Thursday, June 05, 2008 Ng: The value of books and work By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
WITH all the things you can do today, you can say one thing - life is never boring! There are unlimited music and videos you can find on the Internet, countless video games you can play and the hundreds or thousands of friends you make in social networks.
The person who can invent a way for us to have more than 24 hours a day is really the one that will get my hug.
One thing I was afraid of was that my children would suffer, as a result of the choices available for them and they would read fewer books! TV or video is a great way to learn a lot of things, but nothing stimulates thinking and learning more than reading.
That is why I was so elated about the report that worldwide, 3.13 billion books were sold in 2007, still an improvement from over the 3.1 billion books sold in 2006. Although that represents only a one percent growth, hopefully, that illustrates that reading is still a must and should not be substituted.
I try to continue to read as much, and although I don’t watch as many movies, I was still flabbergasted to learn about the big fire that gutted Universal Studios. One of the things that immediately caught my attention was the report that over 50,000 movie films were burned.
Because if you ask me, all the others can be rebuilt, but the films cannot be retrieved!
The big loss was not really the physical asset but the intellectual asset. Even if the buildings cost millions, the films were priceless!
I think it was a relief to hear that all the films had copies. This reminds me to remind everybody to have backup files of their data.
Store them somewhere a little bit far, so that when something happens, you will not lose them!
Hard disks are much better nowadays, but there is still no guarantee that they will not go anytime.
NOSTALGIA. I was a little bit nostalgic when I read about Bill Gates delivering his last public speech as a full time employee in the TechEd Conference.
Bill will officially retire from Microsoft in a few weeks to devote most of his time to philanthropic work.
His work will focus on how to give away over $60 billion—an amount which could single-handedly pay the foreign debt of the Philippines. He finds the task challenging. Gates started as a developer 33 years ago when he co-founded Microsoft, and regardless of some of the things that you might have read about Microsoft, he left a lasting legacy in the industry. Although users are more fickle, many developers remain the most loyal followers of Microsoft.
By becoming the richest man in the world for sometime, and making Microsoft one of the most visible companies of the tech generation, Gates showed an army of developers that it was not only cool to be a nerd and a techie, but one could also make a lot of money.
Gates himself was a little bit nostalgic—reflecting that for over 30 years or since he was 17, he had only one passion and immersion—software. Gates, in his last speech, also highlighted the Internet Explorer browser, which has been somewhat of a curse to the company.
Although it helped Microsoft secure a dominant position on the Internet, it has remained free all these years, and, in fact, was the primary technology that triggered its antitrust problems—something that haunts the company up to today.
Anyhow, beta 2 of Internet Explorer Version 8 will be available by August, he said.
