RoR: Forum

Ya'think?

Or maybe he's planning to run for office.

Post 1

Friday, June 29, 2007 - 7:43am

Let's see what Gates has done. He has been selling crappy, buggy software at an inflated price. He has conducted ridiculous raids against companies which are often based on the anonymous tips of disgruntled employees. He has broken numerous agreements with other companies and businesses, especially IBM. Lately, he has been spreading spew about a shortage of talent in the industry with the hope of duping unsuspecting youths of choosing software as a career.

Post 2

Friday, June 29, 2007 - 9:00am

Who is not a product of their society? (Me! Me!... well, okay, some of us are not...) Would you react any differently to hearing John D. Rockefeller talk about the moral necessity of Chrisitianity? G. K. Chesterton said that it is ironic that every little trait of a publicly-acclaimed "great" man becomes "important" all out of proportion. In an essay that was aimed as much at the successful capitalists of his time as it was at the journalists who fawned over them, he pointed out that a man who does not like dogs is just that: a man who does not like dogs. If the man is a millionaire, his dislike becomes something important to know about.

Bill Gates survived and thrived when others did not. Gary Kildall, Steve Jobs, Ken Olsen, Edson deCastro, Alan Tramiel, Ted Dabney and others achieved somewhat less or ended worse. His success came one sale at a time. No one ever had to buy anything Microsoft sold. He earned every cent the same way we all do.

That this includes the stupidity of our clients, and that is something we live with. Sometimes we put up with it; other times we exploit it shamelessly. The bottom line is that you are not responsible for what is in their heads when you make the best offer you have. Microsoft thrived because of the IBM cachet in a time when corporation people played for not failing and they knew that "you can't get fired for recommending IBM." Unlike Data General, CDC, RCA, Raytheon or others, IBM sold not technology, but "solutions." Basically, in selling you the safest alternative, they bought your risk.

Think of the times. We have talked about this here. It was the late 1970s early 1980s. The computer industry drew thousands of people who could work on their own without degrees or certificates or approvals,just creating interesting new things for their own pleasure first and then being elated that they could sell that to others. Outside this was still corporate America. In the 1970s who was in industry? Objectivists? I think not. I know not. Groupthinking conformists dominated business and industry. Those people made Microsoft rich. Microsoft went with IBM and IBM was safe.

Who is the bigger altruist: Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs? You might not agree with Jobs' philosophy, but the former fruitarian pilgrim to India has a philosophy: "Philosophy? I need it!"

It would be nice if Bill Gates were an Objectivist. Heck, imagine if little Hillary Rodham had not drifted away from Youth for Goldwater. Just think what life would be like today if Jesus had read Aristotle. And I always thought that if you were going to unload trucks for a living it would be handy to have four forearms. If we had chlorophyll in our skins, we wouldn't need as much food. Reality is what it is and Bill Gates is who he is.

The difficult lesson in Bill Gates is that capitalism -- as noted in a concurrent (and much better) essay -- is not "moral." It only allows people to be moral. Or im. You can't have one without the other. Pity Ted Turner, if you want, or the corporation executive who takes $80 million extra when he leaves the company he ruined. It sucks, but what's the alternative?

Post 3

Friday, June 29, 2007 - 11:44am

Gates has the potential to be great, but his guilt over his wealth and genius has stunted his judgement and has sent him on a haj of altruism.

Post 4

Friday, June 29, 2007 - 9:36pm

Gates is mediocrity who happened to be the person who made a MacIntosh knock-off for IBM. He did not invent the personal computer, windows type working interfaces, or anything new. He just happened not to be apple when IBM decided it wanted to get its own apple. Windows has been a lemon from day 1. Praising windows is like praising the qwerty keyboard - it is not an optimal solution, or even an innovation, just a standard that got entrenched.

When I imagine what Peter Keating looks like, I see Bill Gates.

Ted

Post 5

Saturday, June 30, 2007 - 7:38am

I got most of my background from Hackers by Steven Levy(*) but most of this is personal experience.

If you know the operating systems of the 1960s, you can see the roots of MS-DOS. In the 1970s, there was CP/M the Control Program for Microprocessors that was based on IBM's mainframe batch language. As Digital Equipment refined RSTS for the PDS-11 they created a very robust and intuituve system. DIR , DEL, COPY, * for the wildcard, all of that came from Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX (virtual address extensrion) machines in 1977.

Wanting something like that for the new microprocessors, Gary Kildall, founder of Digital Research, created CP/M. Much of that was interface language copied by other microcomputer makers, Radio Shack's TRS-DOS also circa 1977, for just one example. However, the devil is in the details and CP/M was more robust and, more to the point, Digital Research created and sold software to and for others, whereas Tandy developed TRS-DOS specifically for their own computers. Therefore, CP/M had the potential to become a standard. Indeed, by 1980-1983, many microcomputers ran the CP/M operating system.

IBM lead negotiator Jack Sams ...left Gates with the task of obtaining an operating system, so he suggested using the CP/M clone 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products (SCP). Paul Allen negotiated a licensing deal with SCP, had QDOS adapted for IBM's hardware, and IBM shipped it as PC-DOS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall

So, not Gates himself, nor anyone employed by him wrote MS-DOS. It was bought as a product from another firm and shipped to IBM for their first PCs. For some years, PC-DOS was the official IBM-PC OS for actual Big Blue machines while MS-DOS was the version that came on PC clones, such as the Compaq.

Everyone knows (or should) that Xerox's PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) developed the first graphical user interface, but Xerox did not want to make the investment. (Years later, I saw a xerox "document production system" that was computer-driven via their original gui.) Apple saw it and made one for themselves. Microsoft copied Apple. However, for many years Windows was not an operating system, per se, but only a user interface for MS-DOS. That is why there was a program called Magellan that was a "navigator" or "explorer" for MS-DOS. Under Windows even to 2.0, as I recall, you had to open the application before you could open the file. You could not click on a DOC and have Word open up. Magellan (and the Norton Commander, etc.) could do that, which subjected Microsoft to derision for several years until Windows 3.1 came out in 1992 eight years after the Macintosh.

One advantage to those early Windows for a real programmer was that until Windows 2000, the native mode processor commands ("Debug") were at your fingertips. You could get to the command prompt and scratch on bare metal. That was harder to do with a Mac. I have a nice two-diskette set of utilities for Intel chips.

Here under Windows XP 2002 Professional, I still have a little 22-byte "Fortune Cookie" program that gets the seconds counter of the system clock and throws out a motivational message. I wrote it in DEBUG. See, last semester, I took a class in Java and that's nice and all, but those systems come with so much overhead that there is no such thing as a 22-byte program.

(*)Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) is an unauthorized made-for-television docudrama written and directed by Martyn Burke. Based on the book, Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer, by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, this film documents the rise of the home computer (personal computer) through the rivalry between Apple Computer (Apple II and the Apple Macintosh) and Microsoft (MITS Altair, D.O.S., I.B.M. P.C., and Windows). -- wikipedia

Post 6

Saturday, June 30, 2007 - 10:03am

Gates is mediocrity who happened to be the person who made a MacIntosh knock-off for IBM. He did not invent the personal computer, windows type working interfaces, or anything new. He just happened not to be apple when IBM decided it wanted to get its own apple. Windows has been a lemon from day 1. Praising windows is like praising the qwerty keyboard - it is not an optimal solution, or even an innovation, just a standard that got entrenched.

When I imagine what Peter Keating looks like, I see Bill Gates.

Even if he didn't invent the PC, Gates is a talented software engineer. He is an innovator rather than an inventor. But his real genius lies in his entrepreneurial talents -- in making computers available to consumers.

- Bill

(Edited by William Dwyer
on 6/30, 10:04am)

Post 7

Saturday, June 30, 2007 - 12:20pm

Bill Gates or anyone employed by him has never invented any computers. Microsoft is a software company, not a hardware company. Steve Wozniak of Apple was one man largely responsible for making the personal computer something everyone would use at home.

The only thing Gates really invented was the office suite. This wasn't necessarily an invention. But Microsoft was the first company that understood the genius of combining spreadsheet programs, word processors, etc., into one package. He also marketed himself in a way that made people think he was the only product to buy.

Last week, I got lots of phone calls to consider the possibility of working on a big project for a local state agency. Some idiot (probably somebody non-technical executive) at this agency made the decision to scrap their Novell network and go to Microsoft. I was, of course, disappointed to hear that anyone would be scrapping a quality server to go with a server that doesn't work the way it should.

"How could any technical person with any knowledge and integrity take on such a project?" I thought to myself. Can you imagine a doctor removing an artificial heart that never crashes and replacing it with one that crashes about once a week? As a networking professional, people hire me because I know more about networks than they do. If I allow them to make a bad decision, I'm not doing my job.

Post 8

Saturday, June 30, 2007 - 1:51pm

But his real genius lies in his entrepreneurial talents. (Bill Dwyer)

Thank you, Bill.

Why, oh why is it that every single time Gates is mentioned on this board, a literal shitstorm is kicked up. Gates haters chime in with all the reasons why he doesn't deserve even an ounce of respect. The kneejerk reaction to his very name is ridiculously over the top, and so completely automatic that it occurs even when it misses the point of the thread!

What anyone thinks of Gates or his products has NOTHING TO DO WITH WHETHER OR NOT GATES SHOULD FEEL OBLIGATED TO GIVE HIS MONEY BACK TO SOCIETY.

For the record: I don't hate him or love him (I don't know him), but I can respect the fact that he is the most successful entrepreneur in the fucking world. Period. Whether or not his products are "mediocre", obviously his marketing and entrepreneurial skills are not. Get over it already, people.

Oh...and he doesn't owe his money to society, either. Can we agree on that?

(Or have I misjudged everyone?) Are we all on topic, after all? Have all these "Gates=Hitler" posts actually been part of a larger argument that:

Bill Gates DOES owe a monetary sum to hordes of unnamed people, as a penalty for putting out "crappy software"? (that people willingly buy)

If so, how would this work, exactly?

Post 9

Saturday, June 30, 2007 - 2:13pm

I do not begrudge Bill Gates, George Soros or Michael Bloomberg their wealth.

I do not support confiscatory measures against them.

I am an advocate of free trade, which I see as something which exists within the context of the rule of law.

I do not suffer the illusion, known as Panglossianism, that selective processes such as God's Will (Leibniz), evolution (Selectionism) or the market always lead to ideal real-world solutions.

I do not hold that a life in sales or the possession of great wealth is a stigma of shame.

Neither do I expect that because a product has dominant market share, or that because a person has made a large fortune, that the product is ideal or the person necessarily of any great virtue.

Would that it were otherwise, but the quality of MS Windows and the actions of Bill Gates speak for themselves. Through his "charitable"actions, no doubt motivated by his own sense of self-worth, Bill Gates will most likely do harm that will live on after him. I fully concur that if Gates were able to rid himself of guilt and altruism, and perhaps put his great wealth and entrepreneurial skill into something worthwhile, like an elegant and workable replacement for Windows that does not suffer from its internal legacy constraints, that he would do both himself and the world much more good than his altruist activities ever will.

But it's not my money.

Ted

Post 10

Saturday, June 30, 2007 - 2:25pm

I fully concur that if Gates were able to rid himself of guilt and altruism, and perhaps put his great wealth and entrepreneurial skill into something worthwhile, like an elegant and workable replacement for Windows that does not suffer from its internal legacy constraints, that he would do both himself and the world much more good than his altruist activities ever will. (Ted)

Nice post, Ted.

Of course, Jon Letendre's idea of what he could do with his money (at death) was interesting, too...

As Gates I would identify ten thousand of the finest people on the planet and give them all my wealth at death. Each would receive $5 million. (I�ve been assuming $50 billion current wealth.) I like that because it rings to me like the most egoistic and dramatic way to perpetually imprint myself on the world. http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/GeneralForum/1080_1.shtml#20

Erica

Post 11

Saturday, June 30, 2007 - 2:51pm

Unfortunately, dear Uncle would take 2 of the 5..... penalty for receivership....

Post 12

Saturday, June 30, 2007 - 3:13pm

I think Windows is fine, why all the hate for the product?

Post 13

Saturday, June 30, 2007 - 4:45pm

I'm with you John, it works fine for me. It seems that most of the people who have a beef with Microsoft are more technical than I. I'm sure they have their good reasons, but for what I do, it's fine.

Post 14

Saturday, June 30, 2007 - 5:29pm

I'm with you John, it works fine for me. It seems that most of the people who have a beef with Microsoft are more technical than I. I'm sure they have their good reasons, but for what I do, it's fine. (Jonathan)

Bingo.

The people who hates Gates and Windows are usually folks who know a lot more about actual technology (like Linux/open source people) than the other 90% of the world's population, who rely on Windows and feel it works ok for the things they need to do. And of course, some of them are just hardcore Apple fans, who are required to hate all things Microsoft, just because. And that's fine. Whatever floats your boat, so to speak.

My tirade in post#8 was just me fed up with the fact that every single thread that mentions him immediately turns into a war of words between people personally invested in hating him and his products, and people invested only in trying to defend him for being, you know, a successful businessman.

There are valid points on the side of the haters, especially those who have worked in the software/computer/IT business...I'm just tired of the issue always hijacking the threads.

(In fact, I promise to try to make this post the last I speak of it in this one.)

:-)

Erica

Post 15

Saturday, June 30, 2007 - 10:42pm

True believers want simple truths. I do not begrudge him his billions:he earned his wealth one sale at a time.

That said, I sanctioned Ted Keer's last post specifically because I recognize that the intellectual bankruptcy of our age made Gates (not Jobs or others) a billionaire. It is ironic that the RoR "Technology Leader" fesses up to not knowing a lot about computers. I point out that Erica's last post contrasts the technical knowledge of "some" against the feelings of 90% of the others. Maybe she should go back and read The Fountainhead.

Did Peter Keating deserve his money? Of course!
Is there a more basic question? Of course!

Post 16

Saturday, June 30, 2007 - 10:52pm

"Did Peter Keating deserve his money? Of course!
Is there a more basic question? Of course!"

Let's make that mutual. Mike.

Ted

Post 17

Saturday, June 30, 2007 - 11:25pm

True believers want simple truths. I do not begrudge him his billions:he earned his wealth one sale at a time.

Did Peter Keating deserve his money? Of course!
Is there a more basic question? Of course!

Yes, the basic problem with Bill Gates is that he lowered his standards. Instead of making a good product, he aspired to sell bogus corn cures like Wesley Mouch.

Jim

(Edited by James Heaps-Nelson on 6/30, 11:46pm)

(Edited by James Heaps-Nelson on 7/01, 8:00am)

Post 18

Sunday, July 1, 2007 - 4:55am

I point out that Erica's last post contrasts the technical knowledge of "some" against the feelings of 90% of the others. Maybe she should go back and read The Fountainhead. (Marotta)

Ohhhkayy...Let's try this again:

(First off, I know, I know... I should have known better than to use a word like "feelings" on an Objectivist board. I realize my error, and I'll try not to let it happen again.)

I'm just not sure what word to use to describe people who are happy with a product they're currently using. How shall I describe this phenomenon accurately, Michael? And are John and Jonathan irrational fools because they have no problem with their Windows systems? What they hell do they know? They only "feel" Windows works for them, but it really doesn't, right, Michael? Thanks for clearing that up for everyone.
Of course, you'll still have to explain this:

I use Windows at home, but some kind of Linux system at work. Most engineering tools don't run directly on windows. Probably because a linux/unix system is easier to deal with hundreds of users sharing data in real time. But unless I'm doing engineering work, I much prefer Windows. (Joe Rowlands)

http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/RoRTechnology/0000.shtml#3

Joe, someone who builds microprocessors for a living, is definitely one of the "some" with the technical knowledge you speak of, so...is Joe brainwashed? Or just insane? Obviously, he has too much knowledge to just be another loser who "feels" his operating system works for him...what's going on here, Michael? Help me, O wise one.

It is ironic that the RoR "Technology Leader" fesses up to not knowing a lot about computers. (M. Marotta)

Uh, where did I say that, exactly?

I NEVER "fessed to not knowing much about computers." (Incidentally, I also didn't give myself, nor ask for, the title of "Technology Leader", either, but that's neither here nor there.)

While I do not work in the field, I have both a Windows and a Linux box at home, and have taken apart my own computers more than I can count. I have been aware for a long time of the advantages of other systems vs. Windows, and have never argued anything else. Sorry, let me repeat that: I have never argued anything else.
Not even in this thread.
I cannot claim to be an expert, but I actually do know more than the average person about computers.
And I am aware of, understand, and acknowledge the valid complaints others have against Microsoft and Bill Gates.
I always have, and I always will, because I'm not a Bill Gates "groupie", (and neither are the others who have countered the Gates critics.) It's just that the critics are so frighteningly invested in their hate, that it spews forth like a fountain of acid, and anyone who tries to neutralize it, even a little, is then personally attacked as a Gates supporter (which, of course, is synonymous with "enemy of reason".)

So...I give up. You win!

By all means, gentlemen, do continue your circle jerk around the burning effigy of Bill Gates. I wouldn't want to interrupt your joy, and besides, it ain't like Bill's paying me to post, or anything, and I actually feel (shit, there's that word again!) bad for continuing to be a part of this.

Erica

Edit: Oh, and, like Marotta, I also sanctioned Ted's post#9, because he managed to say everything that needed to be said, quite well, and succinctly...without personally attacking me or anyone else.

(Edited by Erica Schulz on 7/01, 7:31am)

Post 19

Sunday, July 1, 2007 - 7:53am