Fa3ien <fab### [at] yourshoesskynetbe> wrote:
> I have a biography of Bill Gates waiting on my bookshelf to be read :-)

  I bet Gates is not such an evil person as most people want to depict
him. While he does have some opinions which grinds the gears of some
people (especially open source software advocates), I don't remember
ever hearing anything nearly as bad as for example from Steve Ballmer
(who, for all I know, is psychotic).

  If I'm not mistaken, Gates was a 70's - early 80's programming nerd
who had some talent and some business ideas, and who, along with a few
others, won the jackpot with his company, by being in the right place at
the right time (and, perhaps, sometimes using some slightly dubious tactics).
I really don't know how much he advocates the "you will be assimilated,
OSS is a cancer" ideology Ballmer does. Perhaps he just silently concedes,
while Ballmer does all the antics.

  Speaking of programmer nerds, there's one person in that field who
I admire: John Carmack.

  How many famous programmers (pure programmers, not people who are for
example computing scientists and who do some programming along the way)
can you remember? I can only list two right now: John Romero and John
Carmack. From those two the former is remembered only by his fiascos
with Ion Storm, while the latter is well known from his successes at ID.

  The vast majority of computer programmers are more or less anonymous.
You never hear, for example, *who* was the lead programmer of the team
who developed, let's say, the Source engine or the Unreal engine. You
just hear the company which developed it. Carmack is rather unique in
this regard, as he is quite well known for his role in the ongoing
development of the doom/quake engines. Not many programmers reach that
level of celebrity.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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