I was informed that Bill Gates was not a salaried employee of Microsoft...
He has a foundation receives benefits on his behalf from Microsoft in the form of non-expensed stock options and then Bill Gates lives at the foundations expense.
End result, Bill Gates does not receive very little taxable salary (probably less than you or I receive in a month) and therefore pays a minuscule tax but due to the foundation, is able to live quite comfortably.
This would explain the eyewitness observations that Bill Gates counts his pennies carefully when making cash purchases for groceries - he does not personally have much cash.
His proclamation that his children will not receive a large inheritance would also be a factual statement as the foundation is its own entity and does not 'belong' to him.
Of course, this is all heresay and I have no hard evidence to back any of it up.
Interesting article but... It omits all mention of the contributions from outside of the USA.
In particular, there is no mention at all of the development of the ARM processor, or even the Japanese microprocessors. NEC made higher-performance pin-compatible clones of the 8088/8086, the V20/30 chips... a early way of improving performance of early PCs was to remove the Intel chip and slot in a NEC.
But it is the lack of mention for the ARM I think is particularly alarming, given that the ARM is perhaps the most successful micro after the Z80.
For the last century, the title of "most important place in the world" has belonged to the United States, but that role seems likely to shift in this century to China.
Umm.... Concidering that more than half of all significant inventions that affect our daily lives came from the British during the last century, I think that statement may be misleading.
Maybe more accurate to say that the United States was the most important place in the world in the last decade.
Here in the UK, IIRC, a senior detective of one of the police forces wrote and had published a book which described how to commit a perfect crime. Detailed in the book was what the detective decided was the "Golden Rules"
1. Do it once, 2. Do it big, 3. Don't get greedy, never forget rule 1.
A few years later, he was caught for fraud and was jailed... How did he get caught? He forgot rule 1.
(I should google and find the specific case and post the link here... but I am too lazy right now)
I too would love to see life breathed back into the WorkPlace Shell.... IMO the best desktop environment to grace any computing platform I have used.
But for IBM to opensource WPS, they would need to opensource SOM which the WPS heavily relied upon... Particularly the DSOM aspect which allowed weird/wonderful stuff like true distributed objects... where you can subclass a class which the implementation is on a different machine to the machine where your implementation resides. And it just works! You can even replace class implementations within the object heirachy - at run time.
IBM's SOM extensions to CORBA never made it into the CORBA spec... and IBM's last release of SOM was version 3.0 (although, the last version of SOM to ship with OS/2 was something like SOM v2.3) Bits of SOM still exist in IBM ComponentBroker (now buried somewhere in IBM's WebSphere suite) but the extensions which allowed the WPS to work were taken out - in the name of standards compliance.
I still fire up my trusty old OS/2 box every once in a while... just to remind myself that computers can be fast, powerful, fun and easy to use.
Actually, NT was first written for the (nonexistant) i910 processor... which was where the NT name came from (Nine-Ten). NT "ran" on a simulation of the i910 processor.
MIPS was the first port, largely because of the lack of delivery of the i910 processor.
Years ago, Apple ported classic MacOS to run on a 486... This was during a time when they had reached the limit of the 68000 cpu and was pondering a replacement.
When MacOS/X was in development, they simultainously compiled it to run on a Pentium with a Matrox graphics card.
AFAIK, Apple still cross-compiles MacOS, just to check if the code is clean.
They can switch anytime they want... But the important thing is that Apple is a H/W company. Selling MacOS/x86 is unlikely to make them a fortune, (unless they had a killer app/productivity suite as a lock-in solution)
The only company who would benefit from MacOS/x86 would actually be Microsoft... Think of all the additional licenses of MS Office for MacOS/x86 they could sell!
They should simply license the patent to Microsoft for 10 cents per annum per license sold, with the contractual assumption that a licencee could use the software product which incorporates their IP over a minimum 25 years.
Kodak would have secured a lucrative revenue stream for at a generation!
Here is an idea to eliminate overreaching EULAs...
1. Purchase expensive software from a software retailer famous for extravagant markups. 2. Rip open the packaging in a frenzy of excitement. You are permitted to do this on the retailer's premises if desired. 3. Get as far as the EULA on installation. 4. Phone their (freephone) support for clarification. Go over every single clause on the 'contract' at least 5 times. 5. Decline the 'contract' and abort the install. 6. Demand that the software house refund you in exchange for the license. You do not have to do a thing, just wait for the money to come back because you only want a refund on the license. 7. When it comes to the packaging and CD... "What? I have to return that too? Can't you pick it all up? I already threw it all in the trash, I'll go and dig it out... Should be fine, I'll pick off all the pizza bits." 8. If they complain about the packaging, say that the EULA did not stipulate anything about the condition of the items not covered by the EULA. ie: the packaging and shipping media. 9. Goto step 1.
Now I have a plan.... I just need enough money to complete step 1.
Ahh well... one of the sayings that I live by: If it isn't worth paying the ticket price, it isn't worth using. The last 3 operating systems I purchased were from IBM but open-source satisfies most my needs now.
I am a great supporter of copyrights but EULAs and software patents leave a bad taste.
I have 2 PCs, both running FreeBSD. One of them has never run any OS except FreeBSD.
Somehow I have 3 XP licences (2 XP Home and 1 XP Pro)
I hardly use the XP Pro because its got all kinds of problems - including headaches such as no sound available even though the drivers are installed and are supposedly working fine - Microsoft's own tech support hasn't been able to find a solution. I expect I will have to wipe and reinstall from scratch to have XP 'fully functional' on a PC which FreeBSD 4 and 5 both have no problems operating.
Oh well... At least I don't need it for much. I wonder if they would let me use the same license of XP if I install it in QEMU running on the same machine?
He was a member of the Hellfire Club which resided in an artifical cave in High Wycombe, England - an exclusive gentleman's club where no wives were allowed yet women were frequently admitted... where he famously gave advice to other gentlemen on how to choose a mistress.
I have an IBM 3 button mouse (P/N:11H4878 S/N:000646) and it is still working well. I reckon it is soon to be 20 years old.
I also have a near-identical looking Logitech Pilot Mouse (serial 3 button) which is already 20.
Also I have half a dozen old keyboards (sans Windows keys), up to 20 years old and still mostly working (although, my favourite one needs repair, it is about 18 years old, need to find out if the key switches are still available)
I should dig around and see if I have any hardware older than my wife...
The PSU is always the centre of many 'issues' partly because the task of designing it usually falls to the most junior engineer who has very little experience.
Why? Because they are boring and 'un-sexy'.
So it is not surprising that throughout modern times, the laptop powersupply brick has had more product recalls than anything else. On many an occasion, I have pried one apart and inspected its innards to see that there has been factory mods done to it with wires, globs of solder and tracks cut with a crude knife.
But such measures will not stop all those people out there who are driving without insurance and don't give a flying f about it either.
In the UK alone, it is reckoned that there are at least 1.5 million cars on the road with no insurance. I am sure, the figure is appropriately higher in the USA.
Until there is an effective crackdown on people who deliberately and wilfully drive without any form of insurance, everyone else will pay the costs.
Confiscating uninsured cars won't work - the people involved would just supply a fake name/address and then go buy another cheap burnt-out car and drive that (without insurance).
Back on to topic... I personally would have no problems having such a device fitted to my car - I rarely break the speed limit. (besides, its too expensive in the UK to drive fast: fuel is expensive here)
The only reason I still have an old 200MHz Pentium next to my main PC (connected via a KVM switch) is to that I can fire up Lotus Ami Pro 3... IMO, it is the best wordprocessor I have ever used.
For preserving/viewing the documents, they have been converted to PDF.
Slashdot Mirror
1.5 is available for the brave and adventurous.
1.4 and 1.3 seem pretty stable.
Only 1.3 is available as a binary due to Sun's restrictive licenses.
I am not an expert but...
I was informed that Bill Gates was not a salaried employee of Microsoft...
He has a foundation receives benefits on his behalf from Microsoft in the form of non-expensed stock options and then Bill Gates lives at the foundations expense.
End result, Bill Gates does not receive very little taxable salary (probably less than you or I receive in a month) and therefore pays a minuscule tax but due to the foundation, is able to live quite comfortably.
This would explain the eyewitness observations that Bill Gates counts his pennies carefully when making cash purchases for groceries - he does not personally have much cash.
His proclamation that his children will not receive a large inheritance would also be a factual statement as the foundation is its own entity and does not 'belong' to him.
Of course, this is all heresay and I have no hard evidence to back any of it up.
Interesting article but... It omits all mention of the contributions from outside of the USA.
In particular, there is no mention at all of the development of the ARM processor, or even the Japanese microprocessors. NEC made higher-performance pin-compatible clones of the 8088/8086, the V20/30 chips... a early way of improving performance of early PCs was to remove the Intel chip and slot in a NEC.
But it is the lack of mention for the ARM I think is particularly alarming, given that the ARM is perhaps the most successful micro after the Z80.
For the last century, the title of "most important place in the world" has belonged to the United States, but that role seems likely to shift in this century to China.
Umm.... Concidering that more than half of all significant inventions that affect our daily lives came from the British during the last century, I think that statement may be misleading.
Maybe more accurate to say that the United States was the most important place in the world in the last decade.
Here in the UK, IIRC, a senior detective of one of the police forces wrote and had published a book which described how to commit a perfect crime. Detailed in the book was what the detective decided was the "Golden Rules"
1. Do it once,
2. Do it big,
3. Don't get greedy, never forget rule 1.
A few years later, he was caught for fraud and was jailed... How did he get caught? He forgot rule 1.
(I should google and find the specific case and post the link here... but I am too lazy right now)
I remember having the '79 edition as a kid...
Flood Network Solutions with notices that icann.org ownership is being transferred to someone else.
If there are enough of them, then there got to be at least one which isn't answered within the 5 day timeout.
And whoever wins, wins control of the Internet! Whoot!
Get emailing, theres no bigger competition than this!
I too would love to see life breathed back into the WorkPlace Shell.... IMO the best desktop environment to grace any computing platform I have used.
But for IBM to opensource WPS, they would need to opensource SOM which the WPS heavily relied upon... Particularly the DSOM aspect which allowed weird/wonderful stuff like true distributed objects... where you can subclass a class which the implementation is on a different machine to the machine where your implementation resides. And it just works! You can even replace class implementations within the object heirachy - at run time.
IBM's SOM extensions to CORBA never made it into the CORBA spec... and IBM's last release of SOM was version 3.0 (although, the last version of SOM to ship with OS/2 was something like SOM v2.3)
Bits of SOM still exist in IBM ComponentBroker (now buried somewhere in IBM's WebSphere suite) but the extensions which allowed the WPS to work were taken out - in the name of standards compliance.
I still fire up my trusty old OS/2 box every once in a while... just to remind myself that computers can be fast, powerful, fun and easy to use.
Actually, NT was first written for the (nonexistant) i910 processor
MIPS was the first port, largely because of the lack of delivery of the i910 processor.
Years ago, Apple ported classic MacOS to run on a 486... This was during a time when they had reached the limit of the 68000 cpu and was pondering a replacement.
When MacOS/X was in development, they simultainously compiled it to run on a Pentium with a Matrox graphics card.
AFAIK, Apple still cross-compiles MacOS, just to check if the code is clean.
They can switch anytime they want... But the important thing is that Apple is a H/W company. Selling MacOS/x86 is unlikely to make them a fortune, (unless they had a killer app/productivity suite as a lock-in solution)
The only company who would benefit from MacOS/x86 would actually be Microsoft... Think of all the additional licenses of MS Office for MacOS/x86 they could sell!
They should simply license the patent to Microsoft for 10 cents per annum per license sold, with the contractual assumption that a licencee could use the software product which incorporates their IP over a minimum 25 years.
Kodak would have secured a lucrative revenue stream for at a generation!
Here is an idea to eliminate overreaching EULAs...
1. Purchase expensive software from a software retailer famous for extravagant markups.
2. Rip open the packaging in a frenzy of excitement. You are permitted to do this on the retailer's premises if desired.
3. Get as far as the EULA on installation.
4. Phone their (freephone) support for clarification. Go over every single clause on the 'contract' at least 5 times.
5. Decline the 'contract' and abort the install.
6. Demand that the software house refund you in exchange for the license. You do not have to do a thing, just wait for the money to come back because you only want a refund on the license.
7. When it comes to the packaging and CD... "What? I have to return that too? Can't you pick it all up? I already threw it all in the trash, I'll go and dig it out... Should be fine, I'll pick off all the pizza bits."
8. If they complain about the packaging, say that the EULA did not stipulate anything about the condition of the items not covered by the EULA. ie: the packaging and shipping media.
9. Goto step 1.
Now I have a plan.... I just need enough money to complete step 1.
Ahh well... one of the sayings that I live by: If it isn't worth paying the ticket price, it isn't worth using. The last 3 operating systems I purchased were from IBM but open-source satisfies most my needs now.
I am a great supporter of copyrights but EULAs and software patents leave a bad taste.
Now here is an idea to fight oversized EULAs and junk mail...
Send letters to software companies for a paper hardcopy of the EULAs for each of their products. This may be repeated several times, for bulk.
Pack the EULAs inside the prepaid reply envelopes for all the junk mail you receive.
Rinse, repeat and smile
I have 2 PCs, both running FreeBSD. One of them has never run any OS except FreeBSD.
Somehow I have 3 XP licences (2 XP Home and 1 XP Pro)
I hardly use the XP Pro because its got all kinds of problems - including headaches such as no sound available even though the drivers are installed and are supposedly working fine - Microsoft's own tech support hasn't been able to find a solution. I expect I will have to wipe and reinstall from scratch to have XP 'fully functional' on a PC which FreeBSD 4 and 5 both have no problems operating.
Oh well... At least I don't need it for much. I wonder if they would let me use the same license of XP if I install it in QEMU running on the same machine?
Perhaps even bounties marked "Dead or crispy" would be more effective?
Mr Franklin said a lot of things...
He was a member of the Hellfire Club which resided in an artifical cave in High Wycombe, England - an exclusive gentleman's club where no wives were allowed yet women were frequently admitted... where he famously gave advice to other gentlemen on how to choose a mistress.
A very good analogy which has real-life parallels are people who engage in a very elaborate spoof which has occurred in one of the following ways:
1. Buy an ATM machine, mod it so it records the account and PIN, stock it with money (real and/or fake) and install it in some convenience store.
2. Steal an ATM machine, mod it and then replace an existing ATM machine from the same vendor with the trojaned machine.
3. Fit devices to Bank ATM machines to capture stripe and PIN.
In all those cases, people believe that they are safe because they are using what looks like an authentic machine.
IBM WebExplorer... It was fully keyboard navigable - used the Tab key and all the hyperlinks were also made available in the Links pull down menu.
IIRC, WebEx predated any MSFT browser. Unfortunately, only available for OS/2.
But it was excellent at rendering pages before they had completed loading... even giant HTML tables can be rendered before all the html was loaded.
I have an IBM 3 button mouse (P/N:11H4878 S/N:000646) and it is still working well. I reckon it is soon to be 20 years old.
I also have a near-identical looking Logitech Pilot Mouse (serial 3 button) which is already 20.
Also I have half a dozen old keyboards (sans Windows keys), up to 20 years old and still mostly working (although, my favourite one needs repair, it is about 18 years old, need to find out if the key switches are still available)
I should dig around and see if I have any hardware older than my wife...
The PSU is always the centre of many 'issues' partly because the task of designing it usually falls to the most junior engineer who has very little experience.
Why? Because they are boring and 'un-sexy'.
So it is not surprising that throughout modern times, the laptop powersupply brick has had more product recalls than anything else. On many an occasion, I have pried one apart and inspected its innards to see that there has been factory mods done to it with wires, globs of solder and tracks cut with a crude knife.
I don't expect the situation to improve either.
But such measures will not stop all those people out there who are driving without insurance and don't give a flying f about it either.
In the UK alone, it is reckoned that there are at least 1.5 million cars on the road with no insurance. I am sure, the figure is appropriately higher in the USA.
Until there is an effective crackdown on people who deliberately and wilfully drive without any form of insurance, everyone else will pay the costs.
Confiscating uninsured cars won't work - the people involved would just supply a fake name/address and then go buy another cheap burnt-out car and drive that (without insurance).
Back on to topic... I personally would have no problems having such a device fitted to my car - I rarely break the speed limit. (besides, its too expensive in the UK to drive fast: fuel is expensive here)
Don't forget the demolition orders for Arthur's house.... and the Vogon demolition orders for Earth (printed on a silver coated card)
And the box also says that it includes "no tea".
I have the original game on a 5¼" floppy in the original box which comes complete with a microscopic space fleet and no tea.
Pity I don't have a disk drive to read the floppy with anymore...
The only reason I still have an old 200MHz Pentium next to my main PC (connected via a KVM switch) is to that I can fire up Lotus Ami Pro 3... IMO, it is the best wordprocessor I have ever used.
For preserving/viewing the documents, they have been converted to PDF.
Obviously, you are not aware of the cost of gasoline in the UK....
At current exchange rates and other convertions, I think we are paying nearly $5 per US gallon.
Compare that to the price at your local 76 or Texaco when you fill up in the USA.