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Gates Nose-Dives at CES
Lots of submissions this morning about Bill Gates' performance at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show. His Media Center PC presentation crashed. (The presentation is online.) He also gave an interview to CNET, where he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists". Boingboing has some commentary on that interview as well.
I find it pretty unusual that both cases caused the machine to stop responding completely. That hasn't happened to me since Windows 98/Me. 2000 and XP have generally been pretty stable theirselves. Individual programs still crash, but they don't usually take the system down with them. I wonder if there was some bad ram or other hardware failure as part of the cause. Still funny and I'm sure embarrassing all the same. :)
So, his media player presentation crashed, and the link to this is ... a .asx.
Kinda ironic don't you think ?
he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists".
While this is generally laughed at by the slashdot community we still need to consider that Joe Sixpack pretty much sees it the same way. Not that he minds downloading free music and pr0n but ultimatly he does see it as theft.
And this could really bite at the community in the future. While most people here laugh at Joe Sixpack he's the one who helped Gates build an empire.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Other than one fake quote attributed to him and getting hit in the face with a pie, can anyone actually remember anything he has done or said? Ever?
I wonder if the fathers of capitalism ever imagined the levels of marketing we would have today. I believe it really skews the whole idea of competition...
It didn't hurt Windows 98 sales after Gates got a blue screen during a demo, Ashlee Simpson is still selling albums even though we found out that she really, really, can't sing (SNL + Orange Bowl), and G. W. Bush got the presidency despite being a below average public speaker.
The american public really doesn't hold public figures to a very high standard anymore.
There are music geeks who hate Ashlee for taking away a spot at a record company that some talented band might have had, political geeks who know every single word GW has said wrong, and normular computer geeks who know the design flaws in Windows.
Still, the public doesn't seem to care, and prefer to be sheep following celebrity shepards rather than thinking humans supporting the most qualified public figures.
You have to be a really dedicated researcher if you want to get beyond the multi-million dollar marketing hype surrounding most products and people these days.
$8.95/mo web hosting
Throwing words like comunist is very imature and unprofessional on Bills behalf IMHO.
We'd be supporting the idea of the government owning all intellectual property.
However, not to defend Mr. Gates (and surely to piss off a lot of the OSS community), but there is some small degree of validity to his statement, though he used the wrong word.
Many people who completely reject the idea of intellectual property (not all) aren't really communists as Mr. Gates would propose, but in fact, radical left-wing anarchists. They despise authority in any form that it comes in; that is why such things as IP and copyrights are hated so much. The idea of God introduces a supreme authority, so they hate him even more.
They wear the "communist" label with pride, not understanding who they really are, or what communism really is and what it has done to nearly every single society that has been foolish enough to try it.
They are the modern day hippy, when it comes right down to it. They stand for and oppose the same things and the same principles.
But God demonstrates his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us - (Romans 5:8)
He has to say this sort of thing since he's bet the MS farm on DRM and the like. When you hear people making these kind of references though, you know they are concerned. That tells me the DRM plan isn't going as well as they thought it would.
Have you seen Ironstayn vs Supergovernment yet?
and was surprised, at first, to find that many people there actually believed that.
Best Slashdot Co
Why is IE on those systems, Bill, oh that's right because you made it part of the OS and there was little way for it not to be on the system.
"...We need to keep IE the best. So no big problem; it's not that people have stopped using IE, it's just we've got lots of good ideas that can match and move ahead...."
I'm sure the Firefox is being downloaded, over and over, but it's not catching on... right? IE hasn't been the best in years.
And for the best (in terms of the IE talk)
Well, no one invests more in security of their browser than what we do on IE.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is correct. The part Bill seems to ignore is the fact that the $ is wasted is you base that on their track record of making things secure.
That fool? He's gone down hill since all his best writers left him. Did you know they have to PAY his audience members? He is now the joke.
a) Bullshit. Don't talk authoritatively about things you don't know anything about. The important quote here is ""From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
The center of the system is protecting the individual who is perceived as being exploited by the state.
b) Communist is indeed a pejorative term in the US. The fact that "they" were at one time the enemy is hardly a moral justification of continued discrimination. I'm not a "commie", so I won't defend thier ideology, but I would suggest that any criticism be directed at ideas and not cultural impressions.
One key difference between Communism and Capitalism is the existence of a middle class in Capitalism. In other words, Capitalism let's you have a house, a TV, a car, and it let's you dream about being rich, whereas in Communism these things are not allowed by the law.
Generally, Capitalism is better in the short term, but in the long term, both are equally bad, because greed is a key factor in both systems.
As for Gates, he became ultra-rich from Windows...what did we expect? personally, I did not expect anything else.
The sad fact is that although technology has the power to transform the world to a paradise, it's people with the mentality that BillG showed in this case that do not let that happen.
You're wrong.
Real life implementations of communism that *work* and were not based on party control exist - kibbutzim in Israel, communes in the US and elsewhere. They aren't based on a Party structure at all.
The totalitarian government you had in Eastern Europe was not really communism, it just went by the name. Drawing conclusions about the validity of real communist principles from the USSR is like drawing conclusions about the lifespan of a human by studying how long penguins live.
(note: I believe communism would still fail as a government, even if it weren't implemented as a totalitarian system, but it is not in and of itself a failure as an idea, as kibbutzim, moshavim, and communes have been showing for the past century.)
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
I suggest that someone with Windows machine download and share the file so that non-windows users can see it as well. Here neither MPlayer not Totem seem to be able to play the provided link or any of the URLs provided inside that file (it's text file). It looks like problem with being even able to start downloading (non-standard protocol?).
I'm not talking about re-encoding, just providing a link usable with normal HTTP-enabled client.
Come on, the deaths caused by Communism were a result of Religious Fervor. The folks who participated didn't have a religion, so they substituted "Humanism" as their bailywick, and justification to slaughter.
People want to slaughter. It's in their nature. Religion often provides a reasonable excuse for it, but so does racism, or any ideology. (Including Capitalism).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
where he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists"
Communism is where everything is owned by the government and is distributed among the citizens. Intellectual property is where everything you've *payed* for is owned by a company after in your possession.
So we're not a communist state; we're far worse.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
Hitler thought his armies and his works (esp. with regard to the Jews) were holy, and killed in God's name. Or, at least, that's what he claimed he thought.
Does that count?
Seek to 1:13:25 in the video to watch the Xbox game Forza Motorsport blue screen with an "out of system memory" error.
image
I've said for many years that Gates was just another mad fascist out for world domination at any cost.
How old was Hitler when he began gnawing carpets?
"Bill! Spit that out! The MSNvideo interview is about to begin!"
"But I LOVE chocolate brown shag! Mmmmmm...."
Objectivism is the most baroque, grotesque, venal, intellectually masturbatory philosophy ever constructed.
Just plain disturbing. Pseudo-philosophy for people who have some brains but think they are much smarter than they are and so fail to respect many of the complexities of the world. Just a pet fundamentalism for them to latch onto. If you like some of the ideals in Objectivism, then read some Nozick and Rawls for the love of God, and put down the Rand trash for a little while. They at least have rigor in their philosophy and respect for complexities. Rand just spirals off in petty intellectual obscurantism.
The demo of whatever racing game they're plugging is roughly at 71 minutes.
The guy's showing off the fact that you can pick a car, then modify it... and it just goes blue. DOH!
A little further on, there's a bit where Conan and Bill are going head-to-head in a race and Conan has absolutely no idea what he's doing. And when the force feedback kicks in, he has no idea what the fuck's going on. :)
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. Always boom tomorrow. BOOM!
To flesh this out a little more...
The reason why Capitalism works best when there is just enough stuff to go around is because it is based on Supply and Demand. If there is too much Supply, then the price drops so low that you can not sell it and make a profit. This is one of the many factors that cause the great depression in america. (too much food was produced, so farmers could no longer afford to grow food and sell it). Communism doesnt have this problem because everything is distributed by the government, which can cause its own problems if the government it bad. There is a lot more too it, but that is the basics. However, I am no expert, this is just how i see it.
But, as you said, since there is no limit to the amount of software, you dont need anyone to regulate the distrobution of the software.
>where he described anyone who doesn't support >ever-increasing intellectual property laws as >"communists"
2 5COPYR IGHT.html
Lawrence Lessig on The Tyranny of Copyright
"We are invoking ideas that should be central to the American tradition, such as that a free society is richer than a control society," he says. "But in the cultural sphere, big media wants to build a new Soviet empire where you need permission from the central party to do anything." He complains that Americans have been reduced to "an Oliver Twist-like position," in which they have to ask, "Please, sir, may I?" every time we want to use something under copyright -- and then only if we are fortunate enough to have the assistance of a high-priced lawyer."
NY Times Jan, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/
"failed economic ideology that has resulted in tens of millions of unnecessary deaths worldwide"
There was a great opinion piece on Space Daily a few days ago that pointed out the irony that the Russian space program is a pragmatic group, doing a lot of great work with very limited resources and are in fact great businessmen, especially with their space tourism attempts.
The article then contrasted it with NASA's manned space program which is in fact an incompetent bureacracy with all of the worst characteristics you expect from a the "failed economic idealogy" of "statist communism". An agency laced with incompetent bureaucrats who aren't held to account for failure or rewarded for success and who squander state funds at a breathtaking pace and build incompetent empires. I hate to break it to you but if you look at the massive growth of government spending in the U.S. it is in many ways a socialist state too. Vast segments of the American economy are completely tied to and dependent on government spending and contracts which is pretty much socialism. There was a time the Republicans blamed all this socialism on the Democrats but now they have complete control of the government and they are accelerating government spending and intervention in the economy, not slowing it.
As an aside I'm pretty sure capitalism and dictatorial socialism which is what you see in China and the U.S.S.R, not really communism, are both to blame for millions of unnecessary deaths. Vietnam for example was a mutual effort of the two ideoligies as they fought proxy wars around the world see they couldn't do it directly. The U.S. most certainly did kill millions of civilians in Vietnam and is killing plenty of civilians unnecessarily in Iraq today.
There have certainly been some major slaughtering of innocents in the U.S.S.R, China and North Korea but that really has NOTHING to do with ideology. That is just what you get from dictatorships whether they be left or right leaning. The U.S. has propped up, if not outright installed, plenty of right wing dictators who slaughtered innocents, Pinochet for example may finally be held to account for all the people his U.S. backed government murdered.
@de_machina
"Communism is a method of government"
... gasp ... socialism it is a nearly inevitable evolution of Capitalism that eventually you end up with one company that owns everything, and in the computer age it would most likely be Microsoft unless they screw the pooch at some point.
Actually Communism is a way of living. It derives from living in a commune. You might note it has the same root as a word us Linux people use a lot, community. Bill Gates is in fact right, sharing MP3's and open source software development IS communism. The catch is thanks the word was hijacked by a bunch of socialist dictators, specially Stalin. Its been turned in to a dirty word and thats why Bill Gates and Co. try to lay it on file swappers and Linux. Americans in particular freak at the word and start warming up the jets on the deck of the aircraft carriers everytime the get a wiff of it in the air. That is exactly what Bill is trying to do here, mobilize the American people and government in to a reactionary frenzy in which they wipe out file sharing and Linux. Oh, and in the process he just happens to get "Trusted Computing" and he locks Linux off of the Internet and out of personal computing because it can't be "Trusted". In the process he further secures his monopoly because all computers have to be trusted and Microsoft will seek to control the implementation of that trust(in all hardware and all software). It is classic Marxism, the community versus an ever expending capitalist monpolist.
At its ideal Communism is a group of people living together sharing their resources and labor, working together for the common good. They are not dividing the world up in to personal property which at its worst usually means one percent of the people own everything, including all the land and everyone else is dirt poor and share cropping or working in outright servitude. Thats what Russia was like prior to 1917 which is why there was a revolution. Its also classic Marxism that when you have capital you have a huge advantage in making more capital over people who have no capital. And of course there is a near inevitable concentration of wealth in a few hands and ever larger monpolies because large corporations can dominate smaller ones and huge monopolies are extremely good at making money, and destroying or gobbling up their competitors. Unless government restrains it through antitrust law, which is
@de_machina
He already tried that but it backfired. M$ tried to blame windoze viruses and worms on FOSS. It was easy to show that the worms were written on Windoze by people who know about Windoze. All the accusation did was admit that there was a worm problem and give a good example of blame shifting. It also highlighted the relative security of free software.
Concentrated efforts by real Communists against free software have failed. No automated worms have emerged, despite the majority use of free software in typical targets of such efforts: high profile corporate webserves.
Microsoft themselves have engaged in such activities against previous competitive threats. There are court documented cases of them breaking code for DrDOS, Netscape and a host of others. It would be interesting indeed if they were to try to classify such activity as "terrorist".
If there is a software terrorist threat, it's dependence on Windows. Windows systems, including large banks, have continued to be trashed and this has an effect on public moral and institutional confidence.
Mojo, free software's got it, M$ don't.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My brother just got one and it seemed pretty like a pretty neat computer. Since I was also on the lookout for a new PC, I bought one days after he did.
AMD-64 3400
1.8G FSB
512M RAM
200G Hard Drive
128Meg AGP Video Card (Quoted on the documentation)
Now for the fun part.
First, the video board is really a PCI card (not to be confused with PCI-Express). I've yet to resolve this issue as I didn't realize this until just the other day.
Now for the Operating System: Windows XP - Media Center Edition. Windows ME's big brother.
Applications suddenly terminate - not all the time, but enough.
Premiere 6.0 is a nightmare on this system - crashes repetedly on the same project within seconds after starting up. If I place a video on a timeline and resize the edit window the app crashes. No other OS (WinXP, Win2K or Win98) crashes.
Windows Messenger - Where to start. First-off, you can not uninstall Windows Messenger (at least without uninstalling The Media Center)!
Running the media center to listen to the radio (which is a cool idea) causes Windows Messenger to run. That particular PC is not connected to the Internet therefore I don't have to worry about it nor can I report it's behaviour after the Windows Messenger comes up. Maybe someone can fill in those details.
On the subject of the Windows Firewall and Anti-virus detection schemes: Oi! (Remember, now, that this system is NOT connected to the internet.) I uninstalled the pre-packaged Norton AV and Norton Internet Security because of it's constant whining about connecting to the net to get updates. It just would not stop prompting me - so I uninstalled it. That's when SP2's problem reared it's very ugly head.
I thought, "OK, I'll just 'change the way Security Center alerts me.'"
I checked the requesite check-boxes in the security center (4 check-boxes total (two under 'Change the way Security Center alerts me and one each under the firewall and AV recommedation buttons). After two restarts, the checkboxes miracouslty (-2 sp) un-check themselves and the Security Center continues to nag me to death. ( I imagine there is some other procedure to effectively (permenently) turn off this mis-feature; but, I haven't found it, yet.)
Anyway, I give 4 'drives down' on WinXP-MC.
"You have the freedom to do anything but deny freedom to others" are not big fat chains, and are only strings to the sociopathically greedy.
The enemies of Democracy are
Funny, just last week it took me 20 minutes to get an ipod working with SuSE and gtkpod, and an additional 30 to get a USB DVD burner working correctly with k3b.
Linux: Free if your time is worthless.
Well.
:P
It is NOT true, as far as my recollection goes. I lived through 15 years of communism in former Yugoslavia, and then through 15 years of capitalism right afterwards (Croatia, if you are interested).
To be blunt, we lived well under communism. We had everything we wanted, my parents both worked, nobody was hungry (nobody, as in you'd never see hungry folks on TV or on the street, no matter where you went), and life expectancy was fairly good. Almost up there with the most advanced countries in the West (within 5 years).
Then we hit the magic capitalism. Life standards plummeted, my parents lost their jobs, life expectancy went to hell. You see poor, desperate, hungry people all the freaking time. Things have gotten a little better recently, but they still SUCK big time.
Let me compare some numbers. In 1980 or so, my parents (decidedly middle class, both with a college education) were taking home about 1500 dollars each month, in 1980 dollars. We went skiing every winter, we went to the Adriatic for a summer vacation every summer. We changed cars every 4-5 years. We had a nice TV (in 1980), and in 1985 I got my first computer (Atari ST).
Okay, now compare this to 2000, twenty years later, after 10 years of glorious capitalism. My mom doesn't work, my dad takes home about 800 dollars a month (that's 2000 dollars!), we haven't used our skis in a decade, I've last gone to the sea on a vacation 5 years ago, the TV is still the same one from 1980, and we don't have a car. The only new thing is the PC, which I made from scrounged parts.
1500 1980 dollars compared to 800 2000 dollars. Even without inflation it is obvious which system shafted us. When you add the inflation, loss of universal care and universal education, dismantled public transportation, deteriorating infrastructure, and great increase in crime and illiteracy, communism was a goddamned paradise compared to the capitalist free market.
I don't care if communism sucked ass in USSR, Poland, and the rest of the Warsaw Pact. Communism worked very nicely for us Yugoslavs, and when we ditched it we went through a goddamn civil war lasting 10 years. Oh, by the way, it is arguable that Western Europe and US did their best to destroy the country with "economic reforms" forced down our throats in 1980 which torched the economy, and political assistance to various nationalist assholes who wanted their own little kingdoms.
After all, it is bad for propaganda purposes to have a successful communist system giving you the finger all the time. Nuh, uh, it's gotta go.
I am bitter. I am doing well in capitalism these days because I learned to cheat, lie, and screw everyone else, all to "get ahead". Hard word, solid ethics, and niceness would have gotten me to my mom's position, aka unemployed and unemployable...
That may very well have been the reality of the situation, but it's certainly not what he claimed.
BTW, do you know what I've found to be most rock solid software from Microsoft? Windows Server 2003. I've got 12 servers with 8-20 terminal server users each running IE (Gasp!) Outlook Express (The Horror!) on an internal network (proxy for mail/web access) that haven't been rebooted since May of last year (yes - they're behind on their security patches) and don't show any signs of stopping.
These machines are pounded day and night, and hold up incredibly well, despite two of them running on the same crap commodity hardware as some of our problematic XP desktops.
As a comparison, according to my stats, I have exactly three XP machines in this office that have had > 2 weeks of uptime, *EVER*.
You sure are throwing that "liar" word around a lot without any actual justification.
"you are lying when you say Bill Gates is calling open source developer or Linux developers communists"
This is exactly what he said:
"No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist."
He obviously didn't say LINUX in bold letters but who exactly do you think he is talking about when he is refering to "software makers" here? The "incentive" here is that software makers should hold all their software under proprietary license and get paid for it, an arguement he's been making since his famous letter in 1976.
OK if that didn't clarify who the liar is here lets hop in the wayback machine and remember when Steve Ballmer, Bill's partner called Linux "communist" outright. He said:
"Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it."
"what you are doing is essentially changing that into an attack on open source."
I am doing no such thing. I'm merely pointing out that Linux IS communist in the classic sense of the word. It is a community working for the common good, and renouncing private ownership of the fruit of their labors for that good. There is nothing resembling an "attack" in that. It is an entirely positive thing. I'm pointing out than when Gates and Ballmer use this word it comes across as an attack because the true meaning of the word "communist" has been so distorted in today's world especially in the U.S. that it is a pejorative and they are trying to associate Linux with all the badness that was and is the U.S.S.R and China which weren't even remotely communist in reality, the were and are oppressive socialist dictatorships.
All in all you strike me as a classic anonymous coward chickenshit slinging terms like "big liar", without supporting it, while you cower under complete anonymity. If you believe what you are saying and aren't a chickenshit at least post it under your login.
@de_machina