Bill Gates Is First Guest Editor In Time Magazine's 94-Year History (geekwire.com) 64
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."
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."
By all means, give back (Score:4, Insightful)
Give back to the people who worked for the corporations you drove out of business with illegally anticompetitive business practices [sfgate.com], Bill. Give back to the people who had to clean up after your deliberate attempts to sabotage Linux [techrights.org]. Give life back to the people that your investments have killed [latimes.com]. Give back the tax revenues you've avoided paying [theguardian.com] even though you're one of the biggest beneficiaries of the system. Let us have back control of education [washingtonpost.com]. Please, Bill. Give Back.
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A lot, but never heard of a legitimate claim for Bill Gates.
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A lot, but never heard of a legitimate claim for Bill Gates.
When the "Dark Cloud over Good Works of Gates Foundation" article originally came out, the Gates Foundation published a press release on their site saying that they would be reviewing their investments' ethical ramifications. The next day, they took that down, and put up another one saying that they wouldn't be reviewing the ethicality of their investments, because that was hard.
They know what they are doing.
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I hadn't read that before. That's a real shame. Pollution, real pollution, is definitely not any better than using a bullet. I'll concede this one!
It's quite amazing, really (Score:1)
How the erstwhile richest man on earth manages to buy himself this access to Time to, well, [i]signal his virtue[/i]... ... and yet remain utterly irrelevant as anything but the man who got rich holding us all back.
I no longer hate him or his company because neither has much of any relevance left: They can safely be ignored. What we do need to do is learn from the damage, and work around it where we can't repair it. There always was a lot to be done. Thanks to him, now that much more. But that's really all
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Give back to the people who worked for the corporations you drove out of business
Basic computing infrastructure software should not be controlled by "other corporations". It should be free. We got this right with the Internet, but we should have gotten it right with operating systems as well. If Linux or FreeBSD had been available in 1985 rather than 1991, then Windows would have never become dominant.
Companies like Sun and DEC deserved to be crushed. They were as hostile to open source as Microsoft, pushing Solaris and VMS, along with proprietary GUIs, until it was too late to matt
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I give you that Ken Olsen said "Unix is snake oil" but that was not because it was open source - it wasn't then. And he refused to port VMS to the 486 - which would not have been that difficult technically, but that has nothing to do with open source either.
Sun, OTOH has behaved disgracefully, and all I can say in their defence is they wer
Re:By all means, give back (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I don't know how open OpenVMS actually was so
It wasn't. The "Open" in "OpenVMS" was marketing BS.
commercial UNIX(tm) was at least based on open standards
DEC was openly hostile to Unix ... at a time when 90% of Unix ran on DEC hardware. This sounds stupid ... and it was.
Sun used Unix, but was openly hostile to open source on their systems. They fought against X-Windows, and pushed their own crappy proprietary GUI. You mention Motif (which was closed source until 2012), but Sun was actually opposed to Motif for years. They switched from BSD Unix to SysV (Solaris) in the face of strong objections from dev
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They even removed the C compiler from the system to keep people from downloading and compiling stuff from the Internet.
Yes, the Sun shop I worked for had a license for the sunspro compiler, and I'd compile stuff on whatever the big machine was and then distribute it out to the other machines. We made liberal use of nis and nfs so it was all easy enough. But binaries of GNU software were a thing for Sun machines way back, including gcc.
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He used the opportunity to shamelessly self promote. Free advertising for himself at Time's expense. Nice move.
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Is that idea even relevant any more. Perhaps you are still trapped in the lie that US main stream media has any value beyond advertising. They are straight up propaganda, all the big hoop de doop about a first ever guest what ever, so the guest did it themselves instead of paying an editor already on the payroll to do it for them. Who is advertising whom in this piece. Is Time desperate for attention, ohhhh look we have Wee Willie Gates the turd as editor, is Wee Willie, desperate for attention, ohh look I
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He played the same game by the same rules that his completion played. And a big part of MS's success was innovators lining up to sell their technology to MS. Three of the most popular MS applications were not developed by MS. WordPerfect , Lotus1-2-3, and Dbase dominated the MS application space but the owners of these applications ultimately sold their technology to MS for big pay days and in some cases received big pay days while being given jobs at MS. And then MS Office came into being. And don't forget
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WordPerfect , Lotus1-2-3, and Dbase dominated the MS application space but the owners of these applications ultimately sold their technology to MS for big pay days and in some cases received big pay days while being given jobs at MS.
Those companies lost their positions in the market because, under the direction of Bill Gates, Microsoft abused its dominant position in the marketplace in a way that the USDoJ found to be illegal and unethical (see GP comment for link.)
And don't forget Netscape had a 90% browser market share in the internet browser space and pissed it away by making some of the stupidest mistakes possible. They screwed up their product so bad that even IE 3.0 looked better.
To whom?
MS earned their dominance because nobody else stepped up and competed with them.
Microsoft engaged in a number of business deals in bad faith which had the effect of stifling competition.
In tax related matters he also played the same game with the same rules as everyone else.
Many wealthy people are the same kind of asshole as Bill Gates, but this conversation is about Bill Gates. Try to stay on topic.
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Yep. Not a dime from Bill Gates to the FSF or the EFF.
He really is a piece of work.
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Peddle that garbage elsewhere.
Any media which is not anti-Microsoft is not reality-based, and is the actual garbage. Microsoft has cast a long shadow over the tech industry, and literally held computing back by possibly as much as a decade with the manipulative practices that the USDoJ found they had engaged in. Bill Gates is a career criminal.
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Right. Have Bill give back to those poor, poor well educated, well paid people working for Microsoft's competitors, as opposed to the dirt-poor people the Gates Foundation is currently focusing on. Makes sense to me.
Keep your nerd-rage to yourself, 1%-er.
WIndows 8! (Score:2)
And other bad ideas.
Newsflash! (Score:2, Insightful)
"Man last relevant in 2001 edits magazine last relevant in 1996! Details at 10!"
Giving back? (Score:1)
If Bill really wants to give back, then give me back some of my money your corporation made from its illegal business practices.
But that feeling may stem from the fact that I'm still pissed that the torturing war criminal George Bush torpedoed the court decision to break Microsoft up into multiple companies for Microsoft's multiple violations of our anti-trust laws.
> On the whole, the world is getting better.
Starving polar bears and the clear and present danger of global warming loudly say otherwise. :(
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I'd wish they'd fix their software even more than getting money back. My entire weekend is going to be wasted trying to install KB4056890. Looks like it's going to take through the weekend to update 21 servers since Microsoft's update keeps failing, and I have to keep hitting retry. Security updates shouldn't be so unreliable.
I don't understand the worship of Gates (Score:1)
Slashdotters knees jerking... (Score:2)
In utterly unrelated news (Score:3)
Time has given Windows 10 a 5 star review. "The perfect software," the news weekly says.
Jumping to conclusions (Score:2)
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."
Giving them prophylactics and education so they won't make children that die would also spare heartbreaks and help curb population growth. We're not an endangered species; we don't need as many child births as possible.
And, cynically, a small but significant number of children dying is helpful from an evolutionary point of view. Unless there is competition and culling, the gene pool will become less healthy over time. Make sterilization mandatory when saving a child's life, whether it's a rich child or a
He Should Donate To The MS Veterans Foundation (Score:2)
Why all the hate against Bill? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re: Why all the hate against Bill? (Score:2)
It sounds like you're trying to say that Microsoft isn't as bad as ISIS.
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Good news. (Score:1)
It's nice to hear that Sonny Bono is being productive these days.
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He's dead, you insensitive clod!
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He's dead, you insensitive clod!
How quickly you forget what he was doing just before that tree got him. (If only ski season had come early that year...)
Graced? (Score:3)
"graced the cover of Time with Bill as the 2005 Persons of the Year."
Like Stalin and Hitler who also 'graced' the cover in their day?
It's not an honor.
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it's in the mind of the beholder, I'm sure PRAVDA said "graced"
How Bill Gates single handly destroyed computing (Score:3)