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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 ^_^
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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"?
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