You know the basic story---Microsoft has agreed to offer an up-to-date version of Win95 that's fully-functional without Internet Explorer. This lets Microsoft dodge a big, fat contempt-of-court bullet that was headed its way. Most reports focused on that one element of the story: "Microsoft Blinks," "MS Backs Down," "Microsoft Yields Ground" was the typical spin you probably saw in various news reports.

But if you read some of the actual text coming out of the agreement, you'll see that the agreement may actually strengthen Microsoft's case that IE is an essential and integral part of the OS---Microsoft now has court-sanctioned language that uses "Windows 95 files" and "features of the operating system" to describe what sure looks like IE-related stuff to me.

Microsoft essentially gave up nothing, and now has court-sanctioned language that in effect accedes to Microsoft's claims that IE is integral to the OS.

Want to judge for yourself? Please click over to http://www.langa.com/badlink.htm to see excerpts of Microsoft's description of the agreement, and to join in a discussion of what it means to competition, to future versions of Windows, and to everyone who uses Windows and IE.

It raises a point: what are the best ways to recover from any errant software installation?

I know of several, and that's what this week's WINDOWS Magazine BBS column is about. To start, I'll tell you of two tools hidden on your Win95 CD; they're there, but they don't get installed on your system when you set up Windows. In fact, most people don't even know these tools exist---or that they can save your bacon when your system goes belly-up.

WinMag is rebuilding the BBS area, so the old lead-in page is gone. But starting Monday, you should see a link to my column on the WinMag home page (http://content.techweb.com/winmag/) and I'll also post a link from my HotSpots page (http://content.techweb.com/winmag//flanga/hotspots.htm).

Join in--and see what hidden tools your Win95 CD has to offer you!

Java, so they said, would be a true cross-platform ("Write once, run anywhere") tool; it could even be more than just a tool, becoming a full-blown platform that might even eventually replace Windows and seriously weaken Microsoft. The way the hype built, I was waiting for someone to claim Java would end world hunger and cure cancer.

Come on: It's a language. And a very young one at that.

That's what Netscape found. Although they were the first high-profile company to commit to Java, they found it a sinkhole for development costs. "Write once, port everywhere" became the joke. At one point, Netscape had 17 different versions of its Java VM (virtual machine) so that the supposedly "write once" language could actually work on different platforms.

Last week, Netscape threw in the Java towel. They're laying off an unspecified---but probably significant---number of their Java developers. Instead of developing more VMs, Netscape will offer a set of APIs; it'll be up to system vendors to build their own VMs, and to hook them to Netscape's APIs.

The San Jose Mercury News has a story on it here:
http://www.sjmercury.com/business/center/netscapejava012498.htm

This is major news--- Netscape's support of Java is what gave Java its early visibility and credibility. Java won't and shouldn't go away, but I think the Java Wars will soon wind down. In the future, I think DHTML and XML will end up doing a lot of what Java was once thought to do, and Java itself will go back to being what it really is---a very nice, very powerful development language.

I'll have more on this in a column next week.

HotSpots & BrowserTune
Last Thursday, we threw the switch on new versions of my areas on the WinMagWeb: 3491 files and some 10,000 links went live! I learned some interesting things about FrontPage along the way.

The WinMag server is a NT/IIS box and is constructed with an extra safety measure: New pages are posted first to a "staging server" and then automatically replicated to the live server. The idea is to keep web authors from having to touch the live, public server---and that’s a good thing.

But FrontPage normally uses the web author's local system as a staging server. When FrontPage "publishes" a web, it expects to talk to the live web server and builds some pages accordingly. For example, it sets some necessary Base URLs to point to whatever the target server is.

But if those published pages are then lifted and moved to yet another server---which is what the WinMag site replication does---the Base URLs are then invalid, pointing to a location other than the one where the web now resides.

None of this is in the FrontPage help files, of course, and I spent about a day trying to figure out why some pages that had tested fine on two other servers were broken on the WinMag site; and then fixing them by manually editing the broken code.

But once that was done, I could start to attend to the final fit-and-finish issues and to ensure that the whole thing is working.

You can see the results on the HotSpots page (http://content.techweb.com/winmag//flanga/hotspots.htm), the BrowserTune97 pages (http://content.techweb.com/winmag//bt97/), the BrowserTune Classic pages (http://content.techweb.com/winmag//btclassic/ ), and the all-new HotSpots Hall Of Fame Archives (http://content.techweb.com/winmag//hsarchives/).

With the infrastructure in place in final form, I'm now wrapping BrowserTune98 test pages in the code that will make them work on the WinMag site. Expect a beta very, very soon.

Do You Trust Computer Magazine Reviews?
Do you trust computer magazine reviews? Why---or why not? Do you believe the content you read is uninfluenced by advertising, or do big-buck advertisers buy their way to good press? Who does a good job of reviewing products, and who have you found to be wanting? What could magazines and online news sources do to make reviews better?

And On A Lighter Note...
Reader Paul D. Williams used Roman Numerals to prove something I've suspected for a long time:

I've been hearing from a number of LangaList readers who live in coastal New Hampshire; people have sent not only good wishes, but also specific advice on restaurants, places to shop, local community members I should know about, what ISPs to consider, and more. So far, it's all by ‘Net, but I know I'll meet at least some of these people F2F. So not only did the web help us find a place to live, it's already helping us meet some very nice new neighbors. Cool!

Fred
(fred@langa.com)


A live web version of this note is online in  the "what's new" section of http://www.langa.com.

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