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Look at Wikipedia's reports of various market share stats for that period. There is no controversy that Netscape's market share plunged in 1997. Now look up the browser MS shipped in 1997. It was not a superior product competing in the market place, because nobody chose IE; they got it by default.

(Using "EWS Web Server at UIUC" figures because they are the most detailed. Relatively simplistic analysis because I'm damned if I'm going to waste too much time arguing with someone trolling for hits on their soapbox website.)

For most of 1997 Microsoft was shipping IE3. IE3 was considered to be - overall - on par with Navigator 3. While it was not as good in some areas, it was better in others.

Navigator's market share dropped from ~75% at the start of 1997, to ~65% in September.

In February 1997 (from memory, could be a month off either way), the first IE4 beta was released (warez copies of it and the cancelled "Nashville" update which would have introduced it had been floating around the 'net since late 1996) . In September 1997, IE4 proper was released, a far superior browser to Navigator 3 or 4. In the remaining 3 months of 1997, Navigator's market share dropped a further 5%, to ~60%.

So, they lost 10% in the first 3/4 of the year, mostly (~7%) to a product that was roughly equivalent, and the rest to a series of betas. However, they lost the final 5% in 3 months, straight after the release of IE4 - and that extra market share went directly to IE4 (IE4's marketshare went from 2% - 3% in September 1997 to ~13% in December 1997).

The first 6 months of 1998 tell a similar story. Navigator drops from ~60% to ~50%. IE4's share grows from ~13% to ~19%. In June 1998, Windows 98 was released (with IE4).

So, over 18 months, Netscape lost ~25% of the market - but it lost the majority of that (~19%) to IE4 (before IE4 was included in any version of Windows). Clearly a case of users _deliberately_ deserting Navigator for the superior IE4 browser.

Moving onto the second half of 1998, we see Navigator's fall slowed, only losing ~5%. IE4 continues to gain, however, stealing significant marketshare especially from IE3 (I'm sure you'll attribute this to bundling with Windows 98, conveniently forgetting Windows 98's relatively slow adoption). IE4 ends 1998 with ~40% of the browser market.

Sure, after MS set up a barrier to Netscape's business plan, it could then invest more into browser development. After 1997, Netscape could do very little, while MS rapidly released three major new versions in 97, 99, and 2001.

In fact, Netscape were doing a great deal, desperately trying to rewrite their browser from the ground up so it could have a chance of competing with Microsoft's largely-from-scratch IE4. It was this major error that was the real reason Navigator 4 sucked so much - Netscape were too busy with their other codebase.

What needs to be noted is what happened after AOL/Netscape/Mozilla stopped delivering anything as a competitor. Microsoft, without any further need to take the browser market, froze development of the browser for half a decade. Another version of IE wasn't delivered until 2006, and only because Firefox was starting to compete again.

Microsoft were hardly the only ones. The only significant change to the web browser in the last decade since IE4, is the introduction of tabbed interfaces (which weren't exactly an outrageously obscure idea either).

You can say all you want about what "Steve Jobs" wants or knows, but since you can't understand why anticompetitive behavior and monopoly maintenance are bad for markets, I also have to assume you know nothing about what was going on inside Apple.

A straw man, ad hominem and a non-sequitor all rolled into one. Nicely done.

We also know, because Jobs announced it, that Jobs did try to

The issue of the start menu has come up previously. The last time it did I remember reading a blog of the MS guy who was working on it (can someone supply the reference).

I found it, and the related posts to the menu by Joel.

That' far worse than Channel 9 hinted at and apparently a big problem that grew with XP and exploded during Vista. Some comments I selected.

Moishe, the dev who worked on the menu:

The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in a week.

Also each team was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let's add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature [: the shutdown menu].

By the time I left the team the total code that I'd written for this "feature" [in a year] was a couple hundred lines, tops.

approximately every 4 weeks, at our weekly meeting, our PM would say, "the shell team disagrees with how this looks/feels/works" [...] Then at our next weekly meeting we'd spend another 90 minutes arguing about the design, [...] and at the next weekly meeting we'd agree on something... just in time to get some other missing piece of information from the shell or kernel team, and start the whole process again.

Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. [...] the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. [...] it [took] between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes.

Stanely Krute, ex-Microsoft developer:

In 1989 I worked on Windows UI for a brief period. [..] Even then one could see that what MS did to IBM would eventually happen to MS [..] Vista is a bloated baroque thing that adds some kernel security and eye candy at the cost of doubling a machine's RAM and adding a high-end graphics chip.

Anonymous ex-Microsoft manager:

I was a manager at Microsoft during some of this period [..] [There is] promiscuous dependency [, including circular dependencies, ] taking between parts of Windows without much analysis of the consequences. [...] There was much work done analyzing the internal structure of Windows [suv4x4: note they're not familiar with the structure of their *own* OS]

As others have mentioned, the real surprise here is that they managed to ship anything.

Anonymous developer working at Microsoft:

Slavish adherence to the "rules" as a means of CYA, a desire to build kingdoms (people/hardware/process), an inability to adjust as circumstances changed, and an irrational fear of breaking "something" were the real problems with many branches in Vista.

teams constantly harped on BS "rules" as the reason why they couldn't move or make progress. "My PM tells me what bugs I can/can't work on". "I can only check into branch vvv_www_xxx_yyy_zzz - I have no idea if/when my changes will migrate up". "We need a N-week test pass before we're allowed to make a change - there's no way we could do that in any other branch".

Anonymous developer who worked in Vista UI in a small company hired by MS 2002-2004:

Microsoft wanted to avoid some of the problems that cropped up with XP and told us they were going to do Longhorn "right" this time. After years of slaving away to supposed exacting standards of UI elements, the project was pulled from us and (I assume) taken in-house. [..] Now we see the result and I can tell you it is not

The issue of the start menu has come up previously. The last time it did I remember reading a blog of the MS guy who was working on it (can someone supply the reference).

I found it, and the related posts to the menu by Joel.

That' far worse than Channel 9 hinted at and apparently a big problem that grew with XP and exploded during Vista. Some comments I selected.

Moishe, the dev who worked on the menu:

The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in a week.

Also each team was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let's add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature [: the shutdown menu].

By the time I left the team the total code that I'd written for this "feature" [in a year] was a couple hundred lines, tops.

approximately every 4 weeks, at our weekly meeting, our PM would say, "the shell team disagrees with how this looks/feels/works" [...] Then at our next weekly meeting we'd spend another 90 minutes arguing about the design, [...] and at the next weekly meeting we'd agree on something... just in time to get some other missing piece of information from the shell or kernel team, and start the whole process again.

Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. [...] the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. [...] it [took] between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes.

Stanely Krute, ex-Microsoft developer:

In 1989 I worked on Windows UI for a brief period. [..] Even then one could see that what MS did to IBM would eventually happen to MS [..] Vista is a bloated baroque thing that adds some kernel security and eye candy at the cost of doubling a machine's RAM and adding a high-end graphics chip.

Anonymous ex-Microsoft manager:

I was a manager at Microsoft during some of this period [..] [There is] promiscuous dependency [, including circular dependencies, ] taking between parts of Windows without much analysis of the consequences. [...] There was much work done analyzing the internal structure of Windows [suv4x4: note they're not familiar with the structure of their *own* OS]

As others have mentioned, the real surprise here is that they managed to ship anything.

Anonymous developer working at Microsoft:

Slavish adherence to the "rules" as a means of CYA, a desire to build kingdoms (people/hardware/process), an inability to adjust as circumstances changed, and an irrational fear of breaking "something" were the real problems with many branches in Vista.

teams constantly harped on BS "rules" as the reason why they couldn't move or make progress. "My PM tells me what bugs I can/can't work on". "I can only check into branch vvv_www_xxx_yyy_zzz - I have no idea if/when my changes will migrate up". "We need a N-week test pass before we're allowed to make a change - there's no way we could do that in any other branch".

Anonymous developer who worked in Vista UI in a small company hired by MS 2002-2004:

Microsoft wanted to avoid some of the problems that cropped up with XP and told us they were going to do Longhorn "right" this time. After years of slaving away to supposed exacting standards of UI elements, the project was pulled from us and (I assume) taken in-house. [..] Now we see the result and I can tell you it is not

It uses its own font-smoothing, so text in Safari under Windows looks different to every other application.

I can understand Aqua, but the other points are a little strange.

Good take on the font differences here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.htm l

Instead, I think that the problem lies in the attitude of the people who provide the tech support. When tech support is viewed as a "cost center" to be minimized rather than an opportunity to gather data about the products that you provide, everybody loses. Outsourcing is always a bad idea because the goal of whoever you outsource to is never going to be your goal. They're trying to maximize their profits by gaming their compensation. You (assuming you have a clue, for mutual benefit is the essence of trade) are trying to maximize your profits by maximizing the value of your products. The easiest way of gaming the system is not going to be actually solving problems. That doesn't add any value to your products.

As a matter of fact, Joel Spolky has an article on providing customer service and while I disagree with one of the points (I think that vendors should be judged based on how often problems happen in addition to how well they resolve the problem--if it always takes six tries for an organization to get something right, I don't care all that much if they admit it's their problem and fix it for free, I'm still not going to think they're doing a good job) I think his direction is right. The feedback you get through your customer service folks gives you a direct window into what's happening with them and an opportunity to improve everybody's experience. It's just that nobody seems to realize the value of that information.

Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness.

Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface.

Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness.

Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface.

Apple and MS have very different philosophical approaches for text rendering. Microsoft attempt to make the text as readable as possible on an LCD screen, to the detriment of the original font design. Apple preserve the font design to the detriment (for some people, I like it) of the readability.

The main reason MS fonts look lighter is that Cleartype renders to pixel boundaries - if the font would naturally go over a pixel boundary when anti-aliased, Cleartype does not render that. The fonts end up looking "lighter" on screen because of it. Apple don't do that. As far as I know, It has nothing to do with colour and black & white.

The upshot is that MS text appears lighter (they even designed fonts to match their rendering philosophy) than Apple text under most circumstances. It also means that the print output on a Mac looks very similar to the displayed output, whereas printing an MS document can make it look a lot "heavier" because the rendering on print is different from the rendering on display.

As for 'proprietary', both rendering engines are 'proprietary'. I don't see why you call one that, and not the other.

Simon

Like the 24 people involved in "owning" the off menu.

I found Joel Spolsky's article on map-reduce ("Can Your Programming Language Do This?") very enlightening, much more so than the wikipedia article. Unfortunately, a google search for map reduce ranks it ninth.

The NetKernel doc says code required is "10x to 100x less than other approaches" which, along with the complete technobabble in the early part of the doc, tells me this is Yet Another Piece O' Nonsense.

I'll start believing when you have a complete working example of an application (not the NetKernel framework) that you can share, in full, with the world, that compares directly with another known piece of software. In the meantime, read Don't let architecture astronauhts scare you.

Check out this old joelonsoftware.com piece on what good managers do for to get the most out of powerhouse developers:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Development Abstraction.html

Management's primary responsibility to create the illusion that a software company can be run by writing code, because that's what programmers do. And while it would be great to have programmers who are also great at sales, graphic design, system administration, and cooking, it's unrealistic. Like teaching a pig to sing, it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.

Microsoft does such a good job at creating this abstraction that Microsoft alumni have a notoriously hard time starting companies. They simply can't believe how much went on below decks and they have no idea how to reproduce it.

Why do I need to know about OS and compiler design to develop high level software for solving real problems?

Leaky Abstractions

-jimbo

I don't see any reason why all of those things are integrated and not seperate addons. And that list gets bigger with each new version.

For a seminal work that explains this concept to the intellectually unenlightened: Bloatware and the 80/20 myth. It's not that bloated, slow software is preferred, exactly, it's simply that so-called "bloat" features are actually an advantage.

I'd personally prefer that FF has automated updates. I noticed the spell-checker after an update, and think it's kinda nice, although my spelling is generally pretty good. The popup blocker is quite nice. The other features I just don't care about, and I never noticed any particular performance decrease on my dual-core, 2 GB RAM laptop. Thus, for me, this "bloat" is something I either like or don't mind.

Other people may think an RSS reader is DA SHIZNIT! Some people lean hard on the anti-phishing features. And they will find bloat just as tasteful as I do. Go ahead - read the article I linked to, and then think about it. Of the functionality, what 20% do you want? And, is that the same 20% that everybody else wants? There's the reason for your bloat.

Want just a browser and only a browser? It's open source code, dude. You are welcome to create a fork and do whatever you like with it.

-- Mahatma Gandhi

Seriously, Microsoft is getting ready to pull off their kid gloves, now. They are really, truly, in a rather scary position.

1) Their flagship product, Microsoft Windows, is selling very softly. Word on the street is "don't buy until Service Pack 1, at least". (Told to me by our local computer store, I might add) Dell has reverted to Windows XP. Lots of public institutions are making very public noises about switching to alternatives, such as Ubuntu. What's worse is that some are actually doing it, and it's working. Apple OSX is ballooning. People are sick of viruses and dumb security alerts. The cost of supporting Windows clients has been rising almost exponentially as the number of band-aids required to keep a Windows system running has exploded. Anti-virus, Anti-spyware, Firewall, Malicious Software Removal kit, r00tkit detectors, frequent software updates, it's just getting to be too much for any reasonable non-technie to manage.

2) Their next big product, Microsoft Office, is similarly under heavy assault. The Massachussetts ODF debacle brought to the forefront the basis of Microsoft's lock-in, and jurisdictions are switching rapidly to ODF, PDF, and other open formats. Just today, we saw Norway joining the fray.

3) Their big ace in the hole is the Windows API. But they're losing that on several fronts:

3A) The Windows API is the cause of many security problems, since it's a buggy, insecure, festering pile.

3B) Even so, it's being emulated, warts and all with increasing effectiveness with the WINE codebase.

3C) Lastly, it's just not as relevant anymore. New apps today are commonly web-based, partly to avoid the problems inherent in client-side software.

Case in point: I had a school contact me JUST TODAY and ask if our product (normally Windows/Mac) would work with WINE. (No need for WINE - it's GTK-based)

4) They've almost completely failed to diversify their product line despite trying for over 10 years to do so. They have other, profitable products, but the amount earned by MSN and Xbox is a pittance compared to what Windows and Office earn for them.

So why wouldn't they fight back with whatever they have? They're SCARED SILLY. They have BILLIONS of dollars in their war chest, and their revenue stream might be flat, but there's still an INSANE amount of cash available. They won't take this lying down, folks.

Get ready for the fight of your lives - this will make SCO look like yesterday's donuts.

"It's not that the wine developers havent tried, it's just that emulating a Piece of Shit like Windows is nearly fucking impossible.. nobody can emulate the development hysteria that went into building windows."

Joel On Software has a good article on this. At least in part, here's why developing WINE is like cleaning out the Aegean Stables:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

Report as soon as possible no matter who it embarrasses.

Oh, please. Responsible disclosure isn't about who it embarasses; this isn't high school. It's about lost data and compromised systems of real people and real companies.

What you're preaching is a form of Econ 101 -- if we incentivize security patching via reputation, you'll have more people fixing their holes. Maybe, but regardless, I think you'll just have more people changing the definition of what constitutes a vulnerability.

The price of anything is based on the maximum price the seller can sell it for while maximizing the number of items sold.

Nothing built on Javascript will ever achieve the security, cross-platform reliability, and programmatic friendliness that Web 2.0 needs.

Security - Javascript is NOT designed to secure a web app, security needs to happen on the server side, out of necessity!

Cross-platform - I would argue that Javascript / ECMAScript, having been standardized and distributed with all major browsers for years, is arguably the MOST supported cross-platform programming language in the world. If a computer has a browser made in the last 5 years, it supports standardized ECMAScript. And what PC doesn't have a browser?

The only incompatibilities I run into on a frequent basis are getting my scripts to create results that look the same across all browsers, and that's not Javascript's fault, it's CSS and browser support of CSS! If you have problems with the [i]functionality[/i] of Javascript, then you're probably not writing according to the well established standards, or worse yet, throwing together snippets of Javascript from all over the web like so many amatuers that give the language a bad rep.

Proprietary solutions and vendor lock-in are also dead ends

So you would use Sun's solution, rather than the well established internationally standardized ECMAScript?

Programmatic friendlyness - Joel says it all here Personally, I've programmed in dozens of languages, and few are as flexible and enjoyable as Javascript

Javascript used to have the same status that Java applets and Flash still do, used predominantly for play things, small self-contained segments of the browser where you want to do something different. Javascript has risen above that. The world is finally realizing Javascript can be an integral part of an entire website, and that the website as a whole can be enhanced by Javascript and it's tight integration with other web standards.

This article sounds like an attempt to rehype Java applets, which frankly, have not seen the advancement and acceptance that Javascript has over the years.

Raymond Chen is also a condescending tool. (Check out Verity Stob's recent article for a good laugh at his expense, or this Joel on Software forumn thread.)

what do you do when the current design stands in the way of a new feature you want to add?

Refactor the relevant parts of the application. It's not a closed debate, but Joel Spolsky has a good starting essay on why rewriting is usually a really, really stupid idea.

Usually inexperienced coders come to a large existing application and find it's really hard to understand. In their heads is a simplistic picture of the parts of the requirements they understand, and they assume that can be turned directly into code. But in any real application there are usually hundreds of other parts that have been worked on and revised multiple times by others.

Note this is not saying "don't rewrite anything". Sure, rewrite *parts* of your application, using the experience you gained from it, and after designing it properly, and reusing the parts of the code that don't have a problem, and looking at the existing code for answers to problems. Just not everything at once.

Then send the wordpress developers this link:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.htm l
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

If this subject interests you, then you should also read Joel Spolsky's account of his first BillG review: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.htm l

Reminded me of Joel on Software's first BillG review and how he handled it.

It might also be that the idea wasn't any good after all...

Not all former MS employees hold a grudge. Joel Spolsky appears thoroughly impressed with his former boss: My First BillG Review

Didn't you know, nobody sells hammers anymore...

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel .3.219431.12

This sounds like the classic Framework versus Library debate. Some good reading:

The Dojo mailing list thread "dojo: framework vs library"
http://dojotoolkit.org/pipermail/dojo-interest/200 5-May/000231.html

Joel Spolsky's "Why I Hate Frameworks"
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel .3.219431.12

Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz's "Frameworks vs. Libraries"
http://www.ddj.com/blog/architectblog/archives/200 6/07/frameworks_vs_l.html

That being said, there are plenty of features in Prototype which are more library-like than framework-like, so it is easy to use parts of it without buying into a whole framework methodology. I don't know much about the other evaluated tools.

Am I the only one who usually finds frameworks to be pointless for serious web development?

backslash: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/22/15 51236
and the original Joel blog post: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.htm l

In advance, to any GNOME fanboys (because I feel like I'm on the front lines of that holy war): this doesn't mean people shouldn't be able to do things. If it's easy to learn how to do things, then it's *great* to be able to do things. By 'things', I mean reassigning hotkeys, and changing the contents of the toolbar. The interface for these actions is uniform across all of the core KDE apps and many of the peripheral ones, so after learning just one simple gui, the user gains great control over all the programs in his KDE desktop.

Hungarian Notation has a bad (w)rap because it got perverted into something it was never meant to be.

Read Joel Spolsky's explanation of how it all went wrong, and how Hungarian Notation can actually be a good thing.

Quoth the sibling:

If you want to know what real Hungarian is, as opposed to the abomination exposed through the Windows header files, try reading about the Hungarian naming convention [idleloop.com] as conceived and used by Charles, somewhat evolved from his original PhD thesis.

Or read Joel Spolsky's lucid explanation and examples of Hungarian Notation the way it was meant to be.

1. Using prefixes for datatypes, instead of the use or meaning of the variable.
2. Not having a clear style guide with definitions of the allowable prefixes to be used

Joel Spolsky advocates dual monitors a lot. Item 9 in this article goes into some detail on this. And here, he mentions the standard developer setup in passing (toward the end of the article).

If people at your office take him seriously (which you may be able to do just by droping his name in the right way), that might be enough.

Joel Spolsky advocates dual monitors a lot. Item 9 in this article goes into some detail on this. And here, he mentions the standard developer setup in passing (toward the end of the article).

If people at your office take him seriously (which you may be able to do just by droping his name in the right way), that might be enough.

Joel Spolsky advocates dual monitors a lot. Item 9 in this article goes into some detail on this. And here, he mentions the standard developer setup in passing (toward the end of the article).

If people at your office take him seriously (which you may be able to do just by droping his name in the right way), that might be enough.

I'm quoting this article a lot today...

"WinFS, advertised as a way to make searching work by making the file system be a relational database, ignores the fact that the real way to make searching work is by making searching work. Don't make me type metadata for all my files that I can search using a query language. Just do me a favor and search the damned hard drive, quickly, for the string I typed, using full-text indexes and other technologies that were boring in 1973."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

"Microsoft Lost the Backwards Compatibility Religion

Inside Microsoft, the MSDN Magazine Camp has won the battle...."

From one of the best articles a guy can read

• Do NOT, under any circumstances, upgrade an existing XP machine to Vista, even if it's Vista Supremo Premium Ultra-Capable.
• When you get a new computer, if it comes with Vista, that's when you'll upgrade.
• Do NOT buy a new computer just to get Vista, if your existing XP-based machine is working well enough.

According to Joel on software people don't sue you because you admit the mistake, people sue you because they are mad at you. If you admit the mistake and try to fix the problem, they aren't going to sue you. If you try to pretend there is no problem, then they will sue you. The article linked above is a very good read for anybody doing any kind of customer support, or working in the tech industry in general.

Your mention of strcat reminded me of this Joel on Software article:

Back to Basics:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog00000003 19.html

If you're looking for a reason why assembly would be a good thing to learn, check out the below article from Joel on Software.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstra ctions.html

Europe virtually ignored the tech industry for decades

Yes, Tim Berners-Lee completely ignored technology when inventing the Web (whilst working at CERN) preferring to use homing pigeons instead of a packet-switching network.

Just because the EC is taking a known monopolist to task--and going the right way about it--doesn't mean there is some sort of European conspiracy going on. Microsoft have got a massive percentage (a bit out of date, can't seem to find anything current) of desktop market share and are using that to unfairly hamper competition. They use bundling and their API to stop people from developing for other platforms. They put the brakes on IE for as long as possible because they realised their API was (and still is) threatened by web based applications.

Unfortunately the US government failed to prosecute Microsoft fully so the EC are being forced to do it. It's sad but quite simple.

concur, C won't be left. Java is still far away from C in low level programming and perfomance. perils of javaschool

Also check out this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.htm l

It may not stay that way though... check out this "Joel on Software" on what's been happening with the Windows API....

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

Actually creating technical specs is worth a book in itself; check the article on Joel on Software.

You can learn the process... and the mockups are actually a good start. You just need to go further and develop the app. by thinking "what happens behind this fascade". Also, if you don't have any formal accounting qualifications yet, get your boss to pay for them, since that's the type of work you're doing... five years later you'll probally be glad you have then when you're... making more money than you can count, or whatever.

you can simply put your swap partition on a flash device as opposed to the hard disk
And it wouldn't take any more effort to do this in Windows, either. But Vista isn't simply moving the swapfile.

keep track of the recently used apps, and preload them into memory on startup
That's not at all what Windows is doing.

Under Windows, if I bog the CPU down Winamp will start skipping because it won't get CPU time often enough to keep the audio device buffer from emptying. This must be Winamp's fault, because Windows has had an "interactive" scheduler since NT.

a knowledgeable Linux hacker could code up one of Vista's enhancements in a day or two and the community would begin to comment on it and improve it. That's the power of free software.

Ah yes, the true strength of open source software: to copy successful implementations of innovative designs.

> There are quite a few people used to the old world where a string was interchangeable with a
> vector of 8 bit bytes

No. No, no, no. NO. Please, no. Seriously. This is bad. A LOT of damage happens because people can't be bothered to spend the 10 minutes it takes to learn the basics of Unicode. It's easy. I don't always think very highly of what Joel Spolsky writes, but his introduction to Unicode is an ABSOLUTE must-read.

Seriously. Strings are NOT interchangeable with byte arrays. EVER. Without an encoding information, a byte array can represent a wild number of different strings. Without an encoding information, you can't even tell where the string that the byte array represents ends! This is one of my pet peeves, really -- pretending that byte arrays and strings are equivalent is on the same level of professionalism as pretending that the data won't ever be larger than your buffer. Ignoring issues that bother you don't make them go away.