Because anyone who writes software in competition with Microsoft software on the Microsoft platform is at a disadvantage. They don't have access to everything in the same way. MS (and Apple, and probably other in the same position) can and do make use of API calls not available (due to not being publicly exposed or documented) to competitors. That is is anticompetitive. On the scale of Windows and Microsoft, it's a real problem.

Wrong. I use to use AllOfMp3.com, paying for music for the first time in years, because the service was so great and the price was so low. Then of course it was shutdown. You can compete with free, you just have to add enough value at a price people are willing to pay for. Or you make money from something other than selling the product. Plenty of examples, Christ, internet search, the subject of this post is one. Pay much for your internet search engine do you?

Google are no angels, but compared with MS they are.
MS make a closed operating system and closed software for that closed operating system. How is that not anticompetitive? (I know this doesn't just apply to MS). It was even found as such in court, they where to be broken in two (a OS business and a software business), but then they got out of it!
MS bully the OEM to force Windows on us, and those of us free of them, end up paying more to not have it!
MS where given a monopoly by IBM from the get go and have maintained it with every trick in the book, and a few new ones they came up with themselves. Many of which come under "dirty trick". I could rant about MS and standards, but it's old ground everyone knows. Even the MS fan boys must be able to see Goolge are less bad by a order of magnitude or two, even through the MS cool aid vision. It Google do go properly evil, we can just change search engine, big deal. Many people aren't ready or able to change OS, in fact they are often deliberately locked in.

Thus the Gates Foundation to be remember by something else. Plus I'm sure it does MS no harm with him being all charitable and still supporting Windows. Everyone is a winner......

> Saying nice things about people never sold anything. If he said nice things about Gates, would the book even be on Slashdot?

Quite possibly, as a shock factor. This is pretty much as we expected.

Exactly, exactly. :-)

No high end game is done in managed languages. If you suggested that kind of shit in my company to anyone who really knows (i.e engine team or real game programmers) they will laugh at you. Also, you can't get the most out of these things if you don't understand the virtual machine and the real machine it runs on. It's not a excuse for ignorance as many use it, if anything, it requires you know more as you need to understand the virtual machine as well as the real machine.

What? Grow ourselves out of the mess? Government debt not like personal debt? What madness. No, we need to cut to the bone because that has such a long history of working......

I think the Rhineland model is a better bet. After it's 50 years old, which isn't long, will you just increase the number of years? I agree with Karl Marx on "capitalism will destroy itself", only I don't think it's a good thing and can be, and is, prevented by regulation. We can also use regulation to align outcomes we want with the profit motive.

The gap was big and growing before the credit crunch. A good website on this and the affects of a unequal society is: http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/

Or look at Germany and it's relationship with industry and it undermines your point.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Rhine_Capitalism
If we apply your thinking to the banks we let them burn and us with them.

Don't everyone thinks the cuts should being being done as they are:
http://falseeconomy.org.uk/

There was a time where artists and programmers learnt in their bedroom. This was great because when they came into industry, it didn't take much to get them up to scratch as they had been doing it at home, just with less tools and no access to others. Now, in the game company I work at, we struggle to get people who know what we need.

I wonder how much of the recruitment problem is noise to signal ratio because of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGar7KC6Wiw

These kids go and do "games" courses, but aren't being taught what they need, because really, they don't want to know and the course is about bums on seats to make the education stats look good. I was on a "VR" course that was similar, but I dropped out and went into industry when our "professional 3D artist" didn't know what was skinning or IK and seamed to make everything out of spheres, and our programmers didn't know anything about real-time 3D. That was 10 years ago, not sure it's got better since.

I also wonder how much of the problem is no one learning "roll in the mud" C/C++ that is required. Those learning at uni, and even at home, seem to be learning only managed languages, so don't really understand computers. They don't get memory, data and instructions, only objects and garbage collection. Even if you are going to use someone else's engine, that still puts you at a disadvantage. Though of course, as long as the tech is "good enough" it starts becoming about game play and artwork....

I also wonder if this is limited to the game industry after last week's link to:
http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-hire-net-programmers/

I think this kind of thing makes people angry because they know, deep down, there is at least an element of truth to it, but don't want to take the ivory tower blinkers off and see. Same kind of people who shout that programmers should do GUIs for everything, and there should be no CLI. Tough. For real time, you need to know what the computer is doing, even if you are using a virtual machine on top (in which case, you need to know what that is doing too, so it's actually making things more complex for you). For advanced computer use, you need to learn the CLI.

If everyone thinks something means something, that is what it means. Meaning aren't static. Dictionaries need to reflect this else they fall out of date and usefulness. Sorry, but that's reality. You can argue with dictionaries if you want, but I'm not going involved in such madness.

Economy of scale.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Anarchy?r=75&src=ref&ch=dic

What I'm saying is a system of freedom rules is freer than no rules. The GPL is just that. You don't have the freedom to take away from others the freedom you where given yourself.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Anarchy?r=75&src=ref&ch=dic