In article <482d4273@news.povray.org>, war### [at] tagpovrayorg says...
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> 
> > > I wonder if Bill Gates can code his way out of a paper bag nowadays?
> 
> > You think he could originally??
> 
>   Bill Gates was a computer programmer in the 70's and participated in
> developing, among other things, a BASIC interpreter.
> 
>   (However, how *competent* as a programmer he was is another question.)
> 
> > As I understand it, every product his name has ever been associated wit
h 
> > was actually stolen from somebody or other...
> 
>   Do you have any hard evidence of this? For example on that BASIC
> interpreter.
> 
Not hard to write one of those really. I could manage it, and frankly, I 
am not that great a programmer. I know people at age 12-13 that managed 
to use Apple IIs to do stuff that blew my mind, and I thought at the 
time, while taking the same class, that I was a major hotshot (until I 
saw what they managed). But seriously, we do know, from the history of 
things, that their first OS was basically gotten from someone else, and 
while they had to write a "boot loader" for it at the last minute, its 
kind of unclear if Gate or him partner did that, and again, bootloaders 
are not that big a deal. I wrote something similar not long ago while 
trying to figure out how the hell the encoding worked on "protected" 
Apple II disks for a game. I managed to write something that could read 
normal disks fine, but never could figure out what differed in the code 
for the loader used by the game.

I haven't seen a lot to suggest Gates was extraordinary at all at 
programming, or, for that matter, that the people he hired where, for 
the most part, great programmers either, instead of just real good at 
adapting stuff other people already came up with. Evidence is hard to 
come by though, when such a great amount of time has passed, and the 
only people that "know" if he was good at it, or bad at it, have no 
reason to tell the truth (or even remember correctly). But, I am not 
going to give him credit for being a Linus Trivald, given that Gates 
didn't even *invent* the first OS he sold to IBM. Compared to even the 
stuff Apple II people had to do to crap their code onto a disk and run 
it, DOS and the rest didn't need to be well designed, efficient, 
complex, or even smart (the BIOS did most of the hard lifting, while on 
an Apple II you often had to *code* sections of what would be BIOS on a 
PC by hand, to "fit" in the memory you had available, thus the code I 
fiddled with to "load" data from disk and decode it.)

-- 
void main () {

    if version = "Vista" {
      call slow_by_half();
      call DRM_everything();
    }
    call functional_code();
  }
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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