AI Hubris

Chris McKinstry, a researcher in artificial intelligence, recently committed suicide, after posting suicide notes in his personal blog and a discussion board on Joel on Software. (Ryan Park has more details.) Joel’s discussion board, which I read regularly, provides very useful information for software development and marketing. The suicide notes Chris left were in

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Read more » Jan 27, 2006, 4:22PM
AI

Innovation at Microsoft

I frequently mentioned Microsoft innovation in the past. I encountered some interesting observations about Microsoft innovation in the past month: Eeyore designs Microsoft’s product: “It makes me think of how many feature meetings I've had and what a small percent of those features have actually ever shipped. Not that every

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Read more » Jan 25, 2006, 2:45PM
Technology

Bugs versus Limitations

In my code analysis tool, I capture just about every feature of a source code file into an internal memory representation. The information that I collect will be more useful in future products and internal tools. However, when it comes to interpreting the code, I ignore a lot of that same

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Read more » Jan 17, 2006, 11:26AM
NStatic

NStatic Status

I wanted to get this application out for private beta testing before Christmas, before I embarked on my two-week vacation at my parents’ home in New York. However, I didn’t like having to write a lot of rules that embodied just a few general principles, and I realize that I

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Read more » Jan 16, 2006, 2:24PM
NStatic

The Concept of Concepts

I once read that Windows Vista would introduced several new system-wide concepts such as “contacts” to better support personal communication. I immediately wondered why Vista didn’t introduce the concept of a concept, so we don’t have to wait years for a new release of Windows to offer another new set

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Read more » Jan 9, 2006, 11:21AM
AI

Intelligence vs Intellisense

My main gripe with Microsoft is that the company doesn’t know how to write “smart” software. (Much of the industry doesn’t either, but, since Microsoft is the leader…) The current tendency among software developers is to determine the minimum work needed that can be done to help users. This is

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Read more » Jan 8, 2006, 5:14AM
AI , NStatic