Honestly, most college students don't play crazy games, don't do DVD editing, don't need massive compiling horse power, or anything that would necessitate dual cores. It's papers, music, and aim. A three year old hand me down from mom/dad/or the aunt/uncle's office/living room is just what the doctor ordered. Most of the time hand me downs already have MS office installed. As for spyware, generally one Mt Dew and Pizza package is enough. If the geek friend is smart he replaces all of the IE links with Firefox.
Having the ability to run powerful utilities from a browser isn't as crazy as it sounds. Active-X just really screws it up because users are stupid, and because MS can't code securely. An example of a wonderful (IMHO) very low level active-X application is trendmicro's housecall. There's a big future in web applets, and if a program that can be downloaded can perform a specific function, there's no reason an applet shouldn't be able to. The problem is just making sure the user A) is aware of what the applet is doing, and B) approves of it, and that's where Active-X is really going wrong. Java is an awesome language, but it'd be useless for trying to implement something like the online windows update tool, or the TM Housecall service, two tools that a LOT (your parents among them) of people find very useful.
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Honestly, most college students don't play crazy games, don't do DVD editing, don't need massive compiling horse power, or anything that would necessitate dual cores. It's papers, music, and aim. A three year old hand me down from mom/dad/or the aunt/uncle's office/living room is just what the doctor ordered. Most of the time hand me downs already have MS office installed. As for spyware, generally one Mt Dew and Pizza package is enough. If the geek friend is smart he replaces all of the IE links with Firefox.
On an product which has gotten cheaper and cheaper to provide.
Yeah, but I'm not sure I'd prefer to fly in a plane where the pilot is pee'ing his pants while flying either.
Having the ability to run powerful utilities from a browser isn't as crazy as it sounds. Active-X just really screws it up because users are stupid, and because MS can't code securely. An example of a wonderful (IMHO) very low level active-X application is trendmicro's housecall. There's a big future in web applets, and if a program that can be downloaded can perform a specific function, there's no reason an applet shouldn't be able to. The problem is just making sure the user A) is aware of what the applet is doing, and B) approves of it, and that's where Active-X is really going wrong. Java is an awesome language, but it'd be useless for trying to implement something like the online windows update tool, or the TM Housecall service, two tools that a LOT (your parents among them) of people find very useful.