Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po
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Hackers Hall of Fame
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· Score: 5, Funny
In his early days Gates was a hacker, more so than a lot of self-described Slashdot 'hackers' whose only tools are a phillips screwdriver (because they're 'hardware experts') and Linux installation CDs (because they're 'software experts').
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po
on
Hackers Hall of Fame
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· Score: 5, Insightful
by his early concern for copyrights when others were sharing everything,
Actually, the 'others' who where 'sharing everything' were not the copyright holders. The user community of the time was widely sharing things that weren't theirs to share. Bill spoke up, but his company wasn't the only victim of said 'hackers.' There was plenty of other commercial software being spread around without paying for it.
And the 'hacker culture' comes from a different social set than the early 'home computer' enthusiasts anyway. The 'hacker culture' comes from the computer labs of Universities. The 'homebrew computer' culture was a seperate social set entirely.
Intel and IBM started it, but by the late 80's IBM had kicked on the brakes and was trying to kill the monster they had created. They'd brought out the Microchannel PS/2 line and were pushing OS/2 as the 'next generation' alternative.
Apple gave us the 'grandma can use it' interface but wanted to make sure only rich grandmas could afford it. They along with Lotus introduced the culture litigation and legal hassles to the market with their ill-fated 'look and feel' suit.
It seems like you might be one of those people trying to spread some of those historically revisionist myths:
IBM was cool, OS/2 and Microchannel Architecture was bigtime progress and not IBM's attempt to drag the world back into a proprietary box they owned.
Apple (post-Apple ][, which was neat, but the Apple corporate types killed it for the big-bucks Mac) made cool stuff that the geeks and nerds respected.
Yeah, we know you were around back then, but stop lying to the younger folks like you're the wise grandpa. IBM sucked, and tried to kill the clone market when they lost control of it. Apple did their best to make sure the market was securely controlled by marketing people and computers were expensive fashion accessories.
We (the rabble) were all rooting for Bill's vision of computers everywhere for cheap. Thank goodness IBM failed (though the Microchannel architecture had technical merit, it was poisoned by IBM's tight control on the 'standard.'). Thank goodness Apple lost the look-n-feel lawsuit, or the few of us who could afford computers would all be using terrible-quality pre-OSX Macs (they wouldn't have had any motivation to change, the old MacOS developers were arrogant and stubbornly clung to their ways for years and years and still would if they could).
Don't cop an attitude and tell stories that aren't the truth to the younger folks.
Gates and Microsoft further promoted the cause of Linux by their ever-increasing bloat-ware initiative with Intel and the clone vendors. In the period when Linux was coming into it's own there was a huge wake of older hardware on hand no longer suited for running the latest eye-candy from Microsoft, therefore extremely cheap and readily available for Linux and the freenixes.
In the early 90's I had a few 'expensive' machines, i.e. 486DX machines, but I cut my 'networking' teeth running a bunch of copies of Slackware on a home-built subnet of 386sx boxes I got for almost nothing. There was a zero-entry-cost for experimenting with Linux primarily because the Bill-Ware forced so much decent hardware into early obsolescence.
It's not that much the case now, as Linux distro producers seem to have caught the spirit of their 'eye-candy bloatware' commercial brethren, and the latest Linux OSes are just as piggish if not more-so than the Redmond offering, but back in ye olden times it wasn't so.
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po
on
Hackers Hall of Fame
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
No, actually, a lot of us had cheap PC clones that we'd put together from parts. I was running a BBS on an 8088 machine with 640K, a 5 meg HD, and a 1200 baud modem. It had a member list in three digits and at it's height sponsored a bowling league (not just a bowling team). You guys with your cheap plastic-case computers were there, too, but you shouldn't discount the PC people as just doing 'boring crap.' Some of you were connecting to my board.
Of course, I was a grown-up (in my 20's) in the '80s, I guess if I'd been younger I would have been seriously involved in the toy computers, rather than just having a few around to fiddle with, while doing practical things with PC clones.
Does this mean that all the people who rant and rave and hold protests, and the businesses and organizations who lobby politicians should all just go to the voting booth and vote, and then sit on their hands after the election?
I don't see why 'voting' is a pre-requisite to having a say.
The process is often a joke, a game complete with 'Rules of Order' and little hats to wear. It isn't necessary to get sucked into the BS to call it what it is, and have a strong opinion about the issues in question.
I don't understand why anyone would want to not vote. It's throwing away your right to complain about the government.
Anybody forced to pay for government (any taxpayer) is entitled to complain about government, wether or not he/she engages in the dog and pony show used to 'elect' the people who decide how his/her taxes are spent.
I'm sorry. Glib 'get involved in party politics or quiet down' nonsense doesn't work.
It's a filtering process. If you can filter out everyone else, you end up with a customer list of sukkahs that is a gold mine.
Similarly, those ads for obscene junk on TV (all those 'miracle pans' and the 'garden weasel' and what-not) don't have to make that much money selling the particular item- it builds a list of the kind of dweebs you can sell all sorts of stuff to in the future.
I go to estate auctions regularly, and every once in awhile the estate of an obvious dowager comes along. A elderly woman with money whose 'affairs' all through her life were settled and managed by a man who isn't there anymore. There are often boxes and boxes of mail order junk that the woman accumulated, and didn't even open. It's obvious she ended up on somebody's 'list' somehow.
I can't remember the last time some of my Windoze software broke because I installed something else or 'upgraded' or 'patched.'
It used to happen all the time with Microsoft Windows systems. But Linux came along and challanged Microsoft in terms of reliability. Microsoft scrambled and came up with Windows 2000 as their response. It's far, far, more stable than older MS offerings.
Problem is, many of the most frentic Open Source advocates haven't used a Microsoft OS since before W2K so their experience of 'buggy easily-broken' Microsoft OSes is dated and no longer the case.
but impulse renting has gotten me some real stinker movies,
Oh, the horror of it all! Well, you'd best stay on your chosen track, watching only meticulously selected films that you know ahead of time you will like.
All I know is, they don't seem to have configured their robots.txt file properly. Wget isn't doing any clicking at all, and it's swooping a lot of images onto my hard drive.
One of my favorite RPGs is 'Castle of the Winds' which is one of the few Windows 3.1 games worth playing for hours. It plays well on the 386SX-16 laptop I have for things like that. I don't run Linux on that laptop because it only has 4 megs of RAM. But I could.
I run Office 2000 on an older Toshiba 486 laptop (75 MHz). It runs on Windows 95 OSR2. As long as you stuff enough RAM in the system (it has 32 megs) it moves right along. I wouldn't get up in front of a thousand people and run a Powerpoint presentation using this setup, but for most of what people use a program like MS Office for, it works great.
The surface area of large SUV vehicles is far greater than that of small compact cars. Therefore, they can have a far greater positive impact on the environment when painted with this paint than the little pod cars.
Voila! I can see Detroit getting behind this paint bigtime.
Slashdot Mirror
In his early days Gates was a hacker, more so than a lot of self-described Slashdot 'hackers' whose only tools are a phillips screwdriver (because they're 'hardware experts') and Linux installation CDs (because they're 'software experts').
by his early concern for copyrights when others were sharing everything,
Actually, the 'others' who where 'sharing everything' were not the copyright holders. The user community of the time was widely sharing things that weren't theirs to share. Bill spoke up, but his company wasn't the only victim of said 'hackers.' There was plenty of other commercial software being spread around without paying for it.
And the 'hacker culture' comes from a different social set than the early 'home computer' enthusiasts anyway. The 'hacker culture' comes from the computer labs of Universities. The 'homebrew computer' culture was a seperate social set entirely.
Apple gave us the 'grandma can use it' interface but wanted to make sure only rich grandmas could afford it. They along with Lotus introduced the culture litigation and legal hassles to the market with their ill-fated 'look and feel' suit.
It seems like you might be one of those people trying to spread some of those historically revisionist myths:
IBM was cool, OS/2 and Microchannel Architecture was bigtime progress and not IBM's attempt to drag the world back into a proprietary box they owned.
Apple (post-Apple ][, which was neat, but the Apple corporate types killed it for the big-bucks Mac) made cool stuff that the geeks and nerds respected.
Yeah, we know you were around back then, but stop lying to the younger folks like you're the wise grandpa. IBM sucked, and tried to kill the clone market when they lost control of it. Apple did their best to make sure the market was securely controlled by marketing people and computers were expensive fashion accessories.
We (the rabble) were all rooting for Bill's vision of computers everywhere for cheap. Thank goodness IBM failed (though the Microchannel architecture had technical merit, it was poisoned by IBM's tight control on the 'standard.'). Thank goodness Apple lost the look-n-feel lawsuit, or the few of us who could afford computers would all be using terrible-quality pre-OSX Macs (they wouldn't have had any motivation to change, the old MacOS developers were arrogant and stubbornly clung to their ways for years and years and still would if they could).
Don't cop an attitude and tell stories that aren't the truth to the younger folks.
Gates and Microsoft further promoted the cause of Linux by their ever-increasing bloat-ware initiative with Intel and the clone vendors. In the period when Linux was coming into it's own there was a huge wake of older hardware on hand no longer suited for running the latest eye-candy from Microsoft, therefore extremely cheap and readily available for Linux and the freenixes.
In the early 90's I had a few 'expensive' machines, i.e. 486DX machines, but I cut my 'networking' teeth running a bunch of copies of Slackware on a home-built subnet of 386sx boxes I got for almost nothing. There was a zero-entry-cost for experimenting with Linux primarily because the Bill-Ware forced so much decent hardware into early obsolescence.
It's not that much the case now, as Linux distro producers seem to have caught the spirit of their 'eye-candy bloatware' commercial brethren, and the latest Linux OSes are just as piggish if not more-so than the Redmond offering, but back in ye olden times it wasn't so.
No, actually, a lot of us had cheap PC clones that we'd put together from parts. I was running a BBS on an 8088 machine with 640K, a 5 meg HD, and a 1200 baud modem. It had a member list in three digits and at it's height sponsored a bowling league (not just a bowling team). You guys with your cheap plastic-case computers were there, too, but you shouldn't discount the PC people as just doing 'boring crap.' Some of you were connecting to my board.
Of course, I was a grown-up (in my 20's) in the '80s, I guess if I'd been younger I would have been seriously involved in the toy computers, rather than just having a few around to fiddle with, while doing practical things with PC clones.
Not in an economy where nobody can afford to hire a plumber.
And, of course, MyHeretic.a for people who want a richer, more complex FPS playing environment.
Does this mean that all the people who rant and rave and hold protests, and the businesses and organizations who lobby politicians should all just go to the voting booth and vote, and then sit on their hands after the election?
I don't see why 'voting' is a pre-requisite to having a say.
The process is often a joke, a game complete with 'Rules of Order' and little hats to wear. It isn't necessary to get sucked into the BS to call it what it is, and have a strong opinion about the issues in question.
I don't understand why anyone would want to not vote. It's throwing away your right to complain about the government.
Anybody forced to pay for government (any taxpayer) is entitled to complain about government, wether or not he/she engages in the dog and pony show used to 'elect' the people who decide how his/her taxes are spent.
I'm sorry. Glib 'get involved in party politics or quiet down' nonsense doesn't work.
Yeah, right.
And nobody in the US drinks Budweiser, either.
What those guys did primarily screwed a bunch of bureaucrats. Oh, and it screwed the bureaucrats running things in the U.S.S.R., too.
Oh, wait....
You won't find that many non-Thailand customers who want to use a version not in their native language.
These days you overclock or get into case modding.
It's a filtering process. If you can filter out everyone else, you end up with a customer list of sukkahs that is a gold mine.
Similarly, those ads for obscene junk on TV (all those 'miracle pans' and the 'garden weasel' and what-not) don't have to make that much money selling the particular item- it builds a list of the kind of dweebs you can sell all sorts of stuff to in the future.
I go to estate auctions regularly, and every once in awhile the estate of an obvious dowager comes along. A elderly woman with money whose 'affairs' all through her life were settled and managed by a man who isn't there anymore. There are often boxes and boxes of mail order junk that the woman accumulated, and didn't even open. It's obvious she ended up on somebody's 'list' somehow.
It's good to see examples of the fear of inadequacy right here in the discussion threads.
I can't remember the last time some of my Windoze software broke because I installed something else or 'upgraded' or 'patched.'
It used to happen all the time with Microsoft Windows systems. But Linux came along and challanged Microsoft in terms of reliability. Microsoft scrambled and came up with Windows 2000 as their response. It's far, far, more stable than older MS offerings.
Problem is, many of the most frentic Open Source advocates haven't used a Microsoft OS since before W2K so their experience of 'buggy easily-broken' Microsoft OSes is dated and no longer the case.
Where did he say anything about his tastes being 'elite'?
but impulse renting has gotten me some real stinker movies,
Oh, the horror of it all! Well, you'd best stay on your chosen track, watching only meticulously selected films that you know ahead of time you will like.
Please note small typo in comment title, to 'protect the innocent.'
(Slow Down Cowboy!
It's been 43 seconds since you last... blah blah blah)
All I know is, they don't seem to have configured their robots.txt file properly. Wget isn't doing any clicking at all, and it's swooping a lot of images onto my hard drive.
One of my favorite RPGs is 'Castle of the Winds' which is one of the few Windows 3.1 games worth playing for hours. It plays well on the 386SX-16 laptop I have for things like that. I don't run Linux on that laptop because it only has 4 megs of RAM. But I could.
I run Office 2000 on an older Toshiba 486 laptop (75 MHz). It runs on Windows 95 OSR2. As long as you stuff enough RAM in the system (it has 32 megs) it moves right along. I wouldn't get up in front of a thousand people and run a Powerpoint presentation using this setup, but for most of what people use a program like MS Office for, it works great.
The surface area of large SUV vehicles is far greater than that of small compact cars. Therefore, they can have a far greater positive impact on the environment when painted with this paint than the little pod cars.
Voila! I can see Detroit getting behind this paint bigtime.
Homework Assignment:
Go anywhere in the third world and find out what gets accepted more readily: A US $100 bill or a Canadian $100 bill.
Somebody needs to cut up Carly for fish food. Problem is, the Mississipi carp are already contaminated enough.
It's too bad we can't just beat her to death with RPN calculators.