Moved from D1 forum

[kandrathe]

I mean it's pretty shocking how just the global health care portion of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation contributes more to world health than the entire UN World Health Organization.

I'm wondering what the basis for this claim is? The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does good work, and they have a gigantic endowment, but I'm not sure what the metric would be for measuring them against the WHO.

I read it... but...

BMGF -- 2009 Annual Report grant summary Grants paid out to global health - $1.826 billion

The entire budget of the WHO was at that time $4.2 billion (of which they spend about $3.5 billion, 85%), but it appears that the entire outlay of research grants is less than a billion. Some of which it gets from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. It's hard to get an accurate financial picture, as they break down their finances by strategic objective, by nation, and by program, but never break it down enough to show how much gets to those who need it.

I'm having trouble even finding exactly how many people are employed, and the gross budget for salaries. There is the boiler plate on the about page, "More than 8000 people from more than 150 countries work for the Organization in 147 country offices, six regional offices and at the headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland." Just how many are out in the field delivering aid, as opposed to pushing paper in the office is hard to tell.

The estimates I've seen attribute about 60 to 80% of the WHO budget spent on bureaucracy. From their regional expenditures, I can see that about $1.5 billion (about 1/3) was expended in Switzerland.

Anyway... The bottom line, and my point was that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's spending on global health is very high, comparable to USAID, and WHO. These evil capitalists, even the ones that I don't like, have this way of de-scrooging themselves by focusing their financial gains on philanthropic benevolence. Anyway, back in the 80's I despised Bill, and how bamboozled Seattle Computer Products (who had in fact borrowed heavily from CP/M). I started to give him a break back in the late 80's when I saw at trade events how his super model dates treated him (i.e. badly).

There are quite a few free games out there, but the majority of them are quite likely resume builders, or skill builders. The person is making them because they want to get better at writing code, or to have something to show at an interview. Their goal in most cases I would bet is to make money from those skills or that product down the road. It might be from working for someone else it might be by starting their own company.

Other than padding the resume... Many times "we", the programmers, write the games because we want to play it with our friends. When I worked for MECC, someone bought and was playing Microwave for the Apple II which is a Pacman rip off. Anyway, we "the programmers" were interested in some of the mechanics allowing the animation to move smoothly, and one thing led to another and we ended up reverse engineering it to see how it ticked. We ended up creating a very fun multi-user LAN version of Microwave we called "death taxi" that never was released as an educational game (sort of a team based Pacman FPS). But, from what we learned, a whole series of smoothly animated educational games were created for the Apple II. Around the same time, there was this guy, Alan Klietz, who wrote a multi-user game called "Scepter of Goth", which contributed to the spawn of the MUD movement (back when rather than graphics games were played with words).

And, I remember another example at a former software house I worked at, we got into a big discussion about a deficiency in the software language we were using. By the next weekend, we had disassembled, corrected, and reassembled the language to correct the deficiencies, and in fact added many new features we had also desired. Over time, it became the standard, and eventually management learned about our "skunk works" project and packaged it as a product. Of course, after that it was hard to just make changes whenever we wanted to "our language". A modern example would be Martin Dougiamas, and Moodle. It started as a Ph.D project "to examine "The use of Open Source software to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry".

It's easier, and harder to build modern games. Easier due to the inherent graphics card abilities, but harder due to the demands for adequate looking 3D graphics rendering. But, I think most undergraduate computer science students could master enough network protocol handshaking to build a multi-user game for casual (read unsecure) play over a network. If I were in the same position now, as I was in the 80's I'd probably take a stab at convincing my co-workers to help me make Morrowind a multiplayer game (for private use).

So, anyway, its not always about getting the job. Many of the creative people in software development, do it at work and then never shut if off. It's the nature of our employment contracts that restrict us from handing away our work for free, since the companies we work for claim the rights to what we produce (24x7).