Historically control did not exist on any creative work, remember that copyright is a modern concept, previously artists were funded by patrons, the greatness of their work reflecting well on their benefactors
You want to go back to this system? Where only a very few artists can survive because there are only a couple of kings, and there's only so much music they can listen to?
Sure! Let's all become peasants and have an ultra upper class, and an ultra lower class, and not much in between.
Only a minority of people make software that gets distributed publicly and it's still perfectly possible to make a living as a programmer making publicly free software. The Linux kernel hackers do it, for instance. Hell Linus is a millionare for making free software.
Linus Torvalds is certainly not, however, a good general example.
Show me 1000 people making a living writing free software. Then I'll believe your argument.
So if one freely decides to write a program and not divulge the code, then that person is antisocial?
It's ok. I personally consider Richard Stallman to be an antisocial bastard because, frankly, he's actively trying to bring about the destruction of my way of life. Not by producing a better alternative, but because he thinks that I'm impinging on his freedoms.
And he does so without ocnsidering the consequences on society as a whole.
The great thing about utopias is that they all have a common flaw - they fail to take into account human nature. So why should I, as a software engineer (who Richard Stallman likens to a retail clerk, being the pompous jerk he is) give up my chance at happiness and the personal freedom to explore different chances and opportunity within this wide wide world, while allowing others to feed off that work and profit- in fact, enabling them to do what I cannot - sell my work?
He's a jerk, and he's trying to set up a reactionary argument - flamebaiting, or trolling, if you will. Because the only way he can make his argument work is if he makes his protagonists look unreasonable. And he does that by starting a flamewar.
Admittedly, I just copied & pasted that and know nothing of GTK programming, so I don't understand why your rebuttal is brilliant:)
Is it because of the choice of includes or because of actual functionality?
Well, the thing is, they're all different ways of doing the same thing.
The standard Windows Hello World app creates a window from scratch, and displays text in it by hand. Which is useful if you want to learn the hard core of the framework.
The GTK app you displayed, creates a standard frame window, with a standard label control in it, and displays it. Which is OK, but is one step removed - you don't have to handle any of the underlying stuff, and you don't learn any of the nitty gritty from it. Might as well have written it in MFC.
I took it one step further, and decided I could do the same by visually building a dialog and putting a text control on the dialog - that way I don't even need to write code to build it (the way the GTK sample does) - all I need is the code to show the dialog. But that hides even more implementation info.
Heck, I could even go one better, and replace it all with a call to MessageBox, which just displays a message in a popup window with an OK button to dismiss it.
The question is - what are you trying to learn from the Hello World sample? How the framework works? Or how to build a really really simple (but nearly completely useless) window? Or how to use the MessageBox API - which is nearly entirely useless (but is often given today as the standard Hello World for Windows because so many people complained that it wasn't as simple as the C one.)
I like the Windows one - if you work through it, it gives you nearly all of the basics you need to get up and running with Win32 GUI code, and gives the basis to create pretty much ANY app you want.
All of the other samples we've gone over don't give you anything close.
Where would they get uncompressed video to start with in the first place?
I don't know... maybe POV ray renders? Or perhaps they could capture analogue TV? *shrugs* Either way, it's not my problem.
Did you mean to imply that DV encoded data isn't lossy compressed? I believe it is, fixed 5:1 compression in fact.
No, but it's pretty soon going to be the industry standard video source from broadcast to consumer level (if it isn't already). Given that you edit as close to the source data as possible, and only compress again as an output stage, you probably want to look at those tests for the most part.
Am I the only person here who thinks that recompressing an already MPEG2 compressed source is going to cause lots of problems for other compressors? At the very least, they now have to deal with block quantization artifacts, and all of the associated ringing etc.
Not to mention that because the sources were not compressed in a lossless fashion, there's less data to work with than they started out with.
So I guess if your goal is to test how well other codecs can recompress MPEG2 data, it's all well and dandy. What might be a better test is to see how all of the codecs work on DV encoded data, as that is rapidly becoming a common source of video information.
elementcomputer.com sells a convertible tablet running a custom Xandros linux. The distrobution doesn't come with kernel sources, and there are many limitations on the software side. Also, touchscreen calibration as a severe pain in the ass. As an early adopter, i can deal with these limitations, but it is DEFINATELY not ready for the mainstream.
That "tablet" has a resistive touch screen.
Its not a tablet if it's touch sensitive. The whole idea is to be able to rest your palm on the display while writing. No Microsoft TabletPC is touchsensitve.
Actually, that pricing does sound about right. I recall laserdiscs were rather expensive back in the day, and there certainly weren't any (good/cheap) ways to make perfect copies of them
Compare how many people bought laser disks vs. how many DVDs are sold, then compare the pricing.
If you don't do the market size analysis, your price comparisons are frankly useless.
(Clue: The laserdisk market was tiny compared to the DVD market - the hardware was too expensive for most people).
You have a really shitty understanding of economics.
Your biggst problem is that you couch your response in terms of morality. The marketplace doesn't give two shits about your morality, it only cares about maximizing value and minimizing cost. Right, wrong or sideways, piracy is marketplace competition and the end result of increased competition is always reduction in pricing.
And if abstract economic theory is too hard for your little shitty mind to comprehend, read this for actual hard proof that the music industry has been reducing prices. If your morality-laden theories were correct, with the increase of music piracy costs would have gone up and so would have prices. Clearly you are incorrect and your beliefs false.
As another person has already said in this thread:
If you're so right, then why weren't DVD and CD prices much much higher before they were being copied and spread on networks?
Answer: they were priced about the same. Because you're wrong.
Apparently you don't like having your theft thrown in your face, otherwise you wouldn't be throwing the word "shitty" around like it's going out of fashion.
What's wrong? Feeling a little confronted by people who don't agree with your outright stealing?
Oh, and one more thing? That link you referred to. I guess that has nothing to do with the music companies being found guilty of price fixing a couple of years ago, huh?
Without the threat of piracy, its a good bet that CD's and DVD prices would be 50-100% higher than they are today.
If economics and history teach us anything, its that producers of any product, whether its widgets or music, or movies, will raise the price as high as they can in the absence of any competition.
Since Government sponsered "Intellectual Property" is a defacto monopoly supported by the government, the only relief we have is to just grab the stuff if they charge too much.
Hmmm... sounds like a rather nice way of justifying stealing to yourself.
Kind of shifty really. Do you enjoy being a thief?
And no, piracy is not competition to real sales. Other DVDs which you can buy are the true competition, that and the fact that if you price them too high, people won't be able to afford them on their disposable income. Stealing them doesn't drive the price down; if anything, it drives up the cost.
Last time I checked, Windows in all its multifarious versions has no way to run a program in a sandbox, such that this program is incapable of DOS'ng the PC by opening tons of windows, file handles, memory blocks, processes, etc....
Perhaps you should check again, and learn what Job Control Objects are used for.
Security and networking weren't part of the base design of Windows OR its predecessor,Dos, unlike all the *nixish operating systems, which were designed from the ground up with the intent of running multiple processes with multiple users.
Given that you're the one claiming that we shouldn't ignore the history of Windows when people pull you up on the stupidity of this comment, let me show you that you shouldn't ignore the history of Unix, which also WASN'T designed from the ground up with networking and security in mind.
"The first fact to face is that UNIX was not developed with security, in any realistic sense, in mind; this fact alone guarantees a vast number of holes."
Unix started out life with 14 character filenames. No security. No networking.
It wasn't until BSD that you had filenames up to 255 characters.
You're not dealing with an obsolete profession in this case - the profession will still be there, but the market will not be willing to pay for that work.
Seems to me that's a very good working definition of obsolete.
Not really, because people still want that software - they're just becoming less and less willing to pay for it because Free Software has shown that there are thousands of 'marks' willing to give away their work for free.
FS is not just 'proprietary SW that is given away" - it is a different product. Users want software that they aare free to use as they want.
Actually, they mostly just want software. Developers want software they can modify - and they're a special, separate class of user - not a general case.
Are you suggesting that FS is (or should be) illegal?! Shurely shome mishtake..!
No, I'm arguing that you can't claim that "the market has decided" when the price point for your product is free. That puts you outside of the bounds of the normal operation of the market - in a scenario officially known as predatory pricing, which is illegal. Either you're operating within the bounds of the market and your stance that this is normal functioning of a capitalist market - and your pricing is illegal as a result - or you're not operating within the bounds of the market at all, and you're not doing anything illegal.
So be careful with the arguments you try to present.
For example, you and your ilk all cried foul when Microsoft released IE for free and "killed" Netscape (even though all the browsers are that time but Netscape were $0 per copy). Why do you think anyone else should be treated any differently?
Or the code for the Microsoft Visual Studio C/C++ Runtime Library
That's already available for you to read if you buy Visual Studio. Given that you can read the code (and implement any bug fixes you find if you want to, and publish the deltas for those fixes), it's already heavily tested and bug free (at least, it has no obvious bugs), and the fact that the Microsoft C runtime libraries are already pretty nicely optimized, just what advantage exactly does anyone get from Microsoft open sourcing that code? What advantage is there to Microsoft? What advantage is there to a Windows developer? What advantage is there to anyone?
I mean, other than the fact that GCC could then steal their runtime library implementation and use it in their own compiler (they certainly could do with a number of the optimizations).
Releasing some of your own tools under some type of open source license is NOT equal to "working with the open source community". Working with the open source community IMHO, would be releasing tools or at least specifications that allow any non MS products to work better or integrate into existing MS products. This may happen on a small scale now but it is VERY limited.
As I said, I've already looked over this stuff on MSDN. Perhaps you missed where I said I'm looking for "simple information". I already said I looked over this information and found it was not simple (e.g. fairly complex) for a simple hello world program. Since I said I already looked over it, I don't know why you make the assumption that I have not already looked over it, and then post a link to it saying I don't know how to search for it. I said I couldn't find a simple explanation, not that I couldn't find an explanation. You're going off on a ridiculous tangent. Perhaps you could have assumed I don't know how to compile instead of assuming I don't know how to find Microsoft's byzantine hello world for Windows program. The problem is not that I can't find it, which I did, a long time ago, but that the information is as much, if not more, opaque and confusing then one would find looking for this information on UNIX You said
Which part of the documentation are you finding hard to understand?
The Entry-Point Function
Every application must have an entry-point function. The name commonly given to the entry point is the WinMain function.
As in most Windows-based applications, the WinMain function for the Generic application completes the following steps:
Registering the window class
Creating the main window
Entering the message loop
Registering the Window Class
Every window must have a window class. A window class defines the attributes of a window, such as its style, its icon, its cursor, the name of the menu, and the name of the window procedure.
The first step is to fill in a WNDCLASS structure with class information. Next, you pass the structures to the RegisterClass function. The Generic application registers the GenericAppClass window class as follows: code sample elided
Creating the Main Window
You can create the window by calling the CreateWindow function. The Generic application creates the window as follows:
code sample elided
The first parameter is the name of the class that we registered. The remaining parameters specify other window attributes. This call creates the window, but the system does not display a window until the application calls the ShowWindow function. The Generic application displays the window as follows:
code sample elided... and so on
What's hard about that? If you want a much simpler one, you could just do a call to MessageBox() - but frankly, that's NOT a "hello world" program. You might as well be demanding a console-mode printf("Hello World"); - the point of a "Hello World" is to teach you how to use the platform you're trying to use. This being a GUI platform, requires much more code than a command-line platform's equivalent.
Would you care to provide the equivalent in X? Or KDE? Or Gnome? Or any other Linux GUI? That way we can compare "simplicity".
do not find what you linked to "easy to use". The first page you linked to says "This section assumes that you have used Windows-based applications and therefore are already familiar with windows, menus, and dialog boxes in Microsoft® Windows®." Well, I'm not familiar with any of that, that's why I was looking for a "Hello world" sample (as I said before, I am somewhat familiar with MS-DOS programming, not Windows programming).
So you can't read. Big deal.
It assumes that you have USED Windows based applications. Heck, you've used LINUX based applications, I'm sure that you've not been running IBM370 terminals for the past 20 years - you HAVE experience using a GUI. If you're claiming you haven't, you're either very very insular, or are lying.
So then I click on the GENERIC.C program and get a 189 line program to make Windows do a hello world. If not for copyright I'd post it al
Anyway, (a) if no-one could afford to make a living with FS, who the hell is developing it?
People with more free time than sense, typically. People who work other jobs to make ends meet.
I'm doing that right now, trying to set up my own company. It's not an efficient way to do anything - by the time you finish your day job, you've typically been wrung dry for the day.
(b) no-one has a god-given right to make a living in a particular professsion
Correct. However, that's a corruption of the real argument. That argument was made regarding obsolete professions. You're not dealing with an obsolete profession in this case - the profession will still be there, but the market will not be willing to pay for that work. There's a huge difference between this, and say, someone who makes buggy carts. Buggy carts are in very low demand. Software developers are in increasing demand, but free software is trying to push their value to zero - after all, they can't be worth anything if most of them give away their work for free.
FSF damages the profession - deliberately, I might add - for all of those who are in the industry.
(c) it's irrelevant to the ethical & moral issues of free vs proprietary sw anyway.
Not particularly. You see, I believe that when one expects others to do work, one should compensate them for that work. It's an ethical thing, you see. It's why I don't like shooting short films at nights and weekends without paying crew & actors in some way - it's just too much to ask without giving them something in return for their hard work - even if they would gladly do it for free.
But hey, maybe I'm just a weirdo in this business world - I just happen to believe in paying people above and beyond what they're worth, and trusting in their professionalism to do a good job. Not wringing them for everything they have, and taking them for everything I can get for free.
I'm not advocating the use of force to compell everyone to do so. Market forces will take care of it in the end. If the market won't support crippled software, that doesn't mean vendors aren't free to carry on trying to con people into buying their proprietary snakeoil.
However, "Free" software, with a unit price of Zero, breaks the market system because people will always gravitate towards free as in beer. It's not even part of the market any more - it's a separate entity designed to destroy the market. So, no, market forces won't do any such thing.
If you really insist that "market forces" are at work, you might want to look up "predatory pricing", which is illegal. Either you operate within the market - and its laws - or you don't.
Oh, so you want to add some development tools? that's an additional 200MB [or so, without manual pages]. You want an office suite? Add another GB. So now you're upto ~2GB and you're out of pocket over a thousand dollars. Mmm... fun.
1. A full install of Office, including OneNote, Project, Frontpage, Access, Powerpoint, Word, Excel, InfoPath, Visio, Publisher and the VB Macro IDE takes up only 507Mb on my system. THat's a far cry from "add another Gb", and for a lot more functionality than you get in a full Open Office install.
2. Microsoft developer tools - compilers, SDKs - can be downloaded for free. No cost. Install size of developer tools is not an issue if you're a software developer - it's only an issue if your platform requires that you compiler everything yourself - a la Gentoo.
3. While we're at it, you can run Open Office for free on Windows too if you want to. SO your "out of pocket over a thousand dollars" comment is bunk.
4. Yes, you can replace explorer.exe. Try looking at the stardock website some time. Here's an example for you.
5. Yes, you can replace the browser in Windows with something different. I know you've probably never heard of them, but try looking at Firefox or Opera some time.
6. While we're at it, any install that requires a "competent user" to do it is not exactly something that you can buy off the shelf. If it requires hand tweaking, you can pretty much rule it out as an example of "lack of bloat". In the past, I've managed to fit a fully working version of Windows NT 4.0 into less than 50Mb of disk space. Whoopdidoo.
7. Your "don't want to use" argument is lame. Your Gentoo install contains Gnome (don't want to use), perl & python (really don't want to use), mozilla (bloatware), xmms (don't want to sue), mplayer (uses illegally copied dlls from Windows), X (inefficient subsystem for a GUI that runs on a desktop computer). So that's not a particularly good argument either way.
8. Yes, you do get a competent music/media player. That's what the whole EU lawsuit is about. The webbrowser is also fine. And the shell is fine - for basic tasks. If you want more, download something else.
Call *me* when MSDN can put up some simple information on how to do a "hello world" program in Windows. God forbid you want to use multiple windows which are tabbed or something.
Please take this person's notion that MSDN is world's above what Linux or some other UNIX has with a grain of salt. Also, docs.sun.com and sunsolve.sun.com have always worked adequately for me.
While you're at it, you might also want to question the person I'm responding to, who apparently can't search their way out of a paper bag.
Slashdot Mirror
Historically control did not exist on any creative work, remember that copyright is a modern concept, previously artists were funded by patrons, the greatness of their work reflecting well on their benefactors
You want to go back to this system? Where only a very few artists can survive because there are only a couple of kings, and there's only so much music they can listen to?
Sure! Let's all become peasants and have an ultra upper class, and an ultra lower class, and not much in between.
Welcome to the 14th Century.
Only a minority of people make software that gets distributed publicly and it's still perfectly possible to make a living as a programmer making publicly free software. The Linux kernel hackers do it, for instance. Hell Linus is a millionare for making free software.
Linus Torvalds is certainly not, however, a good general example.
Show me 1000 people making a living writing free software. Then I'll believe your argument.
So if one freely decides to write a program and not divulge the code, then that person is antisocial?
It's ok. I personally consider Richard Stallman to be an antisocial bastard because, frankly, he's actively trying to bring about the destruction of my way of life. Not by producing a better alternative, but because he thinks that I'm impinging on his freedoms.
And he does so without ocnsidering the consequences on society as a whole.
The great thing about utopias is that they all have a common flaw - they fail to take into account human nature. So why should I, as a software engineer (who Richard Stallman likens to a retail clerk, being the pompous jerk he is) give up my chance at happiness and the personal freedom to explore different chances and opportunity within this wide wide world, while allowing others to feed off that work and profit- in fact, enabling them to do what I cannot - sell my work?
He's a jerk, and he's trying to set up a reactionary argument - flamebaiting, or trolling, if you will. Because the only way he can make his argument work is if he makes his protagonists look unreasonable. And he does that by starting a flamewar.
including from someone who's got as 'Foe' - hi spectecjr:
Who's got who as foe? I've never ranked you as one... and I don't recall you ranking me as one... so erm... just exactly what are you talking about?
Admittedly, I just copied & pasted that and know nothing of GTK programming, so I don't understand why your rebuttal is brilliant :)
Is it because of the choice of includes or because of actual functionality?
Well, the thing is, they're all different ways of doing the same thing.
The standard Windows Hello World app creates a window from scratch, and displays text in it by hand. Which is useful if you want to learn the hard core of the framework.
The GTK app you displayed, creates a standard frame window, with a standard label control in it, and displays it. Which is OK, but is one step removed - you don't have to handle any of the underlying stuff, and you don't learn any of the nitty gritty from it. Might as well have written it in MFC.
I took it one step further, and decided I could do the same by visually building a dialog and putting a text control on the dialog - that way I don't even need to write code to build it (the way the GTK sample does) - all I need is the code to show the dialog. But that hides even more implementation info.
Heck, I could even go one better, and replace it all with a call to MessageBox, which just displays a message in a popup window with an OK button to dismiss it.
The question is - what are you trying to learn from the Hello World sample? How the framework works? Or how to build a really really simple (but nearly completely useless) window? Or how to use the MessageBox API - which is nearly entirely useless (but is often given today as the standard Hello World for Windows because so many people complained that it wasn't as simple as the C one.)
I like the Windows one - if you work through it, it gives you nearly all of the basics you need to get up and running with Win32 GUI code, and gives the basis to create pretty much ANY app you want.
All of the other samples we've gone over don't give you anything close.
If you're going to do it that way, I can do the same thing. Or alternatively, I can just use a dialog resource and do it in one line of code:
::ShowDialog(IDD_HELLOWORLD);
#include
#include "resource.h"
void WinMain(...whatever...) {
}
What is "What kind of dolt pays $500 for a game, with or without bugs?"
$500 for the question, not the game.
Sheesh. Do you get off on disemboweling jokes or is it just an incidental past time?
resources are spent on fixing bugs rather than porting to platforms that may or may not increase profits
Not very buggy game vs. many platforms?
I'll take a not very buggy game for $500 please, Alex.
Where would they get uncompressed video to start with in the first place?
I don't know... maybe POV ray renders? Or perhaps they could capture analogue TV? *shrugs* Either way, it's not my problem.
Did you mean to imply that DV encoded data isn't lossy compressed? I believe it is, fixed 5:1 compression in fact.
No, but it's pretty soon going to be the industry standard video source from broadcast to consumer level (if it isn't already). Given that you edit as close to the source data as possible, and only compress again as an output stage, you probably want to look at those tests for the most part.
Am I the only person here who thinks that recompressing an already MPEG2 compressed source is going to cause lots of problems for other compressors? At the very least, they now have to deal with block quantization artifacts, and all of the associated ringing etc.
Not to mention that because the sources were not compressed in a lossless fashion, there's less data to work with than they started out with.
So I guess if your goal is to test how well other codecs can recompress MPEG2 data, it's all well and dandy. What might be a better test is to see how all of the codecs work on DV encoded data, as that is rapidly becoming a common source of video information.
elementcomputer.com sells a convertible tablet running a custom Xandros linux. The distrobution doesn't come with kernel sources, and there are many limitations on the software side. Also, touchscreen calibration as a severe pain in the ass. As an early adopter, i can deal with these limitations, but it is DEFINATELY not ready for the mainstream.
That "tablet" has a resistive touch screen.
Its not a tablet if it's touch sensitive. The whole idea is to be able to rest your palm on the display while writing. No Microsoft TabletPC is touchsensitve.
Actually, that pricing does sound about right. I recall laserdiscs were rather expensive back in the day, and there certainly weren't any (good/cheap) ways to make perfect copies of them
Compare how many people bought laser disks vs. how many DVDs are sold, then compare the pricing.
If you don't do the market size analysis, your price comparisons are frankly useless.
(Clue: The laserdisk market was tiny compared to the DVD market - the hardware was too expensive for most people).
You have a really shitty understanding of economics.
Your biggst problem is that you couch your response in terms of morality. The marketplace doesn't give two shits about your morality, it only cares about maximizing value and minimizing cost. Right, wrong or sideways, piracy is marketplace competition and the end result of increased competition is always reduction in pricing.
And if abstract economic theory is too hard for your little shitty mind to comprehend, read this for actual hard proof that the music industry has been reducing prices. If your morality-laden theories were correct, with the increase of music piracy costs would have gone up and so would have prices. Clearly you are incorrect and your beliefs false.
As another person has already said in this thread:
If you're so right, then why weren't DVD and CD prices much much higher before they were being copied and spread on networks?
Answer: they were priced about the same. Because you're wrong.
Apparently you don't like having your theft thrown in your face, otherwise you wouldn't be throwing the word "shitty" around like it's going out of fashion.
What's wrong? Feeling a little confronted by people who don't agree with your outright stealing?
Oh, and one more thing? That link you referred to. I guess that has nothing to do with the music companies being found guilty of price fixing a couple of years ago, huh?
Cause and effect. Learn them.
Without the threat of piracy, its a good bet that CD's and DVD prices would be 50-100% higher than they are today.
If economics and history teach us anything, its that producers of any product, whether its widgets or music, or movies, will raise the price as high as they can in the absence of any competition.
Since Government sponsered "Intellectual Property" is a defacto monopoly supported by the government, the only relief we have is to just grab the stuff if they charge too much.
Hmmm... sounds like a rather nice way of justifying stealing to yourself.
Kind of shifty really. Do you enjoy being a thief?
And no, piracy is not competition to real sales. Other DVDs which you can buy are the true competition, that and the fact that if you price them too high, people won't be able to afford them on their disposable income. Stealing them doesn't drive the price down; if anything, it drives up the cost.
Why do you think I said *nixish and not unix. The parent OS was MULTICS, which had selective file sharing, access controls, etc.
You said all the *nixish systems. That includes Unix.
Last time I checked, Windows in all its multifarious versions has no way to run a program in a sandbox, such that this program is incapable of DOS'ng the PC by opening tons of windows, file handles, memory blocks, processes, etc....
Perhaps you should check again, and learn what Job Control Objects are used for.
Security and networking weren't part of the base design of Windows OR its predecessor,Dos, unlike all the *nixish operating systems, which were designed from the ground up with the intent of running multiple processes with multiple users.
Given that you're the one claiming that we shouldn't ignore the history of Windows when people pull you up on the stupidity of this comment, let me show you that you shouldn't ignore the history of Unix, which also WASN'T designed from the ground up with networking and security in mind.
From Dennis Ritchie:
"The first fact to face is that UNIX was not developed with security, in any realistic sense, in mind; this fact alone guarantees a vast number of holes."
Unix started out life with 14 character filenames.
No security.
No networking.
It wasn't until BSD that you had filenames up to 255 characters.
Learn some freakin' history.
Seems to me that's a very good working definition of obsolete.
Not really, because people still want that software - they're just becoming less and less willing to pay for it because Free Software has shown that there are thousands of 'marks' willing to give away their work for free.
Take a look at this, for example...
Blog post re: google's pleas for new database software
FS is not just 'proprietary SW that is given away" - it is a different product. Users want software that they aare free to use as they want.
Actually, they mostly just want software. Developers want software they can modify - and they're a special, separate class of user - not a general case.
Are you suggesting that FS is (or should be) illegal?! Shurely shome mishtake..!
No, I'm arguing that you can't claim that "the market has decided" when the price point for your product is free. That puts you outside of the bounds of the normal operation of the market - in a scenario officially known as predatory pricing, which is illegal. Either you're operating within the bounds of the market and your stance that this is normal functioning of a capitalist market - and your pricing is illegal as a result - or you're not operating within the bounds of the market at all, and you're not doing anything illegal.
So be careful with the arguments you try to present.
For example, you and your ilk all cried foul when Microsoft released IE for free and "killed" Netscape (even though all the browsers are that time but Netscape were $0 per copy). Why do you think anyone else should be treated any differently?
Or the code for the Microsoft Visual Studio C/C++ Runtime Library
That's already available for you to read if you buy Visual Studio. Given that you can read the code (and implement any bug fixes you find if you want to, and publish the deltas for those fixes), it's already heavily tested and bug free (at least, it has no obvious bugs), and the fact that the Microsoft C runtime libraries are already pretty nicely optimized, just what advantage exactly does anyone get from Microsoft open sourcing that code? What advantage is there to Microsoft? What advantage is there to a Windows developer? What advantage is there to anyone?
I mean, other than the fact that GCC could then steal their runtime library implementation and use it in their own compiler (they certainly could do with a number of the optimizations).
Releasing some of your own tools under some type of open source license is NOT equal to "working with the open source community". Working with the open source community IMHO, would be releasing tools or at least specifications that allow any non MS products to work better or integrate into existing MS products. This may happen on a small scale now but it is VERY limited.
You're mixing up working with and working for.
Apple Developer Connection (ADC)
Hello World at ADC
Clearly not a Unix man page per se, and that isn't the job of Unix man pages. That is the job of MSDN. MSDN does it very badly.
You linked to a page full of 265 results for a search on "Hello World" on an Apple website.
And you think this is better than MSDN?
Would you care to let me know which of those 265 results is the actual GUI hello world program you claimed was "easy" to find?
Which part of the documentation are you finding hard to understand?
What's hard about that? If you want a much simpler one, you could just do a call to MessageBox() - but frankly, that's NOT a "hello world" program. You might as well be demanding a console-mode printf("Hello World"); - the point of a "Hello World" is to teach you how to use the platform you're trying to use. This being a GUI platform, requires much more code than a command-line platform's equivalent.
Would you care to provide the equivalent in X? Or KDE? Or Gnome? Or any other Linux GUI? That way we can compare "simplicity".
do not find what you linked to "easy to use". The first page you linked to says "This section assumes that you have used Windows-based applications and therefore are already familiar with windows, menus, and dialog boxes in Microsoft® Windows®." Well, I'm not familiar with any of that, that's why I was looking for a "Hello world" sample (as I said before, I am somewhat familiar with MS-DOS programming, not Windows programming).
So you can't read. Big deal.
It assumes that you have USED Windows based applications. Heck, you've used LINUX based applications, I'm sure that you've not been running IBM370 terminals for the past 20 years - you HAVE experience using a GUI. If you're claiming you haven't, you're either very very insular, or are lying.
So then I click on the GENERIC.C program and get a 189 line program to make Windows do a hello world. If not for copyright I'd post it al
Anyway, (a) if no-one could afford to make a living with FS, who the hell is developing it?
People with more free time than sense, typically. People who work other jobs to make ends meet.
I'm doing that right now, trying to set up my own company. It's not an efficient way to do anything - by the time you finish your day job, you've typically been wrung dry for the day.
(b) no-one has a god-given right to make a living in a particular professsion
Correct. However, that's a corruption of the real argument. That argument was made regarding obsolete professions. You're not dealing with an obsolete profession in this case - the profession will still be there, but the market will not be willing to pay for that work. There's a huge difference between this, and say, someone who makes buggy carts. Buggy carts are in very low demand. Software developers are in increasing demand, but free software is trying to push their value to zero - after all, they can't be worth anything if most of them give away their work for free.
FSF damages the profession - deliberately, I might add - for all of those who are in the industry.
(c) it's irrelevant to the ethical & moral issues of free vs proprietary sw anyway.
Not particularly. You see, I believe that when one expects others to do work, one should compensate them for that work. It's an ethical thing, you see. It's why I don't like shooting short films at nights and weekends without paying crew & actors in some way - it's just too much to ask without giving them something in return for their hard work - even if they would gladly do it for free.
But hey, maybe I'm just a weirdo in this business world - I just happen to believe in paying people above and beyond what they're worth, and trusting in their professionalism to do a good job. Not wringing them for everything they have, and taking them for everything I can get for free.
I'm not advocating the use of force to compell everyone to do so. Market forces will take care of it in the end. If the market won't support crippled software, that doesn't mean vendors aren't free to carry on trying to con people into buying their proprietary snakeoil.
However, "Free" software, with a unit price of Zero, breaks the market system because people will always gravitate towards free as in beer. It's not even part of the market any more - it's a separate entity designed to destroy the market. So, no, market forces won't do any such thing.
If you really insist that "market forces" are at work, you might want to look up "predatory pricing", which is illegal. Either you operate within the market - and its laws - or you don't.
Oh, so you want to add some development tools? that's an additional 200MB [or so, without manual pages]. You want an office suite? Add another GB. So now you're upto ~2GB and you're out of pocket over a thousand dollars. Mmm... fun.
1. A full install of Office, including OneNote, Project, Frontpage, Access, Powerpoint, Word, Excel, InfoPath, Visio, Publisher and the VB Macro IDE takes up only 507Mb on my system. THat's a far cry from "add another Gb", and for a lot more functionality than you get in a full Open Office install.
2. Microsoft developer tools - compilers, SDKs - can be downloaded for free. No cost. Install size of developer tools is not an issue if you're a software developer - it's only an issue if your platform requires that you compiler everything yourself - a la Gentoo.
3. While we're at it, you can run Open Office for free on Windows too if you want to. SO your "out of pocket over a thousand dollars" comment is bunk.
4. Yes, you can replace explorer.exe. Try looking at the stardock website some time. Here's an example for you.
5. Yes, you can replace the browser in Windows with something different. I know you've probably never heard of them, but try looking at Firefox or Opera some time.
6. While we're at it, any install that requires a "competent user" to do it is not exactly something that you can buy off the shelf. If it requires hand tweaking, you can pretty much rule it out as an example of "lack of bloat". In the past, I've managed to fit a fully working version of Windows NT 4.0 into less than 50Mb of disk space. Whoopdidoo.
7. Your "don't want to use" argument is lame. Your Gentoo install contains Gnome (don't want to use), perl & python (really don't want to use), mozilla (bloatware), xmms (don't want to sue), mplayer (uses illegally copied dlls from Windows), X (inefficient subsystem for a GUI that runs on a desktop computer). So that's not a particularly good argument either way.
8. Yes, you do get a competent music/media player. That's what the whole EU lawsuit is about. The webbrowser is also fine. And the shell is fine - for basic tasks. If you want more, download something else.
Call *me* when MSDN can put up some simple information on how to do a "hello world" program in Windows. God forbid you want to use multiple windows which are tabbed or something.
Sure. In fact here's two.
Generic Windows Hello World program (in C)
Alternatively, how about this one... Hello World for Win32
There you go.
Please take this person's notion that MSDN is world's above what Linux or some other UNIX has with a grain of salt. Also, docs.sun.com and sunsolve.sun.com have always worked adequately for me.
While you're at it, you might also want to question the person I'm responding to, who apparently can't search their way out of a paper bag.