Roundup of Microsoft Research At TechFest 2009 123
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has a very thorough post of some of the technologies that Microsoft researchers showed off at TechFest last week. 'The exact number of projects that were demonstrated at TechFest 2009 is not clear, but here's a quick rundown of about 35 research projects that haven't received much coverage, accompanied by links that will let you further explore if your interest is piqued. Remember that these are concepts and prototypes, not finished products, and they may never end up becoming anything significant.'" While Microsoft has been criticized for squandering a fortune on R&D, there can be no doubt that they are showing off some cool tech here.
What about Bob? (Score:1, Informative)
Bob 2.0 is a speech-enabled, touch sensitive Social Networking hypervisor powered by Cloud Computing.
And may I have your attention to the mobile phone over here - *this* isn't your father's Clippy.
Re:Good for them (Score:2, Informative)
I just cancelled a 10-year Hotmail account and left to Gmail a few days ago because Microsoft thought that it would be cute to splice their own(poorly-implemented, I might add) version of MySpace into my goddamn e-mail account.
It's not like Hotmail is the only one. Yahoo!'s mail did it, too, with their "Connections," but perhaps it's easier to ignore on Yahoo!.
DT
Re:Good for them (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Good for them (Score:4, Informative)
I just cancelled a 10-year Hotmail account and left to Gmail a few days ago because Microsoft thought that it would be cute to splice their own(poorly-implemented, I might add) version of MySpace into my goddamn e-mail account.
You seem like the kind of hot-headed prick that makes rash (and ignorant) decisions out of anger. Case in point. Did you have to cancel your account? No. You could have done this:
Blaming Microsoft for your own shortcomings. Classic.
Re:Here's hoping ... (Score:3, Informative)
Nobody has (almost).
Microsoft did bit of brilliant market engineering by switching the default setting from BSOD to automatic reboot for XP. It meant all their evangelists could legitimately (if misleadingly) claim that XP was so stable it never BSOD'd, while not requiring any actual expensive coding to fix bugs.
To get your pretty blue screens back, change the recovery settings to disable automatic rebooting:
Enjoy your cheery BSOD messages!
MSR's reputation (Score:5, Informative)
While MS gets heavily criticized, the same can't be said about MSR, which is a highly prestigious industrial research group that harkens to the culture brought about from the early days of Xerox PARC Research. When it comes to research, MSR publishes consistently in extremely competitive and top-rated conferences and journals (e.g., ACM Siggraph, SOSP, OSDI, etc). While these outcomes do not have a tangible "dollar" amount attached to them, they do allow MSR to attract and bring together a tremendous amount of talent coming out of top computer science schools. Increasingly, very few companies out there are willing to commit the resources to research like MS does or truly focus on "pure" research without being tied down to a product group. Some examples would be IBM, Intel, HP Labs, etc. The reality is: research that truly has an impact cannot be tied to product cycles.
As a CS PhD student myself at a "competitive" CS graduate school, many of my peers who are considering academic positions also intend to apply to MSR after graduation. And it's not easy to get in. The interview process is nearly as rigorous as one would undergo if applying for assistant professorship at a top CS school. So, MSR only hires top-rate people, and I think MS's decision to fund MSR will and continue to pay off in the future.
Re:Here's hoping ... (Score:3, Informative)
Thinking about it, most BSOD issues you had back in those days was either from your printer drivers, your network drivers, your graphic drivers, or a bug in your game which ends up tieing up the hardware.
And the only reason windows 9x allowed games to crash your system was because the game companies needed as much speed as possible and a HAL slows things down.
Re:Here's hoping ... (Score:3, Informative)
You can fool some people some times, but you can't fool all the people all the time... this cuts both ways. Sure, it could be applied to Microsoft making auto-reboot the default, but it also applies to you claiming that's why we haven't seen BSODs at all.
A couple interesting points:
* It's quite possible to tell when a Windows system crashes, even with auto-reboot enabled - you still see the BSOD briefly, and then the computer spontaneously reboots, and *then* you get a message on log-in claiming that a problem occurred.
* I have auto-reboot disabled on all my computers. I *still* haven't seen one of them crash (BSOD or otherwise) on any release OS (betas don't count, especially when mucking about with beta drivers as well) in literally years.
* If you, personally, are getting BSODs (or crashes in general) you're doing something wrong - the OS itself does not inherently crash, but if you're running as an Administrator (and if you're using XP, I'd give 100-to-1 odds that you are) then a single poorly written program that silently loads a bad driver into the kernel can bring the system down. A remarkable number of programs insist on loading some driver or another.
Re:Cool (Score:3, Informative)
Surface has already been deployed. The first models were installed months ago. Some of the fancier hotels are rolling them out across the country already. It's not priced for the home user - something on the oder of $5000/machine - but you could probably buy one for personal use if you wanted to. Given enough time, its price will certainly come down.
The point is, just because you've never personally used a given product doesn't mean it isn't already developed, deployed, and being used in the world.