nawl

The tea room has been locked up since Wednesday.

They stole the tables out of the nice seminar room, kicking computer vision class yesterday into the mini-auditorium downstairs.

There are shiny people in suits walking around in the tea room now.

There are scary security guards with those curly ear wire things hanging out in the printer room.

Yes, Bill Gates is visiting the department.

Time to go ogle.

Update: It's boring. The shiny people glared at us for sitting nearby.

Update on talk: Pretty boring.

He talked about the importance of software in doing things that future people might find useful to do with computers, such as machine translation and integration with all of their devices.

They played a couple of recruiting videos, one of Princeton alumni working for Microsoft talking about how much fun it was and how much Princeton spirit they have, and one that was uh Napoleon Dynamite and Bill Gates. They looked like they had fun making them.

I sat quite near the sign language interpreter, and amused myself by trying to keep up with where she was in translation. He just said "PC"... watch for it... there it is. He just said "around the world" and she just made a big sweeping circular motion with her hands. She was chatting with the guy she was signing for before the speech but I was behind him so I couldn't see his responses.

There were demos of new products: an honestly unimpressive photo management tool, the new Xbox which lets you plug in your ipod and play music or your camera to view pictures, and a camera/projector thing that was supposed to notice when you placed your cell phone in its view and let you log in, recognize and upload information on a business card,display your schedule, etc. The first two certainly suffered from an obtrusive and ugly UI. The third one won't impress me until I see an unrehearsed demo, and even then it's not far out enough to blow me away.

Then there was the Q&A session. People asked about DRM, intellectual property, whether constant upgrades were really necessary, how to get computers to third-world countries, something about censorship in China. Some guy invited him to come over and play Halo.

I'm not quite sure what the point is. There are easy public answers to all of those. "Of course we want to balance the right of artists to be paid for their work with the needs of consumers to have user-friendly products." "Microsoft is often the defendant in patent litigation, but I think the patent system in the US is the envy of the world." "We have a computer recycling program and last year we took 300,000 computers from businesses and gave them to communities." "We should work on making sure these countries have adequate health care and education to build the correct infrastructure before worrying about giving them all computers." (Actually that response impressed me.) "Encryption is much more advanced than code-breaking. There are other problems to work on."

Even for the questions where we don't like the public answers, the response you're going to get in a Q&A session after a polished presentation will continue to be polished. The cynic in me thinks that people are either aware of these issues or aren't listening.

I wouldn't know what kind of question to ask that wouldn't get a nice response that makes everyone happy. Another student suggested "So, Bill, how's your sex life?" This of course launched a discussion on how Microsoft will integrate all of our communication techology to organize all of your phone calls and emails and pictures from your girlfriend so that when they release Microsoft Girlfriend she can seamlessly integrate with all of your devices and you won't even notice there is no longer a human behind them. The equivalent for women, of course, would just be the fabled women who move to Redmond in search of eligible Microsoft bachelors. Is there a cute word for them?

The audience was supportive. The undergrads gave him some sort of "Crystal Tiger" award for being awesome. I saw no shenanigans like at other schools. (Though I must disagree with one thing: maybe he has no charisma, but he has clearly spent a lot of time and effort in learning to do public speaking. No stumbling, no mispronunciations, just the right amount of faked thought before launching into each topic. A little bit of incoherence while fiddling with video games, but that's forgivable.)