A Real Bill Gates Rant

lou ibmix XI submitted an email written by Bill Gates a few years ago and turned over to the feds as part of the government's antitrust case. Great quotes like 'Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?' and 'The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind.' We like to think of him as an abstract, but I think this is interesting stuff. Also, this might seem familiar. Oops.

Comments

Massive Dupe

[Thelasko]

http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/06/26/026237.shtml

Re:Massive Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

To install what ? Since we are talking about desktop, name atleast one decent desktop app thats much better (or atleast equivalent) than its windows counterpart. I am for opensource and all but give windows some credit.

Re:Massive Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Firstly, "m" and "c" should be lower-cased in the famous Special Relativity equation.

Secondly, "m" is the inertial mass, which follows from a Lorentz transformation. It is not the rest mass, which is intrinsic to the object in question. "Rest mass" in Special Relativity is the intrinsic energy of an object in an inertial frame in which it is at rest with respect to a stationary observer at infinity, in a slice of spacetime with a set of coordinates that makes it locally flat (Minkowski spacetime).

A photon in the Standard Model must have zero rest mass. Experiment has demonstrated that the rest mass of a photon is actually << 1e-16 eV/c^2 (or much less than 1e-22 the rest mass of an electron). Cosmological observation puts stronger constraints on the rest mass of a photon, although those have not yet been demonstrated experimentally.

Photons have inertial mass when not at rest. Usually this is considered in terms of linear momentum (p) in the Special Relativity equation E=cp. However since this is equivalent to E=mc^2, there is an equivalence between inertial mass and momentum. This equivalence does not mean that they are the same thing, merely that an increase in linear momentum and in inertial mass gives an object more inertial energy, all relative to an observer.

Photons transfer energy from one object (or system thereof) to another; following a strict conservation law in nonexpanding/noncontracting Minkowski spacetimes. Usually this is considered in terms of a conservation of momentum, and is treated by statistical thermodynamics/statistical mechanics. An energetic system radiates away its movement in photons; photons bombarding a less energetic system heats that system up; in a closed system this leads to thermalization (equilibrium).

Beause of the equivalence of mass, linear momentum and energy, one can also say that photons carry inertial mass away from an energetic system to a less energetic one, but this sort of counter-intuitive use of equivalence is both unnecessary and liable to confuse people. This is mainly because inertial mass is not the same as intrinsic mass (aka rest mass).

Inertial mass comes from movement relative to an observer / measurer. Intrinsic mass is what is observed / measured when the observer / measurer is co-moving with the object under study (i.e., they are at rest with respect to one another). Lorentz transformations are used to determine rest mass when an observer is not co-moving with the object under study. The famous Special Relativity equivalence equations must be satisfied if the Lorentz transformations are correct.

Photon masslessness does not arise from Special or General Relativity[*]. It derives from the U(1) symmetry group in the Standard Model. The Standard Model is widely believed to be incomplete (thus the experiments at the LHC) but there are very, very few extensions to the Standard Model that predict a photon with a nonzero rest mass.

[*] In GR, photons are considered massless because they offer zero resistance to acceleration. They go from stationary (with repsect to an observer) to the relativistic speed limit (c) in free space and flat spacetime, given any acceleration at all (even exceptionally tiny ones). Giving a photon a small nonzero mass would mean giving a photon a small nonzero resistance to acceleration, which has enormous consequences for cosmology, but not on GR grounds per se. There would be Special Relativity consequences to a photon with nonzero resistance to acceleration, namely fringing or other evidence of directionality of travel when measuring the speed of light, but these were strongly precluded by Michaelson-Morley and other interferometry experiments, as well as microscale redshifting experiments (GPS for example) and the dipole anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

So, your parent should have said "rest mass" or "intrinsic mass" to be clear. However, I think requiring the qualifier on "mass" in a context that is

its easy

[diegocgteleline.es]

In some of those published emails, you can see Bill Gates:

-Asking to add Windows-specific quirks to the ACPI "standard", just to make Linux more dificult. "It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work [...] Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me. Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open. Or maybe we could patent something related to this

-Asking their teams to add IE-specific crap in the HTML code generated by Office, just to make harder for other browsers to display things: One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered well by others people browser is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPIETARY IE capabilities" (emphasis by gates, not mine)

-Lobbying Intel to get them to do all their design work in Windows desktops, not in Linux.

-A lot of other "fun" stuff.

And you wonder why people hates Gates? ;)

Re:even more ironic, he praises add/remove

[Ancient_Hacker]

It has nothing to do with a fragmented Registry. My Registry is not fragmented and the time goes from two hours to 20 seconds when I unmount the disk with all the files.

And the installed programs list in the registry is only 15 entries, that should not take two hours to load.

It's just poor design. You should never have to scan the universe when you already have the info in at least two places, the Registry and the installer directory. And of course it's a bad idea to have the info in two places.

Re:even more ironic, he praises add/remove

[Spatial]

Yup, it's a piece of shit. I use this Nirsoft tool instead, which shows more information and allows you to remove and change the entries.

Re:I don't get it

[spacefiddle]

Yes.

I worked for a couple places that were funded by M$ or accepted donations. I suggested a FOSS solution for something, and was told quite explicitly, "We can't, its in the contract."

Now, it's certainly possible the man was lying to me, or mistaken, or if you want to get cute, there was no actual legal obligation to eschew Open Source but M$ reps *implied* that there was, and the folks in charge assumed, were cowed, or simply too slow of mind or weak of will to look at it closer, resulting in this gawdawful run-on sentence i can't seem to fix.

But why wouldn't they add an exclusivity clause to such agreements, and why wouldn't most FOSS-ignorant public school and library administrators agree to it, thinking "who needs crappy free weird software written by teenage hackers, when i have professional polished shiny software for free?" They have never heard the drug-pusher analogy, i suppose, which is weird considering they're in at-risk public schools. Ahem.

Now, you asked for proof. I obviously cannot (and would not) provide a copy of any documentation from former employers, but you DID ask. I am not posting anonymously. Therefore, if you discount my account, as it were, then *you* are now the conspiracy theorist.