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The Tech Interviews of Yesteryear
nihilist_1137 writes: "Cnet has a collection of interviews with some of the 'biggest movers and shakers' of 2001. It focuses on their plans, ambitions and fears. Included is Sir Arthur C. Clark, Bill Gates, Will Wright, and Bill Joy, to name a few." It''s a fairly eclectic bunch of interviews collected from the last year, not ones done specifically for 2001 nostalgia.
This cracks me up, in a funny-as-in-sad sort of way.
In the Gates interview, he said "If we can't add any features, then what is Windows? I mean, there were guys who sold TCP/IP stacks for $100. Should we not have put TCP/IP stacks into Windows?"
If MS was reimplementing TCP/IP for windows today, it would probably compatible only with Windows Media Packets.
Oh well ^_^
Anyone tell me how Bill Joy was a mover or a shaker in 2001?
Broken Hearts are for Assholes. - Frank Zappa
Damn....These last three days should be called " The Attack of the Slashdot News Montage " Meta news is great, but meta news that is already meta news? Anyways, the Interview with Arthur C. Clarke is great and I especially love this quote from Clarke: "No, obviously you have to continue to use the technology. Life would come to a stop if we didn't have our cell phones and our computers and so forth." - Heh, at least I'm not the only one who believes this!
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
This one is a scary read, Richard Parsons: Why the Web Can't Remain Free It's not as if we get it free now. ISPs, computer, eyestrain, carpel tunnel, backaches, etc. I would do less shopping than I do now, between Amazon, Ebay, Ubid, and others. Free? It's not free now Mr Parsons.....
About the GPL, he said "But if you say to people, "Do you understand the GPL?" And they'll say, "Huh?" And they're pretty stunned when the Pac-Man-like nature of it is described to them."
Pac-Man-like nature? IANAL but I think I understand the basics of the GPL but wtf is the Pac-Man-like nature of it?
Anyone care to comment?
Well, some will be free, and some will be for pay. The marketplace will decide. When you describe to people that every file on their machine will be backed up--photos of their kids, business documents, e-mail--if your machine is taken or breaks, those will be available to you."
and to Microsoft for marketing purposes, to Ashcroft for his latest terrorist witch-hunt, to the IRS for the audit they had in mind for you, ...
Does Gate really think people will swallow that ? I mean, holy crap, hell will freeze over before I send any of my files to a remote storage volume owned by Microsoft (or owned by anybody else for that matter).
Not that I agree, I'm just positing the Gates perspective.
Agreed : I understood the "viral nature of the GPL" analogy, but I have no clue what Pac-Man has to do with this.
Anyhow, I think Microsoft should be sued by Namco for mis-using the "Pac-Man" trademark.
but wtf is the Pac-Man-like nature of it?
You sir, have been the recipient of some genuine grade-a Microsoft brand FUD. How is Linux like cancer? Or the GPL like Pac-Man? If you explain something to someone in terms that are so base that it seems their meaning should be obvious, people will tend to say "Okay, that makes sense...yada yada yada", instead of saying "Yo Bill, WTF! Care to explain yourself without poor metaphors and misleading analogies?" And on top of it all, Bill seems to have forgotten that Pac-Man actually kicks ass.
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
I don't know that anyone has ever asked for the source code for Word. If they did, we would give it to them.
But you can *bet* that I'm going to try it. Lemme go find a MS email address and request it. They've gotten me seriously curious. (Yes, I'm really going to do this after I post this comment.)
And can I sue Gates for lying if they refuse to give it to me?
Pain(n): when you're telnetting into a box doing somethin cool, and some luser calls for help with a 'critical error' ad
I don't fear targeted marketing, it is merely a huge annoyance to me. But I do dislike the idea that someone somewhere knows more about me than what I told him.
"If you are not a terrorist, why do you fear Ashcroft?"
If you're not a communist, why should you fear McCarthy ?
"If you're not cheating on your taxes, why do you fear an IRS audit?"
I'd rather see the IRS people come to me directly and ask me what they want to know than do things behind my back. It's the same argument as the marketing data issue : I don't like things done behind my back, that's all.
It's always fun to read old news. You get to see inside the heads of people.
But more exciting than last year's interviews are old "white papers" published by Gartner, KPMG and the like. They're filled with tons of analysis, and conclude with strongly worded predictions.
I think that these predictions are mostly grossly wrong, and aren't worth their weight in soiled dirt.
But the funny part is that CIOs and CTOs often pay big bucks for these things. They pay thousands of dollars for the "sage advice" of money-grubbing dreamers.
So, CTOs and CIOs: get out those old reports you bought and read them over. See just how wrong they are. You'll most likely laugh or cringe. And then decide where your money should go this year.
And we're obviously going to spend a lot in marketing because we think the product sells itself...
AH! It's all so clear now!
---
Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
It tells you a lot about the people Bill Gates surrounds himself with. I can't imagine what kind of innovation you're going to accomplish when everybody around you is willing to praise the brilliance of your every utterance. That's great for a lazy trust-fund kid, but for a guy who's still running one of the largest American companies, it's not a recipe for long-term success. Better hang on tight to that monopoly, Billy.
Alternatively, the people he's talking about could be major American business leaders... In other words, the same people who would gladly distribute software under a license requiring the sacrifice of the user's firstborn... who are hideously offended that the GPL might require some small sacrifices fom the user in exchange for free redistribution rights.
if project alpha uses some code from the GPL license, then all of project alpha code is subject to ("under") the GPL.
the GPL-as-a-virus and GPL-as-Pac-Man-esque are the same thing, just different ways of expressing the concept.
if the pellet or ghost that Pac Man eats is a GPL pellet, then Pac Man is GPL. I think there is a kind of a food-chain implication here, like there should be a line of ever larger pac men feeding on eachother and in the end the big pac-man is under the GPL, or "infected" by/with it.
Dale Fuller: The new barbarians? is an interesting article about borland's resurgence as a real company in the marketplace, from thier slump for the past several years. The article doesn't really come out and say it, but the reason borland is doing well now, and wasn't before, is the personnel. I find it amusing that they don't just come out and say it, but they refer, again and again to the "departures of key staffers" when they started their decline, and now, according to Fuller, "one of the major indicators is the number of cool programmers who want to work here--and we're now getting people back from Microsoft, from universities, from all over the world." I guess what Robert A. Heinlein said is true: "brainpower is the scarcest commodity and the only one of real value."
I'm a concientious
Really, you can't have any expectation that this guy is going to promote free content distribution.
I think that tinfoil you wrap around your head to shield you from the government mind control satellite needs to be loosened a bit.
On top of it all, why would you think for a minute that Yahoo or AOL or your own mom and pop ISP won't sell your data?
By the way, you don't own a credit card, do you?
Ya must be a youngin, so we'll all forgive ya. Pac-Man, an arcade classic produced by Namco, involved a small yellow spheroid. The goal of the game was to gobble up dots and fruits for the benefit of Pac-Man. The analogy fits the Open-Source movement rather well, in my opinion. Open programmers make use of those resources that have been left for them to access. Meanwhile, companies that actually care about such petty things as profit and market shares, represented by the ghosts in Gates' Pac-Man analogy, attempt to waylay the Open programmers. These programmers can only combat the corporation by consuming fruit, obviously representing killer ideas that are worth implementation. The whole epic takes place in a maze that is oddly similar to a cubicle forest, further reinforcing the analogy.
Pax Digitalia
Someone please mod the parent up "Funny". That has got to be the most poignantly humorous interpretation of the Pac-Man quote I've yet heard.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Nice description of PacMan on OpenSource. Conversely in my opinion, the PacMan analogy fits Bill Gates vision more appropriately. Those bits of food used to be his competitors while he proceeds to clear the board. Those trusty power pellet lawyers and the "repressive" USDOJ ghosts just have to make things interesting for his game.
Indeed, Bill Joy is a different breed. Contrast him with the others in sense that ethics became his driving force behind his motivation of advocating technology.
Because Microsoft has always been extremely focused on high volume, low price,
Ok, is it just me, or does pricing an OS at like two to three hundred dollars not really sound like high volume, low price.
Maybe it's his billions and billions of dollars that makes him think that such an overpriced OS is "high volume, low price."
Gimp.
"There is this whole history that free software is developed often in the academic environment, where basically government money funded that work. And then commercial work is done. TCP/IP came out of the university environment. Now, 90 percent of the implementations you buy are commercially tuned and supported. And then the companies that do that commercial work pay taxes, create jobs, so the government keeps funding more research, primarily in universities. So that ecosystem where you have free software and commercial software, and customers always get to decide which they use, that's a very important and healthy ecosystem."
First of all, in many college based 'free' software it is the programmer or group of programmer who 'pays' for the development, in the manner of paying for thier education and sacraficing time they could have spent at a job, studying or with friends. In rare cases there are Government grants for that lobbyists have pushed through congress, because politicians are cheaper than developing the software yourself.
This is why GPL is a 'Threat.' It is a threat to government funding to get the best and brightest upcoming programmers to implement the newest developments in software. Under a "free" license the software company with the money to push these bills through congress will also be able to snap up patents and copyrights which the can then 'license' to third party developers.
Free software development is not a 'healthy' ecosystem. Many time the people who put the most effort into 'free' software have turned around to find themselves being sued out of exsitance for violating patents or copyrights on code they wrote. Worse still is the independant software developer, should they wish to write a routine they first have to check who has patents on that. Even if they wish to write from scratch they may have to pay as much as $25 per piece of software they 'ship' depending on what it is they're trying to do. This obviously benenfits the major players, those who have the money to get patents or copyrights on 'obvious' code. This is why as soon as a freeware or shareware app becomes good it's author finds themselves in deep legal waters. Once a program is 'good enough' it is a threat to anyone with a similar, more costly program. If that company has a legal staff they can sue, or better yet Cease-and-desist letter out of existance anyone who poses a threat.
Myself I don't mind that a company like say apple is capable of using BSD code to write a stable Operating system, as long as apple is crediting the authors and isn't turning around suing BSD developers. While not a scientific statistic according to google.com about 2,180 pages have the phrase "Microsoft Sues" on them. I didn't have any luck finding how many companies microsoft sued last year but I seem to recall it was twice as many as sued Microsoft. Also is you take away piracy the hit result is still over 1500. Some other interesting addendums is that adding the word 'patent' outsite the quotes narrows it to some 200 hits, and adding 'copyright' only narrows it to 1500 pages. In the interest of fairness "apple sues" matches 1500 hits and "linux sues" matches 7. However apparently "Linus sues" can't be found anywhere on the internet (until google indexes this page anyways.)
If I had to sum up the software development market in one catch phrase "Innovation through Litigation" is the one that comes to mind, although "If you can't code it, Sue for it." comes in a close second.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Blockquoth the Chief Software Architect,
Wouldn't 100% of the things you buy be commercially supported? Or is it just me...?
Well, there was that picture where Ballmer was in such a pose as to be holding a very large spherical object...
And of course, some genius added the caption, "And we used to eat big balls! Really big, huge balls!" or something to that effect. Hilarious, but I cannot find the image now.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Remember a while ago when Cringely wrote the article about Microsoft building their own version of TCP/IP?
I really thought that Cringely had misheard some information at that point. I couldn't see how or why Microsoft would want to do that.
Then I read the interview with Bill Gates that was part of C|Net's end-of-year wrap-up. Check out this quote:
[C|Net] As described by Microsoft, HailStorm has to be hosted on servers globally for the system to work. How do you plan to do that and ensure security?
[Gates] "We are doing a lot. All of those things are being done with other people. The very protocols of the Internet will evolve for security and quality of service and richer caching. And so we are out talking with the Ciscos and the Akamais and Intel--you name it--for that level of stuff." [italics mine]
All I can say is: wow.
How much do you want to bet that Microsoft will be calling this "Secure TCP/IP"?
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Hopefully my comment is not a troll:
This could be taken more seriously if it wasn't true that most open source programs are simply feature copies of closed programs.
I do agree that open source programmers do make better use of their resources, because most of the time, their only true resource is their own time and money.
-- Dan
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1014-201-7005495-0.htm l
All the talk about how MS is encouraging competition by giving the consumer a choice... but then when pressed, the guy tells the real story. Manufacturers are only allowed to sell PCs that give the user a choice, loading up Windows FIRST, then they have to choose otherwise...
NO DUH! Of course they'd accept that, because by the time the consumer has the option to switch to another pre-loaded OS, Windows is already on there... which means MS has already made their extra $130 on the price of the computer.
Furthermore, OEMs can only put their own icons on the desktop if they allow MS icons as well (IE: advertisements).
I don't get what they're so scared of... if MS really feels it has a quality product, it has nothing to fear. People will choose Windows at the outset and then people might actually feel good about it, as opposed to how it works now... even if you don't WANT windows on your new PC, you have to pay for it. Nobody likes being forced. Nobody likes being pushed around.
Then he goes on about how MS is going to offer choices of different OSs... oh right... yeah, I'll believe that when I see it.
It's obvious this guy thinks that installing Windows on every new PC is somehow a "right" of MS simply because they created it.
"Well, something we don't permit and the court said they understand was that the user interface can be replaced without the user deciding that's OK...We think the user should make that choice so we have a coherent Windows experience when it comes up."
Windows has to be on there first, MS makes their money, and obviously, if the choice is given by MS, whose product will they encourage?
The whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth... Top that off with the fact that at my school and at the stores (all comps over 1.5ghz machines with 256+mb of ram) windows XP ran so sluggish... Most people don't notice/care, but I spend enough time on my computer that it would waste a significant amount of time waiting for My Computer, My Documents or IE 15-30 seconds per invocation... it will really add up, and I'm not willing to slow down, especially like that on those fast computers.
the widely used tcp stack on windows 3.1
was done for free by hackers. what
a joke, bill
Lots of MS software is high volume low price.
Think back a few years to when buying a database engine involved months of price negotiation with a suited salesman and you ended up paying an absolute fortune. Or when you had to pay thousands of dollars for anything more sophisticated than the free C compiler than came with your proprietary Unix? Or when fonts were specialised products sold mostly to people like newspapers, again for thousands?
So MS introduced SQL Server for a grand or so compared to tens of thousands for the competitors.
And development tools for a few hundred compared to around ten times as much for the same thing on a Unix box.
MS themselves didn't directly drive font prices down from thousands or hundreds to pennies, but the introduction of Windows 3.1 did.
So now some of the competitors have been forced to drop their prices, or introduce low-end products, to compete with MS, and some aren't there any more, and the font market has changed beyond recognition. And the Unix development tool market was so ludicrously overpriced that there is now plenty of competition, some of it open source and/or free beer, on Unix as well.
Next? Well, the next thing that I would like to become "high volume low price" is mapping data. Down to the level of where the pipes and wires go in the pavement outside my house.
I was hoping this was about old tech interview questsions, such as "How are your COBOL skills" or "Have you ever used Windows 3.1"
He's bringing the joy of walking to work to lazy people.