My, how quickly people forget. IE really won because Netscape 4 sucked. Sure, IE stagnated after that and it's hard to forgive MS for that, but let's not pretend that IE6 was an inferior browser that came to dominance simply through underhanded techniques despite superior offerings from competitors.

Hmmm... I think your memory is slightly misleading there. Netscape losing the Browser War had nothing to do with Netscape Navigator being inferior to IE6.

IE4 bundled with Windows 95C was the beginning of the end for Netscape. Up until that point, IE3 had been a separate entity and most people had no idea how to get it installed, let alone that it existed. Windows 95C included IE4 as a "bonus" CD on OEM distributions and if you wanted a lot of the new features tht made 95C "better" you needed to install it. If an OEM left it off, their version of Windows 95C was seen as being "inferior" when compared with those that did install it.

It was at this point that Microsoft started releasing builds if Memphis (later known Windows 98) that had IE built into the core of the OS by default. All the new features, such as active desktop, nice looking folder browsers, CHM Help and so on, relied on IE being left on the machine. By the time Windows 98 was released, the browser wars were essentially over. Why? Because people got IE4 for free when they bought a new computer that had Windows 95C on it, and when Windows 98 was available, the OEM didn't even need to make the effort to install it any more.

Netscape lost their browser war, not because their browser sucked (and I agree that it did) but because they could not compete with Microsoft's strategy of tying the browser to the operating system on desktop releases of the Windows platform. This is partly what started the whole anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft. People no longer felt compelled to pay for the shareware Netscape Navigator when they get Internet Explorer and Outlook Express for free with their new computer. Why spend the hour downloading Netscape at dialup speeds (which the majority of the internet user base still had back then) when something just as good was already installed.

The OEM contracts that Microsoft had with the majority of the OEM companies was also another factor, but irrelevant here. Maybe in another BeOS discussion it might prove pertinent.

IE6 wasn't released until 2001, a few months before Windows XP was released in August. It was available for all versions of Windows, from Windows 95 to Windows 2000. It was a free upgrade. But IE6 in no way had any effect on Netscape. It was all over by then for Netscape. The Mozilla engine had already been released as open source by then and the Phoenix browser project was already in its infancy.

This is a little surprising to me. Why would they go after the end user companies that produce computers rather than the much bigger fish that rely on this technology for their core bread and butter?

Cisco, Foundry, Juniper, F5 and so on all make a lot more sense to go after given that they're less likely to want to risk the chance of losing and more likely to settle the issue out of court.

Companies like Dell, Apple, Acer, HP and the beige box boys can simply just ignore the patent and say "Talk to Intel/nVidia/chipset vendor X" or simply not include onboard NIC machines and switch to using PCI/USB cards instead.

Theres not a lot of hope for this suit even at the best of circumstances, but the companies its going after are potentially shielded by the fact they themselves are not likely to produce the chips that handle Ethernet. Merely include chips from someone else (such as Intel) in their products.

Or am I completely missing something?

No more likely to bite you than a bumble bee will bite you. Just don't piss them off and you can handle them without issue. Problem is they look pretty scary to most people. Huge grasshopper type bug with huge thorns over its legs and body that lives in dark places like caves and hollowed trees. Still, as long as you don't piss them off, you can pick them up without fear. Just hope no one before you came along and pissed it off before you got there. ;-)

Not really quite the case. Maori and the British fought tooth and nail for most of the 19th century. In fact, some British officers wanted nothing more than to completely wipe Maori off the face of the planet, and in some areas pretty much succeeded.

NZ's history as far as the colony is concerned is far from peaceful. Maori didn't stop fighting each other, maybe. But they didn't just ignore the British either. They used the British technology against each other, and also against the British.

The major issue with the Treaty of Waitangi is that the Maori version and the English version are not identical. The translations were pretty rough. So even after it was signed by all the tribal leaders across the country, there are still disputes going on between the Crown and many of the Maori tribes today. The only difference is that the weapon of choice is now money and land. Or the expenditure of former, and prolonged occupation of the latter.

http://www.newzealandwars.co.nz/ is a good place to find out about the wars that raged in the 19th century.

As a work around, Google has said they are going to release an iPhone Safari specific version to run as a webapp on the iPhone. The different Google Voice apps (across all platforms) are just a significantly improved and platform-native GUI to the service.

The GV app is still just an app. It doesn't replace any of the Apple apps. They're still there and still fully functional. What it does do is make them redundant.

Instead of giving people your cell number, you give them your Google number. At that point, all your voicemail is kept on the Google service, all your calls are routed through the Google service to whatever phone(s) you choose to have the calls go to. You are no longer tied to Apple's Visual Voicemail (which by most people's accounts hasn't worked properly in quite a while anyway) nor are you limited to AT&T's network anymore. The same applies to SMS and so on as well. Use your Google number instead of your iPhone number and you can get the messages on any/all your phones rather than just your iPhone.

The GV app also allows you to make calls out through Google's network. Your phone dials Google, then dials out from Google to where ever. With the apps on the various platforms, this is essentially transparent. You just use the dialer in the GV app instead of the Apple dialer. It doesn't sync your contacts to the Google servers as such. Like all apps on an iPhone, it has access to your contacts directly, so doesn't need to store them on the server. Not that it matters much given you can use Google Sync to do it, or even us iTunes itself.

Having said all that, the Apple phone apps are still all there and you can use those as well if you want. But if you do, CallerID will show your cell # instead of your Google number. If people call that number, you lose things like voicemail transcription features and so on.

I am basing this on the functionality in the applications on other platforms such as Android and Blackberry. I doubt the app for the iPhone would be any different in functionality, only in appearance.

But no, the app doesn't replace the Apple ones. It merely supersedes them and essentially makes them redundant.

I agree... I had a similar issue at a school a few years back. Windows + Mac clients on the network. Rather than try to run two directories, we just used Novell eDirectory with (then available) Novell dirXML which allowed all the clients to use a single directory without realising they weren't native Active Directory or OpenDirectory platforms they were talking to. It saved a lot of effort down the line and proved extremely scalable. Also had the benefit of allowing the network to integrate other platforms in the future without much effort if the school wanted to. I'm sure there are plenty of great FOSS solutions out there, but eDirectory make it so much easier and reduced the cost of implementation significantly, even taking into account licensing costs. Sometimes you do just have to weigh up all the angles.