Firefox market share bounces back 6701

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, billwg wrote on Wed, 07 Dec 2005 00:20:38 GMT

Why aren't we using NetBEUI-IX? Is Microsoft giving us superior protocols, or just crap?

Perhaps Microsoft will simply take over the 'Net. It hasn't happened yet.

Yes. Windows is the default choice, as it should be, given the market conditions we have today. At some point, I for one hope that changes.

One particularly weird possibility involves

which, contrary to expectations, does not involve driving things through wickets (though given the visuals, I guess the name was inevitable!), but is rather an effort to develop a brand new open source OS allowing for collaboration between teams of users. (A whiff of "The Incompatible Timesharing System", which eventually mutated into Unix, might be discernable here.) The visuals are primarily 3-D based, which might be intriguing to graphics designers, game designers, and game players; I don't know how much it will do for accountancy, documentation, or software development.

At some point Croquet might have to model what I might call a "tensor": a method by which a bunch of data can be processed into something else. The best analogy in 2D space I can think of is throwing XML through XSL into a webpage, or perhaps recolorizing HTML using CSS to one's local preferences.

Perhaps it already has that capability. It appear to be at least partly based on Squeak, a Smalltalk-80 variant.

It's interesting to note that Berlin (Fresco) is still out there, though there's not a lot of activity since 2003 apparently.

No doubt OpenGL on X satisfies much of the need here.

Of course the ultimate OS may depend on what one wants to do with what is essentially an information communications device. Time was that computers were considered "number crunchers", but nowadays microprocessor units are almost ubiquitous, from the traffic lights one pbuttes through (or by) to the phone in one's ear to the mbuttive forecasting computers used for such things as weather forecasting and nuclear weapons simulation.

Movies such as "Collosus: The Forbin Project" are now almost ludicrously outdated.

We shall see.

It's the best, for those who don't want to think. :-P

-- It's still legal to go .sigless.