Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

techemails.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 239 posts

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#221

Post by tasuki »

ThrowAgain wrote: post #207
elevaet wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't fault him on hiring a crew to craft his videos. He has better things to do with his time. Wouldn't you outsource that if you were in his position? My 2 mins of googling came up with more like 3.6B$ on malaria, but even 2B$ is a shit-ton of money. I certainly haven't donated 2% of my net value to malaria (and it's only on the order of 1/10000 of his!). Malaria rates are down around 30% since 2010, thanks in part…

2, 3 or 5 billion don't matter if you still have tens of billions left. I'm not saying he shouldn't outsource his videos. What I'm saying is that this looks more like a professionally made commercial (advertising his personal brand). I'm pretty sure it cost O(hours) of his time (consider even getting to the set - you can see this is a professional set, so probably in some studio; I also doubt this was done in one tak…

What does it matter how much he has left?

There are somewhat diminishing returns spending money on philanthropic causes: if he were to spend 30 rather than 3 billion the result wouldn't be ten times better. I'm happy he's trying to make the world a better place while still keeping an eye on the money being used efficiently.

Why does the 100k matter if the 3 billion don't?

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#222

Post by kragen »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #218
kragen wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if www browsers had removed support for ftp, browsers would have been dead in a week, in 01998 but because they waited until last year, removing that interoperability did not significantly affect their dominance as a way of accessing the internet

> but because they waited until last year FTP died long ago as a protocol, it wasn't killed by some corporations trying to embrace and extend, but by better protocols (SFTP, SCP, HTTP(S) etc.) also FTP created a lot of issues behind NAT

there are still ftp servers and there is still a substantial information that is only accessible through ftp, however lame the protocol design is

wrt nat i would say that nat created a lot of issues with ftp

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#223

Post by tasuki »

ThrowAgain wrote: post #200
elevaet wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Gates is absolutely terrible at PR and doesn't tick any of the boxes of being chic, unless it's some kind of so uncool that he's cool kind of thing. Despite this and more importantly despite his reputation in business and the often laughable products MS produced, his tremendous philanthropy really changed my perspective on him. In a world where there are mega-billionaires, he's my least unfavourite. He's doing…

Eh, I would say he puts a lot of effort intro creating image of benevolent nerd philantropist. Point in case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hnZJIRd6Qw There must have been a team of people dedicated to carefully crafting this video, creating props, there's even a dozen or so actors there (each in the background for just a few seconds). It looks like someone put a lot of effort into this and it surely consumed thou…

> Maybe it had impact on people's lives, but given Gates' net value is 100B$+, giving away a billion or two does not matter.

Is it not enough for you that he went out of his way to improve other people's lives? Would it only satisfy you if his lifestyle suffered?

> it's easy decision to make when you have that much money

How do you know? Have you ever been in that position?

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#224

Post by brundolf »

Beltalowda wrote: post #117
mikro2nd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amara's Law: "We overestimate the impact of a technology in the short term. We under estimate its impact in the long term."

There's a tendency to overestimate things, but not so sure about the underestimate part. Unless I missed something I don't think there are many people running NoSQL databases on Itanium processors with GNU Hurd powering their XSLT/Xforms website. (NoSQL is still useful, but it didn't "replace SQL" as promised, and the others have completely failed in spite of promising much). It's always hard to predict the future; o…

I think it's more that technologists tend to underestimate the social factors, edge cases, general "stickiness" of this stuff. We see the destination and think "ah, well the technical problems have been solved, we can all start using the new thing right now and it's clearly superior, as everyone can see, so surely that will happen very quickly"

When in reality there's,

- People who aren't convinced yet

- People who don't want to be convinced (because of comfort, hubris, or livelihood)

- Human processes and skills that have to be adapted to a new way of doing things

- Material cost of making those transitions, which has to be justified to those making decisions

- Ecosystem support

Etc etc

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#225

Post by nh23423fefe »

dmarchand90 wrote: post #36

I had never heard of Nathan Myhrvold before, but, his lucid descriptions of the nature of technology has me convinced he's a genius. Incredibile career he's had. Went to the best schools, published in top scientific journals in multiple foods. And, he took a leave of absence as Microsoft CTO (around when these emails were written) to go to chef school in France. He even has cookbooks! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na…

Modernist Cuisine was very popular back in 2011, that was my introduction to him.

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#226

Post by AnimalMuppet »

legitster wrote: post #22

> New things are NEVER a threat to the old world as soon as people say. Look at the mainframe vs PC. It has taken us TWO DECADES and even after all that IBM still has billions in mainframe revenue. Cool new technology always expands rapidly into NEW areas (where there is a vacuum). Pundits always say that this is going to kill the old businesses - eventually that happens but not anywhere near as soon as they say.

The mainframe business still isn't dead. It's not where the action is, but there's still a fair amount of money in it.

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#227

Post by agnosticmantis »

nostromo wrote: post #21
invalidname wrote: post #8

I don't like it when people focus on grammar too much but "I am worry..."?

It’s a Silicon Valley pro-tip: spelling and grammatical mistakes are signs that you’re super busy or too rich to care. There’s a few famous VCs that are apparently too busy to ever capitalize a letter... Too busy to shift!

Missed opportunity: Those VCs are “too busy to capitalize”!

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#228

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

mrblampo wrote: post #132

This was super interesting, and it would seem Bill Gates absolutely predicted the effect that not Java, but ultimately interactive web apps in a broad sense would come to have by making it less important to have one operating system or another. Interesting that the reply mostly implied that there wasn't much reason to worry, and that the future and dominance of web apps was still uncertain. But we are reading this em…

I'm surprised nobody here is discussing how Java did cause Microsoft to lose a ton of OS market share.

Gates's fears were tremendously prescient: They completely lost the mobile OS market to Android.

Re: Bill Gates: I'm literally losing sleep over Java (1996)

#230

Post by resonious »

bitcharmer wrote: post #96
resonious wrote: post #30

> First, the excitement is overblown - at least from a business perspective. At the moment Java is expanding into a vacuum. It allows you to make cool web pages, and that is a very attractive thing for people. It gives programmers something new to learn, book people something new to sell books on, software tool companies a way to issue new development tools etc. This is a pretty interesting take, and it feels relevan…

> It allows you to make cool web pages, and that is a very attractive thing for people This is the most misinformed take on what Java is used for I have seen on HN. Today Java is used by FAANG and other tech shops. It's employed in the enterprise, science and finance. What it is almost never used for is creating "cool web pages"

FAANG is basically just creating cool web apps, no? Point taken on science though. Also I think Java was dog slow at the time. Eventually hardware caught up.
Post reply on HN