old, but good. reading a whole series of these would be very interesting indeed. what is surprising about all of this particular experience (indeed, about many of my experiences) is the fact that for most of the things Mr. Gates mentions is about getting the prerequisites for MovieMaker installed. In fact he doesn't even talk about the program at all. all of the steps up to that point involve the Microsoft website, the program manager in control panel, and windows update, arguably the most visible pieces of the company to anyone who administers their machine (read: just about everybody w/ a Windows box). And Mr. Gates is speaking of his frustrations of each of these as someone who is experiencing these feelings for the first time. when it comes to the particular section of the website experience to download, it appears to me that this is the first time he's been there.

why hasn't he been more involved with how these pieces work in the first place?

oh, and when he retires, I would like to think he installs KDE on some Linux distro and uses that. He would then realize the mistake of his professional career was his ego as a developer, and that his problems could be personified by the decision of keeping all the Win16 real mode stuff through and through. Int19h anyone?

my inclination is, of course, to agree with you, however, i've been spending far too much time thinking about what Stephenson wrote in In the Beginning was the Command Line :

But it's true. Credit for Linux generally goes to its human namesake, one Linus Torvalds, a Finn who got the whole thing rolling in 1991 when he used some of the GNU tools to write the beginnings of a Unix kernel that could run on PC-compatible hardware. And indeed Torvalds deserves all the credit he has ever gotten, and a whole lot more. But he could not have made it happen by himself, any more than Richard Stallman could have. To write code at all, Torvalds had to have cheap but powerful development tools, and these he got from Stallman's GNU project.

And he had to have cheap hardware on which to write that code. Cheap hardware is a much harder thing to arrange than cheap software; a single person (Stallman) can write software and put it up on the Net for free, but in order to make hardware it's necessary to have a whole industrial infrastructure, which is not cheap by any stretch of the imagination. Really the only way to make hardware cheap is to punch out an incredible number of copies of it, so that the unit cost eventually drops. For reasons already explained, Apple had no desire to see the cost of hardware drop. The only reason Torvalds had cheap hardware was Microsoft.

you can read it in it's entirety here.

i have a feeling you already have.

if so, do you not see any validity to this perspective, regardless of how somewhat infuriating it may be to any of us who have mostly disdain for MS?

it's a tough one, no doubt, tho one i've thought about more and more lately. especially in the contexts of other *systems* that rely on a dualistic mechanism of one sort or another in order to achieve certain potentials.

this could be said for empirical pursuits as well as metaphysical or unquantifiable ones.

anything. almost anything. not mosquitoes, liver and onions, or, well - i suppose there are quite a few examples where something just sucks without any benefit in return ; )

doesn't make me like or or hate ole bill but it does move me to recalibrate my thinking about a lot of the things i do have strong negative feelings about.

even shitty movies?

nah ; )

still, in the case of this email example, just to play devil's advocate for a moment : what if bill set himself to using the site and reporting on it as through the eyes of the *average bear*? perhaps, it was an exercise like any other where he was not only intending to reflect on only the app but also the surrounding user experience/tasks/dependencies in order to use it in the first place.

in all fairness, i find it admirable that movie maker wasn't already installed, configured, tested, launched and awaiting his arrival to take it for a *spin*.

seems rather thorough that he would want to go through the entire process himself. any of us would do the same i presume.

maybe it had been awhile since last he had or there was something else that drew his focus to take the time to *experience* it first hand?

who knows.

i don't imagine a fella like that spends a lot of time on such mundane tasks as dealing with any of it, Int19h notwithstanding, but i see some value in his communication that made me [as someone who's spent a fair amount of his priceless time in this life administrating infernal winblows machines] waiting on many of the same inefficiencies he describes and laments.

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