Bill Gates Is Coming To A College Near You

Xyn writes "Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates visited UW-Madison today as part of his 2005 College Tour, designed to promote greater youth involvement in technology careers. Gates discussed "The Impact and Opportunity of Technology: Why Computer Science? Why Now?" at a student forum."

Personally...

[Pichu0102]

I think he wants kids to grow up to replace Ballmer and NOT waste money on broken chairs.

Re:Personally...

[Doppler00]

I just just imagine Ballmer jumping up and down on his office chair screaming:

"Developers, developers DEVELOPERS!"

Re:Personally...

[jkrise]

Good carpenters are cheaper than good IT managers....

Re:Personally...

[AuMatar]

You haven't hired a carpenter lately.

Quick!

[gardyloo]

Everyone line up with the shiny bits to welcome Bill! Now... aim....

Re:Quick!

[mboos]

At Waterloo, where he's coming tomorrow, security is going to be very tight. They've even got metal detectors for the entrances. Only those with invites (they will be checking IDs) are permitted inside.

One of my friends had wanted to get in - I was going to lend him my Google shirt just to see what the reaction was. Unfortunately, invites were limited and he didn't get invited.

Re:Quick!

[einhverfr]

Maybe one can still build the MIT version of the Archimedes death ray. No, not hot enough to hurt him, just raise the temperature a few degrees...

"Is it just me or is it hot in here."

"It's just you....."

Free MS Office for Linux to first 100 attendees !

[SgtChaireBourne]

If I were on such a campus, I'd paper the kiosks and announcement boards the day before with flyers promoting the event and proclaiming things like:

Free MS-Linux preview CDs to all attendees!

Free MS Office for Linux beta for first 100

Sign up for free MS Linux Developers Kit

That ought to make the question and answer session interesting.

Re:Quick!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, if I ran an empire and was going to Waterloo, I'd want tight security too. Gotta learn from history, you know...

Re:Quick!

[earthforce_1]

Yeah, you never know, he be might be attacked by another crazed pie wielding terrorist:

http://www.zpub.com/un/bill/pie.html [zpub.com]

Re:Quick!

[Basehart]

"They've even got metal detectors for the entrances."

Those are to stop people with iPods from watching "Lost" while Bill is on stage trying to sell Microsoft XP Media Edition!

Pies

[gilesjuk]

What about pie detectors? :)

http://www.bitstorm.org/gates/ [bitstorm.org]

Answer

[ravenspear]

Why Computer Science? Why Now?

Because we need people with more skill to fix up all your shit Bill.

Re:Answer

[HMC CS Major]

Funny, but to be fair to Gates, all indications are that he was a hell of a programmer individually.

The software his company produces may suck (at times ... ok, most of the time), but he was apparently a hell of a programmer back in the day.

Re:Answer

[jkrise]

all indications are that he was a hell of a programmer individually. a programmer who used vi and a shell environment where ^c meant 'break' not 'copy'. And then he destroyed... or tried to destroy the environment he grew up in.

Re:Answer

[commodoresloat]

"Back in the day" ... he was definitely a master of BASIC and pretty much the only person in the world who actually understood DOS... (I remember trying to figure that crap out when keyboards didn't even have a "\" key.) Apparently he was famously a twit back then too - there's an article from the 70s by him calling people thieves for copying his BASIC code and patronizingly explaining why since he wrote the code he should be able to dictate who is allowed to learn something from it... Maybe someone can di

Re:Answer

[Tom]

Funny, but to be fair to Gates, all indications are that he was a hell of a programmer individually.

You base this bold statement on which facts, exactly?

The only software that wikipedia attributes to Gates personally [wikipedia.org] was the Altair BASIC interpreter, and even that was co-authored with Paul Allen.

So, where are your "indications" ?

Re:Answer

[Korgan]

Bought CP/M for $25,000 then rebranded it and sold 'licenses' for a hell of a profit. :-)

Still, he was a master of BASIC. He developed many BASIC roms for a lot of different machines in the late 70s and early 80s. DOS's BASIC was actually a derivative of much of his early code.

He knew machine code and ASM pretty much inside out for much of the architectures he built a BASIC interpretter for. To be honest though, beyond some of the original BASIC interpretters, and the earliest versions of PC-DOS/MS-DOS, I really cannot think of anything he directly had a hand in. By the time Xenix and OS/2 were on the cards, they'd already hired a decent sized development pool. I don't think he had any hand in developing the Microsoft contributions to those code bases.

I vaguely recall him being very involved in Project Bob, but I can't remember if that was as a developer or just a very interested manager. Not that it matters. Project Bob was dumped in favour of Cairo.

Re:Answer

[Novus]

One minor clarification: CP/M-86 became DR-DOS, not MS-DOS. MS-DOS was based on QDOS [wikipedia.org]. The rest of the post seems to be correct.

Where's the Code?

[4of12]

Still, he was a master of BASIC. He developed many BASIC roms for a lot of different machines in the late 70s and early 80s. DOS's BASIC was actually a derivative of much of his early code.

I'm inclined to believe that Bill Gates was a sharp programmer back in the late 1970's and early 1980's from what I've read [amazon.com].

Not to mention that he has a talent for reading legalese (Dad was a lawyer) that typically turns off many programmers. That talent was instrumental in his company's ascendency; people didn't expec

Re:Answer

[D-Cypell]

Interestingly, Bill Gates estimated I.Q. is about 20 points more than Adolf Hitler's.

Yes, they also grade George W as 125. I am not sure I trust the estimations of a group that forget to put in the decimal points in this way.

He was a math major, not accounting.

[TurkishGeek]

Bill Gates was an undergraduate in the Math department before he dropped out, you might want to get your facts straight.

Re:Answer

[RLiegh]

1)wrote or co-wrote one of the first mainstream implementations of BASIC
2)created the FAT file sytem (originally for use with #1, a few years before Patterson's DOS.

Re:Answer

[jkrise]

Or rather... what computer? what science? Colleges deal with science and technology.... and Microsoft has been - is -and will be a marketing company.

marketing expedience

[yagu]

From the Post:

designed to promote greater youth involvement in technology careers.

Ahem.

Anyway, I searched and searched for more information on Gates' special visit and what he really might have said. Alas, the closest I came was buried on a meta-referred pages was the helpful:

General public: An archived version of the webcast will be available on F riday, Oct. 14.

I hate to jump the gun here, but any wagers on the content of his presentation? Any bets "involvement in technology careers" was pretty mu

Re:marketing expedience

[frank378]

I've read about him doing these college talks [com.com] several times in the near past. My guess is the video would show something similar to what he's been saying. Something about how they need more CompSci majors, especially with some kind of business masters type skills for project management assignments. I've *heard* that these project management jobs are tougher to outsource than the straight technical stuff but I'm not sure how much I believe it.

Re:marketing expedience

[Stalus]

We all knew he was coming, but his schedule was very much secret, and aimed at undergraduates. I hadn't even heard about the drop into the 302 class until now, and I know the guy that was teaching the class. Most of us had to watch a remote feed of the later talk, which I missed the beginning of, but the Q&A was better than most CEOs I've heard talk. Yes, a chunk of his presentation was "Look at the great products Microsoft is about to release" (XBox, Treo phone, etc). Funny thing is that he didn't mention Vista until someone specifically asked him about it.

Anyway, the basic message he was trying to get across, in my opinion, was that no matter what you do these days, technology is going to play a role, so it would be advantageous to embrace it. Technology is becoming ubiquitous in the home. Most sciences rely on some sort of software for simulation or analysis. Traditional blue collar jobs are disappearing because they are being automated. Therefore, if you want a job in the future, you're going to need a better education than you could get away with in the past.

I kind of left with the impression of.. "So, I'm in school longer, and will have to do more work, but will get paid the same or less... why is technology a good thing again?" Frankly though, you can watch the presentation in a few days.

Re:marketing expedience

[Breakfast Pants]

"So, I'm in school longer, and will have to do more work, but will get paid the same or less... why is technology a good thing again?" Theoretically technology makes the things you desire cheaper, so you don't need more money. The average American today lives more comfortably than kings of the past. In actuallity it isn't about having a comfortable life or any of that crap; it is about power and/or having more money than your neighbor.

Re:marketing expedience

[Simonetta]

In Germany (where I live) employees' wages were nicely rising along with the overall productivity until about 1990. Since the beginning of the 90s, however, raises in wages barely compensate the inflation.

I believe that the productivity gains in Germany achieved since 1990 has been invested into the development of the eastern part of the country. Perhaps this is the economic equivalent of the amount of energy needed to change states of matter. When ice turns to liquid water, it takes a lot

Why to do computer science

[cdrdude]

What did the liberal arts major say to the compsci major?
>
>
>
>"Would you like fries with that order, sir?"

Re:Why to do computer science

[ilyaaohell]

Does this joke honestly make sense in this day and age? As an unemployed graduate with a computer science degree, I say no, no it does not make sense in this day and age. :(

Re:Why to do computer science

[WindBourne]

Then either

1. Get a job.
2. Make a job.

You can do both. To get a job, you may have to move. To make a job, You may have to work. There are good ideas out there.

With that said, Good luck. These are not like the 80's or 90's were.

Re:Why to do computer science

[einhverfr]

Does this joke honestly make sense in this day and age? As an unemployed graduate with a computer science degree, I say no, no it does not make sense in this day and age. :(

And as a computer programmer with a liberal arts degree....

Re:Why to do computer science

[Fulcrum of Evil]

And as a computer programmer with a liberal arts degree....

...you're talking to yourself. 'Would you like Prozac with that?'

Re:Why to do computer science

[einhverfr]

Honestly?

Gates himself seemed to say many times that CS degrees were optional and that learning to program well required hands-on experience more than formal education. So it is interesting to see the turnaround on this issue. Yes, CS education formal or not (I get mine by hanging out in forums with people who have deep knowledge of the technologies I work with).

But education is education and should be aimed not merely at teaching a vocation but teaching someone how to learn. Unlike most liberal arts majors, I have a strong interest in science and math and can hold my own in most of these fields. However, most of my formal education was spent on humanities such as History, and I have attempted to study linguistics, philology, and other fields on my own (though these are fields where one simply cannot do serious work without at least a MA in the fields). So part of the problem today is that many liberal arts majors are intellectually lazy, but one should not generalize to the relevant fields as a whole. There is absolutely no reason why a serious historian with an interest in and reasonable grasp of mathematics cannot become a good programmer in non-research fields.

Why do geology majors do better in medical school than those with pre-med degrees? Again, if you are ready to learn a discipline, the fact that you have studied what you love and learned critical thinking skills in the process is far more important than taking a CS curriculum as a vocational track (if you love CS, it will *not* be a mere vocational curriculum, and I have seen plenty of history majors who treated it as a vocational track :-( ).

So what I am saying is that to any student, you should study what you really want to study, because it is the educational and not vocational aspects that will build the best foundation for your life. Sure some fields give more leeway for intellectual laziness, but ideally you want something that will inspire you to go forward. If I was hiring a computer programmer and I had a choice between an Irish Lit Major who seemed excited and curious about technology and a CS major who seemed somewhat bored, I would hire the Irish Lit Major. If course if I was hiring kernel programmers for the next Cray, it is safe to say that neither would get much consideration, but these jobs are few and far between and really are only suited for CS majors who really are in love with the field.

Re:Why to do computer science

[flatt]

What did the compsci major say to the liberal arts major?

"Dude, shut up and give me a application already."

Re:Why to do computer science

[__int64]

What did the liberal arts major say to the compsci arts major?

"Didn't you mean 'an'?"

Re:Why to do computer science

[NilObject]

To which the computer science major said "no" because money has been tight ever since his job got shipped off to India. :-/

Re:Why to do computer science

[OpenGLFan]

What did the liberal arts major say to the comp. sci. major?

"No, I won't go out with you."

Re:Why to do computer science

[ErikZ]

What did the CompSci major say back?

Ha ha. Very funny. Now get out of my way, my shift is next.

Dare I Attend Class Tomorrow?

[Cruxus]

I was going to attend CS 480 tomorrow, but now I just don't know if it's worth the possibility of seeing the Evil One in person.

Re:Dare I Attend Class Tomorrow?

[RocketRainbow]

Come on, it's got to be worth a giggle. 200 other students think so, too!

Just in case, why not stop by the food co-op on your way and pick out a nice armful of ripe, juicy tomatoes?

I love the way he's got professor dress down: blue checked shirt always goes with green sweater! Go Bill, you trendy go-getter, you!

After which...

[CardiganKiller]

...He and Booger immediately started training to win their place as Delta Delta Deltas.

Wow

[XMetal2001]

No matter what your opinion of him, if the Richest Man in the world suddenly showed up in your Computer Science class as a guest speaker, that would be mindblowing.

Re:Wow

[AutopsyReport]

Apparantely for his visit tommorow to the University of Waterloo (Ontario), tickets sold out extremely fast and students were trying very hard to get in on the presentation. No doubt, I would listen to the richest man in the world. I'm sure there's advice in there somewhere worth hearing.

Overrated talk like at UIUC? No thanks.

[jbn-o]

The tickets for his visit to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign sold out quickly too. But his talk was remarkably dull, the questioners were inarticulate (even the one person who tried to raise a FLOSS argument against Gates), and the hall was nowhere near filled. After asking around, I learned that Gates basically told the University he wanted to address the students; he essentially invited himself over. UIUC, being a large source of Microsoft employees, was perfectly willing to continue their relationship with Microsoft and promote his talk heavily. The local media didn't ask any questions (such as how he became so wealthy), nor did they refrain from expressing their unexamined adulation of money.

What would have been far more interesting (particularly considering these are ostensibly educational facilities) would have been to have a response talk from someone at the FSF that was promoted with equal vigor and University backing, and broadcast on University television just as Gates' talk was. When Brad Kuhn came to visit not that long after Gates' visit, Kuhn's talk was also sparsely attended nor was it carried on University television. But thanks to a UIUC group (Free Software Society) you can download it and hear what he had to say (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/audio/audio.html#FS S04 [gnu.org]). Kuhn's talk was far more substantive than Gates' graphics demo.

Perhaps Gates will take the opportunity to again call free software "unamerican" or a "cancer" as Microsoft reps have done on previous visits to campuses and in other tours. Then the follow-the-leader coverage of his visit will have something interesting to quote and an excuse to ask why free software matters. But I'm not holding my breath for the local media or the Universities that let him give his job pitch to supply a more thorough examination of how we got where we are.

Re:Wow - Ikea coming to a uni near you

[fido_dogstoyevsky]

No matter what your opinion of him, if the Richest Man in the world suddenly showed up in your Computer Science class as a guest speaker, that would be mindblowing.

I suppose Ikea DOES use computers a fair bit...

Re:Wow

[markiv34]

Maybe I could suck his dick when he shows up at my college, and get some of his millions as a return favor. Give me a break, there have been plenty of rich men ever since creation of life, the only people we remember now are like Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Newton. Just because Bill Gates is the richest man now does not mean that he would be remembered by anyone even 50 years from now.

Re:Wow

[tpgp]

You're right, the world doesn't remember fabulously successful and rich people.

For example, I have no idea who Louis the XIV or King Solomon were

Not that I particularly disagree with you - but the Louis 14th was remembered mostly for expanding French territory and Solomon mostly for his wisdom and building the Temple of Jerusalem.

Both were undoubtedly wealthy - but are remembered primarily for things other then wealth.

How did he pick UW-Madison?

[ZachPruckowski]

I mean, why not MIT, etc, as his top five schools to visit? (No offense to any Wisconsiners out there, my Cheesehead suitemate will doubtlessly exact revenge on me for you)

Anyways, wouldn't high schools be an even better choice? I mean, I feel that if I'm in college, I'm either already studying Computer Science, or not. I mean, maybe you could convert engineering students from other disciplines, but most college students with a major in mind would be harder to get to switch. I think he'd do better at the high school level, esp. around junior level, when he can influence the people to apply to schools with a CompSci bent, or convince them to take CompSci as a high school senior.

Just my four cents. I found two extra in a vending machine, which doesn't even take pennies (stupid drunks)

Re:How did he pick UW-Madison?

[NoMoreFood]

I believe the article mentioned biology related material. Bioinformatics is big @ Madison.

Wish I was there to catch one of his talks.

Re:How did he pick UW-Madison?

[richdun]

Maybe he's looking for a broader audience. If you're at MIT, Caltech, IIT, etc., chances are you're already in a technology/computer field. Sure, there are some crazy people that aren't, but if he went to these schools it be like the proverbial Locutus assimilating the collective...

Re:How did he pick UW-Madison?

[richdun]

You've never heard of Borg Proverbs? Surely if the Vulcans have such great proverbs as "Only Nixon could go to China" and the Klingons such stinging truths as "Revenge is a dish best served cold," then the Borg could have great one-liners like "Locutus assimilating the Collective would be futile."

Re:How did he pick UW-Madison?

[sumdumass]

Maybe the choice of coledge instead of highschools are because the need will arise sooner then later? Maybe we just need to saturate the field with as many Compsci people as we can so they all make $10 an hour and we can give India a fight?

I think it might be along those lines somewere. When i told someone i finaly got my MCSE back in 2000, he said i could probably make a s much money as him. After i found out that it was a paycut i didn't talk about my certs anymore.

Re:How did he pick UW-Madison?

[Beller0ph1]

Just a little background about the class: CS302 is our introduction to computer programming class. This is a pre-requisite for other classes in other majors. Some people even take it for "fun" to learn Java. Even though it is in the CS department, many other students from other science majors (Engineering, Physics, Math) take it. Heck, even the liberal studies people can take it if they are interested in Java programming. I think that would have been pretty neat to see him talk. I wonder if he actually did a little teaching? On Wisconsin!

Re:How did he pick UW-Madison?

[Gothic_Walrus]

Well, he was at the University of Michigan this morning. I was there. I know.

Stupid article not mentioning my college...

But then again, we had the distinct pleasure of watching him struggle with an Xbox 360 because he didn't turn on the controller. Silly Bill...

Re:How did he pick UW-Madison?

[superpulpsicle]

If he truely did visit University of Michigan, then that's 2 of the top states where the IT jobs count dropped the most since 2001. I guess this is Bill Gate's way of saying "We agreed on helping the industry ship tons of jobs over to India. In exchange, I'll make a personal visit."

Re:How did he pick UW-Madison?

[st0rmshad0w]

Uh, because MIT has an Archemedes Death Ray?

Re:How did he pick UW-Madison?

[bmasel]

Better dope.

Re:How did he pick UW-Madison?

[Peter La Casse]

UW-Madison does have a pretty highly rated CS department, but that's probably more a measure of faculty publications than the undergrad program. (Still, I wonder sometimes. My second semester programming course included topics like big O notation and sorting and searching algorithms; is that a sign of a good program or one that tries to cram too much into too little time?)

The full tour

[Chris Pimlott]

If you're sad you missed out on the opening dates, don't worry, there's a few more to come:

Wednesday: University of Michigan and University of Wisconsin.
Thursday: University of Waterloo and Columbia University.
Friday: Princeton University and Howard University.

Found the dates on Kevin Schofield's blog [msn.com], thanks!

Re:The full tour

[greenguy]

Wednesday: University of Michigan and University of Wisconsin.

Typical Microsoft planning: Tuesday, Wisconsin. Wednesday, Michigan - then back to Wisconsin!

Drop Out

[micromuncher]

Does he mention at all that he dropped out of post secondary?

The joke's on him

[Anonymous Coward]

The intro programming class he crashed, CS 302, teaches OOP using Java.

At my College

[FakeRhino]

I don't know about you, but at my college he would have been laughed out of the room... Plus, I really doubt he would show up in any of my CS classes this semester, Unix and System's Security.

Re:At my College

[ravenspear]

Werd. The CS dept here is basically all Apple/*nix right now.

This has been going on for a while

[quantax]

Bill Gates has been making himself a bit more high profile in the education movement so this is no surprise really. Back in February, he went to a conference with governers from the 50 states to discuss education:

"America's high schools are obsolete..." - Bill Gates [yahoo.com]

Though I am not a Bill Gates fan, he has a valid point, and more importantly, he has the power & money to actually do something about it beyond just talk. While I have little doubt that he wouldn't mind expanding MS's market share, I do not think Gates is disingenuous in his efforts. Anything/anyone that advocates a good look at our public education is a good thing (and I dont mean talking about vouchers), so lets not let the anti-MS attitudes overwhelm the basic good that can come out of his efforts.

He was also at the University of Michigan

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gates was at the University of Michigan [umich.edu] in the morning. He pushed the XBox360, and grabbed the wrong controller for the demo.

Re:He was also at the University of Michigan

[Gothic_Walrus]

That's just part of the story.

Before that, he spent a minute or so fighting with the controller before his tech support man ran out and told him, within mike distance, that he didn't hold the power button for long enough.

Do as you say or as you do?

[JanneM]

So, a guy who famously became the richest person in the world by skipping college and leaving a technical career in favour of business is now trying to persuade people to go to college and study technology?

Re:Do as you say or as you do?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've known a few very successful businessmen that didn't finish college, and one even spoke at a local high school not long ago. He made a point to explain that while he dropped out of college and was still successful, he's the exception to the rule, not the standard. He explained that although a college degree isn't a requirement for some of the positions he hires for, people with a college degree get a more in-depth look at their resume compared to those who don't.

I would assume Gates is the same way.

Does Bill Gates tell those students

[Travoltus]

that low end and high end tech jobs are moving overseas and that plenty of graduates today are out of work and changing careers?

THIS is why tech careers are so unpopular as a major in college now.

Come and get shafted, boys and girls!

[SysKoll]

Why Computer Science? Why Now?

Come work in computer science, boys and girls! Why? Because you'll have an opportunity to experience first-hand the effect of offer and demand on the job market, when we at MS will lobby for an increase of H1B -- the ones for 2006 are already allocated. [thehindubusinessline.com]

Because since the industry is mostly managed by lawyers and MBA, not engineers, you in the tech field will never compete with us lawyers and sons of lawyers for these coveted positions of execs who get a raise at the same time techies are laid off [siliconvalley.com].

Because in spite of all Bill Gates' public wailing for attracting talent, he spits on tech talent, and so do most CEOs. The only "talent" he cares really about is execs, especially sales and marketing execs. That's talent. Design? Programming? Architecture? A commodity at best. A cost to be outsourced.

And you wonder why there is such a decrease in engineering and science students? Of course they want to work in finance and law. Do you think they are stupid?

Re:Come and get shafted, boys and girls!

[SysKoll]

The reason why MS lobbies for an increase of H1B? Because they have thousands of open positions.

Well, what a coincidence, there are tens of thousands of jobless techies in the US with exactly the kind of qualifications (and them some) requested by MS. Some of them have been out of job for months. In fact, CS and EE are the two fields with the highest unemployment rates among all engineering fields, thanks to the dot com bust.

So the only explanation for Gates wanting lots of H1Bs is that he doesn't want

His hosts got him to...

[gardyloo]

...stand on a trireme.

Bill Gates Goes to College!

[knappz]

If you think Bill Gates going to college is interesting, you might want to watch Bill Gates Goes to College [ifilm.com], a movie staring BillG and Napoleon Dynamite, everyone's favorite antihero. Totally hilarious...

Napoleon: "I've got like, computer hacking skills, probably the best I know of."

Bill: "I don't think so."

MS plugs aside, it's really great, and watching Napoleon pull a roller-skating Bill from his totally sweet bike is well worth it. Enjoy =D

Gates Visted CMU a few years ago...

[KewlJedi]

...and was greated with this http://weblogs.asp.net/ajuneja/archive/2004/02/25/ 80113.aspx [asp.net]

Cradle Robbing

[Doc Ruby]

Microsoft depends on recruiting young developers more than on any other population segment it reaches - market, purchasers, legislators, investors, whoever. All that crazy-ass "developers developers developers developers, developers developers developers developers" ranting comes from the heart over there. But Microsoft has lost the zeitgeist in that segment - Linux got it. Otherwise, Linux's tiny market share, especially among normals, would never justify the amount of software developed for it by multi-platform vendors.

Gates is out there trying to keep Microsoft looking cool to their most important audience. Too bad he's easily outcooled by an expat Finn and a cartoon penguin.

a public video stream

[rmkincaide]

.. will be available Friday: http://webstreamer.doit.wisc.edu/gates/ [wisc.edu]

I attended the event this afternoon, and overall found it to be interesting, particularly the Q&A session. Gates' response to a question concerning Microsoft potentially collaborating with Google was entertaining. :)

Other moments of note:

A short starring Bill Gates and Jon Heder (of Napolean Dynamite) was shown, which I found to be surprisingly hilarious..
"Where do you want to go today?"
"Wherever I feel like going, gosh..."

Great Opportunity

[max born]

If you happen to be there. Ask him lots of questions. Let's get something on the record. Here are some I can think of. Make up your own.

Could Microsoft ever open its code and make more money from support than developement?

What's up with Microsoft and Linux? Seems like you guys have the same goal of wanting to write geat software for the benefit of everyone. Why not collaborate?

Microsoft was recently sued by 20 states and found guilty of violatling the Clayton and Sherman anti trust acts. What have you done to rectify that?

It's still not possible to buy an MS-free computer from many vendords. Why? Will you personally pledge you will put no pressure on an vendors to sell "microsoft only" systems.

Just keep asking questions. We want to know.

A few more questions for Bill

[melted]

When will you stop beating your wife?

How many chairs does Ballmer go through in a month?

You've said "the Chinese fucked us" to Kai Fu Lee, what exactly did you mean by that?

What do you think about outsourcing?

Quick!

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone involved with the music programs at the remaining colleges on the tour should organize pep bands to greet him with the Imperial March.

hopefully

[Dr Floppy]

someone can bean him with a pie again! Thats about the best picture of him.

I for one,

[Spy der Mann]

welcome our new... WHAT AM I SAYING! *slaps self*
whew, that was close.

Pitchforks and Torches

[moo083]

If he came by my university, UC Santa Cruz, I think he would not be verbally attacked. Not in an abusive way, but I think the professors might ask him questions that make him look stupid. The School of Engineering here is almost entirely Unix based and almost all (or all, I'm not sure) the professors in the School of Engineering run some flavor of *nix (Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X). I remember worrying about having to use windows for my CS major when I got here, and quickly learned that you do not need

A better title

[deaddrunk]

Why Computer Science? Why bother?

Been doing it a while

[Tablizer]

About 2 years ago he lectured in a southern Calif university. I was there (on the outside) as part of a demonstration against H1B's and outsourcing. One of his suited handlers came up to a demonstrator and claimed more H1B's were needed for the "tech shortage". He was talking to an unemployed techie. Gotta love suits. They have their own reality.

Good idea.

[andreyw]

One thing that I noticed in my two years of college now is that Microsoft is *very active*, always coming to CS orientation classes to give talks (UIC alums working at MS), giving talks to the CS college, actively looking for interns two times a year, actively partecipating in job fairs.

Kudos to them. They realize that if they want future talent, they need to sell the idea of working for MS as early as possible. Why don't I see Apple, Sun, IBM doing this?

Wrong approach

[Percy_Blakeney]

Obviously, Bill Gates pulled this stunt in an effort to curb the declining CS enrollment in the US. The problem with his approach, though, is that this won't do anything to change the situation; the problem isn't that anyone considers computer science to be irrelevant, but rather that many people see it as having a limited future in this country. Look no further than the very visible layoffs due to outsourcing, and you will see why CS enrollment is down.

If I had been in the class, I would have asked Bill the following:

• What financial motivation do large software companies have to keep CS jobs in the United States?
• Do you see outsourcing as a growing or shrinking trend?
• If overseas workers are brilliant, low-paid, and trained in the US, then how will US workers ever be able to compete?
• How would you compare the long-term job prospects in the US of a business major vs. a computer science major?

Questions to B. Gates

[mtenhagen]

I have a few questions for Bill,

1) Should a society defend it self against monopolies. If so how?
2) Should children be raised with the thechnologie from one company?
3) What is worse, people using pirated windows or people using linux?
4) Should technology be accesable to everyone or only those who can afford?
5) What is more important, money or a social society?
6) How can we learn operating systems without the source?

Are the answers from Microsoft different than your own? If sow why?

Why Computer Science? Why Now?

[jandersen]

Indeed, why? When you can learn something useful, like bricklaying, and earn as much or more with less effort?

I disagree

[ravenspear]

There is still a lot of interesting work going on in CS and will continue to be for some time. CS is a relatively new scientific field. There will be no shortage of new work to be done for a long time.

You could make the same argument about math. After all haven't Newton, Gauss, Lagrange, Leibnitz, et al already discovered everything there is to know hundreds of years ago? Is math a dead end field too? No, but math is basically the same way today as you are describing CS. It's combining and reevaluating what we already know in new ways, but there are completely new things still being discovered, as with CS. Read some of the ACM journals and you will find some interesting stuff (if you're into CS).

Re:What else can CS give us?

[WindBourne]

CS as a field of study is a dead end, unfortunately. The real progress to be seen in the future is not in the science of algorithms, but in the application of the existing corpus to our needs. This requires dreamers, not people who know the nuts and bolts.

So much ignorance these days. CS is much more than simply structures and algorithms. In fact, What I find funny is that the vast majority of new companies that deal with high tech are routinely by CS or CE/EE. Think about the shear number of high tech com

Re:What else can CS give us?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is left to study in Computer Science? What algorithms are still out there waiting to be uncovered?


I guess you haven't seen the ten problems, huh?

For starters, if you take any integer, and if it is divisible by two divide it, but otherwise multiply it by three and add one, what happens? Do you eventually reach 1 and stop for all integers, and can you prove it one way or the other? The 3n+1 problem is unsolved. So are several complexity problems, including where exactly factoring large integers fits in the complexity heirarchy. Quantum computing will provide a new medium for designing new algorithms. AI isn't exactly solved either.

CS as a field of study is a dead end, unfortunately. The real progress to be seen in the future is not in the science of algorithms, but in the application of the existing corpus to our needs. This requires dreamers, not people who know the nuts and bolts.

Most of the "dreamers" tend to choose the wrong algorithms and data structures because they know nothing of the theory, not to mention too many "dreamers" who think they will solve some hard problem in CS without knowing that they've already been proved intractible or NP hard.

We still don't know if P=NP for Turing's sake!

Re:What else can CS give us?

[adrianmonk]

What is left to study in Computer Science? What algorithms are still out there waiting to be uncovered?

Well, for starters, nobody has even figured out whether or not P == NP yet. Sure, most people strongly believe P != NP, but nobody really knows for sure.

Kinda along those same lines, cryptography is built on the idea that certain tasks can be computationally infeasible to one group of people (eavesdroppers) but feasible and practical for the people who want to securely exchange information. We have stumbled on some algorithms that seem to fit this in practice, but according to what I understand, there is not really a cryptosystem out there for which anyone can supply proof that the computations that look hard actually are hard. For example, if I recall correctly, RSA's security rests on the idea that it is computationally very tough to factor a product of two very large prime numbers. But we don't know that there isn't an efficient algorithm for doing this. All we know is that we aren't yet aware of one.

There are other active areas of research. For instance, right now "managed code" systems like Java and .Net are in their infancy. Computers have only just recently become fast enough that it is practical to consider switching to just-in-time compilation, and the thing is, there are optimizations that can be done when compiling at runtime that can't be done when compiling before runtime. (For example, you can use real profiling data to automatically create code that is most efficient for the actual workload.) So there are bound to be a lot of techniques to be discovered in this area.

And there are other potential areas of research as well. We are already starting to see dual-core processors because it's looking to be hard to increase processor speed in conventional ways. We could probably use some research on how to do parallelism in other ways, possibly even going beyond dual-core machines or even beyond Von Neumann machines. If we ever feel compelled to do that, let me tell you, there will be a whole bunch of research needed in programming languages all over again, because imperative languages mirror the architecture we are using now but won't be suitable for an architecture that lends itself to automatically taking advantage of parallelism.

Finally, keep in mind where physics thought it was after Newton. It seemed that classical mechanics explained just about everything pretty well. Until Einstein came along and blew it all out of the water. For all we know, something like that could happen with computer science. Although it might be 100 years...

Re:no substance

[hdparm]

Personally, I don't think there would be much substance in college dropout's talk on software engineering. His career is the ultimate proof - all software MS ever created was largely driven with a single thing in mind - how to lock in the world and make everybody else's software obsolete.

Now, if he decided to speak about how to become extremely successful in business that would be another story.

Re:no substance

[FidelCatsro]

I believe he was originally planning to do a talk on business , but the university board had thought it too similar to Prof. D Vader's lectures on people skills

Re:Dr. Gates?

[ThinkOfaNumber]

In those pictures, Bill Gates looks entirely too much like most of my other university professors.

You mean the borg-bill picture? What sort of uni do you go to?!! ;)

Re:Here we go again...

[deaddrunk]

And if Microsoft had competition in their marketplace? Would Windows be better or worse. Blaming the user for the flaws in Windows is an appalling argument. How the hell would a user know that their web browser could download malicious software silently. That idiotic functionality is built-in to IE and it shouldn't be. It's always the same arguments from MS apologists: it's the user's fault (but it's supposed to be easy to use); it's buggy drivers (so what's the HAL for?); oh you're just a communist et al.
A

Re:Technology is Heading to Its Own Death as of To

[PrimeNumber]

I didnt know the Unabomber posted on slashdot.