However, Gates stated that he’ll continue to to act as an advisor to Microsoft, since he has left the software giant to be involved in full-time philanthropy with his foundation (named after him and his wife) in 2008. “I’m part-time involved with Microsoft, including even being in touch this week to give some of my advice but that’s not going to change – the foundation requires all of my energy and we feel we’re having a great impact.”, he said.

We wonder how much input into Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 8, Gates himself has personally put in. The public beta of Windows 8 is reportedly coming out in February of next year, and the official operating system, sometime around the third or fourth quarter of 2012.

[via Sydney Morning Herald]

“The idea is to be very low cost, very safe and generate very little waste” Gates said this week, publicly confirming the talks between Terrapower and the Chinese National Nuclear Corporation. Although talks are at an “early stage” one of the key benefits of the fourth-gen design is that they are created with safety as the default. “All these new designs are going to be incredibly safe,” Gates insisted, point out that “they require no human action to remain safe at all times.”

Traveling wave reactors (TWRs) are unique among nuclear power plant technologies for being relatively fuel agnostic. Once the chain reaction has been started, TWRs can not be fed by depleted uranium, natural uranium, spent fuel taken from existing light water reactors, or even a combination of different materials. In contrast, current designs require a supply of  enriched uranium that must go through dangerous and costly reprocessing.

The problem is that, so far, TWRs have not left the drawing board and jumped to actual products. Still, the designs are appealing because of their low-maintenance nature: once started they would be in effect self-sustained and could operate for 40-60 years without requiring any refueling or removal of spent fuel rods.

More on the traveling wave reactor at Wikipedia.

Gates may even face cross-examination. Bloomberg reports that this legal case comes from the suit that the US brought against Microsoft and eventually settled eight years ago. That was the case that did in fact declare Microsoft had a monopoly. According to the legal team for Novell, Gates even said that Word could not compete without anticompetitive conduct.

The case was brought back from the dead by an appeals court in May of this year. It had previously been dismissed by a lower court. The appeals court ruled that Novell didn’t give away its rights to the suit by selling WordPerfect to Caldera Inc in 1996. Novell alleges that WordPerfect had historically been the most popular word processor on the market. The anticompetitive tactics by Microsoft are the reason Novell points to for its program rapidly losing share.

[via Bloomberg]

The iPod and iPad question is probably the least surprising, to which Gates points out unsurprisingly that his children “have the Windows equivalent. They have a Zune music player, which is a great Windows portable player. They are not deprived children.” As for whether he would respond to calls from some investors to return to Microsoft and take back the CEO position from Steve Ballmer, Gates’ answer is a definitive no. “My full-time work for the rest of my life is this foundation” he claims. “I’m part-time involved. But this is my job now.”

It’s not just Travie McCoy songs that Gates can do – his children apparently tease him by singing the recent hit – but characters from Austin Powers. Challenged with the question of whether foreign aid gets partially skimmed off by less than admirable regimes, he dismisses it with a Dr. Evil impression. ”When we buy vaccines we are super-smart about what we pay. We get price reductions. We can track how many kids get the vaccines. People don’t stockpile vaccines. It’s not like you’re going to go to Mugabe’s mansion and you’d find polio vaccines in the basement and he’s going “Ha, ha, ha! I took it ALL!”"

Still, you can’t escape the geek for too long, and Gates’ money – metaphorically speaking – is on speech control and its integration into our daily lives. ”The next big thing is definitely speech and voice recognition” he insists. “You’ll be able to touch that board or speak to it and get your message to colleagues around the world. Screens are cheap.”

“[Ballmer's] continued presence is the biggest overhang on Microsoft’s stock” Einhorn had insisted at an investor event, pointing to the CEO’s wishy-washy performance in the mobility sector and underwhelming tablet, smartphone and PMP offerings. His inability to compete had left Microsoft “stuck in the past” the fund manager argued.

Microsoft has declined to comment officially, though inside whispers suggest it isn’t simply loyalty-among-execs keeping Ballmer in his role. ”Bill Gates is a ruthless capitalist” a fund manager reportedly at one of Microsoft’s largest shareholders said. “If he wanted to, he’d walk Ballmer to the door himself.”

Ex-Google and current Mozilla design lead Kevin Fox believes that Skype is the soft-carrier piece of a strategy pyramid that will see Microsoft use its Windows Phone OS and Nokia’s hardware capabilities to attempt to shift more voice minutes over VoIP than via traditional means.

“If over half of a soft carrier’s airtime minutes were carried over wi-fi rather than a leased cellular network, that carrier could beat a national carrier on price even if the national carrier doubled their costs when they leased access to the soft carrier, and for every customer who only has 3G access there’s another who has almost exclusively wi-fi access, and over time the scales continue to tip toward the latter, steadily lowering soft-carrier costs.” Kevin Fox

It’s not a new idea, as Fox admits. Google attempted to bypass carrier dominance with the Nexus One, selling the handset online through a special phone portal of its own. That failed to gain consumer traction, however, and Google was forced to work with carriers getting the Nexus One into retail stores instead.

Similarly, Apple is rumored to have spent considerable time and effort fighting its corner over the iPhone, including persuading AT&T to enable Visual Voicemail support on the handset. More recently, the company is believed to have been experimenting embedded SIM technology which would allow Apple to shift activation and provisioning of new handsets away from the operators and instead to its own iTunes ecosystem.

“The idea of video conferencing is going to get so much better than it is today” Bill Gates suggested, pointing out that “Skype actually does get a fair bit of revenue.” That developmental shift may well extend to voice calls, if Microsoft has its way.

Allen reportedly inserts himself into meetings that others attending cannot recall him being present at, in addition to claiming credit for much of the innovation that pushed Microsoft on to success. As a result, there is ongoing frustration at the number of shares in the company he holds, in addition to the accusations that he caught Gates and Steve Ballmer discussing ways in which they could reduce his equity by issuing further options to others, themselves included.

“I had helped start the company and was still an active member of management, though limited by my illness, and now my partner and my colleague were scheming to rip me off,” he claims. “It was mercenary opportunism, plain and simple.”

As for Bill Gates, the co-founder hasn’t spoken publicly on the memoir, but issued a written statement suggesting that “while my recollection of many of these events may differ from Paul’s, I value his friendship and the important contributions he made to the world of technology and at Microsoft.”

The default icon is used whenever Outlook contacts lack either a local image of the individual or one on Facebook or another social networking site that the People Pane can query.  Why they chose a picture of Gates – and this particular image – is a mystery, as is whether the man himself knows of its origins.

“Microsoft has a lot of different tablet projects that we’re pursuing. We think that work with the pen that Microsoft pioneered will become a mainstream for students. It can give you a device that you can not only read, but also create documents at the same time.” Bill Gates, chairman, Microsoft

Ironically, the sort of device Gates talks about is most reminiscent of Courier, Microsoft’s dual-display project that the company recently confirmed it has no intention of commercially producing.  However, Microsoft also said that technologies developed during the Courier project could show up “in future Microsoft offerings”; we ourselves speculated that the company might develop a custom pen-centric OS build for OEMs to use on their own tablet hardware.

That would certainly allow them to relaunch their ongoing work in tablets (which, contrary to what you might believe from reading the mainstream press, has never stopped) and take advantage of the newly focused attention on the format.  Gates was also (again) asked his opinion on Apple and the iPad, to which he said “Yes, I think both in general and in the specific, Apple’s done a great job.”

[via TechFlash]

“[Project Natal is] for media consumption as a whole, and even if they connect it up to Windows PCs for interacting in terms of meetings, and collaboration, and communication” Bill Gates,

In fact, based on ongoing price reductions, Gates envisages hardware based on Project Natal to be in “most office environments” at some point in the future.  He held off from describing specific usage applications, but given Natal uses video recognition we’re assuming obvious areas of focus might include collaborative prototype interaction, augmented reality systems where users are identified while on video calls, and general controlling of PCs with gestures.

Natal uses an RGB camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone and custom processor all in one compact bar, which can track gamers’ movements in 3D space as well as respond to verbal commands.  Unlike the Wii, it requires no controller; Microsoft have not revealed when the device will see a commercial launch.

[via Engadget]

As much as I hate to admit it, Steve Jobs is the jock. He’s the cocky guy that knows he’s the best and most of the time, he’s right. Bill Gates is the nerdy type with a chip on his shoulder. He knows he’s smart and he wants to let you know too. Both guys lack social decorum, but one comes out on top as the victor time and time again, and that’s Steve Jobs.

And you know, what? It’s all about advertising. Not only is Apple the “cool” company, they are so cool they can make fun of themselves and PC in one move. The Mac and PC Guys are famous–the Mac guy is cocky and sure of himself, PC guy is self-depreciating and likable. What other company can portray their opponent in a more lovable fashion and still come out on top.

But nothing has done more to stoke the company war than the media itself. Parodies abound all over the net–feel free to try your hand at the SuperNews game below (it’s good stuff)–and the rivalry continues even though Gates is no longer Microsoft’s CEO! It will forever be a Jobs/Gates duel, because they are merely icons of the war between what is cool and what is the norm. And really, who wants to go with the norm, anyway?

Mac v. PC: The Game