Well, that's appropriate because Windows 8, with its limited palette and ugly "Flat" UI looks like Windows 2.

NT 3.51 was one of the most stable OSes I've ever used, if not the most stable. NT 4 was still pretty good, minus the even number service packs. Windows 2000 was excellent, minus Explorer, which for me usually crashed within an hour of a fresh install. I always liked XP once you turned on the Playskool theme. Nothing since XP has impressed me. Just more bloat, and more effort to get it to look and act like it used to.

Ten will have a start button. How will it be different from Vista or XP?

It will be uglier, for one thing. You can count on that.

... but the machine used to create the version number was running on a Pentium.

Actually, the web has always worked a lot better if you consciously avoid sites created by "designers"

So, no Slashdot Beta then...

> I really hope it's real 3D this time, not just some stereoscopic trickery where you need special glasses to eat your hamburger.

Yeah, I hate when it's just pink slime on one side of the burger and blue slime on the other.

And don't forget the Christians, who were able to live under Saddam's regime. This is no longer possible and Christians throughout the Middle East are being driven out and/or killed. This alone doesn't mean we should have left Saddam in place, but it certainly is one of the things that needed to be weighed against the benefits of removing him.

>> The classic example is the broken window fallacy...

Hey, if it works in Ankh-Morpork it should work in the real world, right?

>> Remember, you are a citizen of your state first and a THEN a citizen of the United States.

This is how it was supposed to work. And it's the only way it can work well.

It also occurred to me that excess centralization of power is likely to be the driving force behind all the secessionist movements, such as what we saw with Scotland last week. If government were kept as local as possible, these kinds of problems wouldn't happen... or would be much less likely to happen. This is what the Founding Fathers envisioned: Several sovereign states joining together only for those things (and they were very few, although very important) were there is strength in unity. Otherwise, they were supposed to mind their own business, ensuring the success of a republic made up of very diverse populaces. However, this is no longer possible.

Windows 8 is almost literally like going back to the 1980s. And the default wallpapers are all vomit-inducingly ugly. I agree that every UI designer at Microsoft should be fired and go spend their time making hideous public sculptures in major metropolitan cities that I don't live in like all their po-mo art school friends.

I'm amazed that Windows 8 is so advanced it's incapable of the "classic" Windows 2000 look that every other Microsoft OS in the last 15 years could do. And from a usability point of view, I could write a book on why Flat UI sucks. As far as I'm concerned the last version of Windows that wasn't eye-gougingly ugly by default was 2000. Actually, Windows 7 wasn't all that bad, but I still strongly prefer the "classic" look. But of course, Microsoft is so hypnotized by this whole "Flat UI" nonsense that they won't let me have it any more. Or they are so incompetent their state-of-the-art software can't display a 15-year-old UI scheme. Either way, stupidity or malice, it's really pathetic.

Flip a couple bits in the registry, make a SKU and charge and extra $100. They've been doing that for 20 years.

And the only pro feature I wanted (the Unix prompt)

What are talking about, Powershell? You can install that on any version of Windows. If you are talking about an honest-to-goodness Unix prompt then install cygwin or something that gives you bash or some other Unix-style shell.

Or is there something else I'm not aware of?

Mr Ellison is the head of a software company called Oracle.
If your computer is a car, then software is the fuel that runs it.
Hope this helps.

If your computer is a car, then Oracle software is the crank in the front that you use to start it up.

You're not the only one who had that thought.