Bill rules, Ellison sucks.....

[Thunder Bay]

Why does everybody hate Bill Gates; are they jealous? ::)

[wendy]

Who hates Bill Gates?

[Thunder Bay]

Everyone I've talked to IRL. ;D

[archangel]

It could be because he exemplifies the worst case scenario of Capitalism...most work hard to afford toilet paper for what a few can use currency paper for. ;D

[Tiger]

I don't hate Bill Gates. I remind my kids that he started in his own basement - but used his ingenuity to a very lucrative advantage.

I do not begrudge anyone their fortune. Bill owes me nothing.

I wish more folks would have goals and visions like Bill did. Especially those on welfare and aid that think life owes them for their meager existances.

You go Bill......

[Thunder Bay]

It could be because he exemplifies the worst case scenario of Capitalism...most work hard to afford toilet paper for what a few can use currency paper for. ;D



But I doubt it; hey, he worked hard for the money. ;D

[Thunder Bay]

Good girl, Tiger... ;D

Why does everybody hate Bill Gates; are they jealous? ::)


Ask a programer why but be prepared to hear an earful.

[jeny]

I once saw someone get in a fist fight over Bill Gates.

HA HA!

My beloved and I were up in Gualala, CA (Wa- Ha- La) Now Gualala is a vert small northern coastal town, there is not much there except a few B&B's, a winery or two and some nice beach front. Well, there is also ONE place to eat, the Gualala Inn.

This is a "restaurant" comprised of about 6 tables, one kind of grumpy waitress and a very short menu. However, the food was pretty darn good.

Behind us were a group of Marin County snot nosed liberals. Talking EXTREMELY loudly about the lack of good quality food and service in this "podunk" town. After they ripped the town apart, they then began to talk about how Bill Gates does not give nearly enough money to charity and no one "needs" or "deserves" that much money, blah, blah, blah, the usual liberal tripe.

While my beloved and I enjoyed dessert and coffee, these people decided they were finished and made a HUGE big deal of leaving the EXACT change with NO tip. ::) The grumpy waitress made a few snide remarks under her breath, not that the Marin snobs didn't deserve it.

As they were filing out, noses in the air, an older woman says, "I bet Bill Gates tips well you lousy SOB" So one of the guys turns around and says, "STFU you fat white trash bitch"

Ok, DO NOT say that to a redneck's wife. This guy, HUGE when he was sitting, stood up and became towering. He grabbed the snob's collar and demanded that he apologize, which, of course, the snob did not, so he hauled off and punched him in the nose.

Everyone else in the restaurant cheered, LOL. Clearly, the giant was a local because he knew the sheriff by name when he walked in to take the report. I don't know the details, but no one was arrested.

Needless to say, we left a large tip and went on our way. Later that evening, my beloved asked me to marry him on the beach at sunset. What a night!

[Thunder Bay]

Okay, hey a programmer, gimme an earful. ;D

Okay, hey a programmer, gimme an earful. ;D


I'm no programmer. Gates doesn't really bother me, but I know his products are nothing but packaged shit.

[wendy]

I'm no programmer. Gates doesn't really bother me, but I know his products are nothing but packaged shit.


Packaged "shit" that everyone bitches about...yet they are still BUYING it. ::)

Packaged "shit" that everyone bitches about...yet they are still BUYING it. ::)


Try getting lazy assed Americans to use anything that doesn't do all the work for them. Until they decide to stop being lazy they deserve Windohs. I'm in the process of getting all MicroSoft products off my machine, and my next computer will be a Mac.

[wendy]

Try getting lazy assed Americans to use anything that doesn't do all the work for them.

Most Americans don't buy computers to create more work for themselves.

Most Americans don't buy computers to create more work for themselves.


Most Americans buy computers to play Solitaire on. If that's all they want, a deck of cards is much cheaper. I've always felt sorry for people who work customer service for software or computer companies. Imagine getting called by some idiot who can't connect to the internet and is chewing you a new asshole because of it. Then imagine finding out that he hadn't turned his computer on.

Most Americans don't need computers; they need brains.

[The Guardian]

I probably should NOT get into this discussion.

But you rang for a "programmer", so here I am... ;D

As to Windows and other Microsoft software, it is often the victim of the market cycle the computer world has become trapped in; e.g. you have to be the first to the market with the most bells and whistles. Does Windows have its problems? Absolutely. Do other software systems? Uh, hellooooo ... yes they do.

What Gates & company have done is taken something that was not a commodity and made it one. Thus everyone can buy a computer and have a reasonable hope of being able to exchange data. Without some level of standardization, that would be impossible.

The problem any other type of computer faces is how to be price competitive with the Windows PC market. Liz, you will quickly find that your Mac software will cost far far more and do just about the same thing that its Windows equivalent will do. And yes, it *might* cause less problems. But just because the software is on a Mac does NOT guarentee that it will work better or be more stable.

Much software is geared towards the lowest common denominator. In other words, an idiot that might be able to turn on a computer. This does tend to bloat the software and Microsoft is as guilty or more so than many companies of aggravating this trend. But this is a "marketing" decision, not a design decision. This "bloating" many programmres curse has actually made computers and applications accessable to those people that would normally not be able to figure these things out.

Unix systems face the same battle. And as a web developer that has ran on both platforms, Unix is far far more geared toward the propellor head than it is the common user. So much so that it gives me grief when I try and run it.

The problem is price...and convincing your average computer user to pay a premium for a "non-windows" product will be a REAL neat trick. Plus those packages at least have to support some interface to the Windows machines because like it or not, Gates borrowed a page from the old "Big Blue" playbook and sold the boardrooms of Corporate America. As a result, most infrastructures within major companies are Windows. Many employees work at home. I do myself from time to time and it would be very difficult for me to be able to connect into the office if I was running a non-windows machine. Or let me put it this way, I would create a TON of extra work for myself that no one at the office could help me solve.

So before you merrily ditch your Windows, think about these issues. And I do not begrudge Bill his money. For the most part, he and his company has earned it by providing and marketing a product that the market buys. He is also responsible for driving the technology forward by making it accessable on this level too.

My .02. 8)

[Thunder Bay]

Thanks for the input, Guardian. I'll continue with plans to upgrade to XP in the near future. ;D

[The Guardian]

An addendum to my post...

What any user should look at when selecting computers and software is the one simple question. "What do I need to have in order to do the work I want this computer to conveniently do?"

The answer to that question absolutely drives everything from type of system to software selected.

If "convenience" is your driving reason -- then you are stuck in the windows market. Because 90% of the software on the shelves is for Windows. I used to own an Amiga, if any of you remember what that was. (Without going into details, lets just say it was light-years ahead of its time and even today, an Amiga would be compatible with a good PC. But this was in 1986...) The downfall of that system, which was infinitely superior to the Apple (Lisa was just launched around that time) and PC at the time, was simply that you could not buy software for it EXCEPT at Commodore vendors. And no selection. The reason I finally got off the system? I could not buy Quicken for the machine and I got tired of spending hours trying to make the totally POS home-financial software work. I bought a PC just to run Quicken and quickly discovered that supporting two different PC O/S's is worse than teenager food consumption.

Most stores have a Mac section--but the title selection in that arena is still about 1/10 the Windows titles.

Linux? Uh...maybe a handful of stores carry titles and a handful of titles at best. And you damn well better be a software engineer to make anything work because it is totally unforgiving. Powerful? Yep. Just like a shotgun pointed at your own toes.

Now...if all you folks want to do is browse NoPC, write a letter, and answer some e-mail...just about any PC and any software will work. Heck, even older PIIs and PIIIs are powerful enough for most users. But if you are the "Tim Allen" of computing and want cutting edge games, graphics, and so on---again, you are stuck on a PC. Titles are released there because it is where 90% of the market is.

If you have NOT figured out it this point, PC platform selection is more of a marketing exercise than anything to do with how good, bad, or otherwise a system is technically. Going back to 1986, there were three competing platforms: PC (8088 at the time), Apple (Lisa just launched, Mac a few years away), and Commodore's Amiga. To give you an idea of just how technically mis-matched the PC and Apple were, here is a rough outline of a 1986 Amiga 1000. Out of the box, no add-ons:

- 4096 colors (PC was 8, Lisa B&W)
- Stereo left & right outputs. (Beep beep beep everywhere else)
- Up to a 9M seemless memory environment. (64K in the PC, 640K coming)
- SCSI I/O bus, with real autodetect. (Plug & Play)
- 512K ROM (where the entire O/S was) and 512K RAM.
- 3.5" floppy
- True multi-tasking O/S with both GUI and command line. (DOS shell was PC)
- Built-in speech synthesizer

You get the picture. This machine was light-years ahead of its competition in 86, so WTF happened? Answer: Marketing. Simply put, Commodore could NOT market an orgy in a whorehouse. The result of this ineptitude was that of the three platforms at the time, the least technically capable marketed the best (Gates & co.) and became the defacto standard.

Now...how do we break the marketing stranglehold? The ONLY possible solution is to make a machine that can take any piece of software and run it out of the box. Thus the consumer can still go in to Best Buy, buy the title they want...and it works. To do that, you have to build a machine that can build a virtual environment on the fly that simulates the base O/S environment, and then runs the program.

Can this be done? Yes, the technology is probably there. The problem is that no PC manufacturer wants to go there. You think Intel would like Mac owners to have the freedom to run any Windows title on a Mac with ease? Or that Apple would smile if a Windows PC could take a Mac title and run it without any problems?

So...to get to the final answer to the question, you all need to evaluate what you want your computers to do...then go out and find the system(s) that can do those functions without a lot of hassle. THAT answer will define what system is "right" for you.

Hope this helps.