Gates photo — the mystery deepens

That fetching photograph of Bill Gates continues to intrigue people. It was allegedly published in an 1983 edition of Teenbeat magazine. But if so why — asks the eagle-eyed Karlin Lillington — is there a Macintosh clearly visible behind Bill? (The Mac wasn’t released until January 1984.) Presumably the photograph dates from ’84, not ’83.

Update: Mystery solved. The wonderful Urban Legends site says: “These images are actually publicity photos taken of the then 30-year-old Bill Gates coincident with the initial release of Microsoft Windows in 1985. The Corbis photo archive identifies their depiction thusly: ‘Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, reclines on his desk in his office soon after the release of Windows 1.0. 1985 Bellevue, Washington, USA.'”

Hmmm… Not sure about “thusly”. But thanks to Colm MacCarthaigh for the link. (And to AA for spotting the mispelling of ‘presumably’!)

Generate your own Windows error messages

Those of us who don’t use Windows miss out on its baroque error dialogs. How nice then to find that some kind soul has built an ingenious tool for creating them. Here’s my first effort.

Firefox downloads now more than 20 million

Yep. Stats and a nice graph here.

So what is the Mac Mini really for?

Here’s Bob Cringeley’s answer:

“Here’s my thinking, and it is just thinking — I have no insider knowledge of Apple’s plans, I haven’t been diving in any Cupertino dumpsters, and nobody who knows the truth has told me a darned thing. I think the Mac Mini is a fixed component in a system that will extend iTunes to selling and distributing movies.”

Those Google Browser rumours…

Ben Goodger, the lead engineer on the Firefox project, has gone to work at Google. Or, as he puts it enigmatically on his Blog, “As of January 10, 2005, my source of income changed from The Mozilla Foundation to Google, Inc. of Mountain View, California. My role with Firefox and the Mozilla project will remain largely unchanged, I will continue doing much the same work as I have described above – with the new goal of successful 1.1, 1.5 and 2.0 releases. I remain devoted full-time to the advancement of Firefox, the Mozilla platform and web browsing in general. I’m sure you have many questions. While I will be spending more time at Google, I will work out of the Mozilla Foundation offices regularly as the need arises. For all questions regarding Google, I ask that you contact Google directly, rather than myself.”

Hmmm… So Google are paying his salary, but he’s continuing to work on Firefox and other Mozilla stuff. Perhaps this is just Google’s way of supporting the Mozilla Foundation. Or then again…