy."
If you say so. This doesn't however change the fact that the OEM EULA specifically says OEM copies are licensed to a single machine (MS say this is actually a motherboard, despite the fact that changing other components can require re-validating the installation) which is the first one they're installed on. It also says they're non-transferable, which means they have to be removed if the machine is sold or given away, and may not be installed on any computer other than the one they came with. MS tightened the license up even further in 2006 by stipulating to OEMs that all copies must be now pre-installed and come with restore media / partitions rather than being supplied on full installation media.
NB: Microsoft have sued companies for selling (or giving away) second-hand PCs that came with OEM copies of Windows installed on them.
"Furthermore, when I bought it, neither MS nor the store I got the OEM copy from had ANY idea what my initial hardware ever would be."
1) OEM copies are specifically prohibited from being sold without hardware (although the fact that they didn't specify what they meant by "hardware" meant that dealers often sold them along with a cable, memory stick, etc). The wording changed in 2006, so it now says they can't be sold without a qualifying computer.
2) MS know what hardware is being used the moment you validate, because the process sends identifying information to them, hence the fact that changing certain pieces of hardware in the same machine re-triggers validation.
Note that I'm not saying this is the way things should be, or that people who can get away with it should refrain from installing OEM stuff on other gear because of a clause in a EULA.
"Nowadays, fundamental research in physics is big money, while in the past, it's not quite so expensive.
Maybe, fundamental research should be taken in some other area other than physics. Maybe some area where it's less expensive."
All research (fundamental or otherwise) increases in cost, because the easy (i.e. cheap) problems get solved first, so the unsolved ones become progressively more difficult, and therefore expensive, as time passes.
"Take the space race for example. Certainly the progress made in the 1960s was incredible, and I doubt any private sector effort can match. But what have we done since then? How many of us remember a man walking on the moon?"
You're overlooking the fact that research for "the space race" and other NASA (i.e. government funded) projects were directly responsible for many, many technologies that have directly benefited thousands of companies and hundreds of millions of consumers. I suggest you check up on all of the many things you and all Westerners take for granted that would either not exist at all or be significantly more primitive and expensive without NASA having the need to solve completely new problems, and being given the funds to do it.
The ROI of NASA has been enormous, as has its impact on the modern world, which would be a very different one indeed if everyone had waited for the private sector to come up with many of the NASA-derived technologies that are now an integral part of our lives.
"If you hear of a government which still believes that basic research is important, I'd like to know too."
The current British government says it's so incredibly important that they're going to ensure Britain becomes a "research powerhouse". Their plan for this amazing transformation goes thus:
1. Say you're going to ensure that Britain becomes a research powerhouse.
2. Spend lots of government money on products and services from foreign companies who don't do any research in Britain.
3. Help big British companies buy goods and services from foreign companies who do no research in Britain.
4. Cut back on all government funding for British research whenever possible.
5. Goto 1.
"Even at NASA, the aspects fundamental research and engineering have slowly decayed (or so it seems)."
That's because NASA's budget has also slowly decayed.
That's just another way of saying this will be good for engineers and bad for scientists.
"Round about that time I started marveling at how cool UNIX (and BSD and SunOS) were getting, right around the time they got squashed by the Microsoft marketing machine."
What actually squashed them was high prices and a lack of compatibility between UNIX implementations from different vendors.
"Women are the biggest show-offs of all; hair, makeup, clothes, shoes, purses, etc."
Female competition is however different from the sort young males engage in, hence the fact that grinding and spending real money on virtual weapons is something women don't go in for (although there are of course exceptions).
"And women are frequently the most vocal "motivators" in top-level guilds."
That's because, like women throughout history, they know that it's far easier to let some bunch of testosterone-soaked males do all the work for them.
"My guess is that the RPG has experienced a surge in popularity thanks to WoW making it "ok" for non-geeks to play, and some of the other developers were in the right place at the right time to capitalize on the new celebrity status of RPGs"
The games I'm talking about appeared years before WOW existed.
"Despite their stereotype, Germans tend to be nearly as sloppy about spelling as the rest of the world."
And they're just as likely to get into debates about those spellings as the rest of the world. There are for example plenty of Germans who think that the spelling reforms of the early 20th century shouldn't be applied to place names that already existed for historic reasons, while lots of others say that consistency is more important than retaining archaic spellings for what amount to little more than emotional reasons.
"My impression is that they mostly consider it a somewhat silly discussion, sorta like how most astronomers view the "raging debate" over whether Pluto is a planet. Several admit to mixing the two spellings intentionally, just to keep the pot stirred."
Germans who live around the Neander Valley nowadays (Neandertals) don't consider it to be a silly debate, especially given the negative connotations about Neanderthals that have persisted in popular culture since the discovery of Neanderthal-1.
"They do mostly seem to understand that the taxonomic name has the obsolete 'h', while the German place name doesn't."
Peking isn't called that anymore either, so by that yardstick we should rename Peking Man to "Beijing Man", or insist that they're both equally valid names which can be used interchangeably.
"The main comments can probably be summarized as "Yeah, so?" I like to omit the 'h', on the grounds that it saves typing time and bandwidth."
The same can be said for omitting the 'h" from the taxonomic name, yet nobody seems to do this.
"But it's always fun to have pseudo-debates on such inconsequentiae on forums like /."
Agreed, although that was probably obvious from the fact that I'm continuing with it.
"People often speak in awe of how the 512K Amiga did multitasking on its tiny memory budget"
The original Amiga (the 1000) shipped with 256K.
"MS's spell checker is hardly an authority for either scientific or German spelling"
I didn't say it was. My point was about your discovery of the fact that Firefox's spelling checker didn't know the word, whereas those from Apple, MS, and the one supplied with Open Office do.
"Germans often like to use what are now deprecated spellings like "Thal", much like we do in English with words like "ye olde" instead of "the old""
"Ye" as in "Ye olde" isn't a deprecated spelling of anything, but a misrepresentation of an artefact of early printing, which substituted a lower-case "y" (but _never_ an upper-case Y!) for the letter thorn, a part of the English alphabet of the time (along with other runic symbols such as the wen), but not the character sets that were available to printers, which were primarily intended for printing Latin texts.
"Some writers like to omit the 'h' in English text to encourage the correct pronunciation, since to German-speaking ears (;-) the English "th" sounds distinctly odd. ("Why do Americans lisp like that?")"
I've never heard anyone working in archaeology, palaeontology, or palaeoanthropology pronounce it with a lisp, and IMO they're the relevant ones, not others who are prone to mispronounce all sorts of things (read "nuclear" as "nukular" for example).
"if you're writing about the valley where the first skeleton was found, the correct spelling is "Neantertal""
It's actually "Neander Tal". Both the valley and the small river which runs through it get their names from Joachim Neander, a 17th century theologian and poet who spent a lot of time in the valley and its caves. Interestingly, the name "Neander" isn't actually German; it's a Greek translation of the real family name of Neumann (using foreign translations of family names was a popular affectation at the time).
"This may be partly because archaeologists and paleoanthropologists tend to be familiar with the German language"
I very much doubt that this is the case with anything beyond a very tiny minority of them. IMO a more significant factor is likely to be the fact that Americans tend to favour slightly more phonetic spellings of words, whereas the UK and some other native English speaking countries use "British" forms which often contain more silent letters and diphthongs, hence the fact that most decent electronic dictionaries for spelling checkers distinguish between UK English and US English (and some also have other variants of English too).
"Where is NewYorkCountryLawyer when you need him?"
Probably throwing up in a bucket because of stench from all the BS here on Slashdot from people who claim that anti-trust laws apply to Apple because they're the only company who makes Apple products.
"For those who don't know Teddy Roosevelt was one of the last few true Conservative Republicans before the fake Conservatives the Neocons took over"
He was also a racist.
"Its about time someone counter-sued Apple for this monopolistic behavior."
Monopolistic behaviour isn't illegal unless one happens to be a monopoly.
"When Microsoft does it, everyone jumps up their seat"
Because Microsoft has been adjudged to be a monopoly by at least three different legal entities (the US, the EU, and S. Korea), whereas Apple with their 4% or so of the world PC market are obviously not a monopoly. Monopolies are bound by laws that don't apply to other companies.
"You don't need a monopoly to engage in anti-competitive behaviour."
You do however need a monopoly for it to be illegal.
"Though IANAL, I think that the fact that the default OS X system checks to see if it is a Mac or not violates principles of anti-trust laws"
Anti-trust laws only apply to monopolies and cartels. Companies that are neither cannot by definition violate them.
"Now it is an x86 binary and the fact that it checks if it is a Mac or not could be taken as an anti-trust thing."
It could be taken as such by Slashdotters, but not the courts, because they know that anti-trust laws only apply to monopolies and cartels.
"Microsoft did the same thing to Apple, Amiga, Atari, Be Inc., and even NeXT."
Microsoft didn't do anything to Amiga (Commodore) or Atari, both of whom would have destroyed themselves through bone-headed management decisions if the IBM PC and MS-DOS had not existed.
"MS windows is not bound to specific hardware."
The OEM version definitely is tied to the hardware it comes with. Check the EULA -- it's there in black and white.
"Your license is limited in how many systems it can be on at the same time, but from my experience you are not restricted to stick with the original hardware you installed it on."
You can do this with full retail versions of Windows, but not OEM ones. Upgrade versions use the same license as the original install, i.e. an upgraded OEM version is still and OEM version which is tied to the hardware, and an upgraded retail version continues to be a retail version that's licensed to a person rather than a machine.
"As for Portuguese and Romanian people, I don't know if the study included them. Their physical appearance could just be a case of parallel evolution such as the similar appearance of sharks and dolphins."
The mixed-trait skeletons found were tens of thousands of years old, and the fact that they were found in those two countries doesn't mean that they didn't exist elsewhere (early human remains are extremely rare, so absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence). Current populations of Portugal and Romania are modern humans both genetically and morphologically.