Mail in rebates are also a financial scam, since the vendor/manufacturer gets to hold on to your money for 8-12 weeks, earning iterest on it and using it for operational purposes.
Rebates are bad for stupid, illiterate or lazy consumers. I've never had a single problem getting my rebates.
Surely you meant: Mail-in rebates are for stupid or illiterate consumers.
Let me enumerate the fetures of a mail-in rebate as compared to an actual, old-fashioned, "primitive", you know, cash discount:
Mail in rebates make the consumer perform the paperwork and legwork instad of the vendor
Mail in rebates are designed to create an apperance of a lower price while not offerring one unconditionally, i.e. they are a form of a scam
Mail in rebates are designed to offer the manufacturer wiggle room in not paying them, i.e. claims of "illegible writing" or "water damaged envelopes" or "we never got that mail" etc are possible.
Mail in rebates are designed to be an annoyance and hassle in order to deter consumers from actually claiming them
Literate and wise consumers recognize this for what it is, i.e. a form of a "bait and switch" scam by the vendor and manufacturer and do complain to Better Business Bureau or law officials.
I've never had a single problem getting my rebates.
Congratulations, the vendor has trained you to be a circus monkey for them: "Plague, cut the barcode, fill the form with all your personal data for sale to direct mailers, pay for postage, run to the post office, go to the bank depositing the cheque! Good monkey!"
The deal is that Notes is it's own "Pubilic Key Infrastructure" (from long before any internet standards existed). Therefore, it's quite cheap and easy just to flip a couple switches and encrypt everything.
That would contradict the poster right above you who claims that Notes is "standards compliant" and supports encrypted mail transparently via S/MIME and what not...
Granted, I never tried to deploy Notes in that way since it proved to be rabidly insane in getting much simplier things to work, but I would recommend for the rare defenders of Notes to compare their notes (pun intended) before claiming that the product cures common cold and is about to bring an era of global peace and happines to all..
I can build a dynamic web application with personalization, workflow, forms, end-to-end encryption for security, session-based authentication with timeout, LDAP integration, import and export via XML, rich text editing, file attachments, full text search--and I can do it all in a day, including the time it takes to set up the server software on a random Linux box.
I am glad that I have nothing to do with you, but I do pity the "users" of those apps. I have seen the results of this sort of activity in many places and the only person who would ever claim that this was a good thing would be the nut who created these turds. There is a good reason many people make a lot of money getting rid of Notes wherever they are found. And that reason is "dynamic web application with personalization, workflow, forms, end-to-end encryption for security, session-based authentication with timeout, LDAP integration, import and export via XML, rich text editing, file attachments, full text search" built in a day.
I don't know of any other tool that lets me do so much, so quickly.
I heard some of your peers swear by the Visual Basic "rapid application development tool" but I am told MS Access has surpassed it recently in the "built in a day" category of "fully featured"... err.. "applications".
Of course, speed is a tradeoff against cleanliness.
No way! Really?
and the Notes client is kinda crufty and complicated.
Thats like calling the Iraq war "a misunderstanding between friends"
But sometimes you don't have two weeks to engineer a J2EE solution.
In which case the application is not worth deploying. If you are going to screw thousands of people in your corporation with some turd you came up with in an afternoon, which they will have to use and suffer from for years ("oh yea, its just a temporary quick fix...") then you better reconsider what you are doing. Their productivity loss (not to mention morale) is far worse then the IT spending 2 weeks on it. An equation which somehow never seems to penetrate the IT department's thick (and usually rather arrogant) skulls.
Yes, primarilly at causing grief and pandemonium wherever deployed. Look, if any particular software infrastructure has a few bad implementations, you could argue what you are arguing. Unfortunately, Notes has the misfortune of having a rare example of things actually working in a non-infuriorating way for one or two people in a corporation of thousands. And so it no longer can be excused with a "few bad apples" cop-out. This thread seem to have brought out the rarest of breeds of IT personell... people who use and like Notes.
But, it would cost you A LOT MORE, and you would never get off-line capabilities.
Offline would be more difficult, but the cost thing is nonsense. It takes far more expense to train people to code Notes right just because Notes works actively against you in implementing sane design. Can you crank out, half-assed, insanely useless and incompatible with anything else under the sun Notes "apps" in a day? Sure. Trouble is that you will be the only user that does not choose a four letter word to describe them afterwards.
The first release of Notes was in 1989, when nearly all PCs were running MS-DOS, practically no one had heard of the Internet or TCP/IP, and many executives proudly acknowledged that they didn't even know how to log into a PC.
Unfortunately for that theory, TCP/IP, USENET, Gopher et al were quite well known to all the comp-sci students of most universities at that time, including the author of Notes...
The fact that PC industry was hopelessly, stupidifyingly, behind the state-of-the-art in computer science is no excuse to glorify half-assed attempts to re-invent the wheel (poorly) for fun, profit and personal aggrandisment of some, just because various corporate morons were ignorant enough to fall for it.
Philips worldwide uses Lotus Notes, despite the fact that they are a premium client of Microsoft.
The reason is that everybodies mail is encrypted.
The decision to change to Lotus Notes was made after it was discovered that the sysadmins could read all mail, also from upper management. With Lotus Notes that is not possible.
Then Phillips is yet another victim of clueless pointy-haired-bossism. The answer of course is to use standards-based encryption on the client, such as PGP. That way the security is transparent to mail servers and clients and also immune to vendor lock-in. Furthermore, by using Notes they just get a sense of false security since their outside mail is still unencrypted and travels over SMTP in clear text...not to mention that if you got your admins against you, you are doomed anyhow since they will just install keyboard sniffers and get your passwords and what not...
You're right, we should make sure that we only say things the masses want to hear.
That's my major reason for posting on Slasdot: training to be a politician.
Ah! A sarcastic reply to a sarcastic post! What does sarcasm squared come to? Can we get sarcasm to the third power?
M$'s "Exchange" isn't a centralized solution per se- it depends on all the other M$ crap working together.
Oh believe me, I am the last person to defend Microsoft here. But my experience with Notes is so abysmal that even Microsoft junk looks appealing in comparative terms.
you just suffered with bad implementations, like everyone else.
Well, the problem is that Notes for some reason makes bad implementation attractive, they come somehow natural to it and thus vast majority are a nightmare. Or at least that the gist of my experience and all those I spoke with about it.
Notes is simply a bad execution of a rather grandiose design full of not-quite-thought-through components. It takes a great effort and experience in order not to fall into its various pitfalls and frankly that effort would be better spent elsewhere.
Well it appears that even the Lotus developers disagree with you downthread... but hey who are we to burst your bubble. Someone who would go to the trouble to mod and then log-out and post as an AC strikes me as being somewhat childlish and his oppinion should be viewed with that in mind.
Now perhaps we can dump the eternally crappy Lotus Notes here at the office in favor of something a bit more full featured.
Be careful. This is Slashdot. Most of the mods here havn't seen LotusNotes and probably think its a fancy notepad. And to them every software developer is a genius. I just got troll-rated down the thread for saying negative things about this abomniation...
There are a TON of people using Lotus Notes. It's only recently that Exchange has exceeded Notes in number of seats used.
You neglected to mention that Notes has the dubious priviledge of being hated by both users and admins, while Exchange even though being pain for admins, is generally well received by corporate users. Notes was an unwieldy, diseased, monster. Most sane corporations have long replaced it with HTTP based systems combined with IMAP servers or Exchange.
Lotus Notes was universally hated throughout every corporation I came in contact with, IBM included. The only people who hyped this thing were marketing drones, "visionary CTOs" and pointy-haired bosses.
Virtually all functions of LotusNotes are better served by other technologies, like the classic Apache/PHP/SQL combos etc. (Keep in mind that LotusNotes evolved in parallel with the WWW but most corporations were completely unaware of HTTP until Microsoft "discovered" it)
It is quite amusing to me that someone would proudly take credit for the creation of that monster. I think it goes to show tha there is no such thing as bad publicity for self-promoting "geniuses"....
That is your subjective opinion. I for example would never buy a powerbook which to me looks like a bejewelled accessory for hopeless fashion victims (not to mention the touchpad nonsense). Your statement reminds me of the rantings of one of the "computer visionaries" in the press when he got himself a Ferrari-themed laptop complete with high-gloss paint job and revving engine sound on startup.
Be it in dollars, 'stuff', freedom, or something else.
Yes, that is why there are poeple in prisons who would rather lose their freedom then go against their conscience. That is why there were those who died rather then to sell out to those who thought like you. The existence of those people without the "price" is what keeps me thinking that there might be hope for humanity yet, despite the best efforts of those like you, who seem to despise their gift of sentience and would rather return to the ways of amoral animals.
I dont usually converse with ACs but today I seem to be in a charitable mood. The enslavement I speak of has many components, the two top ones being: establishment of a private taxation system on virtually the entire economy of most Western countries, the other is an attempt to establish "Intellectual Property" laws which seek to appropriate the intellectual heritage of humanity and turn it into rental property for the likes of Bill (which curiously results in drug prices being out of reach for the same very african victims of AIDS who Bill claims to be helping). Enslavement of others can be achieved by many ways, steel chains is only one of them.
They may or may or may not be intellectual equals, but Gates is clearly a better salesman
I never contested Bills salesmanship, merely his morals and his worth to the society.
As of today he has donated around 37%, so your 4% figure is a bit off...
Sources please.
Even if he is giving away all this money because of some "rich brat syndrome" (which I strongly doubt), who cares? Why does his motivation matter if his actions are good?
It matters since the whole point of the conversation was comparing RMS to Bill. Motivations is what this is all about.
By the way, exactly how did he "steal" that money?
By first expoiting general public's lack of understanding of software and operating systems and then by engaging in wide scale extortion.
Why don't you want to reply to the question of whether the ability to read the source code for rich people in industrialized nations is more important than the survival of disease stricken children in poor third world countries?
In order to answer that question, one would have to first answer another: how much of the poverty and desease of the poor third world countries is due to the actions of people like Bill who used them as slave labour and plundered their resources while ensuring that they have no education, democracy or other perks of civilization. Furthermore, one would have to examine the impact of "Intellectual Property" laws promoted by Bill and his buddies which result in things like drugs being far too expensive for vast majority of inhabitants of those countries. And so on. After an in-depth analysis you will quickly discover that men like Bill take far, far more then they give.
Everything that's of utmost importance to you, Random American Cubicle Dweller, (i.e. free software) may not be all that important to the rest of the world, some of which has trouble even surviving. To them it is good that people like you are in no position of power.
The length some people would go to to avoid cognitive dissonance is truly mind boggling.
Free software etc has no bearing on the topic you brought up, which was the "charitable" activities of one Bill Gates.
None of those people have anything to offer, espcially Ghandi. He was a towelhead loser..
RMS is a idealist, flawed by nature. "but he means well" .
Morals are relative.
Self-respect? Depends on your morals ( see above ).
Integrity? Might have a point there, but when you can buy small countries out of pocket change the only person you have to be concerned about is yourself. So it tends to be relative as well at some point.
With an attitude like that, you should wear a neon sign reading "Whats you price, whore?" so that you can save yourself time asking that question of everyone you meet. And they will know right away how to treat you too.
This might come as a shock to you but some people are not for sale, no matter the price. I like to think of myself as a member of that list. And in the long term, people on that list are the only ones who actually have a claim to the term "homo sapiens".
Oh, and one more thing, your attitude is dangerously close to that of a sociopath, from what you are saying I could easilly conclude that organizing with one's army a little gold teeth extraction regimen in a "work camp for inferior races" is all-right because, as you said repeatedly, "morals are relative"...
Please enumerate your donationas and net worth. If they dont add up to a third of your need worth, then you are a hypocritical loser.
Right. If I donate 1/3 of my personal worth (which Bill did not), my tax breaks will not make it a net loss to me of around 4% (which is around of total Bills donations, however large they might seem on paper) and I will not get governmemt kickbacks in form of national procurment deals for my products. Furthermore, my money was not stolen or extorted in the first place. And lastly, if I donated 1/3 of my income, I would end up going hungry myself and Mother Theresa I am not. Subsequently, if there is a hypocrtical loser around, it is you for suggesting such an idiotic thing and trying to present it as if it was possible or wise.
95% is hardly a "negligeable fraction", and its (being 95% of the largest personal fortune in the world) hardly "a few silver coins" either
The number is actually around 4% (after tax breaks and what not) as far as I know. I am not sure where did you get 95%.
You may say what you like about his business tactics, but of all rich enterpreneurs, Gates is one of the most devoted.
No, he merely is starting to have a typical guilt sindrome of a rich brat who stole a lot of money. As far as I am concerned, Microsoft and thus Bill himself stole vast majority of their money from unwitting fools first and then, when they got powerful enough, went into an extortion racket. In a similiar vain, Al Capone was said to be a great filantropist.
Gates charity gets relatively little press, and he doesn't actively seek it out
really? Bill Gates donates billions of dollars a year to many charatable causes. What does RMS donate?
Bill "donates" a negligeable fraction of his ill-gotten fortune to "charitable" causes which somehow inevietably result in government procurment deals for his products and tax breaks. Bill's charity is the Dickensonian kind, of a fat pig in a luxury carriage tossing a few silver coins to wretched poor in rags on the street on Christmas. "Self-serving" is a term we use for that.
As to RMS, a lifetime of effort, bearing fruit such as the GPL and Linux, to mention just the obvious ones. More importantly, he "donated" to humanity an entire movement which seeks to protect us from... people like Bill who will not rest until they somehow enslaved us all.
if RMS really had moral clarity, he (and the FSF foundation) wouldn't go after people for violating the GPL.
I can't tell if you are serious here. GPL is a clever mechanism to protect our rights from those who would take them, using the villain's own legalese. If he would not use it as a weapon, the whole thing would be pointless.
if RMS had integrity and self-respect, he wouldn't have tried to change linux to GNU/linux.
I happen to agree that GNU deserves very considerable credit for Linux, far more so then any other component provided by others. The GNU/Linux campaign is perheaps unwise from the PR point of view, but it has all the moral justification it needs.
free software is fine, but the majority of people in this world don't enjoy getting rehetoric forced down their throats.
Do you know the beauty of free software? You don't have to use it, you don't have to contribute under GPL, you can do what you want with your own projects. What you just said is "Meeee! I wanna to make others make software for Meeee under Myyyy terms!! Everyone, gimmeeee!". Somehow I suspect a conversation on this subject with you is waste of time.
I can bet you have used at least one computer today that has a Microsoft operating system installed.
You would have lost your money, but that is beside the point.
I would say that Bill Gates is clearly more intelligent than RMS. Otherwise, we would all be using GNU software.
I see. So the measure of intelligence is an ability to foist one's "product" on the unsuspecting public. By that measure, the inventor of "pet rock" was a true genius, far above Bill. And I am getting an ominous feeling that I am feeding a garbage-covered troll.
Integrity, self-respect, moral clarity, admiration of peers... I'd say RMS is infinitely wealthier then Bill will ever dream of being. It all depends what your "currency" is...
I dont think bill needs to learn much from RMS.
By this yardstick, Bill has nothing to learn from Mahatma Ghandi either... not that he would comprehend anything, ever. I sense you are belonging to the same school of thought Bill does: The Society of Insanely Greedy Psychopaths.
Where the hell does the money go? It can't be in the acting, or the writing, or direction, or editing, or sets, or special effects, or anything related to the quality of the programme.
* with the corporate-media telepathic-remote-viewing-clairvoiance hat on*
From a cursory reading of the Russ Nelson's "angry-economist" site I concluded that he is simply batshit insane.. and now also a racist, which I guess goes hand-in-hand with being insane...
I recomend for people to read his site (but only after getting intoxicated, that way the danger of mental damage will be lessened and things might actually make sense... in a dancing-pink-elephants sort of way)
The fact of him being the president of OSI (never you mind a high-ranking member) casts an extremely negative light on that organization.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely you meant: Mail-in rebates are for stupid or illiterate consumers.
Let me enumerate the fetures of a mail-in rebate as compared to an actual, old-fashioned, "primitive", you know, cash discount:
Literate and wise consumers recognize this for what it is, i.e. a form of a "bait and switch" scam by the vendor and manufacturer and do complain to Better Business Bureau or law officials.
I've never had a single problem getting my rebates.
Congratulations, the vendor has trained you to be a circus monkey for them: "Plague, cut the barcode, fill the form with all your personal data for sale to direct mailers, pay for postage, run to the post office, go to the bank depositing the cheque! Good monkey!"
That would contradict the poster right above you who claims that Notes is "standards compliant" and supports encrypted mail transparently via S/MIME and what not...
Granted, I never tried to deploy Notes in that way since it proved to be rabidly insane in getting much simplier things to work, but I would recommend for the rare defenders of Notes to compare their notes (pun intended) before claiming that the product cures common cold and is about to bring an era of global peace and happines to all..
I am glad that I have nothing to do with you, but I do pity the "users" of those apps. I have seen the results of this sort of activity in many places and the only person who would ever claim that this was a good thing would be the nut who created these turds. There is a good reason many people make a lot of money getting rid of Notes wherever they are found. And that reason is "dynamic web application with personalization, workflow, forms, end-to-end encryption for security, session-based authentication with timeout, LDAP integration, import and export via XML, rich text editing, file attachments, full text search" built in a day.
I don't know of any other tool that lets me do so much, so quickly.
I heard some of your peers swear by the Visual Basic "rapid application development tool" but I am told MS Access has surpassed it recently in the "built in a day" category of "fully featured" ... err.. "applications".
Of course, speed is a tradeoff against cleanliness.
No way! Really?
and the Notes client is kinda crufty and complicated.
Thats like calling the Iraq war "a misunderstanding between friends"
But sometimes you don't have two weeks to engineer a J2EE solution.
In which case the application is not worth deploying. If you are going to screw thousands of people in your corporation with some turd you came up with in an afternoon, which they will have to use and suffer from for years ("oh yea, its just a temporary quick fix...") then you better reconsider what you are doing. Their productivity loss (not to mention morale) is far worse then the IT spending 2 weeks on it. An equation which somehow never seems to penetrate the IT department's thick (and usually rather arrogant) skulls.
Yes, primarilly at causing grief and pandemonium wherever deployed. Look, if any particular software infrastructure has a few bad implementations, you could argue what you are arguing. Unfortunately, Notes has the misfortune of having a rare example of things actually working in a non-infuriorating way for one or two people in a corporation of thousands. And so it no longer can be excused with a "few bad apples" cop-out. This thread seem to have brought out the rarest of breeds of IT personell ... people who use and like Notes.
But, it would cost you A LOT MORE, and you would never get off-line capabilities.
Offline would be more difficult, but the cost thing is nonsense. It takes far more expense to train people to code Notes right just because Notes works actively against you in implementing sane design. Can you crank out, half-assed, insanely useless and incompatible with anything else under the sun Notes "apps" in a day? Sure. Trouble is that you will be the only user that does not choose a four letter word to describe them afterwards.
Unfortunately for that theory, TCP/IP, USENET, Gopher et al were quite well known to all the comp-sci students of most universities at that time, including the author of Notes...
The fact that PC industry was hopelessly, stupidifyingly, behind the state-of-the-art in computer science is no excuse to glorify half-assed attempts to re-invent the wheel (poorly) for fun, profit and personal aggrandisment of some, just because various corporate morons were ignorant enough to fall for it.
Then Phillips is yet another victim of clueless pointy-haired-bossism. The answer of course is to use standards-based encryption on the client, such as PGP. That way the security is transparent to mail servers and clients and also immune to vendor lock-in. Furthermore, by using Notes they just get a sense of false security since their outside mail is still unencrypted and travels over SMTP in clear text...not to mention that if you got your admins against you, you are doomed anyhow since they will just install keyboard sniffers and get your passwords and what not...
Ah! A sarcastic reply to a sarcastic post! What does sarcasm squared come to? Can we get sarcasm to the third power?
Oh believe me, I am the last person to defend Microsoft here. But my experience with Notes is so abysmal that even Microsoft junk looks appealing in comparative terms.
you just suffered with bad implementations, like everyone else.
Well, the problem is that Notes for some reason makes bad implementation attractive, they come somehow natural to it and thus vast majority are a nightmare. Or at least that the gist of my experience and all those I spoke with about it.
Notes is simply a bad execution of a rather grandiose design full of not-quite-thought-through components. It takes a great effort and experience in order not to fall into its various pitfalls and frankly that effort would be better spent elsewhere.
Well it appears that even the Lotus developers disagree with you downthread ... but hey who are we to burst your bubble. Someone who would go to the trouble to mod and then log-out and post as an AC strikes me as being somewhat childlish and his oppinion should be viewed with that in mind.
This concludes the test of how many of Slashdotters actually ever saw LotusNotes... obviously none with mod points.
Be careful. This is Slashdot. Most of the mods here havn't seen LotusNotes and probably think its a fancy notepad. And to them every software developer is a genius. I just got troll-rated down the thread for saying negative things about this abomniation...
You neglected to mention that Notes has the dubious priviledge of being hated by both users and admins, while Exchange even though being pain for admins, is generally well received by corporate users. Notes was an unwieldy, diseased, monster. Most sane corporations have long replaced it with HTTP based systems combined with IMAP servers or Exchange.
Virtually all functions of LotusNotes are better served by other technologies, like the classic Apache/PHP/SQL combos etc. (Keep in mind that LotusNotes evolved in parallel with the WWW but most corporations were completely unaware of HTTP until Microsoft "discovered" it)
It is quite amusing to me that someone would proudly take credit for the creation of that monster. I think it goes to show tha there is no such thing as bad publicity for self-promoting "geniuses" ....
That is your subjective opinion. I for example would never buy a powerbook which to me looks like a bejewelled accessory for hopeless fashion victims (not to mention the touchpad nonsense). Your statement reminds me of the rantings of one of the "computer visionaries" in the press when he got himself a Ferrari-themed laptop complete with high-gloss paint job and revving engine sound on startup.
Yes, that is why there are poeple in prisons who would rather lose their freedom then go against their conscience. That is why there were those who died rather then to sell out to those who thought like you. The existence of those people without the "price" is what keeps me thinking that there might be hope for humanity yet, despite the best efforts of those like you, who seem to despise their gift of sentience and would rather return to the ways of amoral animals.
I dont usually converse with ACs but today I seem to be in a charitable mood. The enslavement I speak of has many components, the two top ones being: establishment of a private taxation system on virtually the entire economy of most Western countries, the other is an attempt to establish "Intellectual Property" laws which seek to appropriate the intellectual heritage of humanity and turn it into rental property for the likes of Bill (which curiously results in drug prices being out of reach for the same very african victims of AIDS who Bill claims to be helping). Enslavement of others can be achieved by many ways, steel chains is only one of them.
They may or may or may not be intellectual equals, but Gates is clearly a better salesman
I never contested Bills salesmanship, merely his morals and his worth to the society.
Sources please.
Even if he is giving away all this money because of some "rich brat syndrome" (which I strongly doubt), who cares? Why does his motivation matter if his actions are good?
It matters since the whole point of the conversation was comparing RMS to Bill. Motivations is what this is all about.
By the way, exactly how did he "steal" that money?
By first expoiting general public's lack of understanding of software and operating systems and then by engaging in wide scale extortion.
Why don't you want to reply to the question of whether the ability to read the source code for rich people in industrialized nations is more important than the survival of disease stricken children in poor third world countries?
In order to answer that question, one would have to first answer another: how much of the poverty and desease of the poor third world countries is due to the actions of people like Bill who used them as slave labour and plundered their resources while ensuring that they have no education, democracy or other perks of civilization. Furthermore, one would have to examine the impact of "Intellectual Property" laws promoted by Bill and his buddies which result in things like drugs being far too expensive for vast majority of inhabitants of those countries. And so on. After an in-depth analysis you will quickly discover that men like Bill take far, far more then they give.
Everything that's of utmost importance to you, Random American Cubicle Dweller, (i.e. free software) may not be all that important to the rest of the world, some of which has trouble even surviving. To them it is good that people like you are in no position of power. The length some people would go to to avoid cognitive dissonance is truly mind boggling.
Free software etc has no bearing on the topic you brought up, which was the "charitable" activities of one Bill Gates.
With an attitude like that, you should wear a neon sign reading "Whats you price, whore?" so that you can save yourself time asking that question of everyone you meet. And they will know right away how to treat you too.
This might come as a shock to you but some people are not for sale, no matter the price. I like to think of myself as a member of that list. And in the long term, people on that list are the only ones who actually have a claim to the term "homo sapiens".
Oh, and one more thing, your attitude is dangerously close to that of a sociopath, from what you are saying I could easilly conclude that organizing with one's army a little gold teeth extraction regimen in a "work camp for inferior races" is all-right because, as you said repeatedly, "morals are relative"...
Right. If I donate 1/3 of my personal worth (which Bill did not), my tax breaks will not make it a net loss to me of around 4% (which is around of total Bills donations, however large they might seem on paper) and I will not get governmemt kickbacks in form of national procurment deals for my products. Furthermore, my money was not stolen or extorted in the first place. And lastly, if I donated 1/3 of my income, I would end up going hungry myself and Mother Theresa I am not. Subsequently, if there is a hypocrtical loser around, it is you for suggesting such an idiotic thing and trying to present it as if it was possible or wise.
The number is actually around 4% (after tax breaks and what not) as far as I know. I am not sure where did you get 95%.
You may say what you like about his business tactics, but of all rich enterpreneurs, Gates is one of the most devoted.
No, he merely is starting to have a typical guilt sindrome of a rich brat who stole a lot of money. As far as I am concerned, Microsoft and thus Bill himself stole vast majority of their money from unwitting fools first and then, when they got powerful enough, went into an extortion racket. In a similiar vain, Al Capone was said to be a great filantropist.
Gates charity gets relatively little press, and he doesn't actively seek it out
See above.
Bill "donates" a negligeable fraction of his ill-gotten fortune to "charitable" causes which somehow inevietably result in government procurment deals for his products and tax breaks. Bill's charity is the Dickensonian kind, of a fat pig in a luxury carriage tossing a few silver coins to wretched poor in rags on the street on Christmas. "Self-serving" is a term we use for that.
As to RMS, a lifetime of effort, bearing fruit such as the GPL and Linux, to mention just the obvious ones. More importantly, he "donated" to humanity an entire movement which seeks to protect us from ... people like Bill who will not rest until they somehow enslaved us all.
if RMS really had moral clarity, he (and the FSF foundation) wouldn't go after people for violating the GPL.
I can't tell if you are serious here. GPL is a clever mechanism to protect our rights from those who would take them, using the villain's own legalese. If he would not use it as a weapon, the whole thing would be pointless.
if RMS had integrity and self-respect, he wouldn't have tried to change linux to GNU/linux.
I happen to agree that GNU deserves very considerable credit for Linux, far more so then any other component provided by others. The GNU/Linux campaign is perheaps unwise from the PR point of view, but it has all the moral justification it needs.
free software is fine, but the majority of people in this world don't enjoy getting rehetoric forced down their throats.
Do you know the beauty of free software? You don't have to use it, you don't have to contribute under GPL, you can do what you want with your own projects. What you just said is "Meeee! I wanna to make others make software for Meeee under Myyyy terms!! Everyone, gimmeeee!". Somehow I suspect a conversation on this subject with you is waste of time.
I can bet you have used at least one computer today that has a Microsoft operating system installed.
You would have lost your money, but that is beside the point.
I would say that Bill Gates is clearly more intelligent than RMS. Otherwise, we would all be using GNU software.
I see. So the measure of intelligence is an ability to foist one's "product" on the unsuspecting public. By that measure, the inventor of "pet rock" was a true genius, far above Bill. And I am getting an ominous feeling that I am feeding a garbage-covered troll.
Integrity, self-respect, moral clarity, admiration of peers ... I'd say RMS is infinitely wealthier then Bill will ever dream of being. It all depends what your "currency" is...
I dont think bill needs to learn much from RMS.
By this yardstick, Bill has nothing to learn from Mahatma Ghandi either... not that he would comprehend anything, ever. I sense you are belonging to the same school of thought Bill does: The Society of Insanely Greedy Psychopaths.
* with the corporate-media telepathic-remote-viewing-clairvoiance hat on*
Err... executive salaries?
I recomend for people to read his site (but only after getting intoxicated, that way the danger of mental damage will be lessened and things might actually make sense ... in a dancing-pink-elephants sort of way)
The fact of him being the president of OSI (never you mind a high-ranking member) casts an extremely negative light on that organization.