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Bill Gates Puts Classic Feynman Lectures Online
theodp writes "Okay Tux fans, let's see how badly you want to see Feynman's Messenger Lectures on Physics. Bill Gates has the goods over at Microsoft Research's Project Tuva site. Also, CNET's Ina Fried has an interesting interview with Gates. He goes into why he spent his own money to make a series of classic physics lectures available free on the Web, talks about the possibility of Project Natal bringing gesture recognition to Windows, gives his thoughts on Google's Chrome OS, and discusses plans to patent 'cows that don't fart.' The last is a joke. I think."
He goes into why he spent his own money to make a series of classic physics lectures available free on the Web
That's easy. It's a good way to lure technically minded people into installing Silverlight. No sale here Gates, I'll wait until it's available by torrent.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You don`t have to be RMS to reject Microsoft`s "me too" technologies cloned by their clowns.
... the interview was actually somewhat interesting. I have to say that, whatever I think about MS, Gates is a pretty interesting guy... and appears to be pretty smart and "well rounded. IMO, he made a pretty insightful (mod him +1 ;) ) comment about Google... the more vague it is, the more interesting it is.
Meh. I didn't like Vista, and kinda like 7 so far. Some MS products are cool. Some are awful. But I do have to say that Gates doesn't usually appear to be a stupid little upstart that got lucky or something like that.
Well, one reason I can say for sure is that he happens to have billions of dollars in his bank account. So the cost of doing this is amounts to a rounding error in his checking account. Let's not ascribe too much a sense of moral duty to him for doing this.
When people sing the praises of the ultra-wealthy who donate a bit of money to this or that, it makes me annoyed a little bit. On the one hand, yes, it is good for them to give money to good causes. But on the other hand, they usually do not donate anything close to being something that they would actually feel. Some do, but most don't.
Isn't Linux "me too" tech too?
I don't care that it's MS Research. The irritating part is that my "browser is not compatible" because I don't use silverlight.
Oh, and regarding Bill's comments on it being a bad idea for Google to have two OS's (Chrome and Android)... MS HAS MORE THAN ONE OS, DUMBSHIT! Is Gates so out of touch that he thinks that win mobiles run Vista?
What about some great reading in HTML instead? It tells about where the real IT World was while MS was monkeying with some clone of CP/M
http://www.longnow.org/views/essays/articles/ArtFeynman.php
BTW, dear BillG: There is something called archive.org if you want to donate something to technical community. They offer standard MPEG and OGG files and Flash, which is current de-facto standard can stream them embedded if one is in hurry. Your attempt to kill Flash has failed, fire that team and target something else.
Isn't all tech "me too" tech of previous tech?
Funny is Tuva is really close to word Truva in Turkish which is basically the city of Troy. Installing some silverlight clone to be able to watch them really reminds "trojan". :)
Either way it's pretty childish
No more childish than requiring Silverlight to read some lectures. No more childish than Windows. No more childish than Microsoft's advertising. No more childish than Ballmer's chair throwing and his "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!"
"Childish" is par for the course with Microsoft.
Free Martian Whores!
...but this guy still makes me facepalm.
"It just shows the word browser has become a truly meaningless word," Gates said. "What's a browser? What's not a browser? If you're playing a movie, is that a browser or not a browser? If you're doing annotations, is that a browser? If you're editing text, is that a browser or not a browser? In large part, it's more an abuse of terminology than a real change."
Editing text has been part of browsing ever since HTML forms were introduced. Playing movies has been part of browsers since QuickTime and RealPlayer -- so, could easily be 10 years.
And of course, he's playing dumb about the real difference here. It seems like he's trying to suggest that it shouldn't be called a "browser", but rather, we should be talking about text editors and movie players.
No, see, the difference is whether I can just watch stuff on YouTube, edit text on Google Docs, pretty much do whatever I want on the Internet, without downloading anything other than a browser update. It means I get a fat client to some very cool services -- one that auto-updates the next time I refresh, yet one that's sufficiently sandboxed as not to be able to touch anything else in my OS.
It also means that when developing such applications, not only are they automatically cross-platform, but I can develop most of the logic as part of the server, and on the server side, I can use whatever technologies and languages I want.
And this reality is something Microsoft has been fighting since day 1, with the bastardization of web technology that is IE, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that Gates doesn't get it. I guess I gave him the benefit of the doubt...
Ballmer and Gates also stressed the fact that Google now has two operating systems--Chrome OS and Android. Ballmer noted that Microsoft learned with the separate Windows 95 for consumers and Windows NT for businesses that having two operating systems isn't necessarily a positive thing.
*facepalm*
Ok, leaving aside the fact that you've got, what, five or six versions of Vista, and it looks as though there will be even more versions of Win7 -- just what does Gates think runs on Windows Mobile? It's not Vista, and it's not Win7.
Sure, Chrome OS and Android are closer to each other than Windows Mobile and Vista, but they're still directed at different markets -- Chrome OS is meant for netbooks, while Android was meant for mobile phones. Android runs on netbooks, but serves an entirely different purpose -- while NT and Win95 look exactly the same -- oh, and as he pointed out, Android has a browser, meaning anything Chrome OS can do, Android can do -- meaning it's more like comparing Vista Starter with Vista Ultimate, whereas NT and Win95 actually had mutually incompatible software.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
//It's the Linux kernel with a new UI.//
You seem to be suggesting that a new interface for linux is passe- but look at what Apple did with BSD.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Actually, no, it isn't. There was no GPL'd kernel for GNU before Linux came.
Ezekiel 23:20
The site need Silverlight to view the lectures, so one has to wonder whether Microsoft was looking for a 'killer application' to make people want to install the plug-in.
On a more optimistic note, does anyone have these lectures in MKV or MPEG4 format, or at least something using a more open format?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
If your bank requires Silverlight while 98% of Planet has Flash installed, they are desperate for MS money or donation of servers which is not a good thing for banks. It also means there is some MS technology involved in process as opposed to AIX/UNIX/zOS which are "rolls royce" of servers and chosen by banks who prefers reliability to price.
Same goes for anyone "subscribing" to media outlets for a long time which requires Silverlight . It probably means they are easily bought out.
I think that it's great that Gates made Feynman's lectures available for free online. Now, I don't know a lot about physics, but I do know that his lectures were some of the best sources out there to learn it. In addition, there are several outlets available for people to expand their knowledge base, with MIT OpenCourseWare being one of the more popular ones. Heck, people could even use YouTube to gain a better understanding of any one topic. It could even be argued that a source like YouTube is better, since the educational videos I've seen were explained in very simple terms (which are always the best terms).
That all goes to show that the sources are there, and are very easy to access. You don't even need an account to access nearly the same material as MIT students do! However, Gates was absolutely right in that motivation is a really strong factor in wanting to find that stuff. I think that a source of that waning motivation comes from the desire to find a job, especially "in this economy."
So many people see school solely as a "means to an end," and many schools set themselves up to be precisely this. When one's goal is simply to graduate, there's "no time" to bother with learning the extra stuff; it's all about the grade in that paradigm.
I don't want to make this longer than it already is, but what I think would be awesome is to let students "create a major" at the college level. Some schools, like RPI and RIT, already practice this, but it should be practiced much more heavily, especially in the sciences and engineering. As a finishing Computer Engineering student, I'll be the first to say that it kind of sucks that I have to take a ton of classes that will have no practical OR educational use for me, just so that I can graduate under the guidelines of a program. However, that rant is for another time.
Here :- 1964 Messenger Lecture 1 Character of Physical Law 1 of 7
I have been loving discovering Feynman. As much as he reveals and explains interesting physics, he also maps the limits of our current understanding. Questions like, how does gravity and matter work, why does light refract, simple aspects of physics that we still don't understand.
Looks like Bill couldn't give something to the world without including a self-serving requirement.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
> It installs and plays on XP in a virtual machine.
Only if one has a copy of XP.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Yeah, that's right. It couldn't be that you're not funny - someone is being paid to not laugh at you.
Wow.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
So let me get this straight: an employee of a public institution (Cal Tech) gave some speeches that were recorded by a government-funded entity (the BBC), and in order to release those recordings to the public, a private individual (Bill Gates) had to purchase the rights? And rather than release in them in a standards-based format, we instead have to to download and install proprietary software (Silverlight) that we may not want on our computers?
So Billy G wants to bring "...[the wonders of science to everyone]..." except for those of us not using Internet Explorer...ahhh...so refreshing!
The site works fine in both Firefox and Safari, on my Mac.
Reading about the interview of Bill Gates, made me wonder, does he truly truly want the videos to be free and available to everybody?
What are the licenses of the videos?
I suspect I couldn't copy them elsewhere, for free. According to article, "Gates said that he hoped his action would serve as a model for taking great educational content and making it broadly available for free." [emphasis mine] yes, broadly available, but locked to single distributor. This does limit the free a lot! I wonder was this the intention of then relatively naive 30-year-old Bill Gates too, I suspect not. Article gave me impression that Gates truly (once) wanted them to be free.
I'm having hard time with Tuva myself, mainly because I cannot watch them by streaming without interruptions. And I couldn't pick them with me and show them to someone not connected to Tuva.
If the purpose of this stunt is to share the knowledge, then please, make them available as download also.
Bill Gates, thank you!
I will watch them all.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
"Perhaps not, but why reject them completely out of hand? "
because of their business practices?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Linux reimplemented Unix, thus joining tyhe family of the best operating systems ever created.
Moonlight tries to reimplement Silverlight, some piece of crap from Microsoft with no technical merit whatsoever.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.