Posts by stizzleswick 429 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2007
"You are a liar. There is no digital mobile phone available that doesn't support SMS."
Mark what I said in my first post: I am using an antique. If you want to look it up, it's a Motorola 5300 e+. Made in 1993. And yes, it's digital. And no, it does not support SMS. Those were introduced to at the network I was using back then in 1995, and were only supported starting with the 7300 and later, which was offered the same year.
Please: Check your facts before calling people liars.
...that SMS and other "services" are pure rip-offs. Hence I use an antique mobile that doesn't do any of them... and I can tell everybody who ever felt intruded upon by SMS spam, overblown pricing and so on: It's a wonderful world without being constantly harassed by text messages saying, basically, nothing, with bad spelling and grammar to boot.
If somebody has something to tell me on the phone, they can talk. I've got two (2) ears ready to receive input. If people can't be bothered to give me a ring to talk to me in person, it can't be important enough for me to waste my time reading about it.
...running on MacOS X; they had a pretty old machine there and OOo was blazingly fast. Loved it.
As to everybody here in love with MS Office: get over it. In fact, forget it. As opposed to MS Office I have never had any problems with OpenOffice (or before that, with StarOffice, for that matter). Paper size is trivial, as are all other settings. Plus, OOo does not declare the user to be mentally retarded by default and actually lets him/her get some work done, like typing a shopping list withOUT interrupting with a brightly-coloured message box claiming that the user is "obviously trying to create an address directory, may I help you?"
As to the format war: also get over it. It has been won already, even if MS are still trying to fake their way back into the fracas. Too many governments on all levels from the village level on up, in North America, Europe, and most importantly in India (approx. 1.5 billion people live there... that's quite a demographic push even on a global scale) have already either adopted ODF or made it clear that they intend to, for any later standard to have much of a chance. I may be wrong, but then again, I wasn't wrong about PDF turning the pre-press world upside down in 1994 either...
Go OOo, KOffice, SmartSuite, and so on... and, ironically, since MS Office is currently to a large part being developed in India, goodbye MS proprietary formats. From the point of view of somebody who learned to make computers work for him, not to work for the computer: the less MS Office, the better. In my long, long, long experience, that piece of junk only gets in the way of productivity. Let's switch to something that actually lets you do what you want without telling you it knows what you want better than you do (and to something that doesn't run potentially dangerous scripts w/o asking whether you'd like it to do that, for that matter).
Microtards, feel free to flame. I'm wearing my asbestos today.
A microwave will fry the drive's electronics in a second, making it unusable by a computer, but the data on the actual glass or plastic platter would take a little more to render unreadable. Come to think of it, hard disk casings are Faraday cages, so the platters won't be affected at all unless the casing is seriously damaged. Getting there with a microwave would probably total the microwave before the data-carrying layers on the platters even notice anything is happening.
Shattering the platters sounds pretty safe to me; most magnetic methods are unsafe (unless we count the use of an induction oven -- that would vapourise the data-carrying layers on non-metallic carriers and the carriers themselves if metallic...)
Last time I looked, most European airports did checks on their passengers departing for any route that takes them through U.S. airspace because they were forced to do so by the FAA -- which will deny overflight rights to any plane carrying passengers not so checked.
Currently, several cases are making their way through the diverse courts of Europe to see whether it is actually legal to send passenger data ahead without explicitly informing the passengers about a. the data being sent, b. what data is being sent, c. why it is sent and d. making certain that the data is not stored or passed on within the U.S. without the express permission of the passenger.
Personally, my dear USians who come to visit Europe, you are welcome to your own medicine. I have been to the continental bits of your wonderful country often enough, and I have never understood why I was being treated as a criminal (fingerprints taken, mug shot, unfriendly interrogation, all obviously filed away in a database -- on one visit I was asked follow-up questions to something I had said a year earlier, at a different airport).
I fly a lot, thankfully mostly within Europe, and I don't even need to carry a passport here, let alone a visa. Plus, the customs officers here are friendly and polite for the most part.
P.S.: I Don't Do T5. Hope I'll never need to.
"Do people still use the F1...F12 keys?" -- those are extremely useful for those of us who use Photoshop a lot -- using them, you can build your own keyboard shortcuts for all those often-used functions Adobe didn't think it necessary to provide keyboard shortcuts for.
Re the old IBM keyboards: my personal favourite of all time was the Keytronic model 4. Not cheap at all, but sturdy and never-miss tactile feedback. Unfortunately, mine had a caffeine allergy and Keytronic stopped making them a decade ago...
And if you want flexibility with "foreign" characters, like it or not, Apple provides them on all their keyboard layouts, most placed more or less mnemonically. Like Ø being alt-shift-o, å alt-a, umlauts made by alt-u followed by base letter, and so on. And the € is alt-e.
And what is that "windows" key for? I haven't been able to find out yet because it doesn't do anything on Linux...
Of course, the antivirus industry is nervous about this contest -- so far, they have been able to blindside their customers about their shortcomings. But Anti-malware products are, of course, only applications like all others and so are obviously vulnerable to exploits and other security problems. Instead of telling people how dangerous this contest is, they should joyfully join in: this is a great chance for them to learn about their own security problems, and somebody else is paying the bill, too!
The argument about the growing size and memory footprint struck me as particularly stupid; those databases have been constantly growing for decades; this contest is not going to change that in any direction -- except maybe it could even slow the growth of the database by presenting the manufacturers with a few generic detection methods that could replace a few dozen specific signatures. After all, the participating hackers are going to publish their code, which is more than most malware writers in the wild do.
Which in turn invalidates the argument about anti-malware personnel now having to cope with the "mal"ware created during the contest. They most likely will have free access to the source code, so it's going to make their lives easier, not harder -- you can bet that any methods demonstrated in the contest would have made it into the wild within the year anyway, contest or not.
@ Daniel B.: '[..] then saying some time after that "Intel is the way!"' -- well, there were 8 years between the introduction of the G4 and the switch to Intel. Switching back to PPC within within 2 years after going through a huge amount of trouble to switch to Intel in the first place might look a little ludicrous. Whereas at the time it came out, the PPC 7500 (aka G4) actually beat Intel's chips lengthwise and broadside in performance per watt, throughput per cycle and actual just plain performance in practical applications like image or video editing.
@ Geoff: Good point, which I had overlooked. That might really be an interesting thing to observe -- though AFAIK the current line of XServe RAIDs is not manufactured by Apple but rebranded OEM ware.
@ Niall: Compared spec-for-spec, I find Apple not all that overpriced -- no, really. I guess it depends on where in their product life cycles you compare prices, but at least with the notebooks, they're not all that expensive if you compare same-spec machines from the likes of Dell, Acer, Toshiba, et al. (I last compared about half a year ago, then decided to install Linux on a MacBook Pro because it was about 250 quid less than what the others were offering me at the time in the same performance range).
But that aside, I agree about the "cool" factor -- plus, since they already have the well-tested PPC version of MacOS X out there anyway... *shrug* how could they resist? And the bonus is that MacOS X scales pretty well with the number of cores involved (it's BSD on a Mach kernel after all), so they actually _could_ go for the big iron if they wanted to. They already have one PPC installation in the upper ranges of the top 500 supercomputer list after all.
Disclaimer: I am not a fanboi of any hardware or software supplier. I don't drink Kool-Aid of any kind. But I can still be fascinated by developments...
-- that would be a complete marketing nightmare, and Apple is highly unlikely to do that on the consumer and workstation fronts.
But most posters so far seem to have overlooked that Apple has a line of servers on offer, and there is a high demand in the server market for low-energy, high-performance chips like the PPC. Compare IBM's product portfolio development.
Also, there have been rumours that Apple wants to make a bid in the big iron league in the long run. In this perspective, acquiring a PPC chip design outfit would sort of make sense.
"I would LOVE to get a Power motherboard and chip and roll my own system."
Actually, there are at least two companies that offer off-the-rack CHRP POWERed desktop boxes for halfway reasonable prices. Probably won't come with AIX, though.
Or the even more generic way, get a Sony PS3 and install YDL or Ubuntu on it, and you've got yourself a Cell-powered PC... Terrasoft even delivers them pre-installed.
"mr Hawking might be a bit of a physics guru"
Actually, while Mr. Hawkings' contributions in the form of popular science literature are undeniable, he has not really contributed much to physics as such. He is a gifted lecturer and a solid theoretical physicist, but nowhere even near Wheeler in his contributions.
Mine's the one with the wormholes...
I guess your mileage may vary. What I was saying was that in my personal experience, BA always handled my problems (if any) very professionally. And no, I'm not in any way connected to BA. I have, on the other hand, experienced a few other "big" airlines that were quite a bit more uppity in their antics, which I therefore tend to avoid. I currently also am avoiding BA, but that's for price and scheduling reasons which do not seem to apply to a panoply of other airlines...
I have flown a pretty varied set of airlines so far, and in my experience, BA still makes the top ten in service and quality.
I'll admit I never flew BA while their staff were on strike (did that with Lufthansa and SAS though), but I had misdirected luggage with several airlines; BA handled it very professionally in my case (no hassles at all, they scanned in the barcode on my checkin tab and checked my passport, I gave them the local delivery address, it was there the next morning). Other companies I have experienced actually wanted to charge me for the delivery to my hotel!
I'm not saying BA doesn't get it wrong at times. I'm a pretty frequent flyer, and I have experienced just about all "big" airlines getting it wrong at times. I don't blame the company as such unless they get it wrong for me repeatedly through different representatives. (Anybody at a certain US airline reading this? You guys are the reason I don't fly Air France transatlantic any longer - AF is nice, but the return flight invariably is your line... and eight out of eight flights were total nightmares for a variety of reasons each...)
And to the topic, finally: I have also, during and after long flights, experienced truly hysterically dangerous people who were attacking other people, verbally and physically, for reasons that for most people are about enough reason to scratch their behinds. If such people are banned from an airline, the airline is making points with me, and I don't give a shit who those people are. When I'm travelling long distance, the last thing I want is a big hullaballoo while I'm underway; I want my peace. I normally have more than enough problems to fix at my destination anyway.
Mine's the one saying "I'll fly anything if it gets me there in peace, not pieces."
is also used by, among others, KOffice, Papyrus, Abiword (IIRC), and more are currently in the process of dropping their previous proprietary file formats in favour of ODF. Nobody is switching to (O)OXML AFAIK.
As for MS' "supporting" the ODF filters for MSOffice, they only did that after an OpenSource set of filters was already existing that threatened to exclude Microsoft from controlling how they were implemented. The original press release on the matter was a clear statement that MS would "never" support ODF.
That's probably why Seymour Cray's "design failures" were cooled by liquid nitrogen instead... (yes, I know that was because of the superconducting interconnects, not waste heat from the processors...).
Anyway, Valdis, how about putting the gear in an oil bath? I have seen at least one attempt at that work pretty well so far (admittedly not on the same scale as the IBM systems).
Mine's the one with the copper plumbing on the back.
OK, granted, I haven't used anything beyond Draw v. 10; up to that version, there was no key-actuated hand tool, and working on splines was ridiculous, really. I guess my main grumble about Draw is that in the hands of the general public it's a deadly weapon against pre-press workflows; just about every single CDR export file my company gets has a whole sheaf of problems that render them un-imagesettable.
As for the Adobe installer problems, both the bundle installer for CS 2 and CS 3 offer so many ways to botch the installation that it would probably be far quicker to install the applications individually. I've had situations ranging from the installer jumping over one step for no discernible reason (and by that way making it impossible to enter the serial number and/or activate the product), the activation process running foul leading to long support calls, to outright crashing on startup (of the installer!).
[rant] ...sell Freehand to whichever company will have it. Make Flash over so the consumer can enjoy it (maybe turn a few pro killers loose on web "designers" who think Flash is the cure-all and then make viewers on fast DLS lines wait literally minutes until they can use the bloody site well enough to click the "skip intro" button - let's add the creators of the intros to the death list. When I visit a web site, I want fast results, not stylistically overblown commercials).
Then, indeed, fix a whole cartload of bugs in the current product range, quickly. Then or earlier, make a definite statement on the fate of GoLive and Dreamweaver. Sell either of them off or kill it. Just don't keep people guessing on this. Serious web coders use neither anyway (they generally seem to prefer HomeSite, BBEdit, Bluefish or Quanta+, or any of a huge number of other choices), but those who have drifted into web design from DTP and therefore are used to WYSIWYG tools should be allowed know what to invest in in the long term IMHO.
Then, PLEASE, buy Corel and shove their entire graphics portfolio down the toilet. Corel's graphics products (and this is a graphics pro speaking here) is a complete, utter and by now unfixable pain in the arse to use. I honestly tried. Dangit, I started out on Corel, way back when. Then-up-to-date package came bundled with a printer. I switched a few weeks later because I wanted to get work done. Unfortunately, because of my line of part of my work, by now I keep having long, long phone conversations giving Corel users step-by-step instructions how to produce files their printers can actually use... so, please, Adobe, buy 'em up and snuff 'em out. Very good riddance.
After all this, Adobe should invest a little in porting again - maybe CS4 for the mainstream Linuxes? I'd welcome it, anyway, and the ports can't be all that hard given that their Mac versions are already on a POSIX-compliant platform...
[/rant]
@DeFex: I agree, the CS2 AND CS3 bundle installers are about the worst I have seen Adobe turn out so far. And I've been in there since before Photoshop first came out.
Oh, my coat is the one with the "Swimmer in the Road" PS4 for Solaris PR print on it...
"[...]they're going to have to develop a whole load of colour management stuff[...]"
Actually, all they'd have to do is point a small development team at x.org or XFree86.org, both of which already have small groups working on colour management. They're slow because they lack some expertise, but experience shows that with some experienced specialized programmers added to any open-source project, it begins to move quickly. E.g., when Apple decided to use webkit for their browser, development accelerated quite noticeably after a few initial grumbles by the community development team.
Heck, point them at KDE, where a few lone rangers try to get in colour management controls that can override or at least control the window server. For those who prefer to use Gnome, just run Gnome with kwm and you're there. Wherever you decide to hook up the colour management APIs, if it can be done on BSD/Mach (aka MacOS X), it can be done on Gnu/Linux, too, without too many hassles.
@Grant: I agree, and I myself would love to see the complete Creative Suite natively on Linux. The biggest hassle would really be the GUI bits, because Aqua is not your everyday X. The libraries should be easy to port because all OSs involved are POSIX-friendly, and Adobe has a history of porting to Unices (anybody remember Illustrator for SGI Irix? FrameMaker, anybody? Though admittedly Adobe inherited the Unix versions of that when they bought Frame Technology). They've shown time and again that they can do it if they think enough money can be made from it. Maybe the decisions made by both Viva and R.O.M. Logicware to offer their DTP solutions (VivaDesigner and Papyrus, respectively; niche players both) on Linux may yet tickle Adobe into following suit.
Actually, Photoshop for Windows runs fine on my Linux box through wine, with no noticeable performance impact.
But I want to throw in my tuppence here.
Unlike most other really big software vendors, Adobe has to my knowledge always maintained a relatively user-friendly and open-minded attitude -- as opposed to the likes of Mi¢ro$o£t, Macromedia or Quark (or SAP for that matter). I am one of those who still fondly remember using Photoshop 4.0 for Solaris and being awed by its performance (thanks for the SPARC III, Sun!).
Adobe is the only major software house out there that seems to have hung on to the vision of its founders: to produce superior software for the customer (and, of course, make a lot of money with it. But that's everybody's vision, innit?). They have been rather reluctant during the last decade to develop for anything but Windows (used to be that their Mac releases were the development leaders; by the late 90s the Mac versions of their apps would lag up to half a year behind the Windows releases. By now, they release both simultaneously).
But after a long delay in getting the next Adobe Reader out for Linux (they left out a few major releases), they seem to have realized that there _are_ Linux customers -- and maybe enough to make it worthwhile to actually develop more software for Linux.
Don't hold your breath for a version of Photoshop that runs natively. Those who are willing to _pay_ for Photoshop and want to run it on Gnu/Linux are few and far between; my guess is that about 70 % of all installations of Photoshop currently in use are pirated. (Don't look at me; I'm fully registered.)
Of course, Adobe is only going to consider developing anything commercial for paying customers. For many Linux users, the GIMP is good enough and then some; frankly, in a few places it outdoes Photoshop. For the other Adobe products, the situation is similar; Inkscape is a quite capable vector drawing application that in some places rivals Illustrator, for viewing PDF files I'd use anything _but_ Adobe Reader, web development solutions abound (and the more visual tools tend to write cleaner code than Dreamweaver or GoLive; most serious web developers use non-WYSYWIG editors anyway), and so on. I'd say only InDesign has no direct OpenSource rival, since Scribus is still somewhere in between PageMaker 5 and XPress 3.3.
So, everything considered, I'd say I am looking forward to more software offers from Adobe for OpenSource OSs -- how about porting some of the Mac versions to BSD? Granted, the GUI bits would need some doing, but the actual back-end should be easy enough to port. And once they've gone that far, hey, POSIX, Linux would not be all that hard to do either.
Just don't hold your breath, is all. If they're going to do it, it won't be this year or the next. My estimation is that they're doing AIR for Linux because lots of software developers use Linux, so it's a logical thing for Adobe to do at this time.
Still, coming back to how Adobe is different from the other big ones: they actually do this thing. Don't expect anything like this to come from the company that dropped Minix in the mid-90s, or any of the other semi-monopolists.
Disclaimer: I am not, have never been, and most likely never will be employed at or otherwise associated with Adobe Systems apart from participating in a few beta test programs in the 1990s.
*shrug* No matter who is behind it, Personal Computer still means what it says -- for me and most people I know who have been in IT since the late 70s/early 80s, it's just a _personal_ computer, as opposed to a dumb terminal or thin client depending on a mainframe.
The Amiga was a PC. So were the Atari ST and the Apple II. Heck, so was the C64. Half of those mentioned were on the market long before IBM's so-branded PC.
Don't confuse brand names with concepts. That can be misleading...
Very interesting to see Webster P. actually posting something coherent and reasonable in response to anything Apple -- hang on to the feeling, man.
Meanwhile, I agree that brand ≠ product, and this poll was about brand _awareness_, i.e., how the respective brands are received in the brains of (in this case) marketeers.
Given that today's marketeers try to give us ideas like French cars turning into Transformers(TM) soon as the owner looks away (and I still wonder: who is going to buy a car that'll start prancing around the city, presumably burning a lot of fuel in the process, soon as he leaves sight of the bloody thing?), this poll only really tells us that Apple marketing seems to work pretty well.
Which one could have sort of known before, given their sales development of the past few years. *shrug*
Mine's the tux...
"Is Safari open?"
It's based on Webkit, same as Konqueror, but Apple has glued a bucketful of proprietary code on to it. My guess would be that the problem lies with the closed-source bits.
*shrug* I'm using FF anyway, if only to have the same browser on all my systems. Good to hear it also makes my Mac a little safer.
And for those baiting the Apple users, go surfing with MS Internet Exploder and MS' standard "security" settings. But I suggest you make a full backup first.
"[...] the idea that Apple sliding their browser into the "critical updates" screen [...]"
Actually, far as I can see, they don't offer it as a "critical" update, just as an update. So I'd say it's on the same level as MS's never-ending attempts to foist WMP on people who neither need nor want it via Windows Update...
Mine's the one with the xmms logo on the back.
...and I concur with the already voiced estimate that an hours-long install run on most Linux distributions is likely due to hardware problems and a bolluxed (love that word, thanks Reg!) HD partitioning.
Then again, no distribution is without its quirks, and I must say that RHEL is unbeloved by me because it seems to have a lot of them; certainly more problems than I have with other distributions.
Thirdly, of course, if you want a HUGE lot of quirks, use Windows, where nothing really works the way it should and the programmers seem to assume all users suffer from Alzheimer's, hence remind me that I just put a CD in the drive.
The tuxedo jacket and top hat, please.
"BMW has announced it will cut 8100 jobs, Siemens will cut 3800 jobs...
But I have not seen any news about Germans boycotting their products."
That's probably because they didn't receive a few dozen millions in subsidies to create those jobs in the first place. A German colleague of mine put it this way: Nokia wanted to screw the German tax payer in order to create more profits in Finland.
My guess is that a certain portion of Germans objects to that sort of thing.
"So a measurable percentage of the earths population are engaged in attacking this single company, every day! I think not."
The AC talked about "malicious access attempts" -- which I figure means attempts to bypass the network's security mechanisms. Such attempts typically are automated and a few million per day can come from a single PC without so much as the cooler fans spinning faster.
The diverse y2k bugs kept me busy for most of a year, patching every single Windows box in a large, mission critical network. You see, if a production database gets the release dates wrong, you're in serious trouble...
Interestingly, some boxes had to be patched again because the patches issued by MS introduced other bugs.
Some software packages for Linux kernel 2.2 were also affected.
Apple announced "We don't have a y2k bug, we have a y32k bug. We're working on that one, though."
The people at Sun sat back and laughed their heads off.
There is a simple reason that Intel decides to maintain the Linux drivers: they run their official benchmarks on Linux, so they want the drivers to get the most out of their chipsets. Writing their own drivers ensures they can use all the features of the chipset. So it's not really that they have to; they just choose to. And AFAIK many of the drivers don't change between releases of X.org; most are constantly being tweaked by the community though. Compare to ATi/AMD's Catalyst; they're almost as "bad" with up to 12 new versions per year.
"A bogus mail account is no use."
Currently, bogus mail accounts are all the rage at mail providers like Google, MSN, Yahoo!... And no, those mail providers don't give a crap who their customers are; they just set up the boxes and let nature run its course until somebody threatens legal action because of the flood of spam coming from their servers.
If email were restricted to ISP-provided email only, then you have a point. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and moving several dozen million webmail users who do not currently use their ISP's email services (including yours truly) over to a new email address would prove rather impractical IMHO.
"Malware does indeed come with an SMTP client (not server)."
Yes, actually there are several strains out there that have their own server (not client).
@Harry Stottle and the answers about joe-jobs: The concerns about joe jobs are of course well-founded, but the real reason that the perpetrators can't be tracked down is that the servers hosting the products advertised with spam are only up for a very short time following the spam run; typically a few hours or less. Also, they are hosted on "bulletproof" servers, i.e., unreachable by law (because they are situated in places like China and some other countries that don't have effective anti-spam laws) and normally are also protected against all normal modes of attack, including DDOS.
Re "Beating spam is easy"
Well, simple solution. Only it does not work. You see, spammers are already used to setting up bogus mail accounts with a wide variety of web hosters... so SMTP_AUTH wouldn't change a thing. Also, much spam these days comes from malware which includes its own SMTP server, so what the relaying server sees is not a client PC, but another server, which makes port 25 the correct port to do business on.
"We made them a monopoly.
So, if you want to blame someone for the evils of Microsoft, then look in the mirror."
I think you are unfamiliar with the contracts Microsoft pushed on PC manufacturers in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. Those contracts bound companies like Compaq and Dell to pay the license fee for one license of MS Windows for every CPU they shipped -- regardless of whether Windows was actually installed on the box or not. Needless to say, they didn't want to throw away that money for nothing, so they sold that license with every PC.
Escom was good enough to sell boxes without any OS installed, or with any OS of your choice, but they had to pay vastly higher license fees for Windows because they didn't agree to the per-CPU pricing model, so their Windows boxes were uncompetitive for consumers.
"This was at near-sea-level pressures, so the damage would be more significant still at the low pressure airliner crusing altitudes."
Actually, the damage at cruising altitudes would be significantly less, because the pressure wave from the detonation would dissipate more quickly. Cabin air pressure is comparable to a height of 9000 ft IIRC, so you already have a lower-than-sea-level air pressure inside the plane to begin with; the lower air pressure at 30000 ft outside the plane will take quite a bit of the punch out of the explosion.
For a nice illustration of this effect, you can watch one of NASA's videos of a space shuttle launch and watch what happens to the exhaust plumes of the boosters as they gain altitude.
Funnily enough, if you look at the development of the top 500 list of supercomputers, it is clear that clusters have been very busy displacing mainframes over the last five or six years.
Optimizing the way a mainframe handles tasks might do something about that, obviously. Nevertheless, the mainframe vs. cluster debate has little to do with ideology in real life; the real question is how much oomph the buyer gets for his money. In some scenarios, that calculation can even lead to solutions like a room full of Macs in racks. Go figure.
Meanwhile, very few high performance machines run on anything except some flavour of GNU/Linux or one of the Unices...
One should think that a judge at least reads and, just for about one half second, thinks about a writ he signs. This case has more holes in it than a sieve. IANAL, but from what I got to read about the entire affair, the judge should have heard the alarm bells ringing the moment the bank asked to shut down a site hosted outside his jurisdiction and started an inqiury into the business practices of the bank.
The best thing MS could do would be to opensource its browser development. Anything that's usable will then be borged into the Mozilla project and the rest of the developers will probably move to webkit, thereby killing off developement of Internet Exploder.
MS definitely missed a few calls since the mid-1990s; integrating a tool meant to work with an environment full of malware (the internet) into the foundations of an operating system is a mindbogglingly stupid idea (well, OK, Windows isn't really an OS, just a pretty program starter for NT). ActiveX is one of the main reasons why I Don't Do MS Internet Exploder. But then again, I Don't Do Windows most of the time either.
@Anonymous Coward from 17:05 GMT
"Maybe I was dreaming at the time, but I dimly recall seeing a Solaris install package for IE many years ago."
Yep... they dropped Solaris in roundabout 1995 or ’96. It used to be available for MacOS, too. The point, though, is that no version of Internet Exploder past v. 5.1 exists for any OS except Windows. Since many halfway modern websites don't work with MS Internet Exploder v. 5, that old piece of tat is unusable for most purposes.
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