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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."
No matter what your opinion of him, if the Richest Man in the world suddenly showed up in your Computer Science class as a guest speaker, that would be mindblowing.
Too bad he's not coming to the school that founded the nation's first Department of Computer Science - Purdue ...not that I'd go see him ...or that I'm even a CS student
So much ignorance these days. CS is much more than simply structures and algorithms. In fact, What I find funny is that the vast majority of new companies that deal with high tech are routinely by CS or CE/EE. Think about the shear number of high tech companies that have been successful. Amazon? Google? Redhat? Yahoo? Who developed each of these? CSers. It is the CSers who come up with paradigm shifts, not just rehashed ideas of others. The internet bust was made up of all sorts of business ppl who fleaced stock holders. What value did they bring to the company? No new software. No new hardware. Just bankruptcy while they either laughed to the bank or to jail.
The CS comes up with loads of new ideas and the vast majority need years to come to fruition. MS (heavy CSers) took 15 years to take on IBM and the mainframe. Linux is now the fastest growing server systems, and it appears to quietly be moving on to the desktop (in spite of what MS/IDG/Gartner/Yankee/etc say, OSS esp Linux is moving on to corporate desktops). How much of the OSS world is CSers? a lot. In fact, I would bet the vast majority is (combined with some CISers and EEs).
CSers will be around for a LONG time to come,and will be very important. In fact, just as engineering is applied physics, CS is nothing but applied math.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If you think Bill Gates going to college is interesting, you might want to watch Bill Gates Goes to College, a movie staring BillG and Napoleon Dynamite, everyone's favorite antihero. Totally hilarious...
Napoleon: "I've got like, computer hacking skills, probably the best I know of."
Bill: "I don't think so."
MS plugs aside, it's really great, and watching Napoleon pull a roller-skating Bill from his totally sweet bike is well worth it. Enjoy =D
Microsoft depends on recruiting young developers more than on any other population segment it reaches - market, purchasers, legislators, investors, whoever. All that crazy-ass "developers developers developers developers, developers developers developers developers" ranting comes from the heart over there. But Microsoft has lost the zeitgeist in that segment - Linux got it. Otherwise, Linux's tiny market share, especially among normals, would never justify the amount of software developed for it by multi-platform vendors.
Gates is out there trying to keep Microsoft looking cool to their most important audience. Too bad he's easily outcooled by an expat Finn and a cartoon penguin.
--
make install -not war
Stupid article not mentioning my college...
But then again, we had the distinct pleasure of watching him struggle with an Xbox 360 because he didn't turn on the controller. Silly Bill...
Goo goo g'joob.
I attended the event this afternoon, and overall found it to be interesting, particularly the Q&A session. Gates' response to a question concerning Microsoft potentially collaborating with Google was entertaining. :)
Other moments of note:
A short starring Bill Gates and Jon Heder (of Napolean Dynamite) was shown, which I found to be surprisingly hilarious..
"Where do you want to go today?"
"Wherever I feel like going, gosh..."
XBOX 360s were on-hand, but should have been demoed by a gamer rather than Bill himself; seeing him attempt to fumble through and explain the menu systems was more painful than informative, and seeing him try to take a corner successfully in Project Gotham Racing 3 was humorous, to say the least. :)
If you happen to be there. Ask him lots of questions. Let's get something on the record. Here are some I can think of. Make up your own.
Could Microsoft ever open its code and make more money from support than developement?
What's up with Microsoft and Linux? Seems like you guys have the same goal of wanting to write geat software for the benefit of everyone. Why not collaborate?
Microsoft was recently sued by 20 states and found guilty of violatling the Clayton and Sherman anti trust acts. What have you done to rectify that?
It's still not possible to buy an MS-free computer from many vendords. Why? Will you personally pledge you will put no pressure on an vendors to sell "microsoft only" systems.
Just keep asking questions. We want to know.
If he came by my university, UC Santa Cruz, I think he would not be verbally attacked. Not in an abusive way, but I think the professors might ask him questions that make him look stupid. The School of Engineering here is almost entirely Unix based and almost all (or all, I'm not sure) the professors in the School of Engineering run some flavor of *nix (Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X). I remember worrying about having to use windows for my CS major when I got here, and quickly learned that you do not need anything windows. In fact, having windows just means you need to use cygwin or putty, instead of using an OS that does all that stuff natively. I think if Bill were to come here, he might regret it as many of the professors here have relatively high reputations in the CS research community and are very anti-Microsoft.
From the first day of my Operating Systems class:
(This is all from memory from six months ago)
"How many of you use a Unix based OS?"
about 2/3 of the class raises their hands
"How many of you use Windows?"
the remaining 1/3 raises their hands
"I hope to change that by the end of this quarter."
-Daryl Long
I hope that most universities are like mine. I could not understand how a professor of Computer Science could actually use Windows. To me, it just does not compute. In that case, Bill better choose his route carefully. Hey! Thats probably why chose to go to Wisconsin of all places (It was one of those sad places they use Windows maybe)!
About 2 years ago he lectured in a southern Calif university. I was there (on the outside) as part of a demonstration against H1B's and outsourcing. One of his suited handlers came up to a demonstrator and claimed more H1B's were needed for the "tech shortage". He was talking to an unemployed techie. Gotta love suits. They have their own reality.
Table-ized A.I.
Wow. Well, you obviously don't know him. The reason why MS lobbies for an increase of H1B? Because they have thousands of open positions. Microsoft has never had a layoff of technical personel. It's not that Bill doesn't care about tech talent. It's that he and the rest of Microsoft demand that the talent be the very best, or they won't hire them. They won't outsource to cheap labor. Two, or even ten cheap programmers will never create what one really good programmer can, and they know that. Heck, I doubt that Bill cares very much who the sales and marketing execs are. He likely leaves that up to Ballmer. But he does care about his technical executives. And especially about college talent.
One thing that I noticed in my two years of college now is that Microsoft is *very active*, always coming to CS orientation classes to give talks (UIC alums working at MS), giving talks to the CS college, actively looking for interns two times a year, actively partecipating in job fairs.
Kudos to them. They realize that if they want future talent, they need to sell the idea of working for MS as early as possible. Why don't I see Apple, Sun, IBM doing this?
Honestly?
:-( ).
Gates himself seemed to say many times that CS degrees were optional and that learning to program well required hands-on experience more than formal education. So it is interesting to see the turnaround on this issue. Yes, CS education formal or not (I get mine by hanging out in forums with people who have deep knowledge of the technologies I work with).
But education is education and should be aimed not merely at teaching a vocation but teaching someone how to learn. Unlike most liberal arts majors, I have a strong interest in science and math and can hold my own in most of these fields. However, most of my formal education was spent on humanities such as History, and I have attempted to study linguistics, philology, and other fields on my own (though these are fields where one simply cannot do serious work without at least a MA in the fields). So part of the problem today is that many liberal arts majors are intellectually lazy, but one should not generalize to the relevant fields as a whole. There is absolutely no reason why a serious historian with an interest in and reasonable grasp of mathematics cannot become a good programmer in non-research fields.
Why do geology majors do better in medical school than those with pre-med degrees? Again, if you are ready to learn a discipline, the fact that you have studied what you love and learned critical thinking skills in the process is far more important than taking a CS curriculum as a vocational track (if you love CS, it will *not* be a mere vocational curriculum, and I have seen plenty of history majors who treated it as a vocational track
So what I am saying is that to any student, you should study what you really want to study, because it is the educational and not vocational aspects that will build the best foundation for your life. Sure some fields give more leeway for intellectual laziness, but ideally you want something that will inspire you to go forward. If I was hiring a computer programmer and I had a choice between an Irish Lit Major who seemed excited and curious about technology and a CS major who seemed somewhat bored, I would hire the Irish Lit Major. If course if I was hiring kernel programmers for the next Cray, it is safe to say that neither would get much consideration, but these jobs are few and far between and really are only suited for CS majors who really are in love with the field.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
You have to be a clever guy to know assembly inside-and-out for a specific architecture and not even be in the college of science or engineering. As far as I know, Billy was an accounting major. Most of the people with business majors I've run into know very little about computers other than how to get around in Powerpoint and Word. Hell, most of the comp-sci guys don't even know assembly very well.
Interestingly, Bill Gates estimated I.Q. is about 20 points more than Adolf Hitler's.
I have a few questions for Bill,
1) Should a society defend it self against monopolies. If so how?
2) Should children be raised with the thechnologie from one company?
3) What is worse, people using pirated windows or people using linux?
4) Should technology be accesable to everyone or only those who can afford?
5) What is more important, money or a social society?
6) How can we learn operating systems without the source?
Are the answers from Microsoft different than your own? If sow why?
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"Back in the day" ... he was definitely a master of BASIC and pretty much the only person in the world who actually understood DOS... (I remember trying to figure that crap out when keyboards didn't even have a "\" key.) Apparently he was famously a twit back then too - there's an article from the 70s by him calling people thieves for copying his BASIC code and patronizingly explaining why since he wrote the code he should be able to dictate who is allowed to learn something from it... Maybe someone can dig up this article; as I recall he had a really whiny argument against piracy of code that was only copied by people who were using it to learn more.
Assembly isn't terrible difficult, it's just engineering. If you can wrap your head around the binary/hex system then you can do assembly.
As far as I know, Billy was an accounting major. Most of the people with business majors I've run into know very little about computers other than how to get around in Powerpoint and Word
Back in the days assembly was a popular hobby, so what he was an accounting major, you find recreational programmers everywhere.
Hell, most of the comp-sci guys don't even know assembly very well.
This doesn't indicate anything, there may be numerous reasons: it's too difficult, too easy, having other priorities, it's not expressive enough, insufficient cost/production effective or they rather design some algorithm involving integration/differentiation than doing low level embedded engineering.
It is interesting to note that the security Gates has here in Waterloo is far greater than that of the Canadian prime minister who visited the day before.
Adventure City Tours
I think you are hitting the nail on the head. As someone who has been programming since I was 12 (I am 32 now) I believe that the shift will be more towards domain specific programming. For instance my graduate degree is actually in Medicinal Chemistry. However I work as a computational chemist were a large portion of my time is spent writing code in Linux. Along those same lines I am currently in the process of co-founding a scientific software company. I think it would be almost impossible for someone trained in CS alone to pursue this route. why? Mainly because anyone with enough drive and ambition can learn the "principles and best practices" of software design. However the same can't be said about a field like medicinal chemistry. There is a certain amount of LAB time and experience in the field that is required to do this. I am also seeing a similar trend in Informatics.
A lot of trained CS people believe that they have some GOD given right to the understanding of CS algorithms and data structures. While I would never argue that outsiders will not know CS to the same level that a PhD in the field would. I would however argue that many scientists are well versed in proper algorithms and data structures....in fact it is pretty much a requirement to writing exactly code in the Sciences.
Outside of science I still see a lot of need for computer literacy. There really is no reason why everyone shouldn't have the basic understanding of how to program a computer just like we all have a basic understanding of a math.
So in essence I think that we need to start integrating CS more into the the current curriculum's. Perhaps it should be treated more like a second language. You know everyone takes 1-2 years worth of CS classes.
Just my two cents
what?
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That ought to make the question and answer session interesting.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Billg complaining about people not paying for SW is rich because he developed his famous basic interpreter on a DARPA-funded PDP-10 in the Aiken Computation Lab at Harvard. Actually, the rumor was that he first developed an interpreter for the Altair on which to develop the basic interpreter. The rumor at that time at Harvard was also that he got into some trouble for this use of a government funded machine for private profit.
Harvard's CS program has an extract of his code on display. He was quite technically good.
Disclaimer: this was a rumor at the time, not first hand knowledge. However I was in CS at Harvard when billg was.
Interestingly, Bill Gates estimated I.Q. is about 20 points more than Adolf Hitler's.
Yes, they also grade George W as 125. I am not sure I trust the estimations of a group that forget to put in the decimal points in this way.
Believe me, he did a great job there. Some tricks with floating-point on that messy 8-bit machine with 3 (!) registers, two of them are only index counters (X and Y) and only one 8-bit accumulator! I reversed some of his code at the time, I remember he did some real 'real programmer' stuff there.