Of course, he left out the fact that the $40,000.00 USD worth of computer time was stolen from a US government owned computer on loan to one of his professors. He didn't actually PAY $40k USD or even raise funds to cover the equivalent value of the stolen computer time. Gates is a thief, and this was just his first big heist. I was always of the opinion that he US government should have gotten a cut of MS BASIC since it couldn't have been built without the modified emulator handling the ALTAIR 8080 assembly instructions.
Readit Newsswagtricker commented on 50 years ago, a young Bill Gates took on the 'software pirates' thenewstack.io/50-years-a... · Posted by u/MilnerRoute
swagtricker commented on Ask HN: How did Paul Allen write an 8080 emulator in 1974? · Posted by u/andrewstuart
3 - What is wrong with that exactly? You make it like he ran a scam.
Him playing the middle man happens all the time. Nothing illegal about that.
Here's 2min & 57 seconds that sums it up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nfgRf2A0Tc
Bill & Balmer didn't even have an agreement with Seattle Computer Products when they pitched it to IBM. They waltzed in, lied & said they HAD IT and they could SELL IT knowing it could go into millions of computers. Then, they bought it for chump change from SCP. SCP was a tiny nothing of a company.
It's like finding a homeless guy with a stamp collection & buying his Inverted Jenny for $1,000 USD knowing damn well it's worth over $1.5M USD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_Jenny). Is it illegal? No. Is it greedy and cruel for no good reason? Absolutely. Did it help SCP? Sure. Just like it helps the homeless guy to have a thousand dollars while you keep $1.5M simply because you could take advantage of him and there was nothing he could do about it.
Again. Gates is a liar and a thief. It's probably damn lucky for him Epstein "hung himself" in that jail cell. Otherwise, we'd probably have proof a few more choice names to call him as well.
swagtricker commented on Ask HN: How did Paul Allen write an 8080 emulator in 1974? · Posted by u/andrewstuart
Why would DOS have been claimed property of the US taxpayers when you are arguing they used that PDP-10 to create basic, not DOS?
Also, why would Harvard do that anyway? They didn't murder someone, they formed one of the biggest companies in history with their computers.
Also did Gates not buy DOS off of Seattle Computer Products? How did he screw him over exactly? Wikipedia says that it ended up making SCP millions of dollars.
1 - Correction: writing late, typo - BASIC should have been property of the US tax payers.
2 - It was still pretty novel back then, but "borrowing" computer time w/o paying for it is (and was) theft of services. Like sneaking into a movie theater without paying. It wasn't their hardware to use, it was a critical part of a commercial endeavor. They didn't have permission in advance to use it. They didn't murder someone, but they were a couple of spoilt brats who figured they could get rich by ripping people off. They ripped off SCP (next point) and they screwed over IBM & Digital Equipment Corp. with the OS/2 gaslighting & NT intellectual property theft (case settled out of court).
3 - Gates wired up the deal with IBM then "bought" 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products knowing very well it was going to be worth millions since people were waiting for IBM to release a PC at the time. SCP made less than a million dollars and had it drawn out in court (from that same article - "Microsoft paid SCP US$925,000 and reclaimed its license for DOS"). He saw an opportunity to play middle man and then shanked SCP.
Dead Comment
swagtricker commented on Ask HN: How many of you have been laid off twice this year already? · Posted by u/squeegee_scream
They say always keeping $10k in cash is recommended.
The general guideline isn't actually an amount: it's 3 - 6 months worth of living expenses. That is, what it takes to cover housing, transportation, food & utilities. If you're "living paycheck to paycheck" that's a problem, because it means 3-6 months worth of paychecks.
Personally, If you're living below your means, I would try to target 6 months to 1 year. Then again, the past 3 years have made me paranoid as hell. Your mileage may vary.
FWIW - I sleep a LOT better knowing I've got a year worth of expenses sitting in a high yield savings account. If I lost my job tomorrow? I'd say fuck it and take at least 4-6 weeks off before bothering to look for a job.
swagtricker commented on Pinball is booming in America economist.com/united-stat... · Posted by u/pseudolus
Seattle area is blessed with a wealth of all ages and 21+ barcades. There's a great one less than 5 miles from my house. I've been a pinball fan for years and still play weekly, playing in a local league pre-COVID. About 2 years ago, I saw a machine with my childhood hero that I couldn't pass up buying. A year ago it finally got delivered. I play at home a few times a week. No big issues with the machine other than one dead "flashy" servo that doesn't work and a stuck target that doesn't impact gameplay. I'll get around to fixing them at some point. FWIW - Here's some info on my big toy:
https://www.thisweekinpinball.com/spooky-announces-ultraman-...
swagtricker commented on Ask HN: How do you balance support and sprint tickets? · Posted by u/throwawayops123
Scrum is training wheels. The time boxes are supposed to make you reflect and improve. Ditch Scrum. Go to Kanban, scope your stories smaller and prioritize bug fixes over all new work until you're not writing bugs. Can't ship code without writing bugs? Improve your skills as a team. Start pair or mob programming. Do TDD to improve your design, testability & maintainability of your code. Start moving towards trunk based development and use feature flags to do REAL CI/CD (hint: using a build server doesn't mean you're doing CI). Code deployment != feature deployment! Strive to "roll forward" your code as much as possible and disable/enable features if you run into problems - learn to not "rollback".
Now of course, since this is HN somebody's going to sneer divisively at everything I just said and tell me it's not possible (despite the fact that I've done this, repeatedly in different organizations in a developer and coaching capacity for almost two decades now). Here's my preemptive caveat/STFU for detractors: the above method only works if you, as developers, have full control & ownership over your application code data, and do your own deployments or are partnered strongly with an OPS team that gives you full monitoring & Read Only access. If your team is working in an environment where you don't actually get ownership over your code and data, this won't work. If management, architects, or egotistical prima donna staff/senior developers "won't let you" pair/mob, do TDD, do trunk based development, or do proper CI/CD, this won't work.
P.S. If you're in an environment where "this won't work" - QUIT! Life's too short to put up with being expected to build software with one hand tied behind your back. These things are often easier to do in medium to small sized companies. These things are often easier to do on greenfield (or at least recent) projects.
swagtricker commented on Low-code is not a cure for overworked IT departments zdnet.com/article/low-cod... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
No, no. Go right ahead and sink time and money into this sort of crap. Just like every attempt before, it'll generate a pile of garbage that's unmaintainable yet will still manage to poop out ONE single nugget of value: determining what needs to be built after the idiot suits thrashed all around with the 'wonder toy' system. Then, we experienced developers can have a walk in the park while cashing out on contracting rates. Fat stacks of cash simply for replacing exact like-for-like functionality with REAL software and then bring in the extensions the vendor toy systems couldn't. I could do with a nice, easy, early retirement path to pop up in 7 years. Bring it on ;)
Don't forget the classic parody of SAFe which shows it as the overblown "waterfall in agile clothing" that it is: LAFABLE. https://www.lafable.com/
swagtricker commented on Software engineering books software-engineering-book... · Posted by u/colin-dumitru
Honest question: what is wrong with Essential Scrum?
You can skip the tar pit of the Scrum Industrial complex (e.g. "here! you MUST take our certificate program!") and the drag setting pointless sprint boundaries and focus on just repeatedly, successfully, ship high quality software. The Accelerate book is a very good starting point - https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Techno...