Bill Gates is succesful, kind and generous. He never finished college, he reads books and writes about them on a blog. He is that rare combination of super smart and benevolent at the time. Trustworthy. Just read his best friend Paul Allen's book. He has given away increments of the fortune that he earned through honest, legal business practices. DOJ dropped their case against Microsoft because Microsoft was innocent. Microsoft is a different company now, too. Gates' company brought us open formats, like zip-compressed XML files as Word documents and PDF alternatives like XPS. He was such a thoughtful developer, e.g., overwriting MBRs installed by other OS with a Microsoft MBR, and making it impossible to boot Windows from partitions other than the first one, in case you accidentally tried to boot another OS from partition one. Microsoft could have stayed the same but they have changed with the times. They now control access to your professional profile on LinkedIn and your source code on Github. Other companies can read their useful patents and use their clever inventions, allowing the development of wonderful things like Google Android. They transformed the Microsoft company culture. Every employee receives full health insurance and benefits; no more contract workers. Everyone working for Microsoft is happy now. What a great place to work. All bugs in Windows have been fixed; it is 100% secure and is still found everywhere. This is a true story of the American Dream. Work hard, follow the rules and be kind to others and you too can succeed. Bill Gates, a gifted kid from a wealthy, connected family who made his way to the top the old-fashioned way: he earned it. He has always respected the intelligence of Microsoft users, as the story of AARD demonstrates. Bill Gates is a man that be trusted. Like Mark Zuckerberg. It makes sense that Microsoft was one of the earliest Facebook investors. Both men of great character.
@1vuio0pswjnm7: You forgot to post the sacarism smiley.
“Bill Gates .. was such a thoughtful developer, e.g., autmatically overwriting MBRs installed by other OS with a Microsoft MBR, and making it impossible to boot Windows from partitions other than the first one, in case you accidentally tried to boot another OS from partition one."
I recently bought a brand-new desktop PC after the other one gave up the ghost after eight years of service. After disabling Secure Boot and enabling legacy USB. The PC rebooted with a BIOS Corrupt error. Requiring a recovery of the original BIOS.
So now I'm stuck on this innovative “Windows 10” desktop that is as slow as molasses and the harddrive is continually churning running background process that don't do anything.
What happens when you make a lot of money? Then you have a lot of taxes. There are various ways of paying those taxes. One of such ways is by making tax deductible charitable donations. Another one of such ways is doing tax deductible research & development.
Most billionaires are also philantropists because they donate sizable amounts of money to different causes. This helps them maintain a favorable public image. It is also a social activity that helps you build relationships with other wealthy people.
Bill Gates does have a bona fide foundation that works on important problems and his approach to solving those problems seems reasonably effective. He is an avid reader and reads hundreds of books per year. He is an interesting person, I enjoy his talks, etc...
But Microsoft is a different story. Behind every Microsoft key product there's some deceiving business deal.
- MS-DOS: Misleading deal involving 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products
- Windows: Misleading deal involving developing software for the Apple Macintosh
- Windows NT: Misleading deal involving a collaboration with IBM to develop OS/2
- SQL Server: Misleading deal involving a collaboration with Sybase to develop Sybase SQL Server
And the list goes on and on and on.
In addition to the AARD code many other things happened. Linux was called cancer, there were fear/uncertainty/doubt campaigns against OpenGL, against Linux, against many open source projects. Open source communities got pissed off, developers got pissed off, and that started slowly hurting Microsoft. So now they have decided to co-exist with open source.
I'm not sure how it looked when you saw it, but the current iteration reads like a beat poem. I'd hardly call it trollish, and would reach for satire before sarcasm.
> On July 6, 1994 Kildall, 52, walked into a Monterey bar. He was wearing motorcycle leathers with Harley-Davidson patches;a would-be biker. There were some real bikers in the bar. Something was said. There was pushing and shoving, and Kildall died from injuries sustained to his head. An inquest called the death “suspicious,” but no one was charged.
"He hoped that Logo, an educational dialect of LISP, would supplant BASIC in education, but it did not"
That's interesting to me, because when I was in grade school, they were pushing Logo, and I didn't like it at all. It wasn't presented as doing much more than ordering a turtle around though.
>All bugs in windows have been fixed
What?
Also Microsoft has brought us open software and open source things in as much as it lets it:
Win over the competition
Let things be open enough for its ecosystem to prosper but not enough for open software to proliferate as much as it could have
They just did not do that as a kind gesture out of their heart or because Bill is a nice guy who loves you but precisely to shut lawsuits, simulate competition and to make a profit so please don’t be so naive.
It's not trolling, it's sarcasm, although with the crippling inability of far too many HN posters to recognize sarcasm, even when its glaringly obvious, I understand why someone might think it's trolling.
Gary Kildall RIP.