Heh. That shows what I get for relying on my memory rather than looking it up again.

I'm particularly embarrassed that I followed a previous poster's lead in mispelling Gary Kildall's name.

Though, as the article you linked explains, Kildall did have a chance to make this deal and blew it, leaving it to Gates to pick up. Had Kildall been a better businessman Microsoft would never have become what it did, regardless of Gates' mom's connections.

On the topic of vacuum robots...

Has anyone seen any vacuum robot that integrates with central vacuum? I'd love to have the robot's base station connected with my central vac so when the robot returns to charge the central vac empties the robot and maybe even cleans its filters a little. The combination would be true launch-and-forget ongoing carpet cleaning.

You're referring to CCleaner and Avast, I assume? The AV industry is certainly a plague on the world.

Anyway, thanks for the specifics. I found some information that says CCleaner's installer asks if you'd also like to install Chrome -- it isn't bundled; it prompts for an additional download, AFAICT. I don't see anything about Chrome related to Avast other than that Avast has a Chrome extension.

Even assuming those are true, are the any other packages bundling Chrome? Is it just AV vendors? The claim is that it's added to a "lot" of products, and that that explains its growth and its presence on millions of machines. I don't think CCleaner and Avast are enough to move the needle significantly, even if they both always installed Chrome.

Maybe. But IBM approached Kindall first. I strongly suspect that if he'd said "Sure! I'll license it to you for $5 per machine", IBM would have done the deal with him. There really weren't any "back room" negotiations required; it was a pretty straightforward deal.

It is perhaps possible that Mary Gates learned that IBM would be interested in a licensing deal, but I'm skeptical that John Opel would even have known that much about the project. IBM was an enormous company and the PC project was a small effort that nearly all of the company thought was irrelevant. It occurs to me that perhaps Mary Gates talked to Opel and found out that he didn't know much about it, and realized that the project didn't have much internal support, and from that deduced that the execs in charge were fighting internal opposition and might see a licensing deal as a way to get to market faster and cheaper before they could get shut down.

But all of that is purely speculation. What is clear is that (a) IBM did approach Kindall first and he ignored them, and (b) an OS licensing deal was good for the PC project. I see nothing to indicate that IBM wouldn't have accepted such an offer from Kindall.

Chrome is truly awful at opening multiple tabs at once on my mac. unbelievably slow loading times compared to Safari. And when a page is loading in one tab, other tabs don't continue to update swiftly. I find this really a weirds because chrome uses a separate process for each tab so one would think they would not step on each other. My guess, wild, is that tabs are contending for some resource like network or GPU and actually slowing each other down. In general I much prefer safari or firefox, but I use chrome because I also own a chromebook and I can't run safari on that. Basically, google is doing the same thing microsoft did to make IE dominant by not allowing other browsers on their platform.

I don't think it's so strange. IBM didn't expect the PC to be a success. It was a niche project pushed by a few execs over the objections of more -- who saw it as undercutting IBM's real business, to whatever degree it was successful -- and ignored by most of the company as irrelevant. Other parts of the company were actively trying to kill the project. The group developing the PC needed an operating system and needed it quickly. They couldn't take the time to build one, assuming they could find the budget, and likewise couldn't pay a lot of cash up front. Licensing an existing OS for a low per-unit cost was an obvious win.

And, of course, by the time it became clear that the PC was a success, it was too late to change OSes, and by then Gates would've been a fool to sell. Besides, the cost to IBM was low and the machines were selling well. As long as IBM was the only company selling PCs, there really was no significant downside to IBM, and IBM was confident in its legal teams' ability to shut down clones... until Compaq performed a successful clean-room reverse engineering of the PC BIOS.

It ultimately boils down to lack of foresight, that the PC would be so important, and that IBM couldn't prevent clones. Without understanding those, IBM had no reason to insist on ownership of the OS.

No, Mary Gates was never on IBM's Board of Directors. She was on the United Way board, along with John Opel, then CEO of IBM. This may have helped Gates. Still, I don't see any reason Kindall wouldn't also have been able to get a licensing deal. There's no evidence he tried.

Interesting. What products include Chrome?

It's the default browser in many Android devices, is that what you're talking about?

Nicely done.

I expect this may turn into something of an arms race between phishing page authors and Google. The cleverest phishers may be able to stay consistently ahead of the extension, but I expect that they'll have to work for it... or would if significant numbers of people used the extension. I just checked the Chrome Web Store and so far there have only been 67K downloads. That's something but it's a long, long way from universal coverage.

The positive aspect of that is that as long as usage remains low, it won't make sense for phishers to bother trying to defeat it, which means it will offer good protection to the few who do.

FWIW, a number of critical Foundation-level APIs are C++ under the hood. Whether linking a newer libc++ dylib would cause them to break or not, I couldn't begin to guess.

The H-1B program is different because H-1B workers who leave their jobs are also legally required to leave the country. This makes them captive labor, almost to the same extent that illegal immigrants are. IMO, we should make green cards easier to obtain and kill the H-1B program outright. By ensuring that foreign workers have similar employment mobility to native workers, it would reduce the ability of unscrupulous companies to bring in workers from overseas and pay them wages that are below the regional going rate. (They would still be able to do it, but they wouldn't be able to retain those employees, so they would eventually be forced to pay wages that are competitive within their geographical area.)

Wow. Give us what we want or we will fuck you even harder.

Are you in the habit of erecting obvious strawmen, or was this particular bit of off-target re-interpretation just special for me?

Although it does apply to this group -- they're telling the government, "give us what we want, or we'll try to hose some good science" So perhaps your post wasn't a strawman after all. Perhaps you're just confused as to who the culprit is in this situation.

Many schools ban bare-shoulder outfits, anyway.

That's like saying "many people try to force others into doing stupid things, so anything I want to try to force you into is good, right and holy."

Some dumb-ass school rule stands as absolutely no legitimate justification for pop-culture repression of personal and consensual choice.

All this particular interest group is doing by going against good science is making is less likely they'll get what they want.

The world goes the way the most powerful choose it shall go. So it has ever been, and likely will continue to go for the foreseeable future. Going against the good things the powerful do is just one more very efficient way to get them to consider your desires irrelevant -- a really poor way of trying to get the powerful to use said power in your favor.

These people are not "natives", either. They didn't evolve there. They're immigrants and descendants of immigrants. just like all of us on the US mainland, basically anywhere but (probably) Africa. Perhaps what you meant to say was "descendents of the earliest known settlers." Or perhaps "invaders" is more accurate.

Another thought along the lines of the powerful do what the powerful want to do... do you think the earliest of these folks took the time to see if the other local life forms wanted them and their changes on and around these islands? Did the fish want to be speared, for instance?

It's all a matter of perspective and power. These people seem to have neither.

I pay close to $250/month for power (it just went up 47% in CT in the last 6 months for the same power usage). So if the 10kWh PowerWall costs me $3,500 (+inverter, grid tie-in, installation), then it pays for itself in ~18 months. That's a pretty easy sell from my perspective.

Adding $10k of solar panels to the system to go completely off the grid, just adds to that value, and to the resale price of my house if I choose to sell it within the next 10-20 years. As panel efficiencies improve, I can upgrade those panels, or add an additional PowerWall, and increase that independence.

Totally worth it, in my opinion.

Besides, many (most?) communities are now putting a quota on the number of solar installations, because of the pressure they put on the common utility/grid system (yes, they do -add- more pressure to the grid, contrary to common thought, especially at nighttime and when there is heavy, localized cloudcover), so if you wait, you may find yourself the only one on the block who can't add solar because it's prohibited. A PowerWall tied to the common utility can relieve some of that pressure, and increase the independence from a constant feed from the power company.