Author: mike

Top 10 Reasons I Like Vista!

mike 7 Comments Technology

vistalogo I upgraded to Vista about 2 weeks ago.  I had to, because uninstalling Visual Studio 2005 left my computer unusable.  It locked up the mouse and had to be periodically rebooted.

Vista is really great.  I wouldn’t recommend it for business yet, because its mostly frivolous glamour and glitz.  But, for home use, it is just awesome!

Here is my top-10 likes:

1) It boots twice as fast as XP.

2) It runs faster than XP.

3) The UI looks beautiful, even though I don’t have the fancy glass due to my cheap video card.

4) Hibernate actually works!

5) User switching is fast and painless; it finally works!

6) The built in search on the start menu really makes finding programs easy.

7) Multi-language packs (Vista Ultimate only) work well.  We switch between English and Japanese profiles easily.  No more needing to maintain two computers for this!

8) Chess Titans is cool

9) Built in parental controls are great.  Finally, I can actually monitor what the kids do, rather than just telling them I can.

10) The task manager has finally been updated to keep units in MB rather than KB.

As a testimony to how much I like Vista – consider this.  I’ve been using 2 monitors for a couple of years now.  I like 2 monitors.  But, Vista can’t grok my two NVidia cards.  It only can use one or the other.  So, despite being confined back into the world of the improverished single-screeners, I still like Vista.  I’m going to keep Vista and only curse Microsoft a couple of times when I buy my new video card (not NVidia).

The Inefficiency of Facebook

mike 2 Comments Technology

facebook I’ve been playing with Facebook a little this week.  I know, I’m very late on this.  The idea of social networks still gives me the shivers.  Putting your picture on the net?  You’d have to be an exhibitionist to do that, right?  I guess I was schooled in a different era.

Anyway, Facebook is actually pretty neat.  I’ve been surprised how with only 3-4 contacts of my own, just a little bit of activity has somehow brought me onto the radar for a number of people.  One is a fellow from college that I haven’t spoken to for over 10 years, another is a gal from high school that I haven’t spoken to for almost 20, and then there have been several other contacts from folks I know recently.  All in all, I have to say that Facebook made these connections quite effortless, professional, and even kinda cool.  I’m seriously considering posting a picture now.

But Facebook really kind of makes my jaw drop with it’s inefficiency.  The fact that Facebook (or myspace, I suppose) exist, is simply due to the complete and total failure of email. 

First, lets look at the inefficiency.  Each time someone sends me a message on Facebook, Facebook sends me an email.  The email looks something like:

Jennifer added you as a friend on Facebook.  We need you to confirm that you are, in fact, friends with Jennifer.

To confirm this friend request, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?reqs.php

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

___
Want to control which emails you receive from Facebook? Go to: http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications

Upon reading this nicely done email, you have to go login to a whole another system to see whats up with Jennifer, engage with Facebook, etc.  It all makes total sense except that Jennifer could have just sent me an email!

Unfortunately for SMTP again, email just isn’t cutting today’s communications.  Today we need:
– Photos (duh)
– Seamless integration with chat
– Public address books (e.g. friends)
– Security around public/private information
– Online/presence information
– This is a stupid list – its so obvious.

Ironically, what makes SMTP great is that its a fantastically distributed system, with no central database of email.  Its this same decentralized control which makes it completely impossible to upgrade and add features to.  So instead, a whole generation of techies are shifting their communications into a centralized, single-vendor repository.

This can’t go on forever – how many myspace, orkut, facebook, etc accounts are we going to have to maintain to connect with our various friends?  This stuff is going to interconnect sooner or later.  And you’ll probably be able to send and receive legacy email too.  Once it does – do we finally have a modern email solution?

Perhaps this is how we replace SMTP.

UPDATE:  I turned off all email notifications from facebook.  It’s just annoying to get an email which says, “you have email, click here, login, and spend 25 seconds reading it over here”, or “xxx jumped through a hoop, click here to see the picture”.  I don’t want to “click here”.  Send me email.

No More NDAs for me

mike 0 Comment Lawyers, Technology

Periodically, friends or colleagues ask me for advice about this-or-that startup company.  I love talking about that sort of thing, and I’m very happy to help, so these are great discussions.  But often, they then ask me to sign an NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement).  Yuck.  I’m never going to sign one again.

You see, when a friend asks you to sign one, to refuse is awkward.  If you tell them you don’t sign them as a matter of policy, they’ll wonder, “is it just me?  maybe he doesn’t want to help me.”  But that isn’t it.  So, I’m left either having to decide to create this confrontation, or more likely, cave in, sign the damn thing and move on.

But NDAs are a pain in the neck, and about as useful as dirt.  Why would I want a legally binding document that someone can later use against me?  If you are asking me for advice, why should I sign *your* document?  If you don’t trust me, fine, don’t ask.  But I’m a man of my word, and that’s what you’ll have to trust.  If you don’t think you can trust me, perhaps I’m not the right person to talk to anyway? 

So, this blog posting is purely a selfish one.  I post it so that in the future I can refer people to it and say, “I don’t sign NDAs, and it’s just a policy I have”.  There is nothing personal to it, and they can read it on my blog dated Aug 17, 2007.  If that is a showstopper, that’s not my problem.

One last note to potential askers of NDA signatures.  NDAs are legal documents.  When you ask someone to sign one, you are asking them to do a big favor.   Each one is different.  There are mutual NDAs.  There are one-way NDAs.  The differences are annoyingly subtle.   When someone doesn’t trust me enough to work without an NDA, I don’t trust them enough to believe their NDA won’t bite me.  So, I have to do a legal review with my lawyer.  Please respect my decision to not use NDAs unless absolutely necessary.  And, while you are at it, fire your lawyer – he is the real problem.

Putting Cheap Labor Into Perspective

mike 6 Comments Editorial

A few months ago we ordered some furniture from Costco.  The furniture was 4 bedroom pieces, which cost $1500.  It was backordered, so it took more than  two months to arrive.  It finally arrived, in two shipments.  The first shipment was 250lbs, the second was 347lbs.   Pictured here is a portion of the packaging materials from the second shipment.  In all, there was twice as much as is seen here.

The furniture is great; well crafted, well packed, and requires very little construction.  We’re very happy with it.

What surprised me, though, is that this furniture was built in Thailand.

So, lets get this straight.  It’s cheaper to build furniture in Thailand, pack it, and ship it (with a shipping weight of over 500lbs across 5 boxes), than it is to build it here in the United States.  Wow. I tried pricing how much it would cost me to ship 500lbs of anything to Thailand.  That’s about 250kg, and as far as I can tell, it would be at least $2000 to ship.  Of course, I’m not Costco, so my shipping rates aren’t as good 🙂 

I knew that labor was cheap there.  But this really shows how much cheaper it is.  More than 500lbs cheaper.  I wonder who made more profit – Costco or the company in Thailand?  I’m betting it was Costco.

If You Aren’t Part of the Solution, You are Part of the Problem

mike 1 Comment Lawyers, Technology

Despite my frequent criticism of technology patents (and here, or here), I am also officially part of the problem.  Last week, I was issued a new patent –number 7243163.

This patent was filed March 29, 2002, while I still worked at Good Technology.  Since that time, Good was acquired by Motorola.  I assume that Motorola now owns the patent; but I don’t really know.  All I know is that while it could be used to do evil work for others, it will no longer do anything to benefit me.  It might have increased the purchase price that Motorola paid for Good, so perhaps everyone at Good owes me a nickel. 

Aside: Here is an idea for a website – sort of like the USPTO website of patents, but instead keep track of who-sued-who and who-was-awarded-what for patent infringement cases.  It would be neat to go back and find out who won from this patent just by looking up the number.

Anyway, there is one thing that makes me proud of this patent.  I am the co-author of that patent with John Friend, Roger Collins, and Mike Bennett.  These guys were all fantastic engineers, and I’m thrilled to have worked with them.  If you want to know more about what a “data processing apparatus” is, you’ll have to ask them, because I haven’t a clue.

Standards are Slow, Vista is Fast?

mike 0 Comment Technology

I love this TCP window scaling in Vista – I am so happy with Microsoft for having fixed up the network stack (after all, faster networks mean more Google searches, right? :-).  I have yet to watch the packets on vista to verify for myself, but I look forward to doing so! 🙂  <super geek>

So what is Microsoft’s reward for having made major improvements to the TCP stack?  Slower connections (and probably some irate customers), of course!  And it’s all because there is software and hardware out there that never implemented a Van Jacobson TCP feature spec’ed back in 1992.  This one isn’t Microsoft’s fault…

The only mistake on this one is the PM that called this “Auto Tuning”.  That sounds like the computer can actually think, right!  If it really could auto-tune, you’d think it would auto-tune out of this edge case, and the poor user wouldn’t have to manually reconfigure.  Maybe they should have stuck with the simple and elegant geek name “TCP Window Scaling” and avoided any confusion.

All in all though, the engineers at Microsoft get an A for implementing the spec.  The PMs at Microsoft get a B for the marketing double talk.

Google Earnings Report

mike 0 Comment Technology

I’m never surprised by the stock market.  I was happy when the Google stock peaked at around $555/sh last week, but yesterday they dropped ~8% to ~$515.  Why?  Well, because Google announced record revenues and profits of course!

But actually, I think there is one thing which really reflects the market disappointment – too rapid growth.  According to the public quarterly report, we hired 1548 people, bringing total headcount to 13786.  That means that 11% of the company arrived last quarter, and that is on top of very high growth rates in the prior quarters as well.

If growing at that rate quarter-over-quarter doesn’t raise your eyebrows, then I’m not sure what will.  On the good news front, Eric and others on the conference call seemed to indicate they were looking at this.  I guess we’ll see what happens next.

For investors (anyone?) it’s just hard to believe that a company can absorb that volume of people without also taking on significant risk to their culture, technology, quality, profitability, and ability to innovate.  Risk is uncertainty, and uncertainty warrants a lower stock price.  It’s just that simple.  On the other hand, to not grow rapidly would mean to take on another, less visible type of risk – that competitors in the field just bulldoze you with massively more features, products, and sales.

All that said, please continue to invest in Google because there’s a whole bunch more of us now working together to make sure that Google’s best days are ahead, and not just part of the past.

The Difference Between Google and Microsoft

mike 0 Comment Entertainment

I had a friend visit for lunch here at the Google campus last week who is a long-time Microsoft employee based in Redmond.  He had never been to Google before, and was interested to see.  As we waited in line in the cafe, he said, “You know, I’ve never heard music in the Microsoft cafeteria before”.  I think he liked it.

So there you have it – the difference between Google and Microsoft is music in the cafe.

Home Depot Carpet vs Empire Carpet

mike 113 Comments Editorial

I had the unexpected pleasure to install carpet from both Home Depot and Empire Carpet in the same week.  Here is a summary of the experience.

Home Depot

Home Depot’s carpet installed first.  The measurements were done electronically, sent to a measuring company and a computer laid out the carpet to leave the fewest remnants.  Home Depot often runs “$99 installation” specials, so the installation cost was fairly small.  The carpet cost ~$4.22/sqft, and I upgraded the pad to the 8lb pad for a few cents per sqft.  Overall cost was about $4.80/sqft with the upgraded pad and installed.  The carpet we installed was a plush carpet.  It was slightly more expensive than average, but we wanted it to be soft.  The result is gorgeous – a very soft, thick carpet that looks great.  It’s an off-white color, and looks beautiful.

We had to wait 3 weeks for the carpet to arrive, as Home Depot ships it from Georgia.  The installers were great, and did a very nice job.

Empire Carpet

Empire’s sales model is to come to your house and use a full-service salesman.  They are very nice, pleasant, and don’t pressure you much.  The salesman measures manually on a piece of scratch paper, and somehow those measurements get back to the installers.  Despite the lack of technology, they got the right amount of carpet.

After measuring, they do try to gouge you on the price, so you have to be careful and it is a requirement to negotiate.  Taking the list price would be silly.  In our case, we were trying to pick the closest match carpet to the Home Depot carpet listed above.  We found the one which was closest in terms of texture, softness, and color.  We knew it was a slightly different color, but it was hard to tell from the small samples how close the texture would be once installed.  Initially, he offered a price of $3870 for the carpet.  I suggested $2000, and we settled at $2600.  This worked out to a price of $4.44/sqft.  I don’t know if I negotiated well or not – I wasn’t trying very hard.  He said all the usual salesman things, but you just have to be persistent.  I’m pretty sure that I could have had the carpet for $2000.

Empire can install the next day because they use local warehouses.  In our case, they installed 2 days later.  The installation was very good, although I didn’t think that their edge cutting was as good as the Home Depot installer (there was about 1/8″ gap which I didn’t think should be there on one wall).

In terms of quality, Empire’s carpet is not as good as the Home Depot carpet we picked out.  It is noticeably thinner, doesn’t feel as good or as soft, and doesn’t look quite as nice.  Don’t get me wrong, it looks good, just not quite as good when side-by-side to the Home Depot Carpet.

Conclusion

Home Depot is easier, cheaper, and has slightly better quality carpet.   But with Home Depot they take longer to get the carpet installed.   In our case, Home Depot also made a big mistake with the carpet which is why we had to have Empire finish the job.  If I had more time and could do it again, I would probably go with Home Depot.