I don't think you have to be very farsighted to see that open source will dominate at some time in the near future. Gates may very well know this. But you do have a good point about this not being mentioned in the ZD review - it probably doesn't contain anything so substantial.
What about it makes it "obviously" a joke? It would fit in line with the Halloween document which wasn't a joke. Are you saying this because you've actually read the book?
There are some reviews up at Amazon.com now and while I suspect most of them were written without reading the book, there was one legitimate looking one that said something which shocked me:
Most remarkable of all are the sections related directly to the earlier book and his revised thinking on the blueprint for the future which it contained. The reader meeting "The Road Ahead" when it was first released would hardly have guessed that Mr. Gates's next work would contain such direct acknowledgements that his corporation will not be a competitor for very much longer in the operating systems market, the area which has traditionally brought so much of its income. The frank discussions about the technical superiority of Open Source software development methods and Microsoft's planned funding of the Linux project and the Free Software Foundation will have historians talking amongst themselves for centuries to come.
Wow. If anybody out there has actually read the book, could you comment on how accurate this is? I really don't want to have to buy this book, but I'm dying to know exactly what Gates said that prompted these comments. It sounds like he's seen the light, but then again it also sounded like that when Microsoft desperately needed to license Java to give their fledgling IE a shot in hell at becoming widely used, so I'm definitely not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I would imagine that most of the stupid patents are filed by big companies to keep some jerk from gaining a broad patent and suing everybody under the sun to get a quick buck.
Huh? Wouldn't prior art be quicker, easier, and cheaper to create than a frivolous patent and provide just as much protection? I really doubt that these companies have any good intentions.
Wouldn't this be a lot more efficeint if they used something that tracked the users' eyes rather than brainwaves? I would assume that these patients have at least some control over their eyes since they're probably looking at a computer screen at some point in this. So why not work out a binary code where a wink in one eye is 0 and the other eye is 1? Or if they can't control blinking (?) looking to the left is a 0 and looking to the right is a 1. OK, so I guess the brainwave thing would be useful if they were paralyzed and blind, but tracking the eyes sounds like it could be a lot quicker than 1 sentence in 30 minutes.
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I don't think you have to be very farsighted to see that open source will dominate at some time in the near future. Gates may very well know this. But you do have a good point about this not being mentioned in the ZD review - it probably doesn't contain anything so substantial.
What about it makes it "obviously" a joke? It would fit in line with the Halloween document which wasn't a joke. Are you saying this because you've actually read the book?
Wow. If anybody out there has actually read the book, could you comment on how accurate this is? I really don't want to have to buy this book, but I'm dying to know exactly what Gates said that prompted these comments. It sounds like he's seen the light, but then again it also sounded like that when Microsoft desperately needed to license Java to give their fledgling IE a shot in hell at becoming widely used, so I'm definitely not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
How about Wing Is Not Gnu
Anybody know what the music from that clip is from (or if it was created just for the clip)? Yeah, the graphics were pretty awesome too.
Shouldn't that be "Jesse Berst Sucks/This Poll Sucks/ZDNet Sucks."
The article says ./ runs on msql, but doesn't it actually run on MySQL? Say, there's an idea for another flame war (MySQL vs msql vs etc...).
Huh? Wouldn't prior art be quicker, easier, and cheaper to create than a frivolous patent and provide just as much protection? I really doubt that these companies have any good intentions.
Wouldn't this be a lot more efficeint if they used something that tracked the users' eyes rather than brainwaves? I would assume that these patients have at least some control over their eyes since they're probably looking at a computer screen at some point in this. So why not work out a binary code where a wink in one eye is 0 and the other eye is 1? Or if they can't control blinking (?) looking to the left is a 0 and looking to the right is a 1. OK, so I guess the brainwave thing would be useful if they were paralyzed and blind, but tracking the eyes sounds like it could be a lot quicker than 1 sentence in 30 minutes.