I like Microsoft, why not?
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... but another one. It seems that all the people is beginning to believe that all the software must be free and/or opensource, because "the knowledge must be free" and things like that. OK, lets say all the software is free and opensource. No one is going to pay the developers, because no company is going to gain money by producing software given away for free, then the developers couldn't survive with their work, then no one is going to write software. DEVELOPERS MUST BE PAYED! All the big opensource projects, from the Linux kernel to Mono, are sponsored by some huge company, say Novell, IBM, and the like. They actually PAY the developers. But they also SELL other (close-source) products, so they can eventually afford to give some money to the OS devs. I know I'm going OT, but I really hate people who wants every software for free. I am a developer, I even develop an opensource project, but I want to get paid for my work. How many opensource developers actually live on their job? Only a few (the ones developing the Linux kernel, Gnome, KDE and the like). All the others develop in their free time, while having a paid job, maybe at Microsoft. I'm really off-topic now. :-O
________________________________________________ Personal Blog [ITA] - Tech Blog [ENG] Developing ScrewTurn Wiki 1.1 and its Plugin Framework
You forgot google, didn't you? free software does not mean the developers are not going to be paid. just that the money is going to come from somewhere else. And it takes smart people to figure out from where. Enterprise be-spoke solutions and services are never going to be free, now the customer support, but software that comes with no support and possible funded by adverts can easily be made free.
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A bit dated but still very relevant and true. -- Why Windows is better than Linux Jon Hamkins (c) 1997 - hamkins@ugcs.caltech.edu Because of the harsh attacks on Dave Hewson recently, I have prepared a summary of the technical reasons why I find 95/NT better than Linux: Because all operating systems are written by programmers, I assume that any operating system is much smarter than me. Thus, any good operating system should try to outsmart me by restricting my options at every turn. Linux, like all versions of Unix, is lousy at restricting my options because at the command line virtually any operation can be performed with ease. (For example, 'rm -rf /win' could 'delete an entire mounted directory, with no popup window warnings whatsoever.) I'm proud to say that there is no such danger in 95/NT. Windows pop up when I want to make a change, and then more pop up to ask if I'm sure I want the change. Thankfully, Windows 95/NT operating systems look after my computer's well-being by occasionally switching configuration settings from the way I want them to what the OS programmers think they might probably ought to be. Boy, I'm just impressed with how smart they are. Once I learned to live with whatever the default settings are on any new hardware I install, I can't say the number of hours I have saved. I use that spare time to reboot my Windows machine multiple times a day. Technical support personnel recommend that I do it regularly-- kind of like brushing my teeth. To help remind me of this necessity, windows pop up to tell me to reboot whenever I make a configuration change. By now my machine is minty fresh, I figure. There is no such useful rebooting in a Linux system. It is as reliable as the sunrise, with uptimes in weeks and months. Virtually no configuration change requires a reboot, to boot. Imagine all that plaque in the computer. Gross! In 95/NT I am prevented from making dangerous fundamental configuration changes unless I use a special "registry editor". I have found it so useful to have this separate editor that I hope in future versions they go all the way and supply a separate editor for each file on the disk-- in that way windows could pop up at every keystroke to warn me that changing any line in the file I am editing could cause the system to not run properly. If this were only the case, people would finally learn that it is best to just stick with the mouse and they would be freed of the need to constantly move their hands back to th
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You forgot google, didn't you? free software does not mean the developers are not going to be paid. just that the money is going to come from somewhere else. And it takes smart people to figure out from where. Enterprise be-spoke solutions and services are never going to be free, now the customer support, but software that comes with no support and possible funded by adverts can easily be made free.
Anand Vivek Srivastava wrote:
software that comes with no support and possible funded by adverts can easily be made free.
X|
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I'm not expert:->, but I think that OpenGL is less powerful than DirectX. With DirectX you can create more. Or not ?:confused:
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Not correct. You can't really compare OpenGL to DirectX since OGL is a graphics API and DX is a whole slew of APIs. But OpenGL and Direct3D (the graphics part of DX) is pretty much comparable to each other. As an axample Doom 3 is OGL based.
Rohde wrote:
You can't really compare OpenGL to DirectX since OGL is a graphics API and DX is a whole slew of APIs. But OpenGL and Direct3D (the graphics part of DX) is pretty much comparable to each other. As an axample Doom 3 is OGL based.
...and not forget the great FuturePinball!
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I'm not expert:->, but I think that OpenGL is less powerful than DirectX. With DirectX you can create more. Or not ?:confused:
BorysBe wrote:
I think that OpenGL is less powerful than DirectX.
Not correct. OpenGL is generally slower than DirectX on consumer-level graphics cards, but OpenGL is much faster than DirectX on workstation-level graphics cards. They are both as powerful as each other, it just depends which hardware implementation you have.
Ryan
"Punctuality is only a virtue for those who aren't smart enough to think of good excuses for being late" John Nichol "Point Of Impact"
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BorysBe wrote:
I think that DirectX will never die.
DirectX... what is that? We dont need that kind of stuff to play games in Linux. We have GPL you know. We play with code. And with someone else's right to exist.
Abhishek It is impossible to change your past. But it is very possible to ruin your present by worring about the future. -Chankya
AbhishekBK wrote:
We play with code. And with someone else's right to exist.
Tell that to all the anti-Microsoft zealots on Slashdot. It is like saying "my religion is a religion of peace" then going out and starting a riot which kills a dozen innocent people who were just in the market selling things so they could afford to feed their family.
Upcoming Scottish Developers events: * UK Security Evangelists On Tour (2nd November, Edinburgh) * Developer Day Scotland: are you interested in speaking or attending? My: Website | Blog
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I understand that not everything is free. Linux is free? ok:) Microsoft is not cheap - you know :rolleyes: - but this is not a reason to hate it. Moreover... I think that DirectX will never die. Why? Computer games. Is anyone creating good games for Linux using OpenGL? :wtf:
BorysBe wrote:
Is anyone creating good games for Linux using OpenGL?
It's called supply and demand. If Linux were to become easy enough to replace Windows and become a prominent OS for the average Joe, people surely would make more games on Linux. As far as OpenGL on Windows goes, as long as I can push an extra 10 or so FPS on nVidia cards for practically the same thing compared to using DX (watch this change on Vista :laugh:), and as long as my API of choice stays platform independent so I'm not locked into one company's marketing efforts, I still think OGL is a nice/wise choice.
Jeremy Falcon A multithreaded, OpenGL-enabled application.[^]
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I understand that not everything is free. Linux is free? ok:) Microsoft is not cheap - you know :rolleyes: - but this is not a reason to hate it. Moreover... I think that DirectX will never die. Why? Computer games. Is anyone creating good games for Linux using OpenGL? :wtf:
BorysBe wrote:
Microsoft is not cheap - you know
It's not cheap compared to free but historically it has been cheap or similarly priced compared to commercial alternatives. MS tends to look expensive once it's become market leader. then everyone forgets how expensive everything used to be, eg., Office software pre-Windows.
Kevin
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... but another one. It seems that all the people is beginning to believe that all the software must be free and/or opensource, because "the knowledge must be free" and things like that. OK, lets say all the software is free and opensource. No one is going to pay the developers, because no company is going to gain money by producing software given away for free, then the developers couldn't survive with their work, then no one is going to write software. DEVELOPERS MUST BE PAYED! All the big opensource projects, from the Linux kernel to Mono, are sponsored by some huge company, say Novell, IBM, and the like. They actually PAY the developers. But they also SELL other (close-source) products, so they can eventually afford to give some money to the OS devs. I know I'm going OT, but I really hate people who wants every software for free. I am a developer, I even develop an opensource project, but I want to get paid for my work. How many opensource developers actually live on their job? Only a few (the ones developing the Linux kernel, Gnome, KDE and the like). All the others develop in their free time, while having a paid job, maybe at Microsoft. I'm really off-topic now. :-O
________________________________________________ Personal Blog [ITA] - Tech Blog [ENG] Developing ScrewTurn Wiki 1.1 and its Plugin Framework
What about a company like RedHat? To the best of my knowledge they do not have any closed source products, yet they pay their employees (quite well according to an old college friend of mine that works there) and continue to make money. I don't disagree with you about paying developers. I am a professional developer from 9-5, but I also am constantly working on small additions to whatever open source project happens to grab my attention this week. I do the first job to survive. I do the second because it is fun to take a large project and add that one feature that you think it's missing.
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BorysBe wrote:
Is anyone creating good games for Linux using OpenGL?
It's called supply and demand. If Linux were to become easy enough to replace Windows and become a prominent OS for the average Joe, people surely would make more games on Linux. As far as OpenGL on Windows goes, as long as I can push an extra 10 or so FPS on nVidia cards for practically the same thing compared to using DX (watch this change on Vista :laugh:), and as long as my API of choice stays platform independent so I'm not locked into one company's marketing efforts, I still think OGL is a nice/wise choice.
Jeremy Falcon A multithreaded, OpenGL-enabled application.[^]
You get my 5 for both points Jeremy. :rose: I used OpenGL a far bit when I was working in the marine sector, and I'd still say that for the majority of 3D applications it's the way to go. The only respect I found it falling short was the lack of with a decent OO framework to wrap it (Fahrenheit never materialised, I seem to remember).
Anna :rose: Currently working mostly on: Visual Lint :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "Be yourself - not what others think you should be" - Marcia Graesch "Anna's just a sexy-looking lesbian tart" - A friend, trying to wind me up. It didn't work.
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You get my 5 for both points Jeremy. :rose: I used OpenGL a far bit when I was working in the marine sector, and I'd still say that for the majority of 3D applications it's the way to go. The only respect I found it falling short was the lack of with a decent OO framework to wrap it (Fahrenheit never materialised, I seem to remember).
Anna :rose: Currently working mostly on: Visual Lint :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "Be yourself - not what others think you should be" - Marcia Graesch "Anna's just a sexy-looking lesbian tart" - A friend, trying to wind me up. It didn't work.
Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
You get my 5 for both points Jeremy.
Thanks. I'm not used to getting 5s, so you'll have to pardon me a moment while I freak out. ;P
Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
The only respect I found it falling short was the lack of with a decent OO framework to wrap it (Fahrenheit never materialised, I seem to remember).
Yeah I think that is both a pro and a con depending on how you look at it. The reason I've been told OGL was done that way was to allow it to run on as many platforms as possible because not all devices support C++. There have been a few free OGL C++ wrappers floating around on the net btw, if you're interested in going that route.
Jeremy Falcon A multithreaded, OpenGL-enabled application.[^]
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Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
You get my 5 for both points Jeremy.
Thanks. I'm not used to getting 5s, so you'll have to pardon me a moment while I freak out. ;P
Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
The only respect I found it falling short was the lack of with a decent OO framework to wrap it (Fahrenheit never materialised, I seem to remember).
Yeah I think that is both a pro and a con depending on how you look at it. The reason I've been told OGL was done that way was to allow it to run on as many platforms as possible because not all devices support C++. There have been a few free OGL C++ wrappers floating around on the net btw, if you're interested in going that route.
Jeremy Falcon A multithreaded, OpenGL-enabled application.[^]
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
Thanks. I'm not used to getting 5s, so you'll have to pardon me a moment while I freak out.
Especially from me! ;P
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
Yeah I think that is both a pro and a con depending on how you look at it. The reason I've been told OGL was done that way was to allow it to run on as many platforms as possible because not all devices support C++.
True...I was thinking more of a wrapper than any wish for the base API to have been implemented differently. In the work I was doing at the time (subsea acoustic navigation) it would have been rather useful! Unfortunately the company didn't persue the technology (sticking to 2D views instead) so the only thing we took from GL was its dimensional and vertex model.
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
There have been a few free OGL C++ wrappers floating around on the net btw, if you're interested in going that route.
I imagine there are by now...shame I'm not working on anything that would let me use them right now!! :doh: (unless of course you can think of a way of visualising lint warnings or resource ID clashes in 3D...)
Anna :rose: Currently working mostly on: Visual Lint :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "Be yourself - not what others think you should be" - Marcia Graesch "Anna's just a sexy-looking lesbian tart" - A friend, trying to wind me up. It didn't work.
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BorysBe wrote:
Microsoft is not cheap - you know
It's not cheap compared to free but historically it has been cheap or similarly priced compared to commercial alternatives. MS tends to look expensive once it's become market leader. then everyone forgets how expensive everything used to be, eg., Office software pre-Windows.
Kevin
...and this is because Microsoft's competition believes that Microsoft won on price or through marketing or bundling with hardware and that therefore they should simply undercut or outmarket or outbundle Microsoft and they will win. None of these are true. Price, marketing and availability were factors, but the major ones were functionality, usability, and performance. Office certainly ticks the functionality box. By comparison with OpenOffice, Microsoft Office is a speed demon. In usability terms, Microsoft themselves have found that the main problem was simply that the features were badly organised and undiscoverable, so that a lot of their feature requests were for features that were actually present but that the requester hadn't found. It's a common claim that users only use 5% or 10% - some small fraction - of Office's feature set, and therefore that a smaller product costing less could easily take market share from Microsoft. In practice it appears that while an individual user might only use a low percentage of the features, taken as a whole, a user population will use a much greater percentage. I suspect that users might also find it easier to learn a new feature of a product they're already familiar with, rather than having to learn a whole new product. In fact the only significant case I can think of where a free or lower-cost product has taken market share away from Microsoft is Firefox - and that's where Microsoft have sat idle for five years, both products are free, facilities exist for converting the user's saved data between formats (basically just bookmarks and cookies), almost all of what users do is interaction with other computers, the network protocols and formats used are the same - while pages may look different - sometimes radically different - in a different browser, they're typically at least legible, and IE has gained a bad security reputation. In comparison Windows XP's usage share - on the desktop - is still increasing, while Linux is stuck at under 0.5% and has been for years (according to statistics collected from web site user agent tracking, so if the browser doesn't report the OS it will end up as 'unknown' but the stats I'm looking at don't give 'unknown' and it looks like these have been excluded from the percentages). Microsoft have also reported significant gains in revenue from server software over the last few years - it's up to you to decide whether this indicates growth of the market or growth in Microsoft's share of the market (or, of course, both).
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Jeremy Falcon wrote:
Thanks. I'm not used to getting 5s, so you'll have to pardon me a moment while I freak out.
Especially from me! ;P
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
Yeah I think that is both a pro and a con depending on how you look at it. The reason I've been told OGL was done that way was to allow it to run on as many platforms as possible because not all devices support C++.
True...I was thinking more of a wrapper than any wish for the base API to have been implemented differently. In the work I was doing at the time (subsea acoustic navigation) it would have been rather useful! Unfortunately the company didn't persue the technology (sticking to 2D views instead) so the only thing we took from GL was its dimensional and vertex model.
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
There have been a few free OGL C++ wrappers floating around on the net btw, if you're interested in going that route.
I imagine there are by now...shame I'm not working on anything that would let me use them right now!! :doh: (unless of course you can think of a way of visualising lint warnings or resource ID clashes in 3D...)
Anna :rose: Currently working mostly on: Visual Lint :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "Be yourself - not what others think you should be" - Marcia Graesch "Anna's just a sexy-looking lesbian tart" - A friend, trying to wind me up. It didn't work.
Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
(unless of course you can think of a way of visualising lint warnings or resource ID clashes in 3D...)
Visualize three figures... one standing with eyes covered, one with ears covered and one with mouth covered... When resource issues are detected they start poking each other in the eyes, bopping each other on the head, etc. :)
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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You get my 5 for both points Jeremy. :rose: I used OpenGL a far bit when I was working in the marine sector, and I'd still say that for the majority of 3D applications it's the way to go. The only respect I found it falling short was the lack of with a decent OO framework to wrap it (Fahrenheit never materialised, I seem to remember).
Anna :rose: Currently working mostly on: Visual Lint :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "Be yourself - not what others think you should be" - Marcia Graesch "Anna's just a sexy-looking lesbian tart" - A friend, trying to wind me up. It didn't work.
Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
The only respect I found it falling short was the lack of with a decent OO framework to wrap it (Fahrenheit never materialised, I seem to remember).
don't go with a wrapper like Jeremy said if you ever get back into it. Go with a scene graph manager. Get some value added for the OO conversion. :) I like OpenSceneGraph, but there are others, if you ever need it, ask. :)
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
You get my 5 for both points Jeremy.
Thanks. I'm not used to getting 5s, so you'll have to pardon me a moment while I freak out. ;P
Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
The only respect I found it falling short was the lack of with a decent OO framework to wrap it (Fahrenheit never materialised, I seem to remember).
Yeah I think that is both a pro and a con depending on how you look at it. The reason I've been told OGL was done that way was to allow it to run on as many platforms as possible because not all devices support C++. There have been a few free OGL C++ wrappers floating around on the net btw, if you're interested in going that route.
Jeremy Falcon A multithreaded, OpenGL-enabled application.[^]
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
Thanks. I'm not used to getting 5s, so you'll have to pardon me a moment while I freak out
you'd better freak out some more... ;) I just had a break to swing through here. :-D
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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...and this is because Microsoft's competition believes that Microsoft won on price or through marketing or bundling with hardware and that therefore they should simply undercut or outmarket or outbundle Microsoft and they will win. None of these are true. Price, marketing and availability were factors, but the major ones were functionality, usability, and performance. Office certainly ticks the functionality box. By comparison with OpenOffice, Microsoft Office is a speed demon. In usability terms, Microsoft themselves have found that the main problem was simply that the features were badly organised and undiscoverable, so that a lot of their feature requests were for features that were actually present but that the requester hadn't found. It's a common claim that users only use 5% or 10% - some small fraction - of Office's feature set, and therefore that a smaller product costing less could easily take market share from Microsoft. In practice it appears that while an individual user might only use a low percentage of the features, taken as a whole, a user population will use a much greater percentage. I suspect that users might also find it easier to learn a new feature of a product they're already familiar with, rather than having to learn a whole new product. In fact the only significant case I can think of where a free or lower-cost product has taken market share away from Microsoft is Firefox - and that's where Microsoft have sat idle for five years, both products are free, facilities exist for converting the user's saved data between formats (basically just bookmarks and cookies), almost all of what users do is interaction with other computers, the network protocols and formats used are the same - while pages may look different - sometimes radically different - in a different browser, they're typically at least legible, and IE has gained a bad security reputation. In comparison Windows XP's usage share - on the desktop - is still increasing, while Linux is stuck at under 0.5% and has been for years (according to statistics collected from web site user agent tracking, so if the browser doesn't report the OS it will end up as 'unknown' but the stats I'm looking at don't give 'unknown' and it looks like these have been excluded from the percentages). Microsoft have also reported significant gains in revenue from server software over the last few years - it's up to you to decide whether this indicates growth of the market or growth in Microsoft's share of the market (or, of course, both).
Mike Dimmick wrote:
In comparison Windows XP's usage share - on the desktop - is still increasing, while Linux is stuck at under 0.5% and has been for years (according to statistics collected from web site user agent tracking
At whose expense though? IF linux is standing still, are they gaining at the expense of apple, proprietary *nix, or older versions of windows?
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Jeremy Falcon wrote:
Thanks. I'm not used to getting 5s, so you'll have to pardon me a moment while I freak out.
Especially from me! ;P
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
Yeah I think that is both a pro and a con depending on how you look at it. The reason I've been told OGL was done that way was to allow it to run on as many platforms as possible because not all devices support C++.
True...I was thinking more of a wrapper than any wish for the base API to have been implemented differently. In the work I was doing at the time (subsea acoustic navigation) it would have been rather useful! Unfortunately the company didn't persue the technology (sticking to 2D views instead) so the only thing we took from GL was its dimensional and vertex model.
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
There have been a few free OGL C++ wrappers floating around on the net btw, if you're interested in going that route.
I imagine there are by now...shame I'm not working on anything that would let me use them right now!! :doh: (unless of course you can think of a way of visualising lint warnings or resource ID clashes in 3D...)
Anna :rose: Currently working mostly on: Visual Lint :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "Be yourself - not what others think you should be" - Marcia Graesch "Anna's just a sexy-looking lesbian tart" - A friend, trying to wind me up. It didn't work.
Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
Especially from me!
LMAO
Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:
(unless of course you can think of a way of visualising lint warnings or resource ID clashes in 3D...)
The only thing I can think of is annoying, but it would be one way to get the user's attention. :laugh:
Jeremy Falcon A multithreaded, OpenGL-enabled application.[^]
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Mike Dimmick wrote:
In comparison Windows XP's usage share - on the desktop - is still increasing, while Linux is stuck at under 0.5% and has been for years (according to statistics collected from web site user agent tracking
At whose expense though? IF linux is standing still, are they gaining at the expense of apple, proprietary *nix, or older versions of windows?
Oh, older versions of Windows, definitely. The headline figure at http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=5[^] for MacOS is falling but it appears that Intel Macs aren't included in this figure - between April and August 'MacOS' fell by 0.62% while 'MacIntel' grew by 0.46%. The difference (0.18%) can perhaps be explained by a differential increase of PC sales vs. Mac sales, or could just be variation in the sample between months (note that NT 4.0 rose by 0.09% which you would expect to be an anomaly, or a bug in OS detection). In the same period Windows 2000 fell by 1.14% (nearly 15% of its April share) and Windows 98 by 1.20% (33% of its share). I'm surprised that the oft-derided Windows ME only fell by 0.34% (24% of share). These shifts, for Windows 2000 and 98 at least, are larger than the entire Linux usage share. Proprietary *nix is genuinely insignificant in the statistics - Windows 95, Windows CE (on handhelds and mobiles), the PSP and even Steve Wozniak's Hiptop appear above SunOS (0.01%). This doesn't mean those operating systems aren't being used - it just means that they're not being used for web browsing (or if they are, they're not being reported or detected properly). Mobile Internet? If Windows 95 is above Windows CE, I don't think Mobile Internet is of much significance - assuming that the rest of the mobiles don't fall into the eliminated 'unknown' or that the statistics aren't eliminated due to gateway/proxy machines, that represent all the mobiles on a network, having only a single public IPv4 address, and the statistics filter out duplicate addresses. Windows Vista's major competitor is not Linux. It's Windows XP.
Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder