
Never Before Seen Bill Gates Photos - jasonlbaptiste
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/storysupplement/gates_microsoft/index.html
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pxlpshr
That was very enjoyable to watch. While I have little interest in Microsoft
anymore, I have a lot of respect for Bill Gates and the road they paved.

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ajross
Yeah. It was The Road Ahead that caused them trouble.

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watmough
I really enjoyed that. When Bill talks about growing Microsoft, and the early
days, it always make me remember really great products like early Excel and
Word, and the sheer excitement when MS Access (Cirrus) came out.

It's kind of a shame that BG kinda let the technical aspect get out of
control. The state of current MS tools, critical stuff like VS2005, is
deplorable in comparison to the tight good performing code that MS used to
have. I remember laughing at early versions of NetBeans, but slightly clunky
though it is, I would much rather be in NetBeans than in VS.

This sloppiness is all over the most recent versions of Office also, and it
seems pretty clear that the race to the bottom in software hiring has really
hurt Microsoft, especially with the devastating mess that was the Longhorn
'reboot' and Vista mess.

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ComputerGuru
That's rather unfair. Visual Studio 2008 is several orders of magnitude
faster, more powerful, and _much_ more responsive than NetBeans. NetBeans is
cleaner, but once you get used to VS you'll realize it's the best IDE. This,
coming from someone who used to live and die by IntelliJ & NetBeans. Visual
Studio is a really great IDE, and togther with the .NET Framework is one of
Microsoft's greatest achievements and a huge boon for coders working on MS'
platforms.

I agree with the rest of what you said though, but I don't think it's
applicable to VS.NET. For instance, you could have talked about how bloated
Office has become; while it still has tons of good new features, they're
inefficiently done. You could have discussed how while Windows is a decent
design/principle it has an increasingly more shitty implementation with each
and every revision. But Visual Studio?? Well, I wish I could use it on Linux
right now!

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watmough
Well, I came from VC 6.0, and I found that VS 2003 wasn't too bad, but VS
2005, on a 2 Gig dual proc Dell laptop runs like crap. I get frequent pauses
and delays while typing, and it just breaks your flow. (to be fair NB can
sometimes do this too)

However, the worst aspect for me with VS2005 is the brain dead UI. Example 1.
Pop-up tabs next to the scroll bars. Nuts. Example 2. The remove the output
window by hitting escape that was in VC6.0 is gone. Nuts. Example 3: Horribly
slow output window and constant unnecessary redraws. See next para.

Try this and let me know if it works. Run any app over remote desktop, like
Word, Outlook etc, then try running VS. At least on my setup, RDP is great
over broadband running almost anything, but when I run VS, I get bizarre slow
bottom to top refreshes about every 5 seconds, or when I type. This makes it
almost unusable unless you look away from the screen when typing.

I used to do quite a lot of development on a server box running VS, rather
than run it locally and have to go to Oracle over a VPN connection. This is
now almost unbearable.

To be fair, I think .NET is at least decent, and C# is a friendly enough
language, with delegates and some nice things in 3.0. (and really nice in
3.5!), but development of anything outside the MS ecosystem is like living in
a vandalized neighborhood. e.g. Most cool stuff is broken on Windows.

I shouldn't disparage Windows. I think the kernel is decent. I know how to
program GUIs. XP has always been rock solid for me. But ... Windows has been
left behind by most of the fun stuff, and it's just irrelevant to most
interesting development outside of a corporate environment.

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parenthesis
There's a Mac in the background in the 6th picture.

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markbao
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEVO2ywceyk>

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mrduncan
Newsweek also has an article about the re-shoot of the famous 70's staff photo
- <http://www.newsweek.com/id/142636>

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DaniFong
And audiotrack, to go with the slideshow.

I enjoyed this.

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mynameishere
Is there some reason that alpha-males like Steve Ballmer always wear pink
shirts? A play for contrast?

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xiaoma
When was Steve Balmer an alpha male? Steve Jobs, sure, but Balmer? He's a big,
fat, bald guy who has spent his whole career in Gates's shadow.

He's a very, very, very rich beta-male.

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anewaccountname
So by your reasoning there can only be one alpha-male at Microsoft at a time?

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xiaoma
The definition of beta male is that they act as second-in-command, subservient
to the alpha. Usually, they're either dethroned, former alpha males or future
alphas on the way up.

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zandorg
I thought this was great.

I really think corporations should open up their media archives, such as
photos, videos, press releases, and put them all online.

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mattmaroon
wow, snore.

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jmzachary
Who cares?

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gexla
Enjoyable or not, this was on the front page of cnn.com. I don't think anyone
needed to come here to see this item.

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neilc
I certainly wouldn't have seen it on the front page of cnn.com -- CNN is not
something I regularly check online.

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gexla
I read the guidelines or whatever and it said that generally you don't need to
post something that would be in regular news. Well, this was on the front page
of CNN. Not really hard to find.

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gexla
Thanks guys, apparently this community isn't for me. The point system is just
that, silly points. But I get a few bumps up from long thoughtful posts and a
huge bump down for one bad one. The down votes are way out of proportion with
the up votes.

The point system can discourage participation. I am a pro hacker like many
here and also like many here I have very little time to contribute to boards
like these. When I get so heavily down voted for something I felt was not that
proportionally out of place or spammy then I wonder why I should bother to
spend time here. I'm blacklisting this site from my browser.

Edit: One more thing to add. Voting is an anonymous comment, which is evil.
Even worse, it is an anonymous comment with no text. People have nothing to
risk in a vote. They are not putting their opinions and views out there for
discussion. This is another reason I feel the vote system is flawed.

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cheponis
I understand your point completely, and I agree. I, too, am an exceedingly
awesome world-renowned hacker who has been unfairly treated here. PG doesn't
really care, or he likes it this way, or he's too busy doing other things. We
need to build a TRUE hacker's community, and this website isn't it.

Remember: the internet routes around damage.

