Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience


Today, Microsoft and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the latest awardees for the joint Microsoft-NSF research partnership in cloud computing. All of the award recipients were selected via NSF’s rigorous peer review process, which emphasized the scientific merit of the proposed work. The Microsoft/NSF partnership is but one part of a broader international…

Like superheroes, successful technologies also become invisible. As technologies mature, market penetration rises, cultural expectations shift and consumer knowledge of the underlying theory and practice generally decline.Today, most computer users know nothing of the halting problem, superscalar pipeline design or object oriented programming. This is success.

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…