OS X Leopard. Amazing.

I could go on and on about Apple’s design and innovation, but seriously, the videos and pictures of Spaces, Time Machine, and others speak for themselves. I love their marketing too: “Redmond also has a cat. A copycat”.. haha. I admit, good design and marketing, but come on, Apple has borrowed more than a few things from third-party companies ;] Another cool thing from OS X that isn’t mentioned as much is their amazing new advances in speech feedback. In an earlier post I talked about the iPod getting speech feedback.. well, here’s what the synthesized voice sounds like:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/accessibility.html

They’ve really got the tone and inflection down pretty well. The only reason that it sounds computerized is probably because they wanted to speed it up. I’m betting this is the same stuff that’ll go into the next version of their iPod. They even simulated the “breaths” at commas and periods… that’s attention to detail.

 

Microsoft’s iPod Killer

So I’m sure everyone’s heard about it through CNN or whatever. It’s definitely not a rumor and Microsoft has done an exceptional job at hiding this thing from a ton of people, including.. Microsoft itself. There’s no mention of it at all at MS and there are no internal sites for it (as far as I know). I can’t find anything about it. Engadget though, has done a pretty good job of getting inside information, but the question remains as to whether it was leaked or voluntary for the purposes of viral marketing. If the latter is the case, well, I’m just contributing to that

Some of the cool things heard so far:

1. The Zune will have WiFi, and through this you can download songs without a laptop and you can also share songs instantly with friends wirelessly.

2. There are multiple devices, one of which will be an Xbox branded portable gaming system with Live Anywhere integration.

3. In order to convert you from iTunes Music Store to Zune’s own media service, they’re going to offer to convert you for free (i.e. you can download any song you downloaded from iTMS for free, which is a crazy deal)

4. Pyxis is the codename for their Nano competitor. It will have video too. Not sure how that’s gonna work…

5. Zune’s media service will be driven by the community through recommendations and such. Much like digg.com.

6. The Zune is headed by Robbie Bach and J Allard, who heads all the design and engineering of the XBox. J Allard is pretty interesting. He is best known for sending a memo to Microsoft in the mid-90s about the rise of the Internet, which reshaped their entire direction of the company. He also legally changed his name from “James” to “J”. Seriously.

There are three things I’m concerned about:

1. DRM. Digital Rights Management. This is basically what iTunes does to force you to get an iPod when you use iTunes Music Store — all songs bought from iTMS play only on an iPod and the original computer plus or minus a few that you register. So Zune will have this in order to have full vertical end-to-end integration services (Zune player, Zune media organizer, Zune online store). What many people think is that DRM protects artists and such but in reality it doesn’t add any value for either artists or consumers. It’s just a way of enclosing various technologies together and preventing others from utilizing a part of the whole.

2. Having multiple devices that are aimed at the same market segment is not a good idea. In the end, you’re going to be creating unnecessary loss. The iPod family was successful because it was able to provide *just* enough innovation in each successive release to warrant the buying of it. What’s the difference between the iPod mini and the Ipod nano? Not much from a high-level point of view, but the timings of both releases were the keys to their successes. MS has to do a good job of hiding their successive Zune devices from the public; hiding the future guarantees a healthy consumer surplus in the present.

3. Wifi Sharing. There are two ways MS could do this. I’m sure they won’t allow you to just give a song to someone else directly. Considering their efforts to enforce DRM, this is impossible. A possibility is that they would allow you to swap songs. So you could trade a song for someone else’s. The other possibility is that instead of even sharing songs, you could send a notice to someone else’s Zune to ‘bookmark’ a song on their account on the Zune online store. This is useful for rare songs, but the popularity of this remains shaky.

 

Microsoft Student Ambassador

… I just got the job! So for 2006-2007 I’ll be the Technical Microsoft Student Ambassador (I think they changed it to Student Partner.. Microsoft isn’t really a country. Yet.) for UNC. Here are some of the things I’ll be doing:

- Launch Events. This one I’m especially excited about. Between ‘06 and ‘07 MS will be launching Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 7, Office 2007, Zune (the iPod killer with Wifi…), and other cool things.

- Tech Talks. So this would include a lot of the technical features behind .NET, Linq, ADO.NET, C#, Avalon, WCF, XAML, all kinds of awesome stuff!

- Parties. This one needs no explanation.

 

John Hodgman on Net Neutrality

This is hilarious…you should watch some of Hodgman’s other videos on the Daily Show. You might know him best as the “…and I’m a PC” guy from the Mac ads:

 

Apple Killed My Honors Project, Sort Of

One of the ideas I had for my Computer Science Honors project was to bring speech recognition/feedback to the iPod. The iPod is a great piece of work from an engineering point of view, but from a usability standpoint, it’s not up to par:

1. A user can barely hold the iPod with one hand while scrolling through songs (as opposed to the single-click-and-hold idea). The one thing that irritates me the most is that there are so many mobile devices out there that only seem useful to some weird species of alien with detachable thumbs. Here’s a good test: hold your iPod, your cellphone, whatever, in a position that is most comfortable in your hand — not the way in which you would normally use it. Now attempt to use it. Try and press the buttons. Navigate through the menus. With my “smartphone”, I find myself bending my thumb in ways I never thought possible, and trying to click those teeny buttons. Come on. What were you designers thinking?
2. Navigating through the menus is analogous to driving through a really complicated neighborhood, trying to find the house you want. Once you reach a dead end, you have to navigate back the way you came until you find something that seems familiar to you. Why should the end-user be the one who takes the plunge into the sea of menus, successively drilling through them until they reach their goal?
3. Driving with an iPod is a good way to wreck your car. Even walking with an Ipod can cause a head-on collision with another person. I find it hilarious that a “mobile” mp3 player was created that actually forced the user to stop everything they were doing to find a song they wanted to play.
4. Accessibility. This is an obvious one. Imagine a blind person who enjoys music. The most popular music player on the planet cannot be used by them. There are a couple million people in the US who are so paralyzed that they can only move one finger. Imagine seeing how amazing the iPod is and being unable to scroll through your favorite songs.

So there lies some design problems with the iPod. I believe that some of them can be fixed in a unique way through speech recognition and feedback. The form factor problem, well, can be fixed by getting another mp3 player The thing that really drove me the most for this project was the accessibility issue. As a brother to a disabled girl, I’ve witnessed for 21 years how hard it is for people with disabilities to use things we take for granted everyday. It angers me that in this day and age, engineers and designers turn away from people with disabilities, claiming that they’re not in their “market segment”.

Speech feedback would be useful for users with blindness, as well as those people who drive cars and listen to music. As they scrolled through the songs, they could hear exactly what song name is highlighted. They could also hear where, contextually, they are in the song: “20 Percent”, “50 Percent”, etc. to aid the fast-forwarding/rewinding problem. An interesting method would consist of being able to “tag” certain categories with snippets of music, instead of reading them out through a monotone, computer-generated voice.

Speech recognition would also be useful for blind users, and could bring in an entirely new interaction model. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could simply state into your iPod: “Thievery Corporation, Lebanese Blonde” and it would simply look up the song and play it for you instantly? Goodbye animated menus. You wouldn’t have to do any sort of navigation.

The brute-force strategy of the speech recognition idea would simply involve doing a speech-to-text transformation and performing a search on your songs based on that text, and playing the most relevant.

So how did Apple kill my honors project? The next version of the iPod will have speech feedback. So it didn’t exactly kill it, it just implemented half of it. The speech-to-text will probably exist in a much later version, and would probably be centered around a completely guaranteed approach of performing the speech recognition. Even if they did implement half of the idea, I’m extremely happy. It’s great that companies can realize design issues and fix them in successive versions of their products, especially issues regarding accessibility. I’m still interested in the speech-to-text part of it.. but I have some other interesting ideas for my honors project..

 

AOL’s Internal Memos! Awesome!

Here’s the good part, straight from the wonderful ladder rung of middle management:

“As you can see, withholding our highest level of service from even one member is all it takes to damage the trust and credibility you have worked so hard to earn. With all of the safeguards we have in place:

• recording and monitoring of member interactions
• our Keep it Real policy, which details our standards of professionalism and ethical behavior
• and Third Party Verification, an industry-first initiative to guarantee quality in every single retention call Any attempt to circumvent our member promise is a violation of our practices, and we maintain a zero tolerance policy for non-compliance.”

Yes, that’s correct. A Keep it Real policy. Maybe that was the problem during Vinny Ferrari’s cancellation call. They should take some tips from Chappelle’s Show.

 

The Silicon Imperative

One of my favorite classes I took in the past three years of college was Computers and Ethics (also known as the disgusting, 1990s term: “Cyberethics”). Although most of it was bashing the use of computers in everyday life and attributing them to a very morbid, Terminator/Matrix-esque view of the future, there were some interesting points that were brought up. One of them was known as the “Silicon Imperative”. The general idea is that we should always question whether a computer should do everything for us. The obvious fact here is that humans are smart and computers are stupid. It’s simple — humans are not “digital” (either this, and/or that) in their logic. We have emotions. We learn based on previous events. We can see patterns very quickly that computers cannot possibly do at the moment. Therefore, there are many things that should not be “Silicon Imperative”.

I agree with all of that — for the present. However, if you have a software project that has a goal, that interacts with users, and gives them a useful featureset, you shouldn’t half-ass it. One of the most debatable areas, I think, of the Silicon Imperative, is in security. The reason why I’m writing this is because, from an end-user point of view, it seems like we are promising security at the sacrifice of innovation and user interaction.

There are some products that have been entering the market – you can probably guess what they are — that seem to embody this kind of thinking. What would your life be like if you had an assistant that promised to do a lot of things for you? Doesn’t that sound nice? Someone who made your food, cleaned your house, organized your desk at work. That would be awesome! Now, imagine if this same assistant would ask you, every time if you really wanted the food you were about to eat. Or, everytime you left the house for work, would ask you how you wanted every room to look like. Or how you wanted your desk to be organized everyday, and if you really wanted that manuscript to be shredded at the end of the day. Yeah, not so great, huh?

Why can’t the assistant remember what we asked? Why can’t it realize that the manuscript is confidential and that we don’t want it, instead of asking us everytime? Is it really that stupid? That assistant has manifested himself in the form of software.

“Hey, I’ve got a great idea, let’s ask the user every time if they really want to perform this certain action. That way, if something goes wrong, it’s not our fault! Sweet!”.

In this day and age in the software industry, is security really that bad that we should sacrifice user interaction like this? The “guaranteed” way of software security is not usually the best. Your software might not have any innovation and it might not do some intelligent adaptation based on what evils are out there, but I tell you what — your users will. You can barrage them with all kinds of prompts and confirmations, but the inevitable will happen: they’ll just click through them without even reading them, and that’s a huge security risk in itself.

What happens after a user accidentally clicks through a prompt and breaks the threat model? Are you going to sit back and point a finger? Is that what we do? Isn’t our goal to help people in their everyday lives instead of making them feel stupid by blaming them? Perhaps we should think some more about the Silicon Imperative…

 

Microsoft… The Times are Changing

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.

 

Meeting Bill Gates!

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…

 

IBM Transistor Reaches 500 Ghz

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…