RE: fruits of Bill Gates labor worth $50 billion

From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Sun Nov 17 2002 - 03:19:34 MST


On Sat, 16 Nov 2002, Frank Prengel wrote:

> Hey 'Gene,
>
> if you happened to have *me* in mind when writing the last sentence
> below (am I a friend of yours after your anti MS/BillG rant? ;-), be

Yes, and yes.

> assured that I love my job, the stuff that I'm doing (.NET), and the

I must admit I don't see the point of XML/SOAP stuff. Lisp did it with
SEXPRs twenty years ago, and did it better. If only the #%#! Lispers

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=lisp+machine&btnG=Google+Search
http://www.naggum.no/worse-is-better.html

weren't such elitists, and programmers weren't so afraid of parentheses
the world would have taken a different turn, and for the better. Ditto
with Forth, as personal machines were too tight for Lisp back then:

        http://colorforth.com/chips.html
        http://www.ultratechnology.com/chips.htm

(I own a Novix NC4000 board from 1985, 12 Forth MIPS).

> company I am working for. You would have a hard time finding the Evil
> Empire from within. (And what's my family got to do with it?)

If the company would treat their own employees the same way they treat
their competition you'd see blood troughs and meathooks in the halls ;)

I readily believe the internal climate is definitely better than, say, at
Oracle (which has a cutthroat sharks-in-suits internal competition
starting immediately above the grunt level). Did I already mention that
Oracle is at least as evil as Microsoft? Oracle was spun out of CIA, and
it is still one of their biggest customers. You can assume that when

http://208.171.236.113/cpunx-news/Current/0404.html

will be implemented, it will have plenty of Oracle warez in it.
 
The reason I mentioned your family is that if I had one, and would have
trouble to find a sufficiently paying job but at Microsoft I'd certainly
bite the bullet, and work for the Evil One. The damage I would create for
the industry would be compensated for the good I do for my family.

I would have definitely more qualms if this was an outfit designing nasty
military hardware.

> Now call me a damned monopolist.

Well, you're making good $$$s, having fun, and help to maintain Redmond's
monopoly position in the industry. You're not evil, you're just helping
the evil ones at the top of the orga graph.
 
I do not see any evidence that MS is reforming their ways, in fact if
anything it is going even more sinister

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=microsoft+palladium&btnG=Google+Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=microsoft+DRM&btnG=Google+Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=microsoft+evil&btnG=Google+Search
http://fuckmicrosoft.com/
etc.

> (SCNR :)



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