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The Softening of a Software Man
theodp writes to tell us that New York Magazine has an interesting editorial stating that no one is afraid of Microsoft anymore. The article argues that Microsoft has noticeably been adrift in the wake of Gates' philanthropy, which some cynics suspect is a Rockefeller-like attempt to 'fumigate his fortune' as he makes a play for the history books. From the article: "Like the robber barons, Bill Gates has moved from trying to take over the world to trying to save it."
Gates would like to go to his grave with some RESPECT. Besides the financial people watching his money, the tech community will have him go down in history as the one who made bad engineering acceptable.
When he took such an obvious path as creating a nonprofit organization (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and pumping in record billions of $$$ to avoid tax and into a country that is a outsource heaven. Really, who didn't see this coming. But some will give him credit for it. OOps did I mention the Bush proposal to eliminate the federal dividend tax right when Gates cashed out on a 99 million US dollar dividend. These people all have hidden agendas.
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
Anyway, veering back to topic, I think Gates is also focused on the money, but he was just luckier with his timing. Some company was going to emerge as dominent in the computer business after IBM dropped the ball, and it turned out to be Microsoft. Yes, Gates played his cards very well and made a whole lot of money in the deal, and he also cheated a little bit on the edges, but he's never been dedicated to crazy evil in the way of Dick Cheney and some of the other neocons.
To use a strained metaphor, Gates has a house of paper--it's just money. The neocons want to build a more substantial palace, and they see killing people as a natural part of the process of building an empire. That's real evil.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
dont be bitter just because you have AIDS.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Perhaps he wants to define "idiot". Having sex with prostitutes. Probably not good, even if you take away your judeochristian/islamic biases. Having unprotected sex with people you don't know...just a bad idea, even if AIDS/HIV wasn't in the picture. Holding on to silly cultural beliefs that have no rational basis, probably a bad thing, too.
It's the same thing about cars and bad drivers, though, too. Do seatbelts and airbags in the long run save more lives, or do they lull marginal drivers into a feeling of self-confidence so that they take bigger risks than they should and cause more problems when they step over their limits, thus resulting in more accidents per se that seem to involve more cars than they used to, increasing the odds of other people getting injuries, etc.?
If you work with powerful tools, the safeties on them are there to prevent stupid behaviors and accidents. But they can't prevent you from more or less intentionally causing yourself or others harm if you have a brain fart or something along the way.
If nature did have a way of weeding out idiots, you'd be in serious trouble!
I think the grandparent was right.
Although there are new TV ads about how a white girl and a black girl are talking about another black girl that was "partying" and "being dumb" and got high and now she has HIV, the actual data does not support that.
AIDS is a problem in underdeveloped nations that do not know how or have the means to do sex safely.
In the US, look at the CDC data:
At the end of 2004, the CDC estimates that 415,193 people were living with AIDS in the USA.1
Of these,
35% were white
43% were black
20% were Hispanic
1% were of other race/ethnicity.
Of the adults and adolescents2 with AIDS, 77% were men. Of these men,
58% were men who had sex with men (MSM)
21% were injection drug users (IDU)
11% were exposed through heterosexual contact
8% were both MSM and IDU.
Of the 93,566 adult and adolescent women with AIDS,
64% were exposed through heterosexual contact
34% were exposed through injection drug use.
For those that do not know, blacks are less than 15% of the US population. I wish they stopped issuing these data only by race but also by socioeconomic status. Despite the etiology of the situation, blacks are on average at the bottom of the stack as far as education, income, good housing, and healthcare go. If the data were separated by socioeconomics, I would believe that the best predictor would be that unsuccessful people are those that get AIDS. I would bet that the largest predictor of AIDS is that these people are simply not healthy to begin with and as the grandparent posted, they should just die. The only reason we "care" is that there are very expensive drugs that never cure the disease, but they extend the life of the patient, which means that they can take the drugs longer.
Problem is that the idiots get laid and we don't. It's the opposite of how it should be.
Idiot.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
Does anyone, really? And why? If you hate him is it because he is successful? Because he succeeded where so many others have failed, and has the billions to show for it?
Everyone I know who met him likes the man - they say he's down to earth, generous, etc.
And yet, so many paint him as evil (his contributions to charity prove he isn't).
I dislike Microsoft - because I dislike their recent turn to not just trying to compete with competitors, but because they are outright hostile to customers now (see their suits against people reselling used but retired licenses, or in some cases, unopened/unused licenses when Microsoft refused to honor their traditional 30-day unconditional money-back guarantee) but that in no way reflects upon Gates.
I think it's mainly closet commies who really hate Gates - because people seem to believe that if they are not successful and don't gain wealth (either due to bad timing, lack of talent, or simple unwillingness to work) then no one else should be able to - and they feel a sense of entitlement, as if everyone else should hand over a house, big-screen television, SUV, etc. for free.
Steve Ballmer? Everything I've heard, read, and seen about him proves he's a fucking nut (especially the "I'm going to f'ing kill Google" bit).
now Re:Yeesh.. by Yartrebo (690383) Alter Relationship on Sunday January 08, @02:22PM (#14422675)
{
Don't forget that Bill Gates has caused immense harm for the world too. The difference between the current situation and having an open operating system and open software being dominant (along with the correspondingly higher penetration of technology in the world and a better quality of technology) is over 1% of worldwide production. Economic rents do nothing but slow down progress and add friction to the system, and the effect is often far larger than the rent extracted.
}
I disagree. If you are old enough to remember the state of personal computing in the '80s, or even late '70s when personal computing became practical, there were NO standards for data exchange (I know arpanet was around but remember, we're talking PERSONAL computing, not military, academic, and Fortune 100). If you wanted to transfer data from one system to another you had to use sneaker-net and PRAY that the data could be read on the other system (I'd say >99% of the time it couldn't), and if that didn't work, you could exchange data via modem, if you were fortunate enough to know they existed, AND have multiple phone lines or analog-capable phone system, but you would have to strip any formatting from the document first, and if it was a spreadsheet, forget about it.
Sure there was CP/M but aside from a very few affordable computers small businesses could afford (most notably the Commodore 128) that wasn't an option, plus the software was expensive unless you had access to a dial-up BBS which had public domain software available for your processor, or belonged to a user group. Even if you had a CP/M computer, many disk formats were incompatible so even if the software and data were exchangable, the physical form factor was often not.
Microsoft introduced standardization, with VERY affordable solutions (until a few years ago OEM Office could be had for $99 bundled with hardware). It was not until OS/2, Smartsuite, and Corel Office were (for all intents and purposes) killed off that Windows and Office each quadrupled in price.
Microsoft has done a lot of good for users by providing some sort of standard, but when competitors were pushed out of the market, they have been abusing their effective monopoly status by raising prices without justification and by treating every customer as a criminal. That doesn't take away what Microsoft did for the industry to get us to the point where we have standards though.
Drop the whole "Microsoft is evil to the core" and "never did any good" bit because when you selectively pick the bad stuff and leave out the good, you're doing exactly the same thing that Microsoft is currently doing with their "Get the Facts" FUD.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50