I guess my point is that GUIs simply follow the 80/20 rule, and that is by design. Arguing for the CLI by using the 20/80 case is really an appeal only for super-power-users and system admins. --
It might not be on your wishlist, but I can think of a few IT managers that would love to have a free operating system with a free office suite to go along with it.
Oh yeah, they also buy thousands of systems a year. And all of those systems have users, some with itchy trigger fingers.
Or, ask yourself -- How many games did Windows have before it became a general productivity tool? --
Actually, what really sucks is that Dejanews purchased Usenet archives going back to the early 1980s some time ago. They used to have a page up announcing this and claiming that they would be up "soon".
Now, they are actually reducing the size of the archive! The one good thing about this, I guess, is that certain crap I posted in younger days is no longer publically available. The bad thing, is that there is also a bunch of Usenet stuff from the 1991-3 era that I'd really like to get my hands on. (Old alt.tasteless!)
The sad thing is that DejaNews was always the big guy, and because of their presence, nobody else got into the biz, or bothered put those old archives up on-line. (If I'm wrong, please tell me!) Now they are getting out of the Usenet business, we've really lost a valuble resource.
why does Intel think it can continue to get away... extremely high markups on their chips
Because the potential x86 CPU market is larger than the production capacity of Intel and AMD combined. Right now, they are both leaving lots of money on the table.
In the situation where you are selling all the product you can make, why would you do? I'd keep the prices high, especially if I had a top notch reputation (true or not), and enormous channel to move product.
On the other hand, if you AMD, and you don't have good OEM relationships (for very good historical reasons), it makes sense to eat some of the profit now and build up long term customers for when the lean times come.
Anyway, your post reeks of the usual Slashdot pro-underdog Winner/Loser dichotomy. In this market, both AMD and Intel are 'winning', unless your only concern is the dick-sizing going on at the very high-end of the lineup. --
But suppose you need to find all files in/var owned by Bob, larger than 300k, and modified in the last week.
Just as a side note, I just want to point out what an outer edge example this sort of thing is (because this kind of example is often brought up in CLI versus GUI discussion).
First of all, what you are really talking about is a system admin function (Bob just took up a bunch of space on the spindle that holds/var, why?), not a normal user operation.
Second, if a user did need to perform such an operation once in a while, a well designed search interface (MacOS's is almost there) could perform such a function, although not as quickly as a adept CLI user could.
Third, the power of the CLI often assumes a CLI-adept user who makes a conscious effort to put files in subdirectories and name files with regex-able names, and furthermore has a brain which is wired in such a way to instantly translate "What I am looking for?" to "What logical query operation can I perform to get the results I intend?"
Compare this to an average user's mixed up naming schemes - "Budget7.xls", "Big Conf. Present.ppt", and of course "Document1.doc". Now let's take a much more common user operation - grab three of these files from this randomly named collection and put them in a subdirectory on onto a floppy disk. The GUI is optimized for this sort of thing, and you'd have to be a pretty quick typist to beat the mouse-wielding user with a CLI. --
On the server side, I'd expect the Mac and Unix communities to come closer (because people will be running Apache, Samba, and so on Macs.)
However, on the client side - I doubt it. A small geeky minority will run Unix software on Mac OS X, the vast majority of Mac users don't have any inclination to deal with Unix. (Nor does Unix offer much 'desktop' software that Mac users would really want.) --
I just wanted to reply that your comparison of OS design to city planning is one of the craziest bit of genius I've read in long time.
Anyway, Houston might not have the 'slum' problems of the classic industrial city, but they are sorta infamous because back in the 1970s, neighborhoods were put in long before the city could deliver reliable water and sewer connections. The city had so little planning capacity that literally had no idea what was being built.
Back to Miguel's point, certain things in an operating system need to be planned and standardized on some level. You can't just "scratch the itch" and put in a sewer system for your neighborhood. Likewise, trying to add things like a printing imaging model or a common component infrastructure to Unix at this late date is exceedingly difficult, and understandablily would make you angry at the stupid people that paved the street without putting the pipes in first.
What happens if I run this program over a network, what is the limit of reg_values I can have, what happens if the reg_value is not there, how do I detect registry corruption, what happens if two people try to access the same keys at the same time, could malicious programs delete values of your registry, could registry information be stolen
What makes you think that a database would be worse at handling these issues than a file system? --
The problem with dot files and/etc is that there never, ever will be standard, reliable engines for parsing and changing those files. Every attempt up to this point of a GUIified system admin interface has failed simply because nobody can trust the output, and you end up back in the text editor anyway.
Now for "Unix" is isn't that big of a deal, because that's what the users like you want, but let's imagine some other OS that is based on Unix but is actually aimed at the average Windows or Mac end user. Reliable GUI system config becomes a absolutely critical issue, and unfortunately it looks like that means that the spaghetti pile of Unix text config files needs to go.
So, while RedHat and Mandrake and the rest of the Linux vendors polish up the installer and the desktop, they haven't gone so far to eliminate the smell of Unix from underneath. Eventually somebody will do so however, and that means a "registry" or XML of some sort. Unix-users won't like it, but despite all of the "no policy" handwaving, the fact is that dot files,/etc, and SysV or BSD init are "policies" that everyone has swollowed whole. (I should point out that this is exactly what Apple is doing with it's Unix base, basing it on an XML config engine and NetInfo, which I think is a binary database.)
Also, I'd like to agree with Tumbleweed that the problem with Microsoft's Registry is primarily implementation, and that there is a many logical stops between a mess of text files and a large binary database that stores everything from MIME maps, to network config, to everyone's Excel settings, to the last 10 CDs you played. (The biggest problem with the MS registry is the FAT filesystem, however. It is simply impossible for a large file to stay uncorrupted on that filesytem over time, no matter how critical that file is to your system.)
I think of it more as an all-time high in Apple's security
Actually, it's probably just a product of the common motherboard design. Now days, the only people that need to see the new case designs is the case design group. In the old days of custom chipsets for each new Mac, you had to have a bunch of hardware guys, a bunch of system guys, (and so on) in on the team. --
Nobody thinks that MacOSRumors is 100% inaccurate, the problem is that their accuracy rate is so low, and they are so willing to print utter rubbish.
(Recall their big "Windows 98 will be ported to Macs" rumor. Not only is that completely inprobable, it's also probably impossible. When I e-mailed them and asked them why 98 and not the PPC version of NT, their reply made it clear that they had no idea what Windows NT even was.)
For reliable reports, I'll take AppleInsider (formerly Reality) any day. They don't go to print regularly, but when they do, their accuracy rate is pretty dang good.
Anyway, the Cube is probably an all time low for Mac Rumor sites. They had the news for only about a week before the announcement, and real (fake) pictures didn't surface until the day before. Even the super top-secret iMac was known to them months before the official announcement.
(And as a meta-comment -- It's strange how Apple's secrecy feeds on itself. I almost wonder if it's a ploy to keep the Macheads religiously following the company. Back in the old days, print journals like MacWeek would have full details of Apples new machines months before they shipped, and it never seemed to hurt sales or the faithful.) --
Win2000 doesn't include UDF support, but you can download a free UDF driver from Adaptec (http://www.adaptec.com/support/advisor/cdrupdates /udfreaders.html). --
If it's an AGP (hardware) issue and not a Windows 2000 (software) issue, why can Matrox dual head work properly under Linux, but inproperly under Windows 2000?
Well, 3D Cards are one thing, SCSI adapters are another.
Linux is supposedly being installed on more servers than Novell NetWare. If you manufactured something targeted at the server market, you'd be a fool to ignore Linux (and you'd be an even bigger fool to not play by the rules and try to support a binary driver...) This is the kind of hardware that comes with support for obscure platforms like OS/2 ODI networking and Novell NetWare 3.x - Linux should be a no-brainer.
Intel proposed a cross-Unix driver API (and presumably will implement it for Linux). The conculsion of the Linux cabal was that any driver using it would be doggy dog slow. --
The Focus Theft bug should have never slipped into Windows 95 in the beginning. It shows a real hostility to the user by granting them control with a normal mouse cursor, and then taking it away. (For example try to use the Start Menu while your machine is starting up all of the taskbar TSR spam for Real, 3Com, AOL, etc.)
For NT users, the bug was only fixed a few months ago when 2000 shipped, and in most cases the IS department hasn't started the upgrade yet. And this is the OS that supposedly is really good at multitasking, and is for power users.
The irony is that Windows 3.1/ NT3.x could handle background alerts without stealing focus. And they haven't even totally fixed it in Windows 2000 -- I've had blinking, minimized IE windows that were un-maximizable because there was invisible dialog box there in the minimized window. You can select the icon on the task bar and press Enter to dismiss the dialog, but for all know it's a ActiveX control asking me if I really want to delete my harddrive.
(Another annoying Windows bug which wasn't fixed for 5 years - Create a shortcut to a folder, say Q:\MYHOMEDIR, and then try to use the Save As standard dialog to navigate into the folder via the shortcut. Your file will end up being called Myhomedir.doc!) --
Maybe Carmack signed up so that he can evangilize OpenGL to Microsoft and XBox developers.
He's got a vested commercial interest in OGL -- You don't think Quake III and Quake-engine will be ported to the XBox? He's there to make sure that his games run well, and his babies (Quake engines) continue to sell. --
Of course, I can't back it up, but seem to recall that in the "suite" market, WordPerfect was around 15% by the time Novell bought them in ~1994. (Their stock was sure low at the time.)
You might be thinking of the Stand-Alone Word Processor market, where WordPerfect has always sold well. (as does 1-2-3 in the stand-alone spreadsheet market, completing the classic 80s desktop combo. Can't say that I've ever seen anyone use Quatrro Pro.) --
They lost most of their 90% word processing marketshare in 1992-94, before they were able to ship a working version of WPWin, and they were able to match Microsoft is suite packaging and pricing. It was Office 4.2 (1994) that killed them, not Office 97. --
Incorrect -- In the early days IBM wrote a simple browser for OS/2 Warp v3.
As more Netscape-only websites appeared, the users complained and IBM *paid* Netscape to port v2.02 to OS/2. (This was a common practice by IBM, and 3rd parties caught on and never ported to OS/2 unless IBM was greasing their palm.)
Neither Netscape or IBM maintained the Netscape 2 port for a long time. Eventually, at the start of the Mozilla effort, Netscape started offering free source licences for Netscape 4.0x, and IBM took the code and ported it themselves to OS/2.
Anyway, Netscape was never interested in supporting OS/2, and any version of Netscape that you could ever get was always ported by IBM, and (to this day, I thinK) only available on an IBM FTP server. --
What Netscape did was worse than that. With version 4 and 80% market share at the time, they basically gave the finger to the the W3C and went and implemented a totally non-standard, totally incompatible layers-based object model that they knew was not going to get approved. They wanted to recast DHTML in their proprietary image, without even paying lipservice to the standards body. Not even Microsoft, with all thier IEisms, has been that grotesquesly proprietary.
The W3C DOM hadn't been approved yet, but Netscape's arrogance basically pushed them into Microsoft's cooperative arms. As you put it --The fact that Netscape would forgo a standard to re-implement similar functionality by using a proprietary extension is what appalled the W3C.
But the Waterloo was that Netscape's Layers implementation was horribly buggy (and still is after umteen bugfix releases), and never worked nearly well enough for anyone to develop to it. They announced that Mozilla wouldn't support layers about a year ago now, which essentially makes Netscape 4 legacy software. Meanwhile, the only sorta-stable version of their software that they've released since the 80% marketshare v3 days was version 4.72, long long after most have thrown up their hands.
Is it any wonder that web developers don't take Netscape seriously? (Well, Microsoft might be quasi-proprietary, but it's documented and it works.)That most Windows and Mac users have dropped them like a hot potato? (Well, IE doesn't leak memory every time you click on a link.)
Netscape handed the keys to the 'dynamic' web right to Microsoft. It's not too late to keep the web 'open', but right now Microsoft is where Netscape was in 1994 -- they can implement whatever they want, and the competitiors will be expected by the user base to clone them. --
Office isn't that important (because it can be cloned), and neither are games (because by the time you have the API emulated, new game APIs will be out.)
What's important is corporate applications written in VisualBasic or Access or even FoxPro -- If you obtain "world domination", the games will come right along with it, but you'll never have world domination unless you can get onto corporate desktops, and you'll never get onto corporate desktops unless you can run their in-house stuff. --
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. (I think back fondly to my Apple II - thousands of games, and the only decent word processor required an add-in board.)
--
I guess my point is that GUIs simply follow the 80/20 rule, and that is by design. Arguing for the CLI by using the 20/80 case is really an appeal only for super-power-users and system admins.
--
It might not be on your wishlist, but I can think of a few IT managers that would love to have a free operating system with a free office suite to go along with it.
Oh yeah, they also buy thousands of systems a year. And all of those systems have users, some with itchy trigger fingers.
Or, ask yourself -- How many games did Windows have before it became a general productivity tool?
--
Actually, what really sucks is that Dejanews purchased Usenet archives going back to the early 1980s some time ago. They used to have a page up announcing this and claiming that they would be up "soon".
Now, they are actually reducing the size of the archive! The one good thing about this, I guess, is that certain crap I posted in younger days is no longer publically available. The bad thing, is that there is also a bunch of Usenet stuff from the 1991-3 era that I'd really like to get my hands on. (Old alt.tasteless!)
The sad thing is that DejaNews was always the big guy, and because of their presence, nobody else got into the biz, or bothered put those old archives up on-line. (If I'm wrong, please tell me!) Now they are getting out of the Usenet business, we've really lost a valuble resource.
--
why does Intel think it can continue to get away ... extremely high markups on their chips
Because the potential x86 CPU market is larger than the production capacity of Intel and AMD combined. Right now, they are both leaving lots of money on the table.
In the situation where you are selling all the product you can make, why would you do? I'd keep the prices high, especially if I had a top notch reputation (true or not), and enormous channel to move product.
On the other hand, if you AMD, and you don't have good OEM relationships (for very good historical reasons), it makes sense to eat some of the profit now and build up long term customers for when the lean times come.
Anyway, your post reeks of the usual Slashdot pro-underdog Winner/Loser dichotomy. In this market, both AMD and Intel are 'winning', unless your only concern is the dick-sizing going on at the very high-end of the lineup.
--
But suppose you need to find all files in /var owned by Bob, larger than 300k, and modified in the last week.
/var, why?), not a normal user operation.
Just as a side note, I just want to point out what an outer edge example this sort of thing is (because this kind of example is often brought up in CLI versus GUI discussion).
First of all, what you are really talking about is a system admin function (Bob just took up a bunch of space on the spindle that holds
Second, if a user did need to perform such an operation once in a while, a well designed search interface (MacOS's is almost there) could perform such a function, although not as quickly as a adept CLI user could.
Third, the power of the CLI often assumes a CLI-adept user who makes a conscious effort to put files in subdirectories and name files with regex-able names, and furthermore has a brain which is wired in such a way to instantly translate "What I am looking for?" to "What logical query operation can I perform to get the results I intend?"
Compare this to an average user's mixed up naming schemes - "Budget7.xls", "Big Conf. Present.ppt", and of course "Document1.doc". Now let's take a much more common user operation - grab three of these files from this randomly named collection and put them in a subdirectory on onto a floppy disk. The GUI is optimized for this sort of thing, and you'd have to be a pretty quick typist to beat the mouse-wielding user with a CLI.
--
On the server side, I'd expect the Mac and Unix communities to come closer (because people will be running Apache, Samba, and so on Macs.)
However, on the client side - I doubt it. A small geeky minority will run Unix software on Mac OS X, the vast majority of Mac users don't have any inclination to deal with Unix. (Nor does Unix offer much 'desktop' software that Mac users would really want.)
--
Open source is like the city of Houston, Texas
I just wanted to reply that your comparison of OS design to city planning is one of the craziest bit of genius I've read in long time.
Anyway, Houston might not have the 'slum' problems of the classic industrial city, but they are sorta infamous because back in the 1970s, neighborhoods were put in long before the city could deliver reliable water and sewer connections. The city had so little planning capacity that literally had no idea what was being built.
Back to Miguel's point, certain things in an operating system need to be planned and standardized on some level. You can't just "scratch the itch" and put in a sewer system for your neighborhood. Likewise, trying to add things like a printing imaging model or a common component infrastructure to Unix at this late date is exceedingly difficult, and understandablily would make you angry at the stupid people that paved the street without putting the pipes in first.
--
What happens if I run this program over a network, what is the limit of reg_values I can have, what happens if the reg_value is not there, how do I detect registry corruption, what happens if two people try to access the same keys at the same time, could malicious programs delete values of your registry, could registry information be stolen
What makes you think that a database would be worse at handling these issues than a file system?
--
MacOS X as a great example of what Unix can become if it's done right. This is true
Lessee how Apple is making Unix acceptable to the masses:
+ Dumped the text config file system in favor of an XML-based system and the NetInfo registry.
+ Built a file browser that lies to the user about the actual layout of the file system.
+ Doesn't include a terminal emulator, so all software will be 100% GUI.
+ Ignored the last 15 years of UNIX APIs, specifically anything that relates to the UNIX GUI system, instead uses three homegrown API sets.
Sure deep down inside, MacOS X is a Unix. But it's probably easier just to think of it as a Mac that runs Apache.
--
The problem with dot files and /etc is that there never, ever will be standard, reliable engines for parsing and changing those files. Every attempt up to this point of a GUIified system admin interface has failed simply because nobody can trust the output, and you end up back in the text editor anyway.
/etc, and SysV or BSD init are "policies" that everyone has swollowed whole. (I should point out that this is exactly what Apple is doing with it's Unix base, basing it on an XML config engine and NetInfo, which I think is a binary database.)
Now for "Unix" is isn't that big of a deal, because that's what the users like you want, but let's imagine some other OS that is based on Unix but is actually aimed at the average Windows or Mac end user. Reliable GUI system config becomes a absolutely critical issue, and unfortunately it looks like that means that the spaghetti pile of Unix text config files needs to go.
So, while RedHat and Mandrake and the rest of the Linux vendors polish up the installer and the desktop, they haven't gone so far to eliminate the smell of Unix from underneath. Eventually somebody will do so however, and that means a "registry" or XML of some sort. Unix-users won't like it, but despite all of the "no policy" handwaving, the fact is that dot files,
Also, I'd like to agree with Tumbleweed that the problem with Microsoft's Registry is primarily implementation, and that there is a many logical stops between a mess of text files and a large binary database that stores everything from MIME maps, to network config, to everyone's Excel settings, to the last 10 CDs you played. (The biggest problem with the MS registry is the FAT filesystem, however. It is simply impossible for a large file to stay uncorrupted on that filesytem over time, no matter how critical that file is to your system.)
--
It's also interesting that Apple's modern all-in-one units (the 500 and 5000 serieses) never sold well until they put clear plastic on them.
Moral is that styling moves product, but that's something that the car industry has known for 70 years.
--
I think of it more as an all-time high in Apple's security
Actually, it's probably just a product of the common motherboard design. Now days, the only people that need to see the new case designs is the case design group. In the old days of custom chipsets for each new Mac, you had to have a bunch of hardware guys, a bunch of system guys, (and so on) in on the team.
--
Nobody thinks that MacOSRumors is 100% inaccurate, the problem is that their accuracy rate is so low, and they are so willing to print utter rubbish.
(Recall their big "Windows 98 will be ported to Macs" rumor. Not only is that completely inprobable, it's also probably impossible. When I e-mailed them and asked them why 98 and not the PPC version of NT, their reply made it clear that they had no idea what Windows NT even was.)
For reliable reports, I'll take AppleInsider (formerly Reality) any day. They don't go to print regularly, but when they do, their accuracy rate is pretty dang good.
Anyway, the Cube is probably an all time low for Mac Rumor sites. They had the news for only about a week before the announcement, and real (fake) pictures didn't surface until the day before. Even the super top-secret iMac was known to them months before the official announcement.
(And as a meta-comment -- It's strange how Apple's secrecy feeds on itself. I almost wonder if it's a ploy to keep the Macheads religiously following the company. Back in the old days, print journals like MacWeek would have full details of Apples new machines months before they shipped, and it never seemed to hurt sales or the faithful.)
--
Win2000 doesn't include UDF support, but you can download a free UDF driver from Adaptec (http://www.adaptec.com/support/advisor/cdrupdates /udfreaders.html).
--
If it's an AGP (hardware) issue and not a Windows 2000 (software) issue, why can Matrox dual head work properly under Linux, but inproperly under Windows 2000?
(Perhaps this isn't the same issue, tho..)
--
Well, 3D Cards are one thing, SCSI adapters are another.
Linux is supposedly being installed on more servers than Novell NetWare. If you manufactured something targeted at the server market, you'd be a fool to ignore Linux (and you'd be an even bigger fool to not play by the rules and try to support a binary driver...) This is the kind of hardware that comes with support for obscure platforms like OS/2 ODI networking and Novell NetWare 3.x - Linux should be a no-brainer.
Intel proposed a cross-Unix driver API (and presumably will implement it for Linux). The conculsion of the Linux cabal was that any driver using it would be doggy dog slow.
--
The Focus Theft bug should have never slipped into Windows 95 in the beginning. It shows a real hostility to the user by granting them control with a normal mouse cursor, and then taking it away. (For example try to use the Start Menu while your machine is starting up all of the taskbar TSR spam for Real, 3Com, AOL, etc.)
For NT users, the bug was only fixed a few months ago when 2000 shipped, and in most cases the IS department hasn't started the upgrade yet. And this is the OS that supposedly is really good at multitasking, and is for power users.
The irony is that Windows 3.1/ NT3.x could handle background alerts without stealing focus. And they haven't even totally fixed it in Windows 2000 -- I've had blinking, minimized IE windows that were un-maximizable because there was invisible dialog box there in the minimized window. You can select the icon on the task bar and press Enter to dismiss the dialog, but for all know it's a ActiveX control asking me if I really want to delete my harddrive.
(Another annoying Windows bug which wasn't fixed for 5 years - Create a shortcut to a folder, say Q:\MYHOMEDIR, and then try to use the Save As standard dialog to navigate into the folder via the shortcut. Your file will end up being called Myhomedir.doc!)
--
Maybe Carmack signed up so that he can evangilize OpenGL to Microsoft and XBox developers.
He's got a vested commercial interest in OGL -- You don't think Quake III and Quake-engine will be ported to the XBox? He's there to make sure that his games run well, and his babies (Quake engines) continue to sell.
--
Of course, I can't back it up, but seem to recall that in the "suite" market, WordPerfect was around 15% by the time Novell bought them in ~1994. (Their stock was sure low at the time.)
You might be thinking of the Stand-Alone Word Processor market, where WordPerfect has always sold well. (as does 1-2-3 in the stand-alone spreadsheet market, completing the classic 80s desktop combo. Can't say that I've ever seen anyone use Quatrro Pro.)
--
WordPerfect did not "hold the market" until 1997.
They lost most of their 90% word processing marketshare in 1992-94, before they were able to ship a working version of WPWin, and they were able to match Microsoft is suite packaging and pricing. It was Office 4.2 (1994) that killed them, not Office 97.
--
Incorrect -- In the early days IBM wrote a simple browser for OS/2 Warp v3.
As more Netscape-only websites appeared, the users complained and IBM *paid* Netscape to port v2.02 to OS/2. (This was a common practice by IBM, and 3rd parties caught on and never ported to OS/2 unless IBM was greasing their palm.)
Neither Netscape or IBM maintained the Netscape 2 port for a long time. Eventually, at the start of the Mozilla effort, Netscape started offering free source licences for Netscape 4.0x, and IBM took the code and ported it themselves to OS/2.
Anyway, Netscape was never interested in supporting OS/2, and any version of Netscape that you could ever get was always ported by IBM, and (to this day, I thinK) only available on an IBM FTP server.
--
What Netscape did was worse than that. With version 4 and 80% market share at the time, they basically gave the finger to the the W3C and went and implemented a totally non-standard, totally incompatible layers-based object model that they knew was not going to get approved. They wanted to recast DHTML in their proprietary image, without even paying lipservice to the standards body. Not even Microsoft, with all thier IEisms, has been that grotesquesly proprietary.
The W3C DOM hadn't been approved yet, but Netscape's arrogance basically pushed them into Microsoft's cooperative arms. As you put it --The fact that Netscape would forgo a standard to re-implement similar functionality by using a proprietary extension is what appalled the W3C.
But the Waterloo was that Netscape's Layers implementation was horribly buggy (and still is after umteen bugfix releases), and never worked nearly well enough for anyone to develop to it. They announced that Mozilla wouldn't support layers about a year ago now, which essentially makes Netscape 4 legacy software. Meanwhile, the only sorta-stable version of their software that they've released since the 80% marketshare v3 days was version 4.72, long long after most have thrown up their hands.
Is it any wonder that web developers don't take Netscape seriously? (Well, Microsoft might be quasi-proprietary, but it's documented and it works.)That most Windows and Mac users have dropped them like a hot potato? (Well,
IE doesn't leak memory every time you click on a link.)
Netscape handed the keys to the 'dynamic' web right to Microsoft. It's not too late to keep the web 'open', but right now Microsoft is where Netscape was in 1994 -- they can implement whatever they want, and the competitiors will be expected by the user base to clone them.
--
Why is it that slashdot can work on both Netscape and IE?
Because IE cloned all of Netscape v3's "de facto" standard features. (That were only submitted to W3C after they'd been implemented.)
--
Office isn't that important (because it can be cloned), and neither are games (because by the time you have the API emulated, new game APIs will be out.)
What's important is corporate applications written in VisualBasic or Access or even FoxPro -- If you obtain "world domination", the games will come right along with it, but you'll never have world domination unless you can get onto corporate desktops, and you'll never get onto corporate desktops unless you can run their in-house stuff.
--