Nope. I am well aware of the Hamsters relativistic view of facts. THis was an illustration on my part of the “close but no cigar” nature of his assertion.

Only to the extent that he tells fantastic tales to a select few who are willing victims of his stories due to their biases.

Oldman, are you forgetting his claim that the Russian probes brought back samples and that there are numerous satellites due to “everyone” choosing them over alternatives? That is what he used to bolster his assertion that he is such a refined student of history.

How about his expertise in CALs vented in other threads? His deep understanding of .NET? SQL? The Australian military? Anything at all?

In the case of the Russian space program it is indeed correct that the Russians did reach the moon first in a series of firsts:

1959: First man-made object to pass near the Moon, first man-made object in Heliocentric orbit, Luna 1
1959: First probe to impact the Moon, Luna 2
1959: First images of the moon’s far side, Luna 3
1966: First probe to make a soft landing on and transmit from the surface of the moon, Luna 9 (this probe transmitted pictures and had was able to measure radiation)
1966: First probe in lunar orbit, Luna 10
1968: First living beings to reach the Moon (circumlunar flights) and return unharmed to Earth, Russian tortoises on Zond 5

So in fact the Hamster is being factual when he said that The Russians were first to go to the moon and back.

Well, Actually it was Russian turtles that did so, but its close enough….;-)

Of course the Russians never got beyond turtles (nor has anyone else in fact, but that’s another affair.

The Hamsters little homily reminds me of one of the definitions of a politician as a person who lies next to the truth but not upon it.

He would definitely make a good politician…

The hamster would IMHO make a great politician.

I am going to die laughing if you do not quit posting such things, Mr. O!

Could you tell an ignorant fellow such as myself just when the Russians sent an automated system to the moon and retrieved some samples? For that matter, exactly how many countries are actually putting satellites around the moon? I agree that it might be cheaper than a manned mission, but I am sure that not “everyone is currently placing satellites around the moon”.

In fact, my poor memory of history comes up empty for even one such satellite. I can only rely on your vast knowledge of history to help me now.

Is your Google machine broken? You seem to have fallen back into fantasy mode.

Vista development started before XP was released. Lot of features in Vista were in fact started back in NT 4.0 that were only include in Vista but were not good enough for 2000 and XP. The $10B figure is a little low.

Be very careful with my words. Vista took more than what it costs to go to the moon and back. Did I say manned flight.

The Russians were first to go to the moon and back. USA was the first to land a man on the the moon. Two vastly different things that a lot of USA people lose. USA people like claiming to be first to the moon as well. They were second.

Manned flight is more expensive.

Clarence Moon you are dealing with a person who knows history. Russians sent a automated system so they were sure they could get it back and had a few problems so aborted man flight project so USA landed man first.

The Apollo program is the wrong program to be price comparing to Clarence Moon. Its the Russian program you have to price compare to. Without a human or living 10 billion dollars today is till more than what it costs to send a object to the moon and get it back.

That is why everyone is currently placing satellites around the moon. Its cheap you can send at least 10 sats for each human and if you lose one. No one is major-ally upset. Even by to-days prices MS spend more on Vista than going to the moon and back as a machine. Its just a funny fact.

Basically humans have not stopped going to the moon. Just stopped going as humans to the moon.

Lot of the information the Apollo got include samples the Russians already had without sending humans.

In the sense of being factually bogus, as virtually all of Mr. O’s claims are, that is indeed one of the furtherest out claims that he has made lately. As a point of fact, however, the Apollo program cost some $25B overall in 1969 dollars which is considerably more than the cost of Vista, even in 2006 dollars. If you figure in the inflation factors, the cost of going to the moon was over $100B. Additionally, the $10B figure is the totality of Windows division R&D costs for the period Vista was under development and not all that money was spent on it. There was even Windows 7 development going on in that same period.

The problem is the same was true for KDE 4.0. And the same might be true for Gnome now.

In every project life cycle some of the best come out of the disasters if they live through it.

So what? Development of first version of Vista laid the foundations of many hidden improvements, which gave fruit later on: new driver model, full migration to 64-bit world, improved scheduler, improved security model, improved GUI, new desktop compositing manager, new versions of DX, improved local search and indexing. Then there come the experimental stuff, which didn’t make it in Vista, but will make it in 8 – like the new storage system.

Far out!