Author: mike

American Ignorance and Honor Killings

mike 0 Comment Editorial

We’ve learned recently of “honor killings” that take place in some cultures.  It seems terrible – a defenseless woman is killed. CNN and other American news agencies report these as tragedies that we must somehow correct.  I am not outraged by the incident.  I am outraged by the gross arrogance of Americans to think that we know what is best for other cultures.  I know nothing of their culture.  I know nothing of why they might do this.  I can’t imagine a good reason for why anyone would do this – but they do it.  Maybe they are crazy.  Or maybe they are religious freaks.  Certainly, by western standards they are.  But – it is their lives – it is their culture – and that is what they do.

In classrooms here we teach “you must learn to accept other cultures”, but yet, we don’t do it!  We want to accept the tolerable parts of other cultures, but not accept the brutal parts.  Well, we can’t have it both ways.  Either we are tolerant and accepting, or we are not.  We cannot pick and choose when to accept.

How arrogant are we Americans to think that these people want to be saved by us anyway?  If they want to be saved, they must save themselves.  We are running around the world pimping Democracy in pretty much the same way that crusaders did.  We think our beliefs are better, and more fair.  Maybe they are, and maybe they are not, but who are we to decide?  Is pushing our politics really any different than pushing our religion?  I don’t think so.  We think its better, but its the people that decide, not us!  Culture and politics is something you must want for yourself; it cannot be given.

I’ll forever condemn my chances of a political career now by saying – let the Honor Killings continue.  There is nothing wrong with them unless the Iraqis decide there is something wrong with them.

Windows to Follow IE Lead

mike 0 Comment Editorial, Technology

Microsoft announced that it is paying $6B for aQuantive Inc today.  Considering that it’s market cap was $2.8B yesterday, and that Microsoft is paying $6B for it, it’s clear that Microsoft wanted it pretty bad!

Microsoft said that they are “committed to earning a bigger slice of that market opportunity [online advertising]”.  Currently, Microsoft’s slice is pretty small in that industry.

We all know what happened to Internet Explorer between 2001 and 2006.  Nothing.  That was because without competition, Microsoft was unmotivated.  Firefox restored some of that competition, and IE8 is now in the works.

But with Vista just released after a grueling and painful 5 years of development, no operating system competition in sight, and Microsoft badly wanting to compete in a brand new market for them (online advertising), is there any hope of a significant, new operating system before 2012?

It’s not Microsoft’s fault.  It’s human nature.  Our nature is to always get bigger.  No matter how big you are, you want more.  And as you get huge, it becomes increasingly difficult to get bigger.  In order to get bigger, they need another multi-billion dollar opportunity.  Even though online advertising is completely foreign to Microsoft (Microsoft would disagree, I’m sure!), Microsoft wants this business, because it is one of the few that is big enough to be significant compared to Microsoft’s existing businesses.

It does make me think that users would have been better served if Microsoft had been split up many years ago.  Sure, the Operating System division of Microsoft would be smaller, but they’d be focused on building operating systems – and there would be no distractions into the online advertising space. 

New Windows Live Mail is Gorgeous

mike 0 Comment Technology

My colleagues at Hotmail Windows Live Mail released the new version of Hotmail this week.  It’s a pretty solid product as far as I can tell.  I am particularly impressed with its snappiness – much faster than the old Hotmail, and with a much more modern UI.

Top features:

  1. Search works!
  2. Preview pane (better than Gmail!)
  3. Generally speedy and quick (maybe not many users are on the new server farm yet?  get in while the going is good!)

My gripes with the product are few.  Primarily, the banner ad at the top-of-screen is excessively prominent, and most of the ads are animated and untargeted creating unnecessary clutter.  Also, it still inserts a promotional tagline at the bottom of your emails.  Both of these, however, are small gripes considering that the product is free.

America will Look Like This

mike 0 Comment Editorial, Politics

The drum of immigration beats this week.  I’m strongly against legalizing all illegal aliens.  The alien population in question is much poorer, much less educated, and much less able to build a great nation than the average American.  We’ve got too much poverty already, and bringing in more is not going to make things easier.  We dilute our wealth by giving it to the aliens.  Mexico needs to build its own wealth, and we should help, but that does not mean allowing all Mexicans into America.

Despite my beliefs, we can’t stop it.  The fact is that most Americans, like myself, are too busy working to go out and protest against the illegals that are currently protesting for legal status every day.  The illegals have much more to gain in the short term than those of us working stiffs have to lose.  Legal status for an illegal would instantly make a huge impact on his life and his family’s life.  For those of us citizens already here, it has almost no immediate effect, and the degradation on our nation will be gradual.  So the illegals will be out in force every day fighting for this (if we let them).  The citizens who oppose them can’t possibly do that, nor are affected enough to want to.  Unfortunately, at the end of the day, the squeaky wheel will get the grease, and that means these illegals are not going to be illegal forever.

America will ultimately look like the pictures you see here.  One is Mexico City.  The other is San Diego.

Making these folks legal is wrong.  Not only do we need to stop the immigration, we also need to stop the protesting by enforcing our existing laws and sending them out of the country.  If I were in charge of the INS, I’d use these protests as an opportunity to arrest them.  Even though they can’t vote on a ballot, allowing them to protest is allowing them to vote.

Spolsky, Lookout and when Better is actually Worse

mike 7 Comments Lookout, Technology

Today, Joel on Software wrote about Outlook 2007’s recent search performance fixes, and mentioned Lookout.  I had a couple of thoughts about the article.

First – I’m so pleased to hear such nice things about Lookout when it hasn’t been updated for nearly 3 years 🙂  Thanks! 

Second, Joel wrote that “Microsoft finally put Lookout up for download…”.  He makes it sound like it was down for a long time; I think the total down period was between 4-7 days.  I know people like to think Microsoft buys products to squash them, and it’s easy to cite this downtime as an example of it.  But I know for a fact that was not true in this case.   I hope people won’t conclude that.

Third, while lots of people really liked Lookout, it did lack some key features which were put into Windows Desktop Search.  Most notable is that WDS actually indexes new & changed email in real-time.  Google Desktop Search does this too, but Lookout never did. 

But it brings up an interesting point which requires some background. Building incremental indexing in Outlook is quite tricky.  The problem is that changes can happen in your exchange mailbox while Outlook is not running.  When you next start Outlook, you need to make sure these changes are reflected in the index.  Because Outlook/Exchange don’t have APIs to do this efficiently, the only real way to do it is to start combing through folders trying to find what changes exist.  There are a whole bunch of nuances (cached mode, exchange mode, internet mode, online/offline, etc) and many APIs available (OOM, MAPI, CDO, ECS, etc).  When you try to make it work across the 4 different Outlooks (OL2000, OL-XP, OL2003, OL2007), each one presents a new set of problems.

So, Lookout punted on real-time indexing, and elected a “wake up every hour when the user is idle and index then.”  While this approach isn’t perfect, it is much much simpler.  And, it turns out that users usually don’t need to search for things which were sent to you less than an hour ago (although some did complain).  But the biggest benefit is that because it’s not trying to be real-time, it is much less prone to bogging down your system doing indexing.   And “system hogging” is a problem which both WDS and GDS took a long time to get right.  Reading reviews of these products indicates that even today, they still are pretty resource intensive.

In my opinion, this is a classic example of “Better is the Enemy of Good”.  The indexer doesn’t really need to be real time, even though it is “better” to be real-time.  If you weren’t confined by the limits of Outlook & MAPI, my thoughts on this would probably be different.  The fact that people are still talking about Lookout after both Microsoft and Google have continued to work on real-time indexers for 3 years is proof to me that in this case, better is actually worse.

Ironically, RIP Don Imus

mike 0 Comment Editorial, Entertainment

The reason Imus had a show in the first place is because he’s a controversial jerk and prone to saying ridiculous things. 

What got him fired is that he’s a controversial jerk and prone to saying ridiculous things. 

I don’t really mean that he is a jerk.  I have no idea.  He’s just a jerk on TV because that’s what we want from his as an entertainer.   We build these guys up because they are whacky, but when they get too whacky, we shoot them down.  This firing is too close to censorship for my taste.  I don’t agree with what he said, I don’t watch his show, and I never intend to.  But he shouldn’t have been fired; it’s a slippery-slope.

Multi-lingual ballots are a bad idea

mike 2 Comments Politics

In the continuing controversy over whether we should have voting exclusively in English or not, one point seems to always be overlooked:  Who translates the ballot, supporting documentation, etc?  Translation is a subjective thing.  For any significant body of text, there are no two translators that would translate in exactly the same way.  The tone, use of vernacular, and subtle word choice can dramatically change a reader’s perception to a body of text.  If we have ballots in multiple languages, we can’t preserve the original author’s tone, and therefore, the original text is void.  I know that “yes”/”no” translate fairly easily; but the supporting text does not. 

If our goal is to have everyone voting fairly – on the same initiatives – then we have to distribute identical material to everyone.  Unfortunately, this means the ballot has to be in one language.  For now, that language is in English.  If the majority wants to change the language to something else, they can put up an initiative to change the language.  Whichever we pick, there should only be one.