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Microsoft is the Industry's Most Innovative Company?
mjasay writes "According to a recent analysis by IEEE, Microsoft's patent portfolio tops the industry in terms of overall quality of its patents. And while Microsoft came in second to IBM in The Patent Board's 2006 survey, its upcoming 2007 report has Microsoft besting IBM (and even its 2006 report had Microsoft #1 in terms of the "scientific strength" of its patent portfolio). All of which begs the question: Just where is all this innovation going? To Clippy? Consumers and business users don't buy patents. They buy products that make their lives easier or more productive, yet Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to turn its patent portfolio into much more than life support for its existing Office and Windows monopolies. In sum, if Microsoft is so innovative, why can't we get something better than the Zune?"
http://begthequestion.info/
A word on Microsoft's ClearType "innovation":
http://www.grc.com/ctwho.htm
I have extreme difficulty to read ClearType text. I think this is related to the way the eyes of some people work and that other people also have similar problems.
I always thought that everyone was seeing the same things as me (fuzzy text hidden in an abyss of colours) and I thought well, maybe the whole world turned crazy or what, until I told what I were seeing to some other people and I asked them what they were seeing and they said "soft black letters", and then I read about the issue a bit and confirmed that yes, I am one of these people who can't read this stuff.
One would assume that the purpose of text is to be read rather than to look pretty. In this regard, ClearType creates difficulties for some people whose eyes can discern colour in more "resolution" than other people (ie it penalises people who have better eyes).
That page kind of misrepresents things, the apple wasnt really using subpixel rendering it was really just saying that you had 280 half pixels and you could use any two neighboring pixels to make one pixel that you would then use normally. The algorithms involved in cleartype are way different and substantially more advanced.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
The size of a patent portfolio cannot be a reasonable measure of innovation, especially in this case given that much of the Microsoft patent portfolio comprises bought patents: patents are bought and sold just like any other commodity.
Secondly, a patent doesn't guarantee the given innovation ever reaches the market. To the contrary, patents are often used to protect an existing inferior product from going to market by having a monopoly over a potentially superceding product. As a result it's possible to argue that patents discourage actual innovation rather than encourage it.
As far as I know, T-SQL only allows top(). Whereas MYSQL allows Limit X, Y, which allows you to basically "page" results to show, say records 5-10. T-SQL makes it redundant:
MYSQL:
SELECT * FROM records LIMIT 5, 5
T-SQL
SELECT TOP(5) * FROM records WHERE id NOT IN (SELECT TOP(5) * FROM records)
They both select records 5-10, but one is more redundant. (and possibly more memory intensive, slower, etc)
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
At the risk of being labeled an insufferable know it all, the submission should read "...raises the question...," not "...begs the question...." If you think I'm being a English usage Nazi, ask yourself(raise the question), "Why would someone use 'begs the question' instead of 'raises the question'?" The only answer I have to that is that "begs the question" sounds fancier. Well, it sounds fancier, because it is fancier, or at least a little more complex. "Begging the question" is a logical fallacy where the only proof of an argument is a restatement of the premise. A simple example...
... "Why do you think that?" ..."Because he's not smart"
"I think George Bush is stupid"
So, why does this matter...because it's important. That begs the question...
It matters, because when people misuse the expression they dilute the actual meaning. Some people people reading the line above might ask, "That begs what question," because the incorrect usage of this expression over time has conditioned them to have a different expectation when they hear the expression. The correct response to hearing that a question is begged, is to assess whether or not this is the case, not to wait with bated breath for the question.
All of this raises the question, when do I use beg, and when do I use raise. The simple answer is if your asking a new question, you're raising it, but if your trying to point out that no real proof has been provided to support the premise except for the premise itself, you're begging the question.
Flame On!
My other sig is extremely clever...
I don't think that means what you think it means. I'm sure that there are lots of "innovative" patents in MS's portfolio, though I'm certain that many were purchased elsewhere rather than developed in house.
It does not seem that you are qualified to comment on the shortcomings of others, you need to work on yourself first. Those interested in what MS actually does in house might want to look at Micorsoft Research's project page: http://research.microsoft.com/research/projects/default.aspx.
Also, out of house research is not necessarily patented. A friend did research on distributed shared computing in grad school. The project was supported by Microsoft, they had access to Windows source code, they were not restricted from publishing their research.
Enlightenment (release E16) does that. A wee bit laggy on my old P2-generation Celeron, 300 MHz laptop, with 320 megs RAM, so it should run fine on modern systems.
You can do that, just not with a limit keyword:
USE AdventureWorks;
GO
WITH OrderedOrders AS
(
SELECT SalesOrderID, OrderDate,
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY OrderDate) AS 'RowNumber'
FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader
)
SELECT *
FROM OrderedOrders
WHERE RowNumber BETWEEN 50 AND 60;
It does not "beg the question." Argh!
http://begthequestion.info/
Of course, neither of those syntaxes is ideal. An ideal request syntax would provide a similarly simple syntax for making a query, saving the query results temporarily, and parceling them out to you in the requested quantity instead. That way, you don't run the risk of presenting things twice or skipping things as new rows are added to the table and old ones are deleted. It should also be possible to query the current data set against the results of that prior query, generating a new query with any new rows appended to the end (or beginning if you are parceling it out from the end).
That would not only be more correct, but also more efficient (assuming you eventually view most of the records), as you would only need to perform the filtering part of the select statement once per entry in the database instead of, on average, (n/2k) times per record, where n is the number of records and k is the number taken at once.
Quite frankly, I'm surprised such a feature hasn't been built into the SQL syntax decades ago. (Yes, I know that you can always store a complete set of matching primary keys in a new row of a "results" table and then query the query results that way, but that's a lot of extra work and doesn't buy you as much of an efficiency gain as if the database could do it for you under the hood.)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Are you sure your monitor just doesn't have reverse ordered pixels? Most LCDs have BGR color ordering... but some have RGB. Sounds the same? It is very different! The following is a very zoomed in example of some backwards y letter I just made up. In the first, the font algorithm (Cleartype) thinks (correctly) you have BGR color order. In the second, the screen has RGB color order, and Cleartype thinks it is BGR (which is BAD!). Notice that the first one looks like a backwards y, like it should. The second one has separated pixels. On screen, this would look like a color halo "fringing" around the letter. Remember that in both examples, that 3 letters make up a single pixel, and the letters in each group that are turned "on" are the same in the first and second example.
BGR..RBGR
.GRBGRB..
..RBGR...
...BGRB..
....GRBGR
RGBR..RGB
RG.RGB..B
R..RGB...
...RGB..B
...RG.RGB
If your video driver supports screen rotation, try inverting the screen, then looking at the result of Cleartype upside down. (temporarily of course... it is not very comfortable to hang from the ceiling and type). If this is significantly better, look for the MS Cleartype Tuning utility, which can change the logical pixel ordering, and gaussian values to make the text look good when the screen is right side up.
The BIG pain is when you have two monitors, one is BGR (my laptop) and one is RBG (external SONY) in dual head. Windows XP cannot set the logical pixel ordering for the monitors separately, meaning one looks good (I can pick which, of course), the other like ass. To remedy the situation, I currently have the SONY monitor propped upside down on my desk and have the screen rotated on it. Sounds dumb, but it works.
Best of luck! (and I hope my monospaced example does not get messed up)
To beg the question does not mean "to raise the question."
Slashdotters are largely clueless regarding Microsoft, and willfully so.
.NET Parallel Extensions, allowing easy use of multiple cores in .NET code, including PLINQ (Parallel LINQ).
First, Office *does* have lots of innovations, particularly Office 97 and Office 2007.
Clippy *was* innovative. Yeah, it failed, but a lot of research went into it.
LINQ *does* rock.
Which reminds me that Microsoft just recently released a CTP of the
VC-1 *is* the most efficient hidef video codec.
XNA *is* an innovative product.
See the 2006 DEMMX Awards and see that Microsoft won Best of Show - Innovator of the Year (beating out the likes of Apple, who won a lesser award for video iPod) and Game Innovation of the Year, both for XNA.
Microsoft *has* been commissioned by the JPEG working group to develop JPEG XR (aka HD Photo aka Windows Media Photo) as the next-gen photo image standard (where JPEG2000 failed).
Industry Standardization for HD Photo
Check out this article on SIGGRAPH 2007 and learn that Microsoft is leading the way regarding graphics technology.
Siggraph: Microsoft the new research powerhouse in graphics?
F# *is* being "productized" and is already used in Xbox Live.
Vista *does* have excellent speech recognition (despite a failed demo of a beta), even admitted to by Mac fanboy David Pogue.
Telling Your Computer What to Do
Windows 2 Apples
TabletPC'S *do* have the best handwriting recognition in the biz.
It goes on and on.
Microsoft Research is this era's "Bell Labs" and "Xerox PARC", but much of Microsoft Research's stuff does wind up in products. Microsoft Live Labs is also doing interesting stuff like Volta (which is being productized), Photosynth, etc.
Just because slashdotters don't are totally ignorant of Microsoft tech doesn't mean that such tech doesn't exist.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
The marketing folks decided it wasn't coming up enough (who want's a revolutionary feature hidden away most of the time?), and so made the development people dumb Clippy down, so it would think you were in trouble at the first sign of anything slights wrong, and pop up.
I suspect that this happens a lot with Microsoft products. The research version of Clippy was probably one of the best online help aids ever--way ahead of, and far more useful than, anything you'll find on Linux or Mac. Then marketing turns it into a joke.
VC1
XBox Live and XNA
C#
Ribbon
Sharepoint
or those nice mice/keyboard that Microsoft makes, they get a lot of patents for those, or if SQL Server does something better in the next release, well they get patents for the new algorithm/method that helped them achieve better performance.
Of course, if you open your eyes, there's a lot more, and they are affecting millions of people.
As for the other things you list, some of them did originate at Microsoft, or Microsoft was among the first. Spam filtering, for example (no Paul Graham was not first with statistical spam filtering--he was the first to popularize it). And they have indeed invented quite a bit of photography analysis tools.
Microsoft Research is basically an academic research lab. The place their results usually go are peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings (which is why most people here never hear of them). But they also work with the product development side of the company so that the products can include this stuff, whether it was something invented at Microsoft, or something that was invented somewhere else and MS Research simply contributed advancements to the original investment.