It's even worse than that. Just as application developers discovered that they had a much harder time getting their apps. to work under Windows than did MS itself, imagine GateWay finding that their machines just don't seem to run Windows as reliably as MS's XBox.
This gives Microsoft a whole new arena for dirty tricks.
Why do I write code in my free time, when I've been writing code for pay for over 20 years?
I started writing Exult about three years ago, mainly just to get a little experience writing with XLib. At the time, my job involved writing a couple HDL compilers for my employer (a large Dutch company). Around the time the compilers were being beta-tested, my group was sold to another company, and my project shelved.
Then I worked for a startup, also developing compilers. I left after about a year, just before they ran out of money (whew!). What I wrote for them will probably never see the light of a CRT again.
Meanwhile, Exult has grown to over 100K lines-of-code, has about a half-dozen active developers, a busy user forum, and gets 8-10K downloads when we release each alpha. We've also received at-a-boy emails from several of Ultima7's developers, and even one from R.G himself (unless someone was spoofing:-)).
I still need to keep coding for money, but the GPL'd code has certainly brought me a lot more satisfaction.
That's when people got spoiled. I spent 3 years working on a word-processor in Z80 assembler when "PC" was a generic term, and extra memory beyond 64K was swapped in/out in 8K chunks. We even had spell-checking and support for right-to-left languages like Arabic.
I wouldn't want to go back to the days of assembly-language, but you're right about it weeding out the incompetent. People who weren't with it just couldn't write assembler at all; but they often can churn out semi-working C/C++ code.
If it's that much fun, perhaps countries could use simulators instead of having real battles. Seems like a lot of wars are about culture, religion, or just egos. In other words, they're not about anything physical.
So set the leaders and top military commanders up with one of these 'games'. If it's fun enough, they'll get so engrossed that they'll forget what they were fighting about.
So what's wrong with ripping out portions of Windows:-)
BTW, it should be possible to run X on a 486/100; speed is even okay on my 486/66. It's the low-memory that makes it a bit of a challenge. But you should be able to run a lightweight window-manager like BlackBox. Just don't try to install KDE or Gnome!
Okay, I'm stuck in the 80's. But the music just doesn't interest me lately. Even the one 'alternative' station seems to only play about 20 songs over and over, so I don't even know if there's anything new that I'd care to buy. And I'm certainly not going to drop $17 on a CD that I don't know anything about.
In the past (>20 years ago), most high-paying fields were difficult for women to get into. So lots of really smart women ended up teaching elementary school, even though the pay was pathetic.
Nowadays, teachers get paid a bit better, but still not nearly enough compared to other fields like law, medicine, or software. Some smart people go into teaching anyway because they're really dedicated, but they're a minority.
Not a bad idea if they supported it. When you use the phone, you may have to wait a bit for an answer, and you may use several more seconds explaining to the 911 operator that it's a fire. If they took email, you could have a hot-coded key or icon; you'd just click and run.
For many, their internet connection is the primary way they communicate with others.
What if your phone service was cut off because you sang a copyrighted song over the line?:-) Or suppose your postal service was suspended because someone accused you of sending or receiving copyrighted material?
Re:Don't Like It That Way? Don't Buy It That Way?
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$1200 Cheap!
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· Score: 2
Of course! Just like if you don't want to buy a PC bundled with software, you don't have to.
Perceptions: Sony vs Microsoft
on
$1200 Cheap!
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· Score: 2
It may be even worse for MS than you suggest. My perception of Sony, which may be fairly typical, is "large Japanese company that produces very high-quality electronics at reasonable prices." I don't think very many people associate the word "quality" with Microsoft.
I guess if your local phone company decides they're going to switch their signal to an encoded digital format, for which only they can supply compatible phones, that will be fine too.
Glade is a great choice if you want something lightweight that doesn't take over the whole project. It takes a little getting used to, as you have to learn something about GTK, which uses layouts rather than absolute coordinates for placing widgets (buttons, text fields, etc.)
But you don't have to know anything about XML (I don't), and I've also found that GTK and Glade/Gladelib work nicely with C++.
...I'd also say that being beset by the Crusaders, then conquered by the Ottomans, and finally, turned into European protectorates also had something to do with their decline.
In one sense, publishers are already the 'walking dead' since anyone can easily and cheaply publish their own works, either on paper or the internet.
But consider how many manuscripts are submitted to publishers. I'd guess there are at least 10 for every one that gets published. I'd also bet that at least half the rejected ones are utter garbage. Publishers hire many editors to deal with these. And they really do have to at least look at them all, since, otherwise, they'd never discover new authors.
In a world without publishers, would you want to have to start reading 10 books in order to find the one that's half-decent? Do you want to read 200 pages of a book, and then discover that one of the chapters is missing?
Yes. In many ways, we've already gone down that path. It used to be that a 'crime' meant robbery, murder, assault, or rape. Now we have the police arresting a guy for failing to pay child support. Sure, failing to support your kids seems like a sleazy thing to me, but it ought to be worked out in civil court, not by the police.
I was on jury duty with a fellow who told this story:
His truck had been stolen, but later recovered. However, the police had neglected to remove it from the 'stolen-cars' database. The result is that he was pulled over, roughly pulled from his car, and handcuffed for several minutes until the problem was sorted out.
People are worried about all the worms and viruses slowing down the internet? If every time Windows PC's blue-screen, the data is uploaded to MS, it will slow to a crawl.
Basically, you're saying that open-source should work more like a corporation in order to compete with Microsoft.
But there used to be many corporations competing with MS. Most are either gone (DRI), bought (Lotus, WordPerfect) or have given up (IBM). I'd bet at least half the people writing open-source would like to start companies and get funding for what they do.
But it's not going to happen. Venture capitalists don't want to fund MS competitors, because experience shows too much likelihood of failure. So the people who want to write operating systems, or word-processors, or GUI toolkits just do it for fun, supporting themselves with work in other areas.
And rather than look for the limitations, I think it's damned amazing how good lots of the free stuff is.
Sure, we in the Linux community think of this as another strike against Microsoft. But the way the news is being reported, the message to the general public is:
1. The internet is being threatened.
2. Microsoft is providing the fix.
Slashdot Mirror
This gives Microsoft a whole new arena for dirty tricks.
The software makers used to be larger. Remember DRI, Lotus, WordPerfect?
I started writing Exult about three years ago, mainly just to get a little experience writing with XLib. At the time, my job involved writing a couple HDL compilers for my employer (a large Dutch company). Around the time the compilers were being beta-tested, my group was sold to another company, and my project shelved.
Then I worked for a startup, also developing compilers. I left after about a year, just before they ran out of money (whew!). What I wrote for them will probably never see the light of a CRT again.
Meanwhile, Exult has grown to over 100K lines-of-code, has about a half-dozen active developers, a busy user forum, and gets 8-10K downloads when we release each alpha. We've also received at-a-boy emails from several of Ultima7's developers, and even one from R.G himself (unless someone was spoofing:-)).
I still need to keep coding for money, but the GPL'd code has certainly brought me a lot more satisfaction.
I started writing Exult
Just curious, but what did "tribbles" symbolize?
I wouldn't want to go back to the days of assembly-language, but you're right about it weeding out the incompetent. People who weren't with it just couldn't write assembler at all; but they often can churn out semi-working C/C++ code.
So set the leaders and top military commanders up with one of these 'games'. If it's fun enough, they'll get so engrossed that they'll forget what they were fighting about.
BTW, it should be possible to run X on a 486/100; speed is even okay on my 486/66. It's the low-memory that makes it a bit of a challenge. But you should be able to run a lightweight window-manager like BlackBox. Just don't try to install KDE or Gnome!
Okay, I'm stuck in the 80's. But the music just doesn't interest me lately. Even the one 'alternative' station seems to only play about 20 songs over and over, so I don't even know if there's anything new that I'd care to buy. And I'm certainly not going to drop $17 on a CD that I don't know anything about.
In the past (>20 years ago), most high-paying fields were difficult for women to get into. So lots of really smart women ended up teaching elementary school, even though the pay was pathetic.
Nowadays, teachers get paid a bit better, but still not nearly enough compared to other fields like law, medicine, or software. Some smart people go into teaching anyway because they're really dedicated, but they're a minority.
Not a bad idea if they supported it. When you use the phone, you may have to wait a bit for an answer, and you may use several more seconds explaining to the 911 operator that it's a fire. If they took email, you could have a hot-coded key or icon; you'd just click and run.
What if your phone service was cut off because you sang a copyrighted song over the line?:-) Or suppose your postal service was suspended because someone accused you of sending or receiving copyrighted material?
Of course! Just like if you don't want to buy a PC bundled with software, you don't have to.
It may be even worse for MS than you suggest. My perception of Sony, which may be fairly typical, is "large Japanese company that produces very high-quality electronics at reasonable prices." I don't think very many people associate the word "quality" with Microsoft.
I guess if your local phone company decides they're going to switch their signal to an encoded digital format, for which only they can supply compatible phones, that will be fine too.
But you don't have to know anything about XML (I don't), and I've also found that GTK and Glade/Gladelib work nicely with C++.
It's amazing what corporate types will do when they're playing with other peoples' money.
...I'd also say that being beset by the Crusaders, then conquered by the Ottomans, and finally, turned into European protectorates also had something to do with their decline.
But consider how many manuscripts are submitted to publishers. I'd guess there are at least 10 for every one that gets published. I'd also bet that at least half the rejected ones are utter garbage. Publishers hire many editors to deal with these. And they really do have to at least look at them all, since, otherwise, they'd never discover new authors.
In a world without publishers, would you want to have to start reading 10 books in order to find the one that's half-decent? Do you want to read 200 pages of a book, and then discover that one of the chapters is missing?
Yes. In many ways, we've already gone down that path. It used to be that a 'crime' meant robbery, murder, assault, or rape. Now we have the police arresting a guy for failing to pay child support. Sure, failing to support your kids seems like a sleazy thing to me, but it ought to be worked out in civil court, not by the police.
His truck had been stolen, but later recovered. However, the police had neglected to remove it from the 'stolen-cars' database. The result is that he was pulled over, roughly pulled from his car, and handcuffed for several minutes until the problem was sorted out.
People are worried about all the worms and viruses slowing down the internet? If every time Windows PC's blue-screen, the data is uploaded to MS, it will slow to a crawl.
But there used to be many corporations competing with MS. Most are either gone (DRI), bought (Lotus, WordPerfect) or have given up (IBM). I'd bet at least half the people writing open-source would like to start companies and get funding for what they do.
But it's not going to happen. Venture capitalists don't want to fund MS competitors, because experience shows too much likelihood of failure. So the people who want to write operating systems, or word-processors, or GUI toolkits just do it for fun, supporting themselves with work in other areas.
And rather than look for the limitations, I think it's damned amazing how good lots of the free stuff is.
1. The internet is being threatened.
2. Microsoft is providing the fix.
This is just the same thing, with everyone a few years older.