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Microsoft Research Fights Critics
coondoggie writes to tell us Network World is taking a look at why Microsoft Research has to fight so hard against critics. From the article: "When the word 'innovation' is tossed about many may look down their nose at the company sitting on top of the high-tech industry — Microsoft. [...] Microsoft Research incubates not only futuristic ideas but young minds, having hired 700 interns worldwide this year including 250 computer science PhD candidates in Redmond alone, which is roughly 21% of all the computer science PhD candidates in the United States."
If Microsoft were less predatory and less a bully in business maybe the rest of the world would stop looking down their noses at Microsoft's "research". As it is, it looks less like research and more like unfettered spending to find "yet another" way to dominate.
I welcome research from any company. I'm guessing I've probably used what amounts to "innovation" from Microsoft, derivative of work from their labs.
Unfortunately for Microsoft (but true to their character) they have tools for mouthpieces like Ballmer. Microsoft inks a deal in what could only be viewed with raised eyebrows, and Ballmer punctuates that with "they're infringing our IP anyway...". As long as Microsoft continues to be so hostile to the world in general, they get what they sow.
Their research may be golden, but it's ill-gotten gains, the world thinks so, and the world is probably right. The fact that Microsoft has such a corner on every market that they can hire 25% of the Computer Science PhD candidates only adds fuel to the fires of suspicion.
In the interim, it's a shame Bell Labs has gone from world leader to nothing... budget cuts, etc. (Lucent)... there was some real research there, and lots of it was shared with the world.
Large companies shouldn't hire these professions just to "push the envelope." Instead, I would hope that all companies diversified as their employee numbers grow. I work in a large IT company and have witnessed the above professions working effectively--especially in the R&D department.
- Psychologists
- Sociologists
- Anthropologists
- Medical Doctors
I'm actually shocked that list wasn't longer and more astonishing. No music theory majors to look at musical products like Guitar Hero's success? No athletic trainers to combat my country's obesity or offer and IT solution for it? No history majors toOne of the areas of studies the gets some of the most criticism from me. But you know what? When it comes to performing experiments on how people think and react to stimuli, psychologists are pretty damn good at it since all their data has been collected empirically from subjects. And who uses the code and devices we make in the end? Humans. And who better to tell you what the effects will be after a human has used your product for hours on end? You know, I've often wondered how many psychologists Blizzard employs because I can play that game for long periods of time with little or no fatigue on my eyes/brain.
As software becomes more and more decentralized and internet based, communities form around it. Communities identify themselves by it. For instance, I am part of the Slashdot community by merely posting on it. Think about how many sociologists that MySpace must employ to predict/track or protect people from social deviance. How do you handle that? How do you address that? Not really an engineer's department.
Now that's a word I hear thrown around a lot and abused to mean many things. But most importantly, it's the study of diverse kinds of people. If you're an international company, you need anthropologists to view your projects and make sure that you aren't inadvertently calling your product or displaying something that may limit your market or create bad press. Engineers focus on one type of person when they make their product and so you need people to make sure that it is still marketable to the world.
Most likely hired for the sheer fact that baby boomers are getting old. Huge market for healthcare. If you can make anything related to it and sell it, you're in the money for the coming years. I may be a horrible monster for saying this but things like Alzheimer's Disease are multi-billion dollar industries based on treatments. Gene therapy and computational techniques in gene sequencing just make the field all that more lucrative.
On top of that, you need to think of the disabled using your product and be conscious of their disabilities. Also, what medical problems might be associated with your product or how can you make it easier on the end user. You don't want a million lawsuits if I'm losing my eye sight or getting arthritis by playing WoW, do you?
Come on people, this is the R&D of the largest software company in the world. I'm shocked that I'm not more shocked on what they're up to.
My work here is dung.
Is the stuff that's going on at MS really all that interesting that 21% of PHD students want to work there? Or is the pay just that good? Or are they just looking for a nice shiny star on their resume? It seems to me that there would be a lot more interesting places to work than MS.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
CS PhDs? No wonder they don't get anywhere.
That for all its "innovation", Microsoft have never in the whole of history released a truly new product. Everything they've ever produced (right the way down to Microsoft Paint - once upon a time there was a DOS version produced by someone else) has been either bought or rehashed from someone else.
Sure, they've played around with things a bit - changed the interface here and there, come up with slight tweaks, But at the end of the day, it's not the tweaks that get recognised as innovation; it's the whole new products.
FTA:"There are virtually no products Microsoft produces today that have not either taken technology from research, come directly out of research, or been built using the tools and technologies we've created in research," he says.
Does that include Zune? The Microsoft music service? How much research did it take to come up with 'We need to make our own iPod and music service'?
Flame On...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Xerox PARC had creative types by the bushel, and we know how little the "copier mafia" in the company paid attention to it. What a gain for Silicon Valley, and the broader world; what a loss for, as my uncle called it, Zoorox.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
I don't know of anybody criticizing Microsoft Research: there are lots of good people doing good work there. People are criticizing Microsoft's business practices and products. Good research doesn't necessarily translate into good products, in particular if a company's primary goal is market dominance through lock-in and other tricks.
wasn't there some inside document which stated Bill Gates' concern the bright minds would be outside of Micrsoft? Concidering what comes out of their R&D department, it looks like all these PhDs are working on an MS Etch-A-Sketch and nothing more. Ok, they did re-invent Apples/Woz's multi-pixel rendering technique and call it MS ClearType or something like that. Oh boy.
No wonder Bill Gates is trying to get Congress to loosen up restrictions on importing labor. :)
* Singularity OS
* Socio-Digital systems
* Digital geographics
* Natural Language Processing
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I think I'm going to tag this article "assimilation".
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I want to know why so many Slashdotters behold XBOX as a major technological innovation but shun Microsoft when Windows is mentioned. Here's one that uses Windows at home and loves it.
"MSR has grown from an idea to more than 700 researchers working out of five labs around the globe with a budget of more than $250 million. MSR incubates not only futuristic ideas but young minds, having hired 700 interns worldwide this year including 250 computer science PhD candidates in Redmond alone, which is roughly 21% of all the computer science PhD candidates in the United States. It's a program Microsoft officials say is the world's largest PhD. internship program for computer science."
Makes their lack of innovation all the more remarkable.
FromTFA:
"Microsoft as an innovator is good for creating things behind the scenes but bad at bringing them to market."
Sums it up nicely.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
look down at MS precisely because it tosses about the word "innovation". The way they toot their own horn, you think they hired marching band. The word seems to be used in the most disappropriate way, where they actually copied the features. And they used that damn word so much and so often, it becomes nearly meaningless.
That alone overshadows everything else they do, including stuff that may actually be innovative.
Bell labs and Xerox PARC were great examples of incidental innovation, these companies weren't desperately trying to be innovative. The greatest innovations can also tend towards subversion, imagine Microsoft faced with a genuine innovation that challenged one of their existing profitable markets. Let's not forget that Microsoft think they can own every market.
Microsoft suck and Microsoft innovation is an oxymoron.
"21% of all the computer science PhD candidates in the United States."
Instead of having a market with CS people all over the place thriving they are scuddled into a very few corporations. I am not going as far as calling it communism BUT having everything in "one" basket or two is VERY dangerous.
I wish it could. I'd be really brilliant by now......
I'm not knocking the individuals working for Microsoft, it's just that there comes a point in the lifespan of a company where it's past its prime. Getting a truly 'new' product far enough to the front is a gargantuan task, that ends up requiring patents and huge investment because the entire process is so slow.
Let's just compare Apple and MS here for a second. Apple pulls stuff into the mainstream that's pretty new once in a while. They seem to enjoy it. It's been really profitable. But some of the stuff they do is so new that noone can really catch up until it's too late. (see: iPod, good UI, 'stylish' design)
BR Somehow, Apple listens to new ideas, where Microsoft attempts to implement old ones and takes flack for never getting it exactly right. One wonders where this cultural issue is in M$, and what makes the difference between the two. But that's only an academic question.
My little site.
Great, and as soon as a PhD has -anything- to do with innovation M$ will finally start doing something different.
That title is the whole truth about MS research and innovation. Classic.
I've never heard either XBOX presented as an innovation, they're both basic PC's. The IBM in-order PPC cores in the 360 would be interesting to play with, but other than that there's nothing.
In case you did not know, MSR also is involved in the field of quantum computing. See http://stationq.ucsb.edu/index.html.
Is not that it's not doing good work- it's that it doesn't change what the rest of the company does. Which is, to put it bluntly, produce crap products and use predatory monopoly practices to keep their obscene profit margins. This is not unlike AT&T/Bell Labs back in the day. Well, except AT&T's products actually *worked*.
Take a young mind, put it in a cube and call it innovation. Riiight...
You can put 22" rims onto a Pinto or Corvair but that won't make anybody want one. Similarly, you can hire all the PhDs you want, but if you can't produce products that are secure, stable, or even responsive, then it just doesn't matter. I came into work today to see signs posted saying "MS patches are being deployed. Your PC may ask to reboot itself."
Additionally, you need smart people throughout the company. Xerox PARC had a lot of brains and made world-changing products decades ago but it didn't do them much good since no one knew what to do with them.
R and D are good, of course, but anyone interested in these types of things should read this about Apple in the 1990s.
"These projects snowballed into horrific disasters that were so complex they could never be completed, but which also contributed highly touted features that were tightly woven into Apple's increasingly widening strategies. That made them impossible to deliver but difficult to kill."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
then they fight you,
Hmmm -- does this mean we're at Stage Two?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I've read a lot of research papers for computer science, especially in the areas of databases and networking. I've developed the bias that the papers from researchers at companies, rather than universities, tend to suck. They tend to use a lot of column space talking about what commercial tools they employed, be a little heavy on unhelpful graphs, etc.
I don't know what leads to this trend, but I'm pretty sure it's there and I now cringe when I have to read a paper from corporate authors. THAT'S one reason I look down my nose at MS research - it's corporate. Am I the only person who notices this trend?
For all the money M$ spends on Research, they sure don't have that much to show for it. Look at the productivity of IBM's R&D compared to M$. One of these days they may figure it out, but until then I am not terribly impressed.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I call bullshit. UW has 150 grad students in CSE. I really doubt there are only ~1200 computer science grad students in the US.
Relax people, they're (bad) jokes!
I saw an interview with 2 or 3 ex-ms-employees
they saied ms works like this:
- they hire young, clever coders
- use them up until they're burned out
- fire them
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
that all these touchy feel-good articles always come out in praise of Microsoft when there is a major product release? Does anyone else think it to be too much of a coincidence?
MS is a really old style company.
Science is just more propaganda tool to MS.
They ship a shrinkwrapped, known product over a generation.
MS main interest is protecting dominance in established markets and moving into new markets.
If MS needs 'computer science' or a new product they buy it off the shelf and sell it back to the market.
If the 'dreams' from the top are "knife the baby" and "cut off the oxygen supply" -
you work for 'just another' business.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I find it hard to believe that Microsoft has 21% of CS PhD students in the USA, meaning that there are only 1000 of them in the country. The big schools, such as Carnegie Mellon and Champagne Urbana, have dozens. There are thousands of universities, and research institutions. The United States is the global leader in CS research (says me, a European), it cant be pulled of with 1000 PhD candidates. Maybe its true, but I urge caution in believing that statistic.
Basically, Microsoft are turning into something like IBM.
I'm a PhD candidate in Computer Science at a relatively small school: UC Santa Cruz. Our web site currently lists 358 graduate students (MS and Ph.D.). I don't know what the breakdown is exactly, but if only 20% of them are PhD students (I think the percentage is higher than that, but I'm being cautious), that's 72 of the current graduate students. And you know the programs at MIT, CalTech, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Rice University, Georgia Tech, Texas A&M, UCLA, UCI, UCSD, and so on must be at least as large. I'm sorry, there is no way there are only 3300 PhD candidates in CS in the US.
I'm not saying that MS is falsifying their numbers, just that the journalist who wrote the story may want to check their math.
for all those people they pay for, they could be pumping money into actually making Windows a usable and enjoyable product.
Or maybe MSR are scamming microsoft as much as microsoft marketers are scamming the world.
A few random MSR scams:
- "hey Wordperfect are making lots of money selling a word processor, let's make our own."
- "hey, over 50% of Sony's global profits are from a games console. let's make our own."
- "hey Apple came up with this fancy MOV movie container format. let's make our own."
- "hey Apple are selling a music player and have an online music store. let's make our own."
These alleged innovations from Microsoft are nothing more than their having an uncanny ability to review the current market leaders and imitating.
Or maybe we're just misreading their website. Maybe it really does say "imitations" and our minds are reading it as "innovations." Where are those psychologists?
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
http://malfy.org/
I got this from a post to Scoble's blog last week:
Speaking of XNA (a framework allowing normal folk to make Windows and Xbox 360 games (without the need for a devkit), a great video of it was released last week at Channel 9:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=261
The video shows coding, debugging, and deployment of Xbox 360 games using XNA. Although XNA uses C# managed code, one of the sample games shown in the video, XNA Racer, runs at 1080p 30fps with 2x antialiasing.
It's a very cool video. Beyond anything you'd see from Apple, Google, et al.
The notion that Microsoft does no innovation is nonsense.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
They hired the whole Mach OS team apart from Tevenian who went to NeXT and David Black who was at the OSF. Anyone ever hear of those guys again? They certainly haven't done anything earth shifting since MachOS. I heard from one of the team who was on the Cairo project at the time that he was being paid to do very little and was there not to work for anyone else. Still they all got very rich.
If M$ research has a to fight an up-hill battle, it's because Microaoft has lied in so many ways in the past. Especially when it comes to innovation. From DOS to Internet Explorer, Microsoft has had a habit of:
1. Buying the second or third ranked player in a market segment.
2. Rebranding it.
3. Throwing their advertising dollars behind it.
4. Calling it "Innovation."
Worse is when they steal other's ideas and call it "Innovation." How many time have they been sued?
I hope they are on the path to reform, but it will take a significant pattern of honest behavour before I believe what they say.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
but given that Microsoft is one of the few companies with a monopoly, this primes them for real research, doesn't it? Many years ago when other tech companies had monopolies they invested a lot of hard cash into their research and development divisions, hiring many graduates and the like that were noted as being at the top (or potentially top) of their game. Now those monopolies are removed, the shareholders have kicked in saying that the research divisions were not generating enough of a profit margin and were a drain on the shareholders' dividends. Real research takes time.
What I mean is that since I work for a university, it is good for me. Those companies can throw a set amount of research dollars our way since we are basically research sweatshops. I admit that I don't like the idea of Microsoft and love to think of them as crippling the potential of a lot of users, but I applaud them for at least acknowledging the importance of research and taking an active part in their 'responsibilities'.
My two cents.
.
Everything they discover was unavailable to you in the first place- otherwise it wouldn't be a discovery, it would be a use of your prior art. Patents don't foreclose in perpetuity the benefits of an invention- they merely grant a limited monopoly on the right to sell or dispose of the work. They incentivize invention, even though they may discourage (at the patent holder's discretion) others from producing derivative work.
You are.
If there's one thing I won't stand for, it's intolerance.
They are absolutely powerful and therefore, absolutely evil.
The real thieves aren't in jail, they're in big business.
700 interns, 21% of students just coming out of college with a Phd.
Where are the programmers with real-life experience. The ones who really know what it is really like.
Sounds like a big, overrun college to me, with professors who try to teach stuff they really don't know about, and students who soak up the crap. When time comes to work in a real environment, they fall apart.
I had games creators on my ZX Spectrum in the early 1980's. I also created games using "managed code" (Java) 10 years ago and it wasn't innovative back then. Please don't confuse innovation with incremental improvement.
but who knows. All 'great things' the research has done and would have gone into Vista have been removed again. To many people that means that either research produces crap, because it can't be used, or the company does not give a shit about research.
The fact that so much people are tied up in projects that will nog go anywhere does not realy help.
research is only so great as to what it produces. If you have 1000 people working on it and nothing comes out of it, it was shitty research. If 3 people work on it and you invent sliced bread, or the next best thing, it was great.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
MSR has grown from an idea to more than 700 researchers working out of five labs around the globe with a budget of more than $250 million. MSR incubates not only futuristic ideas but young minds, having hired 700 interns worldwide this year including 250 computer science PhD candidates in Redmond alone, which is roughly 21% of all the computer science PhD candidates in the United States. It's a program Microsoft officials say is the world's largest PhD. internship program for computer science.
That is all well and good, but what does it produce? The only things that I know that have come out of MSR are ideas like dancepad user input and attempts to produce a Microsoft version of bit torrent. The article lists a few more areas of research, but seriously, is this what you get for $250M? I just don't think Microsoft creates an environment that fosters innovation.
meh
"The problem is not that Microsoft research isn't doing anything interesting, it's that projects like this tend to get buried, or ignored, or simply have a few ideas shifted into existing products."
Microsoft Research is to research what AC's are to slashdot. Burned, buried, and ignored with a few modded up.
How is the Xbox 360 innovative? It's a machine that was designed for market penetration. There's nothing new or innovative whatsoever.
Compare that to the Wii with it's innovative controller, and the PS3 with it's innovative architecture and cutting-edge technology.
We should boycott these "innovations" until they *really* produce something innovative.
Not all innovations or innovators are good or benevolent.
Perhaps Micro$oft can research this...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
They suck up one quarter of the CS braintrust and they still put out crap. What is our schools learning these days?
First and foremost, Microsoft is selling binary compatibility. If not for the virus problem, Microsoft would have to be considered the 5th or 6th best operating system available except for one thing; it runs all those existing Windows apps, and that is the only feature anybody really wants to buy from Microsoft. Any innovation which broke binary compatibility is therefore almost automatically ruled out, sometimes with disastrous consequences. The second problem is that the sort of innovations that Microsoft is most interested in are those that benefit Microsoft. How can we prevent cross platform interoperability? How can we keep users on the 'upgrade' treadmill even when there is nothing in it for them? How can we prevent users from making copies, even legitimate copies, of Microsoft software? How can we build a patent pool to protect us from patent trolls and threaten open source users? There are only so many hours in the day, and when you spend virtually all of them trying to figure out ways to screw your customers and your competitors, there isn't a heck of a lot of time left for real innovation.
Microsoft Research! More computer science papers come out of us than from the top universities! We present them at numerous prestigious conferences around the world!
Now, in partnership with Microsoft Marketing, we are proud to announce... Research4All!
Yes, Research4All is a unique product designed to meet not only the needs of researchers around the world, but also the corporations that feed, clothe, and entertain them! For only $1299.99, you get access to three -- count 'em, three! -- research papers published by Microsoft Research! But wait, there's more!
You may read each paper a total of five times, on a total of one computer! And if you should choose to purchase our Paper Edition (for an additional $499 charge), the ink will degrade after six months. And, as an added bonus, the paper is microprinted so that copying and scanning won't work! We are also working with graphics imaging and word processing vendors to recognize certain unique, secret, and patented characteristics of both the microprinting, as well as the sentence structure!
Research was never this fun!
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
I work in corporate R&D, so want to make one ruthless statement to a pretty impressive list of publications.
In academia, publications are your metric of success. In industry, its your ability to generate an ROI by improving the company's profits.
Xerox PARC was a failure to xerox. Not to Canon, HP and adobe (laser printing and PDF), not to apple, MS or the rest of the world that uses GUIs. But it was to Xerox. I dont know if MSR has repaid their investment yet. Frankly, at the estimated $10B that vista cost in full time engineering staff, I dont know when it will repay its investment either. At least MSR did some nice papers for other people to read and make use of.
"The problem is not that Microsoft can't come up with some innovative stuff. The problem is in how they translate it from their research side to their implementation and then marketing, which is usually pretty lousy."
Quick! Someone get Xerox Parc on the phone. They may want to hear this.*
*Now Lucent Technologies...
Oh, that's so unfair. Go look at this little bunny I wrote last year, pointing out the entire Web Service SOAP stack and its belief in seamless mapping between Java/C# and XML was a load of fundamentally unachievable bollocks.
When I was at the IEEE conf presenting it (and getting best paper, BTW), I had to put up with three days of academics stuck in the depths of their little web service, none of whom seemed to step back and notice that what they basing their work on was junk. Instead they were using Apache Axis or similar and repeating exactly the same mistakes enterprise developers do: they believed IBM and Microsoft knew what was best for them.
I actually prefer open source conferences. Good talks, good audience, ubiquitous beer.
I'm a Ph.D. student in one of the big universities. I also work as an IT consultant while I'm trying to finish. I have interned in several large companies and now work in a startup. I have also talked to _many_ Ph.D. students about interning at MS and would like to convey those findings here.
First, nobody finishes a Ph.D then wants to work at MS in order to find an interesting career. New grads or interns go there to make some money, and hope to move on soon. The respect for MS from IT-aware people is obvious from technically-minded forums such as Slashdot. What I find curious is that many people try to sell Slashdot as 'anti Microsoft' and that it has a an anti-MS bias. From my experience, the only bias is that the people whom bother to post on Slashdot know something about IT and the computer industry in general. Sadly, MS is a marketing company, much like Symantec has become. Software is not the focus, and proper software which is acceptable to a computer-aware user base is surely not the goal of MS. Only MS could advertise they have ~21% of the Ph.D. students while the entire IT field knows the students don't want to be there. From my view, their claim is intended to be impressive to the less-informed public, not for the IT crowd.
In short, computer-aware people know MS is marketing only and do not respect it for its software. However, to have 'dealt' with MS looks good on the resume because it shows you can deal with B.S., much like having a Ph.D. shows. We all know that many more people could earn doctorate degrees if they wanted them, but don't bother and just go have a career with a bachelor's level degree. The extra degree says you can do what needs to be done and work against the odds to make what you envision happen. I view interning at MS much the same way-- proof that those students can beat the odds and work in a less-than-perfect environment (note this is a good skill to have in higher-level employment positions and is why Ph.D.-level people are paid more).
I have never worked at MS and would not necessarily be proud to have MS on my resume. But it does say something, that you dealt with MS and will most likely appreciate working somewhere else next.
Imagine if Microsoft had the DRM enforced monopoly on human knowledge...
Your comment is modded funny but it offers a terrifying glimpse of Microsofts dark heart and the consequences humanity faces if we don't defeat the beast.
"Let's say 70% of [research] sees the light of day . . . that's a good payback."
Quoted in a Wall Street Journal article.
Hiring these people to do research is just a cover, what they actually seem to be doing is hogging 20% of the phd's to prevent them from innovating for anybody else.
Home fucking is killing prostitution.
When Microsoft's idea of 'innovate' is to take something that works (at least in its limited realm) like SPF, bastardize it, break compatibility with it, and then patent it with claims to things that were in the original work I really don't cry much for them when people question their ability to 'innovate'.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Well, that would pretty well explain the downward spiral on Vista. I have yet to meet a PhD who could code his way out of a paper bag. Few things kill real products quite like an ivory tower lunatic looking for a post-doc.
Maybe one reason they have to fight their critics so hard is the "research" they do. Perhaps if they spent more time researching ways to improve themselves, their software and the world in general instead of looking for the best way to cut off the air supply of any and all other products, they wouldn't encounter such criticism.
The real point of MSR isn't innovation. Its a way to keep the best and brightest happy and busy while providing no competition to Microsoft. If they happen to provide some innovation along the way, well thats just gravy.
I am reminded of a line in Princess Bride:
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means." - Inigo Montoya
The opener clearly attempts to posit that a bunch of VERY BRIGHT MINDS work at MS.
From this most people head down the road of confusing INVENTION with INNOVATION.
Lets look at dictionary.com:
verb (used without object)
1. to introduce something new; make changes in anything established.
-verb (used with object)
2. to introduce (something new) for or as if for the first time: to innovate a computer operating system.
3. Archaic. to alter.
If we assume the very first part of definition 1, it does imply being the same as invention. However in popular usage what innovation generally means is taking 2 existing ideas and combining them. Like putting the idea of email and wireless together to make...presto.... a blackberry. Or taking the idea of "hey let's put a search feature into our desktop". This may be a neat idea and it may be "innovative" but I hardly put it on the scale of say discovering the transistor or the cure for AIDS or something. In practical fact, most "innovators" are just everyday cubicle-workers putting together the building-blocks and there's nothing worth handing out prizes for here.
What was the last great INVENTION of Microsoft, that would be an interesting list.
Instead of telling us how many PhDs msft has on their payroll, why not tell us what msft has actually invented? What major contributions to computer scientce has msft actually made?
GUI? LAN? internet? What?
I'm shocked that the figure is so low; that there are less than 1,250 CS PhD candidates each year in a nation of 300,000,000 people.
I wouldn't expect it to be very high, given the simultaneously very-demanding and very-nerdy nature of being a CS PhD. But I would've guessed there are 5k-10k/year, at least... (then again, who have I met besides a CS professor who has a CS PhD? Er, nobody. But I don't live within 2,000 miles of Google's (or MSFT's) HQ...)
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
>>Just because their work does not percolate down to the products and services teams at MS
So msft spends gobs of money, hiring huge numbers of researchers to do all kinds of research. Msft invents all kinds of stuff. Then msft just throws all of that away, and steals ideas from other companies?
Makes perfect sense to me.
I think the numbers quoted from the article here were bungled.
l
> having hired 700 interns worldwide this year including
> 250 computer science PhD candidates in Redmond alone,
> which is roughly 21% of all the computer science PhD
> candidates in the United States."
http://www.cra.org/CRN/articles/may06/taulbee.htm
suggests around 1200 CS PhDs *awarded* in 2004-2005 in the USA and Canada. The number for the USA alone may be lower than this, but it might also be higher since 20% of departments surveyed did not respond. But assuming 1200/year is close to the mark, the number of "computer science PhD candidates in the United States" must be several times that, since a PhD takes several years and furthermore a lot of PhD students never complete their degree. I think an average of five years of studentship per PhD awarded would be a reasonably conservative estimate; then the 21% number quoted should be more like 4%.
Companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Dell, they're the ones I find innovative. Apple for actually producing an operating system and peripherals that I *want* to use, Google for making the pr0n^H^H^H^H information on the internet accessible for nearly everyone, Amazon for making shopping in the web not suck so bad (anyone remember what it was like buying an item over the internet in like, 1995? Wow, that blew.) and Dell for making computers affordable for just about anyone.
That's innovation. Making tier one, power users happy is "innovative". Giving non-techie people like my mother (who'll be 60 next year) the ability to search for the information she's looking for, or throwing together a movie of when I was a kid - that's innovation.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
REMEMBER:
When they say "PhD candidate", they're basically saying these people might be smart.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
Sounds like it would be useful. MS should pull a hundred people off its movie and music projects and get some of this out the door for Windows (not Vista, XP). They could say "...by Microsoft Research" when downloading the patches that give you more functionality in the OS than when you purchased it. Don't force an upgrade to Vista, make XP or 2K more useful as-is and I might imagine someone at MS is trying to do something right instead of the de rigeur warping of everything into surreal Evil. Oh the part about them buying companies and destroying them might have something to do with the perception too.
"Do not confuse research with development. Then again, given that this is Slashdot, blind and ignorant Microsoft bashing is welcome, even if the person bashing it has absolutely no clue whatsoever."
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Now were are the OSRL (Open Source Research Labs) located?* The papers? The cutting-edge developments (aside from jiggling windows)?
*A:At Sun, and IBM and we take the credit. You didn't really think we had the money to pay a lab and staff?
They should hire some English graduates. When I call tech support I need an intrepreter to figure out what the hell is going on.
Carefully noting the effect of light falling on charged metal plates, and the current thus driven did not build a microchip. All it did was provide the basis for quantum mechanics, which built atomic clocks which faciliate GPS, our financial markets, inertial guidance, also the wonders semiconductors, photovoltaics, lasers, and a first world full of shit that populates a spectrum ranging from invisiply nessecary, to conspiciously awesome. Fundemental research such as undertaken by Microsoft research, and very rarely by any public companies, double super especially American ones, is more important and valuable than producing a billion dollar hit product. Fundemental research produces families of trillion dollar markets that everyone enjoys and previously were unable to imagine!
You know what's starting to make sense to me? Slave labor for uneducated troglodites such as yourself. Clearly your free time is wasted with you pretending to think. Who knows with a whip-cracking master, a pick-axe and some tar you might be able to fix a pothole somewhere.
I knew it, no one can answer that in the affirmative and give a good example, so they just slap a flamebait on it instead. Fair enough, here's another chance then, prove your point: Name an MS product they sell-err, "license to use"-for money, that is truly the best on the planet, something that will prove they are "the top tech company". I contend they are not, making the entire premise of the article bogus and astroturfing at its finest.
MS is a marketing company that pushes branding and uses vendor lockin and extortion like tactics to get to be a lucrative enterprise, this is indisputable, they are convicted abusive monopolists and IP hijackers,so they got pretty wealthy, but they are NOT a top tech company based on products they offer, especially anything they developed inhouse. I would say they aren't even in the top 100. The best they have is half assed mediocre, and they brag on it.
What's amazing about MS is how little they accomplish given their resources.
Windows is still bone primitive when it comes to basic housekeeping: your network administrator disconnects a drive that you 'share', you attempt to import a file into an Office ap and the system grinds to a halt - does windows intercept this? advise you? nay nay nay! You have to go to Google to even find out why it's happening. What about ID7s disregard of CSS conventions? We still have all those cryptic error messages. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Why doesn't Paint do anything reasonably useful after all these years - you can't even constrain a rectangle into a bleedin' square
What are they working on up there?
Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people!
That said, I wanted a cheap phone so on the occasions I did need to make a call, I'd have one. I went with TracFone (at the time, I found it on Amazon). According to their web site, they are offering a phone and 450 minutes that last a year for $99 (which is ~$8/month). When you renew, any unused minutes roll over (I just renewed for 2 years and an extra 250 minutes for $149).
If you don't use your cell phone much (like me), this is a cheap solution. However, these are rock-bottom phones. If you need anything much beyond a phone (it does have voice mail), or if you need more minutes (the minutes are relatively expensive), it won't work.
I live in the SF Bay Area, if that matters in the slightest.
Beyond anything you'd see from apple or google?
Nope. Now, I don't want to diminish Microsoft's efforts. Certainly not. They spend billions on their research and it warms the cockles of my heart to know that even one MSR effort has been productized. Wait a tick... XNA wasn't an MSR effort! Still, it's pretty cool that you can make a game in C#... I guess.
At a company I worked at years ago, my boss hired a young CS phD and put him to work on a secure wireless file exchange system for PDAs. After months of toiling on it, he proudly held up his work, which ended up working exactly the same as OBEX, only a little slower. And not secure at all. Basically, he ended up rewriting OBEX. At least he was able to keep his paychecks coming in. I don't know why he didn't invent his own encrypted object envelope or something that probably would have done the job. Just because you hire a phD doesn't always mean that they're not hard at work "innovating" technology that already exists in some form. In fact, that seems to happen quite a bit. It's when you have a problem that you really can't surmount with current technology that you end up coming up with a new system. What having a phD really means is that you have a guy who had the financial means to obtain said phD, and one willing to work hard enough over the course of 7-8 years to gain said phD. While other engineers with 4 year degrees are hard at work on many other projects out in the real world at the same time, you can be sure that your phD is the absolute expert on something that he spent years writing a thesis for.
The only result of what you listed here is more stuff to wipe my ass with.
Calculate this:
Money spent per year at MSR
divided by
Products invented by or improved *significantly* by MSR
And there you have it, the reason no one takes them seriously. It's like MSR doesn't even exist, and everything is controlled by marketing. They should be innovating and whooping Google's bum with all the money spent. But they are playing catch-up to Apple with the Zune, Firefox with IE, Unix with Vista (which had its best features pulled), Sony with the Xbox (although Sony probably overly circumcised itself on the PS3/360 war), Google with the searchy thing, Apache with IIS, Java with
The only areas in which they dominate are Desktop Operating Systems, due to predatory pricing and other illegal activities, and DRM. Fricken WOW! (said sarcastically)
It's all theory that goes nowhere. Hopefully some smart people can turn that research into products, but it won't be microsoft.
#include your rant about how pure research furthers the field and applied research is for moneygrubbing opportunists
With over 20% of the DOCTORAL CANDIDATES, I would expect them to publish more good research than EVERY university. Unless there's a university somewhere that attracts over 20% of the doctoral candidates.
To sum up some other comments: MS Research probably does a lot, but the reason there are so many negative opinions is this:
How much does microsoft spend on research, and how much innovation comes out of it?
compared to
How many times does MS innovate vs. claims of innovation?
Hint: reseach per dollar is seen as very low, innovation per claim is very low.
I'm not saying that's right, but that answers the unasked question of the article, which was, why do they rag on the MSR?
Perhaps there is some cause and effect here. There needs to be a balance where a company can reap enough money from its success that it can continue to support the pure research. Bell Labs was wonderful -- it's too bad they didn't have more business sense and the ability to sufficiently capitalize on their products to stay solvent.
Microsoft Research does many sorts of interesting stuff. How many of those things become useful products? Not many.
Microsoft Research is a drain on society. They take many of the world's smartest people, and put them in an environment where little of what they do ever makes it to the public.
http://outcampaign.org/
The above comment (moderated to +5) is hardly "disparaging of MSR", it is listing three interesting-sounding inventions and the number of papers and uses of those inventions. Maybe you thought it was insulting them in some way, but the wording sounded pretty positive to me. I think the problem is that people like you skim this so fast and are so set on proving the "slashdot bias" that you read the second word, "not", and decided this was a negative comment?
When the functional programming revolution hits the mainstream -- and it will very soon now as the current, C++ or Java way of developing software does not scale complexity-wise without requiring ever-increasing armies of Indians or Chinese to grind out the code -- Microsoft will be ahead of just about everybody else because they've retained the likes of Simon Payton-Jones and Erik Meijer to work in their research department. In fact, LINQ may just be the best thing to ever happen to functional programming because now that Microsoft is doing it, it becomes a legitimate enterprise programming activity.
Microsoft is an 800-pound gorilla, but do NOT knock their research arm. Whatever it may have been in the past, these days there are definitely people doing interesting stuff at the very cutting edge of computing
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
An Xbox is just a PC. Last time I checked, the OS it runs is a stripped down version of Windows.
PCs are also known to run Windows.
Wow! So they created something that allows you to run your game under Windows! Astonishing! Such innovation!
Yes, there's a difference between the Xbox Windows and the PC windows. But they're the ones who made that difference. XNA helps them fix a problem that they created in the first place.
I don't think MS will ever innovate. They're just too big and too conservative to take risks. Buying up small, agile, creative companies is the best they can do.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
I agree with most of what you said. The thing was that I was trying to defend MSR from the perception that -- unfairly -- carries over from MS Corporate about innovation. I *do* think that the perception of MS Corporate taints the perception of MSR even among people who have heard of it (as you said in the bold parts), and I do think that the taint is quite unfair when it comes to the topic at hand, innovation (which you left unanswered as to your opinion).
;-)) But back to the subject at hand, I don't really know what MSR contributes to Corporate. They've got a bunch of UI researchers... but they don't seem to be using them all that much.
The problem with MSR from an outsider's perspective is that they seem to be pretty poor at translating research that goes on to products that Corporate can use. There are some exceptions to this, like the SLAM project resulting in the Static Driver Verifier, which is distributed as part of the Windows Driver Framework. And who knows, maybe in VS 2007 or 2009 you'll see results of the work with Vulcan, recording traces, and time-traveling debugging. (I for one would kill someone for that code now. Actually, on a personal note, I'm sorta miffed about this one... they scooped me by about a year. I was trying to come up with a research project for a software engineering class, read about the Java Omniscient Debugger, and thought "hey, that would be great to do for binaries" (some of my other work involves analysis of binaries so I was in that mindset), and actually did a fair bit of related work research before finding the MSR paper. And it was only released in April of this year for a conference in the Summer I think... if they had waited another year, that'd have been my project.
Maybe there is a lot of transfer going on behind the scenes, but I don't see it.
Oops, I forgot to finish what I wanted to say.
;-)
... Java with .NET
.Net's weakness is its platform specificity. If it was platform independent, including GUI toolkit, I'd take .Net over Java in a second for almost any program where I had to choose between those two languages. (Yeah, I know .Net isn't a language. C# or C++ .Net or a combination. You get my point. And yeah, there's Mono, but they're behind on the GUI front (though catching up), and there's patent worries and such. It's not equal support like Java has.)
;-)
I just wanted to address a few points:
The only result of what you listed here is more stuff to wipe my ass with.
And hopefully more stable drivers in the near future.
But they are playing catch-up to
I don't buy this.
#include your rant about how pure research furthers the field and applied research is for moneygrubbing opportunists
Well, the first part is certainly true, but to be honest, I don't think that applied research is for opportunists. Some of my favorite research has very deeply immediately applicable results. (The best has a great mix of applied stuff and theory. CCured would be an example of this, though it's less applicable than some other possible examples.)
With over 20% of the DOCTORAL CANDIDATES, I would expect them to publish more good research than EVERY university.
Well, there are a few things at work that might conspire against this. First, remember that that 20% is just during the summer; 3/4 of the year they're back at universities. Of course, MSR also has a fair number of full-time employees. Second, even if you have the research to support it, I suspect it's difficult to get more than a paper or two from any given institution into some conference. Third, there's some reason to suspect that people at MSR are less eager to publish than those at universities. Grad students are eager because you need publications for a job, new faculty are eager because they need publications to get tenure, middle-aged faculty are eager because they need publications to get promoted. I'm sure there's still a lot of pressure in an industry lab, but I suspect it's less. I could be wrong about that though, I haven't experienced an industry research lab.
And finally, you shouldn't have posted AC, that's a good post. You deserve the insightful mod.
There is nothing worse than arm chair quarterbacks who get to go online and pretend they know something that they do not. This subject proves it more (worse) than most. I teach computer science and happen to know a little about core CS research. Microsoft leads the industry in core software science research. Bar none in the industry. I don't think it's more than the academic population, but certainly more than IBM, Oracle, Apple or any other software industry players. And before you flame me, I teach using open source tools and on Linux and Windows. You can piss on their business practices as much as you want, but in terms of software research and true software innovations, no other company does more than Microsoft.
It's interesting that they should mention PhD *candidates*. I remember a couple of years ago a story that said that Google had as many PhDs working for them as Microsoft, that's people who already have a PhD.
I'm not trying to downplay their investment for research, but it's an interesting distinction and I'm pretty sure if the story I read was accurate a couple of years ago, then Google has far more actual PhDs than Microsoft at this point.
But then again who cares...
Sometimes I just wish they would give up and let the rest of the world develop decent software.
...that we WANT DRM to 'eat' our music weeks after we buy it, we want WGA to hassle us if it thinks we're pirating, and that we WANT viruses.
GroupThink?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
NTFS is perhaps an advanced file system, if you work for microsoft. The specs have always been closed, so I have no idea what "features" you use that ext3 doesn't provide. By the way, last I checked, AT&T has done the most advanced work with Speech programs. People who counter an argument with "you sound like an idiot", are obviously not bright enough to address things in a rational manner. Windows and Microsoft do some things well, but by no means corner the market on innovation. I am all for them using their considerable resources to develop new technologies, but not if they limit the fruits of their labors to their own products. Tell you what, plugin an ext3 usb hard drive into a ntfs filesystem, and see what you get. Ext3 is one of the more widely distributed file systems in use, and you won't be able to see a damn thing on it. My computer conversely can at least read the data from it, although, due to the closed spec, will not be able to write to it. Microsoft brings market share. Market share that allows their products to communicate with each other, which in turn sells them more products. In the long run, however, they limit the products that could be used by consumers by implementing closed standards. When ext3 gets replaced, its replacement will benefit from all its development. NTFS will be pushed beyond it's usefulness just like FAT was.
All the Microsoft publications are nothing important to the world of software. We are still fighting with bad APIs, program crushes, security issues, monolithic design, the dichotomy between relational databases and OOP, spam, etc.
Where is the garbage-collected, auto-persistent, functional, distributed, type-aware O/S that we should have by now? What has Microsoft research been doing all these years? what are all these PhDs doing?
Oh, I forgot. We had such an O/S. Then we replaced it with this...
Windows is an O/S much more like Unix than a Lisp Machine, and therefore Windows has all the classic problems of a C-based operating system. If Microsoft was serious about research, we would all run a Lisp-like O/S by now, with all the goodies of it and none of the problems...
"these days there are definitely people doing interesting stuff at the very cutting edge of computing"
/only/ solution? No. We know that other people are building equally complex systems without resorting to Microsoft's monolithic designs, and they aren't having these terribly long labour pains and aborted projects that cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
/a/ solution? The jury is still out. We'd have to wait for Microsoft to risk everything on transitioning the Windows product to functional programming rather than disassembling the monolith and copying existing successful projects from outside. If that happens, and if it works, then you'd have your proof that it was a good idea. I don't expect the current management team to even risk this, I expect nasty creaking and tearing noises will leak out of Microsoft blogs as the monolith is broken up after Longhorn Server.
That's always been true. Now, look around your Windows PC. See any evidence that this made a difference? No. Microsoft Research wrote an IPv6 stack. Then Microsoft's Windows group developed another one, and finally the Longhorn team developed a third one from scratch. The people doing academic IPv6 research on Linux saw their improvements go into famous name products, those at Microsoft Research saw their improvements rot on the shelf. On the whole the easiest way to disappoint yourself at Microsoft Research is to imagine that "Microsoft" means your great ideas are going into their billion dollar products.
Is complexity a problem? At Microsoft it certainly is, the responses from inside Microsoft to Joel Spolsky's criticism say it all really. They're no longer able to have a superstar hiring policy due to their size and rate of growth (although they still seem to be hiring to re-inforce existing weaknesses, a sort of inbreeding) and the non-superstars in the company don't cope well with huge monolithic projects like Longhorn/ Vista.
Does that mean functional programming is the
Does it mean functional programming is even
Honestly though there is never going to be a Silver Bullet, and to the extent that its researchers claim otherwise, functional programming will always overclaim and underdeliver. To get really good code you need really good programmers, there aren't enough of them and they're expensive. If you try to design tools that allow you to hire mediocre college kids to write your software, you get mediocre college kid software. So the only approach that has any hope of achieving your goals is to help great programmers be more productive, and there's just not much of that happening in the software engineering or programming language design academic work.
I studied EE (Electronics Engineering) in a University in Portugal. In my experience, most people that directy went for a Phd or a Masters (in an Engineering/Computing area) after getting their degree were doing so mostly to remain inside the protected (and much less demanding) university environment instead of going out in working their asses out in the "real" world.
In more scientific areas (like physics, which was what i first studied before changing to EE), a Phd is a must, but in Engineering or Computing???!
I believe that in such heavilly hands-on/practical areas such Engineering/Computing a Phd without real world experience is less than worthless.
PS: This is not to denigrate the inteligence of those working-on/with a Phd. I knew some very bright people that went for a Phd. My point is that there are also a lot of very bright people that don't go for a Phd immediatly after getting a degree, and in the end, due to their experience with doing real things in the real world, the later are more likelly to do the real breakthroughs that actually work in practice.
Maybe this is a localized thing (only in Portugal?), but somehow i doubt that, anywhere in the world, spending 5 years in the University getting a Phd is any harder than working in the private sector for those 5 years.
OOOOOh...they incubate future minds, they hire lots of PhDs...lots of fancy buzztastic crap. First, lets look at the history...MS has a tendancy to buzzword up anything they can get their hands on and redefine simple words like "innovate". Media Player for all its "innovation" is NOT...it has been playing catchup copying features from anything that had an ounce of success. Active Directory...well given that Novell was doing basically the same thing years ago...MS took LDAP + Novell + Cruft = Innovation! The list goes on and on and on of their products just constantly playing catchup on the features that matter and the "innovative" stuff are features that generally don't make alot of sense and aren't of much use (except for the scumware writers to help get footholds). I mean the most innovative thing they did was create amazing ways to sidestep and ignore the DoJ, and I hardly think Microsoft Research had anything to do with that.
Now on this PhD nonsense they are flagwaving about. Problem 1. When the number of PHB is greater than the PHD by such a large margin the PHD doesn't really mean much. If anything MS should be chastised by depriving the US of so many PHD types by gathering them into one place to be negated by a large group of PHBs. Problem 2. Remind me again why a PHD is inherently more valuable... Not to discount the degree holders, their hard work, or even abilities/talents, but a great number of the critical moments in computer history were not achieved by people holding PhDs.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
How many kids has Lunix Torvolds put through school? None, besides his own, I'm willing to bet.
Some people do, some people don't, some people complain. Hmmm... which group does Slashdot fall into?
Too busy patenting the period (pick whichever meaning you prefer), I guess.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
I like functional programming, but it's been around for a long, long time. The only language older than LISP is Fortran. I think if the "functional programming revolution" was going to happen, it would have already happened.
you obvioulsy have no clue what XNA is.
DEMMX is the one that gave Microsoft the two "INNOVTION" awards. If you have an argument to make, make it with them.
Quantum computers (IBM), reconfigurable FPGA processors (Starbridge systems, SGI), or software technologies like DTrace (Sun) - this is innovation and high-tech; I don't see any real innovation (technical innovation in software design/architecture, ...) in Microsoft's products. They just change the user interface all the time, but at the backend is still proprietary monolithic code with a flawed API and a lack of open interfaces.
I don't see, how Microsoft's employees think of their company as being "at the top of high-tech". To me, Microsoft is a PC, Mobile phone, Game console company like thousands of others, just bigger.
PCs, mobile phones, game consoles - this is all the very lowest end of Information technology. Innovation and high-tech is commonly found in the very highest-end products, but I have never seen one of those labeled with a Microsoft logo...
"Buying up small, agile, creative companies" is what Google does, if you haven't noticed.
Same for Apple, they bought GarageBand. Hell, they bought their whole OS.
Your belittling of XNA only goes to show that you don't know anything about it. You clearly didn't watch the video.
And you fully show your ignorance with your "An Xbox is just a PC" crap. XNA is for Xbox 360, which runs a custom CPU that is a triple core PPC processor, each with two hardware cpu threads. That's not "just a PC" by any stretch of the imagination.
And regarding your "MS will never innovate" BS, DEMMX obviously disagrees, considering that MS won two innovation awards, including "Innovator of the Year" last week.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Meijer's apparently abandoned research and is devoted to getting LINQ out. He's been posting notices about Microsoft conferences over on Lambda the Ultimate mostly spamming for his employer Microsoft on what was once a computer languages research site. Note also Meijer's last post at ICFP 2006 wherein he notes his paper was rejected by the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP 2006).
As for Microsoft helping functional programming becoming mainstream: you need to put your crack pipe down. The only functional programming environment in Microsoft's future is the one that's in it's past: Excel spreadsheets. Your other Microsoft research hero Simon Peyton-Jones has been busy enhancing Excel.
"Lo, how the mighty have fallen."
Ignore the C# part; that's not the interesting bit.
The interesting bit is that, for no cost beyond having a Windows machine and the bandwidth to download XNA, you can write video games for a console.
That's not something that's been done before by any other console company that I'm aware of.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
the article saies microsofts is hiring new employees
I quoted some ex-employees who saied that microsoft exploits it's employees
I don't see, why this was offtopic
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
I hear this nonsense about PhDs from people without PhDs that the pattern of behaviour is pretty familiar.
Anti-intelllectualism of the higher caliber, now rampant in many places.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I totally forgot about the PPC thing.
(Goes and reads a review)
Three cores? HA. You have a CPU, and a GPU broken down into two dedicated functions. So they took the graphics card an embedded it into the motherboard.
Wow, I must be running at least 5 cores on my system then! A dual core CPU, the graphics card, the on-board graphics chip, the memory controller... I feel so elite! Or, not.
I did see the video. What's the part that you think is so awesome?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it