Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 10th Aug 2007 20:23 UTC, submitted by jello
"There is a sub-genre of historical fiction one could loosely call 'what-ifs'. The computer industry also has a number of such obvious what if scenarios. What if Bill Gates and Paul Allen hadn't lucked into the IBM contract for DOS, which was the basis for Microsoft's eventual hegemony? What if the UNIX operating system hadn't split into several minor variants, but gone on to become what Linux later became, only a decade or two before? What if BeOS had gone on to succeed on the desktop...?"
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RE: What's great about today
by mmu_man on Sat 11th Aug 2007 15:24
in reply to "What's great about today"
Member since:2006-09-30
web browser yes... but you're forgetting all the crapwares that comes with them (flash, .NET, WiMP...) that real websites don't use but other abusively "so called" websites use in place for standards.
There are of course opensource alternatives, but neither gnash nor the wmv support in ffmpeg is totally working.
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Member since:
2005-07-07
Back when Be was trying to get it's OS accepted and Apple was fighting Microsoft, they were at a huge disadvantage. Today, less so. What changed? Today, the web browser is the single most important application on a personal computer and there are two very good open source rendering engines (Gecko and WebKit) available to be ported to any platform.
This has changed the game a lot and it really giving alternative operating systems a chance. It doesn't make it easy, but it does make it easier.