First of all, MS supported the Netscape plug-in architecture as part of their embrace/extend/extinguish philosophy. When they introduced IE, they needed plug-ins and forcing developers to write their plug-ins for two browsers would have been suicide for the adoption of IE at that time. Now that MS has succeeded in illegally destroying Netscape, they no longer need to support those plug-ins and can force developers to move to their exclusive plug-in architecture that cannot exist on other platforms, therby ensuring no more threat from potentially competative 3rd party browsers and OS's.
Second, Netscape is not quite dead. Its userbase may be much smaller now, but it is the second most popular browser and has millions of users. Apple being a relatively small software company (software not hardware) doesn't have time or the excess cash necessary for maintaining and supporting two different versions of their browser plugin. MS used to pride itself on backward compatiblility (remember DOS stuck around for an eternity), yet now they drop Netscape style plug-ins because of a whim, or is this a deliberate act to make sure that developers are stuck developing for an API that MS controls and can weild as a weapon to limit competition?
Thirdly, ActiveX breaks Quicktime webpages. Now tens of thousands of web pages need to be updated because ActiveX ignores the EMBED tag that Quicktime relies on. This is a serious problem. I cannot see how MS, a company that used to pride itself on backward compatibility, could justify this act. How long did it take them to get rid of DOS? Yet they don't seem to have any problem getting rid of something like this which affects millions of people. To me, this is MS at its worst.
Well, there is one probalem with scsi device nodes on NEXTSTEP, if you want to boot from a SCSI CD-ROM disk, you had to set the the SCSI ID to 0.
Another problem with device naming was the boot device was always sd0 with other devices named sequentially in probe order. This always caused interesting problems, especially on the HP PA-RISK workstations, the boot device was set at SCSI ID 6 (enforced by the bios of the machine), so the SCSI probe order had to be reversed in the driver to get it to behave properly.
Good thing this was fixed (complete rewrite actually) in OS X.
Luckily, the Updater will usually coalese many updates into a single download if those updates haven't downloaded the previously. When the updates have been downloaded and installed, then you only need to reboot once!
Currently, the releases have really improved things immensely and at this moment, I'd rather have a faster OS with all the latest features. Once the platform has stabilized, I am sure we will see updates coming a lot less frequently.
Hardware Application Layer, a way for applications to modify the state of the hardware without entering the kernel context. No wonder why apps crash my machine so often...
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The MHz myth applies to CPU's, not to memory busses, which is where the real performance is gained in a system that IO bound.
Actually, it *is* better, 100x better in fact, and I'm running 10.1 right at this moment. :P ;)
First of all, MS supported the Netscape plug-in architecture as part of their embrace/extend/extinguish philosophy. When they introduced IE, they needed plug-ins and forcing developers to write their plug-ins for two browsers would have been suicide for the adoption of IE at that time. Now that MS has succeeded in illegally destroying Netscape, they no longer need to support those plug-ins and can force developers to move to their exclusive plug-in architecture that cannot exist on other platforms, therby ensuring no more threat from potentially competative 3rd party browsers and OS's.
Second, Netscape is not quite dead. Its userbase may be much smaller now, but it is the second most popular browser and has millions of users. Apple being a relatively small software company (software not hardware) doesn't have time or the excess cash necessary for maintaining and supporting two different versions of their browser plugin. MS used to pride itself on backward compatiblility (remember DOS stuck around for an eternity), yet now they drop Netscape style plug-ins because of a whim, or is this a deliberate act to make sure that developers are stuck developing for an API that MS controls and can weild as a weapon to limit competition?
Thirdly, ActiveX breaks Quicktime webpages. Now tens of thousands of web pages need to be updated because ActiveX ignores the EMBED tag that Quicktime relies on. This is a serious problem. I cannot see how MS, a company that used to pride itself on backward compatibility, could justify this act. How long did it take them to get rid of DOS? Yet they don't seem to have any problem getting rid of something like this which affects millions of people. To me, this is MS at its worst.
Well, there is one probalem with scsi device nodes on NEXTSTEP, if you want to boot from a SCSI CD-ROM disk, you had to set the the SCSI ID to 0. Another problem with device naming was the boot device was always sd0 with other devices named sequentially in probe order. This always caused interesting problems, especially on the HP PA-RISK workstations, the boot device was set at SCSI ID 6 (enforced by the bios of the machine), so the SCSI probe order had to be reversed in the driver to get it to behave properly. Good thing this was fixed (complete rewrite actually) in OS X.
Finder doesn't need to be fixed, it needs to be completly rewritten, preferably in Cocoa!
Or worse, packaged them as an 'all new' OS and sold it for $150.
Luckily, the Updater will usually coalese many updates into a single download if those updates haven't downloaded the previously. When the updates have been downloaded and installed, then you only need to reboot once!
Hey, what's wrong with Windows nME?!?!? Oh, sorry...
Currently, the releases have really improved things immensely and at this moment, I'd rather have a faster OS with all the latest features. Once the platform has stabilized, I am sure we will see updates coming a lot less frequently.
The problemw with that is there are relatively few Windows 2000 users out there who will actually need or want the patch/update.
Hmmm... We shall see. Get back to me in a year and tell me what versions of Unix have the largest installed userbase. You might be surprised.
Did the Borg implants hurt as they were inserted into your brain?
Hardware Application Layer, a way for applications to modify the state of the hardware without entering the kernel context. No wonder why apps crash my machine so often...