Crave

Melinda Gates was recently interviewed in Vogue magazine and had some rather interesting things to say about her husband and the technology in her home.

According to Gates, both she and Bill have strict rules forbidding their children from having an iPod or iPhone.

"There are very few things that are on the banned list in our household," Gates tells Vogue. "But iPods and iPhones are two things we don't get for our kids."

But it gets better. Gates went on to say that there is an "inevitable lure of forbidden fruit" and "every now and then" she looks at her friends and says, "'Ooh, I wouldn't mind having that iPhone.'"

Of course, the blogosphere has erupted, adding fuel to the Bill Gates fire that might never extinguish. In fact, commenters on David Carnoy's Crave article first reporting on this story have delivered some interesting takes on the issue.

"That is kind of a pathetic insecurity that demonstrates just how little confidence Gates and wife have in the products that built their lives," a commenter named ewlech wrote.

In Gates' defense, commenter David Dudley writes, "I don't think it's a confidence issue, they just don't see a point in using their own cash to increase market share of a competitor. You certainly would not espouse Apple to use Dell servers in their internal infrastructure despite opinions of what is 'superior' or otherwise, right?"

The argument could rage for hours. But I don't think it's as difficult an issue as some might think. If I were Bill Gates and I had three children running around my mansion, I'd ban all Apple products, Nintendo consoles and handhelds, Linux, and every single Zune competitor. There's something to be said about family loyalty.

A few tech blogs on Monday morning are highlighting some choice quotes from a Melinda Gates interview that appears in the most recent issue of Vogue.

According to the Vogue piece, Bill and Melinda Gates, in addition to making their home a no-iPhone/iPod zone, have forbidden their three children from using the devices (no word on rules for other Apple products).

The article's mainly about the Gates Foundation and how it's trying to solve "hunger in the world." We certainly appreciate that, but we'll stick with the inane superficial stuff here, thank you very much.

LG's LG-GM730 may be Melinda Gates' best option as an iPhone substitute.

(Credit: LG)

"There are very few things that are on the banned list in our household," Gates tells Vogue. "But iPods and iPhones are two things we don't get for our kids." The article goes on to add that "Gates acknowledges the inevitable lure of forbidden fruit." The Microsoft founder's wife also is quoted as saying, "Every now and then, I look at my friends and say, 'Ooh, I wouldn't mind having that iPhone.'"

Of course, if we were doing the interview, the obvious next question would be, "Just what cell phones do you and Bill use?"

With a big alliance in place with LG for Windows Mobile phones, I'm betting that they go with something like LG's upcoming LG-GM730. It certainly looks like an iPhone. On the outside, anyway.

Anybody else want to guess?

CARLSBAD, Calif.--In an interesting but perhaps unsurprising move, Microsoft plans to add multitouch interface to Windows 7, CNET News.com has learned. The interface will be shown in just a few minutes as part of Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates' keynote at the D6 event here.

Update: Ballmer says it will come in late 2009. Corporate VP Julie Larson-Green demonstrated the multitouch technology, painting with several fingers at the same time to show how it can process not just touch, but multiple simultaneous input.

"It's much faster to do certain tasks than using a mouse," Larson-Green said. She also showed rotating photos by pinching and rotating, much like Microsoft's surface or Apple's iPhone.

Microsoft had previously hinted that the touch gestures would find their way into Windows. In an interesting twist though, the new technology will work with existing touch screens, Microsoft said. They showed it running on an existing Dell laptop.

A Microsoft blog with a demo can be found here and I've added in Microsoft's video as well at the end of the post.

Analysis and context: I took three major things away from the multitouch demo.

1. Multitouch is going to be ubiquitous. And by this I don't just mean on every Windows machine. I also expect Apple to have a similar feature on its computers, and quite possibly ahead of Windows 7 final ship date.

2. We're going to see touch on a lot more machines ahead of Windows 7. I expect this will help convince PC makers to include touch screens even in Vista machines so they can be "7-proof." Touch can come in many forms. We've already seen that the laptop's touch pad can prove to be a cost-effective spot for gesture sensitive touch, and I think we will see other interesting gesture recognition approaches beyond just making the full screen touch sensitive.

3. User interfaces are a key selling point in Microsoft's No. 1 longterm Windows goal--making the OS matter. Windows is not just under attack from Apple. It's also under attack from forces that threaten to make the OS less relevant, whether it's browser-based applications or (pardon the phrase, boss) Web operating systems.

Two such efforts are going to be on display here at D: G.ho.st (which presents Wednesday) and Glide, which presents on Thursday.

I spoke with CEO Donald Leka, who talked about how Glide allows documents to be shared across devices, such as a Mac user trying to share a QuickTime file with a mobile phone user that happens to have RealPlayer or Windows Media on their device. The company's support for the iPhone, in particular, has been a boon, Leka said.

"The iPhone is probably the best thing that ever happened," he said.

As is often the case, things were a little less compelling when it comes to the business model and the drivers that will push someone to one of these efforts over another. Leka said the company can make money off commerce and by selling premium subscriptions on top of the 5GB of free storage Glide provides.

Video: Multi-Touch in Windows 7

Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.

(Credit: Register Hardware)

We have the regular whitish Xbox 360 gaming console and the souped-up black Elite. But if you're an important associate of Bill Gates, there's also the limited-edition "mother-of-pearl" flavor as pictured here. A special gift from Gates to the president of South Korea, it features a special oriental motif that supposedly symbolizes patience and perseverance, according to Register Hardware.

The exquisite handy work of Korean artist Kim Young-Jun, 100 of these "VVIP" consoles are purported to have been commissioned by Microsoft. If you have any information on the rest of these swanky consoles' lucky recipients, do give us a heads-up. We would love to run a photo gallery.

(Source: Crave Asia)

During his keynote Wednesday at the CEO Summit, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates shows off TouchWall, a 4-foot-by-6-foot touch-screen computer prototype.

(Credit: Microsoft)

It's one step removed from the Midas approach, but Bill Gates wants to turn nearly everything we touch into a computer.

Speaking to a crowd of CEOs gathered in Redmond, Wash., Gates showed off prototype technology he said will allow home and office walls to become computers.

While Microsoft's Surface computers are currently shipping for about $10,000, Gates said the hardware costs for such products need not be that high. Within a few years, it could be in the hands of individuals.

"We're saying it will be absolutely pervasive," Gates said. "When I say everywhere, I mean the individual's office, the home, the living room."

What Gates showed on Wednesday was a 4-foot-by-6-foot prototype called TouchWall. Among the things that appealed to me was the idea that presentations might shift away from the sort of robotic slideshows enabled by PowerPoint.

Along with TouchWall, Gates showed off the software that accompanies it, known as Plex. TouchWall itself uses infrared and laser technology to sense touch input, Microsoft said.

In his speech, Gates also proved why TouchWall is still in the prototype stage.

"Whenever I go up and touch it, the software will notice it," Gates said, in kicking off the demo. When nothing happened, he added the qualifier "theoretically."

The screen did come to life a few minutes later.

As investors around the globe view the sputtering U.S. economy with fear and trembling, at least one maven of the market economy sees a reason for hope: Bill Gates.

At the Government Leaders Forum in Berlin, a student has a close encounter with Bill Gates and a tablet PC.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Stopping in Berlin on his way to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he's expected to speak Thursday about the ways a more "creative capitalism" could benefit society's needier members, Microsoft's chairman told the German newspaper Bild that the best medicine to stave off a worldwide economic crisis is a good dose of new tech.

"I am an optimist. The U.S. economy could remain strong in the next few years because technological progress will urge it forward," Gates said. (Bild, of course, put his words into German.) He put current fears into the context of recent history--a U.S. economy that he said has been strong for the last 10 to 15 years. That statement glosses over the bursting of a certain dot-com bubble a few years back, mind you; no telling if that's Gates' omission, or an editorial one.

Of course, he's always been notoriously upbeat about the coming economic and societal benefits of technology. An op-ed piece by Gates in Thursday's Wall Street Journal reads like the stump speech he's given countless times over the last decade or more: "Together, hardware and software will be the catalyst for advances during the next 10 years that will far exceed the changes of the last 30 years."

But that's his role: As he told Bild, "I'm no stock expert--I'm a software person." Asked if he knows how much money he personally might have lost as markets have tumbled over the last few days, he again took the long view. "I look at Microsoft's stock performance every couple of weeks. The important thing is that in the past it's gone up more than it's gone down."

Gates was in Berlin for the Government Leaders Forum, at which he recommitted Microsoft to its Partners in Learning program, which provides software and training to educational efforts around the world.

Most people compare Bill Gates' keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show and Steve Jobs' Macworld Expo address by analyzing the relative strength of the products announced.

That's all fine and dandy, but what about looking at the words themselves? That's exactly what the ever-resourceful Todd Bishop at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has done. In a blog posting Tuesday, Bishop includes a tag cloud showing the most frequently used words by each, as well as an analysis of the rate of big words used by each.

In terms of which words came up the most, a tag cloud shows words such as "digital," "device," "great," "phone," and "Windows" atop Gates' list, while Jobs most frequently used "great," "iPod," "iPhone," "Mac," and "MacBook."

So both execs think their own products are great. No surprise there.

Gates' speech scored a 9.37 on the Gunning-Fog index, a measure of the number of years of education required to read a particular text. Jobs' address, meanwhile, clocked in at 6.9. Of the words used by Gates, 5.2 were classified as "hard words," while only about 3 percent of Jobs words were given that distinction.

It's up to you whether you think big words are better. I'll stay out of that one, but it's a fun read. Check it out.

The more Microsoft events CNET sends me to around New York (the Windows Vista launch weekend, Halo 3's raucous little debutante ball), the more I realize one thing: No matter how much Gates, Ballmer, & Co. seem to always have issues (like that "Zune" debacle), that company knows how to throw one hell of a party. I'm not kidding. It even has its own wine now.

Created by South African winery Stormhoek especially for Microsoft, the "Blue Monster Reserve" sauvignon blanc is accompanied by the tagline "change the world or go home." It's only available to Microsoft employees, members of a "Friends of Blue Monster" Facebook group, or Stormhoek insiders. The cute little logo was designed by Stormhoek marketing strategist Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com.

This, for the record, furthers my speculation that Microsoft is actually the Dharma Initative.

But, that said, this really isn't that big of a surprise. I speculate that Google has a half dozen tasty custom microbrews on tap in the Googleplex at all times. I've also heard this rumor that Steve Jobs has commissioned a wheatgrass-infused organic sake that was uncorked shortly after the iPhone launch. Don't even get me started on the juicy gossip about Mark Zuckerberg's plans to make Facebook-branded Smirnoff Ice as iconic a part of his image as those Adidas sandals.

And here at CNET, you might not know that we have our own private-label scotch! It has been absolutely instrumental recently as Craver-in-chief Mike Yamamoto attempts to deal with Tim Moynihan's robo-hellraising.

(Via PSFK)

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates speak at the D: All Things Digital conference.

(Credit: Dan Farber/ZDNet)

If you didn't catch the Steve and Bill show at the D5 conference in Southern California last week, Apple has posted the full hour and a half discussion on iTunes. The rare joint appearance between the Microsoft chairman and the Apple chief has risen to the top of the podcast charts on iTunes.

It's available in both audio and video, though the latter weighs in at almost a gigabyte (my copy is still downloading as I blog this). Unlike the high-end conference, the podcast is free. Of course, it doesn't come with the nifty swag bags that conference attendees got either.