Bill Gates’s RDF (Runtime Destruction Field)
Pretty much every time I’ve seen Bill Gates do a demo with some cutting-edge technology, it’s gone wrong. A few years ago he was doing a talk at the AAAS in Seattle showing off an eye-movement tracking system; didn’t work. Rehearsal be damned! This guy can zap a computer at 20 paces! He’s fortunate he’s not Stephen Hawking - people would be saying “It’s a pity his voice machine doesn’t work, he looks like he’s got a lot to contribute.”
The latest example came in the midst of what sounds like a jawbreaking (as in rigor mortis “keynote” speech at the CES show in Las Vegas - his seventh - which was marked by BSODs and witty comments from the talk-show guy who was being his sparring partner. Best of the reports is Iain Thomson’s: Blue screen of death crashes Gates at CES - vnunet.com. Read it and weep (with laughter).
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Why Bill Gates's CES speech had bugs: not actually Windows (well, not all) (13 January 2005; score: 59.09%)
- Apple vs Apple: now read the 1991 agreement (14 September 2004; score: 37.11%)
- "The state of Windows" (27 October 2004; score: 35.81%)
![[Valid RSS]](wp-includes/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed"){kind=small}
January 7th, 2005 at 11:43 am
The last paragraph at that url says:
“A major slip occurred at a Windows 98 demo at Comdex in 1998 that went into blue screen mode, but Gates returned the next year to successfully show off the progress that had been made.”
Which suggests to me that someone got the heading wrong, and the link on the left which purports to point to the 1998 report.
So whose face has the more egg on it?