Actually, while you are technically correct. When I look at that chart, from late 2001 (IE6 release) to late 2004(FF 1.0 release) IE6, Netscape and Opera really do look like the only well known choices for windows users. I suspect that the GP was specifically excluding Opera with the 'free browser' comment, and Netscape was really in a bad way around that time (which is why we've got firefox today). I'm not familiar with all the browsers in that time-frame, but many are not for windows, and it seems likely that those that were were no better than IE6. It looks to me like the spirit of the GPs argument is valid.
You actually _CAN_ compile C# to native code at deployment time. C# has a nice utility named ngen which will essentially run the JIT and store the compiled code as a native image. While you still have the performance overhead of running in a managed environment, this does reduce the loading time significantly.
They removed direct draw from DX8, however DirectX as a whole (as a COM object) maintains everything from DX1-DX7 for backwards compatability. That is why you can run starcraft after upgrading to DX8. It continues to use the old calls, and does not need to worry that there are now more calls.
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You are the most ignorant I've seen in quite some time. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline_of_web_browsers.svg
Actually, while you are technically correct. When I look at that chart, from late 2001 (IE6 release) to late 2004(FF 1.0 release) IE6, Netscape and Opera really do look like the only well known choices for windows users. I suspect that the GP was specifically excluding Opera with the 'free browser' comment, and Netscape was really in a bad way around that time (which is why we've got firefox today). I'm not familiar with all the browsers in that time-frame, but many are not for windows, and it seems likely that those that were were no better than IE6. It looks to me like the spirit of the GPs argument is valid.
You actually _CAN_ compile C# to native code at deployment time. C# has a nice utility named ngen which will essentially run the JIT and store the compiled code as a native image. While you still have the performance overhead of running in a managed environment, this does reduce the loading time significantly.
They removed direct draw from DX8, however DirectX as a whole (as a COM object) maintains everything from DX1-DX7 for backwards compatability. That is why you can run starcraft after upgrading to DX8. It continues to use the old calls, and does not need to worry that there are now more calls.