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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gerald R. Lampton who wrote (22167)	12/16/1998 12:30:00 AM
From: Bearded One	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Hi, I'm only in the groups a little bit nowadays, my work schedule has picked up. Anyway, the value of the integration of a service into an OS is directly proportional to how many other applications or services will want to use it. For example, a routine to draw a nice window on the screen with scrollbars and have it be moved around correctly and work with other windows is a useful piece of the OS. You don't want different applications with their own window managers up on the screen not knowing about each others windows, and thus not getting redrawn when you move one off of another one. Similarly, any connection to a fixed resource belongs in the OS since the OS can then manage application demands on that resource. Network drivers, anything that does anything to a hardware device (think about two applications using a printer at the same time and getting your documents interleaved). As far as IE 4.0 goes, the proper question is--- what conflicts or problems are solved by putting it into the OS? I can't think of any, myself.

To: Gerald R. Lampton who wrote (22167)	12/16/1998 4:27:00 AM
From: XiaoYao	Respond to of 24154

Bill Gates and Bill Clinton -- prisoners of Lawyer World Both leaders have been evasive on the stand. But who can blame them? - - - - - - BY SCOTT ROSENBERG salonmagazine.com

To: Gerald R. Lampton who wrote (22167)	12/16/1998 2:00:00 PM
From: Keith Hankin	Respond to 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.