Gate's bought the DOS operating system and sold IBM a License. He didn't sell them the damn code.
No, he bought QDOS, renamed it to MS-DOS, and licensed it to IBM as IBM PC-DOS.
Er... I don't follow you. QDOS was DOS, the first version of DOS. So Gates did buy DOS.
That is not to say that MS did not greatly modify and improve it, even by the time it was sold with the first IBM PC as PC DOS.
The "QD" stood for "Quick and dirty". IT companies still had a sense of humour then. Grim Gates helped to change that though. The name QDOS was succeded by prefix DOS where the "D" now stood for "Disk" and prefix could be MS, PC and even DR or Caldera.
Indeed. This is the first time I ever heard a suggestion that it was stolen from CP/M.
Gates gave IBM the impression that he had an OS of his own making to hand, so IBM gave him the contact to supply it for their new PC. In fact Gates had no such OS, but then bought QDOS from Seatle Computing - for peanuts compared with what he got from IBM - and ported it to the IBM PC. The deals were legal but shady (setting the pattern for future MS behavour) and Seatle successfully sued MS afterwards.
It was not an emotional thing, and there was no brand loyalty.
Was it really easier to switch to Mepis then set up a repository and "sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment"? You sure there wasn't a bit of emotion there, when you switched? But even if so, that isn't everyone. For many people there was brand loyalty to Ubuntu and Gnome and it was quite emotional. Just reads the threads here.
You seem to have a wide definition of "emotion". To me, an emotional decision is a proactive one taken with no rational basis. Thus most people stick with Windows because of inertia, not emotion, although others do love Windows emotionally; such as our IT department at work (or was it bribery?).
I take it you meant "Was it really easier to switch to Mepis THAN.. sudo apt get- ?...". Yes it was. I needed to update my laptop Ubuntu installation anyway (was v8.04) and from past experience I prefer a clean installation. I originally installed Ubuntu with Gnome when this laptop was new after failing to get the wireless to work with a different (KDE) distro, and had heard that it was easy with Ubuntu; it was, and I could not be bothered to fiddle with it any more. I have always prefered KDE though and meanwhile had installed Mepis on my desktop. I prefer a distro which defaults to my preferred desktop (like Mepis to KDE) because I think (not unreasonably) that it will get more TLC. So I have now installed Mepis on the laptop to give me uniformity between it and my desktop.
The wireless link was easy to set up in Mepis BTW.
You are brave here to confess to being a totally committed Apple fanboi. I don't mean that disrespectfully, the word is right in this context. I can understand the psychology as I have felt such a thing myself, although not in the PC context. Much less expensive, in my case more like hearing that the next Bernard Cornwell book is coming out.
However it is not comparable with "the debate" over loyalty arising over Unity or Gnome 3. Those are, as you say, debates. There does not seem much debate among Apple fans when each new product comes out - they just love it. In the case of Unity, I was a Ubuntu user and expected routine future updated versions without any particualr excitement, then was simply annoyed when Unity came along as I want a more traditional desktop. So I ditched Ubuntu and I am on Mepis right now. It was not an emotional thing, and there was no brand loyalty.
I know Steve Jobs was the God of Apple, and even as an outsider I cannot seem to keep his mugshot off my screen; but the name of the Ubuntu guy slips my mind just now, as does that of the Mepis leader.
So there is no comparison with Apple fanaticism. That is unique. Social historians of the 25th century will refer to it like we refer to the medieval fanaticism over holy relics.
I wish you good luck with the project, but I suggest that on the way you have a good look at the Mepis distro. It is not widely used, and I don't know why, and you might learn some stuff from its implementation.
Mepis is based on Debian Stable, uses their packages. It is easy to install, hence it is sometimes said to be for "beginners"; that put me off using it until recently, until I discovered that it is not dumbed down in any way, just straightforward to install. It defaults to KDE - a "traditional" desktop, something lots of people are looking for now that Ubuntu has gone off the rails.
"Soon Hwang, a nuclear scientist at Seoul National University, says that a thorough government investigation found that the pressure vessel is safe. However, he adds that a more democratic process is needed to get a consensus on the reactor from local residents."
A consensus on the reactor from local residents? That would never happen.
Whether foreigners buying up businesses is good or bad was not my point. My point is that it is not what Mrs Thatcher or her supporters thought would happen. I distinctly remember it being claimed that Britain would become a "shareholding democracy". That was a catchphrase at the time, like it was a cure for all evil. Moreover, Mrs T was known to be very nationalistic herself and certainly did not intend the UK to become owned by foreigners.
I own up, I have some shares myself - I must look at how they are doing, I haven't for months. But the idea of everyone, or even a significant portion, of the population taking an interest in shareholding (even if the spend-all-you-have then spend-on-credit mania had not followed later) was always fantasy. I have only ever known two guys take shareholding seriously (like enough to vote at AGMs and maybe influence the firm's direction) and they spent practically their whole time on it, poring over the FT, drawing graphs, phoning their broker - it was a full-time hobby that made them maybe an extra 2 grand a year at the most.
But most people just would not be bothered with this. There are too many other things going on in their lives and they have no money to spare anyway. Ironically, Mrs T herself would have been the LAST person to have the time or inclination to get into shareholding seriously. Dennis perhaps.
When I went to university, I thought I might find people mostly with similar opinions (politics etc) to myself, being of the same IQ group. Up until then I had always thought most people around me had plainly idiotic opinions and I had put it down to their being a bit low on brainpower. In fact I found the others at uni (who we can assume were all of significantly higher IQ than average) had the same range of idiotic opinions (IMHO) as people generally.
Surveys have shown that the distribution of political, ethical and religious opinions tends to be the same whatever the IQ group. I find this strange.
Take the infamous Mrs Thatcher. I can recognise that she was a very intelligent woman but at the same time stupid in many things. Like she thought that by privatising industries and selling the shares to the public (cheap), the British people would become shareholders in large numbers - a "shareholding democracy" - and we would all then clamour for more efficiency in those industries as shareholders. What happened is that we bought those shares and then promptly sold them again (mostly to foreign enterprises as it turned out - a large part of UK rail freight is now owned by the *nationalised* German Railways!). The point is that most people with any sense could have told her that would happen - why could someone so intelligent not see it herself? Just one example of my point.
Re:Windows 8 seems like a solid product
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It is downvoted because his post is almost certainly a plant by the/. management to wind us up and get us going. First post for a longish piece of writing, with good grammar and spelling, by someone with only three posts ever to his account? I don't believe it.
Not if the manual is as crappy as some that I have seen. And when you buy a PC from the high street, there is no guarantee that you will be forwarded the motherboard manual.
He is not "begging user to turn off secure boot", because, and this is the point, we will not be able to, the way things are going.
As for leaving me "vulnerable to a root kit", I will deal with that my own way, not Microsoft's way, thanks very much. Microsoft's way would be like leaving your house security in the hands of crooks.
He wasn't asking how to burn calories, he was asking for an active job. Does it not occur to you that some people just do not like being stuck inside an office (especially a modern over-crowded one with no privacy) all the working day?
I have a colleague that refuses to schedule a meeting between 11a-noon and he runs a 10k and showers during that time.
Prostitution is legal in the UK, but there are still plenty of hackers.
At 50-100 GBP a shot, most younger hackers could not afford it even if they could pluck up the nerve. I gather that most prostitutes customers are well-off married middle-aged men. In fact many of them (the serious ones, not the teasers in night clubs) refuse to see guys under 25 or 30. Unlike so called "respectable" girls, prostitutes (at least the better class ones) actually value discretion, quietness, calmness, and stability in men.
The problem of younger guys of the more geeky type not finding girlfriends and being pushed to the fringe of society not will not go away until younger women stop chasing after the same few guys - you know, the ones who are good at acting like rock-stars and offer non-stop empty-headed entertainment, entertainment and entertainment - and start looking around them more. Individually this tends to happen to girls around their mid-20's, but there needs to be a societal change, with the media ceasing to worship celebs. Some hope.
Why was parent modded Funny anyway? I thought this was a discussion of the potential for sex to change habits. I find it strange that some people crease up with laughter when sex is mentioned - do they find it embarassing and this is their escape route?
I think your mistake is thinking that all people of the appropriate sex are alike. If you try to "figure out" women or men as a group, you'll just drive yourself crazy.
Girls all acted towards me as in an identical group when I was in my teens and early 20's. They all told me to fuck off. I am not trying to be funny, it;'s true. OK the more polite ones just walked away.
I think there is a strong element of young people, especially girls, trying to act like each other. Some decide that it is not done to date a boy who cannot reel off the latest top 20 songs, or does not speak with a certain jargon, so none do it.
My understanding is that in China, there are roughly 160 million "missing" girls right now, relative to the expected male/female distribution. We'd better find something for those 160 million boys to do, and soon, or they're going to become a huge problem for their own country, their own government, and possibly the rest of the world.
Accoding to a Chinese friend of mine, China has always been like that (and some other countries right back to ancient Sparta). While they may use ultrasonic scans and abortion these days, in the old days they simply strangled them at birth. I gather young men in China shag each other a lot - that is why there are so many ladyboys in the East.
But things are even worse than you say. Vast numbers of what is left of their girls, and the best looking ones at that, are exported to the West as wives or whores. Thai brides are an industry. I live in a country town in a very un-cosmopolitan English shire county, yet I see ugly middle aged English guys going shopping with pretty young Oriental wives. There are about the only non-white you see around here. In the local paper (or the Web) of my nearest big city, the ads for escorts show nearly half them are for oriental girls.
I think if were a young Oriental man I think I'd go crazy, but they seem to put up with it.
Being nitpicky here: The UN says we don't need any more families. The globe is already about 6 billion too many.
That would work only if people only had children within families. But without families (a situation that is already widespread in the UK) there are some guys who will go around getting any number of single girls pregnant and then clearing off to find another. I am sure no-one on/. is in that league BTW. Sometimes those girls then settle temporarily with a guy and they want more children again. Then another guy again.
Men and women forming stable families puts a brake on that happening.
The reason things have become so unstable is that people seem to have become totally f#@ked up about what to expect from life and what to look for.
Im not seeing why, if youre not having kids, or intending it to be long term, or taking a christian perspective, youre getting married.
It is a social announcement.
It is saying that "We two people are a couple, so don't come between us; if you are inviting one of us to something invite the other one too; expect us to be doing things and going places together; the other one is our first priority; and if we stay somewhere we will be in the same room as eachother." It saves a lot of embarrasment, confusion and even fisticuffs.
A guy I knew, living with but not married to his girlfriend, was telling me that while he was getting drinks at a bar another guy started chatting up his GF. It nearly led to a fight as this guy claimed priority. I pointed out to him that one of the functions of a wedding ring is to avoid such misunderstandings, something that had never occurred to him. It would also have helped if he could have told the guy that she was his wife. She wore a ring after that (and they later married). Yes, I know the ring can be a lie, and some guys would not be deterred by it anyway, but it helps.
It may not be relevant to much nowadays, seeing as Windows 95, Wordperfect, etc.
are all obsolete irrelevant things
Errr, that's a strange way of looking at it. I am with you most of the way, but the very reason that WordPerfect is now an "obsolete irrelevant thing" is that it was ousted by Microsoft, and their dirty tricks (rather than actual merit), which is what this case is about, were at least partly responsible for that. Otherwise WordPerfect might still be in general use today. Therefore the events of 15[?] years ago very much affect what we do today.
Actually, WordPerfect is relevant to me, and where I work we still have many documents, such as technical specifications of plant, that were written in WordPerfect. At home I once wrote a lot of stuff (eg family history) in WordPerfect, and one day I would like to get this back into some other format (ASCII would be safest I now think). I am actually keeping an old PC with Windows 3.1 and Wordperfect for when I get round to the task. I could do without that chore and will never forgive Gates and MS for lumbering me with crap like this by their shady business practices.
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No, he bought QDOS, renamed it to MS-DOS, and licensed it to IBM as IBM PC-DOS.
Er ... I don't follow you. QDOS was DOS, the first version of DOS. So Gates did buy DOS.
That is not to say that MS did not greatly modify and improve it, even by the time it was sold with the first IBM PC as PC DOS.
The "QD" stood for "Quick and dirty". IT companies still had a sense of humour then. Grim Gates helped to change that though. The name QDOS was succeded by prefix DOS where the "D" now stood for "Disk" and prefix could be MS, PC and even DR or Caldera.
Indeed. This is the first time I ever heard a suggestion that it was stolen from CP/M.
Gates gave IBM the impression that he had an OS of his own making to hand, so IBM gave him the contact to supply it for their new PC. In fact Gates had no such OS, but then bought QDOS from Seatle Computing - for peanuts compared with what he got from IBM - and ported it to the IBM PC. The deals were legal but shady (setting the pattern for future MS behavour) and Seatle successfully sued MS afterwards.
Gates mislead both IBM and Seatle Computing.
It was not an emotional thing, and there was no brand loyalty.
Was it really easier to switch to Mepis then set up a repository and "sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment"? You sure there wasn't a bit of emotion there, when you switched? But even if so, that isn't everyone. For many people there was brand loyalty to Ubuntu and Gnome and it was quite emotional. Just reads the threads here.
You seem to have a wide definition of "emotion". To me, an emotional decision is a proactive one taken with no rational basis. Thus most people stick with Windows because of inertia, not emotion, although others do love Windows emotionally; such as our IT department at work (or was it bribery?).
.. sudo apt get- ?...". Yes it was. I needed to update my laptop Ubuntu installation anyway (was v8.04) and from past experience I prefer a clean installation. I originally installed Ubuntu with Gnome when this laptop was new after failing to get the wireless to work with a different (KDE) distro, and had heard that it was easy with Ubuntu; it was, and I could not be bothered to fiddle with it any more. I have always prefered KDE though and meanwhile had installed Mepis on my desktop. I prefer a distro which defaults to my preferred desktop (like Mepis to KDE) because I think (not unreasonably) that it will get more TLC. So I have now installed Mepis on the laptop to give me uniformity between it and my desktop.
I take it you meant "Was it really easier to switch to Mepis THAN
The wireless link was easy to set up in Mepis BTW.
Was there much emotion in there?
I can leave the command line behind at last.
You are brave here to confess to being a totally committed Apple fanboi. I don't mean that disrespectfully, the word is right in this context. I can understand the psychology as I have felt such a thing myself, although not in the PC context. Much less expensive, in my case more like hearing that the next Bernard Cornwell book is coming out.
However it is not comparable with "the debate" over loyalty arising over Unity or Gnome 3. Those are, as you say, debates. There does not seem much debate among Apple fans when each new product comes out - they just love it. In the case of Unity, I was a Ubuntu user and expected routine future updated versions without any particualr excitement, then was simply annoyed when Unity came along as I want a more traditional desktop. So I ditched Ubuntu and I am on Mepis right now. It was not an emotional thing, and there was no brand loyalty.
I know Steve Jobs was the God of Apple, and even as an outsider I cannot seem to keep his mugshot off my screen; but the name of the Ubuntu guy slips my mind just now, as does that of the Mepis leader.
So there is no comparison with Apple fanaticism. That is unique. Social historians of the 25th century will refer to it like we refer to the medieval fanaticism over holy relics.
Because you need the capital to pay for the advertising before you get the revenue. Not every company has that capital.
I believe he means that the products are built for the type of people who swallow advertising.
I wish you good luck with the project, but I suggest that on the way you have a good look at the Mepis distro. It is not widely used, and I don't know why, and you might learn some stuff from its implementation.
Mepis is based on Debian Stable, uses their packages. It is easy to install, hence it is sometimes said to be for "beginners"; that put me off using it until recently, until I discovered that it is not dumbed down in any way, just straightforward to install. It defaults to KDE - a "traditional" desktop, something lots of people are looking for now that Ubuntu has gone off the rails.
Aw, come on, sense of humour needed, AC at 14:59 was linking to a joke. After following the link I need a new keyboard.
And same goes for whoever modded him as Troll.
An ASCII Art logo? So it is a CLI distro?!
Gives the wrong impression right at the start.
"Soon Hwang, a nuclear scientist at Seoul National University, says that a thorough government investigation found that the pressure vessel is safe. However, he adds that a more democratic process is needed to get a consensus on the reactor from local residents."
A consensus on the reactor from local residents? That would never happen.
Whether foreigners buying up businesses is good or bad was not my point. My point is that it is not what Mrs Thatcher or her supporters thought would happen. I distinctly remember it being claimed that Britain would become a "shareholding democracy". That was a catchphrase at the time, like it was a cure for all evil. Moreover, Mrs T was known to be very nationalistic herself and certainly did not intend the UK to become owned by foreigners.
I own up, I have some shares myself - I must look at how they are doing, I haven't for months. But the idea of everyone, or even a significant portion, of the population taking an interest in shareholding (even if the spend-all-you-have then spend-on-credit mania had not followed later) was always fantasy. I have only ever known two guys take shareholding seriously (like enough to vote at AGMs and maybe influence the firm's direction) and they spent practically their whole time on it, poring over the FT, drawing graphs, phoning their broker - it was a full-time hobby that made them maybe an extra 2 grand a year at the most.
But most people just would not be bothered with this. There are too many other things going on in their lives and they have no money to spare anyway. Ironically, Mrs T herself would have been the LAST person to have the time or inclination to get into shareholding seriously. Dennis perhaps.
When I went to university, I thought I might find people mostly with similar opinions (politics etc) to myself, being of the same IQ group. Up until then I had always thought most people around me had plainly idiotic opinions and I had put it down to their being a bit low on brainpower. In fact I found the others at uni (who we can assume were all of significantly higher IQ than average) had the same range of idiotic opinions (IMHO) as people generally.
Surveys have shown that the distribution of political, ethical and religious opinions tends to be the same whatever the IQ group. I find this strange.
Take the infamous Mrs Thatcher. I can recognise that she was a very intelligent woman but at the same time stupid in many things. Like she thought that by privatising industries and selling the shares to the public (cheap), the British people would become shareholders in large numbers - a "shareholding democracy" - and we would all then clamour for more efficiency in those industries as shareholders. What happened is that we bought those shares and then promptly sold them again (mostly to foreign enterprises as it turned out - a large part of UK rail freight is now owned by the *nationalised* German Railways!). The point is that most people with any sense could have told her that would happen - why could someone so intelligent not see it herself? Just one example of my point.
It is downvoted because his post is almost certainly a plant by the /. management to wind us up and get us going. First post for a longish piece of writing, with good grammar and spelling, by someone with only three posts ever to his account? I don't believe it.
The BIOS key comes printed in the manual.
Not if the manual is as crappy as some that I have seen. And when you buy a PC from the high street, there is no guarantee that you will be forwarded the motherboard manual.
He is not "begging user to turn off secure boot", because, and this is the point, we will not be able to, the way things are going.
As for leaving me "vulnerable to a root kit", I will deal with that my own way, not Microsoft's way, thanks very much. Microsoft's way would be like leaving your house security in the hands of crooks.
I have a colleague that refuses to schedule a meeting between 11a-noon and he runs a 10k and showers during that time.
He has a very tolerant boss then.
It was probably because Killer Queen was taken by Freddie Mercury and the boys back in 1974 ;-)
.... so who took the previous two hundred and forty six killerkingnnn@yahoo.com addresses?
Prostitution is legal in the UK, but there are still plenty of hackers.
At 50-100 GBP a shot, most younger hackers could not afford it even if they could pluck up the nerve. I gather that most prostitutes customers are well-off married middle-aged men. In fact many of them (the serious ones, not the teasers in night clubs) refuse to see guys under 25 or 30. Unlike so called "respectable" girls, prostitutes (at least the better class ones) actually value discretion, quietness, calmness, and stability in men.
The problem of younger guys of the more geeky type not finding girlfriends and being pushed to the fringe of society not will not go away until younger women stop chasing after the same few guys - you know, the ones who are good at acting like rock-stars and offer non-stop empty-headed entertainment, entertainment and entertainment - and start looking around them more. Individually this tends to happen to girls around their mid-20's, but there needs to be a societal change, with the media ceasing to worship celebs. Some hope.
Why was parent modded Funny anyway? I thought this was a discussion of the potential for sex to change habits. I find it strange that some people crease up with laughter when sex is mentioned - do they find it embarassing and this is their escape route?
I think your mistake is thinking that all people of the appropriate sex are alike. If you try to "figure out" women or men as a group, you'll just drive yourself crazy.
Girls all acted towards me as in an identical group when I was in my teens and early 20's. They all told me to fuck off. I am not trying to be funny, it;'s true. OK the more polite ones just walked away.
I think there is a strong element of young people, especially girls, trying to act like each other. Some decide that it is not done to date a boy who cannot reel off the latest top 20 songs, or does not speak with a certain jargon, so none do it.
Prostitution is negatively correlated with rape. Heroin maintenance programs reduce the damage caused by drug seeking addicts.
People have a built-in urge for sex. They do not have a built-in urge for drugs
My understanding is that in China, there are roughly 160 million "missing" girls right now, relative to the expected male/female distribution. We'd better find something for those 160 million boys to do, and soon, or they're going to become a huge problem for their own country, their own government, and possibly the rest of the world.
Accoding to a Chinese friend of mine, China has always been like that (and some other countries right back to ancient Sparta). While they may use ultrasonic scans and abortion these days, in the old days they simply strangled them at birth. I gather young men in China shag each other a lot - that is why there are so many ladyboys in the East.
But things are even worse than you say. Vast numbers of what is left of their girls, and the best looking ones at that, are exported to the West as wives or whores. Thai brides are an industry. I live in a country town in a very un-cosmopolitan English shire county, yet I see ugly middle aged English guys going shopping with pretty young Oriental wives. There are about the only non-white you see around here. In the local paper (or the Web) of my nearest big city, the ads for escorts show nearly half them are for oriental girls.
I think if were a young Oriental man I think I'd go crazy, but they seem to put up with it.
Being nitpicky here: The UN says we don't need any more families. The globe is already about 6 billion too many.
That would work only if people only had children within families. But without families (a situation that is already widespread in the UK) there are some guys who will go around getting any number of single girls pregnant and then clearing off to find another. I am sure no-one on /. is in that league BTW. Sometimes those girls then settle temporarily with a guy and they want more children again. Then another guy again.
Men and women forming stable families puts a brake on that happening.
The reason things have become so unstable is that people seem to have become totally f#@ked up about what to expect from life and what to look for.
Im not seeing why, if youre not having kids, or intending it to be long term, or taking a christian perspective, youre getting married.
It is a social announcement.
It is saying that "We two people are a couple, so don't come between us; if you are inviting one of us to something invite the other one too; expect us to be doing things and going places together; the other one is our first priority; and if we stay somewhere we will be in the same room as eachother." It saves a lot of embarrasment, confusion and even fisticuffs.
A guy I knew, living with but not married to his girlfriend, was telling me that while he was getting drinks at a bar another guy started chatting up his GF. It nearly led to a fight as this guy claimed priority. I pointed out to him that one of the functions of a wedding ring is to avoid such misunderstandings, something that had never occurred to him. It would also have helped if he could have told the guy that she was his wife. She wore a ring after that (and they later married). Yes, I know the ring can be a lie, and some guys would not be deterred by it anyway, but it helps.
It may not be relevant to much nowadays, seeing as Windows 95, Wordperfect, etc. are all obsolete irrelevant things
Errr, that's a strange way of looking at it. I am with you most of the way, but the very reason that WordPerfect is now an "obsolete irrelevant thing" is that it was ousted by Microsoft, and their dirty tricks (rather than actual merit), which is what this case is about, were at least partly responsible for that. Otherwise WordPerfect might still be in general use today. Therefore the events of 15[?] years ago very much affect what we do today.
Actually, WordPerfect is relevant to me, and where I work we still have many documents, such as technical specifications of plant, that were written in WordPerfect. At home I once wrote a lot of stuff (eg family history) in WordPerfect, and one day I would like to get this back into some other format (ASCII would be safest I now think). I am actually keeping an old PC with Windows 3.1 and Wordperfect for when I get round to the task. I could do without that chore and will never forgive Gates and MS for lumbering me with crap like this by their shady business practices.