Re: www.microsoft.com sure needs a lot of silicon

Excerpts from netnews.comp.sys.next.advocacy: 25-Apr-97 Re: www.microsoft.com sure .. by Paul David Fox_at_lehman.co
> The Unix people have had more APIs than a child can eat sugar-candy.
> Alas, all of these APIs are not sexy enough.

The "sexiness" of an API-- ie, it's appeal to users rather than developers, isn't a very good indication of the value of an API. Nevertheless, OpenGL is kind of sexy, and so is EOF and OpenStep, IMHO.

> Look at the MS APIs: multi-media, 3d/2d/sound, OLE, etc, etc.

Most of those are subsumed within DirectX. DirectX is a decent idea, but the implementation is flawed-- how many people have had their video drivers blown away because they installed a game that didn't ask before reinstalling DirectX & new video drivers that didn't work?

Furthermore, I've heard that DirectX's 3D component has some inherent limitations which only allow a maximum throughput of about 300,000 polygons per second-- whereas Apple has claimed that a native implementation of QD/GX was achieving about 700,000 polygons per second on the same hardware.

> Unix is still figuring out what the size of an 'int' is

That's purely a C issue, and has nothing to do with Unix. If you run other languages (say Java), the size of an int is specified.

[ ... ]
> Unix is a very cold operating system (its warm enough for me!).

Ever use NEXTSTEP? Try it sometime....

> Windows is very easy to assimilate: it looks good. Who cares how
> well it works ? (I do, but the average person in the street wouldnt
> even understand the question).

Let's assume that what you say here is true for a moment. Are you suggesting that it's a good thing that the average computer user is willing to tolerate badly written operating systems (presumably because they don't know any better)?

-Chuck

         Charles Swiger | cs4w_at_andrew.cmu.edu | standard disclaimer
        ----------------+---------------------+---------------------
           I know you're an optimist if you think I'm a pessimist.