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Gates On a Plane: Alaska Airlines Inflight Entertainment Stars Bill Gates (miamiherald.com)
theodp writes: On Tuesday, it was announced that Alaska Airlines will make a new Code.org series of six short videos starring Microsoft's Bill Gates on How Computers Work available as inflight entertainment. "Because students and adults alike can learn from these videos," wrote Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi, "we are pleased to announce Khan Academy and Alaska Airlines will make them available beyond Code.org classrooms."
The original submission notes that Gates (and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) have contributed millions to both educational groups, but Alaska Airlines calls the videos "entertaining and approachable," and says they'll start appearing on their flights in April.
But the videos are also available online, and besides Gates also feature appearances by former Apple designer May Li Khoe and Nat Brown, one of the creators of Microsoft's Xbox gaming system.
The original submission notes that Gates (and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) have contributed millions to both educational groups, but Alaska Airlines calls the videos "entertaining and approachable," and says they'll start appearing on their flights in April.
But the videos are also available online, and besides Gates also feature appearances by former Apple designer May Li Khoe and Nat Brown, one of the creators of Microsoft's Xbox gaming system.
Listening to Bill Gates drone on about whatever is one small step better than sitting in a coach seat next to Andy Dick on a 16-hour trip to Australia.
No one will need more than 6 videos to learn coding
I have had it with these motherfucking Gates on this motherfucking plane!
Right. Unlike all other forms of videos, commercials, etc, which are purely informative.
Tape 2: Security
Nothing against Bill Gates but didn't anyone notice it was always Steve Ballmer selling Microsoft not Gates. I think its great to educate people to a higher plain on PC's and how they work.
At this point he has pretty much unwound himself out of MS. Also MS is going towards open source stacks. One of the currently popular tech stacks out there was invented and maintained by them (typescript).
He *is* a competent programmer. He should do decently. He is not Steve Jobs level of audience engagement but he is not terrible at it either.
The downside to something like this is little 'lab' time. You really learn by doing. Watching 6 hours of lectures does not make you a programmer.
Fine, rich bloke lectures kids on how stuff works in a trivialised manner.
Just as long as he doesn't have a foot-long hotdog and wiggles his arse as he walks away. Still traumatised by that, k guys.
I'll choose another airline then.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
full of howl-inducing inaccuracies, generalizations, and implications that Microsoft-based computers are the end-all-be-all of computing. But I'll bet they'll contain hackneyed comparisons like "the CPU--or (spoken slowly) Central Processing Unit--is the brains of a computer".
Oy! I rather hope these are soon-to-be-available on YouTube for our entertainment.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
But commercials are obviously commercials., This will be masquerading as a documentary.
Oops! Missed that part. Have to check them out.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
airbus.sys has crashed
I can just imagine the first video:
"Hi, I'm Bill Gates, and this is a computer. To run a computer, you must have software that tells the computer what to do. The most important software is the operating system that controls every aspect of the computer's operation."
"Windows is an operating system created by Microsoft, the company I founded. So let's put Windows on this computer. Now let's make few adjustments to Windows so that our competition's programs won't run on it any more. Now let's sit back and let the money pour in." (At this point dollar bills start showering down on Bill.)
"Let's make it better. Let's cut deals with computer manufacturers so that Windows is the only operating system they will install on their products. Now even more money pours in." (The shower of dollar bills increases.)
"Now let's charge hundreds of dollars for Microsoft products, because only our software will run on our operating system. Boy, are we making money now!" (The torrent of money buries Bill up to his neck.)
"And now I'm one of the richest people on earth. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how computers work."
I'd be a lot more entertained watching Bill Gates being thrown out of the plane.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
*Austria
... will not be doing a flight safety video for them.
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Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
Hey, it's Alaska Airlines, maybe they can get some old clips of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens explaining how the Internet is a "series of tubes", as the next step in their curriculum toward a highly-valued certificate in "Understanding Computers Via Inappropriate Metaphors".
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
So after flying for 640km the plane stops and falls out of the sky.
... in the Terminals.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
where Bill explains how to evade paying taxes by transferring money to a foundation where it is still totally controlled by you and your next of kin, and then have that foundation invest that money in companies you hold shares of, at the same time getting kissed your ass by the media who now praise you as being a "philanthropist"...
... as entertainment, even if it was the only option.
Documentary about Gates foundation testing vaccines on n1ggers in Africa..
Hopefully one episode is about how the BSOD works :P
Requiem for the American Dream
Don't let the regular folk know that computers are actually very simple, then I can't demmand a premium wage as compensation for the years I spent studying the science of them. Oh wait I'm Australian, I make the same as the admin people do. Never mind.
Like Windows in a submarine.
Alaska Airlines better stock up on barf bags!
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
I notice that almost nobody has actually looked at the videos, they are fine. If your knowledge of computers extends little further than using a cell phone then they are quite informative. They even have Vint Cerf explaining DNS. There is no Microsoft angle and there are plenty of young and hip designers and coders explaining stuff.
So why post *political* viewpoints without bothering to look at the evidence? You are no more nerds than Facebook is likely to win a Nobel science prize.
Time to move on to the Biological Sciences where the next 50 years of real innovation is going to be. Genetics, agriculture, medicine, viruses, microbiomes are where it is at for nerds now and these are the exciting fields to get into. Bill Gates is not stupid which is why he is working on curing Malaria and not on a talking smartphone.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
This little gem...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Bill Gates Microsoft farewell video
Back in the 1990s, most schools in Bavaria had compulsory programming lessons. Typically either BASIC or TurboPascal. This was changed in the late 1990s to Office 97 courses, in part because of lobbying from Microsoft.
To demonstrate, this plane's autopilot runs on Windows Vista. Pay no attention to that planet approaching at terminal velocity.