Whose Desktop Would You Most Like To See? 920
An anonymous reader writes "Have you ever been curious about what someone else's computing environment looks like? Would you like to see what tools and products someone like Linus Torvalds, Bill Gates, George Bush, or Steve Jobs uses on a daily basis? What percentage of time is spent browsing the web, working in spreadsheets, programming, debugging, designing, or writing documents? How many monitors or devices do they have attached to their PC? What kind of security or anonymizers do they have in place?" For good or ill, open source developers' desktops at least are often visible in screenshots of their pet projects.
Jenna Jameson (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Jenna Jameson (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Jenna Jameson (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Jenna Jameson (Score:4, Funny)
Jenna, if you ever need a good geek to replace that goob boyfriend -- look me up.
Re:Jenna Jameson (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Jenna Jameson (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Jenna Jameson (Score:3, Funny)
Why? You bettin that all of the three billion males ahead of you are going to suddenly die off?
Bill Gates' Super Secret Private Laptop (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Bill Gates' Super Secret Private Laptop (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bill Gates' Super Secret Private Laptop (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bill Gates' Super Secret Private Laptop (Score:5, Funny)
One Man (Score:5, Funny)
Re:One Man (Score:5, Funny)
(note: this is pure speculation)
Dubya (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dubya (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dubya (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Dubya (Score:5, Informative)
Check this story [go.com] out. Yes, the place was a mess, but the General Services Administration [gsa.gov] determined that "The condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy."
If you read the story, you'll also see that the GAO and the GSA have both said that there is no documented evidence of vandalism.
But then again, who needs documentation when your support base never looks any further than innuendo?
ya know he loves mouse trails (Score:4, Funny)
Video of Dubya's computer... (Score:3, Funny)
[For the high-bandwidth version go to http://bushin30seconds.org/finalists.shtml]
Re:Dubya (Score:3, Funny)
Screenshot of Oval Office computer (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Screenshot of Oval Office computer (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dubya (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dubya (Score:5, Insightful)
All of this should be no surprise for someone who doesn't even read the news himself, and has his advisors act as a "news filter" for him so he only hears and learns about what he wants to hear and learn about, or what his advisors want him to hear or learn about.
You can be pro-Bush or anti-Bush, but that's hardcore ignorance, especially for a president. I don't think there's much of anything funny about it.
Re:Dubya (Score:4, Funny)
You must be confusing GWB with someone who was actually in the military.
Fits the pattern. (Score:3, Informative)
Links [google.com]
* In his book "Stupid White Men," Michael Moore claims that Bush has cabinet members read their reports to him.
* Moore also claims that Jr's parents heavily favor illiteracy foundations in their charitable contributions.
If you can find a link to that report that says Jr doesn't "trust" e-mail, I'd really like to check it out. Googling hasn't turned it up for me.
Sounds like a Learning Style (Score:5, Informative)
Some people only learn well verbally.
Most people can learn well both ways, usually with a slight preference either way.
If the preference goes far enough, it's classified as a learning disability, or 'alternate learning style'.
Given the trouble Bush has with a teleprompter, it's pretty clear he has trouble with visual learning, most likely a visual processing delay. Moore's claims would support his preference for a verbal learning style.
But what I want to know is when did it become OK to make fun of people for their learning disabilites? I thought Hollywood Liberals were sensitive and caring? I guess it's OK to pick on disabled people if they're conservatives.
Re:Sounds like a Learning Style (Score:5, Insightful)
He's President. Surely he should be able to pronounce "nuclear", eat pretzels without choking, and not make up words on the spot.
How can anyone defend such a poor excuse for a politician? Every time he steps up to the podium it looks like an episode of Days of Our Lives gone bad. He can't even read what everyone else has written for him without getting in a state. Pausing every. Two. Seconds. Trying to. Add. Emphasis. Incorrect. ly.
It doesn't take a genius to realise when someone shouldn't be in office. Even Bush himself admitted he shouldn't be there.
Re:Fits the pattern. (Score:5, Insightful)
That MBA didn't get him his jobs, his political connections did. (Like most of us.)
He's run at least one company into the ground before becoming President, which says he wasn't paying much attention at Harvard. (Not to mention he knew he'd still have money even if all of his workers were unemployed.)
Come to think of it, doesn't say much for the thoughtfulness of the people who voted for him either -- thinking that he was somehow qualified to do the job because his father was.
His father was a WWII vet, spent decades in Ambassadorships and eventually headed the CIA before becoming President. I can see a lot of reasons to "hire" a person like that for the Presidency.
His son, on the other hand, slacked off through Yale and Harvard on Grandpa's money, snorted cocaine through much of that process, went AWOL from his Guard unit, ran a successful oil business into the ground... and people adore him more than his dear-old-dad.
Sad.
Re:Oh nooooo! (Score:4, Insightful)
The Carter administration had its problems, to say the least, but in economic terms, he left office with real gains in GDP of 14% never experiencing contraction. Reagan left up 25%, with two years of contraction and a tripled national debt. Bush I left up a pathetic 5%--one third the gains of Carter, the last year with contraction and 38% more debt. Together, Reagan and Bush increased the national debt by 430%. Clinton left with an economy having gained 33% and not a single year of contraction, admittedly the debt increased the same as under Bush I, but over twice the time. Nixon-Ford left with a net gain of 14%, with two years of contraction and 56% more debt, compared to Kennedy-Johnson over the same amount of time leaving with gains of 43% with no contraction and only 20% more debt. Roosevelt in nine years managed to leave with an economy 226% larger than that he inheirited from Hoover, who commandeered a 25% contraction.
Are we seeing a pattern here?
Even if we credit Reagan and Bush with expansion--they increased the debt by over three trillion dollars in doing it. When Bush left office, the economy was 7.1 trillion. Over the whole of ReaganBush, the economy grew by 38%--by increasing the debt to practically 50% of GDP. Terrific. What an accomplishment.
Re:Oh nooooo! (Score:4, Insightful)
George Bush (Score:3, Funny)
None. You can't put a desktop on a Etch-A-Sketch. [google.com]
Re:George Bush (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure the closest he comes to working with a computer is reading a few select emails that someone printed out for him.
Re:George Bush (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:George Bush (Score:4, Funny)
Type up the State of the Union address in Word?
Why is that hard to believe? You think that there is some special "For Presidential Addresses"-type Word Processor? I wouldn't be surprised if he used Word, Adobe Acrobat, and Excel a lot. Presuming he does any of his own content creation, and doesn't simply use a paper and pencil.
Re:George Bush (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, it's called a speechwriter.
Not a lie (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not a lie (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I would make sense for them to have an almost-primary computer be the competing OS. This way they'd have to get used to it and see the good points as well as the bad.
--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor? [colingregorypalmer.net]
American Weblog in London [colingregorypalmer.net]
RMS's desktop (Score:5, Funny)
First of all, he doesn't use a GUI.
Second, the desktop environment that he was using was not vi.
Re:RMS's desktop (Score:5, Funny)
Pico! It must be pico!
Am I right?
Oh.
Re:RMS's desktop (Score:3, Informative)
Re:RMS's desktop (Score:5, Funny)
Easy. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Easy. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Easy. (Score:5, Funny)
<grin>
Bill gates' desktop (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Bill gates' desktop (Score:5, Funny)
Drew Curtis (Score:5, Funny)
Jesus! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Jesus! (Score:3, Funny)
Nahh, Jesus' "desktop" is nothing like anything you could imangine. The speach interface is so powerful that he just says "Let there be light", and photons are automaticly designed and they spring into existance from nothing.
Yes, his desktop fully violates most of the laws of physics.
Re:Jesus! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Jesus! (Score:5, Funny)
He uses the command line.
Re:Jesus! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure he runs Jesux... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Jesus! (Score:4, Funny)
(He uses OS2 WARP.)
Mine... (Score:3, Funny)
bhu dhu dhum dhum *crash*
Thank you, thank you... I'll be here all week.
Thanks to "Bush in 30 seconds"... (Score:3, Interesting)
GWB's Desktop... (Score:3, Funny)
George Bush (Score:3, Insightful)
Come on, people in powerful places don't waste their time with this kind of crap. They have lots of people doing "stuff" for them.
The exception is likely those in the computer industry - like Gates and Jobs. Those folks have a technical background, and want to experience their own industry (obviously, having a computer on your desktop can be a help if you're a leader in the world of technology).
CEOs and other people of power are not like you and me. They have people like you and me. Or, more likely, they have people that have people like you and me. Well, twice more removed.
Yours. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yours. (Score:5, Funny)
Password: supa%31337!haxx0r
Re:Yours. (Score:5, Funny)
My IP is 127.0.0.1. Believe it or not, my root password is exactly the same as yours. I'm actually trying to free up some space, so delete files at will!
The Martian Rovers' engineers' desktops (Score:5, Interesting)
They're supposedly a publicly-funded scientific project, so it would be revealing in itself if they refused to answer, claiming the need for secrecy. I dare you to file some FOIAs, Timothy
Re:The Martian Rovers' engineers' desktops (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Martian Rovers' engineers' desktops (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Martian Rovers' engineers' desktops (Score:3, Informative)
Try here. [axonchisel.net]
Interesting that you threatended to use FOIA before actually trying to find out what's already on the web. To sum: they're using VxWorks with a radiation-hardened RAD6000 32-bit RISC chip from BAE systems. I've seen information on the RAM configuration, especially since they began having trouble with the Flash RAM; essentially, they use EEPROM, some Flash, some regular ECC RAM.
Even more here [nasa.gov].
Re:The Martian Rovers' engineers' desktops (Score:5, Informative)
I asked them this when I was at JPL last week. The rover software is coded in C, and most of the rover drivers use Red Hat. Julie Townsend told me that she uses Windows, and there's a fairly even mix of Mac, *nix, and Windows users across the whole project.
Re:The Martian Rovers' engineers' desktops (Score:4, Funny)
No, I didn't. I should have, but instead I asked her which one would win in a fight. She said that they were twins, so it would be pretty even . . . then I asked her which one was the Evil Twin, and she laughed and said that was classified information.
oh, also the Martian Express/Beagles' teams'. (Score:3, Interesting)
You can bet it would be a great kickstart for the next generation of entrepreneurs to have a rudimentary insight into the types of problems (and early-generation solutions) they will have to work
Re:The Martian Rovers' engineers' desktops (Score:3, Informative)
Here's your answer (Score:3, Funny)
Linus uses an sophisticated email filter with a lot of sco.com addresses in it
Bill Gates uses a scepter and fake British lord's robes of state, to rehearse his meeting with Liz
Steve Jobs would use the stress reduction and temper control cdrom he got at Christmas if Macs could run Windows binaries.
Bush uses a Microsoft Barney
Well, you asked for it. (Score:5, Informative)
RMS's desktop (Score:5, Interesting)
As for his .emacs file, last time I looked, it wasn't empty, but contained a few lines to turn off the default disabling of novice-confusing commands like narrow-to-window, and I think he also enables debug-on-error. It no serious customization to speak of though. As someone else mentioned, he's presumably set up Emacs's defaults the way he already likes them.
In recent years because of injuries, he's often had to get other people to type for him while he tells them what to type ("control-F, meta-d, blah blah"). That wouldn't show up in a screen shot either, but somehow seems like it should be part of the picture. Typing for him is an interesting experience if you don't have to do it for too long. Volunteer for it sometime if the situation arises, I'm sure he'll appreciate it.
Re:Elitist Prick (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think he feels "too cool to use a window system", but rather just doesn't feel like he needs one for what he does. He's the author of an old Lisp machine window system and has written plenty of X code, so it's not like the idea of a window system is unknown or scary to him.
Part of his setup's weirdness is because he travels a lot and has limited net access on the road. He does very little online. Instead, if he visits you at your company or university, he'll typically plug his laptop into your ethernet and spend a few minutes downloading his unread email (however many hundred messages that is) into it. Then he unplugs and reads the email offline while going on his way, spooling his replies onto disk. Then at his next stop, he plugs in again, uploads his replies to the old email and downloads new mail that's arrived since the last stop. He usually doesn't use web browsers. If you mail him a URL he should see, he prefers if you send him a text dump of the contents along with it. If he only gets the URL and thinks it's likely to be interesting, he emails it to a special daemon he's set up back home, that retrieves the URL's text contents and dumps it into his next batch of email. Images? What images?
All in all it actually seems like a pretty practical system, less conducive to wasting time web surfing than what most of us are used to, but he doesn't care about that.
funky UI stuff (Score:5, Funny)
The funny/sad thing was one of his specialties was supposed to be user interface. He wasn't please when the X10 to X11 upgrade moved the windows. Plus the line was in permanent marker.
That was one desktop I didn't need to see...
The desktop is a personal thing (Score:3, Interesting)
So what does it matter what someone else's desktop looks like- particularly a non-technical person? They'll likely be using something more "out of the box" than I will. I'm sometimes curious about technical user's desktops to find out tricks about how they've made thier system more productive (such as dedicating each key on the numeric keypad to a screen in X, or using virtual dekstops to represnt connections to a given remote host via SSH, or a desktop where all the windows are automatically tiled so there's no wasted space.
Those are interesting, finding out what Tony Danza uses isn't.
No offense Tony.
- Serge
Re:The desktop is a personal thing (Score:5, Insightful)
LOL I guess you're not a Windows user to make that kind of broad assumption. A lot of people customize thier desktops with backgrounds, layouts, dual monitor layouts, winamp/trillian/etc. set just so, what shortcut icons are on the desktop and what in the toolbar, etc.
To assume a Windows desktop isn't/can't be customized is naive and biased.
Re:The desktop is a personal thing (Score:4, Insightful)
To assume a Windows desktop isn't/can't be customized is naive and biased.
To think that "customization" means the same thing to Windows and *nix users demonstrates inexperience with *nix.
A "custom" Windows desktop is like a custom van -- some furniture, a lifted roof, some art on the sides and windows. A "custom" Linux desktop is more like a custom airplane -- it *probably* has two wings and an engine, but there are exceptions.
My own (Score:5, Funny)
Where was that report again?
An interesting choice (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, since John posts here, I'm hoping that he'd be kind enough to take a screenshot of the current desktop he has, and post it here.
Re:An interesting choice (Score:4, Interesting)
Jobs (Score:5, Interesting)
Speculation... (Score:5, Funny)
Bill Gates: Last night's build of longhorn. Has 5 monitors: one for the PowerPoint slideshow he's rehearsing, one for Outlook, and three for all the extra clocks, sliders, gizmos, icons, etc. that Longhorn puts on the desktop. His background is one of the default WinXP images.
George W. Bush: Cheney and Rumsfeld won't let him touch the "big kid computers", but he has an Etch-a-Sketch with a caricature of Saddam Hussein sitting on a canister of nerve gas.
Steve Jobs: 3 21" Apple Cinema displays. Beta build of OSX 10.4 ("Puma"). Only has one icon on the desktop, but damn if it doesn't look *really cool*.
I suspect W's desktop (Score:4, Funny)
...has the name "Fisher-Price" on it somewhere.
Re:I suspect W's desktop (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, like everyone else who runs XP.
CowboyNeal's desktop of course. (Score:4, Funny)
(_) Bill Gates
(_) Linus Torvalds
(_) George W. Bush
(_) Darl McBride
(_) Richard M. Stallman
(_) The Pope
(_) CowboyNeal
I bet CowboyNeal would win. ;)
Re:RMS (Score:5, Funny)
Re:RMS (Score:3, Funny)
then image a huge black hole which sucks more than you can possibly imagine.. call it emacs.
Re:RMS (Score:5, Funny)
(3) And the user said, C-x C-f, and there was buffer.
(4) And the user saw the buffer, that it was good: and I think we can let the humor end here.
Re:RMS (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, according to this article [freehackers.org], RMS rarely uses X. He uses mostly emacs on the console.
Re:RMS (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Linus (Score:5, Interesting)
It almost reminds me a little bit of the furour surrounding the Pope and Mel Gibson's film. On one level, the Pope is a guy watching a movie, and he probably said something after he saw it. But on the other hand, it seems likely that he didn't want to make a public statement. There's a difference beteen the guy acting as the guy, and the guy acting in the context of his office.
Linus almost certainly has his preferences and his opinions, like any other user. But in his capacity as the guy who holds his vague and unnamed office, as the spiritual leader of the linux movement, he chooses not to express a preference.
For a guy who says he wants to stay out of politics, he understands linux politics pretty well. I think that has a lot to do with his success, and the OS's success.
Re:Linus (Score:4, Informative)
Regards,
Steve
Re:Linus (Score:5, Interesting)
It was an apparently vanilla Fedora Cora 1.
Cheers
Stor
p.s. He beat me 4/5: came back from 1/4. Bastard! =)
p.p.s. Who cares what distro he uses? As far as I'm concerned most of the differences between the distros are pretty academic.
photo of linus playing on his laptop... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Linus (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Dennis Ritchie (of C and UNIX fame) (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Dennis Ritchie (of C and UNIX fame) (Score:4, Informative)
Re:George Bush's Desktop... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:SteveBallmer's desktop... (Score:5, Funny)