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Gates, Jobs, Torvalds: Who is Most Important?
Ian Wilson writes "silicon.com has launched its latest Agenda Setters poll which puts together a list of the top 50 people influencing tech. I remember Slashdot carried last year's poll - which was won by Steve Jobs. The full top 50 includes many of the usual suspects. Last year's winner Steve Jobs has slipped down to second place, but perhaps most interesting is the fact that the panel of judges couldn't separate Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates - they are tied in seventh place."
... the most interesting thing is that #1 is a guy from the BBC. As they look to digitise their content, the BBC is carving itself a really nice niche on the Web -- a World Service for the 21 century.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
To do my bit for pseudo-democracy worldwide, I tried to vote; when I did, though, I was asked to vote again. And again... wonder did my vote count at all. Damn, it's just like living in Florida.
To commit heresy, though: should Linus be that high on the list? Sure, he's influential in linux, and linux should be represented, but in the happy world of IT shouldn't some Red Hat or Suse guy be higher?
In case you care, I voted for Hu Jintao. I don't share the judges' belief that vendors will dominate in China, and I reckon that Hu could well in years to come cause geeks much angst as they support his open source policies while being less fond of his oppression policies.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin? Granted, they may not be as high as a lot of the other people on the list, but they should be on it. How many other companies are having as big of an impact on the Internet as Google? Not many.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
You simply could not be more wrong in your statement. If it weren't for Linus, the OSS movement would now stick to a free OS based either on 386BSD or GNU/Hurd - or some combination of these. Everything would look pretty similar to the real world as we know it.
Bill's case is far from obvious - if it wasn't him in particular, his place would be most likely taken by Gary Kildall. The history of personal computing would look entirely different, as Kildall was far from being a monopolist egomaniac like Gates and Ballmer. Kildall's company, Digital Research, could easily be the Microsoft of the 8-bit computers. Their system was just _the_ system for 8-bit machines, but Kildall did not try to use his advantage as a vehicle for building monopolist empire. Quite contrary, he was sticking to the principle that the company that makes OS should not take part in the application market. That's actually how Microsoft has found its niche - as a key vendor of the CP/M applications. So if it wasn't Bill, CP/M-86 would be the MS-DOS, and GEM Desktop would be Microsoft Windows - but there would be NO equivalent of Internet Explorer, Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Office, and that would be probably good news (we would have various competing office suites instead).
The case of Steve Jobs is even more obvious - Apple with Steve and Apple without Steve (1985-1997) are just different companies. No Steve - no iPod. Period.
Rather, when they abuse them.
From what I read of the article (just as the /.ing began...) its about influence, good OR bad. Keeping this in mind, BGates has certainly created influence in the industry. His draconian licensing terms has created a bigger interest in GPL and BSD licensing (and others). His insistance on a closed software model has created more interest in open source projects like Apache.
He did make it affordable to get a useable computer on mom's desktop, and easier to get it infected. Some of the most ingenious programming *IS* viruses and trojans, which Windows has provided a viable platform to run on. Try writing your own smtp server and remote control server, all in a few K of space, from scratch. Not child's play.
I don't mean to bash him, not everything he has done is bad. You don't become the most successful software company by doing everything wrong, after all. But he IS one of the most influential persons in the industry, if for no other reason than his methods inspiring others to provide an alternative to his products.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
This story is just reattributed to Vlad. It was originally a story about Hatto II of Mainz, who was Archbishop there between 968 and 970 (those dates are provable facts). He also was said to have invited all poor in his diocesy to a huge meal, and he also commanded the doors to be closed and the hall to be burned down.
But when the hall sunk to ashes, a big tribe of mice broke out of the ruins and started to hunt Archbishop Hatto. He tried to have the mice squashed, killed, blocked, nothing helped. So he fled out of Mainz down the Rhine. Near the town of Bingen he asked a ferryman to row him over to a small island with a fortified tower built on it. He ran into the tower and blocked the door. But the mice, being millions of them, were swimming through the waters of the Rhine, reaching the island, entering the tower and eating Archbishop Hatto.
The tower at the island near Bingen can still be visited, it's called the Maeuseturm (lit.: Mice Tower) since then. For further references check a short descripton of the site. Other sources attribute the story to Archbishop Hatto I, a predecessor of Hatto II.
Linus Torvalds makes a convenient representational symbol for the Linux community (it's named after him, after all), but is he really an Agenda Setter?
And, truthfully, Linux is the architect of the Linux *kernel*, which is stable and reliable and all of that, but it's a very small part of the Linux user experience. Actually, it's an insignificant part of the Linux user experience. If the Linux kernel were replaced with, say, BSD, then what impact would that have on someone who spends all of his time in the KDE desktop? This is not to belittle Linus's achievement, but at some point who matters more: the guy who builds guitars or the people who use those guitars to make amazing music? It's not like people say "Oh, my favorite band XXX is so completely enabled by the man who invented the electric guitar."
Then, to my mind, this means Linus, Alan, Richard, Manuel and all the others need to be paraded on Oprah, IBM commercials, and more. Have ANY of these been shown as Geek of the Week?
Instead of much of the reality TV bullshit, we need the 5-minute spot of Linux and F/LOSS personalities to be rotated. Not just Linus, tho, but ALL the major voices from the foreground to the average code contributor.
Surely, some will want to lay low for employment reasons, but others who have contributed code could as well be in a Freedom Hall of Fame. By corollary, ms' henchmen/women could be in the Encroachment Hall of Shame.
It would be nice if IBM would sponsore these commercials. I haven't watched much "live" TV, opting for eye-selected DVDs from the local import video shop, but is IBM doing anything lately. I did in the past 2 weeks look at the list
http://www.ibm.com/ibm/tvads/
of commercials IBM ran, but didn't see anything doing "The Average Freedom Lover".
Actually, putting a little cup o' tea in their hands in some tiny French cups, with Mandrake on one side of the table, and tall Lipton on the Red Hat side, with Novell & SUSE sporting Ginseng and a lager, we might get some serious laughs at microshaft's (lower-casing/deprecation of microsoft's name intentional/perpetual with me...) expense. But, it would take IBM's money to make sure the ads ran, or ms' marketing department would preempt all the ads slots...
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Actually, from direct personal experience, the biggest problem with massive and centralised databases isn't malicious abuse. Rather, it's old-fashioned operator error, but now of the "one wrong number typed and someone's life gets turned upside down for months" kind.
Unfortunately, there is often an implicit culture of denial: the database is "almost perfect", so the procedures for fixing the effects of imperfections are rarely fully thought through, and often far more time-consuming and error-prone than they should be.
FWIW, I was over-taxed by several hundred pounds after someone at a tax office mistyped my National Insurance number (for our US friends: like a SSN, but in the UK) by one character, and inadvertently merged me with someone on the far side of the country. The scary part wasn't so much that I lost some money for a while, but that the first time I knew about it was when my pay-cheque turned up short and I queried it with my employer's accountant; no-one thought to check with me that my status really had changed. Worse, it took three months chasing numerous tax officials and accountants in several offices to get it fixed, because they didn't believe I existed -- the linked computer records had automatically messed up all my identifying information and confused it with the other guy's.
If that could happen to me a couple of years ago, think what's going to happen when your whole life -- medical records, benefits payments, criminal record and "unofficial" black marks, etc. -- are all tied in to the uebersystem, and then that same human in that same office has to type the same hundreds of nine-digit codes perfectly every day.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.