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Gates' Last Day At Microsoft
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday June 27, @04:13PM
from the keep-it-clean dept.
from the keep-it-clean dept.
mrogers writes "Today is Bill Gates' last day as a full-time employee of Microsoft. After 33 years at the company, the one-time richest man in the world will be retiring at 52 to spend more time guiding the charitable Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. What would you buy him as a retirement gift?"
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Ooh! Oooh! I know! (Score:5, Funny)
A shiny, new laptop loaded with Vista, of course. He's earned it!
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So... (Score:5, Insightful)
When can we look forward to a day without Ballmer? That would truly be a day to celebrate.
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Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
But it's so much fun to watch him run Microsoft into the ground. Don't take that away!
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Re:Ooh! Oooh! I know! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing. I have already given him enough money by paying for his OS when I want to run linux.
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A Mac (Score:5, Funny)
(I mean, judging from Microsoft's product lines for the last twenty years, it's what he really wants...)
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Retirement Gift (Score:5, Insightful)
For all my *NIX & FOSS zealotry, I can't help but respect what he's brought to the world. His & MS's achievements have been broad and they've paved the way for multiple industries. Maybe I wouldn't be writing this on a Linux box if it wasn't for Windows
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Re:Retirement Gift (Score:5, Insightful)
...MS's achievements have been broad and they've paved the way for multiple industries. Maybe I wouldn't be writing this on a Linux box if it wasn't for Windows :)
I do not agree with that assumption. First off, Unix was not created because of MS and/or Windows and Linux was created as a Unix clone, not specifically to compete with windows. If the pc hardware was not around it would have been built on different hardware.
Next, even without MS, IBM would have still been looking for an OS for its new computing platform. Because it was IBM, which at the time was the de facto standard/monopoly, there still would have been a clone market even without MS's help. If the clone market did not provide enough cheap hardware, there would have been cheap hardware from either the computers running CP/M or even the home market (Amiga and/or older 8bits computers)
Linux evolved from someone's desire to clone minix, not from a need to use something other than windows.
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Re:Retirement Gift (Score:5, Informative)
What has Bill Gates personally achieved? Note that personally ripping off the ideas of others is not an achievement.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/15/could_bill_gates_write_code/ [theregister.co.uk]
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Re:Retirement Gift (Score:5, Interesting)
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Last day, huh? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Last day, huh? (Score:5, Funny)
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640kb!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:640kb!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
That should be all he'll ever need.
Oh wait, You don't mind me karma-whoring off you, do you?
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The ability to seperate himself truely from.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft and proprietary software. What is good for Microsoft and proprietary software conflicts with a lot of good charitable work.
Giving any poor organization the first copy of Microsoft software for no cost isn't going to help them in the long term.
To do this, he needs to get rid of his stake in Microsoft stock.
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Re:The ability to seperate himself truely from.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill Murray once observed, if you want to be rich and famous, try being rich first. See if that's enough.
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Perfect present (Score:5, Funny)
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I got him a charitable donation (Score:5, Funny)
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The *real* question is... (Score:5, Funny)
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Bill Gates last day video (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I would get him. . . (Score:5, Informative)
"Taking DOS which was bought, and advancing it to Windows and then NT "
NT was a clean-room effort spearheaded by Dave Cutler who did Vax VMS; that's why NT sorta works.
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Re:I would get him. . . (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Obligatory: A Gold Watch ... (Score:5, Funny)
"... that runs Windows ..." ... ME. Enjoy your watch, Bill!
Upgrade the pain! Make it run Vista... All the gore of WinME with the added pain of UAC!
"You are trying to check the time, Allow or Deny?"
Of course, you'd need to upgrade the graphics card and memory in the watch. Oh, let's not forget more storage space. And it'll probably need a faster processor. ... Maybe a sundial is easier...
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Re:the #1 portable media player on the planet.. (Score:5, Funny)
Odd, looking at the brown Zune I could have sworn it was a number two.
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Re:What about... (Score:5, Funny)
Better yet: a 30 foot tall armour plated robot penguin that launches high explosive packed herrings while shrieking "DON'T FEAR ME!!!!" through a 10,000 watt speaker system, programmed to seek and destroy.
Seems fair...
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Re:Maybe a commodore amiga (Score:5, Interesting)
Irving Gould is as responsible for the death of the Amiga as Bill Gates, maybe more so. As much as I adore my C=64, 128, Amiga 1000 and 2000 w/Toaster, Commodore never had the slightest clue as to how to market the Amiga.
In 20/20 hindsight, it was the first true multimedia machine, and could playback video at decent framerates (the DCTV add-on was truely amazing for its time), however Commodore tried to market it as a business machine. As if they had a chance of competing with IBM for that marketshare.
Only too little, too late did they make an inspired version, the CDTV (and later the CD32), which made the Amiga a component of a home entertainment system, (which only now are Microsoft and Apple trying to do), but, typical Commodore, they cheap'ed it to death, and then never threw any money at actually marketing it. As such, almost no one has ever heard of the thing.
Newtek sold more Amigas than Commodore did, by rebranding it as a 'Video Toaster System', and many of those toasters are still in use today (although to be fair, many are also being offloaded on eBay).
But to say that Bill Gates killed the Amiga is to distort history as badly as most people do when they think that Bill invented the computer. Or think that Windows is the only 'PC' there is.
(God, to think that I'm actually defending Bill Gates, a person I'd like to have shot out of a canon more than any other individual in history....) Look what you've done to me, damn you!!!
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