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Here's the single highlight for today. Sorry it's so long, but it's been sitting on my heart for years. Time to unload. I've never liked Bill Gates. I've always perceived him as a cheater. He first came to my attention with the development of the IBM PC, and the Microsoft operating system that became the standard for it. Granted, Gary Kildall really shot himself in the foot, blowing his opportunity to provide the operating system for the PC, but who knew back then that it would be such a success? But, the fact is that neither Bill Gates, nor any of his team, really provided the operating system either. Microsoft was selling their own version of Unix, called Xenix, back then, and a Basic Compiler that ran on Gary Kildall's CP/M operating system. And that's to say that neither Bill nor Microsoft wrote an operating system; they just packaged and sold AT&T's operating system, Unix, under another name. And there's nothing wrong with that. Other companies did the same thing, too. But, what Bill did next was almost shameful. He found a programmer up in the Seattle area (Microsoft was in the Silicon Valley area in those days) who was reworking Gary Kildall's CP/M to run on Intel chips. Bill bought the product, and sold it to IBM as his own. He even later wound up paying the guy even more money, probably to keep it under his hat. By all rights, the money and the glory should have been Gary's, but he got robbed. And it ruined him. It was probably for that reason release after release of DOS was so disasterous. Microsoft didn't really know what they were doing, and they kept botching it. There was even a saying in the industry: Never buy anything from Microsoft that ends in dot-O. But, what else were you going to run? And, appearing to be the 'geniuses' behind the operating system that had helped the IBM PC become such a success appears, in turn to have been why IBM again turned to Microsoft for the next generation operating system, OS/2, for their (back then) next generation PC, the PS/2. Microsoft negotiated a sweetheart deal wherein the two companies would almost become one, sharing brain-power, and even space, in order to accelerate development. That helped and hurt Microsoft. IBM's guys pretty soon began spreading the word back among their own that Microsoft wasn't all it appeared to be, and that they were essentially getting tutored by IBM in the task of making operating systems. So, that venture got shut down, each company going their own way, with IBM having full licensing rights to OS/2, which they continued to work on. Microsoft also continued to work on it, but under a differen name: WindowsNT. Now, remember, back then, IBM was the evil empire that everyone loved to hate. And they had replaced AT&T who'd even had the federal government undertake to break them up because of their abuse of the market. So, Microsoft didn't really seem so bad by comparison, and might even have been seen as David to IBM's Goliath. But then I went to work for WordPerfect. Now, I was on the front lines of the battle. And a battle it was. No one liked Bill Gates. Ray Noorda, then the head of Novell (remember them?) as much as swore an oath to destroy Bill Gates. I mean, I didn't like the guy either, but I was kinda curious just what he'd done to warrant that much venom. How naive I was! About that time, Billy called one of his Windows developers into his office, and proceeded to humiliate him, even telling him that he (Bill) could write better code in BASIC! (an unforgivable insult) So this guy walked right out on Bill while he was still yelling. Walked right out of the building, and went home. His brother-in-law, a WordPerfect programmer, hears about this, and calls him up, and tells him how much more he'd like WordPerfect. And he did. But, he had signed non-competition agreements, so he was pretty much a closed book, acting like a brand-new programmer, just getting familiar with our environment. Then, strange things began to happen. Seattle-area recruiters would call programmers at their desks. Nobody got those phone numbers! How did these recruiters get them? This prompted our former Windows programmer to approach Alan Ashton directly. And he had a very interesting story to tell. Microsoft had been deliberately feeding us misinformation, information which had cost WP many hundreds of thousands of dollars, by the way. So they were essentially sabotaging our emerging Windows products. And this guy was able to tell us exactly what needed to be fixed, and how. Someone then began 'persuading' magazines to give us poor reviews, and Microsoft ads started getting downright decietful: Word is the fastest selling wordprocessor! Really?! How does one sell 'faster' than another? Either it sells more, or it doesn't. Anyway, then the last straw came. WordPerfect had added a couple of completely new, never-before seen anywhere features that were sure to blow everyone's minds at the next Comdex. We even had candies made to promote them: Dragon Drops (dragon-shaped gummi candies) for the new drag-n-drop feature, and chocolate 'button' bars for our new, customizable, button bar. Except, guess what? A rushed version of Word was released just before Comdex, and it, too had a button-bar of sorts (though not customizable) and drag-and-drop functionality. Rumor has it that Alan and Bruce met with our former Windows programmer to ask him just how low he thought Bill would really go. Apparently the answer was that there was no limit. So, they sent us all home early that Thursday, and we weren't to return until Monday. I didn't hear any more about it, until a friend of mine, who still had contacts up in building A (where I used to work just under Alan and Bruce), took me aside to fill me in. Apparently company leadership brought in a specialist security team with CIA connections. They swept the entire campus, and found every room bugged. The most bugs were found in the restrooms, of all places, and, after that, the conference rooms. Life was never the same there after that. And it was apparent to me that everyone had pretty much decided that they were just in the wrong business. And, trust me when I tell you that Bill hasn't improved his behavior since then. Just look up some of the things he's done, especially the causes he's been advocating since he effectively retired. This guy is a devil. But it gets even worse than that. Almost two years ago now, President Donald Trump was engaged in secret negotiations with Saudi Arabia's prince Salman. We don't know what it was about, but it seems pretty obvious that it would have covered Trump's desire that the Arabs keep gas prices low for Americans, AND something else having to do with some, if not most members of the Saudi royal family backing the wrong horse, siding with those who aimed to do more than merely undermine our President. It seems Salman wasn't the bad guy. There was apparently a plot to kill the President AND the prince at that meeting, using the music festival shooting as both distraction and cover. Fortunately, the plot appears to have been almost entirely known about before hand, and the President and the prince were both safe elsewhere, having been replaced by doppelgangers. I say 'appears' because a) we almost certainly do not yet have the full story, b) the story is a bit confusing, and c) imortant witnesses have been disappearing. What? You hadn't heard? Las Vegas shooting survivor, Roy McClellan dies in hit-n-run just weeks after deadly mass shooting. Snopes, of course, does their best to diminish this, but it falls pretty flat for me. Now it turns out that they were beginning to organize, mere days after the shooting, to counter the police chief's version, and to start an independent investigation. Guess that won't be going anywhere now. But the story gets weirder. Paddock apparently rushed out of the room, into the hallway, as if pursuing someone. This was reported by someone who was there, and saw him. Where was he going? Why? I think he figured out that he'd been abandoned by those who'd helped him arrange the whole thing, and actually delivered the weapons. Via a helicopter on the roof. Where they also made good their escape, leaving him behind. You see, not just anyone can land a helicopter up there. There's the police, medivac, the hotel itself (when ferrying distinguished guests), but those guests generally have their own helicopters, and can use the pad pretty much any time they want, with little to no warning. And that's because they own the roof! In fact, they don't just own the roof; they own the top FIVE floors of the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas. They own the entire floor, all the rooms, from which Paddock carried out 'his' attack. And THEY are prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, 64, of Saudi Arabia, and ... BILL GATES! And, in fact, Billy-boy's name just keeps turning up in connection with the Clintons, the Haiti child kidnapping scandal, Epstein, and, as I mentioned the other day, Ray Kurzweil. Exactly what the connection is, I can't say. I have no information other than what's publicly available, and that generally means the same propaganda we all get fed, day in, day out. But, just as with the curoius facts surrounding the shooting itself, and the fates of too many of the survivors, combined with some lessons I'm finally beginning to wake up to ... 1 There's no such thing as a coincidence, ... 2 Two and two still add up to four, and ... 3 Where there's smoke, there's fire. And I'll never believe otherwise again. Moreover, in a radical break with tradition, prince Salman is now crown-prince Salman, Al-Waleed bin Talal is neutralized, a couple of other Saudi princes are dead, and Saudi Arabia has undergone a massive purge of its government AND royal family. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From my playlist I told you how I carefully introduced my kids to music, being sure to cultivate an appreciation among them for their recent cultural history, as well as even older works. But, the student, as so often is the case, becomes the teacher, and now my kids introduce me to music that I really love. In fact, it turns out that my middle boy, River, has a musical taste very much like my own. And, with that, I offer you these: Cowboy Bebop - Blue The Seatbelts - Space Lion Audiomachine - Apollo's Triumph ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |