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When Bill Gates had his neighbors over for breakfast, I wonder if they were aware that their pancakes were being sorted by a man who had changed the course of h
by harveywi 5y ago
When Bill Gates had his neighbors over for breakfast, I wonder if they were aware that their pancakes were being sorted by a man who had changed the course of human civilization.
- ruggeri 5y agoA reference to the famous result of Papadimitriou and Gates, of course. https://web.archive.org/web/20070610154429/http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/papers/Bounds%20For%20Sorting%20By%20Prefix%20Reversal.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20070610154429/http://www.cs.ber...
- ffhhj 5y ago> a man who had changed the course of human civilization. He learned how to do self-promotion from his friend Steve Jobs.
- fsckboy 5y agoGates did not change the course of anything. The personal computer revolution was inevitable, and operating systems were plentiful and doable, and we see the same market concentration, product bundling, and monopoly patterns emerge in every industry, so if not Gates, it just would have been somebody else. If you want to claim he was a more talented monopolist, then I'd point out that monopolies stifle innovation, so a less talented monopolist would have changed the course of civilization much more, i.e. his kind of changing is not the type we need to applaud. Yawl don't remember, but before the dot com era came along and opened things up, Microsoft had more or less completely stifled the computer software industry, there was hardly anything going on in terms of attracting investment and creating jobs, everyone was too fearful of getting stomped. also, while he's no doubt a very smart guy, he's hardly ever said an intellectually interesting thing. Go ahead and challenge that statement, if he has, I'd love to hear it. Strikes me as a complete dullard.