This afternoon when I finally awoke from my Homecoming stuper I looked outside and to my amazement there was snow! Not much, but enough to still be seen around noon. It has been getting colder lately, but I did not think it would snow. It was a pleasant suprise, that's for sure!

I'm really hoping this winter we get more snow then last. It was pretty mild last year, although while we didn't get much snow it was still cold. It's supposed to snow again on Tuesday, so here's to hoping it does!

Jeff sent this out to Junkmail today, and man is it a great idea! It covers how to legally mess with snail mail spammers by sending them a bunch of worthless crap. I might have to try this! =)

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I saw this article in the Wall Street Journal which discusses the changes that Microsoft's Windows development team have gone through in order to better compete. With competitors like Google on the horizon, something had to be changed. The changes that were discussed in my opinion are long over due, and will provide better security in future releases of Windows and allow Microsoft to add features more quickly and easily..

This all came about when Jim Allchin told Bill Gates that Windows Longhorn (Windows Vista now) would never ship unless they started over. Why you might ask? Since it's conception, Windows has never been re-written, only having additions and changes made to the existing code base. When you have thousands of developers writing code then putting it all together to make a product, your bound for disaster unless you take the appropriate measures. Especially when dealing with something as large as Windows.

But, not only did the code base need to be re-written, but good coding practices needed to be implemented. One of the ways to ensure that good code was making it into the product was to create a "bug jail". If a developer produces too many bugs, they can no longer write new code. They have also automated a lot of the testing, so new code can be analized before being committed. If a section of code that is added is deemed "too buggy" by this automated system, it will reject the code from the product.

Is it too little too late though? Take a look at one of Microsoft's most likely future major competitor, Google. Google just got into the software business after cornering the search engine market. Their approach to developing software was drastically different then Microsoft's. First, Google designs their software to be "piece meal". Rather then trying to write something huge, they focus on different pieces, but making each piece so it can later be added to something larger. They started with GMail a web-based email service to compete with Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail and have recently entered the instant messaging market with GTalk a text-based/voice-over-IP application for communicating across the internet. There are several other products that Google offers, such as Blogger, Picasa, Google Earth, the list goes on. With each of these offerings having interoperability.

Since Google's philosophy and architecture is different, they can also quickly and easily release security updates or patches. This proves to provide them a more stable code base across their products since bugs that get fixed can be applied quickly to releases. Take GTalk and GMail for example. Google started their beta with a product that lacked many key features, getting users involved at an early stage to help guide the path for Google's development team. Today, GMail is very stable, even as more and more users are added.

It will be interesting to wait until next year and see if the changes Microsoft has made will make a difference in their products. They say it already has. When they shipped Longhorn Beta 1 to 500,000 customers, they were expecting tens of thousands of bug reports, but apparently there were only a few thousand this time. Although, until the operating system is in consumers hands and we see less problems then seen with previous versions, I'm not going to hold my breath.

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Apparently this isn't as new as I thought, but it was the first time I had heard about it. It's kind of a scary thought too, that using $10 microphones, you can record someone typing on a keyboard then feed it into a computer to be analyzed. It will be 96% accurate in telling you what was typed during the recorded session. Sounds like smart cards or equivilent could become popular to avoid having to type in passwords.

This was actually something I had spent some time thinking about a few years ago while I was sitting in a call center. Throughout the building you could hear the clicking of keyboards and it make me wonder if you could recognize keystrokes. For most people who have computer based jobs the one that they can recognize for sure is the backspace key. I never thought about having a computer analyze it however.

In the article it's reported that this is even possible if there is music or other background noise over the top of the typing. Guess it's time to sound proof my office, close the door and crank up the tunes all day! =)

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This is kind of a follow-up post to a one I made regarding Microsoft loosing employees to Google. This article goes on to ellaborate on how Microsoft isn't the giant that people are flocking to work for anymore and why. It's a long one, but interesting.

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