Fake Bill Gates

If you’re anything like Fake Bill Gates, you’ve seen the Mac fanboys using Exposé on their macbooks to switch from window to window (Fake Bill Gates is not jealous though — no one should be jealous of unemployed people). You may have seen the Linux geeks using the same exact function provided by Compiz (Fake Bill Gates is still not jealous — no one should be jealous of unshowered people). Exposé is a function that puts all your windows on the same screen tiled out so you can click on any one of them to bring it in focus. Here’s a visual demonstration:

The truth of the matter is that alt-tab is decent for switching windows (and far better than the win-tab flipper), but Exposé is much nicer as it puts everything out on one screen. The problem is that Vista’s Aero doesn’t have the Exposé effect installed by default. You’ll have to add in that functionality. Luckily, a programmer has developed Exposé for Vista (source available there too). It works very well and I haven’t had any issues with it.

Dear Idiot Blocking My Parking Space,

You may return to your car sometime later tonight or tomorrow to find your car not there. I called to have it towed. Since my time is worth a lot of money, I also left a bill on your windshield for my time. That 5 minutes will cost you a good $18,000. Don’t worry, I rounded down.

It’s times like these when I wish I had a particle incinerating laser mounted on my car.  There wouldn’t even be a mess to clean up because the entire car would just be sublimated — that’s right, gaseous metals (although that piece of shit is mostly plastic and bondo anyways). When I called up the Ballmer, he said something about the plutonium to power the damn thing being rather rare. Seeing as I, Fake Bill Gates, can blow $5 mil every day for the rest of my life and still die with a ton left, I reminded him about the “head up his ass” patent. Then the legal team gave me a call to let me know that mounting a death ray on your car isn’t exactly street legal in most states. After explaining that they need to think outside the box, they did mention that it was legal to mount a doom cannon on my car if I wanted to move to Alabama. Supposedly, you can drive a tank to work in Alabama. Fucking red states.

Give My Regards to the Tow Truck Driver,

Fake Bill Gates

What the hell is with gas prices causing people to move? Even if you don’t have more money than god (like myself), the gas savings are negligible for so many movers.  Let’s play with some numbers.

Lets say you live in the burbs and drive 15 miles to work each day each way, for 50 work weeks of 5 days each. You’re talking about 15 * 2 * 50 * 5 = 7500 miles per year driving to and from work. Now, most people don’t actually go into the office 250 days a year because that’s only weekends and 2 weekends of vacation. There are numerous other holidays, but I figured it’d be a decent estimate. Now, if you drive a sedan or coupe that gets a modest 25 miles/gal, it takes you 300 gallons commuting. At $4 per gallon, that’s only $1200 a year driving to and from work (I use more than that every day as napkins).

Now lets say you move so you’re only 3 miles from your workplace. Now, we’ll ignore the fact that if you live that close you’re probably going to be driving less highway mileage, thus reducing your average miles/gal. This is (3 * 2 * 50 * 5) 1500 miles per year. At 25 miles/gal, that’s 60 gallons, and at $4/gal, $240. Now, it’s only fitting that we add on the cost of wear and tear on the difference that you’re saving. At a very reasonable $.40/mi, that difference of 6,000 miles is $2,400 (I regularly tip waiters at Taco Bell that much - yes, my Taco Bell has waiters).

Thus, by moving, you’re saving $960/yr in gas and $2,400 in wear and tear totaling $3,360 per year. Of course, the U.S. zone planning is generally set up so people live in one area and work in another. Living closer to work is more often than not, more expensive. At $3,360/yr over 12 months, you get $280 more per month for increased living expenses like rent/mortgage/maintenance, taxes, parking space rental fees. For the vast majority of metropolitan areas, the increased living expenses are much more than $280/mo, and that is why people commute.

And even then, this assumes that the actual cost of moving is $0.

Now, for me, the one and only Fake Bill Gates, this is a non-issue. I could take an SR71 to work every day (if I wanted to go to work anymore) and still never be near broke. But for everyone still living in the real world, you’re probably not saving any money yet.

Last week, Associated Press sent DMCA takedown notices to a blog claiming “copyrights” on quotes ranging from 30 - 80 words. Someone quickly found AP’s policy which apparently demands a license for the quoted use of 5 words or more. The AP followed up with a statement that they’d meet with some bloggers to determine what copyright laws should be in regards to writing text on the internet. Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch blasted AP because of these ridiculous assertions, and AP did what old fogies running ginormous corporations always do when they have no idea how to handle technology: they made total hypocrites out of themselves by quoting 22 words from Arrington.

But now the A.P. has gone too far. They’ve quoted twenty-two words from one of [TechCrunch's] posts, in clear violation of their warped interpretation of copyright law.

And just so you know, AP, Microsoft owns following patents:

• System and method for monetizing excerpts of media,
• System and method for claiming copyright on 5 words and up
• Apparatus combining giant douche and turd sandwich, and
• System, method, and apparatus for removing one’s head from his own asshole (I constantly have to explain to Ballmer how to use this one)

I expect royalty checks from you so I can get back up above Warren Buffet. I’ll have Ballmer send an intern to pick the checks up in person.

And even then, Microsoft has started running a combinator function taking every combination of the 6,000,000 most commonly used words in 5 word long phrases (we’ve patented the iterator for generating said phrases too). That’s only 7.776e+33 different combinations. We’ll be sending you some DMCA takedowns for all the news you post Monday.

Today, I noticed a bug in Vista. If you open up a .zip and copy (either through ctrl-v or drag) the contents into an ftp location opened with windows explorer, you won’t get any dialogue boxes at all (no error dialogues, and no replace-all dialogues), and you can’t do anything with either folder (no selecting or deselecting files, or even minimizing the windows). The windows both lock up, although files are clearly appearing in the ftp window.

And the copy seems to take forever… much longer than if you just copied the files out of the zip and then uploaded them. I’m guessing that it takes so long because the zip extractor and file uploader are waiting on each other left and right instead of doing it all in 2 batches. Then again, I wouldn’t really know, because I haven’t seen code since the 1980s when Steve Jobs and I were working on some stuff and he tried to claim that I stole it from him to build my gajillion dollar empire (Zuckerberg, I’m know how you feel). The worst part of this bug is that you don’t get the transfer status dialogue box either, so you can’t even cancel the transfer (or see the current status). Luckily, when I was uploading, some error occurred and I didn’t have to sit through the excruciatingly long process (once again, I couldn’t see what the error was because the dialogue box was suppressed).

This happens even on Vista SP1.

Looks like we’ll have a programmer to sacrifice to Ballmer.

“So you want to be a blogger?” I thought to myself.

My name is Fake Bill Gates. For a long time, I was the richest man in the world, but I’m now only the third richest man on the planet as I only have $58 billion. I’m currently being beaten by the Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim Helú who’s in second with $60 billion. First goes to Warren Buffet with $62 billion. So what does that mean? At $400 a copy, you need to go out and buy yourself some 12,500,000 copies of Windows Vista Ultimate to put me in first at $63 billion. Of course, I don’t get every penny from Vista, and Buffet probably has some MS stock, so lets round that up to an even 50 million copies of Vista. Now, I know, I know, people aren’t too happy about Vista. If you want, you can substitute a Zune and a Xbox 360 instead of Vista, and I’ll still be happy.

Even if you decide not to buy all this stuff to get me back up, I’ll still be happy because I have more money than god. In fact, I was born on October 28, 1955, and if I die at the round age of 80, that means I can spend $5,885,337 a day for the rest of my life and still have a bit of to leave to my relatives. So now that I’m so rich that I can literally wipe myself with hundred dollar bills, and that I stepped down from Microsoft a bit ago, I figured I’d have my own outlet to the world with all this free time. And since I’m not spending that much money every day, my accounts are literally spewing interest. Really, in the amount of time it took you to read this post, I just made more money than you probably make in a year.

And I’m way richer than Steve Jobs.