Where is Bill Gates when you need him ?

[ravingdave]

Bill Gates does have his good points.

He (with IBM's help) unified operating systems at a time when there was a lot of confusion in the market..

You give him too much credit. The market unified operating systems.

I recall this period VERY well. In the 70s when microcomputers were first becoming popular we had the TRS80, The APPLE II, The Amiga, Lisa, Commodore 64, Ohio Scientific, the Pet, etc.

People would buy a computer to do wordprocessing and inventory for their small buisness, and the very next time they tried to upgrade, the new machine wouldn't use any of their old records or data, requiring them to laborously transcribe everything they wanted to keep.

People were frustrated by the lack of compatibility between systems, and when IBm announced they were producing a personal computer, people thought they would finally be able to buy a low cost "Professional" computer from a well known name in buisness. No more "Toy" computers for small buisness!

What made Bill Gates wealthy is Backward compatibility, and he created it unintentionally , as opposed to doing it purposefully. He got IBm to grant him ownership of DOS, which they had never done with any company before, and they only did so because they expected DOS to be very short lived as a result of their OS2 which they believed to be quickly forthcomming.

OS2 didn't get out fast enough, and DOS became the defacto (default) standard. Bill Gates owned it, and therefore became inadvertently wealthy.

Backward Compatibility was an idea whose time had come, and Bill Gates happened to be lucky enough to be riding that horse when the market decided that's what they wanted.

Bill Gates ought to be a nobody. He simply won the lottery.

What is really holding back computing these days is the dominance of the C, C++, Intel model of computing. The processors are overly complex and the language is clumsy.

Fortunately we are running into fundamental limits (the speed of light) which will eventually force on us a different way of doing things.

The deal is this: you can't design a small processor where C is the native language. FORTH on the other hand.....

In fact FORTH was based originally on the Turing idea that any processor can be made (with the right instructions) to emulate any other processor. Now a days we can skip the emulation process and go straight to silicon.

One of these days i'm going to have to take a look at fourth to see why you advocate it so strongly.

David

[ravingdave]

The laptop idea has a lot of merit in some ways. India has come a long way in development based solely on some forward-thinking implementation of computer technology in that country. That said, it's done very little to deal with the class problems there... sure Mumbai looks a bit like New York, but the countryside doesn't look like Wisconsin... if you take my meaning.

I think wealth and prosperity will resolve class differences in India far better than any intentional intervention.

The Gates' Foundation does a lot of agricultural development... can you leapfrog that, and go directly to industrialization? Stalin tried... Tough call. I think a little of each is probably a good way to go.

Teach a man to fish...

What do you think of this organization? http://www.heifer.org/

Mike

I love their Microenterprise initiative, I think their Gender Equity initiative is putting the cart before the horse, The AIDS/HIV initiative is probably a complete waste of time, but their other initiatives are very worthy and lauditory.

In Africa, as well as other places, Sex is almost exclusively male dominated, and as a result educating the women is pointless. They have no say. Educating the men is also pointless, they simply don't care.

The BEST idea i've heard, ( which the latest is, it doesn't work) was a gel which women could use to maintain vaginal acid levels high enough to kill viruses and bacteria. Women have control of their own protection, but unfortunately, like I said, so far the test trials have been a failure.


David

[jabowery]

Bill Gates does have his good points.

He (with IBM's help) unified operating systems at a time when there was a lot of confusion in the market..

You give him too much credit. The market unified operating systems.

You're basically correct. As someone who was developing an 8086 operating system from the spec sheets before the first silicon (on an 8086 emulator running on a Cyber 6500 written by Steve Freyder of the PLATO project -- my housemate at the time) -- PRECISELY because I saw the monopolistic potential of such a "gatekeeper" role for the 8086 -- I can say unequivocally that Bill Gates became the world's richest man because of a bug in the "economic operating system" of civilization: The tendency to tax economic activity rather than property rights (beyond homestead property).

Gates simply had family connections that allowed him to basically act as a broker between the programmer who wrote MS-DOS -- frankly a "POS" OS even for the time -- and IBM.

The formal term for the kind of monopoly that made Gates the world's richest man is "network externality" which is also sometimes called the "network effect". Basically, its the way black holes become bigger by accretion -- the little bits of "free" material are attracted to the center of mass of their environment -- and IBM's distribution of MSDOS created that center of mass for the PC world.

As to why I didn't end up getting this monopoly, well, aside from being from a middle class Iowa family with no connections to IBM's executives, there were some more important potentials to deal with such as bypassing the personal computer era completely.

Read about one dimension of that here:

http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/psgenesis.html

As a bonus prize you'll see something of why FORTH was and potentially still is important.

BTW: Part of the reason I'm working for $8/hour as a programmer now is due to the fact that Ray Ozzie and I had a fairly early disagreement over the quality of MS's early OS rewrites. Ray went his way and got in on the Gates gravy train. I don't blame him for that -- especially now that he's using his position to open make MS's standards a bit more open. It's sort of my view of grey hat crackers: You exploit systems then use your position to help shore up their bugs.

THE PROBLEM with guys like Gates is that they exploit the bug in the economic operating system and then don't fix it by advocating taxation of property rights as a replacement of taxation of economic activity. I like to _think_ that if I had been successful in my attempts to occupy the monopoly position that Gates acquired, I would have been different. But if not, I could not blame any amount of hatred directed toward me.

[scareduck]

Do you have a link to his rebuttal? Is it as different from Bussard's as is his device?

Not a huge amount of detail, but this is what's available.

PS:

the original poster didn't specify that it was. (philanthropy -- JAB)

As long as we're in the nits:

...Wealthy individuals donate a huge amount of money to crap...

And so what? Because something is operated on a for-profit basis, it's not as good as a non-profit? That's absurd. Economics matter. Cheap energy is the goal here. This is not a "nit", it's the crux of the matter.

[scareduck]

In any case, my point is concerning the General case of very wealthy people sending their money to "cultural investments", using Bill Gates as a specific example.

I'm actually kind of incredulous reading this, because it reveals an astonishing level of ignorance about what the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is spending money on. Unless you think that improving the economic lot of third-world subsistence farmers, advancing knowledge of vaccines and health care delivery, and improving primary instruction in the United States are "cultural investments", well, your vision of philanthropy is a rather crabbed and dim one.

[Mike Holmes]

Hey, Scare, young women want those things. They couldn't, therefore, possibly be practical.

Mike

[jabowery]

Thanks for the link, scareduck.

The full text of the article is apparently freely available.

Holmes, if you have something to say in response to my substantive criticism of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's investment in malaria treatment then say it. My generalization about young women is true and does not imply what you say it implies as evidenced by my call for more movies like "Tucker" as a way of guiding philanthropy to make more practical impact.

[MSimon]

Bill Gates does have his good points.

He (with IBM's help) unified operating systems at a time when there was a lot of confusion in the market..

You give him too much credit. The market unified operating systems.

You're basically correct. As someone who was developing an 8086 operating system from the spec sheets before the first silicon (on an 8086 emulator running on a Cyber 6500 written by Steve Freyder of the PLATO project -- my housemate at the time) -- PRECISELY because I saw the monopolistic potential of such a "gatekeeper" role for the 8086 -- I can say unequivocally that Bill Gates became the world's richest man because of a bug in the "economic operating system" of civilization: The tendency to tax economic activity rather than property rights (beyond homestead property).

Gates simply had family connections that allowed him to basically act as a broker between the programmer who wrote MS-DOS -- frankly a "POS" OS even for the time -- and IBM.

The formal term for the kind of monopoly that made Gates the world's richest man is "network externality" which is also sometimes called the "network effect". Basically, its the way black holes become bigger by accretion -- the little bits of "free" material are attracted to the center of mass of their environment -- and IBM's distribution of MSDOS created that center of mass for the PC world.

As to why I didn't end up getting this monopoly, well, aside from being from a middle class Iowa family with no connections to IBM's executives, there were some more important potentials to deal with such as bypassing the personal computer era completely.

Read about one dimension of that here:

http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/psgenesis.html

As a bonus prize you'll see something of why FORTH was and potentially still is important.

BTW: Part of the reason I'm working for $8/hour as a programmer now is due to the fact that Ray Ozzie and I had a fairly early disagreement over the quality of MS's early OS rewrites. Ray went his way and got in on the Gates gravy train. I don't blame him for that -- especially now that he's using his position to open make MS's standards a bit more open. It's sort of my view of grey hat crackers: You exploit systems then use your position to help shore up their bugs.

THE PROBLEM with guys like Gates is that they exploit the bug in the economic operating system and then don't fix it by advocating taxation of property rights as a replacement of taxation of economic activity. I like to _think_ that if I had been successful in my attempts to occupy the monopoly position that Gates acquired, I would have been different. But if not, I could not blame any amount of hatred directed toward me.

Oh yeah! Postscript. A "mainstream" FORTH. The engine behind every pdf.

And yeah - parenthesis' - who can think like that? Plus it screws with recursion. And the C "stack thrash" is just a killer for real time unless you violate one of the prime rules of programming - short, sweet, easily testable.

BTW Lego uses FORTH for its uP controlled stuff. It keeps their uPs cheap and it can be explained in English. AND OR NOT. The only unusual stuff in FORTH is fetch - @ and store ! . And if that offends you you can write them out FETCH STORE with no performance hit if you write it in the compiler - which is easy.

I might add that Sun had an opportunity to mainstream FORTH and passed. Instead we got a C - FORTH amalgam called JAVA. Oh. Well.

And then there is Open Boot which never caught on.

Satellite construction still uses FORTH because in space - size matters and DRAM is out of the question. SRAM has more RAD tolerance - but you want to use as little as possible. Six transistors a bit is expensive. One of the reasons I like FORTH for the processors that will go into the reactor room.

[MSimon]

BTW path dependence is a feature of a lot of things. Evolution for instance.

It is also a reason why the USA will maintain its dominance for a very long time despite intensive competition - until American culture becomes world culture - which is not a bad thing, all things considered.

[Mike Holmes]

Note to people who might consider the Lego reference to be somewhat... I dunno, childish?... Lego's tolerances on their parts are incredibly small. 2 µm I read? Think about how perfectly Legos fit together.

That said, PDF is almost an indictment... OK, I jest, mostly because PDFs are misused. They're invaluable in actual printing. But they're not meant for screen use. Just stick to good HTML folks. Sorry, personal axe to grind there.

Mike

[ravingdave]

In any case, my point is concerning the General case of very wealthy people sending their money to "cultural investments", using Bill Gates as a specific example.

I'm actually kind of incredulous reading this, because it reveals an astonishing level of ignorance about what the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is spending money on. Unless you think that improving the economic lot of third-world subsistence farmers, advancing knowledge of vaccines and health care delivery, and improving primary instruction in the United States are "cultural investments", well, your vision of philanthropy is a rather crabbed and dim one.

I had to go back and re-read my message to see what was so incredulous. I guess i'm just missing it.

If you are suggesting i'm a bit hard nosed, then that's probably correct. much of what is wrong with the world has nothing to do with money, but with what people are taught and not taught.

many of the people in the world are suffering from the consequences of bad memes. Releiving their temporary discomfort without addressing the cause of their ills will only stave off their misery temporarily.


Several years ago I saw a news story (on ABC) entittled "Dr. Vigliosi's vacation." It told of a heart surgeon who instead of going on a regular vacation, decided to go to bangladesh and offer his services to a hospital there. He ended up seeing a throng of patients, and he did what he could.
He then proceeded to return, (every year since, along with other doctors/nurses etc. whom he would invite) to treat poor bangladeshes. There were so many that he ended up seeing only the most severe congenital heart defect patients, but ones not so severe as to be long shots for survival.


He saves the lives of many poor bangladeshis every year by surgically repairing these defects.

my first thought was " What a man ! He is a true hero. "

my second thought was " Wait a minute. Aren't congenital heart defects "birth defects" ? meaning they are caused by defective genes ? meaning they are inheritable ? "

Is this man swaping misery in the present for more misery in the future ?
Will not the children of these people also have these congenital defects ?

Has he made things worse or better ?


Am I being mean, or pragmatic ?



David

[ravingdave]

As to why I didn't end up getting this monopoly, well, aside from being from a middle class Iowa family with no connections to IBM's executives, there were some more important potentials to deal with such as bypassing the personal computer era completely.

Read about one dimension of that here:

http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/psgenesis.html

.

You have been involved in a lot of interesting things. If your company had chosen to go the way you were steering them, things would be very different now indeed.



I am not completely certain I understand what you mean about taxing property as opposed to economic activity.

I am thinking that you mean the current system allows the accumulation of vast inheritable wealth, therefore creating these "social monopolies" where all the important powerful people are in the clique, while the rest of us are not.

If that is what you are getting at, then I daresay it is in my opinion impossible to stop because class stratification is an inate part of human nature. It can be socially optimized (like crime) but never eliminated.

David

[jabowery]

BTW path dependence is a feature of a lot of things. Evolution for instance.

Thanks for the phrase "path dependence" which I hadn't run across before, but I'll stick to my formal designation of Network Externality as a specific kind of path dependence most relevant to the Gates monopoly. It does help, however, to know there is a more parsimonious definition of Network Externality in terms of Path Dependence.

It is also a reason why the USA will maintain its dominance for a very long time despite intensive competition - until American culture becomes world culture - which is not a bad thing, all things considered.

That may be but only because there is a correlation between being the beneficiary of network externality and genuine creative spark.

[MSimon]

BTW path dependence is a feature of a lot of things. Evolution for instance.

Thanks for the phrase "path dependence" which I hadn't run across before, but I'll stick to my formal designation of Network Externality as a specific kind of path dependence most relevant to the Gates monopoly. It does help, however, to know there is a more parsimonious definition of Network Externality in terms of Path Dependence.

It is also a reason why the USA will maintain its dominance for a very long time despite intensive competition - until American culture becomes world culture - which is not a bad thing, all things considered.

That may be but only because there is a correlation between being the beneficiary of network externality and genuine creative spark.

The creative spark is a side effect of the world sending the USA as many of its semi functional crazy people as it could. The disrupters. The dissatisfied. After a while the USA became a magnet for such people. It is in part genetic. Mild schizophrenia. Which is why I believe the USA is the biggest consumer of illegal drugs in the world. We need them.

[TDPerk]

I found out centrifugally pressurized rockets SHOULD NOT be built out of a home casting.

Eh. Someday, with a forging.