Bill Gates @ UW

Today Bill Gates came to visit the students here at the University of Waterloo. Being on campus I had the opportunity to sit in and listen to his presentation. It was a surreal feeling knowing that this billionaire came all this way to speak to the UW student body. He is only visiting 6 universities and this is his only Canadian stop.

The talk itself focussed on the internet and the future of software development. It seemed like the presentation was geared at getting us pumped about the future. Bill Gates painted this picture of a brave new world so to say with his vision of what will unfold. It seemed quite facinating and some of it unbelievable. I'm sure some of his predictions will unfold with time.

After that we got to see a shameless promotion of 'Microsoft XP' featuring Bill with Napolean Dynamite! I'm not a fan of self promotion but this 5 min video was quite funny. Highlights included; Bill Gates in pajamas with bunnie slippers, Bill on rollerblades getting pulled by Napolean on a bike, dancing, and getting slapped in the face!

After the presentation Bill moved on to the demo table where he showed us some prototype technologies. We got to see the Xbox 360 in action as Bill began playing a racing game. I was quite blown away with the graphics and the versatility of the machine but I'll have to see the Playstation 3 first before I make any judgements. At the end of the line we were shown this cool cell phone assistant device. It does stuff like... scanning a business card that you placed onto the table and putting that digital information onto your cell phone... Its kinda hard to explain but it was really amazing to see. In the end the future he painted and speech given was quite entertaining, but I felt it could of been more.