So Bill Gates came to CMU this morning (and apparently to Cornell right afterwards) to give a talk on *Hard problems in Computer Science.*
We all wake up at about 8 am to make this talk at 10am, and sit for an hour waiting for him to come out. So we hoped this would be an awesome, insightful talk, like Steve Wozniak and Kevin Mitnick have given in the past here.
Unfortunately, all we got was a glorified sales pitch about SPOT watches, multimedia, and spam filtering.
I'm sorry, but I think we already know about these things. Bayes' Filtering works quite well for spam, and sure, we could use a few better tools for that, but big deal. Where's the *hard problems* we were supposed to hear about? Our audience didn't come for a sales pitch and a pep talk, we came to hear some real meat!
What Bill Gates did show us, is that he is really lacking in charisma, still can't dress well, and has all the creativity of a doormat.
Steve Wozniak and
Kevin Mitnick are so much cooler! More charisma, more charm, and most importantly,
a more engaging talk with substance.
You'd think Bill would learn how to do public speaking after all these years of doing it. I guess not.
I also want to give a hand to Beth Lynn Eicher, head of our
Western Pennsylania Linux Users Group, and KGB (
especially Ed, who asked Bill Gates if he had ever used Linux, and then offered Bill a free copy! Bill took the copy -- anyone with pics of that, email me and I'll post them here) for giving out Gnoppix CD's outside of the event (Beth and I planned this idea, I didn't have the time to help execute it, but KGB had similar plans and did).
They also painted our fence, put a penguin on top of the University Center (which was removed by Campus Security at 6am I hear) and sent a message to Bill "Bill Gates PH34RZ [fears] Wean."
These Pictures explain it all:
For those of you that don't attend CMU, note that painting the fence is a tradition here. As is giving speakers warm welcomes!
I welcome all comments to this post, and please do send me other pictures of the event if you have them, and I'll post them here. Also, did any of you at Cornell give Bill a warm welcome like we did?