And of course people change what standard they use too. The US uses the English system with pounds, whereas the rest of the world uses the metric system with grams. We're all talking about the same thing, just using different standards. That's a difference in standard's that's completely incompatible (unlike upgrades to existing standards which are mostly backwards compatible). Of course, ideally the US would change their standard over to the metric system, but like that's going to happen (there are of course some exceptions, 2 liter bottles of soda and stuff like that).
We have `netstat -anp`... they have... ummm... service manager?
Just FYI, but under windows you have the equivalent command but instead of "netstat -anp" it's "netstat -ano". I realize the differences between these 2 commands may be great, but the command does still exist.:)
Of course, netstat and service manager aren't the same tools, because netstat is useful for more than just seeing what Service's you're running - after all, not everything in service manager opens a port, and not everything that opens a port has to be in service manager.
Looking at service manager is really more like looking in/etc/rc.d/... (or wherever your distribution puts your init scripts at) than looking at netstat...
And just FYI, you'll find most of your normal unix networking utilities are available at the command line in windows. There's ping, and tracert, ipconfig, route, nslookup, etc... There's nothing more fun then telling some absolute novice "All right, now go to Start->Run and type in 'command' and enter. now type ping hostname, ok, let's try tracert hostname. What's it say? ". Ahh, so much fun...
Just recently, IE 5.5 has decided to scroll up from where it should be whenever I hit back.
It's quite possible that IE is simply reloading the page and going back to the same height as it was previously. I see this on here a lot because so many people post in such a short amount of time...
Another conspiracy dispelled, and someone even saw your post...
why not use a NON-proprietary standard instead of MP3 or WMA???? Why does everything have to be so controlled and so restrictive? They've obviously got a decent idea here (putting compressed digital copies of the CDDA tracks on the same disc as the music), but they've got their heads up their asses in the implementation.
It's not like CD's/CD players are non-proprietary either [see here], so complaining about the compression technology being proprietary seems a little bit off.
The difference here of course is that no matter what happens CD players and CDs aren't going to become free (because they have physical material costs), so no one notices that they're paying licensing fees. Of course, with the open source crowd they expect everything software to be free, even if a lot of research went into it to make it exist (and someone actually, *gasp*, intends to make some money off of that research).
The whole idea of college 50 years ago was to expand your horizons and try different things, maybe even as little as 25 years ago actually. Now, try to get a professional job outside of sales without a college education; it can't be done. To me it has become another requirement of a job. My grandfather never finished high school and was the manager of a number of Levins stores starting in 1955. You can't get a job managing a McDonald's without a college education anymore.
I think you could probably get a job managing a McDonald's without a college education - it'd just require that you "work your way up", probably much like your grandfather did. What it basically comes down to is you have to prove your competence somehow - whether that be by completing college ('if they could do that for four years, they must be responsible') or by proving your responsibility day after day (and of course after you do it at one place, other people will believe you can do it based upon past performance).
Although I can't say that this is necessarily true for McDonald's, I have certianly seen it happen at other places (mainly pizza places, where I've worked at many of throughout high school and college).
Oh, we're there already. There's a case being appealed now (can't find a link) where a paroled pedophile was found to have a manuscript in his home describing a fantasy of torturing and molesting children. He wrote it, and never distributed it, and is now accused of violating his parole.
There is a difference of course between a completely free person and a parolee's freedom being restricted. A parolee is still in the process of being punished - and therefore their rights are being curtailed in ways which are unacceptable for the rest of us. So this seems rather reasonable. Would you want a paroled bank robber to be able to hold onto the blueprints for a bank? It seems like a reasonable restriction.
Narually after parol ends, and they've finished their time going through the criminal justice process, they should have all their rights restored though. But until that's done I think we can treat them however we want (as long as it's not cruel and/or unusual).
I don't see security updates on the kernel every week. Unless I have had the urge I have never had to recompile the kernel on my linux box. Even to get things like XFS onto the box.
Try looking at the change logs for 2.2.14, 2.2.15, and 2.2.16. The most important of these of course was 2.2.16 which included fixes for both local and network exploits. The exploits in 2.2.14 & 2.2.15 could only be exploited by local users it looks like. From the release notes:
"Linux 2.2.16 is primarily a security release. It includes fixes for both local and network related bugs. Upgrading is strongly recommended. "
They're tanking, even more so than others. Compare to Sun or even Red Hat.
Uhm, not more so than Sun, but Red Hat's doing better than either of them. here's the 1 month chart of all of them and here's the one week chart. For the week RHAT's up 20%, MSFT is down about 2 or 3%, and SUNW's down about 12%.
Ahhh, It's all short term changes anyway, and everyone invests for the long term, right?
Yep, I wrote a chess program in Flash where the board was all done in flash and it posted back to the server to get the computer's move. The way it communicates back to the server is it sends a stream like var1=x&var2=y&var3=z... back to the server, and the server responds with a like stream back to the client (what would be really nice would be a nice SOAP interface... ahh, one can dream.)
Actually there are a few things where Java is actually better. The best example I can think of is the "mirror pond" style applet which takes an image and makes a certian area of it have a water rippling/reflection look. So you take a picture of a lake and you have the water rippling. This could all be done in Flash I guess, but you're probably going to end up with a multi-frame image (a glorified animated GIF) or really crappy looking line art.
To make sure I stay on topic to the discussion at hand, the reason not to have a billion scripting languages available for browsers is security. Java implements a security model which gives it limited access to the user's computer. Flash essentially does the same thing (by simpling not providing any dangerous functionality).
So this means to implement languages for a browser one would need to redesign every language to have a security model, or hack out the dangerous portions of the programming languages for the web based version, or something along those lines.
In related news MS's.NET follows the Java idea of using a security system - so a language implemented to compile down to the.NET framework will use it's security model, and you could therefore use those 'applets' in your web pages all you want. You'd get to use Perl or Python or whatever, you just gotta compile it down to MSIL first.:)
Look at Internet Explorer for example. I've used this for 5 years (until recently as Mozilla build have greatly improved) and I've always wondered why the hell when I type something stupid it forwarded me so some asp on msn.com. I would have loved to edit that out of the registry just because it has that potential to become MSEvil 1.0 but I never could find it. (I don't believe it's in the registry, it appears to be hard coded into IE, don't take my word on it though) About two weeks ago when I typed something stupid it reports it to MSN and tells me what I most likely wanted and does a MSN search. I'm not running MSN Explorer (hell no!), I thought I was running just plain old Internet Explorer but it appears I can't run that anymore..
That would be the "Search from Address Bar" option that you're objecting to. The option is set in Tools->Internet Options->Advanced, and there's "Search From Address Bar" with a "When Searching" option with 4 choices, one of those is Do not search from the address bar. Or that's at least the way it is in IE 6, I would assume it's not a new option though...
that's what in it for you. hailstorm is essentially a platform to host components (like EJBs). passport makes it possible for components in hailstorm to exchange exposed data so that they can interoperate.
Actually hailstorm is a set of web services (which is SOAP over HTTP) which are basically a set of core services (like calendaring, document storage, a wallet and other stuff - see this). The platform to host components like EJBs is really more what ASP.NET/.NET Frameworks are for (which of course includes C# and all that fun stuff (there's a quick summary here).
an example. if your bank uses hailstorm and you authenticate with passport and amazon.com uses hailstorm and passport authentication - you would be able to (once your've authenticated with passport) just click buy and amazon's components could invoke components on your bank with your passport id and say "give me the money now".
Well, this could be done through a web service, but it doesn't necessarily have to be hailstorm. For example, your bank could have a web service running on their Linux box with Apache, or thier IBM mainframe, or whatever... They just need to communicate via SOAP, and it's documented and standardized. It's all XML, so no one should have too many problems with it.
i know you can save your profile and everything on amazon and so you may still ask "so what's in it for me". that was just the first example that came to mind and if you can see the advantages of such an interoperative infrastructure then here. [thinkgeek.com]
And so the profile is one of the Hailstorm web serivces ("myProfile").
and, yes, there are probably risks and stuff involved but lets let it evolve and give it a chance.
It appears that this window.open disabling isn't just on/off though. This one sounds more like it turns it off at certian points when it's most annoying - on page loads/unloads, setInternal / timeout scripts, etc...
This way you'd be left with the times when popups are good (eg, in an a href/onclick pair - one case is popping up an enlarged window w/o toolbars, menus, and all that clutter).
Oh, yeah, and of course Verisign runs a really secure operation. What could be worse than issuing digital signatures for the company who provides 90% of all operating systems? Read this if you want to see how good Verisign is.
This was #1 for "Verisign fucks up" on Google. Of course, a search for "Verisign screws up" yields this article at geek.com coming in at #4 about MS & VeriSign working together on ".NET"... So, it looks like your desire to see Verisign involved is happening:)
Of course, the List price at Amazon.com is 319.99, so you're saving $70. My guess is that when XP is released you'll see a price below the list price too. They may choose to sell it at full price at first, but eventually they'll lower the price on it (just as they have with W2k).
Now tell me how you'd go about comparing the settings on the two to see what's different? It's a god damn pain in the ass. You can't compare the two side by side, and there's a handful of entirely separate panels to check for differences, each with sub-panels.
You can just look directly in the metabase. You can use a command line tool to do it, or you can use a program called MetaEdit. It's Q240225 in MS's knowledge base thingy. I had the pleasure of admining an NT box for a while...
It's not just an emotional thing. There are still some places where you can get te old, good stuff - they really did make it differently back then: Just last week, I grabbed a 12 oz. *returnable* glass Coke bottle from Mexico at a Chevron station that sits by itself somewhere between Smithville and Bastrop on US 71 between Houston and Austin. I'm not even a serious Coca-Cola fan, but this was *good* - the taste of Coke I remember as a child: the old, original Coke formula, not "Classic" which never was the same.
Where's the real stuff? There's nothing here that even resembles a GUI or database classes? There is a string, so I guess I could build a console app with it that outputs "Hello World".
You can find all of the classes documented at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpref/html/cpref_start.asp
Here at my work we have 4 NT 4 servers with the 95/NT4 look and IE 5.5.
And why would you want that? The integrated shell into windows made the user interface good. The 95/NT shell is such a horrible, unusable piece of junk (IMHO).
The one thing that really annoys me about this though is that it's really difficult to get the good shell in NT4/95 now. You used to be able to download IE w/ ActiveDesktop and install that (which is what gives you the new shell), but that's no more. Nowadays you gotta hope you have an old copy of IE4SP2 laying around....
But to the point, I personally think the integration of IE into the OS was a good thing. If it's not obvious on it's own merits the fact that the KDE crowd has done the same should be a sign of this. I mean come on, Netscape wanted the browser to become the platform, right? The fact of the matter is that Microsoft did a vastly superior job of making the browser the platform.
shorten is a non-lossy compression algorith for music. It doesn't compress nearly as much as MP3, WMA, or OGG, but it doesn't lose any quality. Good for downloading live shows and burning 'em straigh to CD.... Hey, I should go do that now...
Uhm. I guess you think they did everything with the sound car, even play the original CD WAVs. Perhaps. It would be the best way, certainly.
This is not a good idea at all. They are judging the quality of the CODEC's, not the quality of a sound card. The best way would certianly be to convert them to format X, back to WAV, and then burn them onto a CD. For consistency sake they should probably rip the original CD as WAV also and burn that back onto a CD. They then have n burnt CD's - play them all in a good CD player.
The problem with playing them in the sound card is if it is distorting the sound quality more than the CODEC does you won't really be able to tell what's sucking - but everything would be sucking in different ways. If you play it on a CD player (which you know and trust the quality of) then you can throw out any other possible variables and only be judging the codec's.
What's wrong with having a published API so that if a competitor comes along and creates a better browser that obeys the published API, I can replace Microsoft's browser with the competitors? (Answer: that's not in Microsoft's best interest, and therefore they will not provide it to their customers - so much for being consumer-driven.)
If the API to use MSHTML isn't published then how exactly are there all these 3rd party programs that rely upon it's existence? It seems to me that it's not the fact that IE can't be replaced, it's the fact that no one has choosen to do it yet (and I'm a little surprised by that too...)
Presumably MSHTML is just used as a COM control, right? Well, one of the thing about COM controls is you don't change their interfaces from version to version. If you want more functionality you add a new interface, and that way there's never a breaking change. So where's the problem with replacing MSHTML?
What does WinAmp use to render web pages? Don't the newer versions have some annoying HTML rendering window thing in it now? I assumed it used MSHTML to do this, but I guess it's possible that they're packaging a web browser with winamp too... (wasteful, but possible, right?)
And we all know how much we're hurting for disk space these days. I think that even if IE took up 100 megs and that wasn't removed that the consumer really wouldn't be hurt. Of course, IE *doesn't* take up 100 megs, it takes up signifigantly less, but really, does the amount of space used really matter that much these days (unless it's like 1/2 a gig or something).
What I personally like is the guy who was installing Office so that people could read Word documents. I guess he never heard of the freely available Word Viewer program which is available on Microsoft's website.
What a great attitude these people have. "Gee, I fucked up by installing illegal copies of software - damn Microsoft sucks!"
Slashdot Mirror
And of course people change what standard they use too. The US uses the English system with pounds, whereas the rest of the world uses the metric system with grams. We're all talking about the same thing, just using different standards. That's a difference in standard's that's completely incompatible (unlike upgrades to existing standards which are mostly backwards compatible). Of course, ideally the US would change their standard over to the metric system, but like that's going to happen (there are of course some exceptions, 2 liter bottles of soda and stuff like that).
We have `netstat -anp`... they have... ummm... service manager?
:)
/etc/rc.d/... (or wherever your distribution puts your init scripts at) than looking at netstat...
Just FYI, but under windows you have the equivalent command but instead of "netstat -anp" it's "netstat -ano". I realize the differences between these 2 commands may be great, but the command does still exist.
Of course, netstat and service manager aren't the same tools, because netstat is useful for more than just seeing what Service's you're running - after all, not everything in service manager opens a port, and not everything that opens a port has to be in service manager.
Looking at service manager is really more like looking in
And just FYI, you'll find most of your normal unix networking utilities are available at the command line in windows. There's ping, and tracert, ipconfig, route, nslookup, etc... There's nothing more fun then telling some absolute novice "All right, now go to Start->Run and type in 'command' and enter. now type ping hostname, ok, let's try tracert hostname. What's it say? ". Ahh, so much fun...
Just recently, IE 5.5 has decided to scroll up from where it should be whenever I hit back.
It's quite possible that IE is simply reloading the page and going back to the same height as it was previously. I see this on here a lot because so many people post in such a short amount of time...
Another conspiracy dispelled, and someone even saw your post...
why not use a NON-proprietary standard instead of MP3 or WMA???? Why does everything have to be so controlled and so restrictive? They've obviously got a decent idea here (putting compressed digital copies of the CDDA tracks on the same disc as the music), but they've got their heads up their asses in the implementation.
It's not like CD's/CD players are non-proprietary either [see here], so complaining about the compression technology being proprietary seems a little bit off.
The difference here of course is that no matter what happens CD players and CDs aren't going to become free (because they have physical material costs), so no one notices that they're paying licensing fees. Of course, with the open source crowd they expect everything software to be free, even if a lot of research went into it to make it exist (and someone actually, *gasp*, intends to make some money off of that research).
The whole idea of college 50 years ago was to expand your horizons and try different things, maybe even as little as 25 years ago actually. Now, try to get a professional job outside of sales without a college education; it can't be done. To me it has become another requirement of a job. My grandfather never finished high school and was the manager of a number of Levins stores starting in 1955. You can't get a job managing a McDonald's without a college education anymore.
I think you could probably get a job managing a McDonald's without a college education - it'd just require that you "work your way up", probably much like your grandfather did. What it basically comes down to is you have to prove your competence somehow - whether that be by completing college ('if they could do that for four years, they must be responsible') or by proving your responsibility day after day (and of course after you do it at one place, other people will believe you can do it based upon past performance).
Although I can't say that this is necessarily true for McDonald's, I have certianly seen it happen at other places (mainly pizza places, where I've worked at many of throughout high school and college).
Oh, we're there already. There's a case being appealed now (can't find a link) where a paroled pedophile was found to have a manuscript in his home describing a fantasy of torturing and molesting children. He wrote it, and never distributed it, and is now accused of violating his parole.
There is a difference of course between a completely free person and a parolee's freedom being restricted. A parolee is still in the process of being punished - and therefore their rights are being curtailed in ways which are unacceptable for the rest of us. So this seems rather reasonable. Would you want a paroled bank robber to be able to hold onto the blueprints for a bank? It seems like a reasonable restriction.
Narually after parol ends, and they've finished their time going through the criminal justice process, they should have all their rights restored though. But until that's done I think we can treat them however we want (as long as it's not cruel and/or unusual).
I don't see security updates on the kernel every week. Unless I have had the urge I have never had to recompile the kernel on my linux box. Even to get things like XFS onto the box.
Try looking at the change logs for 2.2.14, 2.2.15, and 2.2.16. The most important of these of course was 2.2.16 which included fixes for both local and network exploits. The exploits in 2.2.14 & 2.2.15 could only be exploited by local users it looks like. From the release notes:
"Linux 2.2.16 is primarily a security release. It includes fixes for both local and network related bugs. Upgrading is strongly recommended. "
They're tanking, even more so than others. Compare to Sun or even Red Hat.
Uhm, not more so than Sun, but Red Hat's doing better than either of them. here's the 1 month chart of all of them and here's the one week chart. For the week RHAT's up 20%, MSFT is down about 2 or 3%, and SUNW's down about 12%.
Ahhh, It's all short term changes anyway, and everyone invests for the long term, right?
Yep, I wrote a chess program in Flash where the board was all done in flash and it posted back to the server to get the computer's move. The way it communicates back to the server is it sends a stream like var1=x&var2=y&var3=z... back to the server, and the server responds with a like stream back to the client (what would be really nice would be a nice SOAP interface... ahh, one can dream.)
Actually there are a few things where Java is actually better. The best example I can think of is the "mirror pond" style applet which takes an image and makes a certian area of it have a water rippling/reflection look. So you take a picture of a lake and you have the water rippling. This could all be done in Flash I guess, but you're probably going to end up with a multi-frame image (a glorified animated GIF) or really crappy looking line art.
.NET follows the Java idea of using a security system - so a language implemented to compile down to the .NET framework will use it's security model, and you could therefore use those 'applets' in your web pages all you want. You'd get to use Perl or Python or whatever, you just gotta compile it down to MSIL first. :)
To make sure I stay on topic to the discussion at hand, the reason not to have a billion scripting languages available for browsers is security. Java implements a security model which gives it limited access to the user's computer. Flash essentially does the same thing (by simpling not providing any dangerous functionality).
So this means to implement languages for a browser one would need to redesign every language to have a security model, or hack out the dangerous portions of the programming languages for the web based version, or something along those lines.
In related news MS's
Look at Internet Explorer for example. I've used this for 5 years (until recently as Mozilla build have greatly improved) and I've always wondered why the hell when I type something stupid it forwarded me so some asp on msn.com. I would have loved to edit that out of the registry just because it has that potential to become MSEvil 1.0 but I never could find it. (I don't believe it's in the registry, it appears to be hard coded into IE, don't take my word on it though) About two weeks ago when I typed something stupid it reports it to MSN and tells me what I most likely wanted and does a MSN search. I'm not running MSN Explorer (hell no!), I thought I was running just plain old Internet Explorer but it appears I can't run that anymore..
That would be the "Search from Address Bar" option that you're objecting to. The option is set in Tools->Internet Options->Advanced, and there's "Search From Address Bar" with a "When Searching" option with 4 choices, one of those is Do not search from the address bar. Or that's at least the way it is in IE 6, I would assume it's not a new option though...
that's what in it for you. hailstorm is essentially a platform to host components (like EJBs). passport makes it possible for components in hailstorm to exchange exposed data so that they can interoperate.
Actually hailstorm is a set of web services (which is SOAP over HTTP) which are basically a set of core services (like calendaring, document storage, a wallet and other stuff - see this). The platform to host components like EJBs is really more what ASP.NET/.NET Frameworks are for (which of course includes C# and all that fun stuff (there's a quick summary here).
an example. if your bank uses hailstorm and you authenticate with passport and amazon.com uses hailstorm and passport authentication - you would be able to (once your've authenticated with passport) just click buy and amazon's components could invoke components on your bank with your passport id and say "give me the money now".
Well, this could be done through a web service, but it doesn't necessarily have to be hailstorm. For example, your bank could have a web service running on their Linux box with Apache, or thier IBM mainframe, or whatever... They just need to communicate via SOAP, and it's documented and standardized. It's all XML, so no one should have too many problems with it.
i know you can save your profile and everything on amazon and so you may still ask "so what's in it for me". that was just the first example that came to mind and if you can see the advantages of such an interoperative infrastructure then here. [thinkgeek.com]
And so the profile is one of the Hailstorm web serivces ("myProfile").
and, yes, there are probably risks and stuff involved but lets let it evolve and give it a chance.
It appears that this window.open disabling isn't just on/off though. This one sounds more like it turns it off at certian points when it's most annoying - on page loads/unloads, setInternal / timeout scripts, etc...
This way you'd be left with the times when popups are good (eg, in an a href/onclick pair - one case is popping up an enlarged window w/o toolbars, menus, and all that clutter).
Oh, yeah, and of course Verisign runs a really secure operation. What could be worse than issuing digital signatures for the company who provides 90% of all operating systems? Read this if you want to see how good Verisign is.
:)
This was #1 for "Verisign fucks up" on Google. Of course, a search for "Verisign screws up" yields this article at geek.com coming in at #4 about MS & VeriSign working together on ".NET"... So, it looks like your desire to see Verisign involved is happening
Of course, the List price at Amazon.com is 319.99, so you're saving $70. My guess is that when XP is released you'll see a price below the list price too. They may choose to sell it at full price at first, but eventually they'll lower the price on it (just as they have with W2k).
Now tell me how you'd go about comparing the settings on the two to see what's different? It's a god damn pain in the ass. You can't compare the two side by side, and there's a handful of entirely separate panels to check for differences, each with sub-panels. You can just look directly in the metabase. You can use a command line tool to do it, or you can use a program called MetaEdit. It's Q240225 in MS's knowledge base thingy. I had the pleasure of admining an NT box for a while...
It's not just an emotional thing. There are still some places where you can get te old, good stuff - they really did make it differently back then: Just last week, I grabbed a 12 oz. *returnable* glass Coke bottle from Mexico at a Chevron station that sits by itself somewhere between Smithville and Bastrop on US 71 between Houston and Austin. I'm not even a serious Coca-Cola fan, but this was *good* - the taste of Coke I remember as a child: the old, original Coke formula, not "Classic" which never was the same.
And this ISN'T emotional?
Where's the real stuff? There's nothing here that even resembles a GUI or database classes? There is a string, so I guess I could build a console app with it that outputs "Hello World".
= /library/en-us/cpref/html/cpref_start.asp
You can find all of the classes documented at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url
Here at my work we have 4 NT 4 servers with the 95/NT4 look and IE 5.5.
And why would you want that? The integrated shell into windows made the user interface good. The 95/NT shell is such a horrible, unusable piece of junk (IMHO).
The one thing that really annoys me about this though is that it's really difficult to get the good shell in NT4/95 now. You used to be able to download IE w/ ActiveDesktop and install that (which is what gives you the new shell), but that's no more. Nowadays you gotta hope you have an old copy of IE4SP2 laying around....
But to the point, I personally think the integration of IE into the OS was a good thing. If it's not obvious on it's own merits the fact that the KDE crowd has done the same should be a sign of this. I mean come on, Netscape wanted the browser to become the platform, right? The fact of the matter is that Microsoft did a vastly superior job of making the browser the platform.
shorten is a non-lossy compression algorith for music. It doesn't compress nearly as much as MP3, WMA, or OGG, but it doesn't lose any quality. Good for downloading live shows and burning 'em straigh to CD.... Hey, I should go do that now...
Uhm. I guess you think they did everything with the sound car, even play the original CD WAVs. Perhaps. It would be the best way, certainly.
This is not a good idea at all. They are judging the quality of the CODEC's, not the quality of a sound card. The best way would certianly be to convert them to format X, back to WAV, and then burn them onto a CD. For consistency sake they should probably rip the original CD as WAV also and burn that back onto a CD. They then have n burnt CD's - play them all in a good CD player.
The problem with playing them in the sound card is if it is distorting the sound quality more than the CODEC does you won't really be able to tell what's sucking - but everything would be sucking in different ways. If you play it on a CD player (which you know and trust the quality of) then you can throw out any other possible variables and only be judging the codec's.
What's wrong with having a published API so that if a competitor comes along and creates a better browser that obeys the published API, I can replace Microsoft's browser with the competitors? (Answer: that's not in Microsoft's best interest, and therefore they will not provide it to their customers - so much for being consumer-driven.)
If the API to use MSHTML isn't published then how exactly are there all these 3rd party programs that rely upon it's existence? It seems to me that it's not the fact that IE can't be replaced, it's the fact that no one has choosen to do it yet (and I'm a little surprised by that too...)
Presumably MSHTML is just used as a COM control, right? Well, one of the thing about COM controls is you don't change their interfaces from version to version. If you want more functionality you add a new interface, and that way there's never a breaking change. So where's the problem with replacing MSHTML?
What does WinAmp use to render web pages? Don't the newer versions have some annoying HTML rendering window thing in it now? I assumed it used MSHTML to do this, but I guess it's possible that they're packaging a web browser with winamp too... (wasteful, but possible, right?)
And we all know how much we're hurting for disk space these days. I think that even if IE took up 100 megs and that wasn't removed that the consumer really wouldn't be hurt. Of course, IE *doesn't* take up 100 megs, it takes up signifigantly less, but really, does the amount of space used really matter that much these days (unless it's like 1/2 a gig or something).
What I personally like is the guy who was installing Office so that people could read Word documents. I guess he never heard of the freely available Word Viewer program which is available on Microsoft's website.
What a great attitude these people have. "Gee, I fucked up by installing illegal copies of software - damn Microsoft sucks!"