Slashdot Mirror
Gates and Jobs to Share A Stage
Rob wrote with a link to a Computer Business Review online article, which reports that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and Apple chief Steve Jobs will make a joint
appearance at a future technologies conference in Carlsbad, California. The event is expected to last a little more than an hour, and the two computer industry magnates are expected to reflect on their pasts - while theorizing on the future. "[WSJ Tech columnist] Walt Mossberg, a co-producer of the conference who will interview the execs on-stage along with colleague Kara Swisher, said they simply invited Gates and Jobs to do the interview ... [Mossberg] declined to give any color about the questions he and Swisher are preparing, or any additional information. Most likely, Gates and Jobs will use the occasion to do some friendly sparring on their polar-opposite philosophies on personal computing. Jobs may bang on about the benefits of a software-hardware approach, while Gates may rattle off the joys of partnering with hardware partners."
I have this vision of the future Heroes episode where Peter and Syler have a showdown. Glowing hands and all.
"Jobs -- while Gates drinks a glass of water -- may bang on about the benefits of a software-hardware approach."
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Best. Episode. Ever.
coffee | nose > keyboard ©
Seems like a scheme to reiterate the idea that people can only choose between Mac and Windows. They are completely ignoring another big player.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
When they get on stage, the lights will drop, strobes start going off, and as chain link fences lower from the ceiling, the techno music starts and the announcer screams, TECHNOLOGY CAGE MATCH!!!!!!!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Dear Mr Jobs,
Please could you ask Bill to bring along 235 software patents or shut up.
Sincerely, everybody.
Actually, my vision was of Stewie and Olivia fighting over who was on-key in that Family Guy episode. ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
M$ = Lawful Evil (we can do what we want, our lawyers will make it legal)
Mac = Neutral Evil (we're evil, if we break the law our lawyers will get us out)
M$ = 20th level necromancer
special attack = Summon Zombie pc
Mac = 20th level enchanter
special attack = Charm people into thinking a Mac will make them cool
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
1. a spoof of those pc guy/ mac guy ads with jobs and gates in the appropriate roles. it will never happen, but still
2. an icon for jobs on slashdot. gates has his borg visor one. why not jobs with an ipod?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I wager 30 quatloos on the newcomer.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
...when I first glanced at it, that the article headline said, "Gates and Jobs to Share A Grudge?"
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
Gates: We want you to be locked in to proprietary Microsoft products
Jobs: We want you to be locked in to proprietary Apple products
Would that be east-west poles, 'cause they seem pretty close together...
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
2 CEOs enter...
One CEO leaves.
Walt Mossberg: Bill Gates, what about a shared interview with Steve Jobs?
Billg: Sharing a stage with Steve Jobs? That's the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft.
Jobs on the other hand is gives off (regardless of if it is true or not) a degree of approachability and dramatic flair (but, some would argue, at a hinderence of reality and pesky fact).
So I'm not going to be too interested in what they say, but how they say, and most interestingly of all how they play it against each other. Although I can't shake the feeling that they will be slapping each other on the back....
I envision it starting like this:
...and I'm a PC
Jobs: I'm a Mac
Gates:
Let's not forget it wasn't long ago that MSFT basically ripped off apple [who rippled off PARC]
If Woz's explanation is correct, no one did any "ripping off" in this case. Apple paid for the rights to various parts of GUI from Xerox, and Microsoft traded rights to Apple II Basic in exchange for the GUI rights to make Windows.
Three-way cage fight!
Of those three, Stallman is the only one that cares about anyone but himself.
Jobs: Hi, I'm a Mac. Gates: And I'm a PC.
I'm sure Apple technicians breathed a sigh of relief when they found it was going to be Gates instead of Ballmer. An anti-pie personal forcefield is much easier to build than an anti-chair personal forcefield. :P
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
anymore. The macbook was updated after 6 months without a product refresh(I don't consider adding an 8 core option to an otherwised unchanged mac pro a refresh, you could do that aftermarket before anyhow). And the previously updated model was the macbook as well. The mac mini is a joke, hasn't seen a real update in over a year, and there are rumors of its demise. The iMac, macbook pros, and mac pros are no longer price competitive with other manufacturers like they were when they first came out. I don't mind paying a little bit more, but this is just stupid. It just seems to me that Apple no longer cares about computers, they want to peddle ipods, overpriced phones, and crappy media center pc replacements. If Apple doesn't majorly ramp up its lines by WWDC, my powerbook G4 will be the last mac I own. I don't want to sit around and wait until Steve Jobs considers computers are important enought to start making good ones again.
Monstar L
Bringing matter and antimatter so close together? What if they annihilate each other in a giant explosion?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'm surprised nobody's excited about the part where Bill Gates walks towards a table of Apple gear and Steve Jobs stops him, yelling, "You shall not pass!"
Of those three, Stallman is the only one that cares about anyone but himself.
Every time rms opens his mouth, he hurts the Free/Open Source Software (I don't care if he doesn't like the term) movement.
Mark Shuttleworth, please.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
As someone that has done some DIY once-upon-a-time:
./'ers.
1. this would be considered a "win" for both companies. IMHO the Wall Street Journal and a mention by Walt Mossberg is the pinnacle of PR success. Literally, it doesn't get much higher than that in the U.S. anyway.
2. This is a perfect example of the power of the media. Bitter rivals? Not if Walt Mossberg asks you to come to his event.
3. Walt's not going to do anything to ruffle any feathers. Considering the audience, this will most likely be a snoozer for most
4. Linus _should_ be in Walt's media contacts list. Does Linus pay an _insane_ amount of money to PR hacks who bribe their way into Walt's assistant's office? That's kind of a pre-requisite.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
...you would think that Gates and Jobs would be best buddies....
After all, who else besides them have duped and lied more than them? (outside of politics, of course)
The difference between Gates and Jobs is only this: Gates TELLS you he is fucking you in the ass, whereas Jobs just hopes you won't notice.
Living With a Nerd
Almost 25 years ago I was working as a programmer/analyst at Aetna Life & Casualty in Hartford CT. The company brought in Gates and Jobs for a one day seminar/meet-and-greet to help decide how seriously we should take the personal/desktop computer revolution. AL&C was at the time, of course, heavily into mainframe computing and barely looking at workgroup computing (System/38) let along personal computing.
The two gentlemen were cordial, but not particularly friendly toward each other and clearly had different visions of the future of corporate computing. Now here's the punchline: The big debate between the two was over the viability of COBOL. Jobs passionately prevailed on AL&C to drop the use of COBOL altogether (money quote: "Aetna is just about the only place left in the world that still uses COBOL, everyone else has migrated to C") while Gates was just as passionately (albeit not as charismatically) espousing the virtue of moving COBOL off of mainframes and on to the desktop.
Not a word from either of them about GUI or operating systems. Jobs was all about "new programming paradigms" and Gates was all about "the craft of programming" and how the broad range of Microsoft programming languages on PCs would accomodate that model. Gates was even promoting the idea that each programmer would have a wide range of programming languages at hand, using each one as appropriate for the task at hand like tools on a workbench. Of course, at the time, Microsoft's bread and butter was programming languages.
My, how times have changed!
GM: M$, you go first. ...although computers with Ubuntu cost the same as Windows machines... ...no, they're actually more expensive, since they're not bloated with our crap... /. mod: *goes to preferences, unchecks "willing to mod"*
M$: Trying to summon a lawyer.
GM: 1d20+43 = 63, you summoned bloodsucker bastard lawyer from ninth circle of hell. Your turn, Apple.
Apple: Trying to cast "Control minds of iPod users with vision of drm-free music"
GM: 1d20+16 = 17, forty thousand iPod users are under your command, Steve. M$?
M$: We try to sue Linux users for using software infrigning our patents.
GM: 1d20 - 16 = -4, and you do not own any useful patents. Apple?
Apple: We tell our customers that higher bitrate is worthy 30c.
GM: 1d20+27 = 41, forty one thousand users now believe you. Minus the forty thousands that were hypnotised, they've lost their mind and thus cannot reason.
Some Random Geek: But where are the Linux users?
Some Random Computer User: WTF is Linux?
GM: Some Random Computer User does not know Linux. Sorry, Some Random Geek.
Some Random Geek: But there is Ubuntu...
Dell:
Some Random Crapware Company:
Another Random Geek: It was supposed to be a fight between M$ and Apple.
Some Random Geek: Mod parent +5 insightful!
Another Random Crapware Company: This is not crap!
Dell: Let's have a deal with M$...
M$: OK, like the one with Novell?
Novell: We only want SuSE to be more compatible with M$!
Another Random Geek: You betrayed us, Novell!
Some Random Geek: Mod parent +5 insightful!
Some random
Apple: Leopard will be delayed.
Another Random Geek: Damn it! I knew that Apple is going to forget about Macs when it dropped "Computers" from its name...
Some Random Geek: Mod parent +5 insightful!
Another Random Geek: Mod parent -1 redundant...
GM: SHUT UP EVERYONE! Time's out, it's been an hour.
Where's Linus and Stallman? Throw them in there for Super Smash CEOs Brawl!
Well, what updates do you have in mind? The Macs run the fastest processor available. They run 802.11n, have blue tooth, integrated camera, etc. Maybe they will work on a tablet someday but I suspect that will only happen when they finish the iPhone. Apple always take small but measured steps. Getting multi-touch screens to work is probably a first step in that direction.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Sort of. I can explain why the mods thought it was +5 funny.
YMMV.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Jobs: I'm a Mac
Gates:
Gates: Hello, I'm a Wii
Jobs:
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
I really don't get this. I've been using OpenOffice for quite a while now and it seems much more useable and intuitive than MS Office. Its also compatible with MS formats and is free in all senses of the word.
Only problem is that OpenOffice doesn't run nicely on the Mac. And by "doesn't run nicely", I mean it's a bloated, ugly, craptacular pile of shite that doesn't integrate with OS X at all.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
C'mon, man ... it is a few months until Leopard. These systems don't exist in a vacuum. You are looking right now at the very end of the end of the Intel transition. All of the machines pretend to be their immediate PowerPC predecessors in some way to minimize the fuss. The Intel transition is over and Leopard is coming that is going to mean new machines and probably a whole new model of some kind, like a very small notebook or something that fits between Mac mini and Mac Pro.
... none of those shops was going to buy a 4-way and pull the processors and put in some Intel part that has been found to be compatible by somebody "on the Internet."
Also, the Mac Pro update to 8 processors was very significant because it is like Apple putting their multi-processing money where their mouths are. Big developers have these machines now and they are making their apps work better across 8 processors, which we will probably see in the iMac by 2010 or so. And there are going to be a lot of new Mac Pros purchased just to run Photoshop v10 which just came out. Photoshop is so interactive that a faster machine will be noticed immediately in work output
The most interesting Mac hardware rumor for me is that they will have multi-touch screens, like the iPhone. Mac OS X Leopard has the same resolution-independent display from the iPhone, the menu bar or windows can all scale up if you have fat fingers or bad eyesight or both. If you look at Mac OS X Tiger on a 30 inch display, you don't want to push a mouse cursor around that thing, you just want to press icons in the Dock with your finger. You want to push mixer sliders around in Logic, or scrub video in Final Cut just by applying the fingers directly. This is also a feature that DJ's want to replace the turntables in an electronic setup, it is very hip. And it would make Mac users buy new Macs for Leopard and it would take 5 years to come to the PC in a real way. Look at all the stuff that is in iPhone for $500, why can't I get a touch screen on my $1200 iMac? Also it would enable them to make even smaller systems, such as a sub notebook with no track pad.
Hope to God that Gates doesn't wear an assless hospital gown...
/* No Comment */
The Apple attendees will walk in casually in their tie dye shirts and Birkenstocks, sit down and wait for the movie... er event to start with a glaze in their eyes and a half smile on their lips. Their wallets and ID will be safe and no one will get sick. They paid twice as much to attend, but no one will complain.
The Microsoft attendees will each be stopped at the door and asked "You are entering the auditorium. Accept or cancel?" When they go to sit down they'll discover their wallet is gone. Every fifth person will have a cold or some sort of virus so by the time the event is over, all the attendees will leave sick. They'll sit expectantly waiting for something to happen, but each time Bill walks out onto the stage he stumbles, falls and has to restart his entrance. Once he does get going all he'll talk about is how beautiful the backdrop is.
I personally think it would be rather humorous that they each give a presentation created and shown on their respective systems. We know Bill has been embarrassed by crashes a few times. Think he'll use Vista or XP?