Bill Gates Plays Secret Santa To Reddit User

An anonymous reader writes "Gates fulfilled a Reddit users wish-list by buying several items and donating to a listed charity organization, although he did pass on getting the iPad on the list. From the article: 'The true identity of Rachel's Secret Santa was finally revealed when she found a photo of Gates holding the stuffed animal and the signed donation sent to Heifer International. An inscription in the book with a "really nice message" and note from Gates wishing Rachel a Merry Christmas and a Happy Birthday was the topper.'"

Comments

30 years of substandard software

[rsilvergun]

Microsoft set the bar, and set it low. When there were several very usable desktop environments that ran on the 386 (which was a ridiculously powerful computer) theirs (Windows 2.0) was junk. It was also cheap, and OEMs packaged it up so they could say they had a desktop environment w/o paying for one...

Don't get me started on Beos. I don't care so much that they killed the OS, but they buried the technology too. Beos had a multimedia filesystem with working meta data that was fully searchable in near real time in 1999 for God's sake, and it did that on a 400 Mhz AMD. Microsoft STILL can't get that working.

Microsoft has set back software development and usability at least 20 years. I keep hearing how amazing their engineers are, but I don't see much evidence of that. What I see a series of Alphas (Vista), turned into Betas (Win7) and then back again (Win8). Forget my flying car, why the hell can't I move a window on a screen without ghosting in 2013? I have 2 gig of ram on my VIDEO CARD... :(