Bill Gates just announced the Gates Foundation will be closing their doors ahead of schedule. The plan now is for Bill to shore up the Foundation with money of his own, keep the works going for the next 20 years and then call it a day.
Call me a cynic, but the whole thing strikes me as odd. If you are doing the most important work on the planet, why stop? Maybe you don’t want to become a worthless behemoth that just exists to pay the staff? That seems to be a common fate for organizations like the Red Cross. They start as a way to do some real good and after a while they morph into corporate machines. Maybe that’s what Gates is trying to avoid by shutting the doors on his foundation.
The timing is a little suss. Just saying.
I won’t be sad to see the Gates foundation go away. The whole operation just seemed shady. What did they really do? What was the actual plan? Where was the money really coming from? Turns out, I’m not alone with these questions. And was the Gates Foundation just an old school tax shelter that had people running around the globe doing more harm than good?
This seems like a good time to remind folks of just a few of the controversies surrounding Bill and the Gates Foundation.
Mr. Gates has always been very concerned about the world population being too big. That’s a bit concerning.
Nope. We won’t miss the Gates Foundation one little bit. Just wish they were closing up shop today instead of 20 years from now. You can do a lot of mischief in 20 years.
TL;DR: comments about gates, microsoft, and some O/S facts of interest on versions, origins, and how M$ could have done better.
If there are errors, hopefully someone will comment.
Gates was OK when he was a kid selling MS-DOS to IBM. Software is what he and his company are best known for. He wrote and borrowed software that became earliest versions of Windows, and as Windows has become more complex, has generally treated paying customers like Beta-testers. Eventually he got a (harmless) pie in the face, which everyone thought was not only funny but well-deserved. So allow me to make some comments and criticisms of Windows.
Windows wasat first run on top of MS0DOS. Version 1 to 3.1 was really just DOS with a graphical interface and a mouse pointer, which could switch tasks. 3.11 was the same but added networking, a big deal in the day, and 3.11 couldrun easily on 4 megabytes of RAM. Windows 95, 98, and ME had a much imporved GUI and stability, but it was best if you had 64 megabytes or more memory or it could be slow.
Windows 98 was in many ways the most fun o/s, and the most freedom-filled, most hackable as well – for really going crazy with customizations, as one could change or set the color of every part of a window, some 16 elements to color to one’s liking and thereby customize Windows. Plus animated screensavers, background colors and images, etc. All of these characteristics could be saved together as a ‘theme’ I created a theme called pumkin-lime. It may sound girly, but it was really good for working in a room where it could be well-lit one minute and dark the next. Such were the repair areas for the largest of video projectors. The point is, everything in the 98 GUI could be set to the indiviual user’s liking, work needs, or ADA requirements without ‘tampering’ with the machine, which was good for everyone including the fascists in the IT department.
98 was also the last Windows to directly use hardware addresses on the motherboard like all of its predecessors including MS-DOS, and there were soooo many companies and hobbyists who made special boards and software for the PC because of this -a feature of the basic DOS operatinf system design which lasted until ’98, the last DOS-based Windows environment. I still have a copy of “the $25 network”, a software which allowed up to three PCs (XT and up) to share all of their internal disk drives with each other. The user would map the drives using a config file on each PC, and the network wiring was simply a set of standard 25-pin (DB-25) parallel printer ports. But 98 and versions below are very insecure. So we kept them all safe with anti-virus programs.
Then came Windows NT 3.1, which was the first attempt to address the almost non-existent security of a PC running 98 and below. It was not based on MS-DOS but on the NT Kernel, a partial port from the highly secure OpenVMS of Digital Equipment Corporation. In NT, most simple malicious programs don’t have a chance because all addresses of hardware and memory are virtualized. I could not, for example, get a straight answer from my PC what address the printer port is on, because it would tell me the virtual address. Ine hardware addresses inside thePC are only known by o/s kernel not accessible to the user or to lowly things like programs. NT has evolved to Windows 11.
Here we are at NT11 / Windows 11. The unprotected PC would be quickly destroyed by scrpits and viruses if there were no “windows defender” and some attacks get past Defender. NT could have been secure like VMS, but no. Windows NT, 2000, 2003, XP, 8/10/11 are very secure at the user console (leaving bootable devices DVD/thumbdrives out of it..), but totally vulnerable to internet attack. It didn’t have to be that way. Why, oh why, Microsoft?
Maybe they make more money off it that way. Like the Intel-AMD-Microsoft conspiracy to eliminate older systems and software by making the previous gen CPU/Mainboards not run the Windows 11 O/S, and the windows 11 O/S not run on the older CPUs/Mainboards. They did this to the whole world. A nasty tale for another time.
Any unprotected intercourse with the internet is a death sentence for Windows. Early DOS-based Windows users used third party antivirus, but Windows has come with Defender from Microsoft for several years. If that isn’t updated, it won’t do its job.
In this way, Windows NT versions fall far short of the invincibility of their Father, OpenVMS. I ran OpenVMS at home as a hobbyist for several years with no internet trouble ever. See ‘OpenVMS and DEFCON 9′ for a real battle story. Firewall? Avtivirus? We don’t need no steenkin’ Defender! OpenVMS is not affected by viruses/malware. Just pointing out, as Bill Gates points his way out, what Windows could have been, and what I feel that we have been cheated out of in the Windows of today.
Three little videos show how aggressively a Windows 2003 Server was compromised when connected to the web without protection, and also shows the OpenVMS system, equally bare on the web, handling some legitimate traffic on the same connection, unaffected by hacks and scripts. “I am OpenVMS. I walk Naked upon the SUN” THAT kind of robust fortress-like toughness is what we should have had with Windows! It was based on VMS, in fact:
VMS – Virtual Memory System
WNT – Windows New Technology
just shift one to the right!
Plus, all the beautiful ease of interfacting and colr schemes from Windows 98 are long gone, no plans to ever allow that simple, helpful pleasure again.
I wish the formatting would have taken