rec.autos.simulators

HW and SW are very different entities.  USR and Rocwell will
eventually still compete with similar products based on a common
standard.  No software company can make their own version of windows
and sell it because it is fully proprietary.  We only have one source
for our products.  This is actually quite scary.

<snip>

Good point, but you ignore the fact that you could have different OS's
that work with standards.  Therefore, apps can be ported very easily
to different platform (eg. w/ different unices).

What the hell don't you understand?  TCP/IP works anywhere.  DOS and
Win95 apps do not. Emulation is not in useable yet if ever. Also,
TCP/IP has competing protocols that have been rejected mostly, or we
might have ATM/IP in the future.  So there.  At least we have more
than one source for products.  Competition is good.  It should be
standards based in the computer industry IMHO.

yikes.  What's wrong with commodity apps and commodity uP's then?
What about one video card manufacturer and one modem manufacturer.

--

I can barely form my own opinions let alone Nortel's.
Salim

Java is a whole 'nother story.  Sun was aspiring to create a platform-
independent computing model.  However, Microsoft realized that that would
be bad for their business, and began to "corrupt" Java by creating many
PC-specific APIs for it.  It's worked.

HTML is another standard that's been corrupted by the greedy influence
of big business.  Both Netscape and Microsoft have rapidly created new
HTML tags that would initially only work with their own browsers.  Their
attempt was to get sites to use these tags, and thus force the public to
use their browser in order to view those sites.

You don't look very hard.  Proprietary standards often DON'T move
us forward.  Understand?  Probably not.

Try to listen again:  Microsoft ONLY cares about making money.
There's nothing noble about them.  If they could get away with
continuing to feed the public MS-DOS 1.0, they would.  It's
other companies' competition that drives Microsoft forward.
Microsoft wants to kill the competition.  What's wrong with this
picture?

Microsoft certainly doesn't want the best Java.  What they want
is everyone to run Java only under Windows.  They'll do whatever
it takes to further that end.

MS is publicly traded on NASDAQ, under the symbol MSFT. Has been since,
what, 1981?

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---Jim