Yes. I am actually a Fan, though not becuase of his work in computers. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is, if not one of the largest, then one of the deepest pocketed philanthropic foundations around. They do good things with the money that Bill has made over the years.
Oh please. How the Astroturfers and sycophants wax lyrical about Chairman's Bill's never ending kind-heartedness.
Bill didn't make computers in general easy to use, and people have claimed and most people think.
He only made Pee Cees easier to use for those who were already running MS-DOS.
If you can't understand this, then more fool you.
There were already many more technically-superior personal computer architectures with easier to use software about years before Bill Gates made Windows (more specifically Windows 95). The only one that survives in any numbers is the Apple Macintosh. It is still the vastly superior platform in every way.
Contradict yourself much? You're right, if it weren't for Bill Gates and Windows most of the world would still be using some DOS variant or an IBM terminal.
No. You are a victim of revisionist history.
Most businesses realize the value of CHOICE which is why Apple didn't make it in the business sector
Wrong! Business only values conformity. Back in the day, there were several superior architectures to the PeeCee in terms of hardware and software, including the Apple Macintosh, which is the only one that has survived. There was the Amiga, the Atari ST and the Acorn Archimedes (which was very popular in UK schools, and was about 10 times faster at the same price point that PeeCee hardware). These machines were capable of emulating the 286 PeeCees of the day at native speed or fater.
All the business world cared about was being "IBM compatible" and being able to lock itself into running Lotus 123.
That's what happened.
Bill came late to the party as usual. The rest is history and has been largely forgotten by noobs and youngsters like yourself.
Bill is where he is through questionable business tactics, and the herd mentality.
My mother-in-law is technically illiterate, but she's just got herself (at the age of 65) a degree in English with Religious Studies. She thinks Bill Gates is wonderful.
One day she said,"But he's made computers easy to use..."
"But you see, he hasn't..." I replied.
Bill Gates provided, in WIndows 95, a much-needed backwards-compatible upgrade to MS-DOS. He may have made MS-DOS PeeCees easier to use than before, but I need not point out the history of computing here on slashdot.
Bill Gates has done a remarkable job of pulling the wool over they eyes of the average member of the public without more than a passing interest in computers.
No it wasn't. Intel developed to itanic as a "post-RISC" design to crush all the 64-bir RISC processors, and to take over the workstation and server market. It was designed to be _the_ volume 64-bit processor with spectacular performance and low price due to economies of scale.
Those of us with a passing interest in microprocessors knew it was a turkey.
The only thing itanic has going for it is high SPEC FP scores. On everything else it is either poor or mediocre. It is hot, power-hungry, expensive, have virtually no software support, no developer community etc.
If you look closely at the "benchmark" comparisons that HP and intel put out for public consumption, you will see they usually only compare with very old models from competitors. Also notice the kind of workloads they compare and the configuration of the machines.
SGI recently might have given NASA a free itanic supercomputer if the rumours are true, accounting for a whole 10% of this years itanic shipments. That sounds like a processor in trouble.
Itanic was a solution looking for a problem. It was based on out-dated ideas of processr design, it was late, over-engineered and basically a damp squib for all but the handful of people who can afford it for numbercrunching. This is a far cry from the de-facto 64-bit, mass-market, low-cost processor with world domination that intel intended for it to be.
FORTH is trivial to implement (in a few hundred lines rather than a few thousand) and can be compiled or interpreted. It is interactive, the parser is completely minimal (all tokens are seperated by spaces with few exceptions) and the compiler/interpreter/system can be extremely compact. The code also runs relatively quickly. FORTH was fairly popular in the days of 8-bit micros and 16-bit minis for these reasons, and is still used in microcontrollers and workstation firmware.
The problem with Dell Technical Support is that they expect you to be running some kind of Windows on your machine. Even if it is a blatant hardware malfunction, they will not fix anything unless you run one of their Windows-based programs that allegedly check the hardware. This is a real pain in the backside if you have Linux, Solaris or NetBSD installed on the machine.
They will also refuse to sell you a machine without Windows "to prevent piracy" and if you ask for Linux they'll charge you more than for Windows because "Linux is more expensive" despite the fact it can be obtained legitimately for the cost of your internet bandwidth and a few blank CD-Rs. Try to argue with them and you'll lose.
Metadata? You mean like file names, attributes, files with notes in them? As long as the stuff is accessable and readable I don't see any problems at all.
It was the ready-assembled version. Mine is in an upgraded case (keyboard with moving keyes) and has a multi-tasking FORTH ROM on a daughterboard along side the original BASIC ROM.
I really want to "back up" that FORTH ROM. I have seen virtually no reference to it anywhere on the Internet. I hope it still works. I haven't fired it up in years. One of the ribbon cables fell off the keyboard. I need to plug in the old one.
I know. It's astounding. My first computer, when I was 8, had 1k RAM. 1024 bytes for everything. It was little more than a programmable calculator, but it got me hooked:-) I got a 16k (enormous!) RAM pack for it...
Are there many consumers out there with more than 120GB of family digital photos? A spare hard drive is cheap these days as an additional place to store a copy.
Excuse me while I put on my tinfoil hat to entertain a creepy possibility for a moment.
M$ is putting Digital Restrictions Management into Windows. Most people use Windows, and most people are not very clued-up about computers in general (e.g. what a file is, what a file format is etc.).
Now, suppose a mass-market digital camera maker were to bring out very cheap digital cameras with a proprietary image format, and were to get Microsoft to Digitally-Restrict the saving of the files on the PeeCee's hard disk in some way (file size, image quality, number of images, none at all without paying a fee)...
As time goes on, storage space increases exponentially. As I upgrade my disks as time goes by, it's possible to have all of my data to hand (as well as archived). For example, before CD-R, I had over 100 1.44MB floppy disks. I had a 1.2GB disk drive. Now I have CD-Rs a plenty and 280GB of disks in my PeeCee, and in a year's time I expect that to grow to 1000 gigabytes (1 terabyte). All this time, my machines are networked and use Open protocols to communicate. I have 10 megabit and 100 megabit NICs. When I have a spare few pounds, I'll get gigabit. I have broadband.
As time goes on, space increases, bandwidth increases, etc. The data gradually migrates from one to the other.
Who cares if my CD-Rs are knackered in 20 years time? It'll all be on a tiny corner of a hard disk or equivalent, on the network, in Open file formats....
IBM are getting there with P5/P4 and Linux. Linux will soon catch up and overtake Solaris for the things that matter to Sun the most - HA and in chassis scalability.
IBM? Of course, how silly of me to forget.
I see that Slackware now has an IBM S/390 port, but still no Opteron port. Now all three people who want to run Linux on their S/390 can each choose a different distro: Slackware, RedHat and SuSE.
IBM sure is bending over backwards to make a good impression on slashdot.
Cooling the reactor uses a lot of water taken from the rivers, thus warming them (heat pollution). The very same issue also means that during very hot periods of the year, nuclear plants needs to be throttled down or even stopped down to stay within safe operationnal boundaries. What's the power source then when you suddenly can't rely on nuclear plants?
The prolem in France is that most of the nuclear reactors are PWRs. They're not a very efficient design, and they require a lot of very cold cooling water. Ideally, they should use cold sea-water for cooling, but I believe that in France a lot of the nuclear power plants use water from rivers. This is not such a good idea.
The wonderful thing about France, is that 75% of their electricity comes from nuclear, and what really amuses me is that other continental European countries, such as Germany, who have been bullied on to the "environmental" anti-nuclear bandwagon by the Greens, are closing down their nuclear power stations. They claim that they can generate enough "environmentally-friendly" electricity to meet thier demands form wind power and burning gas, of all things. In reality, they can't generate enough electricity to meed demand and are having to import it from France. France has an excess of capacity because it has nuclear power...
Nuclear power isn't giving anyone cancer (which is what you're implying).
What safety risk to humans?
A shed turbine blade could be very bad for your health (hint: fatal) if you're in its way, which will not be that unlikey if they build them by the million.
As for the rest of your comment, Im sorry, im not buying. The fact remains that radioactive waste is a massive management undertaking. With enormous cost.
It wouldn't be if hysterical, ignorant people stopped putting up obstacles and let the people who know the facts get on with it.
The public does not need to fund these massive, centralised, dangerous facilities.
The public shouldn't be funding anything that's dangerous. These things are not dangerous. They're the best technology we have to produce the amounts of electricity we need without major harm to health and the environment.
You don't have to "buy it." You can rant all you like, it doesn't change the facts.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, this is slashdot and the facts are irrelevant and should never be allowed to get in the way of a good shouting match :-)
At this pint I will give up arguing with you. You are a troll and a revisionist historian. You are a fool and an ignoramus.
Oh please. How the Astroturfers and sycophants wax lyrical about Chairman's Bill's never ending kind-heartedness.
Have you all already forgotten about Bill's trip to India, where he gave $100m to fight HIV, $421m to fight Linux?
Now, I ask you as to where this man's priotities lie.
Bill didn't make computers in general easy to use, and people have claimed and most people think.
He only made Pee Cees easier to use for those who were already running MS-DOS.
If you can't understand this, then more fool you.
There were already many more technically-superior personal computer architectures with easier to use software about years before Bill Gates made Windows (more specifically Windows 95). The only one that survives in any numbers is the Apple Macintosh. It is still the vastly superior platform in every way.
No. You are a victim of revisionist history.
Most businesses realize the value of CHOICE which is why Apple didn't make it in the business sector
Wrong! Business only values conformity. Back in the day, there were several superior architectures to the PeeCee in terms of hardware and software, including the Apple Macintosh, which is the only one that has survived. There was the Amiga, the Atari ST and the Acorn Archimedes (which was very popular in UK schools, and was about 10 times faster at the same price point that PeeCee hardware). These machines were capable of emulating the 286 PeeCees of the day at native speed or fater.
All the business world cared about was being "IBM compatible" and being able to lock itself into running Lotus 123.
That's what happened.
Bill came late to the party as usual. The rest is history and has been largely forgotten by noobs and youngsters like yourself.
Bill is where he is through questionable business tactics, and the herd mentality.
My mother-in-law is technically illiterate, but she's just got herself (at the age of 65) a degree in English with Religious Studies. She thinks Bill Gates is wonderful.
One day she said ,"But he's made computers easy to use..."
"But you see, he hasn't..." I replied.
Bill Gates provided, in WIndows 95, a much-needed backwards-compatible upgrade to MS-DOS. He may have made MS-DOS PeeCees easier to use than before, but I need not point out the history of computing here on slashdot.
Bill Gates has done a remarkable job of pulling the wool over they eyes of the average member of the public without more than a passing interest in computers.
These people are his fans.
No it wasn't. Intel developed to itanic as a "post-RISC" design to crush all the 64-bir RISC processors, and to take over the workstation and server market. It was designed to be _the_ volume 64-bit processor with spectacular performance and low price due to economies of scale.
Those of us with a passing interest in microprocessors knew it was a turkey.
The only thing itanic has going for it is high SPEC FP scores. On everything else it is either poor or mediocre. It is hot, power-hungry, expensive, have virtually no software support, no developer community etc.
If you look closely at the "benchmark" comparisons that HP and intel put out for public consumption, you will see they usually only compare with very old models from competitors. Also notice the kind of workloads they compare and the configuration of the machines.
SGI recently might have given NASA a free itanic supercomputer if the rumours are true, accounting for a whole 10% of this years itanic shipments. That sounds like a processor in trouble.
Itanic was a solution looking for a problem. It was based on out-dated ideas of processr design, it was late, over-engineered and basically a damp squib for all but the handful of people who can afford it for numbercrunching. This is a far cry from the de-facto 64-bit, mass-market, low-cost processor with world domination that intel intended for it to be.
FORTH is trivial to implement (in a few hundred lines rather than a few thousand) and can be compiled or interpreted. It is interactive, the parser is completely minimal (all tokens are seperated by spaces with few exceptions) and the compiler/interpreter/system can be extremely compact. The code also runs relatively quickly. FORTH was fairly popular in the days of 8-bit micros and 16-bit minis for these reasons, and is still used in microcontrollers and workstation firmware.
They will also refuse to sell you a machine without Windows "to prevent piracy" and if you ask for Linux they'll charge you more than for Windows because "Linux is more expensive" despite the fact it can be obtained legitimately for the cost of your internet bandwidth and a few blank CD-Rs. Try to argue with them and you'll lose.
Yes, I have the David Husband FORTH ROM in my ZX81. :-) I'd love to get the code off it and try it in an emulator.
Metadata? You mean like file names, attributes, files with notes in them? As long as the stuff is accessable and readable I don't see any problems at all.
I really want to "back up" that FORTH ROM. I have seen virtually no reference to it anywhere on the Internet. I hope it still works. I haven't fired it up in years. One of the ribbon cables fell off the keyboard. I need to plug in the old one.
ZX81. It is in a cardboard box behind me as I speak. It has something very special in it that I'd like to try to preserve for posterity.
I know. It's astounding. My first computer, when I was 8, had 1k RAM. 1024 bytes for everything. It was little more than a programmable calculator, but it got me hooked :-) I got a 16k (enormous!) RAM pack for it...
Excuse me while I put on my tinfoil hat to entertain a creepy possibility for a moment.
M$ is putting Digital Restrictions Management into Windows. Most people use Windows, and most people are not very clued-up about computers in general (e.g. what a file is, what a file format is etc.).
Now, suppose a mass-market digital camera maker were to bring out very cheap digital cameras with a proprietary image format, and were to get Microsoft to Digitally-Restrict the saving of the files on the PeeCee's hard disk in some way (file size, image quality, number of images, none at all without paying a fee)...
As time goes on, space increases, bandwidth increases, etc. The data gradually migrates from one to the other.
Who cares if my CD-Rs are knackered in 20 years time? It'll all be on a tiny corner of a hard disk or equivalent, on the network, in Open file formats....
So what the heck is this and this?
And what about these workstations?
IBM are getting there with P5/P4 and Linux. Linux will soon catch up and overtake Solaris for the things that matter to Sun the most - HA and in chassis scalability.
IBM? Of course, how silly of me to forget.
I see that Slackware now has an IBM S/390 port, but still no Opteron port. Now all three people who want to run Linux on their S/390 can each choose a different distro: Slackware, RedHat and SuSE.
IBM sure is bending over backwards to make a good impression on slashdot.
I think it's indicative of the currently dominant mind-set in the USA.
The prolem in France is that most of the nuclear reactors are PWRs. They're not a very efficient design, and they require a lot of very cold cooling water. Ideally, they should use cold sea-water for cooling, but I believe that in France a lot of the nuclear power plants use water from rivers. This is not such a good idea.
The wonderful thing about France, is that 75% of their electricity comes from nuclear, and what really amuses me is that other continental European countries, such as Germany, who have been bullied on to the "environmental" anti-nuclear bandwagon by the Greens, are closing down their nuclear power stations. They claim that they can generate enough "environmentally-friendly" electricity to meet thier demands form wind power and burning gas, of all things. In reality, they can't generate enough electricity to meed demand and are having to import it from France. France has an excess of capacity because it has nuclear power...
Ah, politics :-)
1996 IIRC. 8 years.
Nuclear power isn't giving anyone cancer (which is what you're implying).
What safety risk to humans?
A shed turbine blade could be very bad for your health (hint: fatal) if you're in its way, which will not be that unlikey if they build them by the million.
As for the rest of your comment, Im sorry, im not buying. The fact remains that radioactive waste is a massive management undertaking. With enormous cost.
It wouldn't be if hysterical, ignorant people stopped putting up obstacles and let the people who know the facts get on with it.
The public does not need to fund these massive, centralised, dangerous facilities.
The public shouldn't be funding anything that's dangerous. These things are not dangerous. They're the best technology we have to produce the amounts of electricity we need without major harm to health and the environment.
You don't have to "buy it." You can rant all you like, it doesn't change the facts.
Come on now mod-bombers, you usually mod me "overrated" not redundant. What's different today?
No, wait, that ain't right.
You get it from the Monkey Man.
There are a lot of sexually frustrated young men here on slashdot. :-)
Maybe Ballmer wants to Open Source Windows and has hired him to show them how to do it?