In <37ph8l$2p1@astfgl.edb.tih.no> morteni@edb.tih.no (Morten Brakstad Isaksen) writes:
>And you realy shouldn't judge a person on apperance. I mean, just look
>what the man has DONE. Says everything really.
What Bill Gates has done, in a nutshell: he made himself immensely rich by crippling the personal computing industry.
I have no problems with his richness...
Dan
--
Dan Pop
CERN, CN Division
Email: danpop@cernapo.cern.ch
Mail: CERN - PPE, Bat. 31 R-004, CH-1211 Geneve 23, Switzerland
Heaven's reception area was the size of Massachusetts. There were literally millions of people milling about, living in tents with nothing to do all day. Food and water were being distributed from the backs of trucks, while staffers with clipboards slowly worked their way through the crowd. Booze and drugs were being passed around. Fights were commonplace. Sanitation conditions were appalling. All in all, the scene looked like Woodstock gone metastatic.
Bill lived in a tent for three weeks until, finally, one of the staffers approached him. The staffer was a young man in his late teens, face scarred with acne. He was wearing a blue T-shirt with the words TEAM PETER emblazoned on it in large yellow lettering.
"Hello," said the staffer in a bored voice that could have been the voice of any clerk in any overgrown bureaucracy. "My name is Gabriel and I'll be your induction coordinator." Bill started to ask a question, but Gabriel interrupted him. "No, I'm not the Archangel Gabriel. I'm just a guy from Philadelphia named Gabriel who died in a car wreck at the age of 17. Now give me your name, last name first, unless you were Chinese in which case it's first name first."
"Gates, Bill." Gabriel started searching though the sheaf of papers on his clipboard, looking for Bill's Record of Earthly Works. "What's going on here?" asked Bill. "Why are all these people here? Where's Saint Peter? Where are the Pearly Gates?"
Gabriel ignored the questions until he located Bill's records. Then Gabriel looked up in surprise. "It says here that you were the president of a large software company. Is that right?"
"Yes."
"Well then, do the math chip-head! When this Saint Peter business started, it was an easy gig. Only a hundred or so people died every day, and Peter could handle it all by himself, no problem. But now there are over five billion people on earth. Jesus, when God said to 'go forth and multiply,' he didn't say 'like rabbits!' With that large a population, ten thousand people die every hour. Over a quarter-million people a day. Do you think Peter can meet them all personally?"
"I guess not."
"You guess right. So Peter had to franchise the operation. Now, Peter is the CEO of Team Peter Enterprises, Inc. He just sits in the corporate headquarters and sets policy. Franchisees like me handle the actual inductions." Gabriel looked though his paperwork some more, and then continued. "Your paperwork seems to be in order. And with a background like yours, you'll be getting a plum job assignment."
"Job assignment?"
"Of course. Did you expect to spend the rest of eternity sitting on your ass and drinking ambrosia? Heaven is a big operation. You have to pull your weight around here!" Gabriel took out a triplicate form, had Bill sign at the bottom, and then tore out the middle copy and handed it to Bill. "Take this down to induction center #23 and meet up with your occupational orientator. His name is Abraham." Bill started to ask a question, but Gabriel interrupted him. "No, he's not that Abraham."
Bill walked down a muddy trail for ten miles until he came to induction center #23. He met with Abraham after a mere six-hour wait.
"Heaven is centuries behind in building its data processing infrastructure," explained Abraham. "As you've seen, we're still doing everything on paper. It takes us a week just to process new entries."
"I had to wait three weeks," said Bill. Abraham stared at Bill angrily, and Bill realized that he'd made a mistake. Even in Heaven, it's best not to contradict a bureaucrat. "Well," Bill offered, "maybe that Bosnia thing has you guys backed up."
Abraham's look of anger faded to mere annoyance. "Your job will be to supervise Heaven's new data processing center. We're building the largest computing facility in creation. Half a million computers connected by a multi-segment fiber optic network, all running into a back-end server network with a thousand CPUs on a gigabit channel. Fully fault tolerant. Fully distributed processing. The works."
Bill could barely contain his excitement. "Wow! What a great job! This is really Heaven!"
"We're just finishing construction, and we'll be starting operations soon. Would you like to go see the center now?"
"You bet!"
Abraham and Bill caught the shuttle bus and went to Heaven's new data processing center. It was a truly huge facility, a hundred times bigger than the Astrodome. Workmen were crawling all over the place, getting the miles of fiber optic cables properly installed. But the center was dominated by the computers. Half a million computers, arranged neatly row-by-row, half a million ....
.... Macintoshes ....
.... all running Claris software! Not a PC in sight! Not a single byte of Microsoft code!
The thought of spending the rest of eternity using products that he had spent his whole life working to destroy was too much for Bill. "What about PCs???" he exclaimed. "What about Windows??? What about Excel??? What about Word???"
"You're forgetting something," said Abraham.
"What's that?" asked Bill plaintively.
"This is Heaven," explained Abraham. "We need a computer system that's heavenly to use. If you want to build a data processing center based on PCs running Windows, then ....
Bill Gates dies and fronts up to the pearly gates.
St Peter: Well, you've got a choice. Have a look around here. Pop down to Hell and see what Satan has to offer. Check us out, and then let me know your decision.
Bill has a look around heaven. Lots's of sombre people singing hymns, praising the Lord (and probably writing Ada:-). He goes down to Hell. There are beautiful beaches, lots of sun, sand, attractive women (and a lot of C and Basic :-). Long cool drinks that never get you drunk. He loves it. He goes back to St Peter.
Gates: Look, I know you're really doing good things here, but Hell seems more with it. More my kind of scene, you know what I mean? No hard feelings, but I pick Hell.
St Peter: No worries. You've got it.
Bill finds himself back in Hell, neck deep in fire and brimstone, suffering eternal torment. He can't work it out.
Gates: Hey! St Peter! Where are the beautiful girls and long beaches and cool drinks?
St Peter: Sorry if you got confused, That was just the demo version.
I wish I could take credit for this list, but it was written by my friends Andy, Bill and Michael (last names withheld to protect the guilty).
For the first time in, oh, a decade, I think, something from Microsoft shipped on time: Jennifer Katharine Gates, weighed 8 pounds 6 ounces when she was downloaded, er, born on Friday, April 26 at 6:11 p.m.
And what do Baby Gates and Daddy's products have in common?
Routers, 16th August, 1996
The Acorn scene erupted in anger today when a press release from Acorn House made it clear that Bill Gates had written much of the core code of RISC OS 2 and 3. Usenet networks were groaning under the stream of vituperation, particularly concentrated in the comp.sys.acorn.misc news group.
Gates' influence was mostly weeded out in the move to 3.5+, although he managed to force Acorn to retain the 77 file limit and (initially) the 512Mb partition size. After the dramatic restructuring of the Acorn group, Gates is now no longer involved with Acorn. Claims that Win95 is a petulant attempt to imitate the Acorn OS are "unsubstantiated" according to Acorn.
Gates' motivation was likened by Bondar to that of tourists visiting great British institutions like Cambridge, Oxford, the London museums and Harry Ramsden's. "He just wanted to be a part of British culture," explained Bondar, "and be able to say 'I made that!'" Bondar was said to be impressed by Gates' work ethic, if not by his dress sense or personal hygiene.
Some of the work done by Gates himself included the !Printers application. "We knew that rumour of Microsoft involvement was leaking out after an article in the c.s.a. newsgroups mentioning !Printers acting like a Windoze app," Bondar explained, "and so we took the decision to make the announcement now." Speculation is still rife about the exact nature of Gates' programming work, with each Acorn programmer having his own pet theory. First Word Plus is a prime candidate, rumoured to be Gates' teething app before he understood the nature of RISC OS.
A regular poster on the Acorn newsgroups, known only as "K", was leading a vociferous majority in favour of lynching Bill Gates, hanging Sam Wauchope from the flagpole of Acorn house and sending out patches to bypass all remaining Gates legacy code in RO 3.1+. All that was standing in the way of this plan was the task of waking up the c.s.a.binaries moderator. In response, another user with the tag "IG" defended the scheme saying that Acorn had 'a lot' to learn from the Windoze Way. The general concensus on that opinin, however, seems to be "B*llocks."
Seattle police were forced to make frequent patrols of the Microsoft campus amid fears for Bill Gate's life. "Acorn fans are the worst kind of fanatic," warned Sgt. Tom Keks. "We just don't know what they're going to do. Fortunately we know that no God-fearing US citizen would ever use an Acorn machine, so we're just going to shoot any non-American dude we find inside the perimeter." Microsoft's Web servers have been offline since shortly after the announcement. Network administrators denied reports that a hacker had crashed the main NT server, patched the kernel with edlin and rebooted it so that it GPF'd every five minutes with the error "MS Sucks. Buy Acorn."
But there's a silver lining to every cloud; now free of Gates, RISC OS will continue to be developed by the hard-core Acorn tecchies. Bondar promises a 777 file limit, pre-emptive multitasking and a 10-StrongARM RiscPC with 120MHz bus and 2ns memory for under #1000 "real soon now." Acorn shares jumped sharply to 280p, but fell back 10p at close of trading on the rumour that Larry Ellison was to write the new kernel for RISC OS 4.
All the above is a product of my imagination, in conjunction with concepts from my pet fluffy penguin. No similarity to persons living, dead or using Windows 3.1 is intended. No offense is intended either. My employers have nothing to do with the above (as if you thought they did...)
For the record, I personally think that Acorn is wonderful and accord Peter Bondar semi-deity status. Just in case anyone was wondering!
So Boris Yeltsin convenes an emergency meeting of the Russian Parliment and says: "I have bad news, and really bad news. First of all, there is a God. Secondly everything we have worked for since the revolution will be totally destroyed in 3 days."
Bill Clinton makes a State of the Union address to the American people on TV and says: "I have good news and bad news. First of all, there is a God. Secondly, everything we have worked for since the revolution will be destroyed in 3 days."
Bill Gates convenes a meeting of the board of directors and says: "I have good news, and really good news. First of all, there is a God, and He spoke to me personally. Secondly, in 3 days, IBM will be destroyed."
Consider that he made this money in the 22 years or so since Microsoft was founded in 1975. If you presume that he has worked 14 hours a day on every business day of the year since then, that means he's been making money at a staggering half-million dollars per hour, around $150 per second.
Which means that if, on his way into the office, should he see or drop a $500 bill on the ground, it's just not worth his time to bend over and pick it up. He would make more just heading off to work.
We're assuming about 4 seconds to bend down and pocket the bill. Of course he can afford to hire people to follow him and pick up any $500 bills he may drop. Not that he would, fortunately he doesn't quite think of his wealth or time this way.
When I first calculated this, it was only a $20 bill, and then for some time it was a $100 bill. I remember speaking to him at a conference some years ago thinking, "$31 per second, $31 per second" as we talked. I didn't mention this.
It's perhaps more disturbing to look at the slope of his appreciation this year. From January to July he's gained some $16 Billion, meaning that at the rate he's going, if he sees a $10,000 bill, he's just as well to pass it by. (They do exist, but he won't see one until he buys the U.S. treasury -- they are not circulated. Salmon Chase, former secretary of the treasury and chief justice, is on it.) If it's a pile of cash he has to count, it's even worse. At $2,500 per second so far this year, they would have to be thousand-dollar Bills -- and he would need to have a quick hand -- to avoid him losing the money in wasted time while he's counting them. Counting $500 bills would be very unprofitable.
The "Too-small-a-bill-for-Bill" index has gone up quite a bit over the years. When Microsoft went public in 1986, the new multimillionaire only had to leave behind $5 bills.
In the HTML version, you will find a chart of the amount of currency it's not been worth Mr. Gates' time to pick up off the ground over the years, based on his current 281 million shares of Microsoft (he hasn't sold many) and the split-adjusted stock price courtesy of Microsoft's own web site. The spreadsheet (Excel of course) is there too.
So for example, you might think a new Lambourghini Diablo would cost $250,000, but in Bill Gates dollars that's 63 cents.
That fully loaded, multimedia active matrix 233 MHZ laptop with the 1024x768 screen you've been drooling after? A penny.
A nice home in a rich town like Palo Alto, California? Two dollars.
You might spend $100 on tickets, food and parking to take your family to see an NHL hockey game. Bill, on the other hand could buy the team for 100 Bill-bills.
You might buy a plane ticket on a Boeing 747 for $1200 at full-fare coach. In Bill-bills, Mr. Gates could buy three 747s. One for him, one for Melinda and one for young Jennifer Katherine.
Bill: "There are a few issues we need to discuss."
Contractor: "Ah you have our basic support option. Calls are free for the
first 90 days and then $75(#47) a call thereafter. Okay?"
Bill: "Uh yeah... the first issue is the living room. We think
it's a little smaller than we anticipated."
Contractor: "Well, yeah. Some compromises were made to have it out by the
'release date'."
Bill: "But we won't be able to fit all our furniture in there."
Contractor: "Well you have two options. You can purchase a new larger living
room; or you can use a stacker."
Bill: "A stacker?"
Contractor: "Yeah, it allows you to fit twice as much furniture into the
room. You out the entertainment centre on the couch, the
chairs on the table, the bookcase on the sideboard, and so
on. You also leave an empty spot, so when you want to use
some furniture you can you can unstack what you need and
then put it back when you are done."
Bill (Shaking his head):
"Uh, I dunno. Anyway there's something else. The second
issue is the light fixtures. The bulbs we brought with us
from our old home won't fit. The threads run the wrong
way."
Contractor: "Oh! That's easy! Those bulbs aren't plug-and-play.
You'll have to upgrade to the new plug-and-play bulbs."
Bill: "And the electrical outlets? What about those? The holes
are round, not rectangular. How do I fix that?"
Contractor: "Simple! Just uninstall and reinstall the electrical system."
Bill: "You're kidding!?"
Contractor: "Nope. It's the only way."
Bill (Sighing deeply):
"Well I have one last problem. Sometimes, when I have
guests over, someone will flush the toilet and it won't
stop. The water pressure drops so low that the showers
don't work."
Contractor: "That's a resource leakage problem. One fixture is failing
to terminate and is hogging the resources preventing access
from other fixtures."
Bill: "So how do I fix that?"
Contractor: "Well after each flush, you all need to exit the house, turn
off the water at the street, turn it back on, re-enter the
house and then you can get on with what you were doing
again."
Bill: "That's the last straw. What kind of product are you selling me?"
Contractor: "Hey if you don't like it nobody made you buy it."
Bill: "And when will this be fixed?"
Contractor: "Oh, in your next house, which will be ready to occupy
sometime near the end of next year. Actually, it was due
to be finished this year, but we've had some delays..."