Bill Gates Is First Guest Editor In Time Magazine's 94-Year History (geekwire.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Time invited Bill Gates to be the first guest editor in the 94-year history of the magazine. Among the news Bill deemed fit to print in Time's first augmented-reality-enhanced issue were articles by wife Melinda and pal Bono, both of whom graced the cover of Time with Bill as the 2005 Persons of the Year... Another article reveals that "the four learning hacks Bill Gates swears by" include Khan Academy (a $10+ million Gates Foundation partner), tech-backed Code.org (to which Bill, the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, and Steve Ballmer have given somewhere north of $17M), the Big History Project (to which Bill had contributed a "modest $10 million" as of 2014), and The Teaching Company (which got Bill stoked about Big History).
The issue also includes Gates' "four favorite ways to give back" and "six innovations that could change the world." In fact, the theme of the whole issue is "optimism," with 62-year-old Gates writing that "On the whole, the world is getting better. This is not some naively optimistic view; it's backed by data. Look at the number of children who die before their fifth birthday. Since 1990, that figure has been cut in half. That means 122 million children have been saved in a quarter-century, and countless families have been spared the heartbreak of losing a child."

Another optimistic essay came from Daily Show host Trever Noah, who writes, "Mock millennials all you want. Here's why they give me hope."

Comments

By all means, give back

[drinkypoo]

Give back to the people who worked for the corporations you drove out of business with illegally anticompetitive business practices, Bill. Give back to the people who had to clean up after your deliberate attempts to sabotage Linux. Give life back to the people that your investments have killed. Give back the tax revenues you've avoided paying even though you're one of the biggest beneficiaries of the system. Let us have back control of education. Please, Bill. Give Back.

Re:By all means, give back

[drinkypoo]

Companies like Sun and DEC deserved to be crushed.

I don't know how open OpenVMS actually was so I can't speak to that, but commercial UNIX(tm) was at least based on open standards, even when it was not based on open source. Several commercial Unixes including SunOS 4.x and NeXTStep were based on BSD even after that became open source, at least the -lite version, and System V was sufficiently well documented that knocking it off was eminently possible. And in fact, that's what happened; except for some very early examples, Linux has always been more SysVish and POSIXish than BSDish. So even though SunOS 5 was not open source, its general adherence to System V style meant that it helped open the door for Linux. I personally installed several Linux systems in a Sun shop at the time specifically on the basis of the similarity to SunOS 5 at a lower cost. They were able to run tools like magic and pspice directly for a fraction of the cost of running them on Sun workstations, and users were able to remotely run verilog tools as if they were local due to the common adherence to the same graphics standards. Having to manually bash out XF86Config files was a small price to pay compared to the large literal price of the Sun hardware.

They were as hostile to open source as Microsoft, pushing Solaris and VMS, along with proprietary GUIs, until it was too late to matter.

The proprietary GUI included with SunOS 4 was a bit wonky, I'll give you that. But the GUI bundled with SunOS 5 was based on Motif, which was open source long before that was hip. That is why the first Linux desktops were motif-based. You could cheaply buy a source license for Motif (which was always open source), and ISTR there being at least two independent commercial ports for Linux. One way to get a Motif license indirectly was to get Caldera Network Desktop, which came with a Motif-based desktop similar to SCO Open Desktop (with icons on a desktop.) I don't remember if there is any relation between the two products, though you would certainly expect there to be. AIX's and HP bundled the same GUI that SunOS did (CDE) which was actually based on HP-VUE. CDE was superseded even in these commercial Unixes by GNOME, which has been the de facto standard for the Unix desktop ever since.

Motif was released as free open source software in 2012 (a few months after CDE.) It's especially interesting in the context of this conversation because Microsoft was on the Motif WG. That's why Windows [NT] 3.x and Motif operate essentially identically, with a menu in the upper-left of the window, buttons in the upper right, and distinct resize handles at every corner and every side of every non-palette-style window. This behavior persists in Windows to this day, although the visual style has changed substantially, with the grab handles disappearing entirely and being only implied by the pointer changing during mouseover. This also continues to be the dominant window handling paradigm on the Unix desktop.