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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.
That's nothing. I was able to hack into his hotmail account.
(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.
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.
Here's a question: Could Jesus design a desktop so cluttered that even He couldn't use it?
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.
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'd really love to see what tools they were using/are using still, when coding the vehicles.
I asked them this when I was at JPL last week. The rover software is coded in C, and most of the rover drivers use Red Hat. Julie Townsend told me that she uses Windows, and there's a fairly even mix of Mac, *nix, and Windows users across the whole project.
Come on he's the son of god for christs sake.
;)
He uses the command line.
siggy played guitar
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.
... here (linus torvalds playing frozen bubble at linux.conf.au). and you can get a glimpse of his desktop.
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
Amazing! GW get's hotmail on this thing?
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
He's President. Surely he should be able to pronounce "nuclear", eat pretzels without choking, and not make up words on the spot.
How can anyone defend such a poor excuse for a politician? Every time he steps up to the podium it looks like an episode of Days of Our Lives gone bad. He can't even read what everyone else has written for him without getting in a state. Pausing every. Two. Seconds. Trying to. Add. Emphasis. Incorrect. ly.
It doesn't take a genius to realise when someone shouldn't be in office. Even Bush himself admitted he shouldn't be there.
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