

Bill Gates Is Coming To A College Near You 412
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... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Personally... (Score:2, Funny)
"Developers, developers DEVELOPERS!"
Re:Personally... (Score:2)
Re:Personally... (Score:3, Funny)
Quick! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Quick! (Score:4, Informative)
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! (Score:2)
"Is it just me or is it hot in here."
"It's just you....."
Free MS Office for Linux to first 100 attendees ! (Score:4, Interesting)
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! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Quick! (Score:2)
http://www.zpub.com/un/bill/pie.html [zpub.com]
Re:Quick! (Score:4, Funny)
Those are to stop people with iPods from watching "Lost" while Bill is on stage trying to sell Microsoft XP Media Edition!
Pies (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.bitstorm.org/gates/ [bitstorm.org]
Answer (Score:5, Funny)
Because we need people with more skill to fix up all your shit Bill.
Re:Answer (Score:3, Insightful)
The software his company produces may suck (at times
Re:Answer (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Answer (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
Where's the Code? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Answer (Score:3, Informative)
2)created the FAT file sytem (originally for use with #1, a few years before Patterson's DOS.
Re:Answer (Score:2)
marketing expedience (Score:2)
From the Post:
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:
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 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:marketing expedience (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:marketing expedience (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
>
>
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>"Would you like fries with that order, sir?"
Re:Why to do computer science (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why to do computer science (Score:4, Insightful)
With that said, Good luck. These are not like the 80's or 90's were.
Re:Why to do computer science (Score:2)
And as a computer programmer with a liberal arts degree....
Re:Why to do computer science (Score:4, Funny)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
"Dude, shut up and give me a application already."
Re:Why to do computer science (Score:5, Funny)
"Didn't you mean 'an'?"
Re:Why to do computer science (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why to do computer science (Score:5, Funny)
"No, I won't go out with you."
Re:Why to do computer science (Score:3, Funny)
Ha ha. Very funny. Now get out of my way, my shift is next.
Dare I Attend Class Tomorrow? (Score:4, Funny)
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? (Score:2)
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... (Score:3, Funny)
Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:2)
Overrated talk like at UIUC? No thanks. (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Funny)
I suppose Ikea DOES use computers a fair bit...
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:2, Informative)
Wish I was there to catch one of his talks.
Re:How did he pick UW-Madison? (Score:2)
Re:How did he pick UW-Madison? (Score:2)
Re:How did he pick UW-Madison? (Score:2)
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? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How did he pick UW-Madison? (Score:4, Interesting)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How did he pick UW-Madison? (Score:2)
Re:How did he pick UW-Madison? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:How did he pick UW-Madison? (Score:3, Informative)
The full tour (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:2)
Typical Microsoft planning: Tuesday, Wisconsin. Wednesday, Michigan - then back to Wisconsin!
Drop Out (Score:3, Informative)
The joke's on him (Score:3, Informative)
At my College (Score:3, Funny)
Re:At my College (Score:2)
This has been going on for a while (Score:4, Informative)
"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 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:He was also at the University of Michigan (Score:2)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do as you say or as you do? (Score:3, Insightful)
I would assume Gates is the same way.
Does Bill Gates tell those students (Score:2)
THIS is why tech careers are so unpopular as a major in college now.
Come and get shafted, boys and girls! (Score:5, Insightful)
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! (Score:3, Insightful)
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... (Score:2)
Bill Gates Goes to College! (Score:2, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Funny)
Cradle Robbing (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Funny)
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! (Score:2, Funny)
hopefully (Score:2, Funny)
I for one, (Score:2)
whew, that was close.
Pitchforks and Torches (Score:2, Interesting)
A better title (Score:2)
Been doing it a while (Score:2, Interesting)
Good idea. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
If I had been in the class, I would have asked Bill the following:
Questions to B. Gates (Score:3, Interesting)
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? (Score:4, Funny)
I disagree (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
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? (Score:4, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, if he decided to speak about how to become extremely successful in business that would be another story.
Re:no substance (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Dr. Gates? (Score:3, Funny)
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... (Score:3, Insightful)
A
Re:Technology is Heading to Its Own Death as of To (Score:3, Funny)