Gates "knew" what the next big thing was and positioned himself to be a leader in this emerging market. The difference between Gates and the thousands who try the same strategy every year? He was right about which emerging market was going to go next
BS. He did not go into computing because) he could see an expanding future that others were blind to; he did so because he found computers interesting. If he had found an interest in, say, cars he might have entered the motor industry instead (and maybe unemployed by now). In "The Road Ahead" he wrote that at school he was fascinated by the computer they could use : "A few of us at Lakeside wouldn't stop playing with it..... [we] dragged that favorite toy with us into adulthood.". So his career choice did not owe to far-seeing vision.
Watson basically came clean out of that because he gave a lot to a local charity when there was some sort of natural disaster. I think he never served his sentence.
Actually, the only thing that was important was that the chairman of IBM personally KNEW Bill Gates' mother. That was the reason IBM was willing to give the contract to Bill Gates.
Still trying to figure out where this myth originated. Yes, Mary Gates served on the United Way board with IBM's John Opel, but I have yet to ser any documented evidence that they ever discussed the PC let alone made any kind of deal.
You want evidence that Mary Gates and John Opel discussed the PC? That is not the sort of thing that gets written down as evidence, and "making a deal" is not the way it works. This sort of thing gets discussed at coffee or lunch, and it is would not be direct discussion - just background stuff, putting Bill Gates junior into Opel's mind as some kind of boy-god. And there would have been no deal that said like : "I John Opel do solemnly promise to give your schoolboy son a massive contract with IBM if and when he grows up."
The deal was IBM giving Microsoft the contract, as they did.
He [Gates] wasn't the one to introduce deliberate incompatibility. In fact he probably pushed us closer to widespread compatibility through the wide spread acceptance of the M$ OS's.
With M$, regardless of the hardware the OS is the same and the applications can get to a much larger market.
DOS was not written for any hardware except the IBM PC. It was IBM who made their hardware the world standard, by allowing clones to be made, on which, naturally, DOS could run. It was the attraction of making PCs compatible with IBM, the corporate standard, that made other companies like Dell adopt the IBM compatible route, leading to such standardisation as there is, not the attraction of Microsoft.
It is also to IBM's credit. or blunder, that their contract with Microsoft did not stop MS from selling DOS to third parties like Dell. It was not Gates' "genius" (as often claimed) that he then did so, any business man would have done it; like CP/M was also sold to different computer makers around that time.
WIndows NT in its early days was ported to some other, more professional, hardware such as the DEC Alpha, but that had little take-up in a small market and little relevance to your "much larger market", which centred on the IBM compatible architecture.
I don't even think bill has said anything of the kind..... making it appear as if someone like him would advocate the equivalent of a single-stroke reset button... but he's not stupid.
You are probably right that Gates did not say it. I loathe Gates, but he is not so stupid as to allow a casual mis-type to reboot the machine. Ctrl-Alt-Delete rightly requires be a very deliberate action.
Anyway, for Gates to say that a simpler reboot action was really necessary would be him admitting that his software keeps crashing, and he is hardly likely to do that no matter how true it was.
As for the engineering issues, that should be something to celebrate! It's not like these are insurmountable problems.
As an engineer who has managed projects I do not find any problem insurmountable if enough money is spent and it does not go against the laws of physics. But I also look at cost benefit, looking ahead beyond the trial stage (as Hyperloop is currently at); and having done that I see Hyperloop will be a commercial failure. Both practical coats and political problems are being vastly underestimated and papered over with hype.
The Colorado proposal is bullshit. The only city here is Denver. Cheyenne and Pueblo are too small. Hell, Pueblo is only 100,000. Colorado Springs which would be in-between is 4x that, and even THAT is too damn small to make this worth it.
Those places should do fine. The Hyperloop will have a very small carrying capacity. Probably only just enough to carry the millionaires, Musk wannabees and crackpots of those places.
"One points out that these winning teams represent a combined population of almost 150 million people" Why is this relevant, other than to make some kind of impressive-to-stupid-science-journalist statement?
It isn't relevant. There is no way they were representing me as they claim.
If they were, then I am making this post representing a combined population of the almost 7.5 billion people on Earth.
... it just appears this company is a joke largely focused on PR and capital investment than actually focusing on engineering..... systems checks with different teams like they were launching a rocket, etc.
That's the point. Musk is a showman, a self-publicising narcissist who is addicted to other people's admiration. You are meant to go "Wow!!!!"
The difference is that a hyperloop pod is MUCH lighter than a train. The level of engineering required for the track is massively less.
That tube is going to be rather heavy though. But it is not just weight; at the speed the hyperloop goes the curvature (vertical and horizontal) will need to be very slight. High speed rail is alread run at the limit of curvature for its speed without inducing nausea in the passengers, so the faster hyperloop will need to have even less curvature than high speed rail.
So where a railway might go round a hill, the hyperloop will need to tunnel through it. Going into a valley the train can drop quite quickly, but the Hyperloop will require some spectacularly high viaducts until the tube can be brought very gently down to near ground level.
It's an elevated metal pipe, with trains running inside. It's cheaper to build than conventional rail because you don't need to buy the land under it
I don't know where you live (is that the USA?), but this news is about world applications so it depends on the property laws of the particular nation. The UK was mentioned - here you cannot build a structure over someone's property (other than electric wires) without buying or renting it, rightly so because otherwise the property would become unsalable except at a small fraction of its previous price. Where motorway viaducts are built over urban areas for example, the properties underneath are usually compulsorily bought and demolished.
Apart from that, expect some very strong opposition from everyone within view of this eyesore, and beyond, even more than with high speed rail. Musk will need to budget for buying Britain wholesale if he wants to play out his pipe dreams here.
We can already build and maintain long oil pipelines without having this problem, so how is hyperloop different?
People keep comparing Hyperloop with "cheap" oil and gas pipelines. Forget them. You can put fairly abrupt changes of direction into oil pipelines, including sweeping "Z" bends to accomodate expansion and contour hugging dips and humps to cross valleys and hills. With Hyperloop pods doing 1000 kph (or whatever it is) the tubes will need to be almost straiight.
With the distance and dispersion they'd still have to have an helluva big antenna pointing in our direction.... we couldn't pick up a TV broadcast from an alien world. If we point a radio telescope at them and "ping" them they'd get the message with current technology - assuming the antenna is pointing in the right direction, but that's quite different from an accidental pick-up of a signal intended for Earth.
You should tell the SETI project to stop wasting their time then.
Give them a chance. Maybe 40 years ago they received our first strong radio broadcasts signals from 80 years ago, and their replies should get here real soon now. Bear in mind the first thing they heard might have been one of Hitler's speeches.
Probably but it's not impossible that, for whatever reason, life might have a better chance of arising in a single-star system.
Life is highly unlikely to arise on a planet around a double star unless the two stars were very close together. The temperature variations as the planet orbited them would be tremendous, that is if the orbit were stable at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Gates "knew" what the next big thing was and positioned himself to be a leader in this emerging market. The difference between Gates and the thousands who try the same strategy every year? He was right about which emerging market was going to go next
BS. He did not go into computing because) he could see an expanding future that others were blind to; he did so because he found computers interesting. If he had found an interest in, say, cars he might have entered the motor industry instead (and maybe unemployed by now). In "The Road Ahead" he wrote that at school he was fascinated by the computer they could use : "A few of us at Lakeside wouldn't stop playing with it..... [we] dragged that favorite toy with us into adulthood.". So his career choice did not owe to far-seeing vision.
Watson basically came clean out of that because he gave a lot to a local charity when there was some sort of natural disaster. I think he never served his sentence.
That sounds like Gates too.
Still trying to figure out where this myth originated. Yes, Mary Gates served on the United Way board with IBM's John Opel, but I have yet to ser any documented evidence that they ever discussed the PC let alone made any kind of deal.
You want evidence that Mary Gates and John Opel discussed the PC? That is not the sort of thing that gets written down as evidence, and "making a deal" is not the way it works. This sort of thing gets discussed at coffee or lunch, and it is would not be direct discussion - just background stuff, putting Bill Gates junior into Opel's mind as some kind of boy-god. And there would have been no deal that said like : "I John Opel do solemnly promise to give your schoolboy son a massive contract with IBM if and when he grows up."
The deal was IBM giving Microsoft the contract, as they did.
He [Gates] wasn't the one to introduce deliberate incompatibility. In fact he probably pushed us closer to widespread compatibility through the wide spread acceptance of the M$ OS's.
That is a myth.
With M$, regardless of the hardware the OS is the same and the applications can get to a much larger market.
DOS was not written for any hardware except the IBM PC. It was IBM who made their hardware the world standard, by allowing clones to be made, on which, naturally, DOS could run. It was the attraction of making PCs compatible with IBM, the corporate standard, that made other companies like Dell adopt the IBM compatible route, leading to such standardisation as there is, not the attraction of Microsoft.
It is also to IBM's credit. or blunder, that their contract with Microsoft did not stop MS from selling DOS to third parties like Dell. It was not Gates' "genius" (as often claimed) that he then did so, any business man would have done it; like CP/M was also sold to different computer makers around that time.
WIndows NT in its early days was ported to some other, more professional, hardware such as the DEC Alpha, but that had little take-up in a small market and little relevance to your "much larger market", which centred on the IBM compatible architecture.
^mod this up.
I don't even think bill has said anything of the kind. .... making it appear as if someone like him would advocate the equivalent of a single-stroke reset button ... but he's not stupid.
You are probably right that Gates did not say it. I loathe Gates, but he is not so stupid as to allow a casual mis-type to reboot the machine. Ctrl-Alt-Delete rightly requires be a very deliberate action.
Anyway, for Gates to say that a simpler reboot action was really necessary would be him admitting that his software keeps crashing, and he is hardly likely to do that no matter how true it was.
The computers should have had a true reset button instead, but not on the keyboard.
Have you ever looked - they did. Or rather they do - all mine have.
Flying is terrible... use the HyperLoop.
Likely to have the same issues.
Hyperloop....Yeah! Airplans sucks!
Likely to have the same issues.
Somehow I don't think this forum understands just how ironic your position (as well as Piratebays) is.
No I don't.
As for the engineering issues, that should be something to celebrate! It's not like these are insurmountable problems.
As an engineer who has managed projects I do not find any problem insurmountable if enough money is spent and it does not go against the laws of physics. But I also look at cost benefit, looking ahead beyond the trial stage (as Hyperloop is currently at); and having done that I see Hyperloop will be a commercial failure. Both practical coats and political problems are being vastly underestimated and papered over with hype.
The Colorado proposal is bullshit. The only city here is Denver. Cheyenne and Pueblo are too small. Hell, Pueblo is only 100,000. Colorado Springs which would be in-between is 4x that, and even THAT is too damn small to make this worth it.
Those places should do fine. The Hyperloop will have a very small carrying capacity. Probably only just enough to carry the millionaires, Musk wannabees and crackpots of those places.
"One points out that these winning teams represent a combined population of almost 150 million people" Why is this relevant, other than to make some kind of impressive-to-stupid-science-journalist statement?
It isn't relevant. There is no way they were representing me as they claim.
If they were, then I am making this post representing a combined population of the almost 7.5 billion people on Earth.
... it just appears this company is a joke largely focused on PR and capital investment than actually focusing on engineering ..... systems checks with different teams like they were launching a rocket, etc.
That's the point. Musk is a showman, a self-publicising narcissist who is addicted to other people's admiration. You are meant to go "Wow!!!!"
Because it's a very low density form of transit, it's much less appealing to a terrorist than a conventional train too.
But think of the publicity it would get !
The difference is that a hyperloop pod is MUCH lighter than a train. The level of engineering required for the track is massively less.
That tube is going to be rather heavy though. But it is not just weight; at the speed the hyperloop goes the curvature (vertical and horizontal) will need to be very slight. High speed rail is alread run at the limit of curvature for its speed without inducing nausea in the passengers, so the faster hyperloop will need to have even less curvature than high speed rail.
So where a railway might go round a hill, the hyperloop will need to tunnel through it. Going into a valley the train can drop quite quickly, but the Hyperloop will require some spectacularly high viaducts until the tube can be brought very gently down to near ground level.
No, but you can build it across a field or forest without making the land underneath useless.
In the UK you will still need to pay someone for it though.
It's an elevated metal pipe, with trains running inside. It's cheaper to build than conventional rail because you don't need to buy the land under it
I don't know where you live (is that the USA?), but this news is about world applications so it depends on the property laws of the particular nation. The UK was mentioned - here you cannot build a structure over someone's property (other than electric wires) without buying or renting it, rightly so because otherwise the property would become unsalable except at a small fraction of its previous price. Where motorway viaducts are built over urban areas for example, the properties underneath are usually compulsorily bought and demolished.
Apart from that, expect some very strong opposition from everyone within view of this eyesore, and beyond, even more than with high speed rail. Musk will need to budget for buying Britain wholesale if he wants to play out his pipe dreams here.
We can already build and maintain long oil pipelines without having this problem, so how is hyperloop different?
People keep comparing Hyperloop with "cheap" oil and gas pipelines. Forget them. You can put fairly abrupt changes of direction into oil pipelines, including sweeping "Z" bends to accomodate expansion and contour hugging dips and humps to cross valleys and hills. With Hyperloop pods doing 1000 kph (or whatever it is) the tubes will need to be almost straiight.
With the distance and dispersion they'd still have to have an helluva big antenna pointing in our direction .... we couldn't pick up a TV broadcast from an alien world. If we point a radio telescope at them and "ping" them they'd get the message with current technology - assuming the antenna is pointing in the right direction, but that's quite different from an accidental pick-up of a signal intended for Earth.
You should tell the SETI project to stop wasting their time then.
Considering that we detect planets that transit the parent star
Not so. Exoplanets can also be detected by slight wobbling of the star they orbit.
"First of all, the latter is in a foreign language and therefore won't be immediately connected with Earth."
I certainly hope you wrote that tongue in cheek.
English was spoken by the aliens in all the sci-fi films I have ever seen.
How often do you try to contact the ants that live in your neighbor's back yard?
I never even try to contact the fucking neighbour, let alone his ants.
I try to contact the ants in my back yard once a month through a visit from Clark pest control services
A Klingon pest control officer is on his way here now.
So why haven't these other worlds contacted us?
Give them a chance. Maybe 40 years ago they received our first strong radio broadcasts signals from 80 years ago, and their replies should get here real soon now. Bear in mind the first thing they heard might have been one of Hitler's speeches.
Probably but it's not impossible that, for whatever reason, life might have a better chance of arising in a single-star system.
Life is highly unlikely to arise on a planet around a double star unless the two stars were very close together. The temperature variations as the planet orbited them would be tremendous, that is if the orbit were stable at all.