You either lie, or you're stupid. It's very easy to buy a computer without Windows installed. Just don't be fooled and buy from somebody else than the big stores, mom & pops computer shops will happilly sell you one without an MS OS. I've been doing this since the days of XTs.
The reason products succeeds nowadays is because they outspend their competitors in marketing, that's the way the market works. How the hell do you think such a pile of crap the PS2 is can sell that much?
Most people have dropped SGI or are in the process of dropping em (Pixar, ILM for example, altough converting those proprietary IRIX applications/script is taking some time), they don't own the high end graphic market anymore, it's overpriced and it's slow hardware compared to what you can get with Linux and PCs. Have done work on an Octane or even an O2? It' so pathetic compared to a machine now costing 1/10 of the price.
Dataplus is a joke... there's not GL support on PS2. In fact Sony is not really giving you an API for 3D on PS2 you pretty much have to code your own drivers.
Bullshit, I've (or my parents when I was a lot younger) been buying computers since the days of XTs and I never bought one with an MS OS installed. Go shop elsewhere than Dell and you'll see you're free to buy what you want.
The fact is every other thing that tried to compete on PC wasn't very useful, DR-DOS sucked and was very slow with some applications, Gem and pre-3.11 version of Windows were pratically useless it's no wonder they didn't worked. And Lotus and WP didn't fly on windows because they were really bad. I was a die hard WP user at the time and didn't want anything to do with Word, first time I saw Word 2.0 for Windows I switched and never went back, it was just so much better.
The difference is nobodies whole life is being controlled because of copyrights.
The fact that I may choose to use some kind of proprietary software doesn't stop you or anybody from creating or using free software.
The right to copy is akin to the right to steal a car from a car dealer. Even if the duplication cost zero, the money invested to pay for the people who developped/tested/designed the software needs to be compensated if the consummer deems the product is worth the price. You just don't have the right to copy anything, it's stealing.
People have the right to charge you for their creation and you don't have the right to copy it. You do have the right not to buy it though and use/develop free software instead.
I think free software is good, it's sometimes a very good solution to some computing problems (there's still a lot of things you can only do with proprietary software because of various reasons such as massive R&D investments needed to get somewhere or special hardware neeeded, of just that it's very specialized and there's not too much demand for it). And it's great for those who can't pay for commerical software or prefer to be able to control their software. But it doesn't mean the world owns you that every piece of software must be copyable and free (ie with source and no restrictions).
And the Chevy worker paid for it's car, and the McDonald employee will pay for it's food... where's the difference with BitKeeper? And anyway a Chevy worker or a McDonald employee is (probably) just a guy executing a job like he was told to. He's not responsible for the research that went behind his job so nobody cares what he uses/knows. It's not gonna give any competitive advantage to the company.
You've obviously never worked on big software projects with multiple concurrent versions being developped at the same time. CVS is utter shit for that (as is VSS), it is not "industrial enough" by any means.
Hydro-electriicty.... not possible everywhere, but it's much more safe than nuclear power... it course has it's drawbacks like the flooding of large regions, and all the pollutions problems related to that.
There's no need to worry about VFX shops, even if you sell your hardware at a really high price, you don't sell enough for it make a difference that would make it a viable reason in itself to support OpenGL. Portability to MacOS X is a good reason though.... although OpenGL on a Mac is nearly as close as DirectX on Windows. You can't publish your extensions before Apple decides they're ready to include them. This sucks....
Precompiler directives.... it's a lot like a template you know... much weirder and undebuggable, but it's still possible to have that fast sort in C without recoding everything.
You've obviously never programmed in X direclty! X is bad, but it's so prevalent in the unix world nobody has the guts to wipe it. Notice that Apple has chosen en entirely different windowing/rendering technology.
Reboots are not really needed most of the time. You can kill DirectX update the D3D driver and restart an DirectX app that'll use the new driver without even rebooting the machine (actually you only need to do this if you're writing the driver). And it's pretty funny that DHCP can change your IP address on the fly, but if you want to change a static IP address you have to reboot. I think they are just being extra cautious because if they can save one support call from some terrible thing that happened once it's worth it the way they view it. A lot of people require reboot at the end of their installshield scripts for NO reason.
Navigator was nearly free. If you were a student or government it was free. And you could always download it and install it, so for most people it was free. Only for profit companies had to buy it (if I remember well), and even then it was so easy to get hold of I'm sure a lot of places just downloaded it and installed it everywhere.
And I don't think MS even had a chance with explorer without it beeing free. They could have used the same pricing system, but by using the profits from the OS (and making the OS more attractive with IE) to develop it they probably got more money from IE than Netscape ever got from Navigator. It's not free, you just pay for it by buying windows.
I just don't know anybody who ever bought Navigator or ever thought it wasn't free, Navigator was just a way to sell servers IMHO.
The publisher is often necessary, because he's the one fronting the cash so you can develop your game. Until you've published a game that was sucessful enough to pay entirely for the next one, you're dependant on your publisher for the money to pay the bills and salary (unless you have other funding). It's true that it could remove the cost of the middlemen, but you need somebody to start you up unless you already have the money. This would typically be a VC/Publisher since a bank probably won't loan it to you since it's too expensive and too risky. So you still end up with somebody taking a cut in the middle and wanting a big return since it's a high risk. Most game projects do not make any money.
Question, is losing privacy equivalent to losing liberty? You can still do what you want, it's just that the gov might know some of what you're doing. What if that system would have prevented what happened on september 11? Is the life of 4000 people worth giving away some of your privacy?
Still... what do you want to code in Windows that you can't because the APIs are not documented? And can you give an example of anothter OS (SunOS, Solaris, MacOS,...) in which this was possible and documented.
They have very good documentation available in MSDN (and it's free). Which APIs are you referring too? What can't yo do without them?
I'm tired of people using this argument just because they heard somebody use it. I've yet to see any prof of this.
I mean, Win32 is well documented and I've yet to see a feature of a Microsoft app I don't know how to reproduce (it may take a long time to reproduce it but that's life). They may have some custon UI controls, but every company has. Basic windowing and kernel functions are the same for everyone.
People who claim this are mostly bad programmers searching for excuses.
Can you actually name a ms app where OLE works well?:)
Don't believe me? Fire up SoftIce and trace through a ms app you'll see they use the same APIs has everybody.
I used to be very anti-MS and pro WordPerfect/Netscape back then but....
WordPerfect for windows sucked and didn't support TrueType fonts leading me to use Word instead.
I hated IE3, IE4 was not too bad and netscape was SO bad I switched.
The fact is they're now a quasi-monopoly (there's no other OS to buy but Linux/BSD offer you another choice, so it's not technically a monopoly, just don't buy your computer from Dell and you'll be able to buy it without an OS) but they were not always in that position. And you need some leader somewhere.
Hardware manufacturers won't play nice with each other and develop mostly compatible hardware without somebody to force them to. (either MS or some other entity). Look a the vertex shader/pixel shader fiasco in GL. Through DirectX, Microsoft forces HW vendors to create hardware with mostly the same capacities, and you can use the feature on multiple cards without rewriting for each cards extensions. In GL everybody does it through extensions and we'll have to wait till next summer until the whole mess has cleared up and has been approved by the ARB. Without MS this could have taken an even longer time since there would have been no guarantee that cards from different vendors would have had similar capacities.
MS is certainly not all good, but they're not all bad. Their licensing is pretty cheap compared to SGI and Sun.
Damn, this is so wrong I created an account to answer....
-XBox has 64mb of memory not the GC.
-The PS2 is the Saturn equivalent not the XBox. The PS2 is a mishmash of different chips running in parrallel which you have to program in assembler and synchronize yourself using a lot of customs TAGS for each chip. The XBox is DX8, really, really, really easy compared to the PS2. Just ask any PS2 progammer who much fun it is to write a 3D polygon clipping routine in VU microcode, and who much fun it is to debug it.
And the XBox does on-the-fly DD 5.1 encoding, this is the coolest thing ever for me:)
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You either lie, or you're stupid. It's very easy to buy a computer without Windows installed. Just don't be fooled and buy from somebody else than the big stores, mom & pops computer shops will happilly sell you one without an MS OS. I've been doing this since the days of XTs.
The reason products succeeds nowadays is because they outspend their competitors in marketing, that's the way the market works. How the hell do you think such a pile of crap the PS2 is can sell that much?
Most people have dropped SGI or are in the process of dropping em (Pixar, ILM for example, altough converting those proprietary IRIX applications/script is taking some time), they don't own the high end graphic market anymore, it's overpriced and it's slow hardware compared to what you can get with Linux and PCs. Have done work on an Octane or even an O2? It' so pathetic compared to a machine now costing 1/10 of the price.
Dataplus is a joke... there's not GL support on PS2. In fact Sony is not really giving you an API for 3D on PS2 you pretty much have to code your own drivers.
Bullshit, I've (or my parents when I was a lot younger) been buying computers since the days of XTs and I never bought one with an MS OS installed. Go shop elsewhere than Dell and you'll see you're free to buy what you want.
The fact is every other thing that tried to compete on PC wasn't very useful, DR-DOS sucked and was very slow with some applications, Gem and pre-3.11 version of Windows were pratically useless it's no wonder they didn't worked. And Lotus and WP didn't fly on windows because they were really bad. I was a die hard WP user at the time and didn't want anything to do with Word, first time I saw Word 2.0 for Windows I switched and never went back, it was just so much better.
The difference is nobodies whole life is being controlled because of copyrights.
The fact that I may choose to use some kind of proprietary software doesn't stop you or anybody from creating or using free software.
The right to copy is akin to the right to steal a car from a car dealer. Even if the duplication cost zero, the money invested to pay for the people who developped/tested/designed the software needs to be compensated if the consummer deems the product is worth the price. You just don't have the right to copy anything, it's stealing.
People have the right to charge you for their creation and you don't have the right to copy it. You do have the right not to buy it though and use/develop free software instead.
I think free software is good, it's sometimes a very good solution to some computing problems (there's still a lot of things you can only do with proprietary software because of various reasons such as massive R&D investments needed to get somewhere or special hardware neeeded, of just that it's very specialized and there's not too much demand for it). And it's great for those who can't pay for commerical software or prefer to be able to control their software. But it doesn't mean the world owns you that every piece of software must be copyable and free (ie with source and no restrictions).
And the Chevy worker paid for it's car, and the McDonald employee will pay for it's food... where's the difference with BitKeeper? And anyway a Chevy worker or a McDonald employee is (probably) just a guy executing a job like he was told to. He's not responsible for the research that went behind his job so nobody cares what he uses/knows. It's not gonna give any competitive advantage to the company.
Yeah but your Ford doesn't come with a full spec and the schematics for every part.
The fact that you can open the hood and tweak it is more like the fact that you can configure your software.
And you can disassemble software just as much as you can diasassemble your car.
You've obviously never worked on big software projects with multiple concurrent versions being developped at the same time. CVS is utter shit for that (as is VSS), it is not "industrial enough" by any means.
It's an 8x2 pixel arrangement.
Hydro-electriicty.... not possible everywhere, but it's much more safe than nuclear power... it course has it's drawbacks like the flooding of large regions, and all the pollutions problems related to that.
There's no need to worry about VFX shops, even if you sell your hardware at a really high price, you don't sell enough for it make a difference that would make it a viable reason in itself to support OpenGL. Portability to MacOS X is a good reason though.... although OpenGL on a Mac is nearly as close as DirectX on Windows. You can't publish your extensions before Apple decides they're ready to include them. This sucks....
Precompiler directives.... it's a lot like a template you know... much weirder and undebuggable, but it's still possible to have that fast sort in C without recoding everything.
You've obviously never programmed in X direclty! X is bad, but it's so prevalent in the unix world nobody has the guts to wipe it. Notice that Apple has chosen en entirely different windowing/rendering technology.
Reboots are not really needed most of the time. You can kill DirectX update the D3D driver and restart an DirectX app that'll use the new driver without even rebooting the machine (actually you only need to do this if you're writing the driver). And it's pretty funny that DHCP can change your IP address on the fly, but if you want to change a static IP address you have to reboot. I think they are just being extra cautious because if they can save one support call from some terrible thing that happened once it's worth it the way they view it. A lot of people require reboot at the end of their installshield scripts for NO reason.
Navigator was nearly free. If you were a student or government it was free. And you could always download it and install it, so for most people it was free. Only for profit companies had to buy it (if I remember well), and even then it was so easy to get hold of I'm sure a lot of places just downloaded it and installed it everywhere.
And I don't think MS even had a chance with explorer without it beeing free. They could have used the same pricing system, but by using the profits from the OS (and making the OS more attractive with IE) to develop it they probably got more money from IE than Netscape ever got from Navigator. It's not free, you just pay for it by buying windows.
I just don't know anybody who ever bought Navigator or ever thought it wasn't free, Navigator was just a way to sell servers IMHO.
I'm not so sure about that (in the game industry)
The publisher is often necessary, because he's the one fronting the cash so you can develop your game. Until you've published a game that was sucessful enough to pay entirely for the next one, you're dependant on your publisher for the money to pay the bills and salary (unless you have other funding). It's true that it could remove the cost of the middlemen, but you need somebody to start you up unless you already have the money. This would typically be a VC/Publisher since a bank probably won't loan it to you since it's too expensive and too risky. So you still end up with somebody taking a cut in the middle and wanting a big return since it's a high risk. Most game projects do not make any money.
Question, is losing privacy equivalent to losing liberty? You can still do what you want, it's just that the gov might know some of what you're doing. What if that system would have prevented what happened on september 11? Is the life of 4000 people worth giving away some of your privacy?
OK I made a typo...
...) in which this was possible and documented.
Still... what do you want to code in Windows that you can't because the APIs are not documented? And can you give an example of anothter OS (SunOS, Solaris, MacOS,
They have very good documentation available in MSDN (and it's free). Which APIs are you referring too? What can't yo do without them? I'm tired of people using this argument just because they heard somebody use it. I've yet to see any prof of this.
Which API? They had a browser working so what did they needed more?
Wrong, it'a a MACH kernel with BSP apis (some) and tools. It's based on OpenSTEP not FreeBSD.
Which real APIs?
:)
I mean, Win32 is well documented and I've yet to see a feature of a Microsoft app I don't know how to reproduce (it may take a long time to reproduce it but that's life). They may have some custon UI controls, but every company has. Basic windowing and kernel functions are the same for everyone.
People who claim this are mostly bad programmers searching for excuses.
Can you actually name a ms app where OLE works well?
Don't believe me? Fire up SoftIce and trace through a ms app you'll see they use the same APIs has everybody.
I used to be very anti-MS and pro WordPerfect/Netscape back then but....
WordPerfect for windows sucked and didn't support TrueType fonts leading me to use Word instead.
I hated IE3, IE4 was not too bad and netscape was SO bad I switched.
The fact is they're now a quasi-monopoly (there's no other OS to buy but Linux/BSD offer you another choice, so it's not technically a monopoly, just don't buy your computer from Dell and you'll be able to buy it without an OS) but they were not always in that position. And you need some leader somewhere.
Hardware manufacturers won't play nice with each other and develop mostly compatible hardware without somebody to force them to. (either MS or some other entity). Look a the vertex shader/pixel shader fiasco in GL. Through DirectX, Microsoft forces HW vendors to create hardware with mostly the same capacities, and you can use the feature on multiple cards without rewriting for each cards extensions. In GL everybody does it through extensions and we'll have to wait till next summer until the whole mess has cleared up and has been approved by the ARB. Without MS this could have taken an even longer time since there would have been no guarantee that cards from different vendors would have had similar capacities.
MS is certainly not all good, but they're not all bad. Their licensing is pretty cheap compared to SGI and Sun.
Damn, this is so wrong I created an account to answer.... -XBox has 64mb of memory not the GC. -The PS2 is the Saturn equivalent not the XBox. The PS2 is a mishmash of different chips running in parrallel which you have to program in assembler and synchronize yourself using a lot of customs TAGS for each chip. The XBox is DX8, really, really, really easy compared to the PS2. Just ask any PS2 progammer who much fun it is to write a 3D polygon clipping routine in VU microcode, and who much fun it is to debug it. And the XBox does on-the-fly DD 5.1 encoding, this is the coolest thing ever for me :)