On Wed, 2005-10-19 at 21:13 -0600, Kevin wrote:
> >> Now, now, admit it. The only reason you hate Mr. Gates is that
> >>he got there first and got rich!
> > I will admit nothing of the sort. I met Bill Gates before he
> > incorporated Microsoft, and I found him odious and irritating then,
> > as well. Not to mention the fact that the on;ly reason Microsoft >
> >survived its first year of existence is that Biully Boy's mommy and
> >daddy are big time attornies, whjo were able to intimidate numerous
> >other hobyists a out of competing with their baby bouy and his
> >precious BASIC interpreter (which he stole frojm Harvard, and had no
> >valid copyright claim on).
> Which, according to the record he bought the license to from an
> ailing CPM company. Have a care with hearsay and slander. Sounds
> like sour grapes to me.
*** BBZZZZZZTTTTTT *** Wrong Answer! Would you care to play again?
BASIC was invented and devewloped at Harvard University (I apologize
for nbot inclkuding the name of the Computer Sciences professor who
invented it,. my memory fails me on that detail) and was in the Public
Domain. That is why Bill Gates had NO right to a copyright on it.
What Bill Gates *DID* Buy was a 16 bit version of CP/M from Seattle
Microcomputer Works (Tom ? (again, my memory fails on the name detail).
His purchjase of that license spoecifically **DID NOT** include the
right to distribute, nor to market derivative works. He and Steve
Ballmer nisrepresented themselvesx when purchasing it (for $10,000),
claimng they were purchasing it for "research purposes" only.
Mickey$hit turned around and marketed that O/S to IBM with virtually
ZERO modifications as MS/DOS V1.0. Tom <?> from Seattle Microcomputer
Works attempted to intervene and proitect his copyright, but lacked the
financial resources to go up against Billy Boy's high powered attorney
parents (who cost Billy Boy NOTHING). Which was precisely the same kind
of thing that happened to every hobyist who attempted tyo put a BASIC
interpreter for the 8080 on the market. Billy Boy's parents threatened
them with lawsuits, and they, lacking the reources to fight such
battles, retreated from the field.
If you're going to try to throw history at me, make sure you have
tyhe history RIGHT, first!!]
> >>I have nothing but respect for his marketing acumin.
> > I have no respect for him, his "acumen," or his products.
> Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
Thank you.
> >>His business ethics may leave a bit to complain
> >>about, but hardly more than GM or Firestone, or just about every big
> >>company out there.
> > None of those companies represent a monopoly, nor are any of them
> >as guilty of stealing products, sellin g absolute CRAP to the public,
> >and grossly overcharging for same (tot he same extent, in any case).
> >but you do have a point, business in the USA is a complete quagmire
> >of unethical behaviour and self-servbing executives.
> Oh really? Read up. GM and Firestone conspired to buy up all of
> the street cars, scrap them and get cities to buy Bluebird buses with
> Firestone tires on them. When they were found guilty of restraint of
> trade practices the court fined them $1. Sounds like a monopolistic
> attack to me. There is no shortage of creeps out there.
This is true. You have your history right on this one! But, they
weren';t looking to create a monopoly. once they had convertedf a city
ffrom what is now known as "light rail," or what was known at that time
as "interurban rail," they sold the transportation companies off again,
often to the local municipality (leaving them, of course, totally diesel
bus-ified, and dependent upon them for parts and replacement vehicles).
While reprehensible, not at all the same thing Billy Boy and Mickey
$hit are doing.
> >> I however like my Mac and the OS X UNIX interface. So, back to
> the question: Eclipse and avr-gcc integration.
> > Actually, I don't much care for Macs either, but for entirely
> > different (and mostly technical) reasons. Of course, Jobs' elitist
> > attitudes about computing platforms doesn't help my opinion of the
> > platform or the company much.
> Again, sour grapes.
Bull puckey! I was a recipient of a pre-produciton sample of an
MC68000 microprocessoir at about the same time that Apple Computer
received their pre-production samples. I was so impressed with the
archi8tecture (which wasn't perfect, but was so far advanced over the
x86 crap as to be totally amazing) that my nick on the intra-state
computer chat system we had on the California State University and
College staste-wdie timesharing computers was "68000Micronut." When
Apple began hinting around about their new design, and let it be known
it was to be based on the 68K, I was thirlled. Unitl I saw the design
and architecture of the machine. What a loser!
To biegin with, Apple, the company who had, for all practical
purposes INVENTed colro computing (for the consuemr, at the v ery
least), had gone with a MONOCHROME display! *ugh* Further more, and
much worse, it was a 9" (diagonal) display! What kind of stupidity was
THIS???
Furthermore, they burdened it with a crummy GUI (granted, it was the
first commercial GUI marketed., and revolutionary in its way, but it
*SUCKED*, not the least of which because it had a freaking ONE BUTTON
(!?!) MOUSE!!!!)
The original MAC was painfully slow, even in comnparison to 8 bit, 4
Mhz 8080 or Z80 systems of the day. Why? All that GUI crapola! Here
you had a 16 bit, 6 Mhz processor working slower than an 8 bit, 4 Mhz
processor. Dumb, and wasteful.
Once the mach8ines hit the market, other serious weaknesses came to
light. The file system on the thier floppies (and at that point,
flopies were the ONLY choice) was so fragile that a flopy diskette could
become unreadable simple by being removed from the drive, and
reinserted. Flopies that had been out of the machine for any length of
time were fairly likely to be unreadable (though not, fortunately for
the users, necessarily unrecoverable) The final insule was thr price.
Macs were ASTRONOMICALLY expensive! Jobs deliberately targetted the
"upscale" Yuppie market with the Mac, and priced it accordingly. This
odious pricing model continued until fairly reecently, when it became
patentl;y obvious that if the Mac didn't drop toward price point parity
with the PC, the MAc would simply disappear fropm the market altogether.
There were a few years thgere where many m,arket watchers were quite
convinced that Apple woudl go belly up. Fortunately, they didn't.
Why fortunately? I dislike the Mac, and I dislike Apple Computer
Corp. the way Jobns runs it, but Aple was a pioneer in the personal
computer market, and, in ded, I honestly suspect that had Apple not
existed, IBM would not have developed the PC anywhere near as soon as
they did, if ever.
IBM only developed the PC after they saw small and medium sized
businesses starting to use Apple ][s in their offices. Let us be
perfectly clear about this: IBM did NOT envision, and certainnoly never
targetted the consumer market for personal computers. Their markting
target was commercial computing, period. The name "Personal Computer"
was in reference to the fact that only a single individiual was using
the system.
Look at the pricing of the original PC, to prove the point. $6,000
for a 4.77 Mhz "16 bit" machine (with an 8 bit data bus) that had but 16
K bytes (not Megabytes, but KILObytes) of RAM, no videop of any kind
(video adapters and monitors were extra cost add-ons (??)), and a
single, SSSD flopydisk drive that was slower than molasses in January.
A fully decked out system wiuth a monochrome video screen and a second
floppy disk drive, and enoug memory to actually *DO* something with
cam,e in at over $8500, retail. Hardly a product targeted to the masses
(especially conmsidering that this wqas in 1981...what does that $8500
look like today? something like $20K!!).
> I don't like Windows, but I don't like it because it smothers
> innovation and forces mediocrity - And it doesn't seem to
> work very well. But the masses have spoken, they like having their
> hands held and everything being the same. So be it, they can have it.
I absolutely agree. I also, however, find their business practices
and their pricing structure opdious and ehtically indefensible.
> > But, as you implied, thus is off topic...back to AVRs
One can certianly hope. *grin*
Tom