On Mar 6, 8:44*am, The Natural Philosopher <a...@b.c> wrote:


>lots of stuff


thanks everyone for your input, but I believe we wen't a litle off
topic here (as usual)
anyway, I believe that as for "serious computing" and gimp and spss
(and autocad, etc), and that stuff, there is a niche, and such niche
is highly specific, for instance, I don't believe my grandma would
require large amount of proccessing, or any of that stuff.
(but then again, she is kinda dead, so she probably won't have use for
PCs at all, but you get the point)

also, I believe that the conversation is driven by the fact that
current browser implementations seem to loose when you compare their
performance with Desktop apps.

This, doesn't have to be always so, if you consider Flash, Java (ugh),
Etc as compiled, fast-as-hell code running inside a browser, and that
the PCs will only become faster and faster with age (If moore is to be
believed, which isn't really the discussion here), making such
differences irrelevant as time goes by.

I have seen the Browsers evolve from HTML rendering tools with no
scripting, to lousy scripting, to today's current application
plattforms, which are nothing but stunning in their level of
complexity and the possibilities they allow (canvas, flash, activeX
(ugh), PDF, etc), some may argue that scripting still sucks, but I
believe we have come to a point where you can spect some level of
standarization, that makes interoperability easier to achieve and
maintain, as long as you keep using a subset of the API that won't
give you much problems, and stay away from the scary parts (remember
C?, just the same stuff).

If you consider a simple user, with simple needs, all he ever sees is
a browser, for email, chat and random document editing and printing;
for such user, the OS is irrelevant, but browser features,
performance, usability, etc. are very important in his/her everyday
tasks.

As for US, advanced geeks who enjoy learning command line options, we
will care about shells and our tools, and we will have our litle
fights over what filesystem is better, and that's us, and the industry
won't be able to change that, but for normal, regular, standard, out
of the box users, that don't really give a damn about technology, but
they care about their *data*, and they care about comm, and all the
stuff that makes them richer and more productive, for them, those
users, will probably see a slow transition that will render their OS
transparent, and no longer part of their water-cooler conversations (I
hope).



there are 6 HTTP layers (or so I was told),
I care not about any of them.
they are infrastructure.
they are invisible (except for the sixth one).
users don't even know what HTTP stands for.
that's what I'm talking about.

the final layer gets all the credit and the OS APIs get none.
what do you guys think?