Distilled Template

I saw this movie a while ago, and I’m glad that finally a movie like this is being validated against the nation’s top 19 climate experts (the original story is here). This is a movie that everyone should see; to put it bluntly — the climate and life on earth is hanging on a thread and if we don’t do anything in 10 years, that thread will snap and we’ll begin a horrific descent into destruction. Well, maybe that was a bit morbid… but in all seriousness, it’s for the most part, true.

Gore draws a good analogy in this movie between man:global warming and smoking:lung cancer. For decades, we debated over whether smoking really caused lung cancer. The real truth was that there was no doubt scientifically that smoking caused lung cancer! It was only the media that propagated otherwise. The same applies to global warming.

The thing that annoys me is that there are actually people out there who don’t even believe global warming is happening. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, has said, “Global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” Even our own President won’t even watch this movie, although he’s hypocritically said that he’s “unbiased” on whether global warming is man-made or natural. Come on. Seriously, look around you. Look at the news. Read scientific papers. Watch this movie.

A lot of stuff has happened here and a lot of people are talking about it. Recap:

1. Gates leaves Microsoft (or rather, he splits up his role and gives it to Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie) and will work full-time at the Gates Foundation.
2. WinFX is renamed to .NET 3.0.
3. WinFS is cancelled. Why? No one quite really knows. I have some ideas…
4. Martin Taylor, a key advisor to Steve Ballmer and head of the marketing for Windows Live "leaves Microsoft". 
5. Warren Buffet, the world's 2nd richest man, has decided to give up his fortune to charity, giving 85% of it to the Gates Foundation.

Good news and bad news I guess. I'm not really sure where Microsoft is headed, but one thing's for sure. There is a lot of potential for success between now and the middle of next year. The question is whether the right steps will be taken to ensure that success.

Tonight there was a party/BBQ for a few interns at Bill Gates' house. It was unbelievable. The only downside was that we were unable to take pictures while we were there. No pictures were taken, not even professional ones — we weren't allowed to bring anything except our MS badge. We were first taken to a church in Medina, went through a security checkpoint, and were taken on shuttles to Bill's estate. The whole place was on high security — there were people on the roads to direct the shuttles. It's really something to go to a rich person's house, but to be at the house of one of the richest people in the world is unimaginable. A lot of his house was roped off from public view, but we had an awesome BBQ (the food was, simply put, amazing). His backyard is right on Lake Washington and he has his own little beach — a couple of us sat on his lawn chairs on the beach and ate our dessert while the sun was setting. Surprisingly, for a guy worth $50+ billion dollars, his house is fairly modest (Most billionaires are fairly extravagant in their investments). While we were finishing up our food, the Man himself came down from a huge staircase into the backyard; it was hilarious seeing the interns who were chowing down on those steps turn around and just drop everything as Mr. Gates sidestepped them. Seeing someone like Bill in person is surreal — just shaking hands with a guy who has influenced the world so much is crazy. We all surrounded him as he answered questions about everything from software to the Gates Foundation to Google to college. It was completely enlightening.

After hearing from Bill, I explored his house (at least what we could explore) for a bit. His backyard is amazing; it has grottos, waterfalls, lakes, streams, all kinds of wildlife, trails.. and that's just his backyard! I got a glimpse of his indoor theater and swimming pool, and apparently he has a huge library in the house that has Leonardo da Vinci's original manuscripts.

A few Vice Presidents were there too — I was really eager to meet Peter Spiro, the head of WinFS. Near the end the SQL interns and I finally met him. Peter Spiro is completely different from the typical tech guy (but in many ways, alike). Before he joined MS, he was a forrester, grew corn, and made charcoal in Africa. Despite all of these non-technical pursuits, he became a technical fellow at MS in databases and he's now the head of one of the most (if not _the_ most) innovative projects at Microsoft. One of the SQL interns is Greek — hilarious guy. He and Peter became real buddies since Peter is from Greece too.

Overall, amazing experience. We all joked that we'd go back and try and draw everything we saw since we couldn't take pictures. Hell, I have a really bad memory so I might just do that…

Uh, pretty fast. That's when they cooled it to almost absolute zero through liquid nitrogen. Still, at room temperature: 300 Ghz — 100 times faster than today's common transistors. It'll be commercialized in two years. What does this mean?

a) Nothing's stopping Moore's Law yet.
b) Intel and AMD should probably start thinking about something other than multi-core processors. (although parallelization is always good)
c) Windows Vista Ultimate with Aero has some hope of running on something

Speaking of which, I believe if you're a TechNet subscriber (it's a free subscription) you can go ahead and try out Vista Beta 2 now. I have a DVD of it sitting right here that I've been itching to try, but no computer…

It rocks. Anyone else listen to it? If you have iTunes or Windows Media.. er, a computer — check it out: http://www.somafm.com. You will love it. My favorite stations are Groove Salad, Secret Agent, Illinois Street Lounge, and Beat Blender.

Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted against an amendment that would make Net Neutrality forceable. Many people don't know what Net Neutrality is — yet in the future, it will affect us all. If we didn't have Net Neutrality, there would be lots.. and lots.. of problems. Imagine not being able to access your Yahoo mail account because it's infinitely slow. Or trying to access your Yahoo mail account, only being told that you can't – but you can access AT&T's special mail service. Net Neutrality is what keeps the internet running. It basically means that you can access the largest corporate website as easily as the smallest personal blog.

The nation's largest telecommunications companies — AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — have banded together to decide which websites will load fast, slow, or not at all. "They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking their competitors." [Savetheinternet.com].

Google, Craigslist, eBay, Yahoo — all of these services would grind to a halt. Since they would have to pay these greedy telcos, it would be impossible to keep their sites running. As Craig from Craigslist explains it, this whole thing is ridiculously wrong. Imagine the sidewalk as the pipes and wires of the internet. According to the telecommunication companies, if you're walking down the sidewalk and having a conversation with someone, the sidewalk is going to get a cut of the value of your conversations.

This whole concept isn't fair. It's not right. Net Neutrality should exist to keep the internet running — the internet itself has been driven by innovation. The smallest mom-and-pop stores can put up websites and the biggest companies can roll out amazing new features, all for the public to use. Net neutrality is about the people. Anything else is for the profit of corporations.

In an effort to twist the public's view of what's best, the telcos have set up an incredibly stupid site called "Hands off the Internet" — itself, a fake grassroots site that isn't even set up by the public. The real site to go to, set up by the public, promoted by some of the greatest founders of the internet and the most notable people in science, entertainment, and politics, is Save the Internet.com. If you truly want to be able to use the internet as it is and be able to take advantage of the amazing technology that exists and will exist in the future, write to congress.

For the next month, Seattle is having its annual International Film Festival. About 200 movies, from 62 countries. Some of them are really, really good. Usually on Rottentomatoes, movies rarely make over 80%; some of these movies have a perfect 100%. Some good ones that might/will make it to the big screen — at least the ones that are playing now — are:

• The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros
• A Prairie Home Companion (100%)
• Life With My Father (100%)
• Bickford Schmeckler's Cool Ideas

I saw Bickford Schmeckler's Cool Ideas last night. It was hilarious.. can't wait for it to be in wide release. The best part is, it was only made on a budget of $1,000,000.

In the car ride back, I was sitting with three interns. I started talking to the guy next to me and found out that he and the driver were both from Duke (much to my disappointment.. jk). He also knew a lot of people from Science and Math. THEN he realized that one of our mutual friends had shown him this blog after he got into Microsoft. Crazy…

During the convo, when I was asked if anyone else from Chapel Hill was interning at MS, I said — not really, but I know someone from last summer who's interning at MS. When asked if I was a second-time MS intern, I said no.. but this guy was from IBM. The guy next to me pointed to the intern in the passenger's seat and said that he interned at IBM too, but was a "speedy" intern, meaning that he was probably on a Speed Team. So I started talking to him and when I told him I worked in Austin last summer, he said that his Speed Team in Rochester spent a lot of the summer integrating with a team in Austin. Weird. I asked him what he did, and what the team in Austin did. When he told me, my jaw almost hit the floor.

This guy worked with our team last summer. I even talked to him on the phone several times last summer but never even saw his face. He and his teammates spent a ton of time communicating with our team. It was fun talking about last summer (I told him how much we cursed his team for their requirements) and I headed back home.

I got in a car and out of the 1500 interns at MS, I happened to have an indirect connection to all 3 of them. Small World.

There is some amazing work going on at Microsoft. Recently I heard about a project that would bring WinFS — Windows' next generation filesystem — to a completely new world of applications. It's called Project Orange. Nothing much is being said about it, but there is one little tidbit on WinFS's Team Blog:

"Project Orange is a brand new team tasked with building a next-generation Information Explorer based on WinFS and WPF (AKA Avalon) to help users finally get organized."

So imagine the traditional way of finding what you want in Windows. Windows Explorer: you go to My Computer, C:, all in one folder (or multiple if you want), navigate through the folders in a tree-like algorithm. WinFS is based on an entirely new paradigm — a single file could be in multiple "folders". When you start to visualize how this is possible on a desktop, you'll start to realize the crazy possibilities. Here's a video to help you (WinFS's iWish video)