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The Final CES Keynote From Bill Gates 182

Posted by Zonk from the won't-be-the-same-without-him dept.
Sunday evening saw the final CES keynote delivered by Bill Gates in his current role with the Microsoft corporation. Speculation about big announcements generally seemed to be for naught, as his last address at the show focused more on broad concepts than blockbuster news. "Gates outlined three major themes for the second digital decade-high definition displays with 3D experiences and high quality video and audio, connected services and the power of natural interfaces. Gates had a vision early of those themes, but his quest to make the Tablet PC, Media Center PCs and natural interfaces, such as speech and touch, more mainstream has not been realized." A full description of the talk, including his Guitar Hero finale with Slash, is available in Engadget's liveblog of the event.
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The Final CES Keynote From Bill Gates More

The Final CES Keynote From Bill Gates

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  • Silverlight? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07, 2008 @08:16AM (#21941158)
    What the fuck is Silverlight and why do I have to download yet another plugin to see the CES page? Hasn't Microsoft ever heard of Flash?

    • Re:Silverlight? (Score:5, Informative)

      by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 ) on Monday January 07, 2008 @08:25AM (#21941230) Homepage Journal
      Silverlight is Microsoft's answer to Flash, more or less. It's supposed to make Web applications more GUI-like and introduce fancy things like 3D graphics and advanced user interfaces to Web applications.

      Microsoft's heard of Flash, I'm sure, but I'm also sure they prefer their own in-house developed stuff to anything coming out of a competitor.

      • Re:Silverlight? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by AndGodSed ( 968378 ) on Monday January 07, 2008 @08:34AM (#21941294) Homepage Journal
        Yep. It's their business model.

        Create your own, force it on your customers. Of course they would prefer that their tech become commonplace, besides, flash is mainstream on Linux too, so if they can find a way to lock Linux out by making an alternative they delay Linux growth in market share.

        • Re:Silverlight? (Score:5, Informative)

          by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 ) on Monday January 07, 2008 @08:38AM (#21941318) Homepage Journal
          Microsoft has made the spec relatively open and it's being implemented by Miguel de Icaza [tirania.org] & Co. as part of the Mono project.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by tgd ( 2822 )
            Worth also mentioning that its not only open and being implemented as part of Mono, its being directly supported by MS and the Silverlight team.

          • Re:Silverlight? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by EvilRyry ( 1025309 ) on Monday January 07, 2008 @10:27AM (#21942228) Journal

            As siblings have mentioned, Moonlight will likely always be a few steps behind silverlight. Also, there's no guarantee the spec will remain open in the future (see SMB, IE for Mac/UNIX for more info).

            More importantly, Moonlight will never be truly Free. Take a look at the audio/video formats it supports. VC-1... sure great for video, also have the option of WMV which I have a feeling will be quite popular. Audio - WMA or MP3. From Miguel de Icaza's web log [tirania.org]

            Microsoft will make the codecs for video and audio available to users of Moonlight from their web site. The codecs will be binary codecs, and they will only be licensed for use with Moonlight on a web browser

            Sure these formats have been/will be reverse engineered, but with DRM out there in the world it will make decoding DRMed media with open source codecs illegal! So much for free!

            This doesn't make Flash any better, I'm just saying that people who proclaim that Silverlight is great because it will have a real open source implementation aren't telling or don't know the whole story.


            • This doesn't make Flash any better, I'm just saying that people who proclaim that Silverlight is great because it will have a real open source implementation aren't telling or don't know the whole story.

              All that being the case, I think you still have to ask yourself:

              1) Is this a lot more than Microsoft has historically done, openness-wise?

              2) If you had heard a few years ago that Microsoft was trying to make a Flash-killer, would you have expected any kind of support from them in making it run on Linux?

              3)

            • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

              by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 )
              Oh, I'm not saying that Silverlight is great. As AKAImBatman would point out, before you implement Silverlight, you should really read the WHATWG specs [whatwg.org], which are being developed in a truly open process, vs. Silverlight and Moonlight, which are nothing more than implementations of some spec developed for some proprietary crap.

            • Re:Silverlight? (Score:4, Insightful)

              by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Monday January 07, 2008 @12:06PM (#21943376) Homepage Journal

              Microsoft will make the codecs for video and audio available to users of Moonlight from their web site. The codecs will be binary codecs, and they will only be licensed for use with Moonlight on a web browser

              Sure these formats have been/will be reverse engineered, but with DRM out there in the world it will make decoding DRMed media with open source codecs illegal! So much for free!

              Not to mention that the codecs will only run on IA32 or whatever other platform MS chooses to grace with their presence, and explicitly will be useless for anything outside the web.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by caluml ( 551744 )
            Explain to me why anybody on a non-Microsoft platform would want to run .NET (which from what I can tell is pretty much a direct Java copy) via Mono? IANAD(eveloper).
            Java already exists, is open, tested, and runs on lots of stuff.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by tgd ( 2822 )
        Not really... they serve similar goals, but its really MS's way of getting the (MUCH more powerful) .NET development environment in the hands of rich client content web developers.

        The uptake is slow, but IMO its really a better technology than Flash. It gives far better language tools to the programmers and provides much better separation of design, interface and code where doing larger projects with bigger teams will be easier.

        Silverlight 1.0 was very flash-like -- the framework wasn't fully fleshed out as

        • Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)

          by encoderer ( 1060616 ) on Monday January 07, 2008 @10:06AM (#21942032)
          Uptake has been slow, but when you're Microsoft, you can afford a slow adoption rate. Especially for a technology like this. Microsoft sees the writing on the wall. This is going to be a major component of their web strategy, I'm sure.

          And when it comes down to it, this is just plainly a better technology than Flash. The only advantage flash has is it's adoption rate and mind-share. Eventually these will be neutralized.

          The newest version of ActionScript is a HUGE improvement upon its predecessors. It truly is. But when it comes to building full-featured web apps that look and act like native rich-client apps, it's still nearly as hard to do that with AS in Flash as it is to do it with JS/Ajax/HTML.

          But with silverlight 1.1 you get the ability to use any CLR-based language-- C#, C++.Net, J#, Python.Net, Ruby.Net, TCL.Net, VB.Net, etc etc. You also get the advantage of the largest framework ever shipped with a language (.Net, of course) and the huge amount of existing code. Not to mention, if you've already got an app -- web based or rich client -- written in .Net, you can port it to silverlight without a terrible amount of work. ESPECIALLY if it was designed using an MVC pattern (or, at least, a 2-tiered approach that would allow you to reuse the model & controller code).

          I'm really not a big Microsoft fan. I've spent most the last year developing with PHP on a LAMP stack. But if I was asked to build a large web based app with a rich-client feel and given the choice of Flash and Silverlight, not having ever tried either, I'd feel a lot better about the latter than I do the former.

          I'm not knocking flash. It's just that flash wasn't really designed to build large apps. It's just been manipulated into that in the past couple years. Silverlight, OTOH, was designed precisely for this reason.

          • Re:Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Lodragandraoidh ( 639696 ) on Monday January 07, 2008 @10:55AM (#21942484) Journal
            This looks great...until they break compatibility in some clever way to marginalize some segment.

            Its not about the tool itself; it is about what the Microsoft management/lawyers will do with it to negate their competition. They've done it before, many times. They've been convicted in an antitrust case, dragging it out long enough for a sympathetic administration to bail them out of hot water. They will do it again.

            Microsoft tools are snake oil.
            • "Microsoft tools are snake oil."

              My thoughts exactly. Silverlight is in the MS evolutionary stage where the tech is promising and many developers will want to experiment. Once a user base gets addicted to the crack, the terms will change. Silverlight is an attempt to push the .Net framework as much as possible. Personally, though Flash is kind of fun in some ways, I say no thanks to Flash and Silverlight.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by hxnwix ( 652290 )

            But if I was asked to build a large web based app with a rich-client feel and given the choice of Flash and Silverlight, not having ever tried either, I'd feel a lot better about the latter than I do the former.
            You'd try it, and they'd tell you to use flash. This is just like XPS. Never heard of XPS? Here, I'll find you a PDF document describing it...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by baadger ( 764884 )

        Microsoft's heard of Flash, I'm sure, but I'm also sure they prefer their own in-house developed stuff to anything coming out of a competitor.
        Microsoft weren't competing with Adobe with Flash *until* they brought out Silverlight.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dbIII ( 701233 )
        I hope they learned their lesson where active-x was supposed to be their answer to javascript but really added nothing extra apart from being a malware vector. Now that's something that's not quite so easy to do in javascript.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by hackstraw ( 262471 )
        Silverlight is Microsoft's answer to Flash, more or less. It's supposed to make Web applications more GUI-like and introduce fancy things like 3D graphics and advanced user interfaces to Web applications.

        Wasn't that Java's goals like 10 years ago?

    • I'm at work. Will I get fired for downloading Silverlight? Don't take this as a troll/flame/whatever, but do we really need another Microsoft imposed Standard, when there are already decent standards in place? I guess I'll never know what this story is about.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jackharrer ( 972403 )
        Actually as much as I don't like Msft, I think Silverlight is good. It makes Adobe to update Flash, it promotes competition and stops the stagnation that's been around for a long time. MPEG4 for Flash anybody? Why does it took so long to implement it? There was no need for Adobe to do it?

        Offtopic: Anybody's curious when Msft is going to buy Novell and Suse with it? So much Msft cash is going into Mono and similar projects sponsored by Novell...
      • Which particular "Decent Standard" would that be? SVG isn't really ready to take on Flash, and Flash itself is more or less undocumented outside Adobe, so the only application that will edit Flash reliably is... Flash.
    • Hasn't Microsoft ever heard of Flash?

      Yes, and they're trying to kill it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ari_j ( 90255 )
      What, no +1 Funny mods? Perhaps our AC friend was a mite too subtle.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrKaos ( 858439 )
      I think we have to keep in mind that Mr Gates lives in a world where he probably uses windows all the time, and in that world he lives in a "Billy Bubble"(tm) where what he say's goes in that world, therefore his perception of the actual world is skewed.

      Likelyhood of Mr Gates ever using a Mac - very small, likelyhood of Mr Gates using a Linux distribution - very unlikely.

      Changes afoot in the music industry suggest that the RIAA cartel are changing their attitude towards DRM so it's not much of a stretch t

  • Holodecks! (Score:3, Funny)

    by AndGodSed ( 968378 ) on Monday January 07, 2008 @08:20AM (#21941186) Homepage Journal
    The way games are getting better visual wise, and tech is getting more powerful, I have a feeling we might see at least an early version of a Holodeck in our lifetimes.

    Now I ALSO hope that by that time Linux will be the OS of choice for the manufacturer, I simply will not survive a BSOD in glorious Holodeck VR...

  • Gates on Tablet PCs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07, 2008 @08:34AM (#21941292)
    "The Tablet takes cutting-edge PC technology and makes it available wherever you want it, which is why I'm already using a Tablet as my everyday computer. It's a PC that is virtually without limits -- and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America." - Gates at COMDEX 2001

    And unlike the 640K story, there's an actual source [microsoft.com] for this quote.

    • Re:Gates on Tablet PCs (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Stormwatch ( 703920 ) <(rodrigogirao) (at) (hotmail.com)> on Monday January 07, 2008 @10:35AM (#21942328) Homepage

      "The Tablet takes cutting-edge PC technology and makes it available wherever you want it, which is why I'm already using a Tablet as my everyday computer. It's a PC that is virtually without limits -- and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America." - Gates at COMDEX 2001

      He is not completely mistaken, actually... [apple.com]

      • Nobody uses the iPhone as their main PC. A better comparison would be OLPC... which is more of a Laptop than a Tablet. But it is much more portable than Dell's which cost twice as much.

        Cost factors keep desktop computers relevant for gamers and businesses with a non-mobile workforce. Otherwise, Laptops + Smartphone are preferred. Five years from now, Laptops and Smartphone will merge into a user-friendly portable Tablet PC and kill those two markets. At least, that is my prediction... and five years

  • that video made me want to puke, what a geek! oh wait nvm....

  • Xbox 360 Ultimate (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rik Sweeney ( 471717 ) on Monday January 07, 2008 @08:53AM (#21941418) Homepage
    Well, it was supposed to be the Xbox 360 Ultimate, but after what happened over the weekend it's now being used to prop open a door.

  • Video of fun part (Score:4, Funny)

    by raffe ( 28595 ) * on Monday January 07, 2008 @08:56AM (#21941438) Journal
    clip of bill gs last day at the office [youtube.com]

  • The problem might be too much too soon (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kupfernigk ( 1190345 ) on Monday January 07, 2008 @08:57AM (#21941446)
    Those things never became mainstream because Microsoft was always trying to introduce them before either the hardware or the software were ready. They thought that people would accept something that actually did not work very well because their engineers thought it would be compelling.

    Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. Disruptive technologies gain traction fast when they have a compelling advantage and a short learning curve.

    For instance, cannon were a disruptive technology but had a very long learning curve, maybe hundreds of years. Railways, on the other hand, had a compelling advantage in speed and capacity, but had a relatively short learning curve because on the one hand there was a huge body of canal building knowledge to draw on when building railways, and on the other the user interface (buy ticket, get on train) was dirt simple. So railways spread rather fast.

    None of the ideas Microsoft have touted have had either a compelling advantage or a short learning curve. Speech input is simply less effective, for many reasons, than learning to type. Lugging around a tablet PC does not result in productivity gains for most people. And, as anyone who has ever tried to design a rule based decision support system knows, anything involving natural interfaces is simply very hard to do indeed, and the payback is rarely there except in a few niche markets.

    I believe that the reason for this is that many large corporations have simply forgotten who their customers are. Google will find it hard to do this because there is no lock-in, and their customers have no loyalty. They must listen to their two classes of customers - sellers and end users - or die. Microsoft doesn't seem, any more, to know whether its customers are the recording industry, computer manufacturers, CIOs or, a poor fourth, the actual end users of their computers. Apple could fall into the same trap, but at the moment (at least with personal computers) seems to have its eye on the ball.

    Microsoft is huge, bigger in revenue than IBM, and enormously rich. It is impossible to second guess them, and shorting their stock would be foolish. But anyone who has followed the trajectory, in recent years, of (say) Ford versus Toyota and Porsche, would have to agree that being very large is no guarantee of continuing success.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by elrous0 ( 869638 ) *
      MS has never really been about innovation so much as implementation. Their products have never been groundbreaking, but they are able to market them over the long haul very well. They know how to slowly nibble their way into markets thought impenetrable (like the browser market, once completely dominated by Netscape, and the game console market, once completely dominated by Sony). None of their ideas are particularly original, but they know how to mass produce them and get them into people's homes as well a

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by YeeHaW_Jelte ( 451855 )
      "Microsoft is huge, bigger in revenue than IBM, and enormously rich. It is impossible to second guess them, and shorting their stock would be foolish. But anyone who has followed the trajectory, in recent years, of (say) Ford versus Toyota and Porsche, would have to agree that being very large is no guarantee of continuing success."

      I'm not sure what you mean with that last example, but it seems you are missing a fact here: Toyota is the largest car manufactorer bar GM, and is set to surpass GM in years or m
      • You have completely missed my reference to "trajectory, in recent years". Once upon a time, Ford was much larger than Toyota. It also believed it had considerable lock in to its markets - in the UK a lot of its market is to companies to which it sells at large discounts (sound familiar) while any ordinary individual who goes out to buy a Ford (they exist, we can't all be engineers) gets a bit screwed.

        For Unix, see Toyota. Superior engineering and quality, bold experiments in production methods, interesting

    • Re:The problem might be too much too soon (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Warbothong ( 905464 ) on Monday January 07, 2008 @10:16AM (#21942138) Homepage
      Touch screens work on the iPhone because users are going to be doing the same thing anyway if the buttons were physical. Using touch technology exclusively on large areas has been around for years and years, and it is proven to be tiresome (the whole 'gorilla arms' thing). Moving images of photos around on a coffee table? Possibly, but organising a photo collection on such a huge screen by stretching around to touch the things I want? No thanks, I'd prefer a mouse because it's less effort. Use touch-based input for things not possible with other technology, or when people would be doing the same kind of thing anyway (like pressing buttons on a 'phone's keypad or a computer's keyboard), not because it is "natural" (walking is natural, but the wheel is one of the best discoveries yet made). Microsoft's dug themselves quite a firmly entrenched computing world BTW, so getting any significant numbers of people away from generic x86 + Windows XP + VisualBasic + generic USB mouse will be difficult unless they come up with something more impressive than specifying expensive customisation of items via a fingerpainting-accurate interface. In my opinion, if touchscreens were the only kind of pointing device people had thought of up until now then there would be a company like Microsoft doing exactly the same flashy (sorry, Silverlighty) demos as they are now, but replacing "new touch technology" with "new mouse technology" and replacing "natural" with "efficient".

    • Microsoft is huge, bigger in revenue than IBM, and enormously rich.

      Not according to financial data. MSFT have a 54 billion income, vs. 96 billion for IBM.

      Microsoft is facing a saturated market. Every desktop PC on the planet that could run an MS app is already doing so. The rest is running non-MS OSes and that percentage is growing. In the server world, Linux is a very strong competitor. Same in the consumer electronics world. Mobile phones? Against Symbian and Linux, Microsoft CE is losing market shar

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nexum ( 516661 )
        Absolutely, and it appears that there's a good chance that in just 6 months Apple have managed to outsell all Windows mobile devices combined with the iPhone. The technology market has turned, Microsoft had fumbled and is up against very strong competition in every one of its operating segments, every key product with the possible exception of Office has extremely tough competition. The 90's are long gone, Microsoft is simply not competing. In short, it is failing. Now, Microsoft is the most ungodly massi

    • Microsoft is huge, bigger in revenue than IBM, and enormously rich

      This isn't correct. IBM's revenues are nearly double those of Microsoft. Microsoft's profits, on the other hand, are 50% higher than IBM's. IBM is the larger company by far, but Microsoft has a higher profit margin and more liquid assets.

    • For instance, cannon were a disruptive technology but had a very long learning curve, maybe hundreds of years

      Yeah, that's why I use Nikon instead. Better ergonomics and user interface.

  • Bye-bye Billy... (Score:3, Funny)

    by ceeam ( 39911 ) on Monday January 07, 2008 @09:04AM (#21941494)
    ... your predictions always sucked and they do now. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. Oh, and thanks for nothing!
    • Before you blast the man, think long and hard about the fact that he is the first billionaire to ever publically give away his entire fortune to real charity (that's right, he's not even giving his own kids anything). That's way more than any of the geek "heroes" like Steve Jobs have done or will ever do for humanity.

      It's easy to bad-mouth his business practices, it's easy to bad-mouth his products. But I can't bad-mouth the man himself. He's way more charitable than I would be in the same circumstance.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dc29A ( 636871 ) *

        Before you blast the man, think long and hard about the fact that he is the first billionaire to ever publically give away his entire fortune to real charity (that's right, he's not even giving his own kids anything). That's way more than any of the geek "heroes" like Steve Jobs have done or will ever do for humanity.

        It's easy to bad-mouth his business practices, it's easy to bad-mouth his products. But I can't bad-mouth the man himself. He's way more charitable than I would be in the same circumstance.

        Did he earn his vast fortune in an ethical, and in some cases legal way?

        No.

        MS is a convicted monopolist on 3 continents. MS used every possible strong arm tactic to cram their shitty OS down on everyone's throat. It's very easy to bad mouth the man himself when he earned most of his fortune by screwing others.

        And I won't even mention BillG's "stellar" predictions. Now let me go back and continue work on my Tablet PC because it's more productive ... oh wait ...

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Chosen Reject ( 842143 )
        What about John D. Rockefeller? Though I suppose Rockefeller gave his kids some of his money. Then again, if you account for inflation, Rockefeller would have made Gates look poor.
      • He's not giving his kids anything? Got a cite for that? I heard he was giving his kids some money, just not all of it.

  • Give Bill a break (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GuyfromTrinidad ( 1074909 ) on Monday January 07, 2008 @09:26AM (#21941676)
    I think we need to cut Bill some slack as he rides off into the sunset. No one can dispute the impact that Microsoft and Gates has had on the world of computers and technology in general. I get it, for many of you "Microsoft is Evil" but let us use this opportunity to acknowledge what Bill has done for Tech, especially now that he is going to be focusing more on his humanitarian work. So from me, Thanks Bill and good luck.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by jejones ( 115979 )
      >...let us use this opportunity to acknowledge what Bill has done for Tech, especially now that he is going to be focusing more on his humanitarian work.

      From the Wikipedia article on Al Capone:

      "Capone often tried to whitewash his image and be seen as a community leader. For example, he started a program, which was continued for decades after his death, to fight rickets by providing a daily milk ration to Chicago school children. Also during the Great Depression, Capone opened up many soup kitchens for th

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by iphayd ( 170761 )
        I understand that your comparison is to show that not everyone is entirely evil, and not everyone is entirely good. However, it is not a good to compare someone like Gates (A monopolist) to someone like Capone (A murderer). It would have been better to compare his philanthropy to that of Dale Carnage or other monopolists.

    • Re:Give Bill a break (Score:5, Insightful)

      by paxgaea ( 219419 ) on Monday January 07, 2008 @09:46AM (#21941864)
      I think some of us pine for what could have been, not the mediocrity that we ended up with as we grew into our technological world (speaking as someone in his early 30's, growing up in the Atari age).

      The negative effect that monopolistic actions have had in stifling innovation has been extremely unfortunate, even if in some ways we don't even realize how unfortunate.

      Also, while I give him credit for what he has been doing lately, as far as I remember, Bill Gates was late to the humanitarian game too. I seem to remember him having to have external pressure applied to get going on that.

      Like many, he has (and will have) a mixed legacy.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Wylfing ( 144940 )

        I hope you don't get modded down, because that's a valid thing to say. Microsoft is the George Lucas of IT. A long time ago, they did a few great things, but then became victims of their own wild success. We didn't need the last 25 years to be sans Microsoft...it just would have turned out so much better if they had been not "won" quite so thoroughly.

        • Microsoft is the George Lucas of IT. A long time ago, they did a few great things, but then became victims of their own wild success.

          I know what great things of Lucas' you're referring to, but I'm struggling to find anything great that Microsoft has done.

      • I think some of us pine for what could have been, not the mediocrity that we ended up with as we grew into our technological world (speaking as someone in his early 30's, growing up in the Atari age).

        Whats even scarier/stranger, is that outside of Windows most all other computers use 30+ year old technology called UNIX.

        Software is only recently starting to get kinda interesting.

    • Acknowledge what Bill has done for technology? Sure. He's helped retard its development by about a decade. Things would be so much better for everybody if he'd just been a lawyer or something instead.

  • Gates is a visionary (Score:5, Insightful)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Monday January 07, 2008 @09:30AM (#21941720)
    who missed the emergence of the Internet for consumers. He had to go back and add the Internet to his The Road Ahead book after the fact. He had to go back and add Internet support to his operating system after the fact.

    This is the visionary who missed the digital media revolution, requiring burst.com and Apple to show him how to do it. In the past ten years of the digital media revolution, which stock price appreciated more, Microsoft's or Apple's?

    Is Gates a visionary, or a monopolist? Gates' image and PR people want him to be viewed as the former. History will record him as the latter.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by King_TJ ( 85913 )
      I'd say Gates was *neither*. He was a shrewd businessman who was able to recognize an opportunity and run with it, back in the 80's - and it paid off for him in spades.

      The cries about him being a "monopolist" are somewhat misplaced, IMHO. Show me ANY C.E.O. of a successful, global business today who wouldn't want his/her company to achieve a similar market-share, if they could only figure out a way to do it! Yes, Microsoft made some questionable business deals, but again, I'd say that's "par for the cour

      • The cries about him being a "monopolist" are somewhat misplaced, IMHO.

        Agreed, but not exactly for the reason you mention.

        First of all, we should make clear that there is nothing wrong with being a monopolist. There's no law against having a monopoly, and there's nothing morally wrong with it either, if you got there honestly and don't abuse the position once you get there.

        What is illegal, and wrong, is to be an *anti-competitive* monopolist. To use your existing monopoly to force competition out of the market, or to leverage it to acquire share in new markets. Micros

  • I was running the MES site at Microsoft under a virtual machine, and the task manager inside the VM was at 70-90% cpu usage running only the one firefox window! (as shown on a 3.2Ghz intel processor with 2GB of RAM running Ubuntu)

    • I was running the MES site at Microsoft under a virtual machine, and the task manager inside the VM was at 70-90% cpu usage running only the one firefox window! (as shown on a 3.2Ghz intel processor with 2GB of RAM running Ubuntu)

      This is what I worry about.

      As it is I'm not enamoured with FLASH. I usually disable it so I don't have to watch a lot of crappy whizzy ads distracting me. It also keeps my bandwidth fairly low. I honestly do not understand why so many sites open up with a FLASH Splash. It really does nothing for me and means I have to wait for all this junk to download. Now with Silverlight I can look forward to more of the same. Another plugin to manage. Yay.

    • Considering what Flash tends to do in VNC/RDP/similar settings, and with no info on what kind of VM you used, a severe lack of accelerated video might explain something.
  • You can bag microsoft all you want, but for all the things tech companies want to be, microsoft actually did it. Does microsoft get everything right? No, but they are nothing short of impressive when it comes to going back to fix mistakes and completely destroying the competition. Gates doesnt deny this, you win by destroying your competition, not creating the best product. Is bill gates the smartest person who ever lived? No, but hes a very smart guy none the less. Is bill gates the nicest person who ev

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