On Jul 15, 9:24 pm, "Ezekiel" <y...@xxxxx> wrote:
> "Rex Ballard" <rex.ball...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
>
> news:5d670465-7653-45e9-97e5-ddb82930f907@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> > On Jul 15, 7:50 pm, chrisv <chr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> Homer wrote:
> >> >To repeat an analogy I used recently: A chef with a knife is simply a
> >> >man chopping carrots, but a psychopath with a knife is a dangerous
> >> >murderer.
>
> >> A psychopath with a PC is a Wintroll. 8)
>
> > Bill Gates, with only a floppy was able to hijack a jet airliner.
> > (he told the people at the gate that unless he installed a patch on
> > the floppy, the plane would crash when it landed).
>
> Any proof of this such as a link or are people simply supposed to believe
> every lie and fairy tale that you dream up?
The movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, which was based on interviews
conducted with Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, and
Steve Wozniac, did a great job of reenacting many of the more famous
antics of the principles. I believe it was Steve Ballmer who told the
story of Bill Gates hijacking the plane. He had stopped to do
something and the plane had already pulled away from the gate.
Ballmer and Allen had made a bet on whether or not Gates would make
the flight or not. When the plane left the gate, the one who bet he'd
make it paid the other. When the plane returned to the gate, the one
who bet Gates wouldn't make the plane had to pay up. Of course, when
Gates got on the plane, he related the story to Ballmer and Allen, one
of whom related the story to a reporter in an interview. This was in
the very early years, after Microsoft had been relocated back to
Seattle, but just before the IBM deal for MS-DOS (1981-2?).
> > Bill Gates, with only a cell phone, was able to extort $250 million
> > from Prudential Insurance. He told them that if he made a phone
> > call, within 30 minutes, every computer owned by Prudential would stop
> > working.
>
> Any proof of this such as a link or are people simply supposed to believe
> every lie and fairy tale that you dream up?
Again, it's only hearsay. I'm sure that Gates was very careful not to
have too many people in the room (I heard the story from the VP for
corporate architecture, who may have been the only person in the
room). It was 1998. Prudential had upgraded all of it's workstations
to Windows NT 4.0, and was still using Office 95. The sales rep had
been given a "Quota" of $250 million, which was the price of upgrading
to Office 97 for 100,000 employee workstations. The problem was that
there were new restrictions on the Office 97 licenses (Employees
couldn't use Office 97 at home, so Prudential would have had to order
additional licenses for those who worked at home at night.) There
were already reports that a new version of office (what would become
Office 2000) was coming, and the company decided to wait until that
version of Office, along with NT 5.0 (they had been promised free
upgrades to NT 5.0) which became Windows 2000, was released.
Microsoft still expected $250 million from Prudential, and so the rep
was replaced with another sales rep who came on site and did an audit
of the Client Access Licenses for all of the Windows servers used by
Prudential. Initially, Prudential had been told that they would need
2 NT servers to replace one 4 processor Sun server. In less than a
year, the number of NT servers required to replace 4 UNIX servers had
grown to 3600 Windows servers. DLL conflicts meant that each function
(Web Server, application server, Lotus Notes, database,...) had to be
placed on it's own NT server. Since the failure of any one server
meant the loss of service to all of the servers, we had to have LOTS
of redundancy. They even had a full time staff of "Box Booters" whose
full time job was to find out which servers had died, and reboot them,
and they needed coverage 24/7.
After redefining a "concurrent user" such that all of those notes
users, and all of those customers who were registered as insured were
counted, Microsoft decided that Prudential owed them $250 million
dollars.
A few executives were flown to Redmond, where Microsoft gave them the
price tag. Of course they felt that such a sudden demand for such a
huge amount of money (which was unbudgeted), was unreasonable. At
some point, they met with one of the top executives (Gates or
Ballmer?) who was walking outside with them (obviously to avoid risk
of listening or recording devices) and they were told that with one
phone call, Microsoft could disable every PC at Prudential, because
the license terms had been violated. Needless to say, the deal was
signed, and Prudential had to scramble to come up with the cash
(though Microsoft did agree to finance the "debt").
When Prudential executives (including the VP of Corporate IT),
returned, and they tried to explain the need to pay $250 million in
unbudgeted royalties to Microsoft, Prudential began exploring
alternatives almost immediately. All of the Lotus Notes servers were
moved to IBM mainframes, most of the web servers were moved back to
UNIX, and many of the databases were moved to the Mainframes and
accessed via MQSeries messages.
It was shortly after the bad news was delivered that I was asked to
put together a demonstration of Linux capabilities. This included a
Linux server, built from a spare desktop machine, and a Linux client,
built from an old Laptop (80486 with 16 meg of RAM). The point was to
show that we could do everything that needed to be done, with Linux
instead of Windows. Within a year, several of the application servers
and custom servers had been migrated from Windows to Linux, and some
of those apps were later migrated from Linux to AIX or Solaris.
The CEO and CFO decided that the money should come out of the
Corporate IT budget, which meant dismantling the corporate IT
department. Nearly the entire staff was cut, and advised to transfer
to other branches or Lines of business. In effect, they chopped off
the head that had been trying to define and enforce standards across
the enterprise. I left in February of 1999 to join IBM.
Later, I came back to do an Enterprise Integration engagement for
them, and a handful of people, about 4, were still in the "corporate
IT" department, because they still needed someone to help enforce
cross-platform and interdepartmental standards. The most notable was
that they were now using Sun's latest JDK and NOT permitting
Microsoft's Java. In fact, we could develop on the Windows laptop,
but we had to test on a Solaris box, just to be sure that everything
was truly portable.
> > But when the highlights of his testimony, including admission of
> > numerous felonies, was aired on CNN,
>
> Really. So people are supposed to believe that Bill Gates is dumb enough to
> appear in court and admit to numerous felonies. What's more likely... that
> Gates, with all of the money and lawyers in the world admitted to "numerious
> felonies" yet was never convicted or charged. Or that you... are making up a
> bunch of bullshit.
The video transcripts of Bill Gates' 42 hours of testimony is
available on the Internet. The CNN program edited out the hours of
evasive answers, and gave 3 hours of clips where the prosecutor
finally got direct answers to questions, most of which amounted to
admissions of fraud, extortion, sabotage, and blackmail.
Judge Jackson had already ruled that Microsoft's contracts requiring
that a Microsoft attorney be present when a witness was being
questioned, and that the Microsoft attorney could tell a witness not
to answer any question on the basis that it violated the nondisclosure
agreement, was obstruction of Justice.
I don't know where ALL the dead bodies are buried, but I do have a
pretty good idea when and where a few of them were buried.
Keep in mind that I'm the same age as Bill Gates, we both got
interested in Microcomputers at about the same time (1976), and we
have been crossing paths, usually with some unpleasant consequences
since then. If Bill and I met on an informal basis, we would probably
even like each other. But given some of the stunts Microsoft has
pulled over the last 30 years, and my personal experiences with those
stunts, I wouldn't trust him to hold my credit card for an hour.
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