For a man thought of as the world's chief evangelist for computer technology, William H. Gates is assuming a surprising role these days, taking his own industry to task for having too much faith in digital solutions to the planet's worst ills.
"Whether it's a good or a bad thing depends on where you stand," said Vint Cerf, a computer scientist who is Google's Internet evangelist and who, with Robert Kahn, devised the original Internet routing protocols in the early 1970s.
Mr. Assange, 42, an Australian computer hacker who rose to prominence as an evangelist for radical government transparency and a critic of United States foreign policy, is a deeply polarizing figure.
MarI/O fails the validation test, but perhaps most of it is due to the fact the input never change [sic]." Other commenters also compare the project to experiments conducted by Swiss researcher and AI evangelist Jürgen Schmidhuber, designed to let a computer learn to beat a racing game from raw visuals alone.
In addition, new computer technology (or the new availability of it) permitted independent evangelists to establish sophisticated "feedback loops" through telephone banks and direct-mail services with "personalized" letters and solicitations.
Founder-evangelist Chairman Steve Jobs has a cult following among certain computer users and the mostly worshipful attention of the business press.
In part, these fans take their cue from Mr. Lucas, an evangelist of digital filmmaking who has led the way by using computers to produce low-cost special effects in his blockbuster movies.
Luckily for the enthusiasts at this third VRLA meet-up more than one company present is staking their whole existence on the dawn of virtual reality being as big as the start of the personal computer era or bigger: from the plans being made it's clear the evangelists think that VR is the next TV.
One of the earliest and most creative titles belonged to Guy Kawasaki, who was known as Apple's "Software Evangelist," when the company was struggling for a share of the evolving personal computer marketplace.
The names that BusinessWeek floats as potential candidates for the position include Vint Cerf, the chief internet evangelist for Google; Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft; Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon; and Ed Felten, computer science professor at Princeton.
