Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said Thursday he expects the next decade to bring even greater technological leaps than the past 10 years. In a speech to the Northern Virginia Technology Council, Gates speculated that some of the most important advances will come in the ways people interact with computers: speech-recognition technology, tablets that will recognize handwriting and touch-screen surfaces that will integrate a wide variety of information.
"I don't see anything that will stop the rapid advance," Gates said, noting that technological change driven by academia and corporate researchers continued even after the Internet stock bubble burst in 2000. Gates also said the coming years will bring rapid changes in media as television increasingly becomes a targeted medium, where viewers can select niche content for news, sports and entertainment.
"TV will be based on the Internet; it will be an utterly different thing," he said.
Gates' speech came after he testified to Congress on Wednesday advocating greater investment in math and science education and more relaxed immigration rules that would allow foreigners who obtain college degrees in the United States to work here after graduation. Current policy, he said, forces many bright, capable students to return to their native countries after the U.S. has invested in their education. Gates said Thursday he was optimistic that policy makers would make the right decisions about investing in technology and human capital, though he acknowledged that such investments don't pay off immediately.
View: Full Article @ The Associated Press
"I don't see anything that will stop the rapid advance," Gates said, noting that technological change driven by academia and corporate researchers continued even after the Internet stock bubble burst in 2000. Gates also said the coming years will bring rapid changes in media as television increasingly becomes a targeted medium, where viewers can select niche content for news, sports and entertainment.
"TV will be based on the Internet; it will be an utterly different thing," he said.
Gates' speech came after he testified to Congress on Wednesday advocating greater investment in math and science education and more relaxed immigration rules that would allow foreigners who obtain college degrees in the United States to work here after graduation. Current policy, he said, forces many bright, capable students to return to their native countries after the U.S. has invested in their education. Gates said Thursday he was optimistic that policy makers would make the right decisions about investing in technology and human capital, though he acknowledged that such investments don't pay off immediately.
View: Full Article @ The Associated Press
I can see where he is coming from but the flip side of the argument is that allowing foreign students to return to their home country will help bring that country forward and hopefully reduce their dependency on overseas education.
you know, we europeans aren't stupid and have our own prestigious universities
Isn't it interesting how many things Gates has predicted over the years, yet managed to miss everything that mattered?
I'm sure I forgot a couple of things.
What will Gates miss next? Odds are you will know about it before he does.
Excuse me! The UMPC is the greatest invention ever!
*hugs his Q1U tightly* Don't listen to them baby, they don't know what they're on about.
look what happened with CPUs, they couldnt make better single cores, so to get around it they made dual cores
i dont think we will see half the kind of stuff that came out in the last decade
its going to me alot more relaxed. alot more patent lawsuits
Last edited by X'tyfe on 15 Mar 2008 - 16:55
multi-core is a better cpu than single core, as long you have the software that takes advantage of it.
The article has a Bill Gates photo dated from March 12, 2008.
I didn't actually select the photo, but rather the category of Microsoft
At least it isn't that awful pic from Tiger Beat...
I think the flaw in these arguments is that while technological advances may allow certain usage scenarios of it, that is often unrelated to how hard it is to change traditions. In the case of (offline and non-ISP related) TV sets, the tradition is several decades old. Decent hybrid cars more than suitable for large groups are also available today technologically, but many still don't even consider them simply because of tradition.
No ****.
How about fixing Vista? Any predictions about that. Or do Windows sufferers have to (yet again) wait for the next version of this dog of an OS?
As a self-proclaimed Mac worshiper, I am guessing you have eased your "suffering". The rest of us are fine, thanks for asking.
Next time, try to focus on the article and resist turning it into an anti-Vista discussion. In case you didn't realize they are getting old.
We are in the worst moment ever, for example OSX?... it's just a reshaped unix (a pretty old operating system), Vista?, is still a NT operating, system, virtualization?.. fine but still a old technology (circa 1970), speech-recognition ... nothing new (and barely usable), "tablets that will recognize handwriting and touch-screen surfaces that will integrate a wide variety of information" or you could say WACOM. Technology speaking we are going to nowhere, but monetary talking technology = money.
Anyways, the "educational" viewpoint of Bill Gates is just a BULL####, Microsoft Certification is a stupid joke that create dumb people, i found many MCE with thousand of studies and still unable to create a single sort algorithm, not to say a more and efficient algorithm such using hash table/ tree or another way.
It's like blaming a lawyer for not knowing how to be an accountant.
- Offices and cube farms are already noisy enough; I don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry using voice commands to operate his computer. Besides, it's quicker to use a mouse/keyboard to select some option somewhere, not to mention that it's way quicker also to undo some error you've made with a mouse than undoing some misinterpreted voice command. Sure, there might be useful applications depending on the environment, but I don't see anything as "revolutionary" as Gates like to think.
- I can type way faster than I can write, and what I type is way more legible. Tablets don't have the right 'feel' of pen and paper. Using a backspace key is infinitely faster than all the steps involved in fixing incorrectly recognized handwriting.
- Those who get excited at the thought of touchscreen haven't used it. Holding your arms out in mid-air to reach a touchscreen to do "precision selecting" gets tiring really quick. That Surface demo was kinda cool, for about 3 seconds, and, yeah, there might definitely be some practical uses, but I don't see anything to revolutionize the way the average Joe uses his home or office PC.
All that being said, I'm certainly not against the idea of trying to improve what exists, but even if every one of those areas was completely perfected, none of it would create the sort of "big technological leap" that Gates has been talking about for years.
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