MKU BAHASA INGGRIS II TEKNIK INFORMATIKA, FTI YUSI ASNIDAR, S.Pd, M.Hum.

1. MKU BAHASA INGGRIS II TEKNIK INFORMATIKA, FTI YUSI ASNIDAR, S.Pd, M.Hum. Discussion Activity Talking About Succesful Person My First Job The Newspaper Solicitor When I was 14, I was hired for an after-school job selling subscriptions to my hometown paper, the Houston Post. I was sent to some of the city's worst neighborhoods to solicit door-to-door. Even though I was often scrambling around after dark in bad areas searching for garage apartments, I was grateful for the work. It was a challenge because people didn't like a stranger knocking on their door, especially a kid trying to get them to buy something. One time, a man slammed his door in my face and screamed, "I don't want no damn paper." I forced myself to knock again and was able to tell him how great the paper was. I ended up selling him a subscription. I was soon among the top subscription sellers and, like other successful salesmen, was given responsibility for training newcomers. Around this time I started playing the harmonica and guitar. Before long I was playing in a band at chili cook-offs and other events. When I turned 18, I focused my attention on becoming a professional musician. I never lost sight of this dream. I'm sure my perseverance came from what I learned knocking on strangers' doors. That experience helped me in many ways. Early in my music career I was locked in a legal dispute with a former manager. He pressured me to back off, but I refused. http://www.mercubuana.ac.id

2. group. We were swimming when these white kids in a motorboat began yelling racial taunts and trying to splash us. The assistant counselor and I had no choice but to warn them, "If you come anywhere near these kids, we've written down the number of your boat and we're going to call the cops." They yelled more stuff but finally left. That experience was the biggest test of responsibility I had ever faced. When I returned to high school after that first summer, it seemed a lot less intimidating than before. Plus, I had earned $375, which after trips to the camp candy store was down to eight cents' clear profit. Dave Barry is a syndicated humor columnist with the Miami Herald. His column also appears in about 600 other newspapers. Bill Gates Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft and the world's wealthiest man, is heading toward his new role as a full-time philanthropist. By mid-2008, Mr. Gates will walk away from his day-to-day duties at Microsoft and shift his energies to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation was already the world's biggest, at about $30 billion, when Warren E. Buffett declared in June 2006 that he would give $31 billion, most of his immense fortune, to the Gates Foundation, whose goals are curing the world's fatal diseases and improving American education. Mr. Gates says the foundation has a real shot at finding a cure for the 20 leading fatal diseases. "Can that happen in our lifetime?" he said, when the Buffett gift was announced. "I'll be optimistic and say, Absolutely." Mr. Gates has never been short on ambition. In 1975, when Microsoft began, personal computers were widely dismissed as mere toys for hobbyists. But he and Paul Allen, his high school friend and co-founder of Microsoft, immediately recognized the implications of the microprocessor and its http://www.mercubuana.ac.id

3. search project, code-named Underdog. But Google and lately Yahoo keep leaping ahead with innovations like local-area search complete with maps and satellite photos, ways to search inside a video file, and search designed for cellphones. Simply put, Google has become a new kind of foe, and that's what has Gates so riled. It has combined software innovation with a brand-new Internet business model--and it wounds Gates' pride that he didn't get there first. Since Google doesn't sell its search products (it makes its money from the ads that accompany its search results), Microsoft can't muscle it out of the marketplace the way it did rivals like Netscape. But what really bothers Gates is that Google is gaining the ability to attack the very core of Microsoft's franchise-- control over what users do first when they turn on their computers. Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt all say that any talk about supplanting Microsoft is ludicrous. But the idea that Google will one day marginalize Microsoft's operating system and bypass Windows applications is already starting to become reality. The most paranoid people at Microsoft even think "Google Office" is inevitable. Google is taking over operating system features too, like desktop search. There are fewer uses for the START button in Windows now that Google's desktop search can locate any program, document, photo, music file, or e-mail on a computer. All of which helps explain why inside Microsoft, the battle with Google has become far more than a fight over search: It's a certifiable grudge match for king of the hill in high tech. "Google is interesting not just because of web search, but because they're going to try to take that and use it to get into other parts of software," says Gates as he leans forward in his chair, his body coiled as if he could spring to his feet at any second. "If all there was was search, you really shouldn't care so much about it. It's because they are a software company," he says. "In that sense," he adds later, "they are more like us than anyone else we have ever competed with." All of which helps explain why inside Microsoft, the battle with Google has become far more than a fight over search: It's a certifiable grudge match for http://www.mercubuana.ac.id