I never found them complicated (besides trying to set up my webmaster account from Affinity).

grrr. read the sentence again please.

Tell me why an OS should have an email client bundled with it? Extraneous FEATURES make computers buggy.

Lets put it this way, making a cup of coffee isn't complex, (this is a semi-long route, but meh). You grab your beans from the freezer, dump it into a grinder, then dump the stuff into the machine, and there you go. Windows is sort of like a freezer/coffee grinder/coffee machine all at the same time, when all you really needed was a freezer. The more you add on, the more likely it is something won't work right, and since everything is interconnected, you might be in trouble. (And this is WINDOWS we're talking about, the freezer probably includes a small oven, microwave set and a small pool, because SOMETIMES they're helpful to have in addition to a freezer.)

Some of you may be interested in this. Get it while it's hot. The last three IE screenshots (the ones showing features) all have something in common. They were all originally mozilla.org (and to some extent Opera) ideas. I personally dislike the new IE UI, but I get the feeling it's going to be (in general) nice for a change. As long as Microsoft standardizes XAML (an XML UI language idea stolen from mozilla.org's XUL language which is more advanced than XUL and will be more successful because it's introduced by Microsoft), I'll be more than optimistic. The only thing is, people are goijng to start having to redesign sites, maybe even predominantly in this language. Not cool for those of us who are XHTMLing new pages right now.

Man, I dunno if it's just me, but I think Windows is trying to look more like *nux. It's like they can't make their own stuff anymore.

I personally wouldn't want XAMP to succeed.

As a general rule, I really don't want single companies being in control of things like that. I wish XUL caught on, and more people knew about it.

Anyway, I sincerely doubt that MS will standardize XAML or play nice in any way. I forsee a horrible horrible world where MS makes a private sandbox in the internet, where those with windows can play, and the rest of the world is shut out. Its a smart thing to do financially, but bad for the 'rest of us'. :-/ If it happens, I'm going to keep my laptop running w98 and switch everything over to some horribly obscure *nix distro and become a hermit. :D

Some of us Mac users out there would argue that Microsoft hasn't made its own stuff in a long long time - oh wait, even DOS wasn't made by Microsoft, Bill Gates bought it on the cheap.

Well, Bill & whoever made Apple (I forgot his name) did make the first computer as far as I know....but that was back in the 80's or somethin' like that.

But yea, you are right. I got a big book about the history of Windows......but it's also about repairing pc's.

Steve Jobs and the Woz (Steve Wozniak...I think he was an original founder) founded Apple Computers, but they had nothing to do with the first computer...which was the HVAC way back in the 50's (maybe 40's).

If you're thinking about the first "personal" microcomputer, they still had nothing to do with it.

What Apple did do first is the GUI...which Microsoft so dilligently jacked for Windows ;) It's not a copy of the MacOS GUI, but the concept is still there.

Did you ever end up reading it? :P Having and reading are two very different things.

There are some people from Xerox PARC who would disagree that Apple made the first GUI.

Heh. I read upto the part about the Windows stuff I just said. It didn't get to interesting after that.

Well old Billie in order for him to be able use the code he copied from a basically open-source environment had to make MS-DOS in order to get around the legal disputes. Also if you look at the original Lotus 123 then you will notice, "hey that looks a lot like microsoft word/office/etc. "It's actually the other way around since microsoft basically copied the Lotus program and changed it into Microsoft word. There are some other basic word processing programs and spreadsheet programs that Gates and MS copied but changed the code around in order to make it look like he legitimately came up with the program.

Its... iunno. Its really hard to say a program COPIED another... For instance, wordpad and notepad both have editing windows. The UI is roughly the same, but I wouldn't say one copied the other. I don't really expect a program to really be able to represent a sheet of paper in any groundbreaking ways. White slab with text on it is as intuitive as it gets... :-/

but WordPad is rich-text, whereas Notepad is plain text ;)

Try to add colors or different fonts in Notepad...you can't.

That's the beauty of xEdi--I mean Wordpad. :p

Actually that depends on what you call a GUI. There was a person who worked for the navy who invented the mouse, and created primitive types of GUIs on Unix computers. There was a whole article on him on ZDnet this year.

If you took a look at a screenshot of that Xerox machine, it looks nothing like the first Macintosh.