Manolith has a list of fifteen people the editorial team says cheated and faked their way into fame and fortune. Some of them have been in the news in the past few years, but others stretch back into history. Among their choices (to no small degree of disagreement in the comments) is Bill Gates, whom Monolith alleges:
http://www.manolith.com/2010/01/27/15-big-cheats-and-fakers-who-won/ via Digg | Photo: Corbis
The problem is, Bill Gates was never successful in his attempt to build an operating system back in 1980. He paid a man named Tim Paterson $50,000 for his shaky but working operating system, QDOS, which was a rough clone of an already established OS called CP/M, written by Gary Kildall. Gates polished QDOS into a finished product, renamed it DOS, slapped Microsoft on the disk labels and licensed it to IBM in what would become the start of a very lucrative career for an individual of very mediocre technical talent. The rest is blue-screened history.
http://www.manolith.com/2010/01/27/15-big-cheats-and-fakers-who-won/ via Digg | Photo: Corbis
So what is the problem? If Neatorama thinks Gates and Windows are fraudulent, maybe neatorama should only set Apple and Linux OS's to access the site.....But wait, then Neatorama wouldn't make nearly as much money.
....don't bite the hand that feeds you.
Neatorama is being hypocritical.
I think the article is just pointing out that the common belief that Gates wrote and sold his own software is wrong. Gates wasn't a poor genius who worked his way up from the bottom. He was a rich kid who worked smart and hard, and was rewarded.
Go easy on Neatorama. If you think the words "cheater" and "faker" are too harsh then tell the editors at Monolith instead.
I really don't think the people who use it know what it means.
- Oscar Wilde
"The mediocre borrow. Genius steals"
- George Bernard Shaw
Sure it's easy to bash Gates and MS but lists like this need to share the bashing.
Jack