Obama: People who earn more are merely "Society's lottery winners"

[bripat9643]

Context, dishonest liberal scum are trying to spin a narrative that success is nothing but luck, hitting the lotto which is complete crap. You are attempting to do the same here with Microsoft so I'm calling you out on this.

Oh, it wasn't the lotto. There are not ten people in the world that could have succeeded in Gates exact situation. Even so, there was a great deal of luck that landed the most lucrative contract in history into the laps of two college dropouts. Gates had the brains and talent to make something out of it, but seriously - he was extremely lucky to get the IBM deal.

Luck played a great part in the success of Bill Gates, but only someone else like Bill Gates could have capitalized on the opportunities presented to him.

 

[bripat9643]

[
Maybe... probably not. IBM was looking for a small company they could control. They can and did pretty much write DOS on their own. IBM funded around 99% of the effort. Microsoft was just the contractor IBM used to circumvent being split up like Ma-Bell.

Digital Research was only 6 guys. They had the CP/M OS from the Zilog Z80 which was selling well, which is why IBM turned to them. BUT they had to upscale it to a 16 bit OS.

{
But there are many somewhat conflicting stories about what happened when IBM went to meet with Digital Research. Gates is quoted in Fire in the Valley as saying "Gary was out flying" that day, but Kildall always denied the implication, telling the authors of Hard Drive that he had flown on a business trip to the Bay Area.

IBM and its lawyers met with Kildall's wife, Dorothy McEwen, and presented Digital Research with a one-sided non-disclosure agreement, which the company refused to sign. Later, Sams would tell the authors ofHard Drive that IBM just couldn't get Kildall to agree to spend the money to develop a 16-bit version of CP/M in the tight schedule IBM required. But whatever the reason, it's clear that IBM left Digital Research without an agreement on an operating system.

IBM communicated its problem to Microsoft later that month, and Microsoft's Gates, Paul Allen, and Kay Nishi apparently debated what to do about the program. Allen knew of an alternative: Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products (SCP) had earlier built an 8086-based prototype computer and while he was waiting for CP/M to be ported to the 8086, he created a rough 16-bit operating system for it. Paterson called it QDOS for Quick and Dirty Operating System, and according to Allen, it all fit within 6K. (It would later be renamed 86-DOS, and sometimes referred to as SCP-DOS.)}

The Rise of DOS How Microsoft Got the IBM PC OS Contract

Yes, a simple OS is something that pretty much any average systems engineer can generate in about two - four weeks effort.

"Simple" is the key word in that sentence. The last I heard, Windows has 11 million lines of code.

 

[Flash]

You have to laugh at Eunuch2008 claiming Bill Gates was lucky after he stated categorically that luck had nothing to do with success. And Gates was lucky:

"Here’s where the dumb luck comes in: in the 1960s, very few colleges had computer labs and a middle school with a computer was unheard of. The chances of a 13-year-old having access to a computer were pretty much one-in-a-million.

If Lakeside hadn’t purchased a computer, then young Bill might never have discovered his love for computer programming and he never would have started Microsoft."

Top 10 Business Lessons from Bill Gates

You are also lucky of your mother doesn't abort you. You are lucky if you are a billionaire and didn't get run over by a truck when you were a kid. Maybe your "luck" was you just happen to pick a book out at random that had something in it that sparked your interest..

I think all of us that have lived comfortably have something that we can point to that had a luck factor to it. However, unless we have inherited wealth we also had to work hard and smart to maintain and grow the wealth we earned. Luck by itself does not insure wealth. Hard work usually does,

In the context of Obama's statement the term luck is used to describe a process of gaining wealth that leads to the conclusion that you are not entitled to it.

It is nothing more than justification for the government to take your money away from you and give it to somebody else, most notably Democrat voters. It is a despicable thing for Obama to say but nevertheless it what the fear and greed mongers of the Left resort to justify their thievery by the hands of the government.

 

[RKMBrown]

Context, dishonest liberal scum are trying to spin a narrative that success is nothing but luck, hitting the lotto which is complete crap. You are attempting to do the same here with Microsoft so I'm calling you out on this.

Oh, it wasn't the lotto. There are not ten people in the world that could have succeeded in Gates exact situation. Even so, there was a great deal of luck that landed the most lucrative contract in history into the laps of two college dropouts. Gates had the brains and talent to make something out of it, but seriously - he was extremely lucky to get the IBM deal.

IBM was all full of itself and its mainframes and viewed the PC as a toy, Gates and Allen saw it differently, that wasn't luck that was vision. The years following that contract also wasn't luck, it was quite competitive. Apple opted for exclusivity, Microsoft licensed their OS to any manufacture willing to pay. Then the real competitive war began when Microsoft took on the software giants of that era, Lotus and Word Perfect for example, both were firmly entrenched and owned the vast majority of those markets and had gobs of cash on hand. Microsoft destroying them with MS Excel and Word also was not luck. Stupid clowns like Obama who think its just luck really are displaying a level of idiocy that surprises even me.

Toy? lol Don't tell that to the Yamato Lab. Microsoft did what IBM told them to do. If IBM had not opened up the architecture of the IBM PC there would not have been other manufactures of IBM PCs for Microsoft to sell too. Again, the reason IBM did that was to avoid being broken up like Ma-Bell.

Yes toy, I lived through that era in that industry from its infancy.

Yes, well I worked at the Yamato lab as a Lead OS Engineer. While there were some in the company that viewed PCs as toys, there were just as many if not more that had more vision than that.

 

[RKMBrown]

[
Maybe... probably not. IBM was looking for a small company they could control. They can and did pretty much write DOS on their own. IBM funded around 99% of the effort. Microsoft was just the contractor IBM used to circumvent being split up like Ma-Bell.

Digital Research was only 6 guys. They had the CP/M OS from the Zilog Z80 which was selling well, which is why IBM turned to them. BUT they had to upscale it to a 16 bit OS.

{
But there are many somewhat conflicting stories about what happened when IBM went to meet with Digital Research. Gates is quoted in Fire in the Valley as saying "Gary was out flying" that day, but Kildall always denied the implication, telling the authors of Hard Drive that he had flown on a business trip to the Bay Area.

IBM and its lawyers met with Kildall's wife, Dorothy McEwen, and presented Digital Research with a one-sided non-disclosure agreement, which the company refused to sign. Later, Sams would tell the authors ofHard Drive that IBM just couldn't get Kildall to agree to spend the money to develop a 16-bit version of CP/M in the tight schedule IBM required. But whatever the reason, it's clear that IBM left Digital Research without an agreement on an operating system.

IBM communicated its problem to Microsoft later that month, and Microsoft's Gates, Paul Allen, and Kay Nishi apparently debated what to do about the program. Allen knew of an alternative: Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products (SCP) had earlier built an 8086-based prototype computer and while he was waiting for CP/M to be ported to the 8086, he created a rough 16-bit operating system for it. Paterson called it QDOS for Quick and Dirty Operating System, and according to Allen, it all fit within 6K. (It would later be renamed 86-DOS, and sometimes referred to as SCP-DOS.)}

The Rise of DOS How Microsoft Got the IBM PC OS Contract

Yes, a simple OS is something that pretty much any average systems engineer can generate in about two - four weeks effort.

"Simple" is the key word in that sentence. The last I heard, Windows has 11 million lines of code.

11m? Jebuz, my version of it was only 2m loc, what have they done to my baby?

 

[The Rabbi]

Context, dishonest liberal scum are trying to spin a narrative that success is nothing but luck, hitting the lotto which is complete crap. You are attempting to do the same here with Microsoft so I'm calling you out on this.

Oh, it wasn't the lotto. There are not ten people in the world that could have succeeded in Gates exact situation. Even so, there was a great deal of luck that landed the most lucrative contract in history into the laps of two college dropouts. Gates had the brains and talent to make something out of it, but seriously - he was extremely lucky to get the IBM deal.

IBM was all full of itself and its mainframes and viewed the PC as a toy, Gates and Allen saw it differently, that wasn't luck that was vision. The years following that contract also wasn't luck, it was quite competitive. Apple opted for exclusivity, Microsoft licensed their OS to any manufacture willing to pay. Then the real competitive war began when Microsoft took on the software giants of that era, Lotus and Word Perfect for example, both were firmly entrenched and owned the vast majority of those markets and had gobs of cash on hand. Microsoft destroying them with MS Excel and Word also was not luck. Stupid clowns like Obama who think its just luck really are displaying a level of idiocy that surprises even me.

Toy? lol Don't tell that to the Yamato Lab. Microsoft did what IBM told them to do. If IBM had not opened up the architecture of the IBM PC there would not have been other manufactures of IBM PCs for Microsoft to sell too. Again, the reason IBM did that was to avoid being broken up like Ma-Bell.

Yes toy, I lived through that era in that industry from its infancy.

Yes, well I worked at the Yamato lab as a Lead OS Engineer. While there were some in the company that viewed PCs as toys, there were just as many if not more that had more vision than that.

And none of them were Bill Gates. Coincidence? I think not.

 

[RKMBrown]

Oh, it wasn't the lotto. There are not ten people in the world that could have succeeded in Gates exact situation. Even so, there was a great deal of luck that landed the most lucrative contract in history into the laps of two college dropouts. Gates had the brains and talent to make something out of it, but seriously - he was extremely lucky to get the IBM deal.

IBM was all full of itself and its mainframes and viewed the PC as a toy, Gates and Allen saw it differently, that wasn't luck that was vision. The years following that contract also wasn't luck, it was quite competitive. Apple opted for exclusivity, Microsoft licensed their OS to any manufacture willing to pay. Then the real competitive war began when Microsoft took on the software giants of that era, Lotus and Word Perfect for example, both were firmly entrenched and owned the vast majority of those markets and had gobs of cash on hand. Microsoft destroying them with MS Excel and Word also was not luck. Stupid clowns like Obama who think its just luck really are displaying a level of idiocy that surprises even me.

Toy? lol Don't tell that to the Yamato Lab. Microsoft did what IBM told them to do. If IBM had not opened up the architecture of the IBM PC there would not have been other manufactures of IBM PCs for Microsoft to sell too. Again, the reason IBM did that was to avoid being broken up like Ma-Bell.

Yes toy, I lived through that era in that industry from its infancy.

Yes, well I worked at the Yamato lab as a Lead OS Engineer. While there were some in the company that viewed PCs as toys, there were just as many if not more that had more vision than that.

And none of them were Bill Gates. Coincidence? I think not.

Actually, the first time I talked to Bill he was trying to sell me on the idea of converting one of my DOS apps to this cool new operating system they were working on called OS/2... this prior to Windows.

 

[bripat9643]

[
Maybe... probably not. IBM was looking for a small company they could control. They can and did pretty much write DOS on their own. IBM funded around 99% of the effort. Microsoft was just the contractor IBM used to circumvent being split up like Ma-Bell.

Digital Research was only 6 guys. They had the CP/M OS from the Zilog Z80 which was selling well, which is why IBM turned to them. BUT they had to upscale it to a 16 bit OS.

{
But there are many somewhat conflicting stories about what happened when IBM went to meet with Digital Research. Gates is quoted in Fire in the Valley as saying "Gary was out flying" that day, but Kildall always denied the implication, telling the authors of Hard Drive that he had flown on a business trip to the Bay Area.

IBM and its lawyers met with Kildall's wife, Dorothy McEwen, and presented Digital Research with a one-sided non-disclosure agreement, which the company refused to sign. Later, Sams would tell the authors ofHard Drive that IBM just couldn't get Kildall to agree to spend the money to develop a 16-bit version of CP/M in the tight schedule IBM required. But whatever the reason, it's clear that IBM left Digital Research without an agreement on an operating system.

IBM communicated its problem to Microsoft later that month, and Microsoft's Gates, Paul Allen, and Kay Nishi apparently debated what to do about the program. Allen knew of an alternative: Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products (SCP) had earlier built an 8086-based prototype computer and while he was waiting for CP/M to be ported to the 8086, he created a rough 16-bit operating system for it. Paterson called it QDOS for Quick and Dirty Operating System, and according to Allen, it all fit within 6K. (It would later be renamed 86-DOS, and sometimes referred to as SCP-DOS.)}

The Rise of DOS How Microsoft Got the IBM PC OS Contract

Yes, a simple OS is something that pretty much any average systems engineer can generate in about two - four weeks effort.

"Simple" is the key word in that sentence. The last I heard, Windows has 11 million lines of code.

11m? Jebuz, my version of it was only 2m loc, what have they done to my baby?

Windows is one of the worst operating systems on the market.

 

[Ravi]

You have to laugh at Eunuch2008 claiming Bill Gates was lucky after he stated categorically that luck had nothing to do with success. And Gates was lucky:

"Here’s where the dumb luck comes in: in the 1960s, very few colleges had computer labs and a middle school with a computer was unheard of. The chances of a 13-year-old having access to a computer were pretty much one-in-a-million.

If Lakeside hadn’t purchased a computer, then young Bill might never have discovered his love for computer programming and he never would have started Microsoft."

Top 10 Business Lessons from Bill Gates

You are also lucky of your mother doesn't abort you. You are lucky if you are a billionaire and didn't get run over by a truck when you were a kid. Maybe your "luck" was you just happen to pick a book out at random that had something in it that sparked your interest..

I think all of us that have lived comfortably have something that we can point to that had a luck factor to it. However, unless we have inherited wealth we also had to work hard and smart to maintain and grow the wealth we earned. Luck by itself does not insure wealth. Hard work usually does,

In the context of Obama's statement the term luck is used to describe a process of gaining wealth that leads to the conclusion that you are not entitled to it.

It is nothing more than justification for the government to take your money away from you and give it to somebody else, most notably Democrat voters. It is a despicable thing for Obama to say but nevertheless it what the fear and greed mongers of the Left resort to justify their thievery by the hands of the government.

Uh, no. In the context of Obama's statement the term luck (actually he didn't use the term but let's go with it) was used in the context of hedge fund earnings being taxed lower than the earnings of people that work regular jobs for a living.

 

[The Rabbi]

[
Maybe... probably not. IBM was looking for a small company they could control. They can and did pretty much write DOS on their own. IBM funded around 99% of the effort. Microsoft was just the contractor IBM used to circumvent being split up like Ma-Bell.

Digital Research was only 6 guys. They had the CP/M OS from the Zilog Z80 which was selling well, which is why IBM turned to them. BUT they had to upscale it to a 16 bit OS.

{
But there are many somewhat conflicting stories about what happened when IBM went to meet with Digital Research. Gates is quoted in Fire in the Valley as saying "Gary was out flying" that day, but Kildall always denied the implication, telling the authors of Hard Drive that he had flown on a business trip to the Bay Area.

IBM and its lawyers met with Kildall's wife, Dorothy McEwen, and presented Digital Research with a one-sided non-disclosure agreement, which the company refused to sign. Later, Sams would tell the authors ofHard Drive that IBM just couldn't get Kildall to agree to spend the money to develop a 16-bit version of CP/M in the tight schedule IBM required. But whatever the reason, it's clear that IBM left Digital Research without an agreement on an operating system.

IBM communicated its problem to Microsoft later that month, and Microsoft's Gates, Paul Allen, and Kay Nishi apparently debated what to do about the program. Allen knew of an alternative: Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products (SCP) had earlier built an 8086-based prototype computer and while he was waiting for CP/M to be ported to the 8086, he created a rough 16-bit operating system for it. Paterson called it QDOS for Quick and Dirty Operating System, and according to Allen, it all fit within 6K. (It would later be renamed 86-DOS, and sometimes referred to as SCP-DOS.)}

The Rise of DOS How Microsoft Got the IBM PC OS Contract

Yes, a simple OS is something that pretty much any average systems engineer can generate in about two - four weeks effort.

"Simple" is the key word in that sentence. The last I heard, Windows has 11 million lines of code.

11m? Jebuz, my version of it was only 2m loc, what have they done to my baby?

Windows is one of the worst operating systems on the market.

And yet its probably the most used. That's the impressive part of Microsoft. They never had the best product for any application but they were successful in selling it anyway.

 

[bripat9643]

Digital Research was only 6 guys. They had the CP/M OS from the Zilog Z80 which was selling well, which is why IBM turned to them. BUT they had to upscale it to a 16 bit OS.

{
But there are many somewhat conflicting stories about what happened when IBM went to meet with Digital Research. Gates is quoted in Fire in the Valley as saying "Gary was out flying" that day, but Kildall always denied the implication, telling the authors of Hard Drive that he had flown on a business trip to the Bay Area.

IBM and its lawyers met with Kildall's wife, Dorothy McEwen, and presented Digital Research with a one-sided non-disclosure agreement, which the company refused to sign. Later, Sams would tell the authors ofHard Drive that IBM just couldn't get Kildall to agree to spend the money to develop a 16-bit version of CP/M in the tight schedule IBM required. But whatever the reason, it's clear that IBM left Digital Research without an agreement on an operating system.

IBM communicated its problem to Microsoft later that month, and Microsoft's Gates, Paul Allen, and Kay Nishi apparently debated what to do about the program. Allen knew of an alternative: Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products (SCP) had earlier built an 8086-based prototype computer and while he was waiting for CP/M to be ported to the 8086, he created a rough 16-bit operating system for it. Paterson called it QDOS for Quick and Dirty Operating System, and according to Allen, it all fit within 6K. (It would later be renamed 86-DOS, and sometimes referred to as SCP-DOS.)}

The Rise of DOS How Microsoft Got the IBM PC OS Contract

Yes, a simple OS is something that pretty much any average systems engineer can generate in about two - four weeks effort.

"Simple" is the key word in that sentence. The last I heard, Windows has 11 million lines of code.

11m? Jebuz, my version of it was only 2m loc, what have they done to my baby?

Windows is one of the worst operating systems on the market.

And yet its probably the most used. That's the impressive part of Microsoft. They never had the best product for any application but they were successful in selling it anyway.

Bill Gates is a marketing genius, not a technical genius.

 

[Uncensored2008]

Yes, a simple OS is something that pretty much any average systems engineer can generate in about two - four weeks effort.

Back the Apple II days, I wrote mostly in 6502 assembly. The ProDOS operating system that Apple included had the most stupid assembler in history. You had to key ,mnemonics into direct memory locations. If you made a change to the code, you had to rekey the entire program. Writes to disk were based on memory locations so there was no way around it.

So I wrote an operating system for the 6502 that provided relocatable code and labeling. But what it could do was list a directory, read and write the floppy disk, and provided an assembler to translate mnemonics to machine code. That is literally it. Big difference between a simple OS like that and DOS 3.2.

Trivia point of the day, the BASIC interpreter in ProDOS for the Apple II was written by Microsoft.

 

[Uncensored2008]

Yes toy, I lived through that era in that industry from its infancy.

Yet the IBM PC armed with dBASE II and Lotus 123 literally changed the world.

 

[Uncensored2008]

You have to laugh at Eunuch2008 claiming Bill Gates was lucky after he stated categorically that luck had nothing to do with success. And Gates was lucky:

"Here’s where the dumb luck comes in: in the 1960s, very few colleges had computer labs and a middle school with a computer was unheard of. The chances of a 13-year-old having access to a computer were pretty much one-in-a-million.

If Lakeside hadn’t purchased a computer, then young Bill might never have discovered his love for computer programming and he never would have started Microsoft."

Top 10 Business Lessons from Bill Gates

You have to laugh at Rati...

Just because she's Rati....

 

[Toro]

FTR, most of the top earning hedge fund managers came from middle class backgrounds. That's hardly "society's lottery winners."

 

[bendog]

President Obama referred yesterday to the wealthy as "society's lottery winners", as though the only reason they were wealthy is because they got lucky one time. No mention of years of training, hard work, risks, 20-hour workdays, failure, recovery, and eventual success.

It's just more of the same attempt to pretend there's nothing wrong with taking they money and resources from those who earned them.

Private people who do this are called "thieves", and are prosecuted and jailed as they deserve.

Public people who do the same are called "liberals", and are immune from the prosecution and jail terms they deserve.

--------------------------------------------------

Keying on poverty Obama suggests high earners hit lottery

Keying on poverty, Obama suggests high earners hit 'lottery'

By Angela Greiling Keane BLOOMBERG NEWS
Updated today at 4:03 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Unless Democrats and Republicans can agree to raise taxes on the earnings of hedge-fund and private-equity managers, there is little chance the nation can make a meaningful dent in poverty, President Barack Obama said Tuesday.

Obama, whose long-standing proposal to raise taxes on what is known as carried interest has gained little traction in Congress, said fairness demands that the nation's wealthiest pitch in as more and more Americans are falling behind.

"If I were able to close that loophole, I'd be able to invest in early-childhood education," Obama said Tuesday. "If we can't ask from society's lottery winners to make that modest investment, then really this conversation is for show."

The president has often said the wealthiest Americans must make sacrifices to better life for poorer people. In addition to urging higher taxes for investment managers, he questioned whether the pay of some corporate chief executives is justified.

I'd be interested in learning specifically what Stiglitz means when he says Obama doesn't understand the wealth inequality today. Stiglitz is a critic of wealth inequality and probably would support higher taxes on the 1%, which is pretty much a term he coined. I'm not sure I agree with that, though I'd be all for more progressive taxes to reduce deficits. Still, I think it's clear that Obama doesn't understand capitalism.

 

[Uncensored2008]

Actually, the first time I talked to Bill he was trying to sell me on the idea of converting one of my DOS apps to this cool new operating system they were working on called OS/2... this prior to Windows.

Since OS/2 (in the guise of NT) dominated the world for over a decade, I sure hope you did it. (Dig into XP, you'll find OS/2 Kernel and Bootstrapper.)

 

[Uncensored2008]

Windows is one of the worst operating systems on the market.

But like Capitalism, it just happens to be better than all the rest...

I love Longhorn. I think it is the most stable OS on the market, including the Debian distros like Mint and Ubuntu. (I did NOT hold this opinion of NT). I also think that Aero is the most glamorous and useful UI in existence. (Unity is a distant #2) I'm not a fan of Metro, but on my Surface Pro 3 it does make sense. The underlying OS is still rock solid.

Windows 8 has just about 50 million lines of Code. To contrast, Mac OS/X "Lion" has 86 million lines of code. Yosemity - where Apple invents the Metro interface from Windows 8 has over 94 million lines of ever so bloated code.

Source lines of code - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia

 

[OnePercenter]

[

Middle class workers making less is a Republican/corporate America accomplishment.

Every ill that effects/affects the middle class today can be directly shown as a Republican fail.

Yea right.

Since Obama has become President and the Democrats controlled both houses of the Congress for four years and the Senate for six years the poverty rate has increased, the welfare rolls increased and family income decreased.

You can blame Obama's failure on anybody you want because you are unwilling to take responsibility for the failure you elected because we have come to expect that kind of cowardice from the Moon Bats.

To have true control of Congress, one party must have a majority in the House, and 60 or more seats in the Senate. The last time that occurred for Democrats was in the late 70's.

Obama has done a great job keeping Republicans from fucking the middle class more than they have already done. He took a job to recover the United States from the worst economic crash in history. In 2009, economists stated that it would take 8 -10 years to recover. Following that time-line, were well on our way.

 

[OnePercenter]

I think carried interest should not be taxed as capital gains. Because, well, it's NOT capital gains and shouldn't be taxed as such.

But Obama reinforces the perception that Democrats think that success comes from luck, not hard work.

Carried Interest is a share of profits made from investment. Why shouldn't those profits be taxed as capital gains?

Take it from someone that spent his entire professional life in business. Obama is 100% spot-on in his business analogies.