Author: M3 Sweatt

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Will Russia abolish Daylight Saving Time?

buildings,Moscow,Photographs,religion,Russia,Saint Basil's Cathedral,St. Basil's Cathedral,travelJust back from vacation and good to see that some things never change. In this instance, it’s the discussion of changes to daylight saving time rules around the world.

Back in early 2008 Last year, I recall that the Russian government considered a bill abolishing daylight saving time or ”summer time” in the country.  Noting "ample research and statistical data” the bill highlighted that the move to and from summer time had serious negative impacts on people’s health, calling out how the time changes attributed to up to 70,000 premature deaths a year in Russia alone. They cited "medical emergency calls increasing by 12% in the first two weeks after each change, suicide rate jumping 66%, accident rate rising by 29%, heart attack rates – by 75%. "

Now Russia has again been considering a move to eliminate DST, and indications in the press are that they will do just that later this year. I’ve read in the news that Medvedev said he has "decided to cancel the shift to winter time, starting from this autumn," and that Russia will not move to daylight saving time on the last Sunday of October. 

A side comment: In his proposal, Medvedev said that the country would not “fall back” and revert to Standard time this fall. But, it would seem better for Russia to in fact move back to Standard time in October 2011, and then not make the “spring forward” change to clocks in March 2012. But who am I to argue with President Medvedev. 😉

We’ll continue to watch the developments on Medvedev’s plan. We do provide some guidance on http://www.microsoft.com/time, that in order to achieve more seamless transitions to new DST and time zones policies, Microsoft requests that governments provide the following:

  • Ample advance notice (1 year or more) of the planned change.
  • Official published confirmation of planned changes to DST or time zones.
  • Concentrated efforts on promoting the change to the affected citizens.

Tags: Microsoft, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Savings Time, RSS,DST, Russia

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More thoughts on The Microsoft Garage Science Fair

A shout out to Steve Clayton’s post last week, looking at "What’s hot at Microsoft’s Science Fair?" as he covered The Microsoft Garage Science Fair…

"It’s fair time at Microsoft – Tech Fest is on the horizon and our Product Fair follows a little later in the year. I’ll be following (and blogging) about each of them and giving you some insight in to what goes down at these events.

"Today was Science Fair at The Commons and I was one of the judges so I got an extensive tour of what’s on offer (and a white lab coat) and then toured again with Josh Lowensohn of CNET who has just posted his views on the event. Science Fair is run by the folks behind The Garage at Microsoft  which I covered in a recent post. In a nutshell, it’s hobbyist development inside Microsoft.

"So what did we see at Science Fair today that I can tell you about?"

Well, there was lot’s that I can’t comment on from the Fair, but I was happy to see Steve’s coverage, specifically with references to the .NET Gadgeteer from the folks over in MSR. Essentially it’s what I envision to be the next iteration of the popular Lego Mindstorms that my kids use today, only enabled with  .NET Micro Framework, allowing you to program in C# and use the tools in Visual Studio. I agree with Steve in that one of the most interesting things was how the team had integrated one of their devices with the cloud services in Azure. 

I enjoyed getting to see the details on The Microsoft Biology Initiative (MBI), an effort in MSR to bring new technology and tools to the area of bioinformatics and biology. MBF provides an extension to the .NET Framework to Genomics research, with connections to web services such as NCBI BLAST.

A few other projects of interest:

"IM-an-Expert", as noted in Ryen’s papers, a system that takes in questions via IM and routes them automatically to nominated "experts" for an answer.

The Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework provides sample code in C++, C#, and VB.NET to demonstrate frequently-asked, tested or used coding scenarios based on the feedback we get in the MSDN forums. Follow the All-in-One Code blog posts here from Jialiang Ge and the team for free code samples form the Microsoft Community team.

Last, I’m a fan of Microsoft Office Labs’ Ribbon Hero, the game for Office 2007 and Office 2010 suite to help you learn how to use all of the features and functionality that you might not know exists in the applications in the suite. My favourite this time around was learning how to do a dop cap at the beginning of a paragraph without invoking the "font" menu command.  You can read more about Ribbon Hero in this post on ZDNet by Christopher Dawson, noting it as a "brilliant training tool from Office Labs." I couldn’t agree more…

"If all this sounds a bit dorky, it is. But the countless people who wile away the hours on WOW, Dungeons and Dragons, and Farmville (all arguably dorky in their own way) will buy into this in a heartbeat. Better yet, Microsoft has actually done their research on the way people learn in the context of gaming and included real thought to the pedagogy of applications training: short, relevant tasks, immediate feedback and reinforcement, and enough difficulty to be challenging with enough supports to be successful. It even adapts the difficulty of the challenges to the speed with which a user completes them.

"And to answer my question about the value proposition of Office 2010 versus Office 2007, the truly diabolical folks at Microsoft have included several challenges highlighting the new features in 2010. Users of 2007 can see these challenges and a brief description of the new feature, but can’t complete the challenge until they download the 2010 beta (and later, pay for a downloaded upgrade). Office Labs is, of course, tracking these downloads to determine both the effectiveness of the teaser challenges and how compelling the new features are for end users."

Additional links of interest:

 

Tags: articles, what I read, blogs, Microsoft, The Garage, Office 2010, innovation.

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Microsoft and Nokia announce plans for a broad strategic partnership on Windows Phone

Microsoft and Nokia Announce Broad Strategic Partnership

Fresh from the Microsoft Windows Phone Newsroom today, the details on the deal with Nokia…

"Nokia and Microsoft today announced plans to form a broad strategic partnership that would use their complementary strengths and expertise to create a new global mobile ecosystem.

"Nokia and Microsoft intend to jointly create market-leading mobile products and services designed to offer consumers, operators and developers unrivalled choice and opportunity. As each company would focus on its core competencies, the partnership would create the opportunity for rapid time to market execution. Additionally, Nokia and Microsoft plan to work together to integrate key assets and create completely new service offerings, while extending established products and services to new markets."

Under the proposed partnership:

  • Nokia would adopt Windows Phone as its principal smartphone strategy, innovating on top of the platform in areas such as imaging, where Nokia is a market leader.
  • Nokia would help drive the future of Windows Phone. Nokia would contribute its expertise on hardware design, language support, and help bring Windows Phone to a larger range of price points, market segments and geographies.
  • Nokia and Microsoft would closely collaborate on joint marketing initiatives and a shared development roadmap to align on the future evolution of mobile products.
  • Bing would power Nokia’s search services across Nokia devices and services, giving customers access to Bing’s next generation search capabilities. Microsoft adCenter would provide search advertising services on Nokia’s line of devices and services.
  • Nokia Maps would be a core part of Microsoft’s mapping services. For example, Maps would be integrated with Microsoft’s Bing search engine and adCenter advertising platform to form a unique local search and advertising experience
  • Nokia’s extensive operator billing agreements would make it easier for consumers to purchase Nokia Windows Phone services in countries where credit-card use is low.
  • Microsoft development tools would be used to create applications to run on Nokia Windows Phones, allowing developers to easily leverage the ecosystem’s global reach.
  • Nokia’s content and application store would be integrated with Microsoft Marketplace for a more compelling consumer experience.

More information is available here

 

Tags: articles, what I read, blogs, Microsoft, Nokia, Windows Phone 7.

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Heading to Microsoft TechReady 12 in Seattle? Check out my helpful hints and survival tips

silence - tweeterHere’s a link to my post last year on some helpful hints on Surviving TechReady in Seattle, from 2010. Many of the links and info points are still relevant…

Going to TechReady next week in Seattle?  It seems from what I read on Twitter that we will have a number of people visiting the fair Emerald City for next week’s geek festivities.

To aid in your visit to the fair city by the Sound, I’ve posted here a few hints along the lines of my notes from Surviving CES in Las Vegas and Surviving MGX. Using that post as a template, here are a couple of resources for you – I will add to the page later as I have time.

First off, a public service announcement.

I have to agree with LyalinDotCom: remember to watch what you say online when you talk about #tr11. What I said about tweeting (remember to be thoughtful) still stands,

Head over to this post for more general information.

Have anything to add? LMK in the comments.

For now, here are a couple of additional links:

http://www.seattlemag.com/ and http://www.seattlemet.com/ – Both online versions of these Seattle magazines are great resources for where to eat, what to see and where to go when in Seattle. SeattleMet has a calendar right on their home page of what to do in the city.

 

Tags: Microsoft, Seattle, Bellevue, TechReady, travel tips.

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Satya Nadella: the new president in Microsoft’s Server & Tools Business

News today: we have a new president in the Server & Tools Business: Satya Nadella, a respected technical leader here at the company (as noted here: http://bit.ly/i5ovIb). Satya moved from MBS to the Online Services Division to head up the engineering division there, which includes Bing, MSN and AdCenter (our advertising platform).

Satya Nadella hasn’t blogged in quite a while – I’ll suggest that he pick this back up ;)  You can check out his old posts at http://bit.ly/iejhvy. In particular I enjoyed one of his last posts on “making complex things simple” mantra, with observations from the book "The Laws of Simplicity" by John Maeda…

"I recently read The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda. He has a cool web site as well. In the Dynamics group there is a lot of passion around this subject.

"John’s first rule – REDUCE: Simplicity through thoughtful reduction…strikes me as the most critical, when it comes to software design.

"I remember going to for my first meeting with the technical team at Navision before the acquisition. Their entire presentation was around how little code they have in their application. Mind you this was before we had settled on price!!

"This spirit of “minimalism” has helped us a ton as we have looked to evolve our apps and make them modern both in terms of user experience, runtime infrastructure and design time tools."

This reminds me of another discussion: Tony Scott, our CIO, asked Steve Ballmer (as noted on the Microsoft CIO Network site) about the biggest lessons he has learned over the ten years Steve has been CEO.

"… there’s a quote from a college basketball coach who just died here in the U.S., a guy named John Wooden, who was the coach at UCLA for many years.  But his writing on this sort of stands out to me.  He used to tell his players, "Be quick, but don’t hurry."  In our business more than any, you’ve got to be quick, but don’t hurry.  You can hurry things and you get a bad outcome if you try to rush, rush, either half-baked, not forward-looking enough.  But if you just take your time, you’re slow, you’re not in the market, you’re going to fail too.  And so really being thoughtful about — it doesn’t mean — there’s no implied algorithm of how you be quick but don’t hurry, but I know that a lot of the bad decisions I made, I made when I did hurry or when I took too much time to make a decision.  One or the other.  And so those are sort of my principles that I’ve learned.  I mean, I can also tell you I’ve learned a lot of things from specific projects."

 

Tags: announcements, Microsoft, Windows Server.

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