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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!
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
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.