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Microsoft Research Turns 10
Alec Muzzy writes: "Did you know that Microsoft Research, the first research laboratory started by a software company, just turned 10 years old? Their website is currently featuring some highlights of their research in the past 10 years and how it is applying to the new products Microsoft is making today - for instance their work in Real-Time Fur will be used in some XBox games, and Speech Recognition may be in future Pocket PC's. Reading these pages gives you a real insight into what new technologies Microsoft is working on."
In the late 1990s the college of engineering at my university would have reps and engineers from Apple's ATG (Advanced Technology Group) visit to judge projects, talk about the industry, and share stories over a BBQ. From what I understand, the ATG was a research group that had free reign to experiment with software and hardware projects, some of which were eventually wrapped into shipping Apple products. In about 1994 I remember a demo/presentation that included some neat webserver CGIs for "intelligent" searching and document organzation (cool for that time period). We were also shown a cool speech recognition + text-to-speech utility that utilized facial recognition as well as displaying a spooky relaistic animated talking face. I also recall a semi-working mockup of a 3D version of the Macintosh Finder (Apple's Macintosh desktop / file manager). One of the coolest things I remember was that not all of their projects were on Apple Macintosh hardware. Most were, but a few were on IBM RS/6000 (AIX) and SGI Indigo (IRIX) workstations.
Cool stuff.
Anyone else notice the amount of people dedicated to researching security for M$? Interesting to see that they still have major security holes in all of their releases. Yet again I am convinced that they leave their software buggy on purpose, so that upgrades are easier to sell.
Celebrate Steak and a Blowjob Day!
Let us not forgive or forget that. :-)
The sad thing is Microsoft has spent a pretty penny on research, but because of Microsoft's internal structure and development philosophy, the research doesn't get to do more than provide a gimick or two. E.g., Microsoft research spent a lot of time and money to develop a technique using Baysean probability to analyze what a user was doing and figure out what they were trying to do. The end result of that was the mother-#$! Office Paperclip that popped up whenever you typed the words, "Dear John".
Microsoft Research should be figuring out how to improve the performance of NT's Microkernel architecture, improve virtual memory management on multi-media machines and a host of other useful technologies. But they don't. Go figure.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
I didn't know about this site. But it looks really very interesting, and something that is even more interesting is that they have special licensees for universities and other non profit research institutes to have access to the source code for NT and CE. This is some of the most interesting things I've seen.
Here is a link.
Will work for bandwidth
The Macintosh is Xerox technology at its best.
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E2 IN2 IE?
I think despite what most people here on /. think about Microsoft as a company, :) you have to admit a lot of their research has created some very good ideas.
For example, the Microsoft Natural Keyboard and the improvements in the design of the Microsoft Mouse came out of this group. And MS Research has done a lot to dramatically improve the look and feel of Windows, especially the placement of menus, icons, etc.
I believe that the Linux supporters and developers should seriously look at creating an Open Source equivalent of Microsoft Research (companies like Dell and IBM could provide the initial seed money for such a lab). Imagine tightly-controlled research that could result in dramatic improvements in the usability of Linux on both the graphical and command line level, and developing keyboards and mouse pointers geared towards the needs of Linux users.
You're an idiot - LOTS of people came up with fur algorithms before R&H. E.g. Jim Kajiya who WORKS at MSResearch and wrote one of the seminal papers about it:
Kajiya, James T. and Timothy L. Kay, ``Rendering fur with three dimensional textures,'' in Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1989, ACM SIGGRAPH, 1989, pp. 271-280.
Have a clue about the topic before you post. Just look at the list of staff at MSR - it's a 'who's who' of various fields........ CGI included...... Jim Blinn, Hughes Hoppe, Michael Cohen... etc etc etc........
Welcome to Slashdot - blind microsoft bashing. MSResearch is doing some damn good work - look at any set of the conference proceedings from SIGGRAPH for the past 5 years and see the published work.........
I read a long time ago that MSR was trying to hire as many Computer Science faculty as would take the offer (usually much better salary than colleges could pay). The goal was two-fold: try to garner some prestige by having notable names within MS, and secondly work as an "intellectual roach motel", where research talent could be prevented from creating breakthroughs outside of Microsoft's control. This latter seems to have worked well, when one considers how many bodies are working for MSR and how little has come out of it. Just having researchers on the payroll, and therefore unable to contribute to IBM, etc. is probably worth it to Microsoft. A cushy, high-paying, do-nothing job at MSR is probably what they had in mind when they tried to hire Alan Cox a couple years ago.
Last SIGGRAPH I was at, Microsoft published a good dozen papers.
I asked a few of the people there about it, and they seemed happy as clams, they weren't worried about it. To me, it appears that their world had shrunk to be just Microsoft. It's more than a pity, it's almost criminal.
To me this indicates a false work ethic with those researchers. It sounds to me that they are only in it for the money, not to advance science or advance themselves. Do you think a great scientist like Stephen Hawking would ever get "bought" (as you put it) by a company like Microsoft? No way, he would have to give up way too much freedom in order to work there. He would only serve Microsoft, not the world or the computer industry at large.
Okay, I know this example is flawed. Hawking doesn't work in computer science :)
2000 is indeed a quantum leap in stability, but if you're doing serious development-type work on it you can still make it unstable an unsettling amount of the time. At least when IE fucks up it no longer takes out all your work though.
I suspect that, in ten years, people will be as impressed by the work that was done at MS Research as people today are with the work done at PARC.
PARC invented: Ethernet networks, windowed GUI's and laser printing! The ABSOLUTE basis for everyone's current networked computer environment (at least at most companies).
To say that Microsoft will come up with anything anywhere even close to as innovative as any one of those things (let alone 3) is totally laughable.
Bullshit couched in intellectualism is still bullshit.
I hope to god this is modded up. Anyway.
"For example, the Microsoft Natural Keyboard and the improvements in the design of the Microsoft Mouse came out of this group"
This is great because I work at a department at my university where a guy downstairs is suing microsoft. You wanna know why?
Way back when he was typing on his keyboard and noticed his wrists were starting to hurt. He then created the first natural keyboard. Upon trying to sell it to several companies and failing, he tried microsoft (Software only, at the time.) Unfortunately they declined, but strangely enough they started making hardware later. One of their first creations... The natural keyboard.
I really wish I knew the guy's name right now. But he works one floor below me. I'll post on it if I find out any more info.