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IT Execs On Their Dream Dinner Guests
StewBeans writes: In this lighthearted article for the holiday, IT executives were asked, if they could invite any technologist living or deceased to their Thanksgiving dinner, who would they invite and why? One CTO said that he'd invite the CTO of Amazon, Werner Vogels, so he could hear his thoughts on the future of cloud computing. Another would invite Ratan Tata, who he calls the "Bill Gates of India." Other responses range from early visionaries like Grace Hopper and Vint Cerf to the mysterious inventors/designers of the Roland TR-808.
A few of their internal employees so they would learn first hand what a mess they created throughout the year. Most IT execs have no f*cking clue.
...who isn't vegan. The worst Thanksgiving I ever had was the one who had the one who condemned the eating of flesh in attendance. Surely there are places these people can go during the holidays!
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I really don't want to listen to someone ramble on and on with their mouth full of food.
Perhaps inviting them to hang out afterward would be a better idea.
#DeleteChrome
Seriously, this is a story?
On the other hand I would want to talk to Archimedes, his work on the catapults is of great interest to me, I would like to use one of his inventions to catapult this site.
You can't handle the truth.
If he's the Bill Gates of India... does that mean I'll start getting calls from Americans trying to convince me my PC is hacked?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Creator of the first large scale, and still the best ever, pseudonymous Usenet and email service. It finally shut down after the Scientologists defrauded Interpol into showing up with warrants and Julf realized he could not protect his very grateful users from money backed fraud.
the real dreams list would at least contain one of the following names :
Jesse James
Jenna Haze
Lexa Belle
Asa Akira
Celine Dion
Show Alan Turing how his own work and discoveries, indirectly widely used today, are of major importance. And also, maybe ask him what he thinks about the "posthumous pardon" he was granted from the queen, only 61 years after his death...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
A lot of non-IT people don't know what a jerk Gates was. He was brilliant at killing off competitors using targeted sell-at-loss campaigns, bait-and-switch "standards", bundling, and locking one in to product upgrade cycles.
But that stagnated business software evolution and robbed the market of choice. I bet he'd make a great military general.
Table-ized A.I.
Until he declares 640 tanks oughtta be enough for any army.
Be sure to invite a representative number of non-hetero white phallocrats.
P.S. Clickbait much?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm dissappointed to see no mention of this.
So you guys woke me from the grave to discuss your thoughts on your IT business? I'm dead? I feel sick. What's going to happen when you're done with me? Can I go and see my family? This is horrible, I wish you'd left me in the ground.
Ratan Tata was chairman of the mighty TATA group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Group
They run hundreds of large businesses including Jaguar / Land rover.
My choice of dinner date would be a table full of porn chicks and a bag of coke. Who wants to talk shop outside of work hours?
When interviewing for articles like this you'll get the sort of high minded answers that make people look good, intelligent and thoughtful.
It is of so little relevance to anyone ever that we need to develop new measuring devices to adequately quantify it.
My list:
Lisa Faulkner (aged 20 - if we can have dead people, we can have living people when they were younger and hotter right?)
Mia Malkova
Karlie Kloss
Eva Green
Also, all the food would be smear-able.
Technologist?
Richard Stallman, of course.
Just to see if, with social interactions, he's as quirky as I think he is, or less, or more.
The social part of the interaction is the only interesting thing when you meet a technologist in real life, the rest you can read or e-mail about.
Just so I could punch him in his face.
Doesn't mean he's not a complete cunt.
Bill Gates
Steve Ballmer
Larry Ellison
Lennart Poettering
Richard M. Stallman
Lucretia Borgia
I am Chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are Free. -Eris
Neil Degrass Tyson - Cause I can learn something about the stars.
John Carmack - Cause I'm sure I could learn something from him about graphics programming even if it's just the basics for 3D stuff like the old Quake and Doom games. Yeah the source code is out there but he'd be nice to just throw questions at. Also to thank him for hours of fun.
Notch - Same as Carmack for Minecraft.
Dona Bailey - Same as the two above for her involvement with Centipede in my early years.
Grace Hopper - For help making COBOL. Yeah I know she's dead but still.
Wouldn't the Bill Gates of India be Satya Nadella?
Did any of them choose their own technical staff to say thankyou for all the hard work?
Congrats for figuring out what it takes to succeed in business.
Come on, /.! You're missing the obvious. Spin this as a social justice troll FEEL GUILTY issue.
Ada, Countess of Lovelace, Enchantress of Numbers; Rear Admiral Hopper, Pirate Queen (yarr!), Lady of the Nanosecond (ok, I'm just making shit up now); Alan Turing, and Hedy Lamarr are right there in TFA, but they don't make it into the summary!? Instead we just get a bunch of cis het white (performing type promotion Indian to white for Ratan Tata) misogynerds!
I mean, ok, Dice, I get the cloud and Bill Gates wunderkind angle. Oh, I get it. It's turkey day today. (Giving thanks? WTF. I've got mine, fuck you. I'm the very image of a modern Randian bootstrapper!) I guess I have to wait until tomorrow for SJW* Friday. (Warning: based on gas prices I haven't seen since I got my operator's license, mentat computations derive extremely bad luck around 7:00 am EST for tomorrow. Outlook bad. We might not get SJW Friday tomorrow, but something much worse.)
Ok, to be serious for a moment, I'd invite Lovelace, Hopper, Curie (they can both come over--I've got some RadAway they could use), and Harriet Tubman--who I recently learned through Drunken History was more epic than I had imagined.
Well, there goes the meager karma I'd acquired on this UID!
* I do despise the SJW term, but hey.
I would spend the whole time giving him ideas like bashd, which would includes commands such as:
-lsctl
-rmctl
-victl
and I'd also suggest that he starts working on PulseWifi, because just like audio and daemons, wifi is something that needs to be reinvented.
lucm, indeed.
Douglas Engelbart. I'd love for him to show my family the Mother of All Demos in person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Just to tell him he was wrong and teach him what we discovered since then. Then I could walk around and pretend I'm smarter than Newton.
Waaaah businessmen are mean poopyheads!!! Are you nerds really so naive that you think that almost all successful CEOs aren't equally as ruthless? You don't succeed in business by being a wimp.
And he would be right.
IF I were a billionaire IT exec, I'd invite two African Americans, Neil de Grasse Tyson and Elon Musk and have them debate the future of the human presence in space. I'd make it like a fund-raising political dinner. Whoever won the debate would get a fresh infusion of funds for their pet space venture, whether of the radio-optical or propulsive variety.
would be an interesting showdown!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler and the Tyrant of Rigel.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
In no particular order:
C.A.R. Hoare
Perr Brinch Hansen
Gordon Bell
Dave Cutler
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
So we can tell them how badly that we need more H1B's
Who the hell cares what or who the rich cats at the top want to eat with? You'll note none of them said "the poor bastards I laid off or that guys who's career I destroyed when he trusted me and I stabbed him in the back." I've known 100's of executives and about 3% of them got there in an honorable way.
What I meant was one wouldn't brag about being like Gates if more knew his tactics. Perhaps ruthlessness is a necessary evil of a modern society, but people should at least be aware that it's being used.
Note I admire Steve Jobs far more than Gates because Jobs had a nose for what FUTURE consumers and movie goers would want (even though he was a still a jerk). Microsoft merely purchased or copied good existing products made by other co's and bundled them together.
Table-ized A.I.
Charles Babbage
Ivan Sutherland
Douglas Englebart
Max Planck
Niels Bohr
Olinto de Pretto