Iain Stuart Murray: Hopefully America 3.0 won’t have to be patched continually like version 2. And it should outperform Europe 5.7.1.2 and probably UKX.

James C. Bennett: Well, America 1.0 was based on a cleaned-up version of England 5.0, the highly successful 1688 release. 3.0 throws out the patches created for 2.0 that had gotten cumbersome and tries to play on the strengths of the original design. Since the original code was English, some of the design could well prove useful for a new UK release.

Iain Stuart Murray: let’s see – England 5.0 was replaced by UKI in 1707, thanks to a merger with another operating system. This proved so successful that it kept adding new features, although it lost some really attractive ones in 1776 when America 1.0 was spun off. UKII in 1801 might be thought of as the first in a series of bloatware expansions. UKIII was in 1858, and UKIV in 1877 following the complete acquisition of Indian call centers that had been outsourced. There were a series of updates between 1906 and 1914, and then several features were spun off until the completely radical revision of UKVII in 1948. That looked shiny when first released, but soon became the slowest system on the market, leading to the equally radical UKVIII in 1979. UKIX (1997) was based on UKVIII but required more and more admin permissions as time went on. There is hope that UKX (2010) will make it cleaner, but there’s been little evidence of that so far.

James C. Bennett: Unfortunately, the development partnership for UK X, formed at the last minute by adverse market circumstances, has resulted in the partner’s insistence on incorporating large chunks of code from Bonaparte V, which runs on an entirely different operating system. Since Bonaparte V itself is already displaying severe problems, this was a particularly problematic choice.

Heh.

History, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Long View

November 29, 2011 Rand Simberg 3 Comments

Putting current events into perspective:

Long after the time in which anyone can easily recall who was US president in 2011, or what party was in power, or which wars of declining empire were fought, and then long after anyone even cares about that ancient history, and later, long after the whole downward slope of the history of the US is but a footnote of interest to scholars of the transition from second to third millennium, and later still, long after anyone can even find out with any great reliability who was US president in 2011 … long after all these things are forgotten, the first half of the 21st century will still be clearly recalled as the dawn of the era in which aging was conquered.

It will also be remembered as the era in which we finally opened up the rest of the solar system to human endeavors after the false start of the mid-twentieth century.

Political Commentary, War Commentary