"What will I do to all the ISA cards with jumpers I have purchased during the years? "
Pop them in the microwave, and videotape it. Post the video on the internet for our collective entertainment. (do the video on a camcorder download it to your PC via IEEE 1394 for editing).
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I'm guessing that lots of USB 2 peripherals will be "falling back" to USB 1 speeds, whether they're on USB 1 busses or not.
You don't honestly believe that USB 2 is going to work, do you? USB 1 doesn't even work as advertised. (has anybody actually ever connected 127 devices, and gotten them to work? - I think the answer is no).
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Get rid of IDE/ATA for mass storage, go with SCSI or IEEE 1394 (actually an evolution of SCSI).
IDE/ATA is horrible. Just crap. Everyone says SCSI is more expensive - but if there was no more IDE, then not only would SCSI be able to take advantage of "Economies of Scale" like IDE has, (making it less expensive), but there'd be nothing to compare it to (making a comparison obsolete anyway). Then everyone could enjoy the benefits of SCSI; flexibility, no drain on your CPU, scalability, compatability, etc.
Everyone complains about "SCSI Voodoo", but that's nothing compared to the virgin sacrifices I've had to make to get IDE to work (adding drives, doing the master/slave thing, trying to get multiple CD-ROMs or CD-ROM/Burner setups to work right, trying to find spots in crammed cases to PUT IDE drives, since there's no option to go external, as with SCSI).
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
USB 2.0 is just intel vapor trying to scare vendors away from IEEE 1394.
Face it, by the time such a beast is actually delivered, Fire Wire will be twice as fast (probably long before that).
USB vs. IEEE 1394: These are two busses for two very different purposes. Nobody is suggesting people connect mouses and printers to IEEE 1394 - why the fsck to people want to shoehorn mass storage and other high-bandwidth applications to USB? It's just not practical, and won't work, no matter how many compelling press releases intel foists on the media.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Shit. I wasted my college years on a chick who dumped me for a construction worker, 2 months before I graduated.
I dated others, moped for 4 more years.
Then I hooked up with a former freind from college, had been married, needed a date to go to a mutual friends' wedding. We got drunk, etc. etc.
Now married, 6 years, 2 kids and one dog later. No regrets.
College really IS the big opportunity, because after that, it was really bad, in my tight circle of friends, watching the chicks that I really wasn't interested in, and thinking they were my only options, and watching them one by one pair up and marry off. So things got really depressing - things may not work out WHILE you're at college, but they may afterwards. In fact, look up as many old college/HS freinds as you can.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Here we have the computer. The medium that science says - one day, will replace the human mind, proving that there is no divine spark, no soul, that humans are simply biological machines. And that these biological machines are slaves to the laws of chemistry and physics. I've even heard it said that what we call romantic "love", is a biochemical play between two animals of the same species (hopefully), and that when one finds attraction to another, it's because of chemical signals in our brains and glands.
Yet, these two people fell in love - through nothing more than the exchange of information over a computer network. No organic molecules. No scents. No hormones.
What if, you had met IRL, and found out this person was lying, and was a man? (well, the lying part would probably kill the love right there). Or what if this person had been fugly? Or smelled funny? You say the love happened BEFORE the F2F.
Well, words, just thoughts, ideas alone did it. Call me a romantic.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Ultimately, warefare is more about economic might than military might. Over the decades that the US and USSR fought the "cold war", maybe a few shots were fired, definately a lot of proxies suffered (Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Viet Nam, . . the list really goes on and on), but in terms of direct US-USSR troop conflict, not much action - but the US (NATO) won, because we had the economic power to manufacture enough missiles to scare the bejeezus out of them, and cause them to manufacture just as many missiles, which caused their weaker economy to fizzle.
Thats why you cut power lines, bomb factories, blockade ports, etc.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I saw a 20/20 episode where some US helicopter pilot was ordered to "chase-off" a suspected Soviet spy-ship, and they used some kind of experimental laser on him, which fried his retinas. The damage wasn't immediate. He returned to base, and later, got severe pain and swelling symptoms, and now he can see, but not good enough to drive, let alone fly. He's extremely light sensitive, has severe headaches, and the vision is degrading further over time.
Nasty weapon.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
while we're at it, how about a general Ask Slashdot discussion, that purges stuff over a week old (yet archives a digest of comments rated higher than a certain number).
This thing could be ongoing, and people can ask pathetic newbie questions, here, where there is a high concentration of Linux knowlege, and expect answers. Sort of a Linux/*BSD tech support forum, where answers are supplied voluntarily, and more knowlegable, nicer folks can earn karma in their spare time.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Hell, if radar guns for catching speeders doesn't violate the Constitution, (and I've heard compelling arguments otherwise), then this sure as hell doesn't.
Passive versus Active information gathering. Hell, you're BROADCASTING your private information. It's like, if a cop walks by your house and hears a woman screaming, he's got probable cause to bust in.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
While it's probably true that there are no *hidden* APIs that give Microsoft's applications developers some secret advantage over ISVs, there IS another very significant factor.
Ask anyone who has spend any amount of time developing apps for Windows, and they'll tell you that the documentation sucks. This could be on purpose, or by accident, but quite often, you'll use an API that doesn't behave as documented, and there are "tricks" that developers learn about these API, but with each update of MFC, these behaviors change.
Now, obviously, the company that produces the API, has a significant advantage in that their developers are far more intimate with the funny behaviors of API. Now, either Microsoft doesn't document these things well on purpose, or Microsoft just doesn't put as much effort into the documentation as they do the code (the same criticism can be made of many Open Source projects). In either case, folks OUTSIDE of Microsoft, developing applications with MSVC++, are going to have a harder time of things. If something doesn't behave right, it's a call to developer support - hopefully a constructive answer? But for the Microsoft employee, it's: "hey, why did it do THIS?" "go ask Jimmy, he wrote the API" "OIC!".
In effect, you have "secret APIs", which is probably why this myth has persisted and spread like it has. Now, there DEFINATELY was a "secret API" kind of technique used at some point (trial of Caldera vs. Microsoft: MS used code to check to see if Windows was installed on top of DR-DOS, and if it was, would error out with some wierd FUDly message - this trial was just recently ruled to go to jury). But as you said, this sort of thing could not possibly be widespread, because people talk.
But these ex-Microsoft employees can leave the company, maybe some are torqued-off, but they'll just chuckle at how badly documented MFC is, and we have to chalk it up to ineptitude, rather than malice.
Now, there was some talk about the remedy for Microsoft being FORCING them to open their source code and document all the "secret APIs", but in reality, we're talking about ineptitude here. How do you legally force someone to "do something right" when they're incapable. I think that getting down to this level in the courtroom would be tedious indeed. And with 140+ million LOC, it's not something I would expect ANY legal system could get through in my lifetime, so I don't expect to ever see it.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
A lot of people have made some interesting "what if" statements about IE vs. Navigator - but I think that the most important factor in Navigator's decline and Netscape's demise was the fact that MS gave IE away. If MS remained in the same price range, or even charged what it cost to develop (kind of an oxymoron for software, because it can be copied at no cost), Netscape would still be around, and Navigator would be a far, far better browser than it is today, and IE would probably be much more standards compliant. However, the internet would probably have about 20% of the users it has now.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Spyglass owned Mosaic at the time, (or at least the part that MS bought from them for IE) and they're still around, doing disgustingly well. Supposedly, there's very little of the original Spyglass-owned code left in IE.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
This ASP thing has been Ballmer's wet dream for a couple of years now. It's one of the reasons they invested so heavily in IE, and MAD (Microsoft Active Directory).
However, this is a thing that the software companies are pushing for, and the analysts that are in their pockets.
I suspect that most people will not buy into this idea. It's an issue of trust, and "having the biggest dick" (fastest desktop machine). While the ASP model may be adopted roundly as an internal corporate thing, the vast majority of users out there will not adopt this stuff if they have the choice. It is bad, economically for consumers. It's like the difference between owning and leasing a car. Or owning your home and renting it. The data security issues go on top of that.
Unfortunately, like I said, if there's a choice, consumers won't buy into this - however, the way the software industry looks today, there's not much choice out there. Software vendors only have to tweak their pricing structures to make "renting" more attractive (short term), and owning economically unfeasible (like, when was the last hobbyist you talked to who actually BOUGHT a copy of Photoshop? I know ONLY professionals who pay the exorbitant fees Adobe charges). So, MS Office = $30/month through ASP, or you can BUY a copy for $1500. Don't like it? So? - Intuit. Quicken via the web = $30 a month, except for April, where they'll charge $50 because of increased demand, CD, $1000 (or more likely, unavailable).
Ballmer would just love to become a software slumlord, rather than a salesman. It's all about steady revenue streams, and captive audiences.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I don't care if ATI puts 2, or 4, or 8, or 50 buzillion processors on their card, and ship it tomorrow. It will still suck rocks if we don't see a stable, fast driver for it until 2001 (which is roughly what has happened to the Rage 128: released fall of 98, and we STILL don't have a stable, fast driver, and the one for the Macintosh it ships on, is even worse!)
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Because Mac users are in the same boat. We take all kinds of crap about how bad our OS is, how it's memory management is archaic, no multithreading, etc. etc. (I could go on, I won't), and pretty much any technical Mac fan out there is going to cite Mac OS X. But the fact is, OS X is vapor right now (consumer version - and server version doesn't exactly live up to "the promise" of what OS X will be).
I believe that this time period, the previous year, to a year from now, is pretty tough on all freedom-loving, cross-platform advocating nerds out there. But when the waiting is over, we'll be happy. Very happy. I think that probably Moz has a bit further to go than OS X, but in one year's time, I will be ecstatic to run Mozilla on my G4 Power Mac running OS X. (likely dual booting Linux PPC). And I'll never look back to this dark time when I was running Nutscrape 4.61 on Mac OS 8.6 (which is REALLY way better than 7.5).
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
You've bought into Microsoft hype. ". . . uses embedded COM objects in an incredibly powerful and interactive way." chuckle, chuckle. You sound like you could be writing articles for ZDNet.
IE5 may lack a lot of the memory glitches and rendering bugs of the old Netscape, but that's mainly because Microsoft was able to pour unlimited funds into developing it. Do you know why Win98 was really Win95 with a few minor bug fixes, and the browser sewn in? Because when it looked like Netscape's Aurora project (admittedly turned out to be FUDdly vapor) was a threat, they pulled half the developers off of Win98, and put them onto the IE4 team. Of course, NO other company in the world has a Desktop OS monopoly, so no other company could possibly pull up the kind of resources Microsoft can. So IE has turned out to be a quality, highly optomized product.
However, MS doesn't necessarily put that kind of effort into all of it's products. COM, is basically designed to deter what MS feels is a low threat. CORBA. And Java, of course. But COM is still a big piece of POO. COM is basically OLE, renamed. There are TONS of problems with COM and especially DCOM. Without revealing the identity of my employer, we had spent about $20m on the development of a major distributed application. Now if I said exactly what it did, I would reveal the product, and my employer, which would be politically unsound. But anyway, after the product went into beta, we discovered significan problems, that were traced back to DCOM. Thinking we were doing something wrong, we had MS come onsite and give our developers a week of intense training. Our developers found out; gee, we weren't doing anything wrong, we had it right. A few things were tried and tweaked, and there were still some problems. Updating service packs fixed some things, broke others, and ignored the major glaring issues. (random disconnects, security issues, uncontrollable error messages spewed into the server event log when nothing was wrong). We have dozens of open issues with Microsoft developer support, and have been told, even on many of the severe ones, that they won't be fixed anytime soon (they've got a lot of effort focussed on ActiveDirectory). So, 9 months ago, they decided - SCREW Microsoft, we had to port our server to Solaris anyway, and there was no cheap implementation we could use on Unix, so we yanked the whole DCOM architecture out of the product, and engineered our own from the ground up. Oh, the product would WORK with the MS DCOM in place, but we would have spent a fortune supporting the damn thing. NOW, our company has control over the bugs, so we can fix things that are a high priority to us. It was expensive, but it would have been MUCH less expensive had we not wasted our time on this Microsoft garbage in the first place.
So, don't buy the hype about DCOM, and COM, which really isn't all that relevant to the browser wars anyway.
Your other assertion, that IE will supplant all the alternatives on the web - IS WRONG. IE is not cross platform, and most of the nifty compelling features don't work on the few other IE platforms other than Windows. People who are not using Windows Mac or Solaris, will NOT use IE. Period. they don't have the choice. Windows can not, and will never be THE OS that is all things to all people. No OS can be that, no matter how hard the riches person in the world WISHES it was so. So it is not a matter of short time, or even infinite time. It will never happen.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Slashdot Mirror
"What will I do to all the ISA cards with jumpers I have purchased during the years? "
Pop them in the microwave, and videotape it. Post the video on the internet for our collective entertainment. (do the video on a camcorder download it to your PC via IEEE 1394 for editing).
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I'm guessing that lots of USB 2 peripherals will be "falling back" to USB 1 speeds, whether they're on USB 1 busses or not.
You don't honestly believe that USB 2 is going to work, do you? USB 1 doesn't even work as advertised. (has anybody actually ever connected 127 devices, and gotten them to work? - I think the answer is no).
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Get rid of IDE/ATA for mass storage, go with SCSI or IEEE 1394 (actually an evolution of SCSI).
IDE/ATA is horrible. Just crap. Everyone says SCSI is more expensive - but if there was no more IDE, then not only would SCSI be able to take advantage of "Economies of Scale" like IDE has, (making it less expensive), but there'd be nothing to compare it to (making a comparison obsolete anyway). Then everyone could enjoy the benefits of SCSI; flexibility, no drain on your CPU, scalability, compatability, etc.
Everyone complains about "SCSI Voodoo", but that's nothing compared to the virgin sacrifices I've had to make to get IDE to work (adding drives, doing the master/slave thing, trying to get multiple CD-ROMs or CD-ROM/Burner setups to work right, trying to find spots in crammed cases to PUT IDE drives, since there's no option to go external, as with SCSI).
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
USB 2.0 is just intel vapor trying to scare vendors away from IEEE 1394.
Face it, by the time such a beast is actually delivered, Fire Wire will be twice as fast (probably long before that).
USB vs. IEEE 1394: These are two busses for two very different purposes.
Nobody is suggesting people connect mouses and printers to IEEE 1394 - why the fsck to people want to shoehorn mass storage and other high-bandwidth applications to USB? It's just not practical, and won't work, no matter how many compelling press releases intel foists on the media.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
um,
creepy?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Shit man. Ouch. Say hi to the Thylacines for me.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Shit. I wasted my college years on a chick who dumped me for a construction worker, 2 months before I graduated.
I dated others, moped for 4 more years.
Then I hooked up with a former freind from college, had been married, needed a date to go to a mutual friends' wedding. We got drunk, etc. etc.
Now married, 6 years, 2 kids and one dog later. No regrets.
College really IS the big opportunity, because after that, it was really bad, in my tight circle of friends, watching the chicks that I really wasn't interested in, and thinking they were my only options, and watching them one by one pair up and marry off. So things got really depressing - things may not work out WHILE you're at college, but they may afterwards. In fact, look up as many old college/HS freinds as you can.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
(Spock's voice):
Fascinating.
Here we have the computer. The medium that science says - one day, will replace the human mind, proving that there is no divine spark, no soul, that humans are simply biological machines.
And that these biological machines are slaves to the laws of chemistry and physics. I've even heard it said that what we call romantic "love", is a biochemical play between two animals of the same species (hopefully), and that when one finds attraction to another, it's because of chemical signals in our brains and glands.
Yet, these two people fell in love - through nothing more than the exchange of information over a computer network. No organic molecules. No scents. No hormones.
What if, you had met IRL, and found out this person was lying, and was a man? (well, the lying part would probably kill the love right there). Or what if this person had been fugly? Or smelled funny? You say the love happened BEFORE the F2F.
Well, words, just thoughts, ideas alone did it.
Call me a romantic.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Ultimately, warefare is more about economic might than military might. Over the decades that the US and USSR fought the "cold war", maybe a few shots were fired, definately a lot of proxies suffered (Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Viet Nam, . . the list really goes on and on), but in terms of direct US-USSR troop conflict, not much action - but the US (NATO) won, because we had the economic power to manufacture enough missiles to scare the bejeezus out of them, and cause them to manufacture just as many missiles, which caused their weaker economy to fizzle.
Thats why you cut power lines, bomb factories, blockade ports, etc.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I saw a 20/20 episode where some US helicopter pilot was ordered to "chase-off" a suspected Soviet spy-ship, and they used some kind of experimental laser on him, which fried his retinas. The damage wasn't immediate. He returned to base, and later, got severe pain and swelling symptoms, and now he can see, but not good enough to drive, let alone fly. He's extremely light sensitive, has severe headaches, and the vision is degrading further over time.
Nasty weapon.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
You're not a humanist, are you?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
while we're at it, how about a general Ask Slashdot discussion, that purges stuff over a week old (yet archives a digest of comments rated higher than a certain number).
This thing could be ongoing, and people can ask pathetic newbie questions, here, where there is a high concentration of Linux knowlege, and expect answers. Sort of a Linux/*BSD tech support forum, where answers are supplied voluntarily, and more knowlegable, nicer folks can earn karma in their spare time.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
To my wife, opening the passenger door used to mean;
"I know, I know, my car's a piece of shit. Someday I'll get around to fixing that damn handle."
Luckily, that car suffered a case of spontaneous combustion.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Hell, if radar guns for catching speeders doesn't violate the Constitution, (and I've heard compelling arguments otherwise), then this sure as hell doesn't.
Passive versus Active information gathering. Hell, you're BROADCASTING your private information. It's like, if a cop walks by your house and hears a woman screaming, he's got probable cause to bust in.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I can just picture President Buchanan's thugs cruising up and down suburban streets in an unmarked van, looking for pr0n collectors. . .
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
well, these kinds of things happen to "singles bar" couples too. . .
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
While it's probably true that there are no *hidden* APIs that give Microsoft's applications developers some secret advantage over ISVs, there IS another very significant factor.
Ask anyone who has spend any amount of time developing apps for Windows, and they'll tell you that the documentation sucks. This could be on purpose, or by accident, but quite often, you'll use an API that doesn't behave as documented, and there are "tricks" that developers learn about these API, but with each update of MFC, these behaviors change.
Now, obviously, the company that produces the API, has a significant advantage in that their developers are far more intimate with the funny behaviors of API. Now, either Microsoft doesn't document these things well on purpose, or Microsoft just doesn't put as much effort into the documentation as they do the code (the same criticism can be made of many Open Source projects). In either case, folks OUTSIDE of Microsoft, developing applications with MSVC++, are going to have a harder time of things. If something doesn't behave right, it's a call to developer support - hopefully a constructive answer? But for the Microsoft employee, it's: "hey, why did it do THIS?" "go ask Jimmy, he wrote the API" "OIC!".
In effect, you have "secret APIs", which is probably why this myth has persisted and spread like it has. Now, there DEFINATELY was a "secret API" kind of technique used at some point (trial of Caldera vs. Microsoft: MS used code to check to see if Windows was installed on top of DR-DOS, and if it was, would error out with some wierd FUDly message - this trial was just recently ruled to go to jury). But as you said, this sort of thing could not possibly be widespread, because people talk.
But these ex-Microsoft employees can leave the company, maybe some are torqued-off, but they'll just chuckle at how badly documented MFC is, and we have to chalk it up to ineptitude, rather than malice.
Now, there was some talk about the remedy for Microsoft being FORCING them to open their source code and document all the "secret APIs", but in reality, we're talking about ineptitude here. How do you legally force someone to "do something right" when they're incapable. I think that getting down to this level in the courtroom would be tedious indeed. And with 140+ million LOC, it's not something I would expect ANY legal system could get through in my lifetime, so I don't expect to ever see it.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
A lot of people have made some interesting "what if" statements about IE vs. Navigator - but I think that the most important factor in Navigator's decline and Netscape's demise was the fact that MS gave IE away. If MS remained in the same price range, or even charged what it cost to develop (kind of an oxymoron for software, because it can be copied at no cost), Netscape would still be around, and Navigator would be a far, far better browser than it is today, and IE would probably be much more standards compliant. However, the internet would probably have about 20% of the users it has now.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Spyglass owned Mosaic at the time, (or at least the part that MS bought from them for IE) and they're still around, doing disgustingly well. Supposedly, there's very little of the original Spyglass-owned code left in IE.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
This ASP thing has been Ballmer's wet dream for a couple of years now. It's one of the reasons they invested so heavily in IE, and MAD (Microsoft Active Directory).
However, this is a thing that the software companies are pushing for, and the analysts that are in their pockets.
I suspect that most people will not buy into this idea. It's an issue of trust, and "having the biggest dick" (fastest desktop machine). While the ASP model may be adopted roundly as an internal corporate thing, the vast majority of users out there will not adopt this stuff if they have the choice. It is bad, economically for consumers. It's like the difference between owning and leasing a car. Or owning your home and renting it. The data security issues go on top of that.
Unfortunately, like I said, if there's a choice, consumers won't buy into this - however, the way the software industry looks today, there's not much choice out there. Software vendors only have to tweak their pricing structures to make "renting" more attractive (short term), and owning economically unfeasible (like, when was the last hobbyist you talked to who actually BOUGHT a copy of Photoshop? I know ONLY professionals who pay the exorbitant fees Adobe charges). So, MS Office = $30/month through ASP, or you can BUY a copy for $1500. Don't like it? So? - Intuit. Quicken via the web = $30 a month, except for April, where they'll charge $50 because of increased demand, CD, $1000 (or more likely, unavailable).
Ballmer would just love to become a software slumlord, rather than a salesman. It's all about steady revenue streams, and captive audiences.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I don't care if ATI puts 2, or 4, or 8, or 50 buzillion processors on their card, and ship it tomorrow. It will still suck rocks if we don't see a stable, fast driver for it until 2001 (which is roughly what has happened to the Rage 128: released fall of 98, and we STILL don't have a stable, fast driver, and the one for the Macintosh it ships on, is even worse!)
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
that's exactly what I hate about Opera too.
They better not implement MDI for the Mac and Linux versions - oh, I'll probably run Moz anyway.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I like how you boldfaced will like that.
Because Mac users are in the same boat. We take all kinds of crap about how bad our OS is, how it's memory management is archaic, no multithreading, etc. etc. (I could go on, I won't), and pretty much any technical Mac fan out there is going to cite Mac OS X. But the fact is, OS X is vapor right now (consumer version - and server version doesn't exactly live up to "the promise" of what OS X will be).
I believe that this time period, the previous year, to a year from now, is pretty tough on all freedom-loving, cross-platform advocating nerds out there. But when the waiting is over, we'll be happy. Very happy. I think that probably Moz has a bit further to go than OS X, but in one year's time, I will be ecstatic to run Mozilla on my G4 Power Mac running OS X. (likely dual booting Linux PPC). And I'll never look back to this dark time when I was running Nutscrape 4.61 on Mac OS 8.6 (which is REALLY way better than 7.5).
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
It's not a completely URL-based operating system. Explorer.exe was hacked to give you URL access.
Try using a DOS shell. It's not only NOT URL based, it's still fucking NETBIOS based. Lan Manager anyone?
New Technology my hairy ass.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
You've bought into Microsoft hype. ". . . uses embedded COM objects in an incredibly powerful and interactive way." chuckle, chuckle. You sound like you could be writing articles for ZDNet.
IE5 may lack a lot of the memory glitches and rendering bugs of the old Netscape, but that's mainly because Microsoft was able to pour unlimited funds into developing it. Do you know why Win98 was really Win95 with a few minor bug fixes, and the browser sewn in? Because when it looked like Netscape's Aurora project (admittedly turned out to be FUDdly vapor) was a threat, they pulled half the developers off of Win98, and put them onto the IE4 team. Of course, NO other company in the world has a Desktop OS monopoly, so no other company could possibly pull up the kind of resources Microsoft can. So IE has turned out to be a quality, highly optomized product.
However, MS doesn't necessarily put that kind of effort into all of it's products. COM, is basically designed to deter what MS feels is a low threat. CORBA. And Java, of course. But COM is still a big piece of POO. COM is basically OLE, renamed. There are TONS of problems with COM and especially DCOM.
Without revealing the identity of my employer, we had spent about $20m on the development of a major distributed application. Now if I said exactly what it did, I would reveal the product, and my employer, which would be politically unsound. But anyway, after the product went into beta, we discovered significan problems, that were traced back to DCOM. Thinking we were doing something wrong, we had MS come onsite and give our developers a week of intense training. Our developers found out; gee, we weren't doing anything wrong, we had it right. A few things were tried and tweaked, and there were still some problems. Updating service packs fixed some things, broke others, and ignored the major glaring issues. (random disconnects, security issues, uncontrollable error messages spewed into the server event log when nothing was wrong). We have dozens of open issues with Microsoft developer support, and have been told, even on many of the severe ones, that they won't be fixed anytime soon (they've got a lot of effort focussed on ActiveDirectory). So, 9 months ago, they decided - SCREW Microsoft, we had to port our server to Solaris anyway, and there was no cheap implementation we could use on Unix, so we yanked the whole DCOM architecture out of the product, and engineered our own from the ground up. Oh, the product would WORK with the MS DCOM in place, but we would have spent a fortune supporting the damn thing. NOW, our company has control over the bugs, so we can fix things that are a high priority to us. It was expensive, but it would have been MUCH less expensive had we not wasted our time on this Microsoft garbage in the first place.
So, don't buy the hype about DCOM, and COM, which really isn't all that relevant to the browser wars anyway.
Your other assertion, that IE will supplant all the alternatives on the web - IS WRONG. IE is not cross platform, and most of the nifty compelling features don't work on the few other IE platforms other than Windows. People who are not using Windows Mac or Solaris, will NOT use IE. Period. they don't have the choice. Windows can not, and will never be THE OS that is all things to all people. No OS can be that, no matter how hard the riches person in the world WISHES it was so. So it is not a matter of short time, or even infinite time. It will never happen.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".