Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: Microsoft
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Checkers, Chess and Go
It is the unexpected, the new game, that disrupts and changes. It is that point when you suddenly and terrifyingly realize that your opponent is playing a deep and subtle game of Go, while you have been contemplating your next checkers jump with the wild eyed naiveté of a nine year old neophyte. Careers are…
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Innovation Via Client Plus Cloud: Microsoft-NSF Partnership
Today, February 4, Microsoft and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a collaborative project where Microsoft will offer individual researchers and research groups (selected through NSF’s merit review process) free access to advanced client-plus-cloud computing. Our focus is on empowering researchers via intuitive and familiar client tools whose capabilities extend seamlessly in power and…
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Don’t Be A WIMP!
It is time move beyond graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and embrace the brave new world of natural user interfaces (NUIs). As the name suggests, a NUI relies on and exploits the kinds of interactions humans use to interact with their peers, including speech, vision and gesture, as well as mood and social context.
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Technology Strategy and Policy
It seems axiomatic that technology strategy must include – drumroll please – both technology and strategy. It is all about the right ideas at the right times. We live in a world of exponential technology change, and understanding when quantitative technical change begets qualitative strategic and policy change is the essence of innovation.
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Smart Grids: Getting Personal
How many electronic devices do you own? Here’s a simple experiment that will (quite literally) illuminate the truth. Some evening, after darkness has fallen, turn off all the lights in your house, walk from room to room and count the number of lighted power indicators, blinking LEDs and glowing screens. I suspect you will be…
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Matryoshka Dolls and Data Centers
If your “data center” is located in the nearest available space to your laboratory — a retrofitted janitor’s closet – and cooled by two box fans from Walmart, odds are you are not a paragon of PUE virtue, even if your aggregate computing power is small.