Channel 9 - Discussions by Michael Griffiths

Coffeehouse - Sanity in Starter Edition, huzzah!

Michael Griffiths — Sun, 24 May 2009 00:29:06 GMT

Yes, it's a good move. People will complain less, though from what I've heard the 3-app limit was hardly onerous. Still, this is a better idea.

Coffeehouse - Kumo vs Live Search

Michael Griffiths — Sat, 23 May 2009 20:31:05 GMT

CannotResolveSymbol said:

From how it appears right now, it's not. All indications show (although nothing's been officially announced) that Kumo is a codename for changes they're making to Live Search (particularly around the layout of search result pages), not a completely different search engine.

Indeed.

I hope they change (improve) quite a bit more than the layout - screenshots of which look unimpressive. I think they look fine, but boring.

Live Search has been getting consistently better since it came out. Unfortunately, Microsoft started out 18-24 months behind Google (made up estimate based on my subjective and flawed interpretation of their respective search qualities), and they've stayed at least a year behind since. Google has matched or exceeded Microsoft's investment into search - moving into more areas of vertical search/etc - while Microsoft has done nothing special. Indeed, Microsoft has closed off vertical search products which compete with Google (book search, academic, etc).

WolframAlpha looks cute, and it's the type of experiment Microsoft should be performing. Or doing things that Google is doing - which is taking more risks with its search results, such as voting on links or adding notes - for all Steve Ballmer's claims that Microsoft is taking more risks. Microsoft is doing, or at least has done, nothing of the sort.

In any event, I currently expect Kumo to be disappointing - to move the bar forward a little bit, but still remain behind Google. A design change does not a product change make.

Coffeehouse - Is Windows 7 notepad going to support unix/mac style line endings?

Michael Griffiths — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:26:00 GMT

PaoloM said:

wkempf said:

*snip*

The thing is, if you are in a position where you need those features, you probably also know where to find alternative text editors that provide them to you.

Notepad is simple, fast and that's why it's still immensely popular

Notepad2 is fast, simple, and supports pretty much every feature I want in a simple text editor (including Regex find/replace!).

I happen to think the built-in Notepad should resemble it far more.

Coffeehouse - Vista's Natural Language Search is Sloooow

Michael Griffiths — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 04:42:22 GMT

W3bbo said:

Michael Griffiths said:

*snip*

I was using SQL as an example. But I'm thinking of something like AppleScript: it resembles English language anyway, but it's a very strongly structured language that has zero ambiguity.

But anyway, how about introducing a simple criteria engine that accepts data like so:

"type={extension or mime-type},contains={wildcard or regular expression},in={directory wildcard},modb4={date}"

Doesn't Windows Search already accept simple criteria?

Coffeehouse - Vista's Natural Language Search is Sloooow

Michael Griffiths — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 19:29:36 GMT

W3bbo said:

PaoloM said:

*snip*

Wouldn't it be more pragmatic to let people type in say... raw SQL? (or some more appropriate search instruction).

You get the benefit of knowing exactly what the computer is searching for, simpler parsing, and if it's well done it should closely resemble English anyway.

You can:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb231256(VS.85).aspx">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb231256(VS.85).aspx

.... just not in the main interface. It'd be rather trivial to create an interface to return the results of a SQL statement.

Most people, needless to say, don't know SQL; and while I'd love some of the features (group, rank) I don't really want to type a long SQL statement for a rather simple query.

_______________________

Paolo, it's interesting that keywords like that are so hardcoded. Natural Language is a bit more ambiguous than that; I'd expect something more along the lines of defaulting to searching for the word, and only using certain words-as-types when the grammer supports it (I would assume you have some sort of grammer parser that deconstructs the search string).

Or doing both - returning all "movies" while at the same time returning everything that contains "movies." i.e. the more general the search is, the more general the query and this the results. A highly specific one (e.g. "all emails sent to microsoft yesterday") would also be easier to parse and "get" accurately, because there's more natural language detail.

Coffeehouse - Vista's Natural Language Search is Sloooow

Michael Griffiths — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 03:43:04 GMT

BHpaddock said:
Parsing should take exactly the same amount of time whether it's using NQS (natural language queries) or AQS (regular searches / advanced query syntax).

If you're waiting 10-15 seconds for search results something is wrong. How many items are in your index according to the control panel?

What sort of machine specs are we talking about?

That's precisely what I would have expected - NQS taking no extra time - it's simply not what I'm experiencing.

I'm running a Dell Latitude D620; Intel Core Duo 2.0 GHz, 2 GB RAM; 80 GB 7200-RPM HD; Vista 32-bit. I have 56,077 items in my index, according to your Sidebar gadget. This is a rather small index; at least to my thinking.

If I turn Natural Language search, my minnimum time for a search jumps to 5 seconds, with searches of up to 15 seconds (for 3 word queries!) occuring with some regularity. This compares to under a second without NQS.

It also fails to find basic things; if I search for "movie" it won't find Windows Movie Maker. Search for "photo," it doesn't find Windows Photo Gallery (or Windows Live Photo Gallery), etc. Things like that. AQS works perfectly; finds everything.

Coffeehouse - Vista's Natural Language Search is Sloooow

Michael Griffiths — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:14:01 GMT

A few months ago - in May - I turned on Natural Language Search in Vista.

I thought it was a good idea.

I didn't notice anything initially, just a failure to work very well when I tried things like "all documents created yesterday."

In June, I installed Windows Search 4.0. I noticed no speed up; if anything, the speed was terrible.

Today, once again waiting for the start menu search to respond after 10 seconds, I finally had enough and set out to make search faster. Needless to say, the first thing I did was go and restore defaults.

Which lead me to disable Natural Language Search.

Which lead to Vista's search response time going from 10+ seconds to under 1 second.

I must conclude that the Natural Language Search option is really bloody slow.

Seriously, what kind of parsing is Windows doing? I can think of a few things I'd like it to do - entity extraction in search string matched to entities extracted from documents, common language components, e.g. support for "all," "only", etc - but how on earth does that take 10 to 15 seconds?

Anyone else get the same speed decrease when Natural Language Search is enabled?

Coffeehouse - Why can't I fullscreen the NBC Olympics Silverlight Player?

Michael Griffiths — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 00:16:58 GMT

NBC's Enhanced Silverlight video player for the Olympics, developed by Schematic, happens to be very nice (whereas the ordinary one is simply ordinary).

The Picture-in-Picture is cool, and allows you to keep an eye on "live" events while watching older videos. The video browser - by popularity, sport, etc - is also well done.

However, I am unable to fullscreen the video player. This rather reduces the quality of the experience for me.

I can only imagine that this limitation is built-in, as every other Silverlight video player I have ever encountered allowed easy fullscreening. Is there some reason for this?

Coffeehouse - Hurrr, maybe messenger 9 won't suck?

Michael Griffiths — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:53:49 GMT

dentaku wrote:

I just hope they can make it look as good as Yahoo Messenger for Windows Vista.

Which is vaporware; a WPF concept developed by an outside development firm that has either been put on hold indefinitely or killed.

There better be a damn good reason it's going to take them another year, minnimum, to release Messenger 9. Yahoo IM 9 came out a few days ago, and it's pretty good. There are rumors Google Talk is being revamped with integration for multiple protocols and tighter Gmail options. Meebo and other online IM sites are gaining (very small) traction, and Trillian Astra (online/offline client) will be done before too long.

Personally, I'd like rich text editing in messenger conversations at the least.

If they're changing the back-end as well as the client (if the Mac client is "awesome," the Windows client better be bloody good) then I can see it taking that long, but Messenger has always seemed to have long development times with regard to the features they add.

Coffeehouse - Leopard 10.5

Michael Griffiths — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 21:46:13 GMT

The 300+ new features page demonstrates just how much better Apple is at marketing that Microsoft.

It's also interesting to see how many of the features are directed at making tasks easier. Apple seems to spend much more time making things easy after they've created the feature; far more than Microsoft.

I do have to say: the Enhanced Find in Safari is really cool. It's perhaps the only thing I like about Safari.

Coffeehouse - Live Search vs. Google

Michael Griffiths — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 21:35:18 GMT

Live Search is some time behind Google (a year? Less?) in terms of relevance & sophistication.

They are now, however, now competitive. Most people, when presented with both results, would fine Live "good enough." (This is just my opinion).

Expansion of existing features (the product review aggregation is awesome, as is instant & context-based previews on videos) will improve the engine and take some time.

There's a staggering amount of work Live Search needs to accomplish to become "better," even if Google stood still. They aren't going to, which means Live Search needs to roll out features faster than Google.

That's tough, and not something I'm confident Live Search can do. Back when Live Search initially cam out, their results were pretty good in comparison to Google. However, Google added and refined features faster than Live, resulting in a large gap Live Search still hasn't closed.

Coffeehouse - IE7: Speed & Addins

Michael Griffiths — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 23:34:36 GMT

I went in and disabled all the non-Microsoft and nonessential addins that load without permission. Most of them weren't currently loaded.

I had a substantial speed increase in page loading time.

Particularly with Hotmail, which went from being "meh" fast to being practically faster to bring up than Gmail.

So:

1) Is there a bloody better way to manage addins in IE than the terrible dialogue the Internet Options?
2) Why is there such a tremendous speed increase from disabling a bunch of ActiveX controls (none where BHOs)? Sure, I can speculate as to why, but it seems idiotic - IE would slow down the more websites (and stupid "addins) you installed.

Coffeehouse - Silverlight on C9

Michael Griffiths — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 01:11:54 GMT

I don't believe that the high CPU issue is a Channel9-specific issue.

I've had this problem with the Silverlight plugin from the get-go.

A middling-size video in a page will jump CPU usage on my laptop (2 GHz Pentium M, 2 GB RAM)around 10%; full-screening it causes the fan to flare up rather loud and CPU usage to max out. Anything dynamic - a game, etc - becomes staggeringly slow, and misses terrifying amounts of frames in full-screen. I've had it de-sync the audio from the video.

This could be due to installing both the 1.0 and the 1.1 Beta at the same time, I suppose. I haven't done any testing.

I do hope it's not a Silverlight issue, though.....

Coffeehouse - Microsoft 'New' Search Engine's Screenshots Leaked

Michael Griffiths — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 15:22:22 GMT

phreaks wrote:

When can we check it out?

You can check it out by adding "&FORM=PRESS" to the results. Or: changing it from whatever it is to PRESS.

Gotta give journalists a chance to review the product...

Coffeehouse - Silverlight on C9

Michael Griffiths — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 15:18:03 GMT

Cyonix wrote:

BlackTiger wrote:
One more issue: 85-90% CPU utilization during playback in fullscreen mode. (CPU Intel T2500, Intel GMA 950, 2GB RAM)

I also get this, is it by design? I find it odd that it needs 100% of one of my cores.

And me.

This is a problem for all Silverlight, in Firefox or IE.

I have no idea why, and it kills the usefulness of Silverlight for me.

Coffeehouse - Engadget: How would you change Vista?

Michael Griffiths — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:56:06 GMT

A few points:

1) DRM is not inherently evil. Enabling DRM in Vista does two things: allows copyright holders to experiment with alternative business models (subscription), and (b) subjects the concept of DRM - as opposed to a shoddy implementation by Sony based on a rootkit - to consumers.

Please note that the marketplace is moving away from opressive DRM; see EMI charging more for DRM-free songs. This is interesting because it allows the market to place a value on DRM: as the market expands, demands will change and the increased flexibility (amount of choice) should drive DRM to a place where both consumers and producers are happy. Most of them, anyway; I don't think Torrenters will ever be happy with DRM.

Also, it would be a shame to dismiss DRM out of hand as purely damaging to consumers. Personally, I benefit from DRM with subscription music. Over time, as rights get hammered out, you'll see creative offerings utilizing DRM in different ways.

2) While most of what Microsoft has been doing is "boring," it's fairly important to realize why. As a large company with an entrenched product and an almost-guaranteed source of income, Microsoft has a disincentive to do "creative" things. Creative things have risk, because creative things are new and untested. And, when you're building something for 600 million people, new and untested isn't a good idea.

Certainly, Microsoft could - and should - take more risks in the consumer space. The beautiful thing about increased competition (with Apple, Linux, and Google), is that the better they do, the more Microsoft will scramble. And Microsoft has traditionally been very good at scrambling. With Apple grabbing more and more of the college crowd, Linux available on Dell PCs (that must burn), and Google replacing Microsoft Exchange in colleges (one example), Microsoft is begining to have a helluva headache.

The past five years have been slow, stable, and boring. In part this is because of the Dot Com boom and the aversion to risk. The humorous thing, of course, is that as Microsoft stumbled - new CEO, delayed Vista, etc - the market ignored them. Linux wasn't mature enough, Apple was recovering from their own problems, and Silicon Valley startups were having a hard time getting funding. Had Microsoft made those same mistakes now, they would have experienced much more damage. Of course, Apple and Linux are well positioned to take advantage of Vista stumbling a bit - they have another 6-12 months before Vista gets "better."

All of which points to a very interesting time over the next few years. We have new leadership - Sinofsky, Ozzie, etc - who apparently (1) understand the mistakes made, (2) are very aware of the competition, and (3) aren't making the same mistakes. Or so we are led to believe.

Microsoft will be more difficult to read, certainly. Decreased transparency can only help Microsoft at this point - it's rather sad that everything Microsoft does, announces, etc is decried and condemned. Shutting up should (1) reduce the volume of anti-Microsoft news, and (2) allow Microsoft to keep some of their movies quiet. It wouldn't be exceptionally healthy to give away all their plans for Windows now: Apple and Linux can steal their thunder, and having those features debated over and over - before they're implemented - means that when Windows actually arrives, reviewers feel cheated. Irrational, but looks to be true.

I certainly hope Microsoft rises to meet the challenge: so far, it's been almost painful to watch. Windows Live isn't a joke, per se, but Live Search constantly seems around a year behind Google, Live.com is terribly out of date (though screenshots of Wave 2 looks decent - if only barely. Nothing compelling compared to, say, the My Yahoo! beta), Hotmail is actually pretty decent (even with the lack of a decent calender) but no one talks about it, and now there's a wave of articles about people switching back to XP. and so on.

We'll see. In any event, it should be fairly tumultous.

Coffeehouse - Whatever happened to .... ?

Michael Griffiths — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 03:14:29 GMT

It still hasn't been very long.

Coffeehouse - C9 feature anti-troll suggestion: An Invite List

Michael Griffiths — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 03:07:04 GMT

I don't like it.

I also don't like the idea of voting on posts, because unless it's done very well, it also masks legitimate posts that don't match group consensus. And thus fosters groupthink. (In order to do it well, you'd need to (1) restrict votes by people logged in, and (2) weight votes by degree of positive & negative votes, (b) number of votes, (c) deviation from the mean, and (d) average vote on individual by voter; e.g. a negative vote on a person who you normally vote positive is worth more than a negative vote on someone you always vote negative on).

However, I think Ignore lists would solve 95% of the relatively minor problems Channel9 has.

It would certainly increase the signal vs. noise ratio.

Coffeehouse - About jamie's locked thread...

Michael Griffiths — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:54:11 GMT

Humor.

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20070713/microsoft-censor-windows-suggestion-list/

Any by "humor" I mean "funny is an almost unfunny way."

Coffeehouse - Leopard, Vista and the iPhone OS X Architecture

Michael Griffiths — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:40:04 GMT

I read the article, but found it difficult to credit the author's profligate use of assumptions that "everyone knows" and "many people believe."

Such as the assertion that so many people said that a stripped-down version of MacOSX can't possibly run on iPhone hardware, despite the fact that I haven't read that. Besides, the iPhone has a 600 MHz processor and respectable memory; I remember running Windows on that, and thinking it was fast. Sure, you couldn't run Vista out of the box on that, but a fairly mature OS? Sure.

Not to mention the glaring inaccuracies when it came to comparing Windows Vista to Mac OS X. Or equating almost 10 "updates" for every MacOSX release to Windows Service packs. Or completely ignoring the release of editions such as Tablet PC Edition, Media Center edition, and so on.

So no, I didn't find it compelling.

Coffeehouse - why do news archives cost money?

Michael Griffiths — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:34:06 GMT

Google isn't charging a fee.

Newspapers are charging the fee to access their back database.

They hold the copyright on those articles.

Coffeehouse - Making money with pirated music + Zune.

Michael Griffiths — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:32:33 GMT

Bas wrote:

http://www.zunescene.com/paid-zune-sharing/

Well that's interesting. A patent application for the Zune that allows you to share music with other Zune users, as usual, but if the receiving user then actually purchases said music, the sender gets a sales commission. And yes, that also works if the sender actually pirated the song rather than buying it.

Clever.

Coffeehouse - Microsoft: Fails at Web Design with Live Earth

Michael Griffiths — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 23:38:08 GMT

Duncanma wrote:

Hey folks... I'm certainly not impressed with the answers from the two Microsoft employees in this thread. Suffice it say that there are people everywhere, internal to Microsoft and out, that don't know how to have a polite conversation.

It is hard to respond politely to strong negative comments about your work, but it isn't like they had to respond. Personally, if I had to choose between posting comments like fatmonkey and bullitracer did and saying nothing at all, I'd go with nothing.

I hadn't expected a response from anyone inside Microsoft. The post was irritated enough not to warrant one - I'd just spent a very frustrating 10 minutes navigating the Live Earth site (6 of those trying to find the schedule) and wasn't very happy; so I spent 5 minutes writing an irritated post.

The first responder (fatmonkey) was good, though he confused complaints with advice, and committed the fallacy in thinking that being good at doing something makes you good at criticising something. It certainly gives more background, but (for example) writing doesn't make you an editor, or vice versa.

Duncanma wrote:

On the original topic though, I'm not sure why defaulting to QuickTime in FireFox is so bad... to use the WMP plug-in by default would seem very odd, since you'd need to turn around and use QuickTime again for FireFox users on the Mac. We go with QT for FireFox by default on http://on10.net and I thought it was a pretty good way to go for a Microsoft site. At some point we'll swap in a Silverlight player, which will then allow us to output the same player for IE and FireFox (Mac/PC), but for now we are going with WMP in IE and QT in FireFox. On this site though, I know that we output nothing for FireFox, should we output an object tag for use with the WMP plug-in?

Good point; hadn't thought about that.

I like the WMP plugin only because it provides a very easy full-screen experience, and I only view videos online I want to watch fullscreen (movie trailers, and so on). I've noticed you can use IE7s Zoom feature to zoom into most Flash objects, and expand them - which is a killer feature for me.

My problem with the LiveEarth (still) is that it's not a consistent experience. Why is there one page for IE, and then a landing page with sub-pages for Firefox and so on?

If they're using Flash and Quicktime - both widely deployed in Firefox and IE - it doesn't make sense to have seperate sites. There shouldn't be any technical reason.

It also really bugs me when sites hard-code to a certain browser resolution. When you have a large monitor, it doesn't look so good.

Now, the site is better that when I first ran into it - same experience cross-browser - so a decent chunk of my problems with it go away (though it changes your browser window to the page size. Fun).

Coffeehouse - Microsoft: Fails at Web Design with Live Earth

Michael Griffiths — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 17:15:08 GMT

blowdart wrote:

Hands up who believes this a Microsoft employee?

If you do, was this the attitude you were expecting? Snide comments about a posters mental and employment status?

Oh dear. Any of our dear C9 team like to see if this really was from an employee? And if so issue the lart to their PM?

I'm certainly suprised

Lawn darts in my head? Oh dear.

Coffeehouse - Longhorn concept Video

Michael Griffiths — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 03:21:19 GMT

The demos would have been done in Flash.

Alot of the "features" look good, and we don't have it today - or where we have it, they're less elegant/pretty. e.g. you can use SharedView (ad supported download, integrates with Messenger).

Personally, I like how Explorer manages devices in the concept videos, the real-time collaboration, and so on.

I think AERO is, for the most part, just a more polished- and in some cases, toned down for ease-of-use/backwards compatability - version of the concept demos.

Explorer is cut down, but still quite similar.

brian.shapiro wrote:

Personally I can say there's a lot I would do differently if Windows had WinFS, because I have to do a lot of file management and would want to move a lot of things into metadata

Or not even WinFS, as it is - just universal, consistent metadata.

This whole "Let's add Explorer-supported metadata to the files themselves!" is OK and all, but dramatically limits what I can use metadata for.