Of course this won't be construed as illegal. After all, this was TELEVISION NEWS in a major market. If, on the other hand, this had been a someone's web site, then they probably would say that it was illegal.
One thing that I don't see in any of the discussion is the difference in programming method used by the two operating systems. Unix processes are essentially sequential. Windows, on the other hand, is essentially event-driven. If you don't take these differences into account, then you will tend to find yourself preferring what you are used to.
One other comment: there is a certain benefit to using the same environment that your users will be using. Quirks (and each OS has some) will be more apparent to you before your users have to suffer through them.
For most puposes you can use ATL instead of MFC. You get a much smaller more streamlined result and don't have to put up with the bulk of MFC. I think that you will find more people moving to ATL as time goes by. The main reason for using MFC now is that Visual Studio already generates most of your application for you in MFC.
while companies have an incentive to create new things since they can't simply rely on selling old stuff to make money
Such as Microsoft? MS gets revenue (mostly) in two ways: every new PC generates an new sale of one or more products and MS sells upgrades to existing products. Since they can't rely on selling "old stuff" to fill the coffers, they must repackage old stuff as "new stuff" and then extract their money from businesses and consumers that way. I don't think that this is a business model that we would like to encourage.
After reading the patent, I think that only prior art will break this. While the concept may seem obvious now, it was not back when the patent was filed.
The patent actually does a pretty good job of describing a Web server passing out pages to a client considering that the Web was still a number of years in the future when it was written. The server is the central computer referred to, the screen in front of you is the terminal apparatus, and a lot of us connect to the Web through a modem and the PSTN. Certainly an HTML page contains blocks of data to display and blocks of data that contain addresses.
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And because of what the School Board would do to the CS program once they found out what the students were doing!
Of course this won't be construed as illegal. After all, this was TELEVISION NEWS in a major market. If, on the other hand, this had been a someone's web site, then they probably would say that it was illegal.
One other comment: there is a certain benefit to using the same environment that your users will be using. Quirks (and each OS has some) will be more apparent to you before your users have to suffer through them.
For most puposes you can use ATL instead of MFC. You get a much smaller more streamlined result and don't have to put up with the bulk of MFC. I think that you will find more people moving to ATL as time goes by. The main reason for using MFC now is that Visual Studio already generates most of your application for you in MFC.
Such as Microsoft? MS gets revenue (mostly) in two ways: every new PC generates an new sale of one or more products and MS sells upgrades to existing products. Since they can't rely on selling "old stuff" to fill the coffers, they must repackage old stuff as "new stuff" and then extract their money from businesses and consumers that way. I don't think that this is a business model that we would like to encourage.
The patent actually does a pretty good job of describing a Web server passing out pages to a client considering that the Web was still a number of years in the future when it was written. The server is the central computer referred to, the screen in front of you is the terminal apparatus, and a lot of us connect to the Web through a modem and the PSTN. Certainly an HTML page contains blocks of data to display and blocks of data that contain addresses.