Gates' Last Day At Microsoft 467
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?"
Re:Obligatory: A Gold Watch ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Perfect present (Score:4, Informative)
It appears that he already has [slashdot.org] a few [slashdot.org] accounts here. [slashdot.org]
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]
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.
Re:Nothing (Score:2, Informative)
Bill Gates last day video (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The ability to seperate himself truely from.. (Score:4, Informative)
Charity is a pretty good spot to recoup karma, IMHO. Certainly better than hookers, blackjack, and coke.
The "Charity" is a front. It makes for-profit investments and has pledged not to review its investments for their ethical acceptability. Everything you need to know about the Gates foundation can be summed up by their response to Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation [latimes.com], an LA Times investigative article (I know, I was as shocked as you must be) which tells the story of the Gates Foundation's investment in big oil that is killing people in the places in which they claim to try to be saving them. This is my favorite paragraph:
Now, keep in mind that the Gates Foundation is not restricted to making holding investments, they are allowed to make them for profit. The profit ostensibly goes right back into charity, right? But here's the issue. As of January 2007 (when the article was published) they'd spent nearly twice as much on sucking oil out of the region (killing people in the process) than on actually helping anyone! And let's not get into what percentage of that money spent is actually applied effectively...
Bill Gates is not interested in helping anyone. Remember how the idea of a presidential bid for Gates was floated in the media? That was not a mistake. It was a test. It did not go over well; millions of the best-connected people on the planet certainly spoke their mind on the issue on every public forum they could find. Now, he is sitting on top of one of the largest fortunes on the planet, in charge of doling out money both to the greedy companies raping the land, and to help people who are being harmed by them. If you follow the money, though, you can see where priorities lie.
Gates has placed himself in a position of power which makes his former position at the top of Microsoft look like the elementary school yard bully on top of the pitcher's mound winning a game of king of the hill, and this is not a cause for celebration. He is not there to do good deeds.
Re:What a silly question (Score:3, Informative)
A UNIX manual, of course!
Microsoft already knows UNIX. They were responsible for the most widely used variant of the 80s. They sold it off to be rebranded as SCO UNIX when they shifted focus to Windows NT.
Let me give you a bit of history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix [wikipedia.org]
Re:Retirement Gift (Score:3, Informative)
I think you need a couple [gnu.org] of history [tug.org] lessons [dssresources.com].
Re:Possible Retirement Gifts (Score:3, Informative)
# Ubuntu...and by that I mean "humanity to others" -- actually, a wish of good luck as he concentrates more in philantrophy. As much as I (and c'mon, I can't be alone here) enjoy Microsoft bashing, I think the Gates foundation could (continue to) actually do a lot of good.
One problem here, his foundation does not stick to healthcare issues. That's right, they spread alot of Microsoft software around and from what I've heard, you get those Microsoft software deals as long as you agree to reject open source software. So Bill is not going to be spending more time helping the world, he's just moving to spread Microsoft Windows and MS Office to more children. You know, like a crack dealer looking for future revenue except the crack dealer isn't preventing customers from getting their fix from another dealer.
LoB
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
Bill Gates
The WSJ has an article looking at the struggle Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer had in switching around their Junior/Senior relationship.
Things became so bitter that, on one occasion, Gates stormed out of a meeting in a huff after a shouting match in which Mr. Ballmer jumped to the defense of several colleagues, according to an individual present at the time. After the exchange, Mr. Ballmer seemed "remorseful," the person said.
Once Gates leaves, "I'm not going to need him for anything. That's the principle," Mr. Ballmer says. "Use him, yes, need him, no."
Linus Torvalds
Ballmer is also known as a vocal critic of competing companies and their products. He has referred to the free Linux software system as a "[â¦] cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." Ballmer was trying to articulate his concern that the GNU GPL license employed by such software requires that all derivative software be made open source.
[edit] Lucovsky/Google
In 2005, Mark Lucovsky alleged in a sworn statement to a Washington state court that Ballmer became highly enraged upon hearing that Lucovsky was about to leave Microsoft for Google, picked up his chair and threw it across his office. Referring to Google CEO Eric Schmidt (who previously worked for competitors Sun and Novell), Ballmer allegedly said, "Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google," then resumed trying to persuade Lucovsky to stay at Microsoft.[14][15] Ballmer has described the incident as a "gross exaggeration of what actually took place."
Cut directly from wikipedia (probably one of the reasons Microsoft wanted to merge with yahoo)
Re:Maybe a commodore amiga (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The ability to seperate himself truely from.. (Score:5, Informative)
Don't you think this is a little unfair?
I mean, its obvious that most of BillG's wealth given to the foundation must have been MS stock (or some stock anyhow). Given that, the foundation will just bleed dry if they don't invest for maximum profits. And the more profitable their investments, the more impact the foundation can have.
Now owning stock in some company that does bad/evil stuff hardly makes you the perpetrator of the crime. I mean, the company is not going to behave different with/without the investment from the foundation. It makes to difference to them who actually owns their stock (unless it's a question of controlling stakes, proxy votes etc. -- and that didn't seem to be the case in the article you linked).
On top of that, it's really unfair when you say
Now, he is sitting on top of one of the largest fortunes on the planet, in charge of doling out money both to the greedy companies raping the land, and to help people who are being harmed by them.
Because again -- he did not dole out money to the company -- he has not made a loan or a gift to these companies. He's simply using the profits generated from their share price appreciation. And poetically, it goes into the people being harmed by this corporation.
I'm not sure where you got the presidential campaign thing from. And why you're so cynical about his intentions. Have you heard his Harvard speech last year?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXCVYtYWVyU [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4Q1T70VwfM [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXKrQBxJViQ [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rh9Aj7WsKE [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnHkUDxfmXE [youtube.com]
And have you seen the progress being made by GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization)? They have already prevented over 2.5 million children's deaths in the third world. The Gates Foundation was an active partner in creating and funding GAVI.
When you listen to Gates talk about solving problems for people in the most wretched of conditions, you'll realize -- he's got a different and fresh perspective compared to people who have worked in this field before. He's got a lot to learn from them, but he brings unique skills to the table, and a unique problem-solving ability.