December 2004 Entries
You may have noticed the comments coming on and off today... I'm getting innundated by an extremely agressive comment spammer (I believe other .Text sites are also getting hit hard), and I'm trying to block them out. Hopefully it'll work, but please bear with me.
Via Slashdot, an article on the problems with patents and possible solutions. Interesting to see that it's not just the software side of things that's had issues. I especially liked the patent on "swinging on a swing."
Every corporate culture has it's own set of acronyms, TLAs (three letter abbreviations) and jargon, and Microsoft is no different. I try not to let it slip too much into my blog entries, but a comment from M.J. Easton reminded me that a while back I did use one without explanation. In an entry talking about the DirectCast operator, I said:In addition to the fact that we like VB, it's also a great way to dogfood the product.I don't believe the verb "to dogfood" is unique to Microsoft at all, but it's certainly an integral part of our culture. It's short for "to eat...
What I want to know about this theory is: what happens if you're someone like me, who cycles between growing a beard and going beardless? Or does it just matter whether your official picture has a beard? I've got one right now, so does that mean I'm doing better work than when I didn't have one months ago?
Eric Lippert astutely pointed out a hole that I consciously left in my discussion of black hole projects - namely, that they sometimes succeed. I left that part out because I figured it probably merited a little discussion of its own and I didn't want to complicate the whole "black hole" narrative.Eric's completely correct that you could argue that .NET was a black hole project, albeit one that succeeded. It managed to hit most, if not all, of the bullet points I listed, including the last one (I started work on what would become VB.NET in mid-1998, after all, and...
After hearing about a product named Netdoc from Scoble, Steve Maine takes the opportunity to reminsce about a similarly code-named project at Microsoft (that has nothing to do with the new product). He says:
The name “Netdocs” reminds me of my experience as an intern at MS in 2000. There was this mythical project codenamed “Netdocs”, and it was a black hole into which entire teams disappeared. I had several intern friends who got transferred to the Netdocs team and were never heard from again. Everyone knew that Netdocs was huge and that there were a ton of people working on...