Bill Gates On the Difference Between Elon Musk and Steve Jobs (cnbc.com) 141
In an interview with Bloomberg, Bill Gates was asked whether his contemporary Elon Musk could be considered the "next Steve Jobs," due to the advancements his companies Tesla and SpaceX have made in electric cars and reusable rockets, respectively. CNBC reports: "If you know people personally, that kind of gross oversimplification seems strange," Gates told Bloomberg in the interview published Thursday. There are some key differences between the way Musk and Jobs operate, Gates said. "Elon's more of a hands-on engineer. Steve was a genius at design and picking people and marketing," Gates said. "You wouldn't walk into a room and confuse them with each other." [...] As for Jobs, he "was such a wizard at over-motivating people ... I could see him casting the spells, and then I would look at people and see them mesmerized," Gates told podcast host Dax Shepard Aug. 20. Musk and Gates also have their differences. CNBC adds: In August, Gates wrote a blog post about electric vehicles, saying that they will "never be a practical solution" for replacing trucks and long-haul vehicles. Musk responded to Gates' comments on Twitter Sept. 11, saying that "he has no clue" about electric trucks. (Gates said in the Bloomberg interview that Musk's electric car "is a huge contribution to the climate change effort," that Tesla "did it with quality" and that "other car companies, seeing his success, will come [into the market].") [...] Of course, Gates own reputation has evolved. In the early Microsoft days, Gates was known for setting high standards for the company and being very tough on his team. "I certainly wasn't a sweetheart when I ran Microsoft," he said on Shepard's podcast.
The biggest difference for me (Score:3, Informative)
One is dead, the other one is not.
Why compare at all?
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It may happen after the election, but it is not guaranteed to happen after the next presidential term begins. In other words, Trump may still fill the vacancy in December.
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Re: The biggest difference for me (Score:2)
What medical condition is causing this person to post nazi-type swastikas all the time? Can someone try and explain? Lack of social interactions, perhaps? Or some chemical imbalance in some regions of the brain?
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Any man nominated will be Kavenaughed.
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True, but RBG's death will trigger a tremendous number of flying monkeys. It's going to get even crazier.
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What is a hypocracy? (Score:2, Offtopic)
Is that like democracy, but instead of governance by the demos, the people, it is governance by persons practicing hypocrisy?
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In 2016 Republicans made it clear that it's wrong to select a new S.C.Justice shortly before a Presidential election. If they tried to do it now, the hypocracy would be too obvious.
This party of "conservatism, tradition and family values" is cowing to x-times divorced, pussy-grabbing, golden spoon in mouth, never served, self-absorbed, womanizing Mr. President.
Are you sure the Republicans give a shit about hypocrisy?
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The Republicans don't care about hypocrisy, they are in it to win it. The Democrats have been too nice, too concerned with doing what's right instead of using every trick in the book to get into power.
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They usually only care about hypocrisy when others do it. Why do they tend to do that?
Anyway, why are we discussing politics here? I thought this was about comparing Jobs to Musk.
My personal opinion is that though Musk is massively overrated in many internet communities (kind of like Nikola Tesla), he has made a lot of actually useful contributions to our society.
Jobs on the other hand has mostly made overpriced status symbols
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"If they tried to do it now, the hypocrisy would be too obvious."
If you think the hypocrisy isn't already obvious enough, you'll have to come out from under your rock more often.
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No way, with the rot that is this Congress, that a nomination today will receive hearings before Thanksgiving.
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Uh, let's forget the unwarranted Benghazi investigation when the perps admitted it was to kneecap Clinton. We'll also need to forget the R's sandbagging Obama's last year and not giving his man a hearing. Now let's roll the tape forward to the current alleged administration whose leader has told over 19,000 falsehoods while in office. His useful idiots are trying to muffle the CDC because they "don't agree with its scientific conclusions". The West is burning down, hurricanes are proliferating, the Arctic,
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No, that leaves the Senate split 50-50, then Eunuch Pence will ride in to cast the deciding vote to move the U.S. back to the 1950s. There is nothing this alleged administration will not corrupt.
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In fact, I suggest it.
Nomination should happen November 11th after a long search for a female conservative pro-lifer. That search should be used to motivate more conservatives to vote for Trump, as it's clear that is the only reason anybody moral would vote for him.
They can hold confirmation hearings comfortably scheduled between Thanksgiving and the Christmas vacation.
Then President Trump can swear in the new justice on a very fitting January 22, 2021.
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If it is reelected then yes he should appoint a replacement. As it is its job.
However 5 years ago. the GOP made a point about not electing a supreme court judge so close to an election. (There was over a year before the election Not less than 2 months) If you are going to make up rules like that and then not follow them, that is just pure Evil Hypocrisy. Unless they are willing to bring in a Liberal judge because they realized what they did was wrong, so they just figured fare is fare.
They currently hav
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My thought exactly.
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Or you can ignore major problems affecting a large portion of our population. If the justice system had failed them. Why would you expect them to use it to push their views.
Oh no some people burned down a few buildings and blocked traffic!! Just because the police are murdering them for nearly any petty infraction or not at all.
Steve died from superstition. Musk from drugs? (Score:4, Insightful)
Musk believes his workaholic life style and drug use mixes well. Hope he will realize it does not, before it is too late for him, because unlike Steve, he has brought some actually useful new technology to live.
He might have died from being a dick... (Score:1)
Steve had a new car delivered every 6 months. In California, 6 months was the limit you could have a temporary license plate, which allowed Steve to park in handicapped spots. New cars emit carcinogens in their new car smell. Steve died from cancer.
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Ergo, temporary license plates are deadly.
Re: Steve died from superstition. Musk from drugs? (Score:2)
Really? THAT is what you come up with? Occasional drug use? What did you smoke? If you ever do alcohol you are in the same danger zone...
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Zolpidem is a fast-acting short-lived sleeping pill, alcohol puts you to sleep for longer, but may stimulate initially, sleep deprivation is the thing he tried to cure... Everything in order.
He's not "workaholic", if anything, he's maniacal. He's exuberant about what he's doing. He has all the money in the world he requires to fulfill his wildest creative ideas.
I couldn't sleep if I were him.
Re: Steve died from superstition. Musk from drugs? (Score:2)
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People should really decide to either write comments or be stupid, not both.
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Bill Gates Got Lucky (Score:2, Interesting)
He got lucky with MS-DOS and Windows, being in the right place at the right time, and having no qualms about hurting good people to get what he wants.
This is Bill Gates' predictive history:
1) 640K should be enough for anyone. He claims he never said it, but I'm convinced he did.
2) No one will ever take the Internet seriously. He nearly tanked Microsoft with this one, and only saved Microsoft at the last moment by embracing the Internet.
3) Electric trucks will never be competitive with fossil fuel trucks, c
Re:Bill Gates Got Lucky (Score:5, Interesting)
Over and over, gates fucked up so many things.
Re:Bill Gates Got Lucky (Score:5, Informative)
IBM approached MS for a cp/m-like os. MS simply bought QDOS (quick and dirty operating system), made some small adjustments and renamed it MS-DOS. IBM could market it under the name PC-DOS. Noteworthy is the position of Bills mother within IBM at the time.
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1) I see no reason to think that he said it. There are internal documents that quote him saying the exact opposite, for two years before he supposedly said the 640K nonsense.
2) Bullshit, pure and simple. Gates had two unfortunate quotes in which he said that the Internet would take a decade before it became important, commercially, and that the Internet as it was needed to evolve before it became the Next Great Thing. He always knew it was coming, but for a brief period (1994-1995) he was not sure how qu
19 years old and he had the balls to tell Altair (Score:5, Informative)
In school, Bill Gates used to go around telling people that he'd be a millionaire by the time he was 30. Sure enough, he was a BILLIONAIRE by the end of his 30th year. He knew he was headed for big things.
A lot of people were trying to build businesses around computers. Almost all failed. Bill Gates succeeded in a HUGE way, just like he said he would. That wasn't just luck. There are a few patterns evident in Microsoft's big successes. Here I'll point out just one of those patterns.
When Gates was 19 years old, Altair was computer company, a leader of the PC revolution. While his friends worked in supermarkets and restaurants, Gates had the fall to call up Altair and offer to sell them some important software - his BASIC interpreter fot Altair. (Remember Python, Perl, JavaScript, Ruby etc didn't exist at the time - Basic was a big deal). The funny thing about 19 year old Bill Gates selling his Altair BASIC to a huge company is that he didn't have a BASIC interpreter, or even an Altair to develop on one. But sell it he did. This is kinda like a teenager today calling up Amazon and offering to sell them self-driving delivery vans, though they don't even own a van, much less a self-driving one.
Altair said they were very interested and so set an appointment for a demo a few weeks later. Gates enlisted the help of a few other guys and wrote a BASIC interpreter for a machine none of them owned in a couple of weeks, closing the sale. They had forgotten to write the critical part that makes it start up, so they wrote that on the plane heading to the meeting. Other 19 year olds worked doing delivery for local restaurants, Gates decided his job would be selling software to the largest computer companies. Never mind the fact he had no software to sell, that's just a minor obstacle he can overcome.
Fast forward a bit. IBM was getting ready to launch a new computer, which would need an operating system. So Gates offered to sell them an operating system, a CP/M clone. Never mind that he didn't HAVE an operating system. He had decided to sell important software to major computer companies, so that's what he did. He wasn't going to let the lack of having any software to sell get in the way. Of course IBM did take him up in his offer to sell them his CP/M clone, called DOS, so hustled to go find a CP/M clone he could buy.
Bill Gates and Microsoft got big because of had the audacity to go big when he had nothing. Instead of delivering pizzas, he went and made a huge deal selling important software major companies. It could have bombed big time, but it was going to be big either way - Gates made darn sure of that.
The story of Microsoft and the web (not the internet) is actually a really interesting story, but that's a different post. Basically Microsoft had invested years and a huge amount of money into some really cool technology that would do really cool stuff. Just as they were launching it, along came the web doing the same stuff in a simpler way. Oh fuck! Microsoft was in a panic because they had bet everything on their new technology and here comes a major competitor, HTML. Gates knew that kind of thing was a winner - Microsoft had invested technologies to do what the web does. They just really, really wanted the world to use their technology, not this new open standard that had blind-sided them.
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This is still the way it is. IBM isnt going to do business with you if you dont already have a track record of delivering.
Re: 19 years old and he had the balls to tell Alta (Score:3, Insightful)
In school, Bill Gates used to go around telling people that he'd be a millionaire by the time he was 30. Sure enough, he was a BILLIONAIRE by the end of his 30th year. He knew he was headed for big things.
Selection bias. How many people went around telling everyone they'd be millionaires by 30, and then ended up homeless?
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Other than people trying to be rock stars? I suspect not many. Certainly not people who planned to go big in business like Gates. Such people, people like Gates and Dyson, often have a *bankruptcy* or two or three on the way to the big success. That's part of going big - when you go go big you eirher win big or lose big. A Gates, or Dyson or Edison doesn't stay down when a deal doesn't work, they get right back up and into thr next one.
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Ps - remember he was a 19 year old kid, he had basically nothing before the Big Deal. If that deal had bombed he would he 20 years old with nothing - exactly the same position he was when he went for it the first time. What would a young Bill Gates do if he had nothing after the Altair deal didn't work? Exactly what a young Bill Gates does when he has nothing - He goes for it!
Re: 19 years old and he had the balls to tell Alta (Score:5, Insightful)
Ps - remember he was a 19 year old kid, he had basically nothing before the Big Deal.
He was a 19-year old with very rich, well-connected parents. That likely helped him immensely.
Upper middle class. Here's his house, 2,000 sq/ft (Score:2)
I think you overstate it when you say "very rich", especially when the topic is Bill Gates Junior. Here's the house where he grew up, which Zillow lists as 2,000 square feet:
7016 28th Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98115
The median home size built last year is 2,687 sq feet. My house at the moment is 3,500 SQ feet and I certainly wouldn't call myself "very rich".
Senior *was* very involved in local charities, and continued to be very involved in charity until he died, spending his time directing Junior's foundation.
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Bill Senior believed in giving his wealth away. He even wrote a book on the subject. Senior also was a lawyer and a "name partner" at Preston Gates Ellis, a top 100 law firm in the US.
Bill's mother Mary served as president of the United Way and was a regent of the University of Washington - before Microsoft was a thing.
How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates (Score:4, Informative)
From: https://philip.greenspun.com/b... [greenspun.com] "Lesson 1: Choose Your Grandparents Carefully: William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars. ..."
Beyond starting out wealthy, dumpster diving for source code helped him too, apparently:
https://patch.com/california/l... [patch.com]
""I would boost Bill into dumpsters and we'd get these coffee-stained texts (of computer code)" from behind the offices, grinned Allen."
Re:19 years old and he had the balls to tell Altai (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be so quick to shit on the other 19 year olds. Bill Gates had significant advantages the instant he was born, particularly his parents were already very wealthy enough to enroll him in an exclusive private prep school when he got older. When he was young his school had the funds to purchase equipment and access to GE mainframe, a big deal in 1968.
Most 19 year olds don't have those kinds of opportunities.
If Gates was born to an ordinary set of parents he too would have been doing delivery.
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If Gates was born to an ordinary set of parents he too would have been doing delivery.
After that he would have been a software developer for Digital Research who never got promoted. He would have been the foul tempered little shit in the corner of the office that everyone avoided.
Re:19 years old and he had the balls to tell Altai (Score:5, Informative)
In school, Bill Gates used to go around telling people that he'd be a millionaire by the time he was 30. Sure enough, he was a BILLIONAIRE by the end of his 30th year. He knew he was headed for big things.
He was the child of a millionaire lawyer, he went to a great college, his mom got him a mention to IBM (she knew a board member). He and Balmer later tried to diddle Paul Allen out of his shares of MS stock because Allen might be dying and they wanted his shares. Gates is a shrewd business man and an above average nerd but a mediocre human being. I wasted many years on his OS crap and will not miss it when it's gone. I wouldn't piss on him if he were on fire.
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> he went to a great college
Well yeah he did spend a year at a great school before dropping out. I'm sure those freshman classes made it inevitable that he'd be a billionaire.
As for his senior, see:
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
Re:19 years old and he had the balls to tell Altai (Score:4, Insightful)
People can change. Yes he was a shit when he was younger but he seems to have had an epiphany in later life with his foundation. He's doing a lot of good in the world now whereas his contemporaries like Elison are just buying ever more boys toys and growing old disgracefully.
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In school, Bill Gates used to go around telling people that he'd be a millionaire by the time he was 30.
That did not make him special and it is not what made it happen. I knew lots of kids like that.
A lot of people were trying to build businesses around computers. Almost all failed.
Plenty succeded. They just did not make as much money or noise as Gates did.
When Gates was 19 years old..... While his friends worked in supermarkets and restaurants,
Clearly their parents were not as rich as Gates' were.
The funny thing about 19 year old Bill Gates selling his Altair BASIC to a huge company is that he didn't have a BASIC interpreter, or even an Altair to develop on one. But sell it he did.
That's done a lot in business, even by schoolkids. I know a guy who supplies plastics; he just sits at a desk and if he gets a call from someone wanting plastic he says "Yes", and as soon as he puts the phone down he picks it up again to order it from someone else (who is probably doin
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Back to Bill Gates: he's clearly a smart guy and a driven guy and very capable technically. Probably his biggest strength compared to other technical people was his business abilities. He spotted opportunities and then took risks that paid off. He made the right moves (some above board, some not) to l
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Re: Bill Gates Got Lucky (Score:2)
Where is my Tesla Semi? (Score:2)
Is it just me, or does it appear that the Tesla Semi has been place on hold?
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They are building factories and capacity at a much greater rate than most predicted. The current factories are running as expected or better. Still Tesla cannot keep up with demand.
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He did not get lucky at all. It was all quite shonky. His mommy and daddy were really good pals with IBM lawyers and they set it all up, especially the no copyright sign over bit. He did not even have an OS but had to buy one to onrent to IBM, yeah, kickbacks for the lawyers all round, great big old kickbacks, IBM investors of course, go right royally screwed over by their own lawyers. All a insider scam to rip off IBM, really quite naughty stuff, they basically stole M$ from IBM.
Lie, cheat and steal it is
Apple model? (Score:2)
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No. Rokr gave them the incentive to push it out due to its suckage.
Motorola didn't make anything much different from Nokia, RIM, or Sony.
Apple already had(copied) multitouch in the lab on a demo tablet-ish device.
There were loads of off the shelf parts available to make a cell phone at the time.
I had a great tiny Sony phone at the time that was about 2x2x1 inch,
and Sony was already a long time Apple vendor.
They didn't need Motorola for them to learn how, as much as how not to.
Apple already made iPods so the
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He got lucky with MS-DOS and Windows, being in the right place at the right time, and having no qualms about hurting good people to get what he wants.
The geek has a mythology he can't let go,
Luck favors the prepared. Microsoft had a solid suite of programming languages for the eight bit micro --- and in MBASIC the first program for the micro to see a million dolars in sales. It was well positioned for a move into the 16 bit world and operating systems. The IBM PC team was thinking in terms of a modular design built from generic parts and a painless transition from 8 bit CP/M. Moving fast and thinking cheap. MSDOS $50 retail at launch and "good enough"
Re: Bill Gates Got Lucky (Score:2)
Elon Musk (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Elon Musk (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's why there's a stupid big-ass tablet in the middle of the Model 3 instead of a dashboard directly in front of the driver.
Re:Elon Musk (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that just a cost-cutting measure. Complex dashboards are expensive to produce and you have to finalize the car's UI before you can even start designing it. Switching to a touch screen means you can save money on all the parts that would normally be needed and release a beta interface to be finished later.
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But they already have to manufacture a custom dashboard display for the Model S and probably at other non-Model 3 ones. At the very least, it's easy to source ultrawide LCDs now so even a long rectangular display in the dashboard would have been better than of a big-ass tablet sticking out in the middle of the car.
Re: Elon Musk (Score:2)
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It's no effort to turn your head, but as the driver your head should be pointed at the road not away from it.
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Re: Elon Musk (Score:2)
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Re:Elon Musk (Score:4, Funny)
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Well, except for that Home Depot fake wood chair moulding they duct taped the cooling system in with. That was beige.
What? LOL
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Which is why his cars have huge panel gaps, zip-tied parts, and buyers rebuilding parts of their interior to fix numerous build quality issues.
Steve Jobs wouldn't have let any of that happen
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"When the battery failed or the engine blew up for lack of oil changes you would buy a new one."
No way, I've got the special MacHoodWhacker tool. It's a Torx that reaches all the way from the bottom of the vehicle to remove the screws, which are all the way at the top...
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Elon wouldn't waste time choosing between 200 different shades of beige for a new product, he'd just get the shit done.
Shit coloured cars? I had one like that, and at least it hid the rust.
Why compare? (Score:5, Insightful)
Obvious question with an obvious answer
Everyone wants to know the (or "a") majik formula for generating a zillion-dollar market-cap company, then getting in early on it with warrants and options at a super-cheap strike price.
Gates' answer was pretty much spot on. Jobs and Musk are two completely different animals and both found success in different ways. What the story didn't do is then compare Gates to either of them. If I had to say Gates would have to be more like Musk than Jobs in that he had his hands in the actually engineering his company did.
Where Musk is much different from both of them is that Musk seems to be a serial success maker. Telsa, SpaceX, the Boring Company, etc. Jobs and Gates were one-company only.
What seems to be most common among them is that they have this driven quality, pretty much manic really, that compelled people working for them to believe in what they were doing.
Where all three are also the same is that you will find in /. and other forum sites an endless supply of dismissive and snarky opinions by mediocre engineers convinced that they would have been much better than Musk, Gates, and Jobs combined if only they had luck and all the stupid people around them would have listed to them.
So roll on, dudes. That's your cue.
Re:Why compare? (Score:5, Informative)
Jobs and Gates were one-company only.
That isn't correct.
After Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985, he founded NeXT, which he sold to Apple for $427 million in 1987. In 1985 Jobs co-founded Pixar, which Disney eventually bought in 2006 for $7.4 billion.
Re:Why compare? (Score:4, Insightful)
Jobs invested in Pixar, but was not a founder or cofounder.
That would be Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, with original funding from George Lucas,
well before Jobs put money in. Jobs may have "saved" Pixar, but he was not a founder.
They needed his money, but dreaded him coming near the place.
Alvy got screwed on that history, and deserves as much or more credit as anyone else
involved with starting Pixar, including coming up with the name.
From first hand experience, Alvy is also an insightful and exceptionally kind man.
I'm in no way a Jobs hater, but fair is fair.
Jobs may have demoed alpha transparency in early OS X keynotes, but Alvy invented it.
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After Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985, he founded NeXT, which he sold to Apple for $427 million in 1987. I
I would argue that NeXT was nothing more from beginning to end an Apple subsidiary and surrogate. It doesn't really count as a separate company. Yeah they produced hardware which nobody bought or got excited over, same as with many Appie products. Had Apple management after Jobs fizzled and Jobs not been a major player in the company with a fan base they never would have been able to sell NeXT OS back into Apple. They certainly would have never been able to sell it anywhere else and the company would
Lol (Score:4, Insightful)
The comments here are golden. I'm sure gates said 640k! Yet no one can find a shred of evidence it was ever said by anyone. Gates is such an idiot because _________. Says the guy who does little besides post to slashdot.
Two A-holes went into a bar... (Score:1)
Why (Score:2)
A failed antivirologist on his Windows platfrom, thunk he gan gain more money and inflcuence by sponsring the WHO, no started analysing people like Elon and Steve?
Please let him get old and leave him alone.
Who is Bill Gates? (Score:2)
Who is Bill Gates, and why should I care what he thinks about other people? These guys are a hundred times smarter than Gates. Why not ask him to compare Newton and Leibniz?
The Road Ahead (Score:2)
It's especially funny for Gates to predict the future of cars.
The funniest thing about him, for me, is his book "The Road Ahead", in the mid-90's, where, let me repeat, in the mid-90's, he dismissed the Internet almost completely. He was really trying to will that MSN future into being, like Trump trying to dismiss the coronavirus, nothing to see here, folks.
He was forced to issue a 2.0 version of the book, with the Internet admitted to be a big part of The Road Ahead, just a couple of years later.
In Va
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"Tesla did it with quality" - Bill Gates
He's obviously never followed the #TeslaQualityIssues hashtag on Twitter. It's a horror show of leaky windows, wheels that fall off and paint jobs that make Earl Scheib look like Monet.
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#SelectionBias
Why would yu follow that? If they sell 1 million cars with a 1% defect rate there would be 10,000 posting of defects. Meanwhile an underselling car with shoddier build quality would report far less instance of defects.
To get an objective view of the defect rate you have to compare with the number of cars that have no problems (get the number good cars and defective cars). If the ratio of defective cars to good cars exceeds that of other automakers .. then you would have a point. Also, the type
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Ok show them. Most recent preferred, but any would do.
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"CP/M didn't even have a hierarchical file system."
Neither did MS-DOS 1.0
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"No body will need more than 640k on a computer"
That was Gates accepting a compromise. IBM's architecture for the PC put the BIOS and ROMs up at the top of the 1M memory map, creating an ugly barrier and preventing a flat memory model. That was not a decision Gates made, though it wasn't seen as a big deal at the time.
The history of the early IBM PC is that the first motherboard had 16K of RAM and you could install 3 more banks of 16K to bring the memory on the motherboard to 64K. Any more memory you had
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Bill Gates never said that [640k is enough for anyone] it's an urban legend.
I agree, much as I am a Gates critic. People who believe it are over-estimating Gates' influence on the original IBM PC anyway - some even think he designed the thing.
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Gates was a TOTAL IDIOT. He never could get the right direction for MS for the first 15 years.
After the first 15 years, aka in 1990, Bill Gates net worth was $2.5 billion.
In other words, you are another fucking disgusting dishonest fuck on slashdot that makes shit up.
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