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# he's been giving a good few million a year
to charities (one per year) for the last decade.
set up the Bill Gates foundation to deal with it, one of the recipients of this generosity was the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine who were not only the first such school in the world, but are recognised as the highest authority on such diseases and consults shows such as ER and House when their plotlines require it (presumably make a fair whack from those shows too)

but yeh, think because of his ruthless corporate style he's painted in a bad light when he's not actually that bad
(cs192 is sucking on a Koala at, Sat 24 May 2008, 19:54, archived)
# Yeah, I grudgingly admit that.
Imagine how useful that is to have him running charities!
(I helped save b3ta! riverghost servicing your mum since, Sat 24 May 2008, 20:02, archived)
# oh don't get me wrong as a business he's done everything that needed to be done
business is war, as they say

it just seems that everyone that ever did a deal with microsoft got fucked to death or near death

and lets not forget he started his magnificent software creation by making unauthorised use of a beaureau system

plus of course mommy working for ibm didn't hurt when it came round to flogging a desirably crippled system to them (but they got exactly the pile of crap they wanted anyway so fuck ibm too )

in short, it's all crap ultimately and things would be what they are today anyway, so it doesn't really matter in the scheme of things

and that's how I argue my case down into destruction

in conclusion, I am now drinking dr pepper
(I helped save b3ta! discomeats This canoe, Sat 24 May 2008, 20:03, archived)
# i'm not supporting nor attacking his business style.
just labelling it as ruthless (which is fair)

i think two of the reasons so many people got shafted was because in the early days they didn't think that it'd become as big as it did so accepted lower deals than they would now, and in later years the companies and people didn't have much alternative than to accept the measley deal microsoft offered.
(cs192 is sucking on a Koala at, Sat 24 May 2008, 20:07, archived)
# I think there's a very large amount of truth in that
And ultimately if DOS was as sucky as everyone pretends and if UNIX was the dream operating system that everyone claims, the world would be running on UNIX or BSD and everyone would be paying a fortune to a company spun off from one of the big American universities anyway.

/Runs a Windows/Arch Linux desktop, Mac OSX Macbook and SuSE Linux at work and has struggled wtih the utter hideousness of administering networks hanging off Solaris or SGI IRIX blog. Fucking Windows 2008 would be a dream compared to those, and I'm willing to put a very large amount of money on that.
(I helped save b3ta! boris the spider, Sat 24 May 2008, 20:13, archived)
# that's the point tho
ibm needed something that worked that didn't make the pc's compete with the minicomputers, it couldn't be "too good" (tho it did pretty much kill off the minicomputer or at least blurr the meaning of it)

"adequate" was absolutely ideal, a simple system for a machine with 64k of ram (and I'm not sure it had that much) and a 4(?)mhz 8086, ibm could have made the hardware a lot better but that would have been a bad idea for their marketing, plus of course even then the base pc was a good few thousand dollars when it came out

thing is tho, dos is good enough (you could probably get away with running a business with it even today) and there's an absolute shitload of software for it (y2k issues notwithstanding)

besides, theres no point wasting time making things absolutely perfect when you can sell good enough, though might explain some software quality issues generally, never mind just microsoft

but it really does make no difference, we'd still be where we are today with computers irrespective of who was making the most money out of it.

/runs windows & linux and still has a dos machine for it's particular use and is just happy that anything even works at all because it all has a mind of it's own and just takes the piss when you need it to work the most :D
(I helped save b3ta! discomeats This canoe, Sat 24 May 2008, 20:37, archived)
# yeah i totally agree
DOS was hardly the greatest thing ever, even by version 7 let alone version 3 or whichever piece of crap I first used. But it worked and it was relatively cheap -- as sick with myself as typing that has made me feel given the stupid cost of Windows. But it did what it had to so why waste another year of man-hours making it perfect if it worked so long as people didn't mind shutting their computer down once a day?

And compared to the user-friendliness of UNIX which feels like being kicked in the balls by fifteen Nazi guards, DOS is like being tickled by an inadequate lover. :)


/Has no computer that will run DOS anymore but does run DOSBox so he can sometimes play Warcraft and Grand Prix 2 and Elite II and other games from his wasted youth blog.
(I helped save b3ta! boris the spider, Sat 24 May 2008, 20:51, archived)
# have a icl 16mhz 386sx
a (typical for icl) well designed system.. *cough*

but it's got an eprom programmer on it and the software is too shite to work on anything faster, I think the 386's too fast for it to be honest :)

tho £100 or so gets me a programmer that'll program about 4 times as many memories and do other things

I'm just loathe to throw out working hardware really :D
(I helped save b3ta! discomeats This canoe, Sat 24 May 2008, 21:14, archived)
# An old 386!
Probably has a Turbo button as well, to slow it down because it was too powerful...? :) I want my old 486 SX25. With the turbo button pressed it could even run some old programs without flashing them by at 128fps...
(I helped save b3ta! boris the spider, Sat 24 May 2008, 21:26, archived)
# no turbo button, I think it would explode due to quality issues
tho it has to be said, that some games were so shittily written that they were an actual blurr on this machine

trying the same games on an early pentium just created a magnificent spazzing blast of alternate conciousness :D
(I helped save b3ta! discomeats This canoe, Sat 24 May 2008, 21:36, archived)
# :)
(I helped save b3ta! boris the spider, Sat 24 May 2008, 21:41, archived)
# Bill Gates charity
Doesn't he give away money to retain a "Chartiable" status under the tax laws thus reducing his tax bill by more than he gives away, or is that just a rumor?
(jethou1, Sat 24 May 2008, 20:05, archived)
# probably an element of that
but the charities who benefit from the money are probably willing to forgive that with the amount of work it allows them to do
(cs192 is sucking on a Koala at, Sat 24 May 2008, 20:12, archived)