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- Katowitz, on 10/12/2007, -9/+236Actually, as a teenager Bill Gates wrote a program for his high school to assign students to different classes. He added in a function to recognize the name Gates, and hold him to the end and then stick him in the classes with the most girls. If that isn't a sign of genius, I don't know what is.
But, of course there was an issue years later when his sister went there and complained she couldn't meet any girls because her classes were fill of girls...
Um... ok, never mind then. - sfacets, on 10/12/2007, -63/+273Bill Gates isn't a genius, just a (very) clever thief.
- diecastbeatdown, on 10/12/2007, -20/+164AKA "Business Man" - and agreed.
- kirakun, on 10/12/2007, -8/+92Bunch of "sour-grapes" people....
Look, there's a chinese saying that running a business is harder than starting it. Microsoft isn't what it is today because of a single act of acquiring DOS. Sure that was probably the first cause, but it was also because of the many many decisions that Gates made afterward that made Microsoft the success that it is today.
Most people when given a million will just waste it in a blink, but how many can turn a million into billions persistently afterward? - ezweave, on 10/12/2007, -5/+84Yeah, this isn't as impressive as it sounds.
With drag and drop UI editor and the built in web browser junk in .NET, anyone could do this without real depth of understanding. It's good to see kids coding in C#, at 12 I was still writing lame games in BASIC. It's not like he is making data structures, complex algorithms, or using MVC. He's not even writing the rendering (I guarantee this uses the IE drag and drop "browser" components provided in .NET). If this was written in something like Smalltalk, I would actually be impressed.
This is basically redressed IE. Hopefully he progresses and goes to a real Uni to learn CS. - scottylist, on 10/12/2007, -9/+80"Another is that Visual Studio and the objects in the .NET Framework clearly make a lot of things easier to include in a program than ever before. This student was taking full advantage of them and had created a very powerful application. "
Total sales pitch... - plarp, on 10/12/2007, -8/+81all this kid was drop an active x component
- armbar, on 10/12/2007, -14/+82I don't mean to downplay the kid's success, but the .NET framework handles a lot of the functionality of a web browser, right out of the box. However, he had to at least have made a layout engine, which is quite impressive in and of itself. Congrats to him, and I hope he continues to be successful.
- ExSlashdotter, on 10/12/2007, -15/+79Exactly. Gates was never a programming prodigy. Just a guy at the right place at the right time to me.
- musntSurfatWork, on 10/12/2007, -15/+61in 25 years, 12 year olds will be building their own Graphics chipset processors.
- ToadX, on 10/12/2007, -5/+48He used the IE control. It renders the page exactly as IE would. This is nothing special at all.
- moke, on 10/12/2007, -2/+43Some screenshots of the browser.
http://picasaweb.google.com/mateuszrajca/Browser - Outdoor83, on 10/12/2007, -0/+41I was programming when I was 10. Interest in technology and programming at an early age doesn't forecast greatness later on in life. Furthermore, someone who starts programming at 9 won't clearly be superior to someone who started programming at 11. I have yet to see a study where this matters.
I'm still posting on Digg and don't own my own Fortune 500 company. Proof that those who start early don't always end on top :) - kdehead, on 10/12/2007, -4/+44no. it just shows how crappy an MCP is.
- ahawks, on 10/12/2007, -2/+41Of all the things the .NET framework provides, I would think a rendering engine would be one of them. Just embed IE, essentially.
- Snowcone, on 10/12/2007, -6/+43@noahhoward
Great, you want a cookie? Bill is 51 and is worth $53B. He could buy your house and the company you work for. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+36$10 says he used pre-packaged components for 99% of the functionality.
- msgyrd, on 10/12/2007, -3/+38Jobs is a salesman, and a damn good one at that, he has a type of charisma that invokes trust and belief from many people. Consider that Woz probably couldn't have marketed his ideas and products as successfully as Jobs did (Woz is the basement dweller type). Inventors aren't salesmen, much the same as biochemists aren't doctors, but each needs the other. Starting Apple was a win-win for both of them, and it made them millionaires.
- Wuss, on 10/12/2007, -2/+301. I believe most of us are in agreement that this kid is the equivelent of a "script kiddie". Using drag and drop, canned components to "build" a web browser.
2. I still think this kid deserves a little credit. Most of you say "I was programming since I was a fetus", but you're the minority. Most of us at 12 were not trying to aggresively pursue a career in loneliness and geekdom, and actually did 12 year old stuff, like play.
3. A "computer repair" business is hardly comparable to programming. I think my dog could replace the ram in a computer given enough time, and maybe a doggy snack glued to strategic areas inside the computer case. - beejay, on 10/12/2007, -3/+27Apparently only if there is a drag and drop kit. Honestly, it's great to see kids coding, but the title and description are wildly innaccurate. If I change my init script to print MyLeetOS on bootup, that doesn't mean I've "made my own OS OMG."
- msgyrd, on 10/12/2007, -4/+28"Bill Gates isn't a genius, just a (very) clever thief."
Gates probably is a genius, but he excels at business, not programming, which is why he runs Microsoft and doesn't code for them. He's also a damn good thief. They knew they were basically stealing QDOS when they purchased the rights to it for $50k. They also knew it was almost an exact copy of Gary Kildall's CP/M, but MS had a deadline from IBM, and did whatever was needed to be successful. Their first major business move set the stage for a 30 year history of pretty much the same thing (buying small company's products for modest sums and relabeling them with some goofy MS name, claiming "innovation").
As for Apple stealing the GUI concept from Xerox...it's true, but also remember than Xerox wasn't going forward with the idea since they didn't believe computers were that useful, and they wanted to sell paper and copiers, not computers. - awasson, on 10/12/2007, -2/+23"I don't mean to downplay the kid's success, but the .NET framework handles a lot of the functionality of a web browser, right out of the box. However..."
Absolutely. Visual C# 2005 Express comes with a drag-n-drop browser component that can be dropped on a form and voila... There's your browser. Add some drag-n-drop text fields, tabs and menus and you're done. This was covered in a quick start tutorial at least a year ago. Probably take a half hour plus time for fine tuning.
Good for him to get going at such an early age. Now do it in C++ without all the drag-n-drop stuff and this guy will be scary. - epluribusunum, on 10/12/2007, -0/+21A kid being a programmer in the 1960s when the only computers were mainframes and it cost big $$$$$$ for computer time and a kid being a programmer in the 2000s when you can get an adequate used computer for fifty bucks are entirely different things.
- sketchydave, on 10/12/2007, -5/+26@ezweave
"This is basically redressed IE."
IE 7 is about as attractive as a lumberjack in lingerie. I'll gladly take the redressing. - kdehead, on 10/12/2007, -4/+24what a load of crock.
when i was 10 , i wrote an arcade game in Z80 assembly language.
if the kid had written the browser in pure C , i would have been more impressed. - FyberOptic, on 10/12/2007, -36/+55At least Gates was indeed a programmer, as opposed to Jobs, who was just a ***** thief, and ripped off his own friend, Woz, the guy doing all the work for his crazy ass.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -15/+33"Bill Gates isn't a genius, just a (very) clever thief."
Most people will think you're being sarcastic, but actually you're 100% right.
Microsoft as a whole is just a smart business that knows when and how to leech on at the right time to maximize profit, but at no point have they ever created anything of true genius or quality.
They didn't invent DOS. Instead they bought it and relicensed it as their own. Apple stole the GUI concept from Xerox, which was in turn stolen by Microsoft to be used in Windows, which was built on top of DOS.
It was marketed to the home user and thus became popular, not because it was the best, but because it was the only thing available at the time made for the "average user".
Funny that their biggest successes weren't even their original ideas. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17Its really not that hard, I can create a fully functional IE-clone internet browser in VB6 or .NET in about 5 minutes. Pop an internet object on the form, throw in some buttons to call methods/functions in that internet object and a textbox and poof, done. not very hard.
- MikeWeller, on 10/12/2007, -4/+18As people have already mentioned, the WebBrowser IE control can just be dragged and dropped onto a form. Then you just code buttons to call the browser.Back() etc methods.
Anybody with VB/C# express could pull this off. - ToadX, on 10/12/2007, -2/+17pfft... That's using the Internet Explorer control. That doesn't count as anything special at all. Using C#, you can create a simple web browser by putting a textbox, button, and IE control on a form and only write 1 line of your own code to make it work.
- evilTak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14"Another is that Visual Studio and the objects in the .NET Framework clearly make a lot of things easier to include in a program than ever before."
Starts out as an article about a smart kid, turns into a commercial. Fabulous. - xutopia, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14The kid seemed to have inserted a few interesting things. Anyone who knows anything about .NET knows that what he did was a "skin" for the Internet Explorer engine.
Essentially he didn't code a browser he simply designed it's interface.
What's fun to see here is that tabbed browsing and whois search are both included on there and the kid did a good job with the simple UI. What I don't understand however is how he did this in 20k lines of code. Having played only very little with the .NET framework I know that this could be done easily in a third of that. - ABadInAlbany, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16as commented on in that blog:
"Dude you can make a browser in .NET in a matter of minutes... it's all drag and drop (it is really just redressed IE). There is no real coding involved.
Most of my peers and I began coding games in BASIC in middle/elementary school. This isn't impressive at all.
Nice try. Real browsers (rendering, etc) are written in C/C++ not .NET (any .NET compatible language, be it C++/C#/or even J#)."
We've also been discussing these lame-ass "browsers" in the MSDN forums for weeks:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=798381&SiteID=1
LAME. marked as such. oooooh, the kid can drag and drop! - msgyrd, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13I was able to make a "web browser" by embedding ActiveX components with VisualBasic nearly 8 years ago when I was in Jr. High. It was ugly and didn't do much. I also didn't know jack about how a web browser really worked. I imagine this kid has done pretty much the same thing, just with newer tools.
Wake me up when this kid discovers threaded processes. - rogueuk, on 10/12/2007, -5/+16embedded IE...looks like others beat me to it
- jellygraph, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14>> This student is 12 but has already been programming for three years.
>> Bill Gates started programming when he was 13 so this young student
>> has a four year head start. Just imagine the possibilities.
Oh STFU, don't be so corny - Thuktun, on 10/12/2007, -8/+19@plarp "all this kid was drop an active x component"
Someone set up us the browser? - cal0140, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11@kday
most of it being the cryptic, garbled mess that is auto-generated by .NET Studio when using drag and drop (which is exactly what he did) - msgyrd, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12Gates has coded things before, but it's probably been a long time since he's did anything now, and I doubt his abilities at creating complex software. Check the fourth paragraph of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_gates
Says right there that he was permitted to leave school to go program for GE. He also helped create a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800. I'm not sure how big his role was in coding, but at the time, they didn't have the resources to just buy out someone else.
As for Gate's vision of "ease of use" for the average person, that's a misconception. Gate's vision always has been and always will be the success of Microsoft, not customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction from MS is a byproduct or their pursuit of success. Just look at the visual effects in Vista. Customers demanded it after they've seen what OSX has been doing for years. Same thing back with Windows. Customers demanded a GUI after they'd seen what Apple's GUI was like (MS just had the advantage of a software library to back them up, Apple didn't really have any software to justify their cost). It's the main reason MS is always trailing behind the pack when it comes to delivering features. They sit back, watch for successful ideas, then buy/copy them, pretty much knowing it'll succeed. (for recent examples, see zune, vista's aero, tabs in IE7, their "new" google maps clone, etc, etc, ad nausium) - strictnein, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12I was writing really stupid BASIC programs on a C64 when I was 5. Of course most of the programs were just something like:
10 PRINT "I ROCK!"
20 POKE 53281,4
30 GOTO 10
Maybe I'd even through in a FOR loop to make the colors cycle and prompt for the user's name.
Congrats to a 12 year old who can integrate a IE control and make it look pretty... - jamble, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12I wrote a nice css file for a client this morning. It made stuff colourful and everything.
jamble.
Age 29 11/12 - Mooseknuckle, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11Seriously I pity this kid .... Only 12 years old and already falling into the bad habit of writing code that will only work on one very specific OS. The kid should be grounded, and should have his computer taken away for a month until he realizes the stupidity of what he's done.
I'm really not sure what's worse ... Kids running around in schools with guns, or kids writing M$ code.
?? - armbar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9I didn't know he was using the IE ActiveX control. Well, that makes it even less spectacular than I originally thought :)
- strictnein, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11and slower
- inkubux, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8I did the same at the age of 14 with VB. Not really impressed. the layout is good and everything, but I thought he created an HTML engine by himself that would have been impressive
- L0t3k, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8""Another is that Visual Studio and the objects in the .NET Framework clearly make a lot of things easier to include in a program than ever before. This student was taking full advantage of them and had created a very powerful application. "
Total sales pitch..."
Yeah, it's a sales pitch, but it's also true.
In truth, we don't know if this kid just dropped a web browser control on a form, and just wrote in the little features. The framework and IDE make this ridiculously easy (like, I can make a tabbed browser tonight), but it's not the same as writing the rendering engine.
I'd like to know more about what he actually did. - kRabbit, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Drag & Drop programming FTL!
If he didn't actually write his own HTML renderer, then this is absolutely pointless. - captjc, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10@zacmccormick
It is not that we are being harsh to the kid, it is just that it is not as big of a deal as it is being made out to be. "12-year old creates web browser" is a bit misleading in this context. He did not create the browser, per say, but he created a IE shell. I am not saying that isn't pretty good, but it probably isn't from page news. Hell, I created an Hal 9000 AI chatterbox program when I was 14. It was pretty good once it "learned to speak." It was a big deal to me, and a nice accomplishment, but overall it is nothing much. I say good work for the kid, but it is not front-page news. -
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