Microsoft Thoughts

Jon Box wrote an interesting little piece on open source and the Windows OS. Also see Scoble's rant on How to Hate Microsoft and the following feedback for some enlightening views.

My own take is that:

Standardization is good for everybody since it allows developers and customers to shoot for a common target in the same way that economic stability promotes liberal democracy. I'm with Jon on getting the source code for the OS. Why in the world would I want it? I'm certainly not going to change it since it takes me out of my core competency and therefore increases the cost of my products and services. Open Source is not the answer, proprietary products from organizations that implement solid and secure code based on standards is.

Microsoft embracing and promoting W3C standards is a logical extension of the standards they brought to the desktop by gaining market share. In the desktop world of the 1990s computers were disconnected and the shrink wrapped software model predominated. In that kind of market a single platform (the Windows API) was the only way software developers could write software that took advantage of economies of scale. In the internet world, the economies of scale are tied to internet standards (HTML, XML, SOAP etc.). Therefore Microsoft's ablity to compete in the long term is directly tied to their ability to incorporate and adhere to standards in their products (such as IE). This is why the book "Breaking Windows" by David Bank was so interesting. It shows how Microsoft almost missed the boat.

Most of the upgrades in products such as Office (and perhaps Longhorn?) are unncessary except those that relate directly to W3C specifications that allow other software to integrate with these products and that better enable users to work in a connected environment (like DRM). This is because the standard software products that will need to run on the desktop are now well-defined and mature (word processing, spreadsheets, games). Everything else is internet related.

Developer tools must move in the direction of subsuming all of the infrastructure for writing applications (navigation, caching, load balancing, personalization, security, UI widgets). I as a developer should only have to specify business rules and point the app at a datastore. Whidbey is making the first steps in this direction with the inclusion of a set of enterprise design tools and a more robust framework for ASP.NET applications.

Microsoft makes money by convincing users and businesses to upgrade their products. Until a different revenue model comes to the forefront, don't expect Microsoft not to continue to produce upgrades and market the hell out of them (like Office System).

The nature of software (being essentially free to copy and distribute) makes it unlike other industries where a monopoly of the physical infrastructure truly stifles competition (the robber barons of the 1890s). So a 95% share of the desktop doesn't necessarily make a monopoly.

Just my two cents.

Is this the Tiqit (ticket)?

Heard about an interesting new mobile-style device from Tiqit. This device runs Windows XP instead of CE and includes wireless connectivity. It is sort of a Tablet PC light although I don't know (and doubt) if it runs the inking layer. The interesting thing is that the screen is simply scaled down rather than losing most of the resolution as happens with Pocket PC devices. Should be an interesting addition to the mobility space.

How far did the Mick hit it?

Also had an interesting email discussion recently about the distance that Mickey Mantle's famous "565" foot homerun in April of 1953 actually travelled. Along with this are other claims of prodigous Mantle blasts.

After reading these claims I went back and looked at what Adair says in his book The Physics of Baseball about how far a ball can be hit. Based on his model he says that in order to hit an 85mph fastball 400 feet you need a bat speed of 76mph. To hit one 450 feet you need a speed of 86mph. He estimates that under normal conditions this is the limit to how far a ball can be hit. If however, the fastball is 95mph add 10 feet. If the batter pulls the ball add another 15 feet. If it's 100 degrees add another 20 feet. With a 10mph wind add another 40 feet. Hit it in Colorado and add an additional 10-15 feet. Add them all up and if everything is going your way the ball could go 550 feet.

Since his book was published in 1990 I assume that a bat speed of 76mph must be modeled after what were perceived norms for the time. With the increase in weightlifting it is probably not uncommon to get velocities of 85mph for guys like Bonds and Sosa although I haven't seen any data on this at all (incidentally I wonder if increased swing velocities account for the increase in broken bats that announcers and players often comment on). And with every increase in velocity you multiply the force (f=mv^2).

Sosa's homerun in Florida in July was projeted at 484 feet. Adair estimates that Mante's homerun went between 511 and 520 feet because we know Mick's blast cleared a 55 foot wall by 5 feet, 460 feet from the plate and then glanced off a beer sign. So he estimates that the ball would have landed 60 feet past the sign given an angle of descent of 45 degrees.

Compact Framework Goodies

I'm teaching a Compact Framework course this week and was reminded that in order for developers to get all the tools Microsoft has released you'll want to get the following:

VS .NET 2003 (of course)
Compact Framework service pack 1
Windows Mobile Developer Power Toys
SDK for Pocket PC 2003 (new emulators)
Utilities for VS .NET 2003 Add On Pak 1.1

Code Samples
UI Guidelines for Pocket PC
And others found on the mobility site

Dusty's Failures

I think this nicely sums up Dusty's failures.

Goodbye 2003 Cubs

Here is the best piece I've seen on the collapse of the 2003 Cubs. Very well said.

Next Year Again

Well, the collapse is complete. I guess it was inevitable but I had a bit of hope until the last out was made. Coming into the series I said the Marlins should be the favorite since they are clearly a superior offensive team and their pitching is on a par (if you count their relievers). So the best team won I think but it doesn't help when you have leads in both game 6 and 7 and blow them with your aces on the mound. Sad day in Wrigleyville.

Also, some poor managing by Dusty. He elected to pitch to the number 8 hitter with the pitcher on deck. That is one situation where an intentional or semi-intentional walk is called for. Being down 2 versus being down 4 makes it a completely different ballgame. He also of course should have pulled Wood much earlier, Dusty has a tendency to stick with starters too long.

Smoking Gun

Here it is, the interference in all its glory:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/cubfan1.html

Updater App Block Alternative

A post on my recent article on the updater application block from Microsoft:

"The .NET Application Updater block does provide a framework for a client-pull model of application deployment and upgrade, and is pretty good for some simple deployment scenarios.

There's a company called Kinitos that offers a more comprehensive solution for the central management of .NET client applications. One of the main differences is that they enable a centrally initiated style of application management including:
- SERVER-INITIATED install, upgrade, rollback, uninstall of client applications
- Ability to target specific users, roles or groups with an upgrade
- Peer-based delivery of application upgrade. (Once one client at a remote location has been upgraded, the upgrade will propagate through the local peer network rather than having all updates pulled from central server.)
- Incremental upgrades where only changed portions of application are transmitted during upgrade
- Central monitoring, tracking of installed version info and ability to interactively query client from central location as to its current status

This is just one area where they make .NET smart client application development, deployment and management easier. Their platform also lets applications make online/offline/occasionally-connected operation virtually transparent to user.

It's worth a look."

Might be interesting....

Self Destruction

Hard to believe the spectacle I just witnessed. In all my years of watching baseball, that was the worst game I've ever seen. The team literally self destructed. At least there's plenty of blame to go around: Prior for walking Castillo, the fan for reaching over the railing (I think the call could have gone either way but certainly the fan had to know better, Gonzales for not turning the double play, and Dusty for leaving Prior in too long and intentionally walking not one, but two batters in the inning who both ended up scoring. Intentionally walking the bases loaded is almost always a bad idea and more so when you're already behind.

It'll be interesting to see how the Cubs respond. The bats seem to have gone silent and they've started swinging at alot of first pitches. I'm confident Wood will respond well. Can't wait for tomorrow night!

ColdFusion to ASP.NET

Jon Box sent me a link to a nice document comparing ColdFusion to ASP.NET. Very helpful for getting the big picture.
Migrating from ColdFusion to ASP.NET

Compact Framework Book Site

Check out the site for our new book due out this month. You can download the code and get the TOC.

1984 Redux?

Let's hope that the 4-0 win by the Marlins tonight is not the start of a repeat of 1984. I heard on NPR this week that Dennis Eckersely, who pitched for the Cubs in 84, said that on the flight out to San Diego (after the Cubs had trounced the Padres in the first two games) the team was brimming with overconfidence. He clearly thought that they were looking past the Padres and we all know what happend (Steve Garvey not withstanding). Let's hope this Cubs team has a better perspective. Of course, this team has Prior and Wood for games 6 and 7 (if needed).

Beckett was simply too tough tonight. The Cubs just got beat by a very good pitcher who was on top of his game. Zambrano bounced back pretty well so that was encouraging. It does look as if Sammy can't hit the good fastball (94 and up) anymore. Way late most of the time as Beckett turned up the heat after the brushback pitch.

Cubs up 2-1

Great Cubs win last night 5-4 to go up 2-1 against the Marlins. I thought Dusty made the right move in leaving Remlinger in there. He looked good and was hitting his spots. Wood pitched well although I thought Leiter was correct in saying he challenged too much with 2 strikes. He was ahead in the count all night but gave up the big hits with 2 strikes.

Both Glanville and Goodwin came through in the pinch. Goodwin especially has had several huge pinch hits in the post season and coming down the stretch. He had a very good year and is still the best bunter I've ever seen (when he played for the Royals).

Clement goes tonight, who has been inconsistent all year. We'll see which Clement shows up tonight.

Will and California

George Will had an excellent column this morning regarding California's recall election. I especially like:

"Now this exercise in "direct democracy" -- precisely what America’s Founders devised institutions to prevent -- has ended with voters, full of self pity and indignation, removing an obviously incompetent governor. They have removed him from the office to which they re-elected him after he had made his incompetence obvious by making most of the decisions that brought the voters to a boil."

He goes on to note that Arnold is no conservative and echoes my previous post that he won't be able to get California out of its initative-created fiscal mess because the budget is largely off limits. His take is that Arnold was elected because he vowed to repeal the car tax. Rightly so but until Californians put some limits on themselves, they even the Terminator isn't going to help them.

Moneyball

Cardinal fan Jon Box brought this article to my attention.

"Without putting too fine a point on it, the Redbirds are taking their first steps into the Moneyball realm. Luhnow should bring a different perspective to a team that has not relied as heavily on statistical models and data as some other franchises in recent years."

The Cards appear to have seen the light and will start to apply some of the sabermetric principles I mentioned in my review of Moneyball posted earlier. Good for them. It doesn't appear the Cubs are anywhere close to such an approach as their thinking appears to be very traditionalist.

Photographic Memory

I just picked up Edmund Morris' The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. I had previously read Theodore Rex about Roosevelt's presidency and this book follows his life from birth in 1858 to when McKinley is shot in 1901. Anyway, I was fascinated by description of Roosevelt's reading habits in the prologue. A short excerpt:

""Reading with me is a disease." [quoting Rooselvelt] He succombs to it so totally...that nothing short of a thump on the back will regain his attention. Asked to summarize a book he has been leafing through with such apparent haste, he will do so in minute detail, often quoting the actual text. The President manages to get through at least one book a day even when he is busy. Owen Wister has lent him a book (of 300 odd pages) shortly before a full evening's entertainment at the White House, and been astonished to hear a complete review of it over breakfast...On evenings like this, when he has no official entertaining to do, Roosevelt will read two or three books entire."

In one stretch from when he was inagurated in the fall of 1901 until about the same time the following year, Roosevelt was able to list over 114 authors that he had read, many of them multi-volume works. When asked how he could quote books that he hadn't read for 20 years, he thought for a second and said something to the effect that after thinking about the book for a second, the pages came before his mind in total.

Gov. Arnold

I'll have to admit that I was suprised that Arnold actually won, but then again in California anything is possible. Unfortunately, I don't think Arnold is going to be able to save California. Aside from the fact that he likely doesn't know what he's talking about, I recently read some interesting analysis of California in the book The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at home and abroad by Fareed Zakaria.

Basically, Zakaria views California's fiscal and management troubles as largely a creation of their own making through the overuse of "direct democracy" through the ballot initiative process. Zakaria notes that since proposition 13 in 1978 which lowered taxes to 1975 levels and put a limit on the amount taxes could grow, Californians (and the nation at large) have fallen in love with bypassing legislatures and making their own laws. In the 1990s there were 378 such referendums across the country compared with 257 in the 1980s, 181 in the 1970s, and 88 in the 1960s. In the year 2000 alone there were 204!

Zakaria feels that citizens going over the heads of the legislatures causes more problems than it solves since the normal give and take of politics is destroyed and instead politicians are mandated to act in a certain way. In the biggest example, 85 percent of California's budget is actually untouchable by Arnold and the legislature as the result of ballot initiatives (for example, proposition 98 mandates that 40% of the budget be spent on education). As a result California now spends very little on infrastructure (5% today as opposed to 22% in the 1950s). So what do they do? They propose yet another ballot iniative to allocate 1% of the budget to fix bridges etc.

Zakaria also argues that since the normal give and take of the political process is bypassed, even iniatives that seem like a good idea to conservatives like me (ending affirmative action in prop 209 and regulating immigration in prop 187) end up having polarizing effects. He contrasts these efforts with the welfare reform package passed by congress during the Clinton administration that had the benefit of being crafted through compromise.

I find myself agreeing with much of what Zakaria says and especially his call for a return to a "liberal democracy" with representative institutions as the founders intended. There is good reason to craft a system where cooler heads can debate and compromise. All the more so as the electorate becomes less educated and the issues become more complex (how can I as a citizen know that 40% is the right amount to spend on education, why not 37%?). This book also has just the right amount of counterintuitiveness to be on the mark. Zakaria also mentions the books Paradise Lost by Peter Shrag and Democracy Derailed by David Broder which likely illuminate this topic in more detail. If only there were time to read all the books....

Cubs Rock Marlins

Both games of the NLCS have been great games to watch for Cubs fans. Even though they took the loss in game 1, they battled back twice to tie the score and Sosa's homerun in the bottom of the 9th was one of the great moments in Cubs history.

I'll have to admit that I'm one of the harshest critics of the Cubs for picking up Gonzales. He's never had an on base percentage higher than .322 in a full season and so the Cubs should have known exactly what they were going to get when they picked him up. Couple that with his large salary (4.5M) and by any reasonable measure it was a poor decision. However, in the post season anybody can get hot and right now Gonzales is leading the charge. Going to try and get a ticket for game 7 at Wrigley, not likely however.

On another front I found some interesting statistics on the probabilities of scoring in various situations in this article. I know there are some better stats somewhere, perhaps I'll need to download some retrosheet data and run the numbers once.

Random .NET Stuff

Some very nice information on performance tuning of a large .NET app that Microsoft runs internally can be found here. Also ran across a nice article on generic in the CLR from the October issue of MSDN Magazine

Looks like the gloves will be off October 27 on the next version of VS .NET and the CLR as Microsoft presents at PDC.