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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."
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.
--Mike Boos
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, thanks!
The intro programming class he crashed, CS 302, teaches OOP using Java.
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
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.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
To which the computer science major said "no" because money has been tight ever since his job got shipped off to India. :-/
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!
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams" -- Willy Wonka
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.
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!
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.
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). 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.
Digital Citizen
One minor clarification: CP/M-86 became DR-DOS, not MS-DOS. MS-DOS was based on QDOS. The rest of the post seems to be correct.