We preserve the things that matter [..] The accumulated works of Geocities do not fit that criteria
Geocities had an *extremely* high ratio of junk:worthwhile material. Yet with a decent search engine, it is- or was- quite easy to avoid the junk and access the useful stuff.... if it had been kept online, that is.
To be honest, I was going to mention Geocities anyway, because it's pertinent to this discussion of "web heritage". When it closed down, all the material was taken offline. Is it permanently lost or still stored offline in a known place?
While Yahoo's decision to kill Geocities might make sense at first glance, IMHO it didn't when you considered the matter. Many of you are probably thinking that it would have required a lot of (a) storage, (b) bandwidth and (c) attention that was no longer worth Yahoo's time. But consider this.
As far as I can tell, the majority of content on Geocities was around a decade old- very few sites appear to have been updated after the early-2000s. That was a long time ago, and the average size of consumer web content - and the ability to store and transmit it - has grown massively in the past decade. Sure, there were a *lot* of sites; but how big was your average website in the late-90s dial up era? By modern, YouTube era standards, tiny- both in storage and bandwidth requirements.
(In fact, after I first speculated on this, I found out that the total storage for Geocities came to- IIRC- single-figure terabytes. Significant- although not ridiculous- by late 90s standards. A few cheap hard drives' worth today.)
Yahoo want people to move onto other services and/or don't want the administrative hassle? Fine. Archive the sites and make them non-updatable (except for an option allowing the owners to download and/or permanently remove their content). Under such circumstances I'm willing to bet that the revenue from the advertising (that Geocities has always been plastered with) would more than outweigh the very modest storage, bandwidth and administration costs.
Not saying that they'd get rich, just that they'd probably make significantly more than it cost to keep the site running.
I suspect that the real reasons for closing Geocities probably had more to do with either indirect legal issues (tax write-offs, accounting and the like) or some executive who wanted to be seen doing something that looked more significant than it actually was.
That said, I don't entirely disagree that some things aren't worth keeping, and indeed I think the world may have already crossed the line where we're keeping too much data for our own good. Nor was I ever a major fan or user of Geocities- yet I do think it's kind of a shame that the whole thing was taken offline wholesale when there was no *real* reason to do so.
Yeah, but what would the service cost without the phone? [..] I'm not sure why Slashdot has so much trouble understanding this. Slashdotters seem to think that cellular networks, phone networks, and internet bandwidth are free to install and maintain
Then you seem to have made assumptions and missed the point that was being made. You can't directly compare a $99 contract-tied price (as the OP did) to a $120 "real" price.
Of course, depending on what your service agreement is, the iPhone may well work out cheaper, but that's a different comparison altogether and will vary by person.
Apple has no control over what a network will charge you for your rates.
That's debatable, as the exclusive telco agreements they had in several (all?) countries when it was first launched implies some degree of leverage, as did the cut they received.
However, this is irrelevant to my main disagreement:-
Saying one model is more expensive than another while including the rates in one phone and not another is not a fair comparison.
I never said it was. The point that provoked the debate was someone trying to compare a $99 subsidised and contract-tied price to one whose "real" price was $120. I believe the OPs were making this point when they added the contract price.
As I said, *depending on your usage*, the contract price may still work out well, but you can't compare the two unless you do it on a per-person basis.
Generally speaking, the same holds in the UK as well- if a guy offers you something in a pub at a cheapass price, it's likely stolen. Though I guess it *could* be a scammer floggeing fakes to people who think- and don't care- that they're getting stolen but genuine goods at a cheap price.
And your point is? Most cell phones in the US are subsidized. You can [etc.]
Everything after your first sentence is irrelevant, because that wasn't his point.
Hal Porter and EvanED's point was that the "$99" genuine iPhone being compared with the fake $120 one in truth would work out significantly more expensive because it was only available at that subsidised price with an expensive contract.
Even if the contract worked out well for some people, it's still misleading to compare the pricepoint of the subsidised iPhone with the (probably) non-tied fake model.
Why can't people use standard units of measurements like millimeters, or even inches?
Perhaps because regardless of minor variations- which I haven't really noticed- the vast majority of playing cards are close enough to the same size and any normal person would understand the approximate scale that the authors meant.
I mean, seriously, most people would know they didn't mean cards this size or require precise measurements unless they were some way along the autistic spectrum of literalness.
Amen. When I was a kid we had one of the Lego "space" sets, but after building the "actual" model with it we used it for other space-themed installations, and later used some of the parts for the vehicles used by some high-tech criminal gang that roamed the streets of Lego town(!!!)
My *current* computer is a Pentium 4 at 3000 megahertz.
Pfft... until 5 months ago, my "current" computer was a Pentium 4 at 1.8 MHz. (Actually, I don't know how my year-old Aspire One compared with that, because I never used it for serious work).
In terms of the original meaning of "hacker", and the motivations and ethics associated with it, corporations are doing it for the money, which is pretty much the antithesis of that.
Personal computing was built by hackers. There would be no IBM clones, no Apple I, without people pushing the limits of what they could get their hands on.
The IBM PC clones weren't built by hackers (I doubt the PC would have been the most attractive machine to a hacker-type anyway), it was built via a clean-room reverse engineering of the original PC BIOS.
Indeed, though they spun off their semiconductor division into Freescale a while back.
Yes; that was what I thought when I first read this. From what I remember reading here, Motorola have effectively split at least once before- seeing this confirms it. The current "Motorola" is AFAIK the one that just happened to keep the name.
IIRC many Slashdotters don't consider the current "Motorola" to be the true original company anyway. When they split again, "Motorola" will still exist- as long as the trademark exists.
Yup wierdstuff used to get lots of really good tech. Nowdays they simply look like a trashbin of useless junk at premium prices.
Must admit I was expecting a bit more from the article. The problem is that a lot of that stuff is from the 90s (or pretty common stuff from the 80s). 1990s PC tech is mostly old enough to be very dated by modern standards, but it's still way past the early days of computing. By that time a lot of stuff had been standardised (not least the world finally settling on the "IBM PC compatible" as a standard). It really just comes across as crappier and more dated versions of what we have now.
Maybe it's just me, but old PCs always felt like just... crappy old PCs. While particular aspects of the technology may be interesting, the systems as a whole generally don't have any particular charm when they get old. Probably because beige box PCs didn't have much charm to begin with.
That assumes that he *wants* to put that info back into the majority of his photos, of course.
But ignoring that elephant in the room:-) there are a few other things:-
(1) If you're not obsessed with the quality, you can have your photos scanned when they're processed, and returned to you on a CD.
(2) The "correct it in Photoshop" forgets that digital photos could often do with a bit of work in Photoshop as well.
(3) I'd be surprised if someone hadn't already invented a tool that used Google maps somehow to allow someone to click a point on a map and have a particular photograph automatically tagged with that location. It's only five or six years since digital SLRs became affordable for the man on the street, and around ten for digital compacts, so even people who are now all-digital may still have a lot of old scanned film photos they'll want to tag.
You're all getting lathered up over 2.6% and 0.65%????? That's serious overreaction!
Who was getting lathered up and overreacting? I pointed it out as an interesting possibility, using it as a starting point to discuss a more general (and serious) issue about privacy.
Though as the other reply to your post points out, if *your* camera is doing it to some of your photos, it's likely doing it to *all* of them!
Someday soon a politician will post what appears to be a benign photo with an embarrassing long/lat location.
Ah... but perhaps they already have, and it's already out there- it's just that no-one has realised it yet.
In which case, there's nothing they can do about it now.:-/
This is why you should be cautious about what information you release. Even if there's no known exploit for information at the time you give it out; even if you tighten things up once a given danger becomes known... your old information is still out there, and now subject to *newer* information-retrieval techniques.
If it's time-sensitive information (e.g. you don't want $REPRESSIVE_DICTATORIAL_REGIME to know your current location), then their being able to retrieve such info two years down the line is meaningless. On the other hand, if it (e.g.) revealed the previously unknown fact that you were active with an anti-government organisation, you're in trouble.
Pre-iPod there were ubiquitous CD players made by everybody and a handful of random companies making MP3 players that only slashbots were buying (e.g. Creative Nomad). The MP3 player market may have been crowded for its size, but it barely existed.
More significantly, Apple released the iPod around the time that technological developments made it worthwhile. Had they done it three years earlier, it wouldn't have been the iPod as we know it.
Yes, there were MP3 players circa 1997, long before the iPod came out. But the first models had circa 32MB of memory (with support for expensive memory cards of similar capacity if you were lucky). That was enough for one hour's worth of low bitrate music uploaded via a hideously slow serial cable or whatever. (USB 1 was around then, but hadn't gathered much support).
So you had an expensive device that could hold a similar amount to a Walkman cassette player in one go and was more difficult and/or expensive to load with new music. And with such limitations, you probably had to decide what you wanted to listen to beforehand, nullifying any benefit of random access.
In other words, outside of the tech-fetishist geek market (which wasn't as big then anyway), the first MP3 players offered little benefit over much cheaper devices for your average user.
It's not just that the early devices were quantitatively different in terms of capacity, it's that such limitations made them qualitatively different in the way you'd have had to use them; i.e. more like a very inconvenient cassette Walkman than a modern iPod- regardless of the underlying technology.
It was only when the underlying tech increased in capacity (and decreased in price) far enough that it would have been possible to create a device with the benefits we associate with modern MP3 players, i.e. hold lots of music, random access, listen to what we want, take our music collection with us, became possible.
And (not) oddly, it was around that time that Apple released the iPod. I'm not crediting Apple with inventing the modern MP3 player- as distinct from those limited early tech toys- someone else would have done something like it- but they *did* do it quite nicely, and they did do it at the right time.
I suspect it's possible that Apple realised this, and had had iPod prototypes around for a while, but waited for the tech to reach acceptable levels. Who knows?
I love how a loved old property from our childhood (Star Wars) is just a pretty facade onto a loved new property from our kids' childhoods (the Lego games).
Pfft... *Lego* was the loved old property from *my* childhood.
The more they tighten their grip, the more the world will slip through their fingers.
The original quote and variations of it- such as yours- appear here on a fairly regular basis. Despite the implied tongue-in-cheek (self-consciously geeky), it's still being used sincerely to make a similar point to the one Leia was arguing in the film.
The absolutely massive irony here is that if you see the original film- which I caught on TV recently and I'd have assumed the fanboys knew inside out- you'll know that this is a prelude to Darth Vader's somewhat effective verbal response and his significantly more effective physical response of destroying her entire f*****g homeworld.
It doesn't undermine the point you're trying to make so much as, er.... blast it into little pieces with a moon-sized weapon.;-)
The wrongheaded idea, held by a lot of misinformed people, that Gates was some kind of trust-fund baby who was handed the keys to the kingdom and merely didn't have to fuck up, is a fallacy.
I don't know if you had my original comment in mind, but it certainly wasn't meant to imply that. Quite the opposite- it acknowledged that being in the right place at the right time was not the sole reason for Gates' success.
Gates was (and is) undoubtedly a very smart guy who had a clear vision and insight and is known for exploiting opportunities when they come to him.
Still, the most common fallacy about Gates- held by the man on the street- is the opposite, that Gates was some super-smart everyman who did it all by himself. And while he deserves credit, and while his parents weren't in the Donald Trump and Warren Buffett league of richness, he certainly benefited from having parents who were very well-off by ordinary standards and who had the right connections. It's open to question if he was just a typical lower middle-class kid whether he'd have had such success.
Or put another way, Gates' upbringing may not have been sufficient for his success, but it may well have been necessary.
This is not entirely correct, although it is close.
With the debatable exception of whether QDOS was a ripoff of CP/M- and I implied that there were differing views on this- nothing I said was wrong (nor contradicted by what you said). It was intentionally simplified without being misleading, as the point I was making related to the innovation (or lack of) in MS-DOS, and it was meant to serve that rather than the other way round.:-)
There's a kind of poetic justice here, with Microsoft's tactics of stifling competitors (rather than out-performing them) being used internally.
Indeed. I note that the article states
Some people take joy in Microsoft's struggles, as the popular view in recent years paints the company as an unrepentant intentional monopolist. Good riddance if it fails. But those of us who worked there know it differently. At worst, you can say it's a highly repentant, largely accidental monopolist.
My understanding was- yeah, Bill Gates may have been in the right place at the right time, and had the right connections- but so did a lot of people who run companies that are long gone and mostly forgotten.
And the reason that Microsoft isn't being that Gates and MS *did* always have their future planned out rather than just small ambitions and being there at the dawn of a new industry for the fun of it. The article asserts otherwise, but doesn't back this up.
I also don't like the vague air of revisionism (in the media generally) about MS now that they're no longer seen as the invulnerable monopolist of a few years back, with Google looking more "big bad" with every day, and Gates disposing of his billions.
It's easy to forget, but around five or so years ago there used to be a *very* fanboyish and indulgent attitude towards Google on Slashdot. That's very much changed now, though some have said of MS that at least they were blatant and upfront about their desire to dominate the market, in comparison with Google.
Still, that doesn't make them any better or more likeable, and as the parent says, it's quite fittingly ironic if they've suffered due to abusive internal competition.
Article: why Microsoft, America's most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future
Well... I probably don't need to explain why this is stupid to your average Slashdot reader, but since when did MS *ever* bring us the future? They were *never* major on innovation; even if they managed to get a technology accepted into the mainstream- one that was normally innovated elsewhere- it was mainly due to their market dominance and everyone ending up using it anyway.
MS-DOS? Not remotely innovative. The well-known story is that Gates snuck in under the radar to grab the contract for the IBM PC's operating system from Digital Research (developers of the then-dominant CP/M OS, and probable favourites for the job).
Of course, Gates didn't actually have an OS, and then had to go out and buy one from a small software company. Which was basically just an unremarkable workalike/blatant-ripoff (delete according to opinion) of CP/M anyway. That became PC-DOS/MS-DOS 1, of course, but you'll note that the interest here is in how Gates grabbed the contract, not in that totally unremarkable and uninnovative (rip)off-the-shelf OS.
Or what about pre-emptive multitasking... ten years after the Amiga did it. Brilliant innovation.
Though the article does a good job of explaining why MS seems to have (or have had) a lot of talented people working for them with relatively little to show for it.
But the fundamental issue is that MS never got where they were through being innovators. They got where they were through aggressive business practices; the software was never that hot.
Slashdot Mirror
We preserve the things that matter [..] The accumulated works of Geocities do not fit that criteria
Geocities had an *extremely* high ratio of junk:worthwhile material. Yet with a decent search engine, it is- or was- quite easy to avoid the junk and access the useful stuff.... if it had been kept online, that is.
To be honest, I was going to mention Geocities anyway, because it's pertinent to this discussion of "web heritage". When it closed down, all the material was taken offline. Is it permanently lost or still stored offline in a known place?
While Yahoo's decision to kill Geocities might make sense at first glance, IMHO it didn't when you considered the matter. Many of you are probably thinking that it would have required a lot of (a) storage, (b) bandwidth and (c) attention that was no longer worth Yahoo's time. But consider this.
As far as I can tell, the majority of content on Geocities was around a decade old- very few sites appear to have been updated after the early-2000s. That was a long time ago, and the average size of consumer web content - and the ability to store and transmit it - has grown massively in the past decade. Sure, there were a *lot* of sites; but how big was your average website in the late-90s dial up era? By modern, YouTube era standards, tiny- both in storage and bandwidth requirements.
(In fact, after I first speculated on this, I found out that the total storage for Geocities came to- IIRC- single-figure terabytes. Significant- although not ridiculous- by late 90s standards. A few cheap hard drives' worth today.)
Yahoo want people to move onto other services and/or don't want the administrative hassle? Fine. Archive the sites and make them non-updatable (except for an option allowing the owners to download and/or permanently remove their content). Under such circumstances I'm willing to bet that the revenue from the advertising (that Geocities has always been plastered with) would more than outweigh the very modest storage, bandwidth and administration costs.
Not saying that they'd get rich, just that they'd probably make significantly more than it cost to keep the site running.
I suspect that the real reasons for closing Geocities probably had more to do with either indirect legal issues (tax write-offs, accounting and the like) or some executive who wanted to be seen doing something that looked more significant than it actually was.
That said, I don't entirely disagree that some things aren't worth keeping, and indeed I think the world may have already crossed the line where we're keeping too much data for our own good. Nor was I ever a major fan or user of Geocities- yet I do think it's kind of a shame that the whole thing was taken offline wholesale when there was no *real* reason to do so.
Yeah, but what would the service cost without the phone? [..] I'm not sure why Slashdot has so much trouble understanding this. Slashdotters seem to think that cellular networks, phone networks, and internet bandwidth are free to install and maintain
Then you seem to have made assumptions and missed the point that was being made. You can't directly compare a $99 contract-tied price (as the OP did) to a $120 "real" price.
Of course, depending on what your service agreement is, the iPhone may well work out cheaper, but that's a different comparison altogether and will vary by person.
Apple has no control over what a network will charge you for your rates.
That's debatable, as the exclusive telco agreements they had in several (all?) countries when it was first launched implies some degree of leverage, as did the cut they received.
However, this is irrelevant to my main disagreement:-
Saying one model is more expensive than another while including the rates in one phone and not another is not a fair comparison.
I never said it was. The point that provoked the debate was someone trying to compare a $99 subsidised and contract-tied price to one whose "real" price was $120. I believe the OPs were making this point when they added the contract price.
As I said, *depending on your usage*, the contract price may still work out well, but you can't compare the two unless you do it on a per-person basis.
Generally speaking, the same holds in the UK as well- if a guy offers you something in a pub at a cheapass price, it's likely stolen. Though I guess it *could* be a scammer floggeing fakes to people who think- and don't care- that they're getting stolen but genuine goods at a cheap price.
And your point is? Most cell phones in the US are subsidized. You can [etc.]
Everything after your first sentence is irrelevant, because that wasn't his point.
Hal Porter and EvanED's point was that the "$99" genuine iPhone being compared with the fake $120 one in truth would work out significantly more expensive because it was only available at that subsidised price with an expensive contract.
Even if the contract worked out well for some people, it's still misleading to compare the pricepoint of the subsidised iPhone with the (probably) non-tied fake model.
Why can't people use standard units of measurements like millimeters, or even inches?
Perhaps because regardless of minor variations- which I haven't really noticed- the vast majority of playing cards are close enough to the same size and any normal person would understand the approximate scale that the authors meant.
I mean, seriously, most people would know they didn't mean cards this size or require precise measurements unless they were some way along the autistic spectrum of literalness.
Amen. When I was a kid we had one of the Lego "space" sets, but after building the "actual" model with it we used it for other space-themed installations, and later used some of the parts for the vehicles used by some high-tech criminal gang that roamed the streets of Lego town(!!!)
My *current* computer is a Pentium 4 at 3000 megahertz.
Pfft... until 5 months ago, my "current" computer was a Pentium 4 at 1.8 MHz. (Actually, I don't know how my year-old Aspire One compared with that, because I never used it for serious work).
Perhaps they were. But the *original* PC clone which made it all possible wasn't.
In terms of the original meaning of "hacker", and the motivations and ethics associated with it, corporations are doing it for the money, which is pretty much the antithesis of that.
Personal computing was built by hackers. There would be no IBM clones, no Apple I, without people pushing the limits of what they could get their hands on.
The IBM PC clones weren't built by hackers (I doubt the PC would have been the most attractive machine to a hacker-type anyway), it was built via a clean-room reverse engineering of the original PC BIOS.
Indeed, though they spun off their semiconductor division into Freescale a while back.
Yes; that was what I thought when I first read this. From what I remember reading here, Motorola have effectively split at least once before- seeing this confirms it. The current "Motorola" is AFAIK the one that just happened to keep the name.
IIRC many Slashdotters don't consider the current "Motorola" to be the true original company anyway. When they split again, "Motorola" will still exist- as long as the trademark exists.
They had bins full of LED traffic lights last time I was there
I thought such things only got common in the past five years or so? Maybe they have newer stuff too?
Yup wierdstuff used to get lots of really good tech. Nowdays they simply look like a trashbin of useless junk at premium prices.
Must admit I was expecting a bit more from the article. The problem is that a lot of that stuff is from the 90s (or pretty common stuff from the 80s). 1990s PC tech is mostly old enough to be very dated by modern standards, but it's still way past the early days of computing. By that time a lot of stuff had been standardised (not least the world finally settling on the "IBM PC compatible" as a standard). It really just comes across as crappier and more dated versions of what we have now.
Maybe it's just me, but old PCs always felt like just... crappy old PCs. While particular aspects of the technology may be interesting, the systems as a whole generally don't have any particular charm when they get old. Probably because beige box PCs didn't have much charm to begin with.
Someone posted a picture of their girlfriend's rear end with a sharpie sticking out of it to a popular anonymous image-sharing web board.
Could she write stuff with it, or did she have it in, um... the wrong way round to do that?
That assumes that he *wants* to put that info back into the majority of his photos, of course.
:-) there are a few other things:-
But ignoring that elephant in the room
(1) If you're not obsessed with the quality, you can have your photos scanned when they're processed, and returned to you on a CD.
(2) The "correct it in Photoshop" forgets that digital photos could often do with a bit of work in Photoshop as well.
(3) I'd be surprised if someone hadn't already invented a tool that used Google maps somehow to allow someone to click a point on a map and have a particular photograph automatically tagged with that location. It's only five or six years since digital SLRs became affordable for the man on the street, and around ten for digital compacts, so even people who are now all-digital may still have a lot of old scanned film photos they'll want to tag.
You're all getting lathered up over 2.6% and 0.65%????? That's serious overreaction!
Who was getting lathered up and overreacting? I pointed it out as an interesting possibility, using it as a starting point to discuss a more general (and serious) issue about privacy.
Though as the other reply to your post points out, if *your* camera is doing it to some of your photos, it's likely doing it to *all* of them!
Someday soon a politician will post what appears to be a benign photo with an embarrassing long/lat location.
Ah... but perhaps they already have, and it's already out there- it's just that no-one has realised it yet.
:-/
In which case, there's nothing they can do about it now.
This is why you should be cautious about what information you release. Even if there's no known exploit for information at the time you give it out; even if you tighten things up once a given danger becomes known... your old information is still out there, and now subject to *newer* information-retrieval techniques.
If it's time-sensitive information (e.g. you don't want $REPRESSIVE_DICTATORIAL_REGIME to know your current location), then their being able to retrieve such info two years down the line is meaningless. On the other hand, if it (e.g.) revealed the previously unknown fact that you were active with an anti-government organisation, you're in trouble.
Pre-iPod there were ubiquitous CD players made by everybody and a handful of random companies making MP3 players that only slashbots were buying (e.g. Creative Nomad). The MP3 player market may have been crowded for its size, but it barely existed.
More significantly, Apple released the iPod around the time that technological developments made it worthwhile. Had they done it three years earlier, it wouldn't have been the iPod as we know it.
Yes, there were MP3 players circa 1997, long before the iPod came out. But the first models had circa 32MB of memory (with support for expensive memory cards of similar capacity if you were lucky). That was enough for one hour's worth of low bitrate music uploaded via a hideously slow serial cable or whatever. (USB 1 was around then, but hadn't gathered much support).
So you had an expensive device that could hold a similar amount to a Walkman cassette player in one go and was more difficult and/or expensive to load with new music. And with such limitations, you probably had to decide what you wanted to listen to beforehand, nullifying any benefit of random access.
In other words, outside of the tech-fetishist geek market (which wasn't as big then anyway), the first MP3 players offered little benefit over much cheaper devices for your average user.
It's not just that the early devices were quantitatively different in terms of capacity, it's that such limitations made them qualitatively different in the way you'd have had to use them; i.e. more like a very inconvenient cassette Walkman than a modern iPod- regardless of the underlying technology.
It was only when the underlying tech increased in capacity (and decreased in price) far enough that it would have been possible to create a device with the benefits we associate with modern MP3 players, i.e. hold lots of music, random access, listen to what we want, take our music collection with us, became possible.
And (not) oddly, it was around that time that Apple released the iPod. I'm not crediting Apple with inventing the modern MP3 player- as distinct from those limited early tech toys- someone else would have done something like it- but they *did* do it quite nicely, and they did do it at the right time.
I suspect it's possible that Apple realised this, and had had iPod prototypes around for a while, but waited for the tech to reach acceptable levels. Who knows?
I love how a loved old property from our childhood (Star Wars) is just a pretty facade onto a loved new property from our kids' childhoods (the Lego games).
Pfft... *Lego* was the loved old property from *my* childhood.
*fourth wall. Stage right, stage left, stage rear, audience.
Maybe JarJar will be so clumsy that he will break the third wall.
I guess most people would be happy for him to break as many walls as is required to have the building collapse on him.
The more they tighten their grip, the more the world will slip through their fingers.
The original quote and variations of it- such as yours- appear here on a fairly regular basis. Despite the implied tongue-in-cheek (self-consciously geeky), it's still being used sincerely to make a similar point to the one Leia was arguing in the film.
;-)
The absolutely massive irony here is that if you see the original film- which I caught on TV recently and I'd have assumed the fanboys knew inside out- you'll know that this is a prelude to Darth Vader's somewhat effective verbal response and his significantly more effective physical response of destroying her entire f*****g homeworld.
It doesn't undermine the point you're trying to make so much as, er.... blast it into little pieces with a moon-sized weapon.
The wrongheaded idea, held by a lot of misinformed people, that Gates was some kind of trust-fund baby who was handed the keys to the kingdom and merely didn't have to fuck up, is a fallacy.
I don't know if you had my original comment in mind, but it certainly wasn't meant to imply that. Quite the opposite- it acknowledged that being in the right place at the right time was not the sole reason for Gates' success.
Gates was (and is) undoubtedly a very smart guy who had a clear vision and insight and is known for exploiting opportunities when they come to him.
Still, the most common fallacy about Gates- held by the man on the street- is the opposite, that Gates was some super-smart everyman who did it all by himself. And while he deserves credit, and while his parents weren't in the Donald Trump and Warren Buffett league of richness, he certainly benefited from having parents who were very well-off by ordinary standards and who had the right connections. It's open to question if he was just a typical lower middle-class kid whether he'd have had such success.
Or put another way, Gates' upbringing may not have been sufficient for his success, but it may well have been necessary.
This is not entirely correct, although it is close.
With the debatable exception of whether QDOS was a ripoff of CP/M- and I implied that there were differing views on this- nothing I said was wrong (nor contradicted by what you said). It was intentionally simplified without being misleading, as the point I was making related to the innovation (or lack of) in MS-DOS, and it was meant to serve that rather than the other way round. :-)
There's a kind of poetic justice here, with Microsoft's tactics of stifling competitors (rather than out-performing them) being used internally.
Indeed. I note that the article states
Some people take joy in Microsoft's struggles, as the popular view in recent years paints the company as an unrepentant intentional monopolist. Good riddance if it fails. But those of us who worked there know it differently. At worst, you can say it's a highly repentant, largely accidental monopolist.
My understanding was- yeah, Bill Gates may have been in the right place at the right time, and had the right connections- but so did a lot of people who run companies that are long gone and mostly forgotten.
And the reason that Microsoft isn't being that Gates and MS *did* always have their future planned out rather than just small ambitions and being there at the dawn of a new industry for the fun of it. The article asserts otherwise, but doesn't back this up.
I also don't like the vague air of revisionism (in the media generally) about MS now that they're no longer seen as the invulnerable monopolist of a few years back, with Google looking more "big bad" with every day, and Gates disposing of his billions.
It's easy to forget, but around five or so years ago there used to be a *very* fanboyish and indulgent attitude towards Google on Slashdot. That's very much changed now, though some have said of MS that at least they were blatant and upfront about their desire to dominate the market, in comparison with Google.
Still, that doesn't make them any better or more likeable, and as the parent says, it's quite fittingly ironic if they've suffered due to abusive internal competition.
Article: why Microsoft, America's most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future
Well... I probably don't need to explain why this is stupid to your average Slashdot reader, but since when did MS *ever* bring us the future? They were *never* major on innovation; even if they managed to get a technology accepted into the mainstream- one that was normally innovated elsewhere- it was mainly due to their market dominance and everyone ending up using it anyway.
MS-DOS? Not remotely innovative. The well-known story is that Gates snuck in under the radar to grab the contract for the IBM PC's operating system from Digital Research (developers of the then-dominant CP/M OS, and probable favourites for the job).
Of course, Gates didn't actually have an OS, and then had to go out and buy one from a small software company. Which was basically just an unremarkable workalike/blatant-ripoff (delete according to opinion) of CP/M anyway. That became PC-DOS/MS-DOS 1, of course, but you'll note that the interest here is in how Gates grabbed the contract, not in that totally unremarkable and uninnovative (rip)off-the-shelf OS.
Or what about pre-emptive multitasking... ten years after the Amiga did it. Brilliant innovation.
Though the article does a good job of explaining why MS seems to have (or have had) a lot of talented people working for them with relatively little to show for it.
But the fundamental issue is that MS never got where they were through being innovators. They got where they were through aggressive business practices; the software was never that hot.