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20
Oct 11

Steve Ballmer… Microsoft’s wacky CEO

Microsoft CEO On Android: “Only A Computer Scientist Could Figure Out How To Use It”

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took his appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit as an opportunity to publicly press the dislike button on Android, Google apps, and the iPhone.

Microsoft is planning to release new Nokia phones powered by its Windows Phone operating system at Nokia World on October 26 and Ballmer told Web 2.0 interviewer John Batelle that he thought iPhone was the main competition. Though Google’s Android software has gobbled up market share to become the most popular smartphone operating system in the United States, Ballmer was dismissive of the competitor.

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People / Science & Technology — No Comments
13
Oct 11

Thank You to Dennis Ritchie, Without Whom None of This Would Be Here

Kernighan and Ritchie, Second Edition


Paul Adams

This morning the news came over the internet: Dennis Ritchie has died.

Dr. Ritchie doesn’t have the mainstream adoring following of Steve Jobs, but he can take considerably more credit for the creation, and even the aesthetics, of the computer world we live in. It’s almost impossible to find a personal computing product or paradigm that doesn’t owe a direct debt to Ritchie.

At Bell Labs in the heady 1970s, Dennis Ritchie created the C programming language and co-developed the Unix operating system. Before C and Unix came along, the computer world was fragmented in a way that’s hard to imagine — there was no such thing as software written to run on a variety of computers. Everything was custom-coded for its particular platform, and every platform had wildly different standards for such fundamental things as “how big is a byte?”

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