Cut-and-paste coming to Windows Phone 7

Via eWeek:

Microsoft is also planning a smartphone software update that will address a separate issue related to Exchange ActiveSync e-mail synchronization. Other updates, reportedly scheduled to arrive in coming weeks, will tweak application-loading speed and introduce a cut-and-paste feature.

I know a lot more and could tell you about cut-and-past and lots of other features but that would be infringing on territory of the marketing guys.

Update: A reader sent me an email saying, “I’m pretty sure it’s just copy and paste. AFAIK ‘cut’ isn’t there.”

I think I would argue that we are both right. But that discussion will have to wait until the update actually hits the streets.

It used to work but not anymore

Some people don’t realize this is the age of information. The cost in time and money to look something up is probably less than one millionth of what it was 30 years ago.

The fossils spewing their lies at Coalition to Stop Gun Violence apparently don’t really get it. Michael Beard is the President and claims to have been an anti-rights advocate as far back as the 1960s. What worked then doesn’t work now.

The thing that surprised me is they even provided a link to the newspaper article which disputed their claim rather than supporting it.

Their claim is that a criminal who killed one police officer and wounded another in Seattle in October of 2009 was a “high-profile gun rights advocate”:

Having benefitted from the anonymity of private gun sales, Monfort has also emerged as high-profile gun rights advocate.

If you read the article the only support for this is the article title of “Christopher Monfort, Second Amendment advocate?”

My understanding is that the article titles are frequently not written by the reporter and are intended to get attention with accurate depiction of the article contents being a distant second in priority. This was certainly the case this time. There was no support in the article for the claim the criminal was a gun rights advocate let alone that he had a high profile for anything other than being a cop-killer. But that didn’t stop the folks at the CSGV from making the claim.

It’s time to hang it up guys. It doesn’t work anymore. You may have a full time salary but some guy chilling in his underground bunker with his guns and ammo and a few minutes on his hands can discover and point our your deception before the end of the same day as you posted it.

Random thought of the day

Our skin doesn’t sense temperature directly. It only senses the difference between the temperature of the skin and the object being touched. I wonder if this means the sensors are actually measure heat/energy flow.

Technologically heat flow sensors are more difficult to build than temperature sensors. I wonder why evolution ended up with heat flow sensors rather than temperature. Was there an evolutionary advantage to this or is it more biologically difficult?

Quote of the day—Special Agent Urey W. Patrick

Kinetic energy does not wound. Temporary cavity does not wound. The much discussed “shock” of bullet impact is a fable and “knock down” power is a myth. The critical element is penetration. The bullet must pass through the large, blood bearing organs and be of sufficient diameter to promote rapid bleeding. Penetration less than 12 inches is too little, and, in the words of two of the participants in the 1987 Wound Ballistics Workshop, “too little penetration will get you killed.”

Given desirable and reliable penetration, the only way to increase bullet effectiveness is to increase the severity of the wound by increasing the size of hole made by the bullet. Any bullet which will not penetrate through vital organs from less than optimal angles is not acceptable. Of those that will penetrate, the edge is always with the bigger bullet.

Special Agent Urey W. Patrick
July 14, 1989
U.S. Department of Justice
Handgun Wounding Factors and Effectiveness
Firearms Training Unit
FBI Academy
Quantico, Virginia
[I really need to write my post on “Energy is irrelevant” someday soon. The most recent incentive was this. Like Sebastian, I’m not convinced. The ammo doesn’t make any claims in regards to energy but I can’t imagine any of the claimed benefits outweigh the penetration and accuracy issues that are not talked about.—Joe]

It Took About 70 Years…

…or so (I wasn’t counting but for the last few) but the correct optic mount for the U.S. Rifle, Caliber 30, M1, also known as the Garand Rifle, is now available for sale.  We’re waiting to ship until next week, when I’m supposed to have the illustrated  instructions ready, but the product is all ready to go.  In addition to making bullets, I’ll be burning the oil all weekend editing images – we try to make the illustrations serve as a more or less stand-alone picture storybook, for them that gets their information better if it’s visual.



Pretty, methinks, though I may be slightly prejudiced.


Use any IER (Scout) scope, reflex or holographic sight.  Pistol scopes may be used also, but need more eye relief and you’ll be mounting them as far forward as they’ll go.  The scout scopes are a perfect match, as is the Aimpoint Micro, Comp, et al, which also allow co witnessing.


If the rifle is good with its iron sights, it’s just as good, only faster and in a far wider range of lighting conditions, with a good optic, even a good 1x optic.


There has been a general assumption that a dot sight is a close quarters sight.  That is true, in the same sense that iron sights are for close quarters, except of course that the dot sight is a vastly superior system.  The dot sight still has its advantages on the longer shots, out to your iron sight maximum range.  More in-depth info on electronic sights here.



That’s the T1 on the new UltiMAK M12.  Now you can punch more holes, in more things, faster, under more lighting conditions, with more confidence.


The weight of the mount body, clamps and screws is 6.16 ounces.  The walnut handguard with retainer clip, that the mount replaces, weighs about 2.24 ounces, so the net installed weight is 3.92 ounces.  Your figure may vary depending on your handguard.  The mount clamps to a tapered barrel, so just like our M8 mount for the M-14, it needs a recoil lug to prevent the mount “falling off the taper”.  The M1 has that rear barrel band right there, pinned to the barrel, hence the M12’s front clamp has been extended a few thousandths beyond the front of the mount body, to engage the barrel band.  It uses two discreet clamping positions, like all our mounts, so there is never an issue with minor variations in barrel profiles.  In this case, as with our M6 for the 30 Carbine, it is cantilevered for some distance behind the rear clamp.


Mention this post in checkout at UltiMAK and you’ll get a 10% early adopters, The-View-From-North-Central-Idaho discount.  Good through Jan, 2011 – see update below.  Then send the difference to the Second Amendment Foundation.


You saw it here first (unless you were on the UltiMAK site within the last 24 hours).  This is the numero uno press release, right nghyaw!


{shameless self promotion = “off”}


Update, Jan 11, 2011; I posted this before we’d had a chance at a meeting to determine price.  We’re changing the price to $185.00.  No on-line orders have been charged as yet, so all orders will be automatically charged at the lower price, and those who mentioned, or mention, this post will receive the discount from the lower price.  Discount offer good through January, 2011.  Any walk-ins that occured before this notice, let us know and we’ll refund the balance.  Thanks, everyone, for the big response!

Barb and Windows Phone 7+

Earlier, when she found out daughters Kim and Xenia were getting a Windows Phone 7 for Christmas, she told me, “You better have not gotten me one of those. I’ll be afraid to use it because I might lose it.”

Here is the video when she opens it and then finds out I got her a little something extra to go with it:

Not that there is anything wrong with that

Via Greg Hamilton’s Facebook Wall Photos:

MacUsers

And a quick reminder than my attempts at humor do not in any way represent those of my employer (Microsoft).

33 megajoule rail gun—Mach 7

I got light headed watching the camera scan the banks of capacitors.

I wouldn’t want to be within a mile in any direction of this gun when it was fired. That many volts ready to dump that many amps in so few microseconds is scary stuff even without a Mach 7 projectile with a range of 100 miles.

Order to buy

Microsoft’s Kinect is doing quite well and may soon be a sex toy as well. People that don’t quite “get it” when it is described to them end up spending hours playing with it when they try it. People at work are complaining of sore muscles and some are even seeing the doctor for before coming back to work after a long weekend of dancing and jumping around in front of their televisions .

Windows Phone 7, particularly when running on a Samsung Focus, is getting a lot of praise and sales are going well for it too.

We have a little bit of money left over from some recent financial shuffling and I put in an order to buy a little more Microsoft stock.


*I’m a Microsoft employee but any “insider” information I have isn’t worth what ten minutes of searching the web would gain you.

Google and privacy

Via email from Chet:

In the past I have said I don’t mind private business getting overbearing as much as I do the government doing so. But when an industry leader uses the invasion of your privacy to it’s advantage without repercussions the rest of the industry is almost forced to follow along or get left in the financial dust. And once the technology is deployed and a profit can be made selling it to the government someone will do that too. It won’t matter how evil it is (read IBM and the Holocaust), if the price is right, and with a government involved the price could be you (or your company) continuing to survive, the information will be abused.

There needs to be repercussion for companies who do this. The “noise” and the boycotts need to start before the information is abused.

I know a lot more than I am at liberty to say and it hurts to bite my tongue this hard…


Note: Full disclosure—I work for Microsoft who is a competitor of Google.

Windows Phone 7 sales are good

Microsoft is being closed mouthed about the sales numbers for Windows Phone 7 but the indications are that it is doing well:



Early reports hint that Windows Phone 7 has been selling strongly in international markets, with DigiTimes reporting in a Nov. 3 article that sales of HTC-build Windows Phone 7 smartphones are better than expected in Europe and Australia. In the U.K., news outlets reported a lack of available phones through carrier Orange.


“Early supporters of the new operating system such as South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics are also experiencing rising demand from carriers,” suggested the DigiTimes article, which sourced its information as unnamed “Taiwan-based handset makers.”


TheStreet.com, citing an unnamed “market research source,” reported some 40,000 Windows Phone 7 devices sold in the United States on the first day of release. Neither Microsoft nor AT&T offered exact figures when contacted by eWEEK, although an AT&T spokesperson said the carrier was “encouraged by early demand from customers in stores and online.”


Microsoft employees (such as myself) were asked to not purchase new WP7 phones for a few days so the local stores would have phones in stock for the general public.


I haven’t decided which one I will get yet and I don’t really have a strong recommendation at this time. I have three “engineering units” in hand which I have been using for quite some time and will get my personal phone within the next few weeks.

That idea has potential

Hover your mouse over the image to get the best part of the joke.

And according to my sources it isn’t all that difficult to build a program which can read a few conversation threads on a topic then make short comments that are indistinguishable from a live person on a similar thread. I would write something to do that and haunt the comment sections of the anti-gun websites but they disable comments or we outnumber them about 100 to 1 already. Hence human labor ends up being “cheaper” than automating the task.

It would be even easier to automate the task of responding as an anti-gun person to all the pro-gun websites—so I did:

namespace AntiGunComment
{
    using System;

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string[] commentCollection =
            {
                “ban armor piercing ammo”,
                “ban assault weapons”,
                “ban cop killer bullets”,
                “ban plastic guns”,
                “ban Saturday Night Specials”,
                “ban sniper rifles”,
                “ban the shoulder thing that goes up”,
                “close the gun show loophole”,
                “get illegal guns off the streets”,
                “keep guns out of the hands of children”,
                “license gun owners”,
                “reduce gun availability”,
                “register all guns”,
                “require an arsenal license”,
            };
            const string commentFormat = “We need to {0}. It’s just COMMON SENSE!”;
            Random randomNumberGenerator = new Random();
            int index = randomNumberGenerator.Next(commentCollection.Length);

            Console.Write(string.Format(commentFormat, commentCollection[index]));
        }
    }
}

In case the source code is a little too obscure here is an executable for up to date Windows machines.

It’s a little scary to think someone could be replaced with such a small number of lines of code. With a little more work the capabilities could be enhanced such that it could respond to Bing News alerts by making a blog post. This could replace most of the anti-gun bloggers out there (hmm… maybe I could do that next weekend). I wonder what Joan Peterson and MikeB302000 would think of that… but then, maybe they already have been replaced. That would explain some things.

First Windows Phone 7 sold

It’s a happy day for the Windows Phone 7 team.


FirstWindowsPhone7Sold


I should go celebrate or something but my chemistry set is frowned upon in Redmond.


I’ll probably get some iPhones and Androids to dispose of in Idaho after the carriers start selling in the U.S.

Windows Phone 7 ads

Microsoft has released two of the ads for Windows Phone 7. I saw preliminary versions of them (and others) about a month ago. Most are pretty good. One has a little bit of what is known in our family as “Scott family humor” (my wife’s side of the family). I don’t like it but I included it anyway.

You will be seeing a lot of these ads soon. Microsoft is making a really big deal out of this phone and I think it is justified. I’m more proud of this work than anything I have done professionally for 15 years.

When I have shown the phone the speech function (particularly in conjunction with search on maps) has most impressed people (it’s working much better than when I was demoing it at the NRA convention):

See more Windows Phone 7 videos here.


Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft on Windows Phone 7.

Quote of the day—Wikipedia, Shaped charge

Most of the jet formed moves at hypersonic speed. The tip moves at 7 to 14 km/s, the jet tail at a lower velocity (1 to 3 km/s), and the slug at a still lower velocity (less than 1 km/s). The exact velocities are dependent on the charge’s configuration and confinement, explosive type, materials used, and the explosive-initiation mode. At typical velocities, the penetration process generates such enormous pressures that it may be considered hydrodynamic; to a good approximation, the jet and armor may be treated as incompressible fluids, with their material strengths ignored.

Wikipedia, Shaped charge
Emphasis added.
Found while Wikiwandering from a link at Roberta’s.
[“… may be treated as incompressible fluids, with their material strengths ignored”! That statement makes me light-headed and weak at the knees. The “7 to 14 km/s” doesn’t hurt either.

7 km/s is about 23,000 feet per second. Your .220 Swift is considered a very zippy cartridge but it only gives you about 4,100 feet per second at the muzzle. Hence a shaped charge gives you velocities 5 to 10 times that of a .220 Swift at the muzzle. This is considered high-hypersonic to re-entry speeds.

I have books on computer simulation of shaped charges. I really need to write the software then do some field testing. Supposedly it is pretty easy to punch through three feet of reinforced concrete. I have some large rocks out in the middle of some fields I’d like to experiment with.—Joe]

Windows Phone 7

According to USA Today Windows Phone 7 is launching on October 11:

It’s about to be put up or shut up time for Microsoft in mobile. On October 11, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and AT&T Mobility & Consumer Markets CEO Ralph de la Vega will be conducting a New York City press conference to spill the beans on the widely anticipated Windows Phone 7 smartphones.

I’m looking forward to being able to buy my own Windows Phone 7. The engineering development hardware I’ve been carrying around for the last year always seems to have something wrong with it that “will be fixed before it’s released”. Some had great sound and camera but poor Wi-Fi reception. Others had great Wi-Fi but poor GPS reception. It was good enough for development but now I’m ready for the real thing.

I know some people that need a new phone for Christmas too. It’ll be awesome.


Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft on the Windows Phone 7 project.

All your Motorola Androids are belong to us

Yesterday Microsoft announced they have filed a lawsuit against Motorola alleging infringement on nine patents regarding Android smart phones:

REDMOND, Wash. – Oct. 1, 2010 – Microsoft Corp. today filed a patent infringement action against Motorola, Inc. and issued the following statement from Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing:

“Microsoft filed an action today in the International Trade Commission and in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington against Motorola, Inc. for infringement of nine Microsoft patents by Motorola’s Android-based smartphones. The patents at issue relate to a range of functionality embodied in Motorola’s Android smartphone devices that are essential to the smartphone user experience, including synchronizing email, calendars and contacts, scheduling meetings, and notifying applications of changes in signal strength and battery power.

We have a responsibility to our customers, partners, and shareholders to safeguard the billions of dollars we invest each year in bringing innovative software products and services to market. Motorola needs to stop its infringement of our patented inventions in its Android smartphones.”

More information can be found here. Even though I work for Microsoft on Windows Phone 7 I don’t have any further information on the topic and even if I did I wouldn’t be at liberty to discuss it.

Biometrics are inherently fallible

I used to work in biometrics. In the first few minutes of a biometrics class in about 2004 the instructor quoted numerous people, going back about 30 years, each saying biometrics would be reliable “in ten years”. When I actually looked at the data for various biometric systems I was rather shocked by the failure rates. And those were in cases where there was no deliberate attempt to defeat the system. I attended a conference on biometrics and I invented a new biometric system (no, I can’t talk about it—a certain government agency says that information is restricted). It became quite clear to me that every biometric system in existence could be defeated if you knew it was being used. And furthermore it was unlikely that any system could ever be undefeatable.

Hence, I am not surprised experts are coming to the same conclusion I did several years ago:

Biometric systems — designed to automatically recognize individuals based on biological and behavioral traits such as fingerprints, palm prints, or voice or face recognition — are “inherently fallible,” says a new report by the National Research Council, and no single trait has been identified that is stable and distinctive across all groups.

Major fail of the Jews in the Attic Test

Let’s just say, “There are ways to defeat this” but I’m not happy about having to do it. It would be MUCH better to defeat it at the legislative level rather than at the technological level:

Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

James X. Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, said the proposal had “huge implications” and challenged “fundamental elements of the Internet revolution” — including its decentralized design.

“They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet,” he said. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.”

But law enforcement officials contend that imposing such a mandate is reasonable and necessary to prevent the erosion of their investigative powers.

It is “Necessary to prevent the erosion of their investigative powers”?

What about the erosion of private communication? It used to be one could have a conversation in their home, while walking across the field or down the road and the conversation was technologically guaranteed to be just between those present. They are now demanding a technological guarantee to eavesdrop on any private conversation, anytime, anywhere.

You can have my crypto keys when you reanimate your cold dead hands.

Understand your Terms

I see this usage pretty often;

   “Maintains less than 1 1/2 minute of angle accuracy at 100 yards/meters – Guaranteed !”

What I want to know is; how does the rifle know the distances to your targets when there are no electronics involved?


If the inherent angular dispersion is 1.5 MOA at 100 yards, the underlying assumption would be that the inherent angular dispersion will somehow be different at some other distance, else they wouldn’t specify a distance.  Sure; the wind comes more into play farther out, but that’s a separate issue, no?  Or am I missing something?  Maybe for the sake of clarity they should say “…as tested at 100 yards.”  I at least would have more respect for them then, but maybe I don’t know squat.