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Bill Gates Interview w/ Spiegel
DaVinciXL writes "Bill Gates just gave the German magazine "Spiegel" an interview which can be read (in English) on the magazine's website. Gates speaks about issues of computer security, competition, software bundling and how he lives with the downsides of his wealth and fame." He does a pretty good job of answering a lot of hard questions.
the quotes may have been added for grammatical reasons in the final product. He might not have specified them during the interview, leading Big Bill to say that.
Searching for "bill gates is the devil" you get about 5100 returns. Thats a lot, but to be expected. Hell, if you search for "computers are the devil", you get 500 results. Or try "bush is the devil".. ~1000 returns. Even "religion is the devil" gets 4300 returns! Moral of the story, people hate a lot of things. :)
Boxing Equipment Reviews
"He is the devil" - 7950
"She is the devil" - 751
"God is the devil" - 1130
"I am the devil" - 11200
"Foosball is the devil" - 557
Hah, I like the way Gates tries to avoid answering some questions by speaking around them...
...
... put so sweepingly, that is not correct. Of course we are the largest target, simply because we have the most widely disseminated system. But it affects others in exactly the same way. Linux is, in many respects, even more significantly affected.
SPIEGEL: But your small competitor Apple, for example, is much less frequently a victim of virus attacks
Gates:
Sig Nature
"SCO is the Devil" only gets 24 results. Maybe they are not so bad.
"Linux is the devil" gets 40 results.
"RMS is the devil gets 6 results.
"Linus is the devil" gets 0 resuts btw.
Jonathanjk.com
if you know anything about how he gets his money, most of it isn't taxable. his actual salary is quite modest, as a great deal of it used to be in options in the company.
he could easily not pay any taxes rather than give 30 billion dollars. People who say he gives that much just for tax write offs obviously have no idea how taxes work in this country.
He could give just a million or so a year to avoid most of his taxes, so I ask you this, why the 30 billion dollars???
Problem is, you never have exactly the same system across any organization, no matter how small.
Consider a medical situation (like the one Gates was using) -- yes, if you standardize on a scalpal, you only need to train everyone to wash and sharpen a scalpal, and anyone can use anyone else's scalpal, clean it, etc. Hell, you can even have just one dedicated cleaning/sharpening/replacing guy.
However, a scalpal might not be the tool for the job. You don't want the dentist to use a scapal to clean your teeth, for instance. So there's never "one basket".
You could mention that having similar components is nice, even if they aren't all identical (give them all the same grip or something), but the reality of it is that you want to use the right tool for the job. I could never live with a system that I can't tweak -- and I don't just mean in the kernel-hacking, source-code-ninja kind of way. I need to be able to mix and match things, configure, build what I want.
Windows doesn't let me do that. For one, they embed Internet Explorer (maybe because "we want our customers to have more features so they will buy our new OSes") to the point where AFAIK, you cannot update the machine without using the second worst browser on the planet. (The worst is IE for Mac -- last I checked, it renders neither Apple.com nor Microsoft.com properly.)
However, Linux hasn't done a great job of running certain essential Windows apps, so I run some things on Wine, and some things on an actual Windows box.
If I went all-Windows, I would feel crippled for hacking and admin (server) stuff, and also very insecure about storing email, etc. on a system with so many bugs (Gates' dodge notwithstanding). Everyday stuff (email, web...) is faster and easier with multi-desktops + middle-click to paste + custom Fluxbox, things which technically can be done on Windows, but would be horrendous kludges and would probably cripple the apps.
If I went all-Linux, I would have to deal with buggy/slow/kludgy ways of running certain essential apps. Games, for instance. I'd also constantly worry that someone would hand me a disk with a Windows app on it, some nice, bleeding-edge thing to try, and my qemu wouldn't be fast enough and my wine wouldn't be able to handle it.
Even as un-customizable as Windows is, it would still be heterogenious enough in any real-world setup that you'd have the same "many baskets" problem. Even as customizable as Linux is, you can still have automated updates and one-click system-wide config changes, often much more simply and powerfully than in Windows.
And then there's the worm issue. If I'm a Linux/Windows/FreeBSD/Mac/Solaris shop, it's almost impossible that one virus will take me out. If I'm pure-Linux, it's a bit more likely, though I get patches faster than people write exploits. If I'm pure-Windows, it's the most likely of any setup.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
" There is some truth in some of what he says.
It's worth noting that an aircraft with multiple engines is more likely to have some sort of engine failure than an aircraft with one engine of similar design. In general, increasing the number of components in a system increases the chance that at some point one of the components will fail.
Basically if you put your eggs in several different baskets the number of eggs you can expect to lose will be greater than the number of eggs you can expect to lose by putting them in a single well designed basket."
All around, that was just poor execution of analogies. Let's just use basic engineering to try again in a more methodical and dependable engineering / scientific analysis:
Having multiple engines on an airplane (versus one of similar design)
- The "weak" point of multi-engine aircraft is that there is a significantly higher *design* requirement to get the engines integrated and working as a system with each other, versus the simplicity of getting a single engine design to work. There is also very significantly higher maintainance time / costs associated with these, both because there are more engines, and because the backbone system supporting them is more complicated. I think the later is perhaps where the original poster was heading with the "one basket" versus "multiple baskets" analogy, but I'm not entirely certain of that fact. For now, I'll just assume... [I'll explicitely make this a computer comparison later, after the analogies are all done...]
- Though the likelihood of a multi-engine aircraft having a failure is higher, the point of having multi-engine aircraft is that you still have engines when one fails. Thus, the overall "System" [the aircraft] availability is higher while in the air, while at the same time, the aircraft is likely to have *less* overall airtime due to the increased number of pairs. Like any engineering feat, it's a matter of finding where the optimal trade-off functions meet ( [Availibility in the Air] versus [Availibility of aircraft to *be* in the air] )
- If you can pick 4 engines that all work flawlessly the same with the backbone system, then mixing in 2 high fidelity engines with 2 lower fidelity engines is, obviously, not a bad idea. Unless
- You don't have any technicians who know how to repair the higher fidelity engines.
- Or they cost more to repair.
- Or, the pilots' have learned all the quirks of the lower fidelity engines, and have to learn to deal with the now-odd COMPLETE System behavior that results from the mixing of engines.
Finally, on to the computers:- Having multiple OS's increases training costs for technical support, and for users if they too are required to use multiple OS's.
- Since the number of computers required at a company are seldom dictated by anything more than the number of people in the company, the choice of OS is not going to significantly impact the total number of *systems*. Of course I recognize that there's more to it than that for *specific* types of company, but as a consultant, I'm sticking to the most common.
- That said, having more *reliable* systems out there has the *potential* to be a money- and headache-saver, but it is not guaranteed. Most companies I deal with have 1-2 "IT" folks, and it's not even their full time job. However, if they already know both systems, and Linux applications are available as replacements for key functions within their companies, then adding a second (or more) OS makes sense.
In other words, there is no blanket statement that says 2 OS's, or 5, or 1, is better. As an intelligent group, we ought to be developing TCO's *specifically* for businesses based on a set of specific capabilities / needs within the realm of possible businesses. THAT would go a lot farther in this day and age then the generic M$ SUCKS! trademark statements, and "Linux isn't ready for prime-time" statement. Both, it seems, can be true once they are applied to a specific class of businesses.> Is it just me, or does the German interviewer come off a bit slant? I'm not pro-MS or anything
> (I'm a linux user) but the person asking the questions sounds like someone off of Frontline, or some crap.
Maybe, but this is just the regular "Der Spiegel" style. If the questions had been directed at an US president or an UN general secretary, they would have come out in pretty much the same tone.
The "Spiegel" is the most influential publication in germany. Its format is like the "Time"-Magazine, but the political and economic influence would be better compared to the NYT or Washington Post.
This magazine has quite a reputation for their interviews. After it is written up, each Interview will have to be reviewed for correctness by the person interviewed. If there are misunderstandings or errors, they can be corrected before it goes to print, but if they try to back off substantially from what they first said, there will be no interview printed.
As far as I remember, nobody ever successfully tried to claim he was misquoted in a printed interview, even if it came out plainly devastating to him.
Still, politicians and managers in germany would give an arm and a leg to get an interview in the magazine, even though they know they cannot control the questions asked.
One noted exception was Helmut Kohl (german chancellor during most of the 80ies and 90ies), who refused to give interviews to the "Spiegel", or even to admit he was reading any of them - but a lot of people regarded this as "chickening out".
In general, in german publications there is a much less pronounced division between "news" and "opinion", and a typical piece of news reported in a german newspaper would raise eyebrows if printed in a literal translation in an US newspaper.
But to me (a german), it seems helpful to the reader if any slant the reporter may hold toward some topic is reflected in the wording of the article itself, rather than only covertly in the selection of topics presented or questions asked. This way, you have more of an incentive to look for a second source of news.