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Whose Desktop Would You Most Like To See?
An anonymous reader writes "Have you ever been curious about what someone else's computing environment looks like? Would you like to see what tools and products someone like Linus Torvalds, Bill Gates, George Bush, or Steve Jobs uses on a daily basis? What percentage of time is spent browsing the web, working in spreadsheets, programming, debugging, designing, or writing documents? How many monitors or devices do they have attached to their PC? What kind of security or anonymizers do they have in place?" For good or ill, open source developers' desktops at least are often visible in screenshots of their pet projects.
Jennas desktop is the one *I* would like to see the most!
Darl.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I'm curious to see what Georgie Bush's computer's like, but it's a pretty strong bet that someone just gave him an Etch-a-Sketch to play with.
Gates uses MacOS, Torvalds uses Windows, and Jobs uses Linux. They're a bunch of swingaas babyyy!
I'd be amazed if he has one. I'm pretty sure he's still using an old vt220 terminal, desperately trying to run HURD.
I'm not curious anymore about what Richard Stallman's desktop looks like. I happened to be sitting behind him at the last FOSDEM conference, just before his presentation. Two observations about his desktop as I saw it that day.
:)
First of all, he doesn't use a GUI.
Second, the desktop environment that he was using was not vi.
Michael Jackson's desktop.
This would fare better as a Fark photoshop contest than as an ask slashdot.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Do you think it contains anything at all? Don't you think the defaults are to his liking already? :-)
I would like to see Jesus' desktop; I bet he uses OS X.
That's nothing. I was able to hack into his hotmail account.
It would be fun to know what distro Linus uses, but we're all better off not knowing.
It almost reminds me a little bit of the furour surrounding the Pope and Mel Gibson's film. On one level, the Pope is a guy watching a movie, and he probably said something after he saw it. But on the other hand, it seems likely that he didn't want to make a public statement. There's a difference beteen the guy acting as the guy, and the guy acting in the context of his office.
Linus almost certainly has his preferences and his opinions, like any other user. But in his capacity as the guy who holds his vague and unnamed office, as the spiritual leader of the linux movement, he chooses not to express a preference.
For a guy who says he wants to stay out of politics, he understands linux politics pretty well. I think that has a lot to do with his success, and the OS's success.
(2) And the buffer was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the file. And the spirit of Lisp moved upon the face of the keys.
(3) And the user said, C-x C-f, and there was buffer.
(4) And the user saw the buffer, that it was good: and I think we can let the humor end here.
So, what's your IP address and root password? :)
You are not the customer.
I'd really love to see what tools they were using/are using still, when coding the vehicles. In fact, I really think Slashdot should try hard to get some info from the development team as to what OS they're running on those little vehicles, not to mention the basic hardware platform. It would be a real eye-opener, in fact, if it was discovered that they were using off-the-shelf components for the core computing systems, or if the specs turn out to be less complex than current-generation mini-itx class boards you can buy on the open market.
:)
They're supposedly a publicly-funded scientific project, so it would be revealing in itself if they refused to answer, claiming the need for secrecy. I dare you to file some FOIAs, Timothy
Get off my launchpad!
You guys are all crazy. THIS is what Bill Gate's desktop looks like.
"Hu, ho, ho-ah-oh-oh-oh. Hu, ho ho-ah-oh-oh-oh. Mario Paint! Whoaaa!"
The swedish site Unix.se has screenshots from several famous computeers (hey, it could be a word!) desktops here. The site is in swedish, but you'll most likely at least understand the names.
All kidding aside, why would George Bush need a personal computer? What's he going to do, write up the new federal budget in Excel? Make a PowerPoint about why we should go to Mars? Type up the State of the Union address in Word? Schedule cabinet meetings in Outlook? Read emails sent to whitehouse.gov?
I'm sure the closest he comes to working with a computer is reading a few select emails that someone printed out for him.
I played a game of "Frozen Bubble" Against Linus at Linux.Conf.Au. on what I assumed was his laptop (but may not have been).
It was an apparently vanilla Fedora Cora 1.
Cheers
Stor
p.s. He beat me 4/5: came back from 1/4. Bastard! =)
p.p.s. Who cares what distro he uses? As far as I'm concerned most of the differences between the distros are pretty academic.
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
As for his .emacs file, last time I looked, it wasn't empty, but contained a few lines to turn off the default disabling of novice-confusing commands like narrow-to-window, and I think he also enables debug-on-error. It no serious customization to speak of though. As someone else mentioned, he's presumably set up Emacs's defaults the way he already likes them.
In recent years because of injuries, he's often had to get other people to type for him while he tells them what to type ("control-F, meta-d, blah blah"). That wouldn't show up in a screen shot either, but somehow seems like it should be part of the picture. Typing for him is an interesting experience if you don't have to do it for too long. Volunteer for it sometime if the situation arises, I'm sure he'll appreciate it.
Actually when he was in Texas, he was pretty active email user. But his lawyers suggested he stopped using email after moving to WH.
The funny/sad thing was one of his specialties was supposed to be user interface. He wasn't please when the X10 to X11 upgrade moved the windows. Plus the line was in permanent marker.
That was one desktop I didn't need to see...
Here is a Screenshot of the computer on the desk in the Oval Office...
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
I prefer George Bush's
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
I'm not clicking any link with the word "goat" in the path.
My own desktop. It's so cluttered with icons and documents that I can't see what background looks like anymore.
:)
Where was that report again?
Of course, since John posts here, I'm hoping that he'd be kind enough to take a screenshot of the current desktop he has, and post it here.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Actually, according to this article, RMS rarely uses X. He uses mostly emacs on the console.
LOL I guess you're not a Windows user to make that kind of broad assumption. A lot of people customize thier desktops with backgrounds, layouts, dual monitor layouts, winamp/trillian/etc. set just so, what shortcut icons are on the desktop and what in the toolbar, etc.
To assume a Windows desktop isn't/can't be customized is naive and biased.
... here (linus torvalds playing frozen bubble at linux.conf.au). and you can get a glimpse of his desktop.
As a Mac user, I'd be extremely interested to see what third-party system utilities, if any, he has installed on his machine, especially given the apparent hostility Apple has to user-interface modifications.
Linus Torvalds: Uses blackbox on three monitors, all full of Xterms running vi. The background is a roll of toilet paper, edited in The Gimp to look like a roll of Transmeta, RedHat and VA Linux stock shares.
Bill Gates: Last night's build of longhorn. Has 5 monitors: one for the PowerPoint slideshow he's rehearsing, one for Outlook, and three for all the extra clocks, sliders, gizmos, icons, etc. that Longhorn puts on the desktop. His background is one of the default WinXP images.
George W. Bush: Cheney and Rumsfeld won't let him touch the "big kid computers", but he has an Etch-a-Sketch with a caricature of Saddam Hussein sitting on a canister of nerve gas.
Steve Jobs: 3 21" Apple Cinema displays. Beta build of OSX 10.4 ("Puma"). Only has one icon on the desktop, but damn if it doesn't look *really cool*.
0 1 - just my two bits
Some people only learn well visually.
Some people only learn well verbally.
Most people can learn well both ways, usually with a slight preference either way.
If the preference goes far enough, it's classified as a learning disability, or 'alternate learning style'.
Given the trouble Bush has with a teleprompter, it's pretty clear he has trouble with visual learning, most likely a visual processing delay. Moore's claims would support his preference for a verbal learning style.
But what I want to know is when did it become OK to make fun of people for their learning disabilites? I thought Hollywood Liberals were sensitive and caring? I guess it's OK to pick on disabled people if they're conservatives.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It's what all the Christian Hackers use...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
I don't think he feels "too cool to use a window system", but rather just doesn't feel like he needs one for what he does. He's the author of an old Lisp machine window system and has written plenty of X code, so it's not like the idea of a window system is unknown or scary to him.
Part of his setup's weirdness is because he travels a lot and has limited net access on the road. He does very little online. Instead, if he visits you at your company or university, he'll typically plug his laptop into your ethernet and spend a few minutes downloading his unread email (however many hundred messages that is) into it. Then he unplugs and reads the email offline while going on his way, spooling his replies onto disk. Then at his next stop, he plugs in again, uploads his replies to the old email and downloads new mail that's arrived since the last stop. He usually doesn't use web browsers. If you mail him a URL he should see, he prefers if you send him a text dump of the contents along with it. If he only gets the URL and thinks it's likely to be interesting, he emails it to a special daemon he's set up back home, that retrieves the URL's text contents and dumps it into his next batch of email. Images? What images?
All in all it actually seems like a pretty practical system, less conducive to wasting time web surfing than what most of us are used to, but he doesn't care about that.
Amazing! GW get's hotmail on this thing?
Yes, it's called a speechwriter.
Random is the New Order.
Doesn't say much for Harvard or Yale then does it?
That MBA didn't get him his jobs, his political connections did. (Like most of us.)
He's run at least one company into the ground before becoming President, which says he wasn't paying much attention at Harvard. (Not to mention he knew he'd still have money even if all of his workers were unemployed.)
Come to think of it, doesn't say much for the thoughtfulness of the people who voted for him either -- thinking that he was somehow qualified to do the job because his father was.
His father was a WWII vet, spent decades in Ambassadorships and eventually headed the CIA before becoming President. I can see a lot of reasons to "hire" a person like that for the Presidency.
His son, on the other hand, slacked off through Yale and Harvard on Grandpa's money, snorted cocaine through much of that process, went AWOL from his Guard unit, ran a successful oil business into the ground... and people adore him more than his dear-old-dad.
Sad.
+++OK ATH
Yeah, like everyone else who runs XP.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
i reckon he'd have a smithers style startup screen. Naked bill gates saying 'you are good at turning me on'
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George