Gates can't install win 8.1

On Thu, 6 Feb 2014 11:41:01 -0600, BillW50 wrote:

For example, any programmer will mention something about
programming even in daily conversations. You know, the very first
program they ever wrote, anything about language
commands/statements, or something. Gates supposed knew about
Basic. Never have I heard him mention anything about For/Next
loops, Goto statements, variables, or anything.

And for somebody to supposedly have programmed the Altair Basic,
you had to know something about registers, addresses, and such.
But you never heard Gates utter any of those words ever. And I
find all of this so odd, so odd indeed.

So Bill's not quite so boring as we thought then?

On Fri, 07 Feb 2014 01:57:01 -0500, Adam Kubias wrote:

I guess I should clarify a bit. When I say autistic, I really mean
the opposite of empathic. In other words, an engineer ; )

Sig alert!

On Thu, 06 Feb 2014 14:24:50 -0600, VanguardLH wrote:

Adam Kubias wrote:

To anyone who reads English as a first language and isn't autistic, it
is clearly satire, based only on the content.

You're assuming the background of the audience is that they know enough
history of Microsoft and Gates to understand it was intended as humor.
There are always newbies rolling into the computer community. Without
historical context by the reader, it is very easy for such proposed
humor to be viewed as factual, especially when linked to and presented
out of context of the publication.

Yes, I read English. I also can write English. Review the article
again. Without that small "keyword: humor" tag at the bottom, what
explicitly in the article declares it is fiction? To be satire means
you present it in that context. Is EVERYTHING published on that site of
satirical content?


plus Borowitz is a well-known humorist.

except here apparently.

his stuff appears regularly in the New Yorker (almost every issue, I
think.)

easy to look him up.

Felmon


The only reason you remark insultingly about my response is that you
were already warned it was satire so, gee, of course you always knew it
was. Uh huh, sure.

On 2/07/2014, mechanic posted:
On Fri, 07 Feb 2014 01:57:01 -0500, Adam Kubias wrote:

I guess I should clarify a bit. When I say autistic, I really mean
the opposite of empathic. In other words, an engineer ; )

Sig alert!

Remarks such as Adam Kubias's that you quoted always strike me as a
form of (or an analogy to) racism, even when they pretend to be meant
as humor or satire.

I think I agree with you about sig alert. The only reason I'm not sure
I agree is that I'm not 100% sure what you meant :-)

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)

On Thu, 6 Feb 2014 14:14:40 -0600, "BillW50" wrote:


"Gene Wirchenko" wrote in message
.. .
On Thu, 6 Feb 2014 11:41:01 -0600, "BillW50" wrote:

[snip]

Yeah... that is quite interesting, although it still doesn't change
my opinion about Gates programming abilities. I had listened to Gates
interview after interview. And I never seen any signs that he truly
understands the internal working of a computer, nor does he seem to
share with us anything about programming code.

For example, any programmer will mention something about programming
even in daily conversations. You know, the very first program they
ever wrote, anything about language commands/statements, or
something. Gates supposed knew about Basic. Never have I heard him
mention anything about For/Next loops, Goto statements, variables,
or anything.

Why would he if he is talking to people who may well not know
that? As an executive, he talks about executive things.

No, he has talked to people researching about how it all started. And
even the interviews back in the 70's before Microsoft was anybody, he
never talked about coding. The only thing he would say is that he was
involved and that was it. I don't even recall him saying that he was a
programmer. Just sort of hinted that he might be one.

You might be interested in it, but it is not what he is selling.

And for somebody to supposedly have programmed the Altair Basic, you
had to know something about registers, addresses, and such. But you
never heard Gates utter any of those words ever. And I find all of
this so odd, so odd indeed.

I rarely talk tech with non-techs. It is part of being polite.

Yeah, but when talking to tech types you do. Gates never does. Do you
know of any program that Gates actually wrote? I don't and nobody else
seems to either. Most of mine can be found in old computer magazines and
old archives.

So what? If he does not care to talk about it, why should he
have to? It was over 30 years ago. He has moved on.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

"Gene Wirchenko" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 6 Feb 2014 14:14:40 -0600, "BillW50" wrote:

"Gene Wirchenko" wrote in message
. ..
On Thu, 6 Feb 2014 11:41:01 -0600, "BillW50"
wrote:

[snip]

Yeah... that is quite interesting, although it still doesn't change
my opinion about Gates programming abilities. I had listened to
Gates interview after interview. And I never seen any signs that he
truly understands the internal working of a computer, nor does he
seem to share with us anything about programming code.

For example, any programmer will mention something about
programming even in daily conversations. You know, the very first
program they ever wrote, anything about language
commands/statements, or something. Gates supposed knew about
Basic. Never have I heard him mention anything about For/Next
loops, Goto statements, variables, or anything.

Why would he if he is talking to people who may well not know
that? As an executive, he talks about executive things.

No, he has talked to people researching about how it all started. And
even the interviews back in the 70's before Microsoft was anybody, he
never talked about coding. The only thing he would say is that he was
involved and that was it. I don't even recall him saying that he was a
programmer. Just sort of hinted that he might be one.

You might be interested in it, but it is not what he is selling.

And for somebody to supposedly have programmed the Altair Basic,
you had to know something about registers, addresses, and such. But
you never heard Gates utter any of those words ever. And I find all
of this so odd, so odd indeed.

I rarely talk tech with non-techs. It is part of being polite.

Yeah, but when talking to tech types you do. Gates never does. Do you
know of any program that Gates actually wrote? I don't and nobody
else seems to either. Most of mine can be found in old computer
magazines and old archives.

So what? If he does not care to talk about it, why should he
have to? It was over 30 years ago. He has moved on.

Even 30 years ago Gates didn't talk about it. There is not one single
program out there that Gates singlehandedly wrote.

--
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era) - Windows Live Mail 2009 v14
Centrino Core2 Duo T7400 2.16 GHz - 4GB - Windows 8 Pro w/Media Center

On Fri, 07 Feb 2014 10:49:57 -0800, Gene E. Bloch
wrote:

On 2/07/2014, mechanic posted:
On Fri, 07 Feb 2014 01:57:01 -0500, Adam Kubias wrote:

I guess I should clarify a bit. When I say autistic, I really mean
the opposite of empathic. In other words, an engineer ; )

Sig alert!

Remarks such as Adam Kubias's that you quoted always strike me as a
form of (or an analogy to) racism, even when they pretend to be meant
as humor or satire.

I think I agree with you about sig alert. The only reason I'm not sure
I agree is that I'm not 100% sure what you meant :-)

FWIW I also don't know what it means. I thought it meant, "Hey, look at his
sig!" but Adam doesn't have one, so I'm left wondering.

On Sat, 08 Feb 2014 00:11:48 -0600, Char Jackson wrote:

I think I agree with you about sig alert. The only reason I'm not sure
I agree is that I'm not 100% sure what you meant :-)

FWIW I also don't know what it means. I thought it meant, "Hey,
look at his sig!" but Adam doesn't have one, so I'm left
wondering.

Old school Usenet phrase meaning 'look for this highly quotable line
to appear in a sig file soon', but today no-one bothers much with
interesting sigs.

Hi, Bill.

There is not one single program out there that Gates singlehandedly wrote.

He didn't write programs. He wrote the operating systems.

Did you ever read the book, "Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal
Computer"? It's by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. I bought and read
the original about 30 years ago, but I've lost or misplaced it. But I also
bought the much expanded second edition, 448 pages,
copyright 2000.

The book has plenty of photos of the microcomputer pioneers (Gates, Allen,
Wozniak, Jobs, of course, plus Ed Roberts, Gary Kildall, David Ahl, Adam
Osborne...and many others). It starts well before there was a Micro-Soft,
or even Traf-O-Data. Tells about how Bill and his middle-school buddies
were allowed to use the big computers at the power company in Seattle for
free - so long as they kept finding bugs in the program that the utility was
buying and didn't have to pay for until it was bug-free. It pulls together
stories abut companies that have been almost forgotten now, like SWTP and
IMSAI and ComputerLand and the Byte Shop. And about magazines like Wayne
Greene's Microcomputing (later Kilobaud Microcomputing) and Creative
Computing and others. With stories by and about the pioneers of what we now
call PCs.

There were the early meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club and Bill's
famous "Open Letter to Hobbyists" (February 3, 1976) in which he recounted
his and Paul's work to develop and polish Altair BASIC. He complained that
while there were hundreds of users of that BASIC, "less than 10% of all
Altair owners have bought BASIC." Did Bill personally code the BASIC?
Without specifically saying, "I wrote some of the code", here is one
paragraph from his letter:

"Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to
expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial
work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year
documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K,
EXTENDED, ROM and Disk BASIC."

Later in the letter he said, "We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing
8080 APL and 6800 APL..." And the book says:

"The fact that Bill Gates had yet to write the disk code for the Altair 6800
didn't help matters, especially because Gates, on leave from Harvard, was
considering returning to school. Paul Allen, in his role as MITS software
director, nagged Gates about finishing the code. According to Microsoft
legend, in February 1976 Gates checked into a motel with some pens and a
stack of yellow legal pads. When he came out, he had finished writing down
the disk code."

Have you read Paul Allen's book, "Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of
Microsoft". I read it and returned it to our library, so I can't quote it
tonight, but I don't recall that he claimed to write code while Bill only
watched.

BillG's 1995 book, "The Road Ahead", starts off with this sentence: "I
wrote my first software program when I was 13 years old." And by page 2, he
is saying, "...we could give this big machine orders and it would always
obey", and "...you get immediate results that let you know if your program
works", and "...to this day it still thrills me to know that if I can get
the program right it will always work perfectly every time, just the way I
told it to." That sounds like a hands-on programmer, a coder, not a
manager, doesn't it?

Yes, page 3 has a photo of Bill standing, watching Paul with his hands on
the keyboard, but their positions may have been reversed a few minutes
before or after.

I'm getting tired of typing all this and you are probably tired of reading
it. Just remember the many articles and stories about how Bill would
scathingly review and tear apart code written by Microsoft developers and
programmers in later years. He had to be an expert coder himself to spot
and fix problems in code written by others. Many articles were critical of
Bill's personality, mannerisms and discourtesy. But I don't recall any that
questioned his programming or coding skills.

I'm not a BillG fanboy, but questioning whether he did or could have written
code is just pointless.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX

Microsoft Windows MVP (2002-2010)
Windows Live Mail 2012 (Build 16.4.3508.0205) in Win8.1 Pro


"BillW50" wrote in message ...

"Gene Wirchenko" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 6 Feb 2014 14:14:40 -0600, "BillW50" wrote:

"Gene Wirchenko" wrote in message
. ..
On Thu, 6 Feb 2014 11:41:01 -0600, "BillW50"
wrote:

[snip]

Yeah... that is quite interesting, although it still doesn't change
my opinion about Gates programming abilities. I had listened to
Gates interview after interview. And I never seen any signs that he
truly understands the internal working of a computer, nor does he
seem to share with us anything about programming code.

For example, any programmer will mention something about
programming even in daily conversations. You know, the very first
program they ever wrote, anything about language
commands/statements, or something. Gates supposed knew about
Basic. Never have I heard him mention anything about For/Next
loops, Goto statements, variables, or anything.

Why would he if he is talking to people who may well not know
that? As an executive, he talks about executive things.

No, he has talked to people researching about how it all started. And
even the interviews back in the 70's before Microsoft was anybody, he
never talked about coding. The only thing he would say is that he was
involved and that was it. I don't even recall him saying that he was a
programmer. Just sort of hinted that he might be one.

You might be interested in it, but it is not what he is selling.

And for somebody to supposedly have programmed the Altair Basic,
you had to know something about registers, addresses, and such. But
you never heard Gates utter any of those words ever. And I find all
of this so odd, so odd indeed.

I rarely talk tech with non-techs. It is part of being polite.

Yeah, but when talking to tech types you do. Gates never does. Do you
know of any program that Gates actually wrote? I don't and nobody
else seems to either. Most of mine can be found in old computer
magazines and old archives.

So what? If he does not care to talk about it, why should he
have to? It was over 30 years ago. He has moved on.

Even 30 years ago Gates didn't talk about it. There is not one single
program out there that Gates singlehandedly wrote.

--
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era) - Windows Live Mail 2009 v14
Centrino Core2 Duo T7400 2.16 GHz - 4GB - Windows 8 Pro w/Media Center

On Sat, 8 Feb 2014 11:09:26 -0600, "R. C. White"
wrote:


He didn't write programs. He wrote the operating systems.


I guess we disagree g but to me an operating system is nothing more
than a specialized program (or collection of specialized programs).


Did you ever read the book, "Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal
Computer"? It's by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. I bought and read
the original about 30 years ago, but I've lost or misplaced it. But I also
bought the much expanded second edition, 448 pages,
copyright 2000.



I had never heard of it until you mentioned it. I just checked my
library's web site, but they didn't have it. So I just ordered a used
copy from Amazon.com. It sounds very interesting. Thanks.

"Ken Blake, MVP" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 8 Feb 2014 11:09:26 -0600, "R. C. White"
wrote:

He didn't write programs. He wrote the operating systems.

I guess we disagree g but to me an operating system is nothing more
than a specialized program (or collection of specialized programs).

When did Gates ever write an OS? Heck all the way up to about '81,
Microsoft didn't have a single OS. Microsoft only wrote programming
languages and that was all. When IBM came to Microsoft and wanted to buy
Basic and an OS, Gates said we don't do OS and sent IBM to Gary Kildall.
That story is a whole thread in itself. Anyway Gates heard that didn't
go well and told IBM, don't worry we will get you an OS. And then
Microsoft went out and bought QDOS, which Tim Patterson (who worked for
Seattle Computer Products) wrote. Then they renamed it to MS-DOS.
Microsoft later hired Tim since he knew the OS the best.

--
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era) - Windows Live Mail 2009 v14
Centrino Core2 Duo T7400 2.16 GHz - 4GB - Windows 8 Pro w/Media Center

On Sat, 8 Feb 2014 11:09:26 -0600, "R. C. White"
wrote in

Hi, Bill.

There is not one single program out there that Gates singlehandedly wrote.

He didn't write programs. He wrote the operating systems.

Did you ever read the book, "Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal
Computer"? It's by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. I bought and read
the original about 30 years ago, but I've lost or misplaced it. But I also
bought the much expanded second edition, 448 pages,
copyright 2000.

Indeed, I recall reading the book "Hard Drive, Bill Gates and the
Making of the Microsoft Empire" (or it may have been "Big Blues: The
Unmaking of IBM ") many years ago. I remember reading that Gates did
very early programming on a DEC PDP (can remember the exact model
number) computer.
--
Web based forums are like subscribing to 10 different newspapers
and having to visit 10 different news stands to pickup each one.
Email list-server groups and USENET are like having all of those
newspapers delivered to your door every morning.

OK, after your writeup, this thread is closed :-)

No, I have no authority to do that, of course, but your quoted evidence
below should put this discussion to rest - but we can no doubt be sure
it won't.

Good post, RC.

On 2/08/2014, R. C. White posted:
Hi, Bill.

There is not one single program out there that Gates singlehandedly
wrote.

He didn't write programs. He wrote the operating systems.

Did you ever read the book, "Fire in the Valley: The Making of the
Personal
Computer"? It's by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. I bought and
read
the original about 30 years ago, but I've lost or misplaced it. But
I also bought the much expanded second edition, 448 pages,
copyright 2000.

The book has plenty of photos of the microcomputer pioneers (Gates,
Allen, Wozniak, Jobs, of course, plus Ed Roberts, Gary Kildall, David
Ahl, Adam Osborne...and many others). It starts well before there
was a Micro-Soft, or even Traf-O-Data. Tells about how Bill and his
middle-school buddies were allowed to use the big computers at the
power company in Seattle for free - so long as they kept finding bugs
in the program that the utility was buying and didn't have to pay for
until it was bug-free. It pulls together stories abut companies that
have been almost forgotten now, like SWTP and IMSAI and ComputerLand
and the Byte Shop. And about magazines like Wayne Greene's
Microcomputing (later Kilobaud Microcomputing) and Creative Computing
and others. With stories by and about the pioneers of what we now
call PCs.

There were the early meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club and
Bill's
famous "Open Letter to Hobbyists" (February 3, 1976) in which he
recounted
his and Paul's work to develop and polish Altair BASIC. He
complained that while there were hundreds of users of that BASIC,
"less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC." Did Bill
personally code the BASIC? Without specifically saying, "I wrote some
of the code", here is one paragraph from his letter:

"Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market
to
expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the
initial
work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the
last year
documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K,
8K,
EXTENDED, ROM and Disk BASIC."

Later in the letter he said, "We have written 6800 BASIC, and are
writing
8080 APL and 6800 APL..." And the book says:

"The fact that Bill Gates had yet to write the disk code for the
Altair 6800 didn't help matters, especially because Gates, on leave
from Harvard, was considering returning to school. Paul Allen, in
his role as MITS software director, nagged Gates about finishing the
code. According to Microsoft legend, in February 1976 Gates checked
into a motel with some pens and a stack of yellow legal pads. When
he came out, he had finished writing down the disk code."

Have you read Paul Allen's book, "Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder
of
Microsoft". I read it and returned it to our library, so I can't
quote it
tonight, but I don't recall that he claimed to write code while Bill
only watched.

BillG's 1995 book, "The Road Ahead", starts off with this sentence:
"I
wrote my first software program when I was 13 years old." And by
page 2, he
is saying, "...we could give this big machine orders and it would
always
obey", and "...you get immediate results that let you know if your
program
works", and "...to this day it still thrills me to know that if I can
get
the program right it will always work perfectly every time, just the
way I
told it to." That sounds like a hands-on programmer, a coder, not a
manager, doesn't it?

Yes, page 3 has a photo of Bill standing, watching Paul with his
hands on
the keyboard, but their positions may have been reversed a few
minutes
before or after.

I'm getting tired of typing all this and you are probably tired of
reading it. Just remember the many articles and stories about how
Bill would scathingly review and tear apart code written by Microsoft
developers and programmers in later years. He had to be an expert
coder himself to spot and fix problems in code written by others.
Many articles were critical of Bill's personality, mannerisms and
discourtesy. But I don't recall any that questioned his programming
or coding skills.

I'm not a BillG fanboy, but questioning whether he did or could have
written code is just pointless.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX

Microsoft Windows MVP (2002-2010)
Windows Live Mail 2012 (Build 16.4.3508.0205) in Win8.1 Pro


"BillW50" wrote in message ...

"Gene Wirchenko" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 6 Feb 2014 14:14:40 -0600, "BillW50"
wrote:

"Gene Wirchenko" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 6 Feb 2014 11:41:01 -0600, "BillW50"
wrote:

[snip]

Yeah... that is quite interesting, although it still doesn't
change
my opinion about Gates programming abilities. I had listened to
Gates interview after interview. And I never seen any signs that
he
truly understands the internal working of a computer, nor does
he
seem to share with us anything about programming code.

For example, any programmer will mention something about
programming even in daily conversations. You know, the very
first
program they ever wrote, anything about language
commands/statements, or something. Gates supposed knew about
Basic. Never have I heard him mention anything about For/Next
loops, Goto statements, variables, or anything.

Why would he if he is talking to people who may well not know
that? As an executive, he talks about executive things.

No, he has talked to people researching about how it all started.
And
even the interviews back in the 70's before Microsoft was anybody,
he
never talked about coding. The only thing he would say is that he
was
involved and that was it. I don't even recall him saying that he
was a
programmer. Just sort of hinted that he might be one.

You might be interested in it, but it is not what he is
selling.

And for somebody to supposedly have programmed the Altair Basic,
you had to know something about registers, addresses, and such.
But
you never heard Gates utter any of those words ever. And I find
all
of this so odd, so odd indeed.

I rarely talk tech with non-techs. It is part of being
polite.

Yeah, but when talking to tech types you do. Gates never does. Do
you
know of any program that Gates actually wrote? I don't and nobody
else seems to either. Most of mine can be found in old computer
magazines and old archives.

So what? If he does not care to talk about it, why should he
have to? It was over 30 years ago. He has moved on.

Even 30 years ago Gates didn't talk about it. There is not one single
program out there that Gates singlehandedly wrote.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)

On 2/08/2014, mechanic posted:
On Sat, 08 Feb 2014 00:11:48 -0600, Char Jackson wrote:

I think I agree with you about sig alert. The only reason I'm not
sure I agree is that I'm not 100% sure what you meant :-)

FWIW I also don't know what it means. I thought it meant, "Hey,
look at his sig!" but Adam doesn't have one, so I'm left
wondering.

Old school Usenet phrase meaning 'look for this highly quotable line
to appear in a sig file soon', but today no-one bothers much with
interesting sigs.

OK, I thought it was from the CHP's term, and that it meant "serious
traffic problem" :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sig_Alert

So I was struggling with your metaphorical intent.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)

On 2014-02-07 1:49 PM, Gene E. Bloch wrote:
On 2/07/2014, mechanic posted:
On Fri, 07 Feb 2014 01:57:01 -0500, Adam Kubias wrote:

I guess I should clarify a bit. When I say autistic, I really mean
the opposite of empathic. In other words, an engineer ; )

Sig alert!

Remarks such as Adam Kubias's that you quoted always strike me as a form
of (or an analogy to) racism, even when they pretend to be meant as
humor or satire.

I think I agree with you about sig alert. The only reason I'm not sure I
agree is that I'm not 100% sure what you meant :-)

I don't follow the racism train of thought. It was meant to be humor...
its a butchering of a really old joke I heard.