Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
he's done Duke things before.
She opened the gift before Christmas. What's up with that?
could he not have tossed in a surface instead (I guess then they could count it as a sell, lord knows he probably has a pile of them in some closet)
666 more days till Windows 8 EOL
and link to something.. ANYTHING slashdot has done in the last few years.
what does slashdot do?
Scratch that. We pontificate. We're very good at that.
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds -- Albert Einstein
What about the million dollars Gates offered to give away in all the spam emails I've got over the years?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Come on! It was a nice gesture. The man didn't _have_ to do this, but did anyway. This brought some joy to the world that wouldn't have been there otherwise and in my book that qualifies as a good thing.
(So M$ and BG has done some (very) objectionable things. I agree, but this wasn't one of them.)
I'm sure I'll get modded down for this, but I can't resist:
iPad: So expensive, even Bill Gates takes a pass!
Of course, his saving grace is he didn't see fit to punish her with a Surface, at least.
Yes, indeed there is blood on that man's hands. I too remember the Great Internet Explorer Wars. Saw many good people lose their lives in that dark chapter of human history. What brutal, senseless suffering, and all because machines came pre-packaged with this one certain browser. Damn it Bill, why did you have to go and include a browser with every operating system, you heartless, greedy bastard! Were those ill gotten gains worth it?! And now you think you can just undo the sins of your past by eradicating malaria, hunger, and illiteracy? Well, it won't work! None of that can compare to the horrors of browser/operating system bundling. Truly, Micro$oft money is blood money.
Do you think he reads Slashdot, too?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You mean, keeping track of who is being naughty or nice and reporting it to the NSA, CIA, FBI, local law enforcement, and other commercial entities?
Typically happens during Google I/O where they give away toys costing about twice what the conference costs to attend.
From the two years that I attended, I got 3 Android phones, a Google TV and preview access to Google Wave (which, in hindsight, was more like the proverbial lump of coal, but it's the thought that counts, right?)
Attendees in the years since have gotten Google Glass, MiFis with free service and I'm guessing quite a bit more.
oh dude get over it, business is business. Of course its cut throat, theres billions of dollars to be had.
This is not tiddlywinks, son.
Saying this is probably some form of sacrilege, considering my tendency to avoid MS products when possible -- my everyday desktop is Debian, for example -- but I have no problem separating the company from the man.
I don't like Microsoft's business practices, and generally don't care for their software, but Gates himself always seemed like an overall decent* guy with a passion for software and technology, unlike Jobs, who always sounded like a jackass to me. There's an irony in that, given the fanatical following of Jobs and general distaste people display toward BillG, presumably due to the business practices of Microsoft and ubiquity of its products.
Even if it's a PR stunt, it was a nice one, and handled in a classy way. He could have given away a bunch of XB1s and other branded products, for example, but didn't. What he did was thoughtful and nicely done, and he didn't even do it in a way that bragged about how many zeroes were on the donation made.
* Which doesn't mean he's a flawless person or always a nice guy. I'm sure he has plenty of flaws; if nothing else, he condoned or ignored Microsoft's various shady tactics over the years
You are being too kind. How they cheated out Tim Patterson and resold "DOS" with a huge profit. How Stacker killed the hard-drive competition. How about Windows 3 hard coded error messages that killed DR-DOS, besides strong arming major suppliers into installing only DOS and then Windows in exchange for major "discounts"...how about hidden APIs and bug fixes to Windows 95 that only were applied when you installed Office. OS/2 was also clearly sabotaged from the inside, they were only there to steal the ideas. Or their sabotage of the Java APIs to prevent it to become a stable ubiquitous platform of development. How they swindled netscape and the HTLM standard. How Exchange had code to make IMAP protcolols slow to further the agenda of Windows/Outlook workstations. The creation of ASP to disrupt PHP. The inclusion of anti-virus in Windows. How they obfuscated so much protocols like SMB and the Office documents to delay their reverse engineering. How their business model is to continually disrupt their own products to create a need to buy the latest, and the latest training.
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...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
TIL you can buy something outright and resell it, and you're "cheating out" the previous owner.
FC Closer
Just Bill Gates again trying to get young kids to like him, and therefore Microsoft, so that they grow up only using Microsoft products. This is like a drug dealer buying a kid tons of toys, and then saying, "Hey, I bought you those gifts. *wink* *wink* I work on 6th Ave., and I'm a drug dealer." Boom!
The G
Well played.
As mentioned Business ain't tiddlywinks. And he's now saving lives, what are you doing?
Yes, indeed there is blood on that man's hands.
Remember this blood? It continues to pour.
And now you think you can just undo the sins of your past by eradicating malaria, hunger, and illiteracy? Well, it won't work!
In fact, the Gates foundation will cure none of these things.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...to my house.
I'd have to buy a chest freezer to fit all the meat, but a whole cow would last me 6 months.
When you dont have any product to offer, you know you are about to do the business of the century, are dealing with the giant of the industry, and do everything you can to hide it from the seller just to pay a paltry sum, yep, you are being a scoundrel. Need I point the obvious?
Look how much free publicity it scored him, if it was truly altruistic why did he pop his picture in there?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Maybe because he wanted to give her something memorable instead of just donating to charity in her name?
Personally I'd think that note and photo were the far more valuable portion of the gift. For anyone who collects things like signatures, it'd be a family treasure. I know I'd be framing it and putting it on the wall, as proof that I once was contacted by the elusive Bill Gates.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Scratch that. We pontificate. We're very good at that.
Nah, we just hurl profanities and insults at each other in a misguided attempt to feel important. You numpty :P
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
Nice list, you got a little carried away though. The Office documents are not obfuscated as much as designed for another time and lazily modernized (they are dumps of the in original in-memory representation of the documents in C++ saved to disk). And I don't think they "swindled" the HTML standard. IE4 was the first browser to implement CSS1 and HTML4, Netscape were the ones trying to abuse their dominance by making their own extensions. Of course after MS won, the situation changed and MS slowed down and made their own shit for IE6.
Other than that, yet pretty spot on. There were also updates in Windows 3.11 to break it in new ways when running inside OS/2. OS/2 ended up having to apply patches to unbreak the stuff MS put in to break OS/2, a slow arms race with patches distributed by floppies for a while. Sure that was a few more companies they screwed as well, it was hard to keep track of in the 90s.
Bill Gates has done more good for this world since he stepped down as the business leader of Microsoft then any of us will ever manage to do. As a business man he was decisive, aggressive and focused. He was arguably the best at what he did. As a philanthropist he appears to be doing the same thing.
It would have been easy for him to sit back with his riches and let them pile up and do nothing. But no, he does the hard thing. He tries to help the world be a better place, he tries to help the human race as a whole and you guys just continue shitting all over him for it.
Fuck Slashdot. I cannot even count how many years I have been here and you fucks have ruined it. Back in the day there would have been some conversation of this but it would not have turned into the circle jerk of wannabes waving their nerd peens.
"A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'" - DNA
Reddit: "Cool! Well-done Bill. Sounds like a good charity that helps people.. Cute cow. Funny you didn't send her a Surface, ha ha ha. Merry Christmas, everybody!"
Slashdot: "FUCKING RAPIST! Yeah, RAPIST."
Jesus Christ.
Numpty? You insensitive clod!
Himself. And the iPad.
No beer and no TV make Homer something something
He started a charitable foundation with a donation of about 40 billion dollars, and while it isn't perfect (what $40 billion venture is?) it has made great strides in alleviating poverty and eradicating disease around the world. And he did this well after gathering more money than any one man could have any hope of using in his or his grand children's lifetimes; what exactly does he need PR for again?
Ok, so I didn't know wtf Reddit was, so I read the article. It appears that this is something where you get assigned a person, and get them some or all of their gifts that they request. In this case, the girl wanted:
teddy bear
magazine
iPad
donation to her favorite charity
So Bill Gates, one of the richest guys on the planet got her, and didn't even get her all of what she wanted, because of his business plan. What a dick! It doesn't mention how much the donation was.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
The creation of ASP to disrupt PHP.
You do know ASP was introduced in 1996, before PHP became popular? That was during the PHP/FI 1.0 days, which were followed by PHP/FI 2.0 before it became PHP 3 and started resembling the PHP we know today.
No, ASP was introduced to unseat Perl, which was the defacto language for CGI scripts at the time.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
So I should have been reposting those "Bill Gates will give you $10,000" messages on Facebook!?! Damn!
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
On a practical and related note, several years running their was a guy I worked with that would buy several young steers and pigs to raise to butchering size. He had the perfect setup at his home to do this.
We would all chip in a modest fee to support the feeding and raising, he would take them to be 'processed and give us a call to come pick up our meat.
He got his 'free' for the work, and we all got range free, and range fed pork and beef at about 40% of current 'but it in the supermarket prices', and it was some AWESOME eating...everyone made out like a bandit.
You might inquire around your area for a similar arrangement.Call it a kickstarter campaign to be 'trendy'. ;-)
*BTW, the 'WHOOOSH' did not escape me...LOL.*
When it comes to quality food, I really miss my youth, growing up on farms and ranches. The food was superb, and FRESH! Well worth the little extra effort, and much cheaper by cutting a slew of middlemen and feedlots out of the loop. ;-)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Totally. And wait, there's more... a lot more:
Gates is not at all a newcomer to "the elite" as many are led to believe. The familiar story (see Wikipedia, Biography.com) of how he's just some regular upper middle class guy who gambled everything, quit Harvard, and managed to trick IBM top management into an exclusive software deal which ultimately became the platform which propelled him into becoming the world's richest man (worth approx. $75 billion) - leaves out some very interesting details.
Like how he's a descendant from English elites of Lancashire, one of his early settler relatives being Sir Thomas Gates, Governor of Virginia in 1611, further along came Thomas Sovereign Gates, President of Philadelphia Trust Company and partner in Drexel & Co. (1918) and J.P. Morgan (1921). Gates is related to at least two Vice-Presidents of the United States as well as to Harry Truman. Gates' great grandfather was a state legislator and mayor, another founded the First Interstate Bank in Seattle, his grandfather a president of a national bank and a prominent very wealthy lawyer. His father was an extremely well connected Washington lawyer, known as "Big Bill", was president of the State Bar Association and influential in the Republican party. Gates Sr. (actually William H. Gates II) was a partner in Preston Gates & Ellis, Washington's oldest law firm (1883) which had over 400 attorneys under its employ. William H. Gates III (duh, what sort of families use these sort of dynastic names?), known lovingly by gullible nerds everywhere today as Bill Jr., came from some pretty rarefied society. Who here thinks it's at all possible for a regular guy (however bright) to walk into a place like IBM, a military industrial giant that had spent 30+ years developing computer technologies for government and research use (using boatloads of taxpayer funds, too), and take advantage of their naiveté regarding the significant opportunities in software, just as all that research and development was on the cusp of bearing fruit commercially? Give me a f*ing break! IBM could easily have hired tens (hundreds?) of far better programmers, and they certainly would have foreseen the importance of software to computers.
Bill's mommy just happened to serve on several corporate boards - IBM being one, United Way another. (United Way, by the way, has been called a CIA front operation by more than one source.) It would be hard to find a more "elite" guy than Gates, and as the world's richest man, he's a "made" man. It appears as if, in Gates, the elites have created a modern type of "robber baron" from one of their own, the end result being some of the privately accomplished societal engineering brought up in the parent comment. End of story. And f*ck him. This is not an Horatio Alger story. He should have given the poor girl an iPad!
Everything and its opposite is true. Get used to it.
If the return address just said bill gates, she wouldn't believe it (just some reddit user trying to stay anonymous)--now she knows it was him and can forever tell the story of how Bill Gates gave her a christmas present.
As to the content of the gift...the book and the stuffed cow are basically on par with what you might be expected to receive from the reddit SS. While I think it would be hilarious if he sent her a Surface instead of her requested iPad and said "here, try this instead", I don't really think that is in keeping with Bill's style. The cow donation is much more in line with Bill. He still managed to give a gift that is probably one of the most valuable reddit SS gifts (in dollar terms), but without turning the SS into some lottery where you buy your "ticket" for $20 (sending someone a gift) and hope that you get some super rich dude to come in and pay off your student loans. Online SS things (I've never done reddit, but have done it on smaller forums) are more fun when it's not about who spent the most $$$ on the gift, but rather who did the best job of stalking their recipient's post history to find them a gift that they would truly enjoy.
Honestly, an ipad is kind of a shitty gift--obviously anyone would be happy to receive one so it doesn't require any effort on the part of the giver other than pulling out $500.
Bottles.
You're right, he was, and he deserves our respect. Job's accomplishments with personal computers outshine Gate's by the same factor that the Gate's fortune outshines Job's. You'll note that Jobs' estate is a tenth the size of Gate's fortune, that it wasn't built on elite "insider" connections, he wasn't simply handed a massive chunk of IBM's future earning potential as a schoolboy with a mere promise to produce an OS. Were Jobs interested in helping the poor, he would surely attend to practical projects with positive results, like potable water systems, and would certainly not not focus on vaccinating to sterilize or developing Orwellian systems to control the underclass.
Everything and its opposite is true. Get used to it.
Yeah, I pick up other people's garbage on a very regular basis; Not for any noble reasons, I happen to walk there and it offends my eye.
Also in case I forget what pieces of shit most folks are, it reminds me.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.