Category: 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.

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.

I didn’t buy an iPhone.  $499 seems like about $459 too much.  You can get a cell phone for free.  You can get a DVD player for $20 (unlimited storage vs iPhone’s 4GB).  But, putting them in one package should get a premium price, so we’ll double it and sell it for $40, right?

 Earlier this month, belshe.com was referenced in an obscure portion of slashdot for the first time.  Belshe.com traffic went up by a factor of 10 on that day (June 4).  Fortunately for me and the other staff here at belshe.com, we’d prepared in advance for the massive spike in traffic, and no downtime occurred.

Seriously, though, it was nice to see someone found my graphs useful.  It took a fair bit of time to make them!

I bought a new Dell laptop with Vista installed recently.  At first, I really liked Vista.  The graphics look wonderful, and the basic install runs pretty well.  I’ve been looking forward to running it for some time.  But, after having used it for a little while now, I’m not sure what to do.  The problem is that I’m basically faced with the choice to either shell out $200 for another GB of RAM, or to uninstall Vista and go back to XP.

With only 1GB of RAM, the laptop is not usable for much other than web-based applications.  Installing Microsoft Visual Studio (which runs fine on XP with 1GB of RAM) was a pretty bad experience.  First, VS2005 as shipped isn’t compatible with Vista, so you have to download Service Pack 1.  That’s understandable, as not all software can simultaneously be ready for Vista.  Unfortunately, the ‘patch’ is a 420MB download!  It’s so big that IE can’t even download it.  I tried twice with Internet Explorer 7, and both times, it just stopped downloading at about 75% done.  That caused me to install Firefox, which downloaded it successfully on the first try.  Finally able to install, I waited for 2 hours for the installation to finish.  Yes – 2 hours.  Available RAM dropped to zero, and it just swapped its way through the whole install.  Why installing a product requires 1GB of RAM is a mystery.

Further, the security enhancements in Microsoft are a real warning to users to not install software.  Installing any software has challenges of guessing whether you need to “Run As Administrator”, and you can certainly expect at least a few “Cancel or Allow?” dialogs.  Overall, the operating system clearly tells the user “do not install desktop applications on this machine”.

In the end, a 1GB Vista laptop is best for using the web.  You won’t want to run Word on it, much less Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, Outlook, Quicken, etc, because they are quite slow due Vista’s memory management.  Since those don’t run well, you might want to try the apps that do run well…  Oddly enough, those are the web-based apps which Google does reasonably well with.  Thus, Vista is a gift from Microsoft to Google.

It’s good to know that Microsoft is looking out for it’s end users.  Having realized that desktop applications are difficult to install, require significantly more hardware resources, are difficult to administer, and are a frequent cause of malware and viruses, Microsoft has concluded that Google applications are better suited for its users than Microsoft Office is.  This is a indeed a very noble step for Microsoft.  I don’t know of any other company that would voluntarily sacrifice 1/3 of its revenues for its users than Microsoft. 

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.