A new solution to Anti-Trust Version creep | The Coffeehouse

John Melville-- MD
Equality Through Technology

The EU has demanded that Windows be availaible without Media Player -- Hence the "N" versions.

South Korea has demanded a "K" version that lacks windows messanger.

The obvious version creep and testing matrix is simply getting out of control.

To effectively solve this problem I propose one cut down version to satisfy them all! Behold Windows "L" (for lame) edittion.

Its simple. Set up a website where government (or any 2 bit company) can complain about anything in windows. Say the word and Bam! its gone. Windows "L" just got a little bit lamer.

Just think about how much you could save in media and support by installing and running Windows L. Windows Lame edition: No Patchguard or Security Center for Symantec, No IE search bar for Google and Yahoo, well really no IE at all to satisfy Firefox and OS. Office Lame edition could have no PDF or XPS support, by default or for download.

We really should extend the new spirit of cooperation to all the other losers who have wasted our time in the past whining about progress. We could really make Netscape the default browser, presuming we could still find a codebase that actually compiles. Of course we couldn't actually run Netscape because there wouldn't be a GUI; a necessary concession to Apple's former legal response to Microsoft competition. I'd even remove the file system because the excellent minds at Samba couldn't reverse engineer it correctly. I hope you understand that I am really going out of my way to please everyone here.

There you have it, every legislator's dream: a completely unobjectionable version of windows and office. I think I will assist this effort by providing the entire, compilable source code, absolutely copyright and royalty free.

#include <stdio.h>

void main () {
    // printf("Hello World!");
    printf("Windows Vista L Edition Version 6.0.0.1");
    printf("C:\");
}

Rossj

John Melville, MD wrote:

#include <stdio.h>

void main () {
    // printf("Hello World!");
    printf("Windows Vista L Edition Version 6.0.0.1");
    printf("C:\");
}

This won't compile. And it should be int main( int argc, char *argv[])

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

Rossj wrote:
This won't compile. And it should be int main( int argc, char *argv[])

You can have an int main without arguments.

Rossj

W3bbo wrote:

Rossj wrote:This won't compile. And it should be int main( int argc, char *argv[])

You can have an int main without arguments.

You're right, hardly as if he is going to pass command line args to it, and come to think of it, although the int return is the correct way of doing it, it is probably overkill as it is unlikely to actually return anything as there is nothing to return to.

As you can tell I was just being arsey, I seem to have woken up in a bad mood today.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

Rossj wrote:
as it is unlikely to actually return anything as there is nothing to return to.

Chapter 1 of any C/C++ programming manual says the returned integer is to report to the host OS the program's reason for ending (0 for normal, !0 for errors)

Rossj wrote:
As you can tell I was just being arsey, I seem to have woken up in a bad mood today.

Cheer up, it happens to all of us

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

Actually, it depends on whether it's C or C++. According to the C++ standard, void main() is illegal - main must always return int in C++. But the C standard says that main may be defined however the implementation wants it to be defined, so that makes void main legal in C, as long as your compiler supports it.

In C++, although main must have a return type of int, you can still omit the "return" statement at the end, in which case the return value is implicitly zero. This is said in section 3.6.1 of the ISO C++ standard: "If control reaches the end of main without encountering a return statement, the effect is that of executing return 0;"

Rossj

W3bbo wrote:

Rossj wrote:as it is unlikely to actually return anything as there is nothing to return to.

Chapter 1 of any C/C++ programming manual says the returned integer is to report to the host OS the program's reason for ending (0 for normal, !0 for errors)

I know (and don't really need a lecture on C Smiley

), but it *is* the host OS with nothing to return to.

I know it was only a joke, and almost funny, but it does raise the question of how tightly coupled some of these apps are to the rest of Windows. I can see the 'this app requires Windows' dependencies, but why might there be 'Windows requires this app' beyond user interaction reasons.