Bill Gates Remembers LSD Trips, Smoking Pot, and How the Smartphone OS Market 'Was Ours for the Taking' (independent.co.uk) 100
Fortune remembers that in 2011 Steve Jobs had told author Walter Isaacson that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates would "be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger."
But The Indendepent notes that in his new memoir Gates does write about two acid trip experiences. (Gates mis-timed his first experiment with LSD, ending up still tripping during a previously-scheduled appointment for dental surgery...) "Later in the book, Gates recounts another experience with LSD with future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and some friends... Gates says in the book that it was the fear of damaging his memory that finally persuaded him never to take the drug again." He added: "I smoked pot in high school, but not because it did anything interesting. I thought maybe I would look cool and some girl would think that was interesting. It didn't succeed, so I gave it up."
Gates went on to say that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who didn't know about his past drug use, teased him on the subject. "Steve Jobs once said that he wished I'd take acid because then maybe I would have had more taste in my design of my products," recalled Gates. "My response to that was to say, 'Look, I got the wrong batch.' I got the coding batch, and this guy got the marketing-design batch, so good for him! Because his talents and mine, other than being kind of an energetic leader, and pushing the limits, they didn't overlap much. He wouldn't know what a line of code meant, and his ability to think about design and marketing and things like that... I envy those skills. I'm not in his league."
Gates added that he was a fan of Michael Pollan's book about psychedelic drugs, How To Change Your Mind, and is intrigued by the idea that they may have therapeutic uses. "The idea that some of these drugs that affect your mind might help with depression or OCD, I think that's fascinating," said Gates. "Of course, we have to be careful, and that's very different than recreational usage."
Touring the country, 69-year-old Gates shared more glimpses of his life story:
But The Indendepent notes that in his new memoir Gates does write about two acid trip experiences. (Gates mis-timed his first experiment with LSD, ending up still tripping during a previously-scheduled appointment for dental surgery...) "Later in the book, Gates recounts another experience with LSD with future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and some friends... Gates says in the book that it was the fear of damaging his memory that finally persuaded him never to take the drug again." He added: "I smoked pot in high school, but not because it did anything interesting. I thought maybe I would look cool and some girl would think that was interesting. It didn't succeed, so I gave it up."
Gates went on to say that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who didn't know about his past drug use, teased him on the subject. "Steve Jobs once said that he wished I'd take acid because then maybe I would have had more taste in my design of my products," recalled Gates. "My response to that was to say, 'Look, I got the wrong batch.' I got the coding batch, and this guy got the marketing-design batch, so good for him! Because his talents and mine, other than being kind of an energetic leader, and pushing the limits, they didn't overlap much. He wouldn't know what a line of code meant, and his ability to think about design and marketing and things like that... I envy those skills. I'm not in his league."
Gates added that he was a fan of Michael Pollan's book about psychedelic drugs, How To Change Your Mind, and is intrigued by the idea that they may have therapeutic uses. "The idea that some of these drugs that affect your mind might help with depression or OCD, I think that's fascinating," said Gates. "Of course, we have to be careful, and that's very different than recreational usage."
Touring the country, 69-year-old Gates shared more glimpses of his life story:
- The Harvard Gazette notes that the university didn't offer computer science degrees when Gates attended in 1973. But since Gates already had years of code-writing experience, he "initially rebuffed any suggestion of taking computer-related coursework... 'It's too easy,' he remembered telling friends."
- "The naiveté I had that free computing would just be this unadulterated good thing wasn't totally correct even before AI," Gates told an audience at the Harvard Book Store. "And now with AI, I can see that we could shape this in the wrong way."
- Gates "expressed regret about how he treated another boyhood friend, Paul Allen, the other cofounder of Microsoft, who died in 2018," reports the Boston Globe. "Gates at first took 60 percent ownership of the new software company and then pressured his friend for another 4 percent. 'I feel bad about it in retrospect,' he said. 'That was always a little complicated, and I wish I hadn't pushed....'"
- Business Insider adds that according to his memoir, Gates "eventually gave his additional 4% stake to [Steve] Ballmer to convince him to quit business school for Microsoft. 'He joined in 1980 and became the 24-hour-a-day partner I needed,' Gates wrote."
- Benzinga writes that Gates has now "donated $100 billion to charitable causes... Had Gates retained the $100 billion he has donated, his total wealth would be around $264 billion, placing him second on the global wealth rankings behind Elon Musk and ahead of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg."
- Gates told the Associated Press "I am stunned that Intel basically lost its way," saying Intel is now "kind of behind" on both chip design and fabrication. "They missed the AI chip revolution, and with their fabrication capabilities, they don't even use standards that people like Nvidia and Qualcomm find easy... I hope Intel recovers, but it looks pretty tough for them at this stage."
- Gates also told the Associated Press that fighting a three-year antitrust case had "distracted" Microsoft. "The area that Google did well in that would not have happened had I not been distracted is Android, where it was a natural thing for me. I was trying, although what I didn't do well enough is provide the operating system for the phone. That was ours for the taking."
- The Dallas News reports that in an on-stage interview in Texas, Mark Cuban closed by asking Gates one question. "Is the American Dream alive?" Gates answered: "It was for me."
The bloated mess that is Microsoft software (Score:3)
That's not the kind of miss Microsoft would normally make. As you might imagine because they did that their phones were relegated to a filing cabinet in a basement behind a sign that said beware of leopard.
I guess it's possible it was just arrogance too thinking that people would flock to it because they knew Windows 8 of course everyone hate it Windows 8 so there's that. But again I think it's more likely they were concerned about antitrust law enforcement at the time whereas Apple and Google were in a better position to do stuff like that
Re:The bloated mess that is Microsoft software (Score:5, Informative)
People didn't buy windows phones because they sucked.
Microsoft trying to make a tiny kernel version of windows wasn't going to help even if they managed to pull it off. Windows wasn't never intended or designed to run on small systems or in pseudo real time. Windows NT was the first Windows with any form of real multi tasking/threading worth talking about and that shit wasn't going to squeeze down from the data center where it was intended to be used to a dinky phone.
And even let's assume that yeah sure they pulled off a proper tiny kernel, what software was going to run on it? All the Microsoft made stuff such as Office which was the only reason most people wanted windows wasn't already bloated back then. And who is going to use Excel or PowerPoint on their phone? Even MSWord, what's the point of a fully bloated out wysiwyg word processor on a phone?
Sales guys pushing whatever had little to nothing to do with the windows phone bombing. It died because it sucked, filled no niche, solved no problems, served no purpose.
The rest of Gates' nonsense is a bunch of retcon shit and some boot licking about giving away $100 billion to slap a ton of lipstick on that immoral and unethical pig. I wonder how many trips he took on Epstein's plane? We know he had no problem drooling on and fucking his employees and apparently his ex-wife divorced him over his "Epstein activities" if the news reports and rumors can be believed. Does he remember all that?
Hey Bill, how about a memoir about your time with Epstein. Tell us about -that-!
Re:The bloated mess that is Microsoft software (Score:5, Funny)
What're you talking about?! They all had that neat little hole on the back that you could stick a paper clip in to reset them every six hours when they locked up. Super convenient.
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Now, Im not saying thats sad, but.... thats sad.
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Best taken with an "OK, Good" (Score:2)
It's the usual path for selling a book about your life, career and legacy.
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What're you talking about?! They all had that neat little hole on the back that you could stick a paper clip in to reset them every six hours when they locked up. Super convenient.
Actually, in those days you could still take out the battery to hard reset the device. Not everything has been progress, I suppose.
Re: The bloated mess that is Microsoft software (Score:2)
I agree, the OS didn't implement many system calls, essentially making it a "the light is on but nobody home" operating system. Ir did just return a value saying that it was ok, but the expected result didn't show up.
No wonder that app makers gave up on creating for that os.
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Everything that Microsoft got nailed to the wall for with their antitrust problems is known as "business as usual" for Apple and Google. Both platforms come with the OS preloaded on their hardware, both bundle their own first party browser, and they even go a bit further than Microsoft ever did by restricting user root access to the OS itself. Don't even get me started on app signing and locked bootloaders.
The smartphone market turned into absolutely everything we feared Microsoft would do to the PC indus
Re:The bloated mess that is Microsoft software (Score:5, Informative)
Everything that Microsoft got nailed to the wall for with their antitrust problems is known as "business as usual" for Apple and Google.
Sorry I don't remember Apple or Google threatening Intel not to release a Java compiler for x86 because they feared Java. I don't remember either of them then releasing an incompatible version of Java just to screw over Sun. I don't remember either of them kindly remind OEMs that if they did business with Netscape and didn't preinstall Internet Explorer, they might lose their favored Windows OEM pricing. As much as Google and Apple does, you seem to forget what MS did back in the day.
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Or used bribes to sway standard setting committees...
https://www.wired.com/2007/08/... [wired.com]
When you're not a dominant market player (Score:2)
With Microsoft the problem is they would clearly be leveraging their dominance in the desktop OS market to take over the cell phone market. That's where antitrust gets triggered.
Although h
Re: The bloated mess that is Microsoft software (Score:2)
Windows CE was not really bloated. The original XBox ran it and smart phones are as powerful as the original XBox.
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CE wasn't the worst piece of software but it couldn't compare to Android let alone iOS back then. I'm not a fan of iPhones but early Android was painful.
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Early Android was basically a blackberry clone with touch screen ability tacked on. It lagged and stuttered tremendously. Google "solved" that by beefing up hardware power over the years, but it's still not really as pixel perfect smooth or responsive as iOS, which was designed with touch control as the priority.
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I don't think that's correct. Most original XBOX games used the DirectX API that Microsoft provided, and integrated into the OS e.g. to allow you to copy your own music to the HDD and replace the in-game stuff, or to use XBOX Live.
The issue with emulation is that the GeForce NV2A chip in it has some quirks to the way to renders stuff.
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That's not the kind of miss Microsoft would normally make. As you might imagine because they did that their phones were relegated to a filing cabinet in a basement behind a sign that said beware of leopard.
During the early 2000-s, Microsoft had very real mobile OS: WinCE. It had a nice programming API, basically a cut-down version of Win32. I can see a world where Microsoft iterated on WinCE and pre-empted Apple by several years. Microsoft was even pushing tablet computing long before iPad.
Their main problem indeed was a total lack of focus. I think Joel Spolsky told stories about how the Microsoft Word team was allergic to pen input (on tablets). Or Pocket Excel not being able to read the real Excel files
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The problem was the "windows" branding...
Buyers expected compatibility with the versions of windows they were already familiar with, but there was none. You couldn't run your existing apps.
The xbox was not windows branded, and was a lot more successful. Apple also differentiated ios from macos so that users didn't expect any type of compatibility between the two.
For others the windows name already had a bad taste. They might have been stuck with it on desktop computers due to existing lock-in, but they were
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The problem was the "windows" branding...
That and the fact that the UI was an absolute disaster for usability on a phone-sized device.
Microsoft did okay with the Xbox because they had a template to copy from the other established console manufacturers, and they resisted whatever urges they might've had to just make it a box that runs Windows on your TV. The fact that it ran an embedded version of Windows under the hood didn't matter because the end user never saw it.
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Dude mobile OS's were going nowhere with the point and click paradigm.
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Was never going to fly on smartphones without some heavy duty antitrust law violations. And I think they just had a little too much attention on them at the time. The reason Windows mobile never took off was because Android and Apple both gave out commission money every time of salesman sold one of their phones and Microsoft didn't.
What history are you remembering? Microsoft was in smartphones long before Google and Apple. Windows CE which powered Windows Mobile existed before Jobs returned to Apple. It was not compatible with Windows on PC and was just superficially made to look like Windows. Windows Mobile had a decent marketshare. The problem was it stagnated while Android and iOS kept adding new features. Also it was buggy, unstable, and sometimes unusable.
What further killed it in the mobile market was every revision that MS ma
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The idea with embedded/mobile versions of Windows was that developers could use a familiar API to bring apps to the platform. The problem with that is that mobile apps need a really good touch interface, and it encouraged developers to stick with desktop style interfaces. They tried to mitigate it with bad hardware like a stylus and tiny keyboard.
Many early attempts at touchscreen portables running desktop Windows had the same problem.
It could have easily been foreseen too, because it happened multiple time
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Was never going to fly on smartphones without some heavy duty antitrust law violations. And I think they just had a little too much attention on them at the time.
Not sure it was attention. Microsoft's strategy was always to get into the workplace with the assumption that people will use the same thing at home as they do at work.
So if I'm Microsoft in that era I'm looking at Blackberry more than Apple / Android, and I'm focused on delivering something that integrates neatly with the Microsoft corporate stack of the time.
The reason Windows mobile never took off was because Android and Apple both gave out commission money every time of salesman sold one of their phones and Microsoft didn't.
I think it's more the point that Android and Apple were cool in a way that Microsoft wasn't and people came into the store wanting them.
People buy Wi
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Was never going to fly on smartphones without some heavy duty antitrust law violations. And I think they just had a little too much attention on them at the time. The reason Windows mobile never took off was because Android and Apple both gave out commission money every time of salesman sold one of their phones and Microsoft didn't.
That's not the kind of miss Microsoft would normally make. As you might imagine because they did that their phones were relegated to a filing cabinet in a basement behind a sign that said beware of leopard.
I guess it's possible it was just arrogance too thinking that people would flock to it because they knew Windows 8 of course everyone hate it Windows 8 so there's that. But again I think it's more likely they were concerned about antitrust law enforcement at the time whereas Apple and Google were in a better position to do stuff like that
I was once given a Windows Phone for work in 2016, one of the few nice things I can say about Windows Phone is that it wasn't slow. Just about everything else was shit though.
Their biggest mistake was trying to copy Apple with a limited "our way or the highway" approach to the end user, where as they should have done things the Microsoft way and said "here's the OS with our base applications, oh and here are the APIs for application developers" and let people sort themselves out. It was never going to wo
wat (Score:2)
"The naiveté I had that free computing would just be this unadulterated good thing wasn't totally correct even before AI,"
You tried to murder it, bro
Epstein Client List (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is he gaslighting us into thinking Windows Phone didn't exist?
Or the Nokia acquisition.
The market didn't want what he was selling.
If you want to point fingers, it was Blackberry and BES - corporate learned that phones didn't need to be a Microsoft product.
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Because you didn't even finish reading TFS
what I didn't do well enough is provide the operating system for the phone
He's saying it was theirs for the taking, but they failed to make their mobile OS good enough.
He never said he didn't do it. He said he didn't do it well enough.
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Well, he's right about that. If he could only be as honest about his impact on computing as about that, maybe I wouldn't hate his guts.
The early Windows phones (all of the wince ones) were bad technically, but they were also bad in other ways. Most had bad hardware to go with the bad software.
Re:Epstein Client List (Score:4, Insightful)
I know a far more important guy who keeps turning up in photos with Epstein. When asked about releasing the files he said it would be problematic for some people.
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Or the Nokia acquisition. The market didn't want what he was selling.
That was long after Bill Gates stepped away from Microsoft entirely in 2008.
To remind everyone (Score:2)
Gates took free code, improved the UI, then sold it. That wasn't enough so he then added vendor lock-in. When he added forced bundling of software, the government got upset. The government got upset again, when Microsoft tried to buy competing software. Gates, the poster-boy of not-free software, knew the "good" didn't survive in the world of profit.
I guess Gates gave-up one dream, owning the world. But that's a common mind-set in the USA. It'll be interesting to see what this decade's billionaires do
Re: To remind everyone (Score:2)
What free code did he take? The only thing I can think of is early versions of Windows used the BSD network stack, but it was quickly replaced.
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He allegedly stole code for an open-source draft version of BASIC for x86 and tweaked it.
Bill must've been on drugs (Score:2)
Microsoft almost had the smartphone OS market? Can we get Vin Diesel [youtube.com] to explain to Bill how far from reality that statement is?
The unwashed masses were never going to accept Windows CE on their phones. It was a clunky, difficult-to-use OS, bringing all the worst design paradigms of Windows to a device too small and underpowered for anything even remotely resembling a decent user experience. People only suffered through using those devices because they were tech enthusiasts living on the bleeding edge, or
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His claim is that MS was positioned to have the entire smartphone market- and lost it.
And he's right.
MS had a smart phone when everyone else had shitty feature phones.
As he mentioned- they fucked up. Their smart phone sucked. If it had not sucked, mobile would be a very different world today.
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"Christ, I do wonder how the fuck people can formulate a comment with so many words in it when they seemingly can't read."
OP's been doing that for years, it gets no better.
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His claim is that MS was positioned to have the entire smartphone market- and lost it.
In order to be positioned to take something it first has to be within your capabilities to grasp it in the first place. Microsoft's corporate culture was simply antithetical to them ever winning over the smartphone market. They would've had to have been willing to flush Windows CE down the toilet much earlier in the game and Microsoft has never been an innovative company - embrace, extend, extinguish was how they've always competed. They've never known what the market wanted until someone else came along
Re:Bill must've been on drugs (Score:4, Funny)
In order to be positioned to take something it first has to be within your capabilities to grasp it in the first place.
Oh, shut the fuck up.
That's how you're gonna dig your way out of idiotically commenting on an article you obviously didn't read?
Get the fuck out of here.
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You're the one who's not getting it. This isn't Mr. Bitcoin pizza who would've been a millionaire if he'd held onto his coins rather than ordered a pizza. Microsoft was so firmly intrenched in their when the only tool you have is a hammer belief that the only way they'd have captured the smartphone market was if the general public actually had a different opinion of Windows CE.
It was a garbage OS and Microsoft loved it so much they even crammed it into their first gaming console. This was never playing o
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You're the one who's not getting it.
My name's Pitt, and your ass ain't talkin' your way outta this shit.
We all thank you from the dumbass from-the-hip take, though.
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You're just butthurt because you projected your failure to read the article and it backfired when the entire relevant quote was already in the summary. Don't feel bad, you can always go on ChatGPT and ask it to come up with some imaginary scenarios in which Microsoft didn't have its head firmly up its ass while Apple was actually innovating.
Heck, don't even need the LLM to see how that would've played out. A long time ago, in an alternate reality where Apple didn't get bailed out and subsequently went out
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My dear dude, I'm laughing at a moron. My butt feels golden delicious.
Your predilection for inventing fantasy histories and nonsensical causalities is amusing- I'll give you that.
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Microsoft's corporate culture was simply antithetical to them ever winning over the smartphone market. They would've had to have been willing to flush Windows CE down the toilet much earlier in the game
Flushing WinCE down the drains later was one of the reasons Windows Mobile failed. They should have kept it and iterated on top of it, and there were plans to do just that.
Microsoft has never been an innovative company - embrace, extend, extinguish was how they've always competed
Oh, bullshit. MS was an innovation-driven company in 80-s and 90-s. They created the market for personal computers, and they had _the_ best office suite. Arguably, EEE really worked for MS only with Novell Netware, and maybe with Netscape Navigator.
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They created the market for personal computers, and they had _the_ best office suite. Arguably, EEE really worked for MS only with Novell Netware, and maybe with Netscape Navigator.
Don't remember the days of DOS productivity software?
How about when Windows 3.x used to crash if you looked at it funny?
Microsoft excels (pun intended) at taking someone else's idea, improving upon it, and then leveraging its existing market share to sell it. It's a great business model when it works, but it fails against a fast moving competitor like Google.
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Don't remember the days of DOS productivity software?
... Was there a point hidden in that trip down memory lane?
How about when Windows 3.x used to crash if you looked at it funny?
Never had that problem. Was your computer a piece of shit?
Microsoft excels (pun intended) at taking someone else's idea, improving upon it, and then leveraging its existing market share to sell it.
Someone else's idea.... a spreadsheet? Are you fucking kidding me right now?
Yup- every spreadsheet every made after VisiCalc- a copy.
What really pisses me off is how they copied the calculator, though. Buttons 0 through 9 and some basic arithmetic operators? Oooooh, so clever MS.
It's a great business model when it works, but it fails against a fast moving competitor like Google.
My ass. Have you seen Google Sheets? They basically took 1-2-3, slapped a crappy web front end in front of it, an
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Didn't have "someone simping for Microsoft so hard they claim Windows 3.x was actually reliable" on my bingo card today. Looks like it ain't the only thing that has memory leaks, dude.
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I stopped using Windows for my desktop back in 2007.
I switched from linux to Mac back in 2020 when the M1 was released.
Being accused of being a simp by someone trying to deflect the heat brought on by their own stupidity wasn't on my bingo card today
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I mean by that logic, I was positioned to be a tech billionaire because I had a website in the 90s, but my web site just sucked but if it hadn't, I'd be big.
MS smart phones were competing with Blackberry and Palm as credible "smart phones" of the time. They were far from alone in the nascent market. They all botched what was the "right" UI to reach the masses (capacitive touch) and failed general UI design especially failing to produce web browsers capable of competent interaction with desktop targeted webs
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Microsoft almost had the smartphone OS market?
That's actually true. Microsoft was the dominant mobile smartphone OS in 2006. I'd say that HTC 8525 ( https://www.gsmarena.com/at&t_... [gsmarena.com] ) was _better_ than the first iPhone in every regard.
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Microsoft can re-enter the phone market at any time they wish. The only tangible difference between a Windows on ARM gaming handheld and a Windows phone is the dialer app.
Windows 10 Mobile morphs into an XBox phone with a simple recompile, it's all the latest iteration of Windows NT under the covers. Don't forget they implemented, then abandoned, an Android compatibility layer for Windows 11.
Just don't market it as a phone. Sell it as an XBox, that makes calls.
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Microsoft can re-enter the phone market at any time they wish.
The problem is that they're not really in a position to extract profit from the phone market. The hardware side of things is cutthroat. The OS side their two major competitors give their OS away for free. That leaves trying to make money off the app developers by taking a cut of their revenue, and whoops, big chicken-and-egg problem there since nobody is going to develop for a platform that has few users.
Microsoft could certainly re-enter the mobile landscape if they wanted to just set money on fire, but
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Like I suggested, they would not making a phone, they'd be making a handheld XBox that happens to make phone calls.
The revenue would come from games.
If Valve (Steam Deck) and Nintendo (Switch) can make a living, I don't see why MS couldn't.
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That's actually true. Microsoft was the dominant mobile smartphone OS in 2006.
Yeah, as I said, among tech enthusiasts and people forced to use the phone by their employer. The average zoomer wanting Apple and Samsung's latest shiny to watch TikTok vids wasn't ever going to be a thing without the changes iOS and Android brought to the table.
Perhaps there's an argument to be made that making a smartphone even an idiot can use has empowered more than a few idiots, but we're talking about achieving success in the marketplace, not whether or not giving the smartphone concept universal ap
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Seriously- it's boundless.
The changes Android brought to the table?
I had an iPhone 3G, and a T-Mobile G1.
Neither of them were any more capable than my MDA.
They had better touch screen tech (capacitive vs resistive), and infinitely less functionality.
My girlfriend (now wife) also had a CE phone.
Neither of ours were forced upon us by our employer.
Android and Apple brought nothing to the table that couldn't have been leveraged by an already overwhelming lead
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By the time Microsoft finally got serious about designing a mobile OS where usability was a consideration, it was far too late. Android and iOS already had established their duopoly and Microsoft was relegated to being an also-ran with abysmal third party app support.
Add that MS cannot really do usability. (Or reliability or security...) They just scrape by on barely usable and that only works with a monopoly. Seems to get worse (again) at this time as well. Their crap wastes to much time that anybody that has alternatives stays away.
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You really are just an infinite source of shit takes.
MS hasn't had anything approaching a monopoly for a very long time.
Now, I haven't used Windows as my desktop machine (I do have a gaming laptop, and a steam streaming PC hidden behind my couch, both running Windows) in about 18 years, now, and I would *never* fucking go back- but it is an absolutely ridiculous falsehood to claim, "They just scrape by on barely usable and that only works with a monopoly."
Because they don't fucking have one.
MS
Complicated (Score:5, Insightful)
I still can't decide if gates is just a savvy businessman or a supervillan.
His business behaviour in the 90's was grotesque and it's the reason the majority of the business world has to essentially pay a tax to Gates for his operating system and his office software. /. community loves to scoff at VB & VB6, but allowed semi skilled programmers to write line of business applications that otherwise wouldn't have been written. .NET/C# which made professional software development easy.
I much would have preferred open source won the business eyeballs battle, but gates was always a step ahead where it mattered.
- He had Visual Basic (and Borland Turbo Pascal on windows). I know the
- He had active directory which was a game changer in managing large IT systems.
- He had a unified registry which was easier to navigate compared to Unix/Linux hundreds of config files.
- He had
So really, I think MS was always a step ahead of the open source community, and when employee time can be hundreds per hour, his solutions become cheap compared to the alternative.
I still think there something deeply dark about the man though.
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I still can't decide if gates is just a savvy businessman or a supervillan.
I think you can be both.
His business behaviour in the 90's was grotesque and it's the reason the majority of the business world has to essentially pay a tax to Gates for his operating system and his office software.
Na. That hasn't been true for 2 decades. Change that "has" to a "had", and I'm with you, though.
We're constantly playing around with newer Office solutions, and moving people to FOSS desktops in test groups.
We keep going back, because the support is a fucking nightmare, and the solutions are janktastic as fuck.
I much would have preferred open source won the business eyeballs battle, but gates was always a step ahead where it mattered.
That was never going to happen.
For Random User A, Windows is a superior platform for them to use their computer. Nerds can claim otherwise, but they're hallucinating.
- He had Visual Basic (and Borland Turbo Pascal on windows). I know the /. community loves to scoff at VB & VB6, but allowed semi skilled programmers to write line of business applications that otherwise wouldn't have been written.
Ya- sol
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I love it- do you imagine you're some air force brass telling me my ego's writing checks my body can't cash?
The funny thing- in many states in this country, were you to enter my place of work, come into my office, and appear anything close to threatening, I'd be well within my rights to turn you into a human colander.
I'm betting you're one of those fine folks that nobody ever accuses of being smart. Then again, you are using AD, so I guess that's a redundant observation.
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You literally mentioned about wanting to have people shot, I.e. perpetrating violence on, simply for using a program.
Ya, totally literally, you stupid fucker.
Then someone takes you up on your wish and invites you to actually attempt to practice what you preach
Don't pretend like you aren't them.
Actually, I took it as a threat of physical violence in response to a hyperbolic suggestion that "people who do stupid thing X should be shot".
You'll not the distinct difference between should be X, and "I'm going to come to your (workplace|hovel) and see if your mouth can cash that check"
That phrase is a variation of "your ego is writing checks your body can't cash", which means: "you're going to get hurt."
That's a threat of ph
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You literally called for violence on people
That's true. I literally did. Read up on the concept. [merriam-webster.com]
Then I offered a chance for YOU to attempt that violence on me.
We done pretending you're the devil's advocate, now?
I never made a threat on you
Your verbiage was interesting if not.
simply to present myself for you to attempt it.
Well that's weird, since I never offered to do it...
Now that someone has called your bluff
Hah, guess not. Do you think pretending to be 2 people posting anonymously off each other is clever?
I suppose someone who deliberately interprets an obvious hyperbole literally to play games anonymously online may actually think that.
You post has been reported to one of my FBI contacts
LOL. Uh huh.
That last leg to stand on you had- the idea that maybe this wasn't del
Re: (Score:2)
We keep going back, because the support is a fucking nightmare, and the solutions are janktastic as fuck.
[...]
Anyone still using AD should be summarily shot.
wat
He had a unified registry which was easier to navigate compared to Unix/Linux hundreds of config files.
Both regimes are fucking nightmares.
A bunch of flat files in /etc are not a nightmare, except that the non-machine-specific files never should have been in there like they were. Now we are transitioning away from that, to where standard or distribution-specific files are going into /usr/lib/whatever. This way you can safely pick up the whole /etc directory, move it to another host, and only exclude away the hostname (or just rewrite it later) if you would like to copy its configuration even to another version of system.
Flat files in a hier
Re: (Score:2)
wat
You heard (read?) me.
A bunch of flat files in /etc are not a nightmare
LOL.
*@*:/etc# find -type d | wc -l
462
*@*:/etc# find -type f | wc-l
2123
I'm sorry, I was distracted by the bullshit I just stepped in... you were saying?
No real disagreement with your last paragraph, though, except that, at best, it serves as an addendum to what I said.
They were also better at gauging what real people need, because when choice opened up, their hegemony remained. It spanned generations.
Any attempt at writing that off is an eyerolling attempt at inventing an alte
Re: (Score:2)
allowed semi skilled programmers to write line of business applications that otherwise wouldn't have been written.
You don't really want semi-skilled programmers churning out poor quality applications, this creates a security nightmare.
Re: (Score:2)
True for large companies, but there are a lot of SME's who don't have the same security requirements.
They want to, convert some CAD data for a machine, or write a test program for a circuit board, or create an aged inventory report for a bean counter, or have a dash board for staff on site today. Even in big companies, it can be impossible red tape to get the pros to do anything, so they just do it on the side so they can get on with life.
Re: (Score:1)
ActiveDirectory? NDS and NetWare did it better!
Steve Jobs was druggie loser (Score:5, Informative)
Look, I do recreational drugs better than most. But people who drop acid and then act like they e joined a proselytizing cult are druggie losers.
Re: (Score:2)
If making a billion dollars is how we define a "druggie loser" then I want to be a druggie loser too.
It's almost like there's other factors in play which determine whether someone becomes a billionaire or a strung out hobo in an alley. As a single factor though, illegal drug use is far more likely to result in the latter rather than the former.
Re: Steve Jobs was druggie loser (Score:2)
If you re-read the comment, I think you'll see I was calling Steve Jobs a druggie loser. Not Bill Gates.
My rant against Baby Boomers (Score:4, Funny)
Antitrust case partially worked (Score:2)
Good! The anti-trust case partially did its job. (MS still owns the biz desktop market.)
Although some argue their obsession with compatibility was already sinking them. Without compatibility,
They not like us (Score:2)
Wow, look at all thsse friendly interviews and puff pieces from several outlets in the course of a week. Very organic (not)..
"He was a nerd that couldn't get laid", how relatable!.. but how does that pair with him being the sort of sex freak that would visit Jeffrey Epstein's residences and fly on his jet?
The rich stay rich (Score:3, Informative)
Gates has elsewhere admitted he had a wealth advantage in that his upper-middle-class area had schools that could afford access to early computers for students.
Re: The rich stay rich (Score:5, Insightful)
Therapeutic uses (Score:2)
So does a full body cast after you've been in a motorcycle accident. But I wouldn't recommend it for the average healthy person.
MS could never have made it with phones (Score:1)
Phones require high reliability and high security in the absence of system administration. MS cannot even provide these _with_ system administration. Their engineering is just too shoddy and too insightless. But wishful thinking is a powerful drug.
Coding batch? (Score:3)
No, bro. You absolutely did NOT get the coding batch.
Maybe you got the Dunning-Kruger batch or the Random Crash batch.
Bill Gates is why Windows Phone failed (Score:1)
Windows Phone failing had nothing to do with Microsoft being distracted. It failed because consumers had spent years dealing with Microsoftâ(TM)s buggy, unstable, insecure, and overpriced products. Nobody wanted to bring another fucking Windows device into their life. None of the shortcomings of iOS and Android could compare to the shit we all went through with generation after generation of Windows.
I'd be richer... (Score:1)
I'd be richer if I didn't hide all my wealth in a non-profit I control.
Whatever Bill. You're evil, we know it, just embrace it.
Timeline doesn’t quite work (Score:2)
The antitrust case was overturned by the Appellate Court in 2001. The DOJ and Microsoft settled the outstanding portions in November 2001.
Android Inc. was started in 2003, and was four guys using pre-existing Open Source components to build a
Little slipup in the wording ... (Score:2)
... of this headline. It was meant to say:
Gates remembers LSD trips on pot, crack cocaine and low-grade meth and then hallucinating so hard he thought "the smartphone market was theirs for the taking". ... Wow, holy cow, those sure must have been some hardcore trips.
Theirs for the taking (Score:2)