AARD Code, or how Bill Gates finished off the competition • Hacker News Board

Re: AARD Code, or how Bill Gates finished off the competition

#41

Post by kmeisthax » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 1:57 AM UTC

pagade wrote: post #8

You might also find 'Embrace, extend, and extinguish' interesting. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

The thing about EE&E is that it's not exclusively a Microsoft strategy. Anyone who develops a popular extension to a standardized format is inherently putting the standard at risk until and unless competing implementations "catch up" and those extensions are adopted back into the standard. Hell, this is what caused the UNIX Wars, and even GNU is guilty of EE&E on the C standard - try compiling the Linux kernel with anything other than GCC (or maybe LLVM) and see how that works.

Google does this a lot too - and usually, when they do it, everything's Free anyway so nobody cares right away. Chrome has basically ended the development of any competing browsing engine by proposing so many standards extensions that only Google's outsized staff could implement them. WebKit survives purely by mandate of the iOS App Store, and Firefox is basically funded by Google anyway. This is arguably more effective EE&E than Microsoft was able to do with Internet Explorer.

(Side note: the whole Oracle/Google lawsuit is basically Oracle trying to litigate EE&E of Java out of existence. This is part of the reason why I can't fully condemn it. If it's wrong for Microsoft to add new class libraries to their own JVM, then it's also wrong for Google to do the same thing. I'd rather live in a world where we can reimplement proprietary extensions, than one where every Free standard has copyright litigation risk associated with it.)

Re: AARD Code, or how Bill Gates finished off the competition

#42

Post by tpmx » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 2:01 AM UTC

flowerlad wrote: post #25

GartzenDeHaes wrote: post #23

The persistent rumors about billg ripping BASIC from a DECUS distribution seem to have finally died down.

You mean this one? https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/29/bill_gates_roots/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC-PLUS

> Microsoft BASIC was patterned very closely on BASIC-PLUS. [...] The ability to place logical and loop commands in-line, like I = I + 1 UNTIL I = 10 was not copied over and does not appear on any common version of microcomputer BASIC. MS BASIC also lacked the matrix commands.

Re: AARD Code, or how Bill Gates finished off the competition

#43

Post by jeffgreco » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 2:04 AM UTC

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #22

Bill Gates is succesful, kind and generous. He never finished college, he reads books and writes about them on a blog. He is that rare combination of super smart and benevolent at the time. Trustworthy. Just read his best friend Paul Allen's book. He has given away increments of the fortune that he earned through honest, legal business practices. DOJ dropped their case against Microsoft because Microsoft was innocent…

Wow:

> On July 6, 1994 Kildall, 52, walked into a Monterey bar. He was wearing motorcycle leathers with Harley-Davidson patches;a would-be biker. There were some real bikers in the bar. Something was said. There was pushing and shoving, and Kildall died from injuries sustained to his head. An inquest called the death “suspicious,” but no one was charged.

Re: AARD Code, or how Bill Gates finished off the competition

#44

Post by trynton » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 2:04 AM UTC

You never sent me a response on the question of what things an app [application] would do that would make it run with MSDOS and not run with DR-DOS, Bill Gates circa 1989

Re: AARD Code, or how Bill Gates finished off the competition

#45

Post by aeturnum » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 2:11 AM UTC

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #22

Bill Gates is succesful, kind and generous. He never finished college, he reads books and writes about them on a blog. He is that rare combination of super smart and benevolent at the time. Trustworthy. Just read his best friend Paul Allen's book. He has given away increments of the fortune that he earned through honest, legal business practices. DOJ dropped their case against Microsoft because Microsoft was innocent…

I love this (ᵔᴥᵔ).

It seems like it's gotten less comfortable slyly mock crappy realities and I think that's a shame.

Re: AARD Code, or how Bill Gates finished off the competition

#46

Post by josephg » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 2:16 AM UTC

alisonkisk wrote: post #38

josephg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stop worshiping him, he's still evil to the core. Its not that simple. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does amazing, mostly unsexy charity work the world over. Governmental aid organizations rarely want to fund boring infrastructure work like building roads in poor countries, or (before the pandemic) overfunding the world's vaccine manufacturing capability. Nobody wants to fund things like that because it doe…

They also use their money to shout down competing approaches to problem solving. They were a big force in "high stakes testing" and "pay teachers who have higher performing students" backed by shoddy statistical analysis.

The B&M Gates foundation has given 23261 grants[1]. Of course some of those projects turned out in retrospect to be regrettable. Thats way too many projects to get a 100% rate when vetting. Or to put it the other way, if you had to be 100% sure when giving money that it would work out well, there would be a lot of great causes you wouldn't be able to contribute to because of outcome risk.

But even if the high stakes testing problem was entirely forseeable, thats my point! Its not simple. Bill Gates isn't Simple. He's not a comic book villain - Nobody is outside maybe mass murderers. Comic book heroes and villains don't exist in the real world. (And increasingly they don't exist in comic books either.)

If you want to know what he's like, watch some interviews with the man. Gates is obviously trying to make the world a better place. And he's going to continue to do that imperfectly, because he's made out of meat like the rest of us.

And yes, I'm also angry about standardized testing, and the historical stain microsoft has left on computing from the 90s. Angry and grateful, all at once.

[1] https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants

Re: AARD Code, or how Bill Gates finished off the competition

#47

Post by chestertn » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 2:27 AM UTC

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #22

Bill Gates is succesful, kind and generous. He never finished college, he reads books and writes about them on a blog. He is that rare combination of super smart and benevolent at the time. Trustworthy. Just read his best friend Paul Allen's book. He has given away increments of the fortune that he earned through honest, legal business practices. DOJ dropped their case against Microsoft because Microsoft was innocent…

Well, thank God “philantropist vaccine Bill” is a diferent person.

Re: AARD Code, or how Bill Gates finished off the competition

#48

Post by cl0ckt0wer » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 2:36 AM UTC

trynton wrote: post #40

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #22

Bill Gates is succesful, kind and generous. He never finished college, he reads books and writes about them on a blog. He is that rare combination of super smart and benevolent at the time. Trustworthy. Just read his best friend Paul Allen's book. He has given away increments of the fortune that he earned through honest, legal business practices. DOJ dropped their case against Microsoft because Microsoft was innocent…

@1vuio0pswjnm7: You forgot to post the sacarism smiley. “Bill Gates .. was such a thoughtful developer, e.g., autmatically overwriting MBRs installed by other OS with a Microsoft MBR, and making it impossible to boot Windows from partitions other than the first one, in case you accidentally tried to boot another OS from partition one." I recently bought a brand-new desktop PC after the other one gave up the ghost aft…

You bough a brand new computer without an SSD?

Re: AARD Code, or how Bill Gates finished off the competition

#49

Post by cbozeman » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 2:54 AM UTC

alisonkisk wrote: post #36

yurielt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>All bugs in windows have been fixed What? Also Microsoft has brought us open software and open source things in as much as it lets it: Win over the competition Let things be open enough for its ecosystem to prosper but not enough for open software to proliferate as much as it could have They just did not do that as a kind gesture out of their heart or because Bill is a nice guy who loves you but precisely to shut la…

Don't feed the troll.

It's not trolling, it's sarcasm, although with the crippling inability of far too many HN posters to recognize sarcasm, even when its glaringly obvious, I understand why someone might think it's trolling.

Re: AARD Code, or how Bill Gates finished off the competition

#50

Post by cbozeman » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 2:57 AM UTC

alisonkisk wrote: post #37

marcodiego wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your sarcasm detector needs maintenance.

Sarcastic people need to stop writing trollish comments.

I sort of want to cure autism so I never have to see posts like this again, but I also don't want to lose /r/wallstreetbets... talk about a catch-22.

This isn't sarcasm, by the way; I'm genuinely conflicted.