You see, wanted to apply immediately but saw that you require a cover letter. Now I have to postpone applying, wait until I write a nice cover letter. Meanwhile, I continue applying and interview processes with those companies who required only CV and responded promptly. I might never get back to your company at all. That's the cost of the friction in your application process.
My problem with wxWidgets was I kinda wish its API was more elegant
There were also some subtle issues like the child windows leaking a lot of memory in the GTK implementations when idle (something like spamming gobjects).
I wouldn't touch Qt even with a ten foot pole, too much bloated for me.
Don't forget that WinRAR comes from 90s eastern European/xUSSR cultural background, where nobody paid for IP, for something that could be copied. Nobody would use it otherwise. I'm pretty sure even the authors used "pirated" copies of OS/compilers to produce WinRAR.
You mean like on HN, a site initially for startups, where every single time there is a post about some tool with payment, there are enough comments about free beer clones?
Because why pay for the work of others, when only we matter.
As someone from southern Europe, where there was hardly any original software being sold during 1980's and 1990's, one thing I gladly do today is to pay for the tools I use in production.
Be it via donations, buying books from key people on the ecosystem, or actually getting a licence.
It's different from HN, because back than e.g. a license of Visual Studio could easily cost as much as an annual income of a person in some/many countries.
I am upset people about the attitude in general, especially when they feel entitled to get a salary and are pretty much capable of owning expensive fruity hardware.
Then every couple of months later everyone is complaining there is no money in FOSS, that there are too many subscription fatigue, walled guardens and what not.
Of course they are, there is no other way to make money from trying to sell software if it doesn't come with a ball and chain, apparently.
I prefer to buy books than software, especially from T3X (Zenlisp, T3XForth, Klong...) and the Eforth+Subleq guy. The software it's libre licensed but the knowledge isn't, even if I have the documents right here, a good book to introduce me on K/Klang it's invaluable.
> European/xUSSR cultural background, where nobody paid for IP, for something that could be copied
Isn't that more of the global culture? I mean, ok, not in business environments, but for most people around the world? Only a small fraction of people can afford buying software to any significant extent.
On the consumer side it's definitely global, but on the productive side it's somewhat unique. Eastern Europe had an odd combination of having a lot of cracked programmers and scientific culture combined with really crappy economics, so you had a lot of illicit, hacky solutions at a surprisingly high and professional level. Take Sci-Hub for example. That you have a Soviet Kazakh girl who had been coding from ten years old start a platform like this because she was broke and it's still going is a very stereotypical EE story.
Places in the USSR or adjacent Soviet sphere, like Bulgaria, which had a very strong computer industry and technical culture but also were isolated from the West had this weird combination of high tech, communist or academic ethos and improvised solutions, that didn't really happen in a lot of other places. Probably accounts for the concentration of pretty sophisticated cybercrime in the region these days too.
> And Western European too. Just ask about Italy, Spain, France in the 90's...
And Sweden and... I'm starting to think this was worldwide, or at least "anywhere-outside-the-US". Many memories of me and friends hanging out on DC++, using cracked applications wherever we could, and most people around me did the same too.
Did you guys have dedicated open-air markets selling CDs with "software collections", "Windows essentials", "The best of Adobe" for $2 ... ? I remember visiting one in Moscow and it was wild. Every piece of software, including like Oracle and SAP ... lol. All for peanuts.
In Portugual yes, you could easily find shops close by to universtities with folders containing endless lists of software, it was a matter to place your order and come back to pick up it later on.
During the 8 bit days all tapes were clearly copied, many of them even had B&W copies of the instructions, clearly cutted out with scissors.
However this is all gone, after our involvement into EU all these kind of stuff started to be cracked down.
It is still around if you look for it, e.g. cracked game consoles and cable TV boxes, but it will be clearly taken care of if found by authorities.
Not that I'm aware of, but I also grew up in the 90s on a island with 700 inhabitants, so not exactly a good representation :) We were mostly sharing stuff once a quarter on LAN parties.
But I do remember visiting either Turkey or Bulgaria in the early 2000s with my mom, and coming across one of those markets, and had a blast buying cracked C&C Generals for dirt cheap, together with a bunch of PS2 games I couldn't actually run on my non-cracked PS2 :D
In the East, even businesses and governments used to run on such copies. Microsoft conveniently closed eyes, otherwise nobody would use Windows, Office or any other software from them.
I believe a majority of prospective game developers got into it because of interest in game engine development. For such people, Unreal/Unity/Godot take all the fun out of game dev.
This is what happened to me a long time ago - I used to write software 3D engines, then 3D cards (3DFX in particular) happened. I remember losing interest at that time ( I eventually figured out that there was still work to do but still…)
Now that I’m quite a bit older, I have come to appreciate the game part a lot more - it’s maybe less techie, but it’s actually also why people make games. When I play with my kids then don’t see the tech - they see the game !
I'm constantly split on it. Especially since there's two considerations for me
1. In terms of industry, potential employers do want to see my tech. So there's benefit to showing that I don't need to rely on big tools to deliver features... Unless they are a dedicated Unity/Unreal shop and then they do want someone used to the engine. It's pretty hard to win here, especially with the industry as of now being a disaster to apply into.
2. But I also want to make my own games one day. As such I will eventually need to think as a generalist and focus on shipping. But all those skills may not be what actually pays the bills in the meantime.
I like both, but I also gotta eat and I realize that going straight towards my end goal isn't guaranteed to let me keep a roof over my head.
There is no EDIT.EXE. If you have an EDIT.EXE you probably need to check for malware. (-:
It was EDIT.COM, and in the days of long ago that was just a way of invoking QBASIC with the /EDIT command-line option. At which point the project becomes one of porting an old MS-DOS full programming IDE to 64-bit Windows, just for its text editor part.
Also, much of MS-DOS was written in 16-bit 8086 assembly language; so porting MS-DOS programs is not a mere matter of compiling a high level language with a compiler that targets the new platform and processor architecture and tweaking whatever breaks.
Yes. In those days of long ago, I saw the .COM extension with my own eyes and ran QBASIC /EDIT directly just for kicks.
Once upon a time, this knowledge was one of those non-secret secrets that made it onto the letters pages of the computer magazines and into every "MS-DOS secrets" book out there. (-:
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