[gaius]

Oh please!

Michael Phelps was born with his flipper-like feet, does that make him any less of an Olympian? Genetic advantage, financial advantage, it's all the same.

Gates did what he set out to do, a computer on every desktop and in every home. The economies of scale he made possible are why you can buy a PC for what, $300 now? He took computing out of the hands of the "high priests" and gave it to the masses.

Would the state of computing be "better" without him? Define better... It certainly wouldn't be fully mainstream.

[generalk]

It certainly wouldn't be fully mainstream.

Really? I think that's discounting the booming home PC market that existed before Microsoft got involved and giving a lot of credit to someone for an achievement that wasn't fully there. All Gates did was ensure that his company's software was on every computer.

[gaius]

You're discounting the network effect of compatibility. I don't even mean "network" as in networking, but in the ability to save a Word document or whatever on a floppy on virtually any PC and load it back on another. This was long, long before every device could render a web page (and you could take for granted that it would have a TCP/IP connection!)

There was huge real value in creating "the standard", not least because it enabled some truly phenomenal economies of scale. I mean, the 386 had the hardware for protected memory, virtual memory and preemptive multitasking. Or you could pay 10x as much for a contemporary SPARC or MIPS processor.

In 1994 I was at college and we were doing some numerical stuff, metal fatigue IIRC. You could run your code on a SPARC 5 or drop into DOS on a crappy PC and give 100% of the CPU to your code. Guess which was actually quicker...

[codexon]

IBM mistakenly asked Microsoft for an 8088 version of CP/M (the predecessor to DOS). Gates then bought a clone called 86-DOS and slapped the MS label on it.

If MS didn't exist, someone else could have easily replaced them. It was also mainly due to Intel, who created such a cheap processor, that we have cheap computers today. Not Microsoft.

[rbanffy]

I was able to save a wordstar document on any CP/M (including CP/M 86) machine and transfer it to any other, including my Apple II running CP/M through a coprocessor. Most other word processors of the time could exchange files in one format or another. I never had any problems with it.

And you shouldn't be using a SPARC 5 on 1994 anyway.

[gaius]

That is true, but it is also true that CP/M was never dominant in the same way that Windows became. At the same time as CP/M there were all the micros (BBC, Commodore, Sinclair, Amstrad), Japan had the MSX "standard" etc etc.

Whereas in the Windows era you were likely to fnd machines running the same applications everywhere, even at home.

[rbanffy]

CP/M was very important in the small-business microcomputer space, offering a measure of compatibility other platforms couldn't. Minis lived above that space and didn't compete directly with micros in the small-business.

The home computer space was much more fragmented and was where Apple, Commodore, Atari, BBC, Amstrad and Sinclair competed. BBC, Amstrad and Sinclair were important only in Europe, further fragmenting that market. It later became dominated by the same IBM-PC clones that took over small businesses.

[codexon]

Michael Phelps was born with his flipper-like feet, does that make him any less of an Olympian?

No, but it makes the victory tainted by circumstance rather than hard work. Who would you be more receptive to in a lecture about hard work: Yao Ming at 7"6' who barely has to stick his hand out to make a block, or Charles Barkley who is an entire foot shorter?

And if Michael Phelps didn't exist, someone like Cavic would have won by an insignificant 0.01 seconds less. By the same vein, it is inevitable that someone else would have stepped up had Microsoft not existed.

So why is it a problem to worship these people that have had all these advantages?

The biggest excuse why these people are against taxation is because they feel their wealth was earned 99% by hard work rather than circumstance. Conversely, many of them feel people on welfare don't deserve it, and it is 99% due to their personality.

It is a classic case of the fundamental attribution error.

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

[gaius]

No, people are anti-tax because they believe government is an inefficient way to Get Stuff Done.

To use your example, recent figures have shown that there are 4M adults in the UK who have never worked and spent their entire lives on the dole. Paying them to do nothing while there is stuff in the public good that needs doing, is simply not a good use of taxpayer's money.

[codexon]

No, people are anti-tax because they believe government is an inefficient way to Get Stuff Done.

This is a common euphemism for "you don't deserve my money because all my money came from hard work and all your poorness comes from your laziness, regardless of circumstances".

And about that 4M figure, I couldn't find any evidence of that on Google, but I did find numerous results for 1.4M, which you were off by more than a factor of two. In addition, half of that is due 16-24 year olds choosing not to be janitors fresh out of college due to the recession that was by no means their fault.

That 1.4M also includes the terminally ill, disabled, and housewives. So for you to even bring this up as evidence is dishonest.

http://www.walletpop.co.uk/2010/09/14/1-4-million-brits-have...

[rbanffy]

> Genetic advantage, financial advantage, it's all the same

In Bill Gates' case, it's more or less giving a machine gun to a young John Dillinger than having a genetic mutation that made him a superior businessman.

Lack of empathy or remorse are not genetic traits, are they?