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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."
I think he wants kids to grow up to replace Ballmer and NOT waste money on broken chairs.
Everyone line up with the shiny bits to welcome Bill! Now... aim....
Why Computer Science? Why Now?
Because we need people with more skill to fix up all your shit Bill.
What did the liberal arts major say to the compsci major?
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>"Would you like fries with that order, sir?"
This sig is neither interesting, nor humorous. Including meta-humor.
I was going to attend CS 480 tomorrow, but now I just don't know if it's worth the possibility of seeing the Evil One in person.
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
...He and Booger immediately started training to win their place as Delta Delta Deltas.
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.
I mean, why not MIT, etc, as his top five schools to visit? (No offense to any Wisconsiners out there, my Cheesehead suitemate will doubtlessly exact revenge on me for you)
Anyways, wouldn't high schools be an even better choice? I mean, I feel that if I'm in college, I'm either already studying Computer Science, or not. I mean, maybe you could convert engineering students from other disciplines, but most college students with a major in mind would be harder to get to switch. I think he'd do better at the high school level, esp. around junior level, when he can influence the people to apply to schools with a CompSci bent, or convince them to take CompSci as a high school senior.
Just my four cents. I found two extra in a vending machine, which doesn't even take pennies (stupid drunks)
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.
I don't know about you, but at my college he would have been laughed out of the room... Plus, I really doubt he would show up in any of my CS classes this semester, Unix and System's Security.
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
So, a guy who famously became the richest person in the world by skipping college and leaving a technical career in favour of business is now trying to persuade people to go to college and study technology?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
I suppose Ikea DOES use computers a fair bit...
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
Come work in computer science, boys and girls! Why? Because you'll have an opportunity to experience first-hand the effect of offer and demand on the job market, when we at MS will lobby for an increase of H1B -- the ones for 2006 are already allocated.
Because since the industry is mostly managed by lawyers and MBA, not engineers, you in the tech field will never compete with us lawyers and sons of lawyers for these coveted positions of execs who get a raise at the same time techies are laid off.
Because in spite of all Bill Gates' public wailing for attracting talent, he spits on tech talent, and so do most CEOs. The only "talent" he cares really about is execs, especially sales and marketing execs. That's talent. Design? Programming? Architecture? A commodity at best. A cost to be outsourced.
And you wonder why there is such a decrease in engineering and science students? Of course they want to work in finance and law. Do you think they are stupid?
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Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
There is still a lot of interesting work going on in CS and will continue to be for some time. CS is a relatively new scientific field. There will be no shortage of new work to be done for a long time.
You could make the same argument about math. After all haven't Newton, Gauss, Lagrange, Leibnitz, et al already discovered everything there is to know hundreds of years ago? Is math a dead end field too? No, but math is basically the same way today as you are describing CS. It's combining and reevaluating what we already know in new ways, but there are completely new things still being discovered, as with CS. Read some of the ACM journals and you will find some interesting stuff (if you're into CS).
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.
...and was greated with this http://weblogs.asp.net/ajuneja/archive/2004/02/25/ 80113.aspx
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.
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make install -not war
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.
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!
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
Well, for starters, nobody has even figured out whether or not P == NP yet. Sure, most people strongly believe P != NP, but nobody really knows for sure.
Kinda along those same lines, cryptography is built on the idea that certain tasks can be computationally infeasible to one group of people (eavesdroppers) but feasible and practical for the people who want to securely exchange information. We have stumbled on some algorithms that seem to fit this in practice, but according to what I understand, there is not really a cryptosystem out there for which anyone can supply proof that the computations that look hard actually are hard. For example, if I recall correctly, RSA's security rests on the idea that it is computationally very tough to factor a product of two very large prime numbers. But we don't know that there isn't an efficient algorithm for doing this. All we know is that we aren't yet aware of one.
There are other active areas of research. For instance, right now "managed code" systems like Java and .Net are in their infancy.
Computers have only just recently become
fast enough that it is practical to consider
switching to just-in-time compilation, and
the thing is, there are optimizations that
can be done when compiling at runtime that
can't be done when compiling before runtime.
(For example, you can use real profiling
data to automatically
create code that is most efficient for
the actual workload.) So there are bound to be
a lot of techniques to be discovered in this
area.
And there are other potential areas of research as well. We are already starting to see dual-core processors because it's looking to be hard to increase processor speed in conventional ways. We could probably use some research on how to do parallelism in other ways, possibly even going beyond dual-core machines or even beyond Von Neumann machines. If we ever feel compelled to do that, let me tell you, there will be a whole bunch of research needed in programming languages all over again, because imperative languages mirror the architecture we are using now but won't be suitable for an architecture that lends itself to automatically taking advantage of parallelism.
Finally, keep in mind where physics thought it was after Newton. It seemed that classical mechanics explained just about everything pretty well. Until Einstein came along and blew it all out of the water. For all we know, something like that could happen with computer science. Although it might be 100 years...
If I had been in the class, I would have asked Bill the following:
In those pictures, Bill Gates looks entirely too much like most of my other university professors.
You mean the borg-bill picture? What sort of uni do you go to?!! ;)
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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Indeed, why? When you can learn something useful, like bricklaying, and earn as much or more with less effort?
Free MS-Linux preview CDs to all attendees!
Free MS Office for Linux beta for first 100
Sign up for free MS Linux Developers Kit
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.