Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Bill Gates Answers Questions From Redditors

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the favorite-meal-is-braised-penguin dept.

First time accepted submitter rroman writes "Bill Gates is answering questions on reddit. He talks about the work that is being done by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, about his life and about his opinions on various topics." Jump right to the answers.

7 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Sign of the times... by xtracto · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sign of the times... when /. is linking to Reddit.

    --
    Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
    1. Re:Sign of the times... by AlphaWolf_HK · · Score: 5, Interesting

      From my observation of 10ish years on slashdot (I didn't register until some time of lurking,) slashdot *was* almost entirely in favor of apple, but no longer.

      The common argument in favor of apple at the time was how open they are (e.g. using posix rules, incorporating samba, etc.) I frequently pointed out that if apple was as dominant as microsoft, they would impose far worse restrictions on user freedom than microsoft ever did. I was shot down at the time, but it turns out that I was right.

      Anyways, most of slashdot now agrees with that assessment and is largely anti-apple these days.

      --
      Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
  2. Re:Looking forward by earlzdotnet · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think we've all moved on to Steve Ballmer being an idiot rather than Bill Gates being evil

  3. Re:Long done by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you had bothered to look, he has been answering for the last 6 or so hours, and his last post was only 5 minutes ago as of this posting.

  4. Handwriting by Dan+East · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Robots, pervasive screens, speech interaction will all change the way we look at "computers". Once seeing, hearing, and reading (including handwriting) work very well you will interact in new ways..

    I'm very surprised he's still hung up on handwriting recognition. It is a DEAD END for human interfacing to a computer (with the sole exception of OCRing existing handwritten documents, and perhaps security as a form of credential). Think about it for one moment, the amount of muscle control, precision and time required to DRAW A SHAPE which is then interpreted as a single input glyph. It is a horribly slow and tedious method of input - I would rather (and literally have) key Morse Code into my android phone than write text.

    It also shows he's still a bit out of touch, and still thinking stylus-centric (which, IMO, was one of the reasons Window Mobile / Windows CE failed, was because it never completely shook the stylus-required-to-interact-with-tiny-widgets problem). Is a person really expected to draw on a modern touch screen with their finger to write letters for the device to recognize (and feel like a preschooler fingerpainting)? Or are we going to step back into having to keep track of a stylus?

    Just found it odd he threw in handwriting in this day and age. It was beat to death with Palm starting a decade and a half ago. It's gone. Dead. Byebye.

    --
    Better known as 318230.
  5. Why doesn't he answer questions on Slashdot? by detritus. · · Score: 5, Funny

    We love the guy!

  6. Re:Looking forward by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you are young and briliant you have a choice, help the world or help yourself and become filthy rich

    False dilemma. Profit seeking capitalists have done far more good for the world than philanthropists.