The fundamental flaw with #20's argument (and his patsy, #22), is that the Win32 API is one of the most complete and well-documented OS APIs available today. You cannot find any better documented API out there. Another problem with MS' competitors (Linux and XFree86) is that their documentation is so poor, non-existant or just plain incorrect that it makes it near impossible to develop for them. One of MS' most brilliant strategies (and it's not that brilliant, really) was that they targeted developers. They first made it really easy for developers to crank out apps. People will overlook failings in the OS if there are many good apps. The reason that developers don't develop for other platforms is, for the main reason, that it's just too damned difficult!
#20, if you had any clue, you'd know that the Win32 API is something to be praised. In fact, to further illustrate how brain-dead your argument is, the Win32 API is so well documented, that there is a project o reverse engineer the internals. The external spec is so well-defined that the internals aren't terribly difficult to reproduce -- thus the success of the WinE project. They actually have Office and many other Windows-only apps running on Linux, not to mention DirectX and other Windows-only APIs and applications.
As far as Eudora with no macro viruses, this is because:
- Eudora doesn't have half the features of OE or Outlook
- Eudora has a very tiny fraction of the users of OE or Outlook. Virus writers don't target apps that no one uses
- There have been several viruses written for Eudora when it was a popular app, but there haven't been any recently because it's not worth anyone's time.
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