Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2001 13:04:04 +0000 From: "Walter C. Pelissero" <walter@pelissero.org> To: chat@freebsd.org, advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: NatWest? no thanks Message-ID: <15330.39364.356654.273742@hyde.lpds.sublink.org> In-Reply-To: <20011101140415.B41247@darkstar.gte.net> References: <20011031210224.A710-100000@howie.ncptiddische.net> <15328.13403.591620.246277@hyde.lpds.sublink.org> <20011101095903.B43740@jake.akitanet.co.uk> <4.3.2.7.2.20011101125020.04a44100@localhost> <20011101140415.B41247@darkstar.gte.net>
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Robert Clark writes: > In a way, I wish MS would make up some incompatible non-open > (browser alternative) product and take the MS-loving > clone-people away from the internet entirely. They already tried. Before Mr Gates realized that Internet was the way to go. It was called MSN (not the current incarnation) and toward the end, to keep the few customers, they had to provide an Internet gateway. More than an Internet clone I think it was an AOL clone, supposedly meant to steal market shares to AOL. It was a close circuit; the information you could get from it was coming from Microsoft. Fortunately, due to lack of content, people abandoned MSN for the Real Thing. I'm afraid, if Microsoft introduced a radical incompatibility in its Web technology now, we all would face the problem of conforming to yet another silly "de facto" standard. Yes, Internet Explorer is not a standard (as some people like to belive), it's just the most ubiquitous browser. This is called "de facto standard". Which just means many people use it or many producers adopted it (better named "industry standard"). Nothing else. A real standard is what goes through a standardization process in a committee set up by a respectable, neutral, possibly international organization. ANSI, IEEE, ISO to name a few. A real standard is meant to save design efforts and produce a broad agreement among implementors so that their products will be interoperable or compatible. This should as well guarantee a long(er) lasting technology that is good for the producer and for the end user. A de facto standard doesn't mean anything of all this. (How often the Word document format has been modified in a totally incompatible way?) Microsoft can introduce _de facto_ standards to their will. They just need to burn some million dollars in a marketing campaign and the hypnotized masses in front of a TV screen will follow. That's, I guess, understandable and acceptable (sort of). Less acceptable is that this kind of misinformation is spreading into technical areas where people are supposed to know what they are talking about. They are supposed to distinguish a standard from commercial hype and they are supposed to advise less informed people (PHB) about this subtle but substantial distinctions. -- walter pelissero http://www.pelissero.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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