I know I shouldn’t say this about one of my own speakers, but I thought Sarah Silverman was god-awful.
Kudos to @TEDChris for making TED an unsafe haven for all! You’re a barnacle of mediocrity on Bill Gates’ asshole.
[Bill] Gates quickly became legendary for telling people that their idea was the stupidest he’d ever heard — so much so that [VP Paul] Maritz would assure them not to worry, “because they weren’t going to hold the record for long.”
In an interview last week, Gates feigned disagreement when it was pointed out that he would often spice up the phrase with an expletive. “No, no, no,” he said, laughing. “Literally, I do say, ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.’ Some people think I add some other word in there, but I don’t — usually.”
Serial Entrepreneur — I hope there’s a special place in hell for people who refer to themselves as “serial entrepreneurs.” What the heck is the difference between an entrepreneur and a serial entrepreneur? I suppose Bill Gates is an entrepreneur and e.e. cummings’ Uncle Sol was a serial entrepreneur — farmer, chicken farmer, skunk farmer, worm farmer.
Length — For some reason, people who talk about basketball now describe players as having “great length.” Nobody says, “He’s very tall.” They say, “He’s got great length.”
News flash: People don’t have length. They have height. They even have width. But they don’t have length — except at birth and shortly thereafter, when we measure them lying down because they can’t stand up yet.
Describing a basketball player as having “great length” is as uninformative as saying, “He’s a tall black guy with long arms.”
The competitors: Windows Live Search, Yahoo! and Google.
I was looking at some really nice maps of Washington, DC, last night on Live Search. I’m not totally up to speed on the latest advances in mapping technology, so I wondered if Live Search had totally leapfrogged the competition with this stuff, or if I could do the same thing on the other map sites.
Here’s what I found:
This is the best view I could get of the Jefferson Memorial on Yahoo!
Google is able to zoom in quite a bit closer.
But Live Search can do this!
Thank you, Bill Gates!
The killer feature (obviously) is that Live Search gives you an oblique view into the scene, instead of just a flat, looking-straight-down view. Plus the image resolution is a lot better.
Final Ranking:
Bill Gates and the Microsoft crowd have been very prominent in charitable circles, saving Africans from disease, etc. By contrast, a Google search for “Steve Jobs charity” or “Steve Jobs donation” turns up nothing except an article on how Apple bought him a $90 million Gulfstream bizjet.
So… if Steve Jobs doesn’t give money to charity and doesn’t pay for his own jet, is he doing something interesting with his $billions?
The Globe and Mail reports that a “small but determined group of computer geeks [is] trying to translate open-source software into African languages, in an effort to reach the continent most isolated by the digital divide.”
The number of students majoring in computer science is falling, even at the elite universities. So [Bill] Gates went stumping at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, M.I.T. and Harvard, telling students that they could still make a good living in America, even as the nation’s industry is sending some jobs, like software programming, abroad.
My brother is a doctor.
He doesn’t encourage his kids to go into medicine though, because he’s incredibly frustrated by the fact that you go to school for 20 years to learn something, only to have clerks from insurance companies decide if a procedure you’ve recommended is or is not “medically necessary.”
I’ve worked in computing for 20 years.
I don’t push my kid to get into it because during that time, it’s become less and less like a professional business and more like a big class project, full of people who have no aptitude, no education and no role models.
A friend of mine teaches a computer science class at a local community college. He loves it.
I don’t think I could bring myself to stand up in front of a group of young people and encourage them to be programmers. I’d probably wind up yelling at them to go be flight attendants or meeting planners and stop wasting their time.
Where are you going to go as a programmer to do interesting, influential work with bright, educated people? The list of possibilities is very short.
Microsoft is on the list — but the fact that Bill Gates is out recruiting at Illinois, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, M.I.T. and Harvard while you’re sitting here in a community college class suggests that a Microsoft career may not be in the cards for you.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
