Linkstew

Hide Your IPod, Here Comes Bill

Heh. "This irks the management team no end."

Microsoft won't go soft on Mike Rowe

Man, this is almost unbelievably absurd. Funny, but still absurd.

Microsoft and Google: Partners or Rivals?

If this happened (and I really don't think it will), based on what Microsoft did to Hotmail, it would pretty much be the worst thing ever.

Microsoft to design city high school

While I'm irritated that Microsoft gets to do this, and I hope it's not so wildly successful that every school wants to be a Microsoft school, I am intrigued by the possibilities of such pervasively integrated technology in education and will be curious to see how this turns out.

Guess what? Microsoft won.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

As April draws closer, I've been worrying more and more about finding a job. Accordingly, I've been working on my resume and sending out feelers, one of which resulted in this quote:

"I'm not sure if I want to work for someone who wants my resume as a .doc."
-- me

First up, I read this article about the Windows build process. As I read it, I was a good combination of horrified and fascinated. I can't even begin to comprehend the complexity involved in that thing... Five thousand programmers? That's almost as many residents as live in the UC Berkeley dorms, and I can't imagine all of them being organized towards one common goal, with the possibility that something someone does will impact someone else's system in some unpredictable way...

And yes, I was horrified by both the complexity being described, and horrified that I was fascinated by what I was reading. Proof once again that I am a geek.

As I read the article, I imagined that the programmers at the lowest levels didn't even know what they were working on -- that they were given a specification for a subroutine, and were just asked to make it do something based on the input. This image was fueled by Stephenson's description of Y.T.'s mom's job with the Feds in Snow Crash, where the programmers are "interchangeable parts" turning out tiny widgets, and the actual software engineering is done by people who aren't actually programming.

The quote that most caught my eye from the article was about the significance of a broken build, which boggled my mind almost as much as the complexity involved in the first place. And I

"We've sent out calls at 3 a.m. when the build is broken, find the developer that broke it, and get him into work right then and fix it immediately. The developers are on call 24 hours a day. There's definitely an escalation process. A broken build is considered a critical, severity-1 problem."

It also got me wondering how Mac OS X and Apple compares. Maybe I'll find out some day.

Second, this interview with Marc Andreessen (one of the co-founders of Netscape) was kind of short, but he did say one thing that I found very thought provoking:

"Things like the back and forward button, we never intended that to be a permanent part of the interface. But people get locked into metaphors. You have to be careful with the metaphors you put in front of people because once they click onto one, that's it.

Consider how pervasive the back and forward button have become these days -- to the point of being "basic" features of our file system browsers -- and you'll see how significant it really is.

I was working with a bunch of Excel data this weekend for my CS project, and at some point I decided I wanted to transpose a table of data. You know, swap the rows and the columns? Simple, right?

Well, I tried searching Excel help, and had no luck. A quick google search didn't immediately yield the answer. And I asked my CS partners, but they also had no clue. A few of them even asked other people they knew in the lab, and still no luck.

For a bunch of CS majors, I was amazed by how little they all knew about Excel. Hell, that I was the one manning Excel in my group (because I knew the most about it) kinda says a lot by itself. I mean, I can get around in Excel, but I wouldn't dare list Excel on my resume. I know how complicated that sucker is, and I know that I can barely scratch the surface.

So I shrugged and decided I was going to write a perl script to transpose colon-delimited data that I could export from Excel. Perl is, afterall, my swiss-army chainsaw. What's the point of having a chainsaw if you're not going to use it? And besides, I figured it wouldn't take me more than 5 minutes to write, and I'd already spent at least that long trying to figure out how to do it with Excel.

But before I started, I had to go to the bathroom. And when I got back, one of my partners had found the "Paste Special" option, which, among a bunch of other handy features, includes a "Transpose" option. So much for showing off my perl-fu.

So I've got a lot of issues with Mac OS X, but you wanna know what my #1 biggest pet peeve about OS X is?

It can't remember my fucking web browser preferences!

I want OmniWeb to be my default browser. I do not want IE to be my default browser. Even using this tip, my default browser regularly switches back to IE. This is especially irksome for me, because I navigate my bookmarks with LaunchBar, which just uses my default browser to open the bookmark in question, no matter which app it got the bookmark from.

Jesus Christ, how hard could it possibly be to retain a preference? You'd think this was a fucking Microsoft OS or something...

Crikey, this is just ridiculous. Why must Microsoft be so stupidly evil? And why do I find myself asking this question more and more as the months fly by? I've asked myself that about 6 times so far this week. Grah.

(Link from Nisa.)

1. Windows XP Professional is equivalent to Mac OS X 10.1, while Windows XP Home lacks too many features to be considered OS X's peer. [1]
2. A full copy of Windows XP Professional costs $299.
3. An upgrade to Windows XP Professional costs $199 [2].
4. Mac OS X 10.1 costs $129. [3]

Now, who tried to deny being a monoply power again?

Anyway, I'm in the process of consolidating/upgrading my desktop computer, and I'd like to try out Windows XP on this 1.4 ghz athlon I've got sitting here, because heaven knows that lovely linux won't stress it the way bloated bill's system will. But there are three things keeping me from doing so:

1. The very idea of Windows Product Activation not only disgusts me, but leaves me asking some very troublesome questions:
   • In my mind, WPA actually legitimizes try before you buy practices.
   • Then, why doesn't Microsoft offer an XP demo disc with an option to either buy a full version of XP or revert the user's system to its previous state.
   • Assuming XP is all that it's made out to be, it seems that such a demo disc would be much more effective at convincing consumers that they should buy XP than simply advertising.
   • If Microsoft doesn't have the technology to enable an XP demo with rollback capabilities, then they should spend a tiny fraction of their XP advertising budget to develop it. Just make the demo requires X gigs of disk space and it should be trivial to back up the old configuration.
   • That Microsoft has not invested in such a demo disc suggests one of two things to me:
     1. Microsoft does not feel that WPA is secure enough to prevent this demo disc turning into free a operating system. In this case, they shouldn't be using WPA in the first place.
     2. Microsoft knows that XP isn't all that it's made out to be (I'm not saying it is or isn't, I'm just extrapolating), and doesn't want to let consumers find that out without buying it first.
2. If I do try XP and decide I want a copy, I'll be damned if I'm going to have to spend 2.5 times what I spent on my lovely Mac OS X for an equivalent product.
3. Have I mentioned how much I hate the name XP?

[1] A full proof of this statement is omitted. The statement is derived from this feature comparison between XP Home and Professional, and information about OS X in my head.
[2] If you happen to own a new enough copy of windows to qualify for an upgrade.
[3] The $20 upgrade from OS X 10.0 to 10.1 doesn't count here, because I consider the upgrade from Win* to XP to be equivalent to the upgrade from Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X.