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Gates' Last Day At Microsoft
mrogers writes "Today is Bill Gates' last day as a full-time employee of Microsoft. After 33 years at the company, the one-time richest man in the world will be retiring at 52 to spend more time guiding the charitable Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. What would you buy him as a retirement gift?"
A shiny, new laptop loaded with Vista, of course. He's earned it!
Caveat Utilitor
... that runs Windows ...
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
(I mean, judging from Microsoft's product lines for the last twenty years, it's what he really wants...)
Blatantly a tux toy.
:)
For all my *NIX & FOSS zealotry, I can't help but respect what he's brought to the world. His & MS's achievements have been broad and they've paved the way for multiple industries. Maybe I wouldn't be writing this on a Linux box if it wasn't for Windows
ilovegeorgebush
When can we look forward to a day without Ballmer? That would truly be a day to celebrate.
Please tell me they're giving him the high tech 'security walk'!
A 386SX with 640KB of memory.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Without him, I am not sure that personal technology would have taken off, and it would only be at work that I could do things like waste time on the internet and argue with strangers.
Microsoft and proprietary software. What is good for Microsoft and proprietary software conflicts with a lot of good charitable work.
Giving any poor organization the first copy of Microsoft software for no cost isn't going to help them in the long term.
To do this, he needs to get rid of his stake in Microsoft stock.
An account on Slashdot. But no trolling, please.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
A donation has been made in his name to the Human Fund.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
a Zune!!
"What would you buy him as a retirement gift?"
http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Programming-Dummies-Wally-Wang/dp/0764508350
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
...so he can get himself a better computer.
$25 gift card to Applebees.
I would get him a big hug. Without Gates, my parents and grandparents wouldn't be using computers for email today. It'd be a lot harder to live across the country where the fun jobs are without that...... I guess they might be using computers, but at least now they have an OS with built in sound drivers that work ;)
A card begging him to not listen to advice given from people who use 'then' when they should use 'than'
"Taking DOS which was bought, and advancing it to Windows and then NT "
NT was a clean-room effort spearheaded by Dave Cutler who did Vax VMS; that's why NT sorta works.
Need Mercedes parts ?
...did security walk him to the door after his exit interview?
A Belgian anarchist style party....complete with custard pies!
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
Steve Ballmer has been CEO since January 2000.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
...who helped him carry his boxes to the car. Steve? Ray?
Obligatory video from CES 2008 for those who haven't seen it. Here's to you Big Bill. Thank you for your sense of humor and your charity. And thank you for inspiring so many including myself to pursue a career in computers and technology.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
A UNIX manual, of course!
Microsoft already knows UNIX. They were responsible for the most widely used variant of the 80s. They sold it off to be rebranded as SCO UNIX when they shifted focus to Windows NT.
Let me give you a bit of history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
Better yet: a 30 foot tall armour plated robot penguin that launches high explosive packed herrings while shrieking "DON'T FEAR ME!!!!" through a 10,000 watt speaker system, programmed to seek and destroy.
Seems fair...
Blank until
I blatantly do not have any awe or gratitude to that person expressed in top comments.
My work is entirely related to computers and without PC it would be more productive, because I would not spend so much time socializing, playing games, watching news, playing with novelties, feeling up needless forms and documents.
Restriction is good, freedom is bad. At least for me.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Irving Gould is as responsible for the death of the Amiga as Bill Gates, maybe more so. As much as I adore my C=64, 128, Amiga 1000 and 2000 w/Toaster, Commodore never had the slightest clue as to how to market the Amiga.
In 20/20 hindsight, it was the first true multimedia machine, and could playback video at decent framerates (the DCTV add-on was truely amazing for its time), however Commodore tried to market it as a business machine. As if they had a chance of competing with IBM for that marketshare.
Only too little, too late did they make an inspired version, the CDTV (and later the CD32), which made the Amiga a component of a home entertainment system, (which only now are Microsoft and Apple trying to do), but, typical Commodore, they cheap'ed it to death, and then never threw any money at actually marketing it. As such, almost no one has ever heard of the thing.
Newtek sold more Amigas than Commodore did, by rebranding it as a 'Video Toaster System', and many of those toasters are still in use today (although to be fair, many are also being offloaded on eBay).
But to say that Bill Gates killed the Amiga is to distort history as badly as most people do when they think that Bill invented the computer. Or think that Windows is the only 'PC' there is.
(God, to think that I'm actually defending Bill Gates, a person I'd like to have shot out of a canon more than any other individual in history....) Look what you've done to me, damn you!!!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
In the BBC documentary How a Geek Changed the World, did anyone see the part where Gates leaped over a chair from a standing start? That must have been a very useful skill when working alongside Ballmer!
(I've been unable to find the clip online so I can't post a link.)
"Three eyes are better than one" -- Lieutenant Columbo
Yay! Now M$ will go down in flames without the evil Gates behind them. bwuhahahaha!
:)
Or something like that.
Of course I didn't RTFA... why would I do that? You really are new here aren't you? Don't let my UID fool you.
> "What would you buy him as a retirement gift?"
That's easy: "Open Source for Dummies"
I'd get him a 20" Intel-based Apple iMac computer installed with the last version of Office (not the newest one, but one before). That way, Bill could at least see that a decent-spec'd, moderately priced yet still well-designed computer CAN actually be a pleasant experience for the overwhelming majority of normal computer users. Maybe then Bill can realize that sometimes less is more and that a long laundry list of half-assed features is no good compared to a shorter list of features that work well.
A nice BSOD T-Shirt. Possibly even a new scanner to go with it.
This post approved by Shampoo.
Gates didn't kill the Amiga. Commodore did.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Bill_Gates (1523) is hated by no one
That settles it, he isn't the real one!
retiring the stupid BillG as The Borg icon! ST:TNG has been in reruns since 1994, there isn't a Star Trek show in production, he hasn't been involved in the daily running of MSFT for years, and as of today he isn't even an employee.
I'm not suggesting that anyone in the /. community consider updating their perceptions of the company for the last 10 years; to acknowledge that anyone who has gone to work for the company since 2000 has had any influence on the company's approach to business, markets, customers, or technology; or to suggest that the investment in software engineering practices, security tools and training, developer outreach, or a monstrous R&D spend could have any value what-so-ever to the PC industry, the software industry, or have improved any MSFT product. It does seem, however, like today would be a good day to update the thumbnail to something that at least reflects the cultural constructs of the 21st century.
The CBC has an article titled Bill Gates in Canada: a checkered legacy.
There are some choice quotes on anti-trust, Michael Cowpland (Corel founder and the WordPerfect debacle), recruiting from University of Waterloo, establishing a Richmond, B.C. campus, ...etc.
Worth a read.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Its funny how gates probably devoted an entire millisecond thinking about slashdot and the fossie zealots that live here, but to any lay person, the commenters on this otherwise benign looking news aggregator seem to be excessively obsessed with gates and his little company.
So while gates continued making shrewd business decisions and generating billions of dollars for several decades, all the people here continued to do is bitch and moan, whilst keeping up with the newest 'net memes, ofcource. I wonder if thats a sign of true helplessness or stupidity.
I guess I'll just hang around while the charming people here mod me down. Well in a couple of years, when the last of the moderates who didn't drink the koolaid on either side of the windows/linux pissing contest, leave this place, it will truly be a joy to read.
I think he at least deserves an unlimited login session on a PDP-10.
Really? I've heard many anecdotes about Bill Gates, but none about him kowtowing to anyone. In the Time magazine cover story on him some years ago, his father talks about Bill, known as "Trey" in his family, butting heads with his late mother (by all accounts an extremely strong-willed woman) when he was a young teenager, and refusing to give a millimeter. There are also many anecdotes about his own pig-headedness, and numerous variations of something he usually told people with whom found himself working: "I think you'll find we'll get along better once you realize that I'm in charge", or words to that effect. He was notorious for bullying subordinates in meetings, launching long tirades at them at perceived faults, but especially if he thought that they were bullshitting him. Microsoft insiders talk about the culture of paranoia he cultivated inside the company, forcing project managers to compete for his attention in an almost Darwinian struggle, and *EVERYTHING* that Microsoft did as a company, including their most egregious anticompetitive behavior, was either his initiative, or had his explicit approval. Ballmer was only his hatchet man, the loud-mouth bully stalking the corridors, threatening at the top of his lungs to fire everyone if a project didn't ship on time.
Gates may look like the stereotypical nerd, but his is very much a Type A personality, quite similar to Ballmer. Don't believe for a moment that Gates was some kind of dewy-eyed innocent who didn't know what was going on inside Microsoft, or that big, bad Ballmer could tell him what to do, much less bully him. From what I understand, friction between them only arose because Gates insisted on trying to dictate to Ballmer even after he was named CEO, and Ballmer naturally felt that since it was his call, he'd do things his way. Believe me, I don't think there's the person born yet who could bully him. Well, maybe Melinda, but that's the prerogative of wives everywhere.
I'll admit to my share of Microsoft bashing over the years. Bill has always been a great boogey man! My hats off to Bill Gates for being the arch-nemesis master . He's kind of like the guy who played Darth Vader. You hated him but,.... you cared about his character. He was meaningful. It's going to be sad to see Bill fading away. Ballmer is kind of like a laughable sidekick. You can imagine him dancing around like monkey-boy while Bill is plotting --like Mojo Jojo-- to take over the world. I think that the "Gates of Borg" icon from Slashdot will live forever. So, goodbye Bill. Go do good things with the remaining time you have and help make the world a better place.
We should put out an ad for a new Arch Nemesis. Who's going to be the next big, bad, evil symbol of corporate greed now that Bill is gone?
GuNgA-DiN
Disclaimer: I'm not against MS products, I use both Windows and Linux for different purposes, and I've used enough other OSes before to not give much of a damn about any particular one. By Slashdot standards, I tend to actually count as pro-MS, mostly by virtue of where the reference point is.
That said:
You're saying, basically, that by making people pay for hardware and upgrades they didn't actually need, it's stimulated and created a bigger mass market for the hardware industry. That's on par with saying that if you break enough windows, the glass industry will benefit greatly, and it might even bring down the price of glass.
What makes it a fallacy is ignoring the cost of all that, and pretending that only the good effects exist. It didn't just wave a magic wand and created money for an industry. It made a bunch of people pay for something they didn't need.
More importantly: money which otherwise would have been used for something else. We don't know what exactly, but it wouldn't be money stuffed under the mattress. (There's a federal reserve, or similar in other countries, which sees to it that money circulates at roughly the desired speed.) Maybe they would have been used to buy something else, and stimulated another industry. Maybe they would have been put in pension funds which in turn get invested in whatever companies are growing fast, essentially giving them more money to grow.
Broken windows or Windows don't _create_ money or markets. They just force a transfer from one to another. Every cent earned by the glaziers for repairing a broken window, isn't a cent magicked out of thin air, but a cent that someone else didn't earn as a result. Every cent earned by MS or the hardware industry because of broken Windows, is a cent some other industry won't see.
So you can't just say that it was good for hardware prices, as if the alternative would have been nothing at all. If we didn't spend our collective money on subsidizing hardware research and bringing hardware prices down, we _would_ have something else instead. Maybe better cars, or maybe HDTV sets would have dropped in price instead, or maybe we'd just have more pizza shops. It's impossible to roll back history and peek down the other trouser leg, so we'll never know exactly what we're missing, or if it's better or worse than cheap hardware. But we would have used those money on _something_ anyway, and _some_ industries would have benefited from it instead.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.