A grain in a bowl of rice

My oppinion on Windows Vista surely is one out of many, but it’s interesting to see it’s being largely reflected. Today I caught up on my Wired reading and found a couple interesting articles on Vista:

Few rush out to buy Windows Vista which confirms my theory that the excitement is definitely missing. If it were not for its domination of the market, Vista would probably go hardly noticed.

The most worthy product upgrade is the new Office’s graphical user interface (GUI). However, to run the new Office, you don’t need Vista and can stick with your XP.

Last but not least, Mac geeks seem to enjoy Vista the most. Using Vista as a gaming rig and OS X for everything else, why not? However, if that’s your goal, I suggest you buy a Mac and a Playstation or a Wii.

Windows Vista hits the shelves

So the dream of every Windows geek has come true: the new Windows Vista finally arrived yesterday. One thing is for sure: Microsoft will sell millions of licenses because it’s such a heavy weight in the market. However, I see one important ingredient missing: excitement.

Back in the days when we upgraded from Windows 98 to Windows XP, there was a simple reason to upgrade: system stability. Microsoft never admitted it, but Win 98 crashed a lot. Win XP finally had the stability of the NT/2000 line together with the gaming suppport known from Win 98. There was a simple reason to upgrade and pretty much every user instantly understood the reason why.

Win XP could have been a good product if the spread of broadband access and the by default offline firewall (before service pack 2) hadn’t made it vulnerable to worms. Microsoft had to catch up on security while other players in the field (Linux, OS X) were upgrading their user interfaces at a higher speed than Microsoft was able to keep up with.

So now we have the Vista long waited for. The problem is, unlike Windows XP nobody among the people I know has been waiting for it. There is no obvious reason why they should upgrade, the most obvious probably being the new Aero surface. However, I still wonder how many users are going to buy the Home Basic edition and end up disappointed when the cool Aero surface is missing.

This morning I browsed the electronics ads while eating breakfast. Interdiscount featured an entire page on a computer coming with Windows Vista, but several pages up front another page was dedicated to the iPod and all its accessories. Steg pretty much dedicated its entire catalogue to Windows Vista, but half a page was used to explain the differences between the various and confusing editions and pricing.

So what got released yesterday? A confusing product that lacks a killer application. It definitely is going to shape the computing experience of millions of home and business users, but they are not going to be enthusiastic about it. Microsoft has caught up, but once more is far from having the lead in innovation. In the meantime I will be waiting with arms wide open for all the used computers that still make a great Linux rig but are useless with Vista.

fous ta cagoule!

Is American HipHop entertaining? It used to be. However, for a long time already we’ve grown sick of newly rich men showing off their cars and blingbling along with starved wannabe models on MTV. After a short while it gets so boring you don’t even have the power left to yawn.

Luckily there’s also HipHop in other langauges than English. And a couple bored firefighters at Geneva airport used the idle time during the holiday season to create a truly special video clip. The government of Geneva was not amused, but after they got featured in the news last night this is going to be big:

(this is the original music video by Fatal Bazooka)

Why religious affiliations hardly count as a reliable classification of conflicts

From today’s New York Times

CAIRO, Jan. 16 — The botched hanging of Saddam Hussein and two lieutenants in Iraq by its Shiite-led government has helped to accelerate Sunni-Shiite sectarianism across an already fragile Middle East, according to experts across the region.

The chaotic executions and the calm with which Mr. Hussein confronted the gallows and mocking Shiite guards have bolstered his image among many of his fellow Sunni Muslims.

But something else is happening too: a pan-Muslim unity that surged after the summer war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia, is waning.

And while political analysts and government officials in the region say the spreading Sunni disillusionment with Shiites and their backers in Iran will benefit Sunni-led governments and the United States, they and others worry that the tensions could start to balkanize the region as they have in Iraq itself. (full article)

In my eyes an interesting analysis of the current situation in Iraq. However, I feel uneasy with the word “to balkanize”. Doing history in a scientific way I know how one needs to be very careful with comparisons. I don’t know exactly the writers original intentions, but I think a comparison with the Irish civil war would be better, although just slightly better. As far as I understand, the Balkan wars took place between followers of two different religions (Christianity and Islam) whereas the Irish civil war and the current sectarian clashes in Iraq are fought out between subdivisions of the same religion.

If we look up the difference between the Shia and Sunni Islam in the wikipedia, it seems insignificant:

Shias believe that they adhere to the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad and the religious guidance of his family (who are referred to as the Ahl al-Bayt). Unlike Sunnis, Shi’ites do not consider the first three caliphs to have been “Rightly Guided”; the fourth, Ali, was to them the first rightful caliph. (wikipedia on Shia Islam)

Whenever we do history, we are confronted with the phenomenon that let their religious affiliations strongly define which side they choose in a conflict, yet when we look at the religious differences they don’t serve as a satisfactory explanation for the conflict. Instead we dip into socio-economic and nationalistic reasons on the search for an answer.
At school I have been taught that the late reason for the Irish conflict are the different living standards between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland that gets fueled with social welfare money from the United Kingdom. However, we also find the socio-economic roots in the origin of the Irish conflict:

From 1874, but particularly from 1880 under Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish Parliamentary Party moved to prominence with its attempts to achieve Home Rule, which would have given Ireland some autonomy without requiring it to leave the United Kingdom. It seemed possible in 1911 when the House of Lords lost their veto, and John Redmond secured the Third Home Rule Act 1914. The unionist movement, however, had been growing since 1886 among Irish Protestants, fearing that they would face discrimination and lose economic and social privileges if Irish Catholics were to achieve real political power. Though Irish unionism existed throughout the whole of Ireland, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century unionism was particularly strong in parts of Ulster, where industrialisation was more common in contrast to the more agrarian rest of the island. (Any tariff barriers would, it was feared, most heavily hit that region.) (wikipedia on the history of the Republic of Ireland)

So is Iraq being balkanized? I seriously doubt it. Is Iraq the new Ireland? I don’t think so. I hope to show with my article how religious affiliations are no adequate means to classify the nature of a conflict and how comparisons should be avoided as it’s hard to find a fitting match.

Vote Tux!

Once again, the students of the University of Bern are supposed to cast their votes for the students’ parliament. I guess my pick is rather obvious: