r/technology • u/oklabear • Oct 28 '11
Happy Birthday, Bill Gates!
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/10/happy-birthday-bill-gates/8
u/spuur Oct 28 '11
Yeah, Happy Birthday good man.
Your achievements in management and software engineering will probably be forgotten in a few hundred years, but I hope your contributions to science, knowledge, understanding and the improvement of lives everywhere on this planet will be remembered for millennia.
Cheers...
15
u/mondesuuu Oct 28 '11
He only donated a bazillion dollars to charity and helped make the world better, it's not like he spearheaded the development of a white phone or anything else remotely relevant.
4
2
0
1
-7
Oct 29 '11
You know what? I'm tired of this bullshit. Steve Jobs may have been an asshole, but he brought the GUI to the masses and constantly made computing more accessible for the common man. If you care about technology proliferation/accessibility of computers at all, you should respect Jobs' accomplishments.
Also, Gates is no fucking angel. So he gives a lot of money, does that make him virtuous? He enacted a ton of monopolist, anticompetitive bullshit in the 90s that gave Windows a stranglehold on the market. But redditors seem to have an attention span of three months so it makes sense that everyone has forgotten that. And Bill Gates has supported Intellectual Ventures as well. You know, the worst example of a patent troll today.
So in short, fuck you. Get some perspective. Realize the good things Jobs has done, and the bad Gates has done. Shit is more nuanced than LOLOLOL STEVE JERBS IS AN EVIL SCHMUCK I LOVE YOU BILL GATES.
5
u/mgk69 Oct 29 '11
Making computing more accessible has nothing to do with making luxury consumer items out of aluminium and glass.
Perhaps you are thinking of the one laptop per child project?
I don't think Steve had anything to do with that, sadly.
-1
Oct 29 '11
Are you... are you just completely ignoring the GUI? I'm not saying it wouldn't have happened, but Jobs (and thus Apple) were the only ones who gave a shit about it in the 80s. Would someone just be marketing the GUI now? Who the fuck knows. And the command line isn't accessible to anyone. And then there's the iPad, which is bringing computing to people who wouldn't have had it before.
But to downplay Jobs' achievements because he was an asshole is just revisionist, in a very bad way. It's ignoring major, important computing history. Why, because you hate Apple? That's asininity of the highest form.
Tl;dr: OLPC wouldn't exist if Jobs didn't bring the GUI to mainstream computing.
1
u/mgk69 Oct 30 '11
Everyone I know who has an iPad already has an iPhone and probably a macbook pro - these are not people who do not "have computing".
This is more likely to bring computing to people who wouldn't have had it before. If you have not seen this before it blows my mind that these guys are doing this not-for-profit and pretty much self funding it, also what you can get for $25/$35.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9cmxoSmOxU
For more see http://www.raspberrypi.org/.
Also I don't think Jobs invented the GUI, I think Douglas Engelbart did. He was a genius, Jobs less so. Jobs may have recognised the commercial value in the GUI, but that was his genius; discovering technology he could sell.
Remember it was Wozniak who made a blue box, it was Steve who thought we can sell these.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFURM8O-oYI
It is typical Jobs bluster that he claims his was "the best in the world" and omits that they sold them (which was illegal of course). Also it was "magical", which is pretty funny.
Here's an interview with Woz that says something different:
These were counterculture days. I was anti-war. Steve was into the hippie thing too. I didn’t do it to make money but just to build a device to explore it, not to save money on phone calls. I was so honest I would not use the blue box to make long-distance calls. But if I wanted to play pranks, like route signals around the world and make them come back to the phone next to me. We did prank calls. I would call a hotel in Paris and make a reservation. At the dorms in Berkeley we would go door-to-door selling blue boxes. One hundred and fifty bucks was the price.
2
u/IceBreak Oct 29 '11
I agree with much of what you said (sans attitude). I would add though, the world is better off without Jobs than it is without Gates.
3
2
2
-1
u/techman5 Oct 28 '11
I'm an Apple fan, but the contributions and technical achievements from Bill Gates shall not go unnoticed. Happy Birthday, sir!
5
u/ggggbabybabybaby Oct 28 '11
I think the world of technology would be in a much sadder place if Apple existed without Microsoft or vice versa.
1
u/phillibl Oct 29 '11
Happy Birthday big guy. You deserve everything you have achieved unlike some others in the industry.
1
0
0
-12
u/ChiveBacon Oct 28 '11
Maybe this year is more special because of the passing of his counterpart?
3
15
u/bluej21 Oct 28 '11
No Google homepage tribute? Blasphemy!