People think that by replacing a universally accepted system with one that is more logically organised that they are making things more simple. What they are really doing is making things more complicated, because the old system will never disappear and forever afterwards you have the hassle of converting from one system to the other.
The features that Gates is talking about are features that require AI, which never work well. It says that Loghorn will screen phone calls and e-mails automatically and track down a person when he is out of the office, etc. all extreamly sophisisticated features which require the software to make intellegent descisions. Software has never been good at this, for example in Word there is an Auto-format feature, which uses AI to decide how to best format your letter. It works sometimes, but 10% of the time it screws up your docuement completely, which effectively means it is completely useless. The features that Gates is trying to introduce are also going to be like this. If Gates really wanted to improve Windows he would better off providing more mundane features which are still missing. For example, OSX has print preview built in to the OS - if you write a program that has a print function, print pre-view is provided by the OS automatically. There are tonnes of features like this which are missing, which would make writing Windows apps easier, they will never get added though, because they aren't considered "flashy" enough.
costs of $8.75 billion?...bullshit, Code Red actually saved my company money, because they had to disconnect the interent, therefore no one was browsing slashdot, etc., therefore some work was done for a change
This problem isn't as big an issue as you think. I use Mozilla all the time and view nearly all websites perfectly. Maybe there are minor appearance differencs, but I don't really care. The real problem is when people use IE specific DOM methods and then you cannot access the page at all. More web pages are going standards complient than you think, so this isn't such a big problem. Since Mozilla 0.99 I have been able to access my online banks, which use heavy amount of DHTML.
It is faster. The performance advantage is really noticable on old PCs. On a new 1GHz with 128 Mb ram, everything is so fast it doesn't really make a difference. The disadvantages of Opera is there is no DOM and most of the bugs don't get fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
If my cheapo digital watch only looses a minute every 2 months, why does the clock in a $2000 PC loose a minute every day?
People think that by replacing a universally accepted system with one that is more logically organised that they are making things more simple. What they are really doing is making things more complicated, because the old system will never disappear and forever afterwards you have the hassle of converting from one system to the other.
The features that Gates is talking about are features that require AI, which never work well. It says that Loghorn will screen phone calls and e-mails automatically and track down a person when he is out of the office, etc. all extreamly sophisisticated features which require the software to make intellegent descisions. Software has never been good at this, for example in Word there is an Auto-format feature, which uses AI to decide how to best format your letter. It works sometimes, but 10% of the time it screws up your docuement completely, which effectively means it is completely useless. The features that Gates is trying to introduce are also going to be like this.
If Gates really wanted to improve Windows he would better off providing more mundane features which are still missing. For example, OSX has print preview built in to the OS - if you write a program that has a print function, print pre-view is provided by the OS automatically. There are tonnes of features like this which are missing, which would make writing Windows apps easier, they will never get added though, because they aren't considered "flashy" enough.
costs of $8.75 billion?...bullshit, Code Red actually saved my company money, because they had to disconnect the interent, therefore no one was browsing slashdot, etc., therefore some work was done for a change
You realise of course it's possible to identify your browser without using any user agent string - if document.All fails then it's not IE, etc.
This problem isn't as big an issue as you think. I use Mozilla all the time and view nearly all websites perfectly. Maybe there are minor appearance differencs, but I don't really care. The real problem is when people use IE specific DOM methods and then you cannot access the page at all.
More web pages are going standards complient than you think, so this isn't such a big problem. Since Mozilla 0.99 I have been able to access my online banks, which use heavy amount of DHTML.
It is faster. The performance advantage is really noticable on old PCs. On a new 1GHz with 128 Mb ram, everything is so fast it doesn't really make a difference.
The disadvantages of Opera is there is no DOM and most of the bugs don't get fixed.