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Posted on Jun 26, 2008
Bill Gates
www.prezydent.pl

Golf claps: Bill Gates, shown here with an unidentified smiling guy in Poland, 2006, is ready for his next act.

It’s official: Microsoft’s top-geek-made-good, Bill Gates, is leaving his full-time position as head of Microsoft on Friday. Now that he’s made more money than regular mortals can even fathom (aside from those congresspeople who approve the defense budget), he’s stepping down in order to focus on his philanthropic work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.


The New York Times:

Although Mr. Gates will spend one day a week at the company, it will be up to his successors, led by Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive, to master the challenges of the Internet or watch Microsoft’s wealth and stature in the industry steadily erode. “Bill’s legacy is Windows and Office, and that will be a rich franchise for years to come, but it’s not the future,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School.

Still, the Gates legacy is impressive. In addition to the software itself, Mr. Gates and his company have fundamentally shaped how people think about competition in many industries where technology plays a central role. Today, there are more than one billion copies of the Windows operating system on PCs around the world.

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By Paracelsus, June 30, 2008 at 4:37 am #

The Gates Foundation and Eugenics

http://www.oldthinkernews.com/Articles/oldthinker news/population_control.htm

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By Blackspeare, June 28, 2008 at 2:53 pm #

Just remember that the MS Windows OS is a knock-off of the Apple system to make “pc’s” operated more like the Apple machines——and the rest is history.

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By Paracelsus, June 28, 2008 at 2:45 pm #

Bill stubbornly lobbies Congress for H1-B visa increaes. No common citizen has such a carte blanche, open invitation to testify in front of Congress on any issue as Bill Gates does on H1-B. Every spring near the H1-B visa application deadline Bill Gates travels to the Capitoline Hill in DC to harangue the legislature. It as if the wells of the Senate and the House are his own living rooms. No middle class professional wants it. We graduate 300,000 science professionals from our universities and colleges to a labor market with only 120,000 openings(DOL figure) in the respective professions. He is worse than a horny pitbull jumping on a woman’s leg. He has had a pie thrown at him, but I think he’s not the type to take a hint. You have to be more blatant about it. Now he has a foundation dedicated to vaccinations and population control. I wish he would just go away and leave us alone.

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By felicity, June 27, 2008 at 3:46 pm #

Can’t remember where I read it, but saint Bill a while back lobbied Congress to get the number of technicians coming here from foreign countries raised.  Saint Bill loves them on his pay-roll because he gets away with paying them a lot less than their American counterparts. 

See, Bill doesn’t have to locate overseas to take advantage of cheap labor, he brings the cheap labor to Seattle.

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By Levon, June 27, 2008 at 12:59 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

write crappy, error prone software and sell it at inflated prices, become wealthy;
repeat

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By jatihoon, June 27, 2008 at 11:06 am #

A person of “VISION, and compassion.“Long after we all are gone, Bill gates will be cosidered as person who brought the world togather and worked with his wife to make it a better place to live.

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By Ed, June 27, 2008 at 10:20 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

If cars worked like Windows, they’d get 5 mpg, backfire pretty regularly, die on the highway more than once a month, etc…

Edsger Dijkstra, a pioneering computer scientist, summed up the problem with Microsoft before Microsoft even existed. He was referring to IBM’s introduction of its “Third Generation” computer and operating system and computer, System/360 and OS/360. The gist of his critique was that this “latest and greatest” computer was spending most of its time doing housekeeping tasks rather than actual work.

Microsoft inherited the “dominate through ruthlessly marketing your second-rate product and crushing your competition’s far superior products” mantle from IBM. The amount of time and aggravation that Microsoft products require is staggering. Windows XP is able to bring a reasonably powerful computer to its knees with all its hogging of resources. It needs more than 256 MB of memory just to idle smoothly, before trying to give it the simplest task.

I’m not even going to talk about Vista beyond saying that it requires a supercomputer just to idle smoothly, and that there are a lot of prayers out there that it meet the same fate as the long-forgotten Windows Millenium Edition.

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By Dr. Knowitall, PhD, PhD, June 27, 2008 at 7:43 am #

the world is still in a shambles and people are starving and being driven out of their homes by war and little kids can’t get plumpy nuts and hard-working people can’t pay their bills and the globe is warming and the school dropout rate continues to escalate and our food supply is tainted and our congress continues to kiss corporate and Bush ass and…

Bill and Melinda will now most certainly get into heaven.

Can we never see another story about this non-newsmaker again, please?

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By nrobi, June 27, 2008 at 5:18 am #

I will never forget the first PC I purchased, many moons ago.  Back then, you still had the option of purchasing single color monitors, Linux version and many other options that are now almost extinct, because of the monopolistic practices of a company that stole most of its ideas and would not be where it is today but for the marketing campaign that surrounds Microsoft. 
Should you find yourself longing for the days when Bill Gates was at the helm of Microsoft full-time, remember this,  the EU and the US have both brought suit against Microsoft for monopolistic practices in selling and building their software and equipment. Secondly, Bill Gates personally has not done anything for most of the people in the world, except to make their lives miserable with the sometimes unworkable software that has been marketed: e.g., Windows Vista and the ensuing problems that have occurred because of the rush to market this product.
All of which leads me to this, Thanks for the memories Bill, those days and weeks trying to figure out why something in the system did not work, poring my heart out over why I could not get a specific program to load into the computer and to top it all off, why a certain piece of information I input into the database that your company invented suddenly disappeared from the screen and gave me error messages that were totally nonsensical and irrelevant to the problem. 
So again, Thanks for all the memories Bill may your money buy you happiness, because your money has certainly not helped me in my life and I have nave not received the benefits of the windfall that has made you one of the wealthiest men on earth.

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