The advantages are several, here are a few I can think of (not that I practice them myself !)

1- You can use your Windows installation in both a real and a virtual machine. Some VM engines allow you to run off a physical disk, like VMWare. If you dual-boot from Linux or OSX, sometime you want to use your windows installation to check out some software and you do not want to reboot and lose your current work. With the DRM version of Windows, you would need two licenses, even though you are never using both at the same time.

2- You can change your hardware anyway you want. The DRM version will unregister itself if you change the CPU, the motherboard, too many disks, the graphics card, and whatnot. You have to re-register by telephone, which is a huge hassle and may stop working if you do it too often.

3- You can carry over your installation of Windows to your new computer (same issue as #2, really).

4- Why do you need as many licenses of Windows if you have say 3 computers but only ever use one at any given time ? Say one at work, one at your SO, and one at home, if you are self-employed?

Basically Windows is behind the time. Linux is free and good, and OSX is becoming more and more gratis (not libre, unfortunately).

This, exactly.

Ornamental subjects like dentistry? Please read the article before making such comments. Cheers.

Very well played, sir.

Us old guys have been on the Internet wayyy before 1994, more like 1984. Lots of value *even then*. For instance in 1991 I would have had no means of communicating with my wife-to-be without the Internet.

There is not much difference with respect to physical properties between printed and sintered metal or ceramics. Sintering is a very well established fabrication process combining endurance, flexibility in design and low weight. However, laser-powered, layered construction a.k.a printing allows for even greater flexibility and most importantly one-off fabrication. This is ideally suited to medical applications like this one. However do not expect to be able to do this at home anytime soon.

Thanks, at least that sounds believable.

Who is talking about PARC? IBM in 1980 certainly did not think personal computers were a joke, else they would not have started their own PC project. Of course Gates had seen the potential! He knew how PC worked, and that a compatible market to the IBM-PC would emerge in short order. In fact as someone else has pointed out in this thread, there were MS-DOS compatible PCs before Compaq did their reverse-engineering of the IBM-PC ROM, allowing for a higher degree of compatibility.

Microsoft was not really interested in the home market until fairly late. They did produce Flight Simulator in the 1980s but it was an outlier. They made their money selling to OEM and businesses. The Internet and the Gates books you mentions are 1990s era. Much later.

Before 1980 or so Gates was very well connected already and Microsoft was a huge figure in 8-bit computing. Everybody wanted their MS-Basic interpreter. He knew what was going on in this field.

You don't have to insult everybody who disagrees with you. That does not make you sound more intelligent.

Cheers.

Apple did not assimilate BSD, NeXT had done that before and Apple inherited it. Unfortunately Darwin/OSX is only weakly BSD. It misses all the great features of OpenBSD (security) or FreeBSD (ZFS, jails) or NetBSD (available everywhere) in return for being easy to use (which is a great feature).

Sorry my friend, I am not a fan of Microsoft at all but I lived through this period and there definitely a time before the deal between Microsoft and IBM and a time after. The deal was a watershed. It changed everything.

The area before that deal was one of fragmentation and hobbyists on the personal computer front, and very expensive minis and mainframes on the business front. The only capable personal computer was the Apple ][ which was a significant business success. It had a modicum of business software, one of which was VisiCalc. This software package alone, the first spreadsheet for PCs, probably motivated IBM to build their own PC.
In 1981, Apple were so sure of themselves that they ran adverts Welcoming IBM to the world of Personal Computers. Apart from the Apple ][ there were a plethora of 8-bit hobbyist computers, often based on the Z-80 or one of its variants like the Sinclair. These were cheap. Apple ][ were expensive. Apple was not interested in licensing their software or hardware.

Normally IBM should have simply paid for an OS outright or developed one themselves. They made that deal with Microsoft which ensured that MS would retain the most important property rights, which allowed them to sell MS-DOS to compatible PC builders. Nobody at IBM had foreseen the rise of compatible PC makers. Bill Gates had. By 1986 or so, capable PCs were everywhere. The hardware was simple, they were all compatible to a high degree to the business-friendly IBM PC, they could all run the same software, and they were cheap. Nobody bought an Apple ][ anymore. The 8-bit hobbyist computers had all but disappeared.

Without that deal compatible PCs would simply not have existed. I completely concur with the notion that this is the most important *deal* in the history of software.

Please come up with an alternative *deal* with an higher significance if you do not agree (and not a mere link to google.com)

Cheers.

No, the site specifically says 2mn *per move* for Gates vs 30s for Carlson.

Computer chess ranking and human ranking are not exactly comparable (even though they use the same basic system), because they don't often play against each other. The tournaments are separate. Also the computers don't play in the same way vs. other machines as vs. human opponents. So the outcome is hard to predict on any particular game. However over enough games, for sure Fritz would win.

The same reason why people pay for Windows instead of using FreeBSD?

At some level everybody is a "moron". Most people confuse ignorance and stupidity, and everybody is ignorant of something.

Easy, wrong target. The women tend to be vastly more reasonable, educated and sensible than the men who lied to them and left them when kid #1 showed up. And then did not comply with their parental obligations. In fact we should trust and empower poor women much more. In many developing country, microcredit has been proposed as a solution to poverty. The thing is, microcredit is only given to women, particularly mothers. They don't tend to dilapidate it on pointless/hopeless pursuits.