Honestly, of the two icons shown in the movie, I'd rather take Gates to dinner over Jobs. Sure, he's shown as being a conniving schemer, but at the same time much less of a reprehensible human being (PoSV was not kind in its depiction of Job's handling of his daughter).
Q: "How was your relationship with Steve jobs? I always hoped that y'all were really good friends and competitors."
A: "He and I respected each other. Our biggest joint project was the Mac where Microsoft had more people on the project than Apple did as we wrote a lot of applications."
So Bill might be giving away some money nowadays, his character doesn't seem to have changed much, still taking credit where it isn't due.
All I have to go on is a handful of interviews, but I've never seen Steve Jobs act like anything other than a condescending douche bag towards Bill Gates and Microsoft.
Anyone know if there's any public evidence that they shared a mutual respect? If there is, I'd like to read / watch it.
Thanks. I'm not surprised that it exists, I just think the media likes showing the clips where Steve is busting Bill's balls over Windows supposed inferiority.
I'm going go finish the video now. I appreciate it.
In that movie Gates is shown to be ruthless in his business dealings with other companies, but Steve Jobs is ruthless in his dealings with his own staff. In the movie, Steve Jobs actively promoted infighting between teams and mandated insane working conditions.
Based entirely on the movie, Steve Jobs is clearly shown as the worse of the two.
It's an interesting showdown of personalities. Steve Jobs had invited the actor who portrayed him at WWDC. So looks like Jobs also thought portrayal was accurate. I think both of them had their own flaws as individuals but their strengths made them what they are.
Post-Microsoft Bill Gates is a much more interesting person. I'm not a Microsoft fan, but I have a huge amount of respect for how he's choosing to spend the money he made. Interesting contrast to Larry Ellison, for example.
Be was so hard to catch, you practically had to infect yourself with it. Netscape mutated into the Communicator Virus, and what with it's bigger molecular structure, transmission became so difficult, that it eventually died out.
We are always learning how to learn more. Destroying the specimens would destroy an opportunity to learn about an organism that has had a significant impact on our own species.
I'm not judging Ellison at all. Bill could have done the same, but I think it's cool that he is choosing to oversee how that money is spent while he's still alive.
From a purely selfish point of view, if I was to choose one path or the other, Bill's seems more pleasant.
By spending the money on charity while alive, Bill is celebrated as a benefactor while he is alive and charities (and people) worldwide will mourn his death.
Larry, on the other hand, is not celebrated as a benefactor while alive, and charities will celebrate after he dies and they finally get the money.
And without pretending that he can fix the world. Which is fatuous and provides a cover for business to continue as usual. Ellison is satisfied with being destructive in one domain of affairs. Gates isn't happy with just screwing up computing. He has to poop other people's parties, too.
I don't believe the children who would have died from diseases the Western world doesn't even have anymore would call it "screwing up" their lives.
He's trying to eradicate disease and help people who don't have billions of dollars, or even millions...or even hundreds of dollars to their name.
Bill Gates didn't screw up computing. The Microsoft that exists today is an entirely different animal than it was when it was just a startup, just as Google and Apple are different.
This isn't cynicism about startups' growth trends; this is a point that Bill Gates has revolutionized the entire industry multiple times over. How he chooses to spend his wealth is what most people would call generous and altruistic.
Wow. That was amazingly insightful. However, comparing Microsoft to Linux or Macintoshes is like comparing Sushi to French Fries or Pork. Each one has its draws and vehement opponents. So yes, they are all different, even Microsoft today and Microsoft circa 1994.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, as I thought everything I said was pretty self-evident. But thank you.
Although I wasn't comparing the operating systems, I was comparing the pattern of the companies' growth and changing management over the years. That's why I included Google.
Fanboys and haters flagging this HN article is more priceless to me.
Grow up guys, you can upvote your Apple and Google posts all you want, you don't need to go out of your way to flag this post out of spite and abuse your moderator privileges.
Yet, you seem to be okay with the folks who flag this story.
What do you call people who go out of their way to flag even product announcements and posts like this? Tech enthusiasts? I'll be happy to use a less abrasive substitute.
I'm guessing he intended to mean it would be nice if there was a week without necessity for the word, rather than the word itself being entirely bad (it's over-used, but I agree in this instance it was apt).
This isn't the first time anyway. Pretty much any post mentioning Microsoft in a not bad light seems to get flagged by people with good karma abusing it.
Edit: It's at 325 points(posted 4 hours ago) right now and stuck at #14. Has to break some record for the most upvoted and flagged story.
I think some sites have a bonus point degrader applied to them, so they age off faster. Prevents what may otherwise be popular sites from dominating the front page.
I should hope so. I didn't flag this (as robber baron parasites go, Gates is pretty interesting and topical) but #1 on the Reddit front page isn't exactly obscure.
Looks like even mentioning the flagging is taboo. My top level comment on this story[1] calling out the flagging is sitting at the bottom of the comment pile, very grayed out.
Flagging on HN isn't really the same as downvoting on Reddit.
From the HN guidelines:
If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.)
I think 27182818284 is talking about the downvoting of your comment, not the flagging of the original story.
Also, Reddit has the same guideline as you quote (only downvote things that don't belong) whereas HN has the creator saying that downvotes can be used to express disagreement.
I created a Reddit account simply for this moment.
Amazing. Bill has had his fair share of flak and has made some decisions in his career that I wouldn't approve of, and I am not particularly a fan of Microsoft, but his humility, modesty, and great work has made him one of my greatest inspirations.
He's a multi-billionaire with a heart that is worth so much more.
They've already said it on Reddit; but, he has to be the fastest Reddit AMA that I've ever paid attention to. He's responding to so much, so quickly; and a lot of the questions don't seem like ones he could pass off to someone else, not to mention the wording, etc seems consistent throughout.
How so? I seriously doubt he's typing on that 82" touchscreen, it wouldn't be very fast and it'd be hard to keep up. So if he uses an external keyboard, how does using that giant gimmick help him in answering quickly?
Of course, he presume he doesn't do much hard core software engineering anymore, but I assumed that family was pretty much a thing of the past (and legacy code).
Gates founded Microsoft to sell a Basic interpreter. His company spent a lot of time keeping Basic as a core part of its line up long after it was considered passé. I suspect that Gates has some nostalgia for it.
Yeah, Microsoft really is the "BASIC company". From the early 8bit machines (did you know the Commodore 64 BASIC ROM is (c) Microsoft?) through qbasic and all the way up to visual basic and VBA...
Not just the Commodore; the Apple II, TRS-80, and MSX all used Microsoft's BASIC in one form or another. It shouldn't be any surprise at all that their dev tools continue to be rather well done (regardless of what you think of the platform they're on)
VB.Net is a completely different beast from older Visual Basic (up to VB6). It's still under active development as a first-class citizen on MS's .Net stack. It has iterators, generics, partial classes, anonymous types, lambdas, and other stuff you wouldn't expect to find in a BASIC.
The same reason craigslist classified haven't been surpassed by a more modern system -- it is much easier for everyone to live with the shortcomings (which really aren't that bad) than it would be to recreate an equivalently large, diverse and vibrant community on another site.
Especially since any focused site that came up to do this would almost certainly put way more barriers to entry into the community than reddit (which still allows you to create a new account virtually instantly, with no email verification) has.
I think what he meant is that if a girl is giving an AMA she gets a lot of off topic "wow you're hot" type posts from the peanut gallery, something that wouldn't happen if the system were more moderated. OTOH, the lack of moderation is part of the charm of AMAs IMO even though it does result in the trolls being trolls.
(The "Woody Harrelson"/Rampart AMAs would be the norm if not for the chaotic nature of reddit).
I'm not suggesting they are all charming, some of them are pretty terrible, but that's the price you pay for having relatively free speech. While moderating the questions would eliminate posts like the one you linked, it would also eliminate ones which aren't terrible but are certainly "off the script" of what would be asked if everything were cleanly moderated.
And if it's a trade-off where more "impulsive" comments are deleted, then I prefer that to subjecting female respondents to constant come-ons from pubescent, sad human beings.
It seems that Emmy Rossum prefered Reddit's version, not the version you prefer.
Emmy Rossum went to reddit for an AMA, and used the site's commenting functionality to ask people not to be rude. She did not cancel her AMA, ask to have the rude comments deleted, etc.
I have the "Reddit Enhancement Suite" extension installed, and it allows me to jump to each comment he responds to. If you are a frequent redditor, I recommend installing it.
But Obama's IAMA got 239,221 upvotes total. Which means he got 225K downvotes...which I guess is feasible, but for all we know, that was just an arbitrary result Reddit's strange algorithm of adding downvotes to obscure the upvote count.
I guess it doesn't matter in the end, it just seems that upvotes should be a real reflection of how liked (or polarizing) a thread/discussion was.
Yes...I don't think I was clear enough about what I meant, in a statistical sense. I know that upvotes/downvotes are added artificially. I'm saying, it's hard to gauge the real ratio of upvotes to downvotes with this fuzz.
The FAQ you linked to gives this example: a submission with 5 upvotes and 3 downvotes may be tweaked to say 23 upvotes and 21 downvotes.
So the net number of upvotes remains the same. But the ratio of approval, a statistic that is prominently listed for each submission, changes:
5 / (5+3) = 62.5%
23 / (21+23) = 52.5%
I thought I had also read that, in earlier implementations of the fuzz, upvotes were either removed, or downvotes added, so that doing an all-time view of popular posts would not completely consist of new posts (because the reddit user base is much bigger than it was several years ago, so a relatively mediocre post could garner more upvotes than a very good older post).
Are you suggesting they allow spammers? Every time I remove a spammer post I submit it to /r/ReportTheSpammers, and they get killed almost immediately. What else can they do outside of that? Not allow new users to vote and comments?
The best they can do is make spammers be unclear on if they're having any effect or not, by obscuring votes, or by secretly banning them without them realizing.
It's a tough problem to get right, especially without making the experience worse for everybody else. I think they've found a happy medium.
Really great to have him in public this way, I mean, most of the celebrities have help teams, that post for them, which is kinda boring, but there are always haters and weeners, that would fill up such pages with some meaningless crap, so my biggest concern is Bill Gates, getting err... unlovey to Reddit ? :( that would be sad
This is ridiculous, and proves that HN is filled with closed minded fanboys and hater zealots instead of technology lovers who otherwise have good karma.
Can anyone who flagged this post tell us why they did so?
If this is not moderator abuse, I don't know what is.
>Trial by jury was introduced in most German states after the revolutionary events of 1848; however, it remained controversial and early in the 20th century there were moves to abolish it.[34] The Emminger Reform of January 4, 1924, during an Article 48 state of emergency, abolished the jury system and replaced it with a mixed system including bench trials and lay judges. In 1925 the Social Democrats called for the reinstitution of the jury, and a special meeting of the German Bar demanded revocation of the decrees, but "on the whole the abolition of the jury caused little commotion".[35] Their verdicts were widely perceived as unjust and inconsistent.
Listen, I don't mean to be rude, but this isn't really the place to hash it out with moderators, or draw parallels with any part of Germany's less reputable history.
You should email them if you're convinced it's flagged and you have an issue with it.
I hope this doesn't come across as pretentious, because I don't mean it that way.
But honestly, I don't take Hacker News seriously enough for it to bother me. I use it to build connections in the community, keep up to date on tech and news matters, and post things from time to time.
It's not as though I need my posts to hit the front page. I post intellectual curiosities and some of my more interesting blog posts around the internet, but I couldn't care less if a small but powerful "1%" holds voting power on Hacker News.
It's quite possible that there's a scaling factor (e.g. 0.3) applied to upvotes to stories submitted from reddit. Although the following linked pg comment is several years old, it does give insight into pg's goal to reduce the ease with which submissions of 'lightweight' content reach the top of the HN front page.
Looking at the AMA, the "verification photo", and the posted video, I see nothing convincing me it's real. However, the responses seem non-trolly, but I'm still not convinced.
The people at Reddit are pretty careful about establishing identities. They certainly did for my two AMAs. Here's a link to my most recent AMA -- notice the bona-fides at the top:
Even Woz had said that the film accurately portrayed all the personalities.
However, we should appreciate Bill for his honesty. He is not shown in good light in that movie.