Puzzle that I came across this week

I love good puzzles and I plan to blog them so that I don't lose them when I need it. Here is one from the book I am reading(The Tipping Point, by Malcom Gladwell):

Suppose I give you four cards labeled with the letters A and D and the numerals 3 and 6. The rule of the game is that a card with a vowel on it always has an even number on the other side. Which of the cards would you have to turn over to prove this rule to be true?

Here is a variation of the same puzzle:
Suppose four people are drinking in a bar. One is drinking Coke. One is sixteen. One is drinking beer and one is twenty-five. Which of those people’s ID’s do we have to check to make sure the 21 legal age law is being observed?

Most (normal) people (inlcuding me) will get the answer wrong. But the second one is easier.

Sony learned its lesson. Will Microsoft follow?

Here is something I took notice and saw some similarities with Microsoft. First the news:
"....Because we had a music business, Sony was reluctant about introducing an iPod type of new product but we (learned) many lessons," said Ken Kutaragi, executive deputy president of Sony, speaking Thursday at The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.
Source: Sony learned its lesson in digital music, says exec

And here another one from forbes.com
"...Kutaragi said the entertainment electronics giant missed out on potential sales from MP3 players and other gadgets because it was severely proprietary about music and entertainment content."

Sony was reluctant because it also owned music and movie units and were worried about content rights. It also owned many proprietiery formats that it wanted to promote. But it realized it is not good for the company. But Microsoft has't yet learned its lession. For the fear of losing Windows business, it is not shipping any of its applications in other platforms. Oracle or any other applications companies don't have this problem and build their applications in all popular OSes.

I still would like to see Microsoft split into OS & Applications business so that one division is not pulled down by the other and are free from obligations to the other business and can work on building world class software w/o the external push/pulls.

Microsoft, Let Go of My NT!

Very interesting to see someone reflecting the idea that I shared in my previous blog. Here is the article from eweek.com that I am talking about. The author went little beyond and asked to open source the product. Here is my piece. What a co-incidence?

Microsoft, not a favorite place to work anymore?

The Great Place to Work Institute, which helps Fortune magazine compile the list of Fortunes's 100 best companies to work for has Microsoft at position 57 for year 2005. Microsoft dropped by 32 positions compared to last year. Just for fun, I compared the positons Microsoft held for the last few years to see where it is heading. It doesn't seem to be promising. Here is the list (Blogger has some issues with table rendering):

Year	Position
2005	57
2004	25
2003	20
2002	28
2001	37
2000	21
1999	27
1998	8
1993	65

Judge nixes evolution textbook stickers. Hooray!!

msnbc.msn.com carried this story that made me happy. I am so glad that there are still people out there who could reason. I wonder how much uproar the following modified sticker would create:

"This textbook contains material on creationism. Creationism is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."

Will Bill & Steve ever shutup and stop trash talking?

Our Billg said the following in a recent interview to news.com
"No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist," he told News.com.

Here is my question to Bill. If it is fine to have business dealings with communist regimes like China and Russia (a.k.a Emerging markets), why not deal with the modern day communists? The former is far worse than the later in my opinion.

Can't he or Steve(Remember the cancer?) convey their ideas without making controversial (or in other words political) statements? There is so much importance given to professionalism inside Microsoft (Well, they screwed my review once because I said somethings w/o being professional in an e-mail), I guess they both could take few more lessions on "What not to say". It is not like they screw up often, even these individual instances can cause great harm to the company and the individual reputation.

They both are extremely smart IMO, but I do not like them playing politics!

It is not just Windows!

If the Operating system becomes unresponsive or acting weird and you are using operating system from Microsoft, the first thing one does is CRTL+ALT+DEL and reboot the system. It is not just this case, a lot of windows updates, Application/driver installation/Settings change requires reboot of the OS. I have so far assumed that this is only a Windows phenomina. Well, I am wrong.

Last week, my DiskNetwork receiver started acting up (and it still does) couple of times a day and would not allow me to watch some pay channels I have subcribed to saying there is some problem with the smart card and I do not have authorization to view the channel. Called customer service and I was suggested to reboot the system (by holding the power button for 7 seconds at least) whenever this happens!! The service rep told me pretty much that I would have to go through this exercise with no remedy. It took me couple of more calls before it got to a more senior guy who switched me to a different transponder & satellite. The problem seemed to have gone but it came back again today.

Also, my telephone adapter(TA. Yes, I have VoIP from AT&T) was not recognizing my phone and the rep told me to do warm reset/cold reset and nothing worked. Same story with my DSL router.

The more sophisticated and smarter the devices get, the more unreliable they become. These days, shipping a product sooner is more important than a reliable or stable product. Same goes with Software. A product just needs to be good enough to ship. All bug fixes and updates come later in the form of updates/patches.

What is next?

• Reboot the microware because it burned your food because of heap corruption!
• Your refrigirator does not open as the software or OS hangs or crashed?
• Your car is in an accident because the onboard computer crashed because of a software bug which thought you pressed the gas when infact you slammed the breaks?

Possibilites are endless. With these modern day devices so unreliable, I wouldn't trust my life on a digital device again. The reliablity needs to get better and not worse as we move to a digital lifestyle/decade.

My new year wish: Free Windows NT4.0

Microsoft stopped selling NT4 under volume licensing as of October 1, 2001. It said 5 years of service for an operating system is long enough. What? Just 5 years? I will have to respectfully disagree. To be frank, it sucks! How would it sound when a automobile manufacturer says it would not support its car after 5 years? Would you go buy that car with that information? I think not. I think the companies should be required by law to mention how long they intend to support their product before it even hits the market so that consumers can decide if they can live up to the upgrade/support cycle available.

I would say a 10 year period would have been a good term w/o putting too much burden on the customers financially. Now Microsoft is forcing customers to upgrade to its newer OSes which is guaranteeded to have some defections to Open source OSes.

Microsoft also announced recently the following changes:
January 1, 2004
Beginning on this date, non-security hotfixes are no longer available.
January 1, 2005
Beginning on this date, Pay-per-incident and Premier support are no longer available. This includes security hotfixes.
January 1, 2007
Online support is no longer available.

Now that we know that this product line is dead and Microsoft is not going to make any money out of product sales or support, I would like to suggest the following:
"Make the Nt40 free and downloadble as there are still many who thinks it is still a good enough OS for their job at hand. Since Microsoft guarantees security hotfixes, it is a win-win situation for both. It will also inject some goodwill among the masses that it is Microsoft and not Micro$oft"

Does Microsoft have to loose anything out of this? I think not. Here are the categories of users:

1. Existing NT 4 users: If they think their current NT40 deployments serves their needs, they are not doing to upgrade to newer Oses. No loss here.
2. New customers for the newer OSes: They would have chosen the newer OSes only if they wanted the new capabilties and the reliability. These people are not forced to buy newer OSes.
3. Potential customers for the newer OSes: This category of people would have chosen the newer OSes only because they are forced to buy newer OSes because the old one which suits their need isn't available in the market.

I think it is a pipe dream. But no one can stop me from being a dreamer.