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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator
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To: Gerald R. Lampton who wrote (22167)12/16/1998 2:00:00 PM
From: Keith Hankin   of 24154
 
Given the testimony in the antitrust trial that software is "malleable," please explain why "a
low-level network driver" is "a logical thing to include in an OS and one that needs to be
integrated to get the best performance" while a browser is not.

I don't really have the time to go into a detailed explanation of this, however I will give it a try. Others on this thread can fill in more detail. The primary reason for having an OS are to be able to share hardware and software resources between concurrently-running applications, providing mechanisms and protocols for this sharing. Thus, there is a core set of functionality that *must* be provided by the OS in order to guarantee that all of the resource functionality is available for use by applications while still guaranteeing the ability to fairly share these resources. Network drivers provide the pipes for sharing network resources, thus they can be legitimately be considered part of what can be considered to be a core service of an OS. They are also necessary in order to provide a standard way of communication. If the network drivers were not included, every application would have to invent its own way of communicating, and everything would have its own language (or dialect), and you would have to inject layers of intermediation (e.g. translation) to translate from one mechanism and protocol to another, resulting in lots of problems, including poor performance. Unfortunately, I have to go (some of us have to work :), but hopefully I can continue later.
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