Thursday trivia #92

• Interesting essay from Tyler Cowan in which he claims that alcohol consumption “is at least as dangerous and undesirable” as gun ownership. Apparently I am an elite because I can handle both.. but then you would expect me to say that, wouldn’t you?
• R.I.P., Mr. Ebert. I thoroughly enjoyed your work lo these many years. You will be missed.
• These images make me really miss the old NASA. And this auction of space-related items makes me wish I had some completely disposable cash stuffed under my mattress.
• Want insomnia? Read this article on insider threats in pathogen research. You’re welcome.
• If you read the insider threats paper, you may need some help to restore your faith in humanity. Since you can’t relax with a beer or a glass of wine (that’s as bad as owning guns, y’know), check out this non-profit that uses Coca-Cola’s worldwide distribution network to deliver lifesaving medicine.
• Looks like Ray Lane is taking the first bullet for the Autonomy acquisition train wreck at H-P. I wonder who will be next?
• Stay classy, Mr. President.

Drone strikes on criminals

For my first Flying Fridays post, I want to return to a favorite topic: drones. My first-ever published work was an article for the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) on some research work done there on unmanned aerial vehicles. I sure wish I’d kept a copy (their archives were no help, sadly). Ever since then I’ve had an abiding interest in the mechanics, ethics, and practical use of unmanned aircraft.

Anyway, here’s a little snippet from the New York Times this week:

China considered using a drone strike in a mountainous region of Southeast Asia to kill a Myanmar drug lord wanted in the killings of 13 Chinese sailors, but decided instead to capture him alive, according to an influential state-run newspaper.

Sound familiar? To put this in context: the publicly-disclosed criteria for droning a US citizen are that it must be infeasible for US or allied forces to capture or kill the target; the target must be a “senior member” of Al-Qaeda, and the target must pose an imminent threat of violent attack against the US. Non-citizens are subject to a different set of rules, detailed in this handy flowchart. In either case, the US government explicitly reserves the right to use unmanned aircraft to kill people who have acted against US interests.. and now the Chinese are copying us.

Thought experiment: imagine a search-and-replace of “Al-Qaeda” in the above paragraph with some other criminal or terrorist organization. Suppose a nearby country (say, Mexico, or Venezuela) becomes a base for violent, criminal-but-not-terrorist, attacks on US citizens. Internal governance is too weak to allow the local authorities to arrest the bad guys. Do you drone them? In other words, could this policy conceivably extend to pre-emptive strikes on drug lords or other violent criminals?

If so, who’s next? If not, why not, given the current legal framework?

If you think this is an unrealistic scenario,  here’s a question to ponder. Law enforcement agencies can, and have, used manned aircraft carrying snipers to fire on suspects. What practical difference is there between an FBI HRT helicopter carrying a sniper and an armed FBI HRT drone? If it’s OK for US to stage armed counternarcotics missions into, e.g.  Honduras and shoot people, why wouldn’t it be OK to just send a drone instead?

(nb. I am not arguing that it is a good idea for the US to be doing these things, merely positing a logical extension of our current policies.)

Meanwhile, the FAA is still trying to figure out how to integrate drones safely into the National Airspace System. There’s a ton of interesting commentary on this AVweb opinion piece that I commend to your attention; there seems to be an emerging consensus in the aviation world that mixing drones and manned aircraft is a recipe for disaster because current unmanned aerial systems (UAS) don’t implement the see-and-avoid behavior drilled into human pilots from day 1. Large, remotely-operated drones such as those operated by Customs and Border Protection are relatively safe: they are large (and thus somewhat easier to see), have elaborate command-and-control systems, operate in predictable areas, and generally fly at medium to high altitudes. What I’m more worried about are smaller, less-visible, less-well-equipped drones (such as the kind operated by police departments in Houston, Dallas, and various other locales). Small drones offer so much potential utility for surveying, traffic monitoring and control, crop monitoring, aerial application, and burrito delivery that their arrival is inevitable; I just don’t want to have to play dodge-a-drone when I fly.

Thursday trivia #89

• I spent Sunday with my extended tribe in Seattle– I had coffee with Tim and Julie, then lunch with my old friend John Peltonen of 3Sharp (who looks just like he did the last time I saw him– no aging at all!), then an afternoon get-together with several Exchange MVPs, including Jeff Guillet, Tony Redmond, Michael van Horenbeeck, Steve Goodman, Paul Cunningham, Sigi Jagott, Brian Desmond, and Clint Boessen. Then Tony and I had a very productive meeting with Karen Szall, our editor at Microsoft Press. (On that note I think there will be some interesting news coming from MS Press in the near future… stay tuned!)
• I couldn’t stay for the MVP Summit because I needed to be back in California to help kick off the second class of students for the school we’re doing for the Veterans’ Administration. My first week teaching is next week and I’m looking forward to it; I’ve been in bug-fixing mode for a while and look forward to more classroom time.
• I’m still loving the Surface Pro. I was able to find a Surface 128GB at the Best Buy in Issaquah, and Windows Easy Transfer worked flawlessly to move over all of my settings and accounts. It didn’t transfer purchased apps from the Microsoft Store, but it turns out that swiping down from the top of the screen while in the store app reveals a link that will download all your previous purchases.
• Fascinating article in the New York Times about the junk food industry and the science and technology used to make junk food addictive. It’s interesting to consider this in light of the LDS Church’s “Word of Wisdom“, which says that the famous Mormon dietary law was given “in consequence ofevils and designs which do and will exist in the hearts of conspiring men in the last days.” Purposely making unhealthy foods addictive sure sounds like “evils and designs” to me.
• I haven’t flown much lately, but this weekend I’ll be doing my rental checkout at the Redstone Arsenal Flying Activity, where my instructor is an honest-to-goodness rocket scientist. It’s also about time for me to start learning how to fly the Cessna 182 (and its retractable-gear sibling, the 182RG). After that, once the book is finished, it’s instrument-rating time!

Coming soon: do-it-yourself armed drones

I recently finished Daniel Suarez’s excellent thriller Kill Decision. The major plot point: parties unknown have been releasing autonomous, armed drones that are killing people in a variety of ways. The drones are capable of insect-level intelligence and swarming behavior, and of autonomously finding human targets and bombing or shooting them. Suarez asks a fairly provocative question: would America’s love affair with drones change if other countries, or criminal syndicates, or even individuals had them and used them as freely in the US as we use them elsewhere? Great plot, well-written, and solid characterizations– by far the best of his books so far. Highly recommended.

Anyway, with that in mind, I saw an article on the Lawfare blog about a guy who equipped an inexpensive commercial drone with a paintball marker. This video shows it in action, hitting targets easily while maneuvering slowly. The video’s a little fear-monger-y, but the narrator is right: “it seems inevitable” that these drones will be used in ways the manufacturer didn’t anticipate.  I sent the video to a couple of coworkers, one of whom asked “I wonder how hard it is to shoot accurately with it?” That got me to thinking… so off the top of my head, I jotted down a few factors that would affect the accuracy of a firearm-equipped drone. Note that here I’m talking about an autonomous UAV, not a remotely-piloted, man-in-the-loop drone. 

• What’s it for? What kind of range and endurance do you need? It would be easy to build a sort of launch rack that would launch a drone to check out a target that triggered a tripwire, motion detector, etc. It’d be a little harder to build one that could autonomously navigate, but definitely doable– as Paul proved with his Charlie-following project. See also: the Burrito Bomber, which can follow waypoints and then deliver a payload on target.  Drones to sneak into somewhere and snipe a single target would have different range/payload requirements than a patrol or incident-reponse drone. This drives the weight of the drone (since more range requires more fuel).
• What’s it packing? The purpose of the drone dictates what kind of firearm you want it to carry. Some of Suarez’s drones had short-barrelled .38 pistols, which are plenty good enough to kill from close range but wouldn’t be very accurate past around 35 feet or so. A longer barrel and a heavier round would provide better accuracy, at the cost of weight and size.
• How much range do you need? A sniper drone that can shoot targets from 1500yds is definitely feasible— use a .50 Barrett, for example. It would be heavy and range-limited, though, unless you wanted to make it bigger. In general, heavier bullets are more stable and give you better accuracy, but they’re heavier to carry and shoot.
• How stable is the drone? A light drone that’s sensitive to wind, etc. will be harder-pressed to make accurate shots. Gyrostabilizing the gun platform would help, but it would add a weight and cost penalty (including for power for the gyros, plus the gyros themselves). The bigger the drone, the more sensors, power, and ammo you can carry… but the more noise, infrared, and visual signature it creates. A small sneaky drone may be a better deal than a large, more powerful one.
• What can you see? In other words, what kind of sensors do you have for aiming? How good is their resolution and range? Do they have to be automated? If so, you need to be able to either fire at the centroid of the target or track interesting parts, like wheels of a truck or a person’s head), using machine vision. 
• Where are you pointing the gun, and how accurate can you be? What kind of angular resolution does the gun-pointing system have? If you’re willing to slow to a dead hover, or nearly so, you can be very accurate (as in the video above). If you want to go faster, you’ll have a more challenging set of requirements– you have to be able to point the gun while the drone’s moving, and changing its aim point means fighting inertia in a way you don’t have to worry about in a hover.

There are lots of other more subtle considerations, I’m sure; these are just what I came up with in 5 minutes. Any engineer, pilot, or armorer could come up with a couple dozen more without too much effort. Of course, you could just buy a pre made system like this one from Autocopter. Isn’t it great to know they’ll lease you as many UAVs as you need? Just for a ballpark figure, Autocopter quotes an 8Kg payload on their smallest drones– figure 3Kg for a cut-down M4 and that leaves you a reasonable 5Kg for sensors, guidance, navigation, and control.

What could you do with such drones? The mind boggles. Imagine that, say, your favorite Mexican drug cartel cooked up a bunch of these in their machine shops and used them to guard the pot farms they run in national forests. Or say the white-supremacy militia guys in Idaho built some for sovereign defense. Or suppose you built 100 or so of them, staged them inside an empty 18-wheeler with a tarp over the top, then launched them into Candlestick Park during a 49ers game. There are all sorts of movie-plot-worthy applications for these drones, to say nothing of the ones Suarez wrote about.

Meanwhile, the February 2013 NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) newsletter is full of safety reports filed after drones got into airspace where they weren’t supposed to be… and these were piloted, unarmed drones. How careful do you think these hypothetical armed drones would be about respecting the National Airspace System? I think I’ll be extra careful when flying around… that smudge on the windscreen might turn out to be an armed autonomous drone.

Thursday trivia #77

• The boys and I are headed for New Orleans this weekend to see my mother and, not incidentally, to hit the Voodoo Music Festival. Of the bands there, I am most excited about seeing Metallica and Skrillex, but there are a few other gems; hopefully we’ll make it there in time for Thomas Dolby on Friday.
• The law surrounding workplace privacy in California is really, really interesting.
• I’m really intrigued by two new devices: the iPad mini, because it’s the perfect size for use in the cockpit; and the Microsoft Surface, because it looks like a better device for some of the most common tasks I do on the road. I’m not quite ready to order either of them just yet, though…
• Candy corn on the cob. What will they think of next?
• So far season 3 of The Walking Dead is excellent. I am actually enjoying it more than season 2 because I’m watching it in HD on my AppleTV instead of in crap-o-vision from AT&T’s Uverse, which had terrible picture quality on AMC.

Bonus: if you like airplanes (and, really, who doesn’t?) then this video of Endeavour flying over southern California is priceless. Watch it in high-quality and full screen for maximum enjoyment.

Thursday trivia #76

A special search-query edition of Thursday Trivia! Here are some of the search terms people have used to get to my blog over the last couple of months:

• how is reading used if you’re a marine: probably not often enough.
• fried fish harmful: for the fish, yes, it certainly is.
• what about airwork: as for me, I highly recommend it.
• s tripit pro worth it: yes, 100%. I also just signed up for CLEAR (thanks to a 4-month trial offer from Living Social for $18) and will report back on how well it works.
• stupid allergy warnings: now you’re talking; I am definitely allergic to stupid too and sometimes I wish there were warnings, like the pollen forecasts that the Weather Channel does.
• everyday carry pouch: hello, Mr. Kangaroo.

The top five search terms that have brought people here since I moved to WordPress: “conversation action settings”, “paul robichaux”, “autodiscover.xml”, “outlook auto discover”, and “the last psychiatrist.” Guess I know what I should be writing about more.

Tomorrow’s post will be titled “how Paul Robichaux used autodiscover.xml to find the last psychiatrist’s conversation action settings folder.”

Thursday trivia #74

• On my last trip to Huntsville, my American flight from Dallas to Huntsville arrived more than two hours late. Consequently, when I booked my flights for October, they’re all on Delta. This letter from a pilot to former AA CEO Bob Crandall, and his reply, are well worth reading.
• Replace Alice and Bob? Never! You can have my standard cryptographic personas when you pry them from my DPAPI storage.
• I have a lot more I want to say about MEC, and I will, but for now the BLUF: fantastic show, great content, and a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with my peers. I saw probably a dozen people that I hadn’t seen in five or ten years, and met maybe another dozen with whom I’ve collaborated and corresponded without ever meeting face to face. I’m already eager to sign up for the next one.
• General James Mattis, a Marine’s Marine.
• The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law. Sounds like a fun read.

Thursday trivia #73

• All that cotton you see when flying into the Huntsville airport? That’s money.
• MacObserver did a comparison test of battery life on various versions of OS X. They document what I’d noticed anecdotally: significantly lower battery life in 10.8.
• Great summary of a student pilot’s first solo… in Cyprus.. at age 69.
• Hmmm. iPhone 5, or Lumia 920? I am trying to decide simultaneously whether to upgrade and/or bite the bullet and move over to Verizon. I am unhappy with AT&T’s coverage both in the Bay Area and in Huntsville; I barely get signal in my house, which is no more than 2mi from an actual AT&T store. This decision is complicated by the fact that the boys’ phones are additional lines on my family plan, and they couldn’t use their existing phones if I move to VZW– plus I’d have to eat cancellation fees on some of the lines. Verizon’s shared data plan for 3 smartphones + 1 dumb phone is $240/month; compared to the $220 I pay now for the same 4 devices (5GB for me, 2GB for Tom, unlimited for David) this is not a compelling deal.  StraightTalkis an option, except that they apparently cap data at 2GB/line/month. I might just move Dave and Tom to StraightTalk, then keep Matt’s feature phone and my existing AT&T line. Or not!
• Single guys, watch out: there are women out there who will pull off your prosthetic leg and then beat you with it.
• I mentioned in a meeting today that VMware’s new vSphere client is based on Flash. That mention was greeted with much incredulity, but it is, in fact, true.
• The other day I saw a tweet that put it very succinctly: if Obama wins the election it will be because of his campaign and in spite of the economy; if Romney wins, it will be in spite of his campaign and because of the economy.

Thursday trivia #66

• I always thought of nutria as being primarily a Louisiana problem, but it turns out they’re elsewhere– including the Delmarva Peninsula. Even the New York Times says so.
• Batman tonight! David and I are headed to see all 3 movies, back to back. (Don’t tell anyone but I may take a nap toward the middle of Batman Begins.)
• This is a really interesting article about the design process behind how Microsoft supports touch in Office 2013, but I agree with what Gruber said: users don’t care about design, they care about efficacy.
• So AT&T now has a shared data plan… that would actually cost me more than what I pay now for the same amount of data on the same devices: 10GB on 3 smartphones and 1 dumb phone (that currently has no data) would cost me $240, a $35 increase. Thanks, guys, but no thanks.
• Tony weighs in on the multi-mailbox search licensing changes. I hope Microsoft takes the opportunity in Exchange 2013 to fix all of the scripts that count ECALS, etc., including the one that gathers data for the organizational health summary. Still no word, of course, on Exchange 2013 licensing. Experience suggests that license terms and requirements will be one of the very last things Microsoft discloses.
• How to sell an airplane. First, of course, you have to buy one.
• The McLaren dealership was every bit what I hoped it would be, at least as far as cars are concerned. What beauties.
• Oshkosh is next week, but I can’t go. I have high hopes for next year though.

Thursday trivia #65

• “7 Minutes of Terror.” Just go watch it.
• Fantastic paper detailing the process of designing and prototyping the F-22. Its subtitle: “An aerospace melodrama, for adults only.” Highly recommended.
• Don McGowan, an acquaintance of mine who happens to be Pikachu’s lawyer, just started a new blog: The Legal Minimum, subtitled “a plain-English overview of legal issues that affect creatives and creators, as understood by someone who works in the business.” If you are a creative or creator, you should be reading it.
• A good question: does Google have any social skills at all?
• From the “I hate it when that happens” department: two Mirage 2000s go supersonic over the Brazilian Supreme Court building. Hijinks ensue.
• This is a pretty good explanation of the TSA PreCheck program, which I am going to interview for on the 31st. I hope it helps.
• A beautiful story of a wrong redressed, and of pride in one’s country.

RIP Exchange UPDATE

I am sad to report that I just got an e-mail from the lovely and talented Amy Eisenberg, executive editor at Windows IT Pro, letting me know that they are ending the publication of the Exchange UPDATE newsletter that I’ve been writing since 2002.

  The original UPDATE was delivered only via e-mail, and it was advertising-supported so that it made money for the magazine. Over time, the market shifted, with a much greater emphasis placed on delivery via RSS and a sea change in how advertisers spend (and how media outlets package and sell advertising.) Because of these changes, it doesn’t make sense for Penton to continue to publish Exchange UPDATE, so it has been moved to the great folder in the sky (and, no, I’m not talking about SkyDrive.) It’s a business decision, and not one lightly taken, but I understand the reasoning and don’t bear the magazine folks any ill will.

On the contrary– writing the UPDATE has been a terrific growth opportunity over the last 10 (!) years. When I first started writing it, I took over from the redoubtable Jerry Cochran, who had recently moved to a new role at Microsoft. At first I found the demands of writing a weekly column on Exchange to be almost insurmountable, but I soon came to realize that there’s always something going on in the Exchange world to write about. Companies introduce new products or leave the market altogether; Microsoft ships or delays products; interesting people create interesting things. This cycle will go on, of course, and I’ll still be writing about it here and for Windows IT Pro. Don’t be surprised if you also see some of my writing in new outlets as well, either…

Thursday trivia #63

• From the department of giant robots: an industrial robot with an industrial laser. I know what I want for Christmas.
• They don’t make ‘em like these guys anymore: Watson’s Whizzers.
• Knolling: something I’d like to do with my toolbox. I wouldn’t dare attempt it with my desks at work or home.
• This interactive chart of the top 10 causes of death in the US from 1900-2010 is absolutely engrossing. The killers of yore– tuberculosis, influenza, “gastrointestinal infections”– have been supplanted by heart disease, cancer, and airway diseases.
• What I hope everyone who reads this blog understands: the military has people whose job it is to plan for every imaginable contingency, from Plan Orange to Plan Red to Iraq. So this article shouldn’t surprise you too much. Don’t take the fact that we have contingency plans for attacking Iran as evidence that anyone in the military wants to do so, or thinks it’s a good idea.

Thursday trivia #62

• Why are the Chinese investing heavily in commercial real estate in and around Toledo? (And no, the answer is not “because no one else wants to.”)
• Got to take nephew Charlie to Fry’s Electronics for the first time yesterday. It was the quintessential Fry’s experience: wide-eyed wonder on the part of the first-time visitor coupled with surly-to-indifferent service from the floor staff, mixed in with a hearty helping of inaccurate information. (The cashier we had, bless her heart, solved the problem for us, though.)
• The NTSB wants you to know that in-cockpit NEXRAD weather may not be as timely as pilots think it is. OK, fine. I’d still rather have old NEXRAD than none at all.
• I’m very interested in Microsoft’s Surface products, but the timing of the introduction seems a little odd. Press reports say that no one was allowed to use the Touch Cover, one of the signature Surface features. That makes me think that it wasn’t ready for public handling– so why not wait until it was ready? One of the unique things that Apple’s done with their product introductions, and that Microsoft could easily copy, is having the product ready to ship the minute it’s announced. Imagine the impact of the Surface announcement if Microsoft had said “here it is, here’s what it costs, and you can buy one today” instead of “here it is; stand by for further details.”
• If you wonder why Pixar’s films are so successful, wonder no more– this list of “story basics” neatly captures the things they think about when crafting stories– and make no mistake, the stories are what make their films so good, not the technology.
• Switzerland as one giant booby trap. With fondue.
• Dick Collins’ writing is always thought-provoking, but never more so than here: “The ultimate responsibility: thoughts on family flying“.

In which I dispute Tony Redmond re Windows Phone upgrades

Microsoft just wrapped up the keynote for their Windows Phone Developer Summit. Following as it does on the heels of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, comparisons are inevitable… so let me succumb to the inevitable:

• At WWDC, Apple announced iOS 6 and talked more about the forthcoming “Mountain Lion” release of OS X, which follows OS X “Lion”‘s lead by incorporating a number of iOS-like features. Many observers believe that Apple’s long-term plan is to provide as much of a unified core between iOS, OS X, and AppleTV as possible.
• At WPDS, Microsoft announced Windows Phone 8 (“Apollo”), which will share a common core with Windows 8– thereby beating Apple to the core OS-integration punch. They also highlighted some nifty new Apollo features that will depend on their hardware device partners, including new higher-resolution screens and support for NFC.

As they normally do, Apple was mostly quiet about the device upgrade path for iOS 6. Microsoft, on the other hand, was up front about the fact that current Windows Phone devices won’t be getting Apollo. Tony has a beef with this approach:

I think this is a brain-dead decision that looks pretty feeble when compared against Apple’s record of making sure that new releases of their O/S run on older versions of iPhones. For example, the iPhone 3GS that I used before making the now-lamentable decision to try Windows Phone 7.5, upgraded smoothly from iOS 3 to iOS5 over the time I owned the phone.

This is clearly a situation where Apple is right… well, except that they’re not.

It is true that iOS 6 will run on older devices. For example, my not-yet-two-year-old iPhone 4 will run iOS 6, as will all models of the iPad; even the relatively ancient 3GS will get the upgrade.

However, there are a number of iOS 6 features that will not work on anything older than an iPhone 4S. Among these: FaceTime over 3G and turn-by-turn directions in the mapping app, two features that exist either as App Store apps or hacks that can be applied to jailbroken devices.

Apple hasn’t said why they won’t ship these features for iPhone 4 users. It might be due to technical limitations (though I doubt it in the case of turn-by-turn directions), but I suspect it’s more likely to be as a tactic to drive sales of new devices. After all, Apple’s profit on iOS devices come from the hardware (and to a lesser extent, the attach rate of purchases from the App Store).

Microsoft, on the other hand, makes no profit on WP hardware except to the extent that they collect a license fee per handset. That raises the question of what Microsoft should have done with Apollo. You could argue, as Tony does, that at least the shiny new Lumia 900 should get the upgrade, and that ideally older devices should as well. But this approach poses some really interesting tradeoffs for Microsoft. They get to choose between two options, to wit:

• spending a large amount of money and engineering time to get Apollo running on older WP7 devices, such as the HTC Surround or the original Samsung Focus, from which they will never derive any additional revenue and for which carriers may decide not to give their customers the upgrade anyway? or
• spending money and effort on polishing Apollo to take full advantage of new hardware, sales of which will drive carrier efforts and directly put cash in Microsoft’s coffers?

I don’t think that Microsoft’s choice was a very difficult one. If you look at the list of Apollo features, some of them (such as NFC, new resolution support, on-device BitLocker encryption,  and the new DirectX) require upgraded hardware. Some of them (such as deep VoIP integration, which I dearly wish Apple would copy, the new Nokia map experience, and support for native C++ code) do not, and could feasibly be backported, but only to the extent that they don’t depend on the new Windows 8 common kernel. Some of the new features, in fact, are actually apps, which means that Microsoft could potentially ship them as separate standalone updates in the future.

When Tony says

After all, we’re dealing with software here and surely a few IF… THEN… ELSE conditions could be incorporated into the code to support older devices?

I’m reminded of our earlier discussion about the pros and cons of requiring an Active Directory version update for Exchange 15, in particular the observation that the test burden of software changes is a lifelong obligation. Adding a feature isn’t always hard, but once it’s added you must test it on every device and configuration for as long as you support that feature– and that is even more true here when you consider the size of the WP test matrix, which contains dozens of devices and dozens of carriers. If I were Terry Myerson, the corporate VP at Microsoft who owns Windows Phone, I wouldn’t spend the money on backporting the core, even if it were technically possible. It doesn’t make sense as an investment, nor is the ongoing cost burden supportable.

(nb. Myerson, you may recall, is the fellow who made the at-the-time extremely unpopular decision that Exchange 2007 would require x64 hardware. This was widely hailed as being an arrogant and ignorant move on Microsoft’s part, but it was actually one made for solid technical reasons, and in retrospect it has proven to be the right decision; the scalability and performance benefits of that move have been critical improvements to Exchange 2007, 2010, and 15.)

While Tony thinks of Microsoft’s move as being a “sad and arrogant indication” of Microsoft’s contempt for its mobile customers[1], I instead see it as a realistic acceptance of the fact that even the mighty Microsoft has limits on what they can feasibly accomplish. They are fighting hard to stay relevant in the mobile device market, and they’ve apparently decided that their effort is better spent on net-new development work. Based on my outsider’s view, I can’t disagree.

Having said that: yes, I’m disappointed that my two-year-old HTC Mozart (and the Lumia 800 I’m going out to buy this afternoon for a project) won’t get the Apollo upgrade.. but no more so than I am that my iPhone 4 won’t get the full flavor of iOS 6. In fact, I am probably more likely to buy a new device to run Apollo than I am to buy a new device for iOS 6. Why? Look at the delta in features; absent some major new hardware improvement, or some as-yet-hidden iOS 6 features, it doesn’t make sense to shell out for a new device just to get Siri, turn-by-turn maps, and FaceTime over 3G. But at the end of the day, this is a business decision, not one that Windows Phone customers should take personally.

[1] You know who really has contempt for their mobile customers? The carriers. Yeah, that’s right; the same ones who do things like block Windows Phone and Android updates. Of course, you can argue that as an OS manufacturer that doesn’t make its own devices, Microsoft’s customers are the carriers, not consumers. Apple’s in a different space because they sell devices both through carriers and direct-to-consumer, as do Google and the increasingly-irrelevant RIM.

A tough travel experience

If you travel often, then you know something that more casual travelers often never learn: the law of averages always catches up with you in the end. Case in point: this weekend I went to Huntsville to visit the boys. I was scheduled to fly on American SFO-DFW-HSV on a Friday afternoon. My outbound flight was scheduled to leave at 2:20pm, and I had about a 40-minute connection for my DFW-HSV flight– the last one of the day.

This particular afternoon, SFO was windy– 31 knots gusting to 36. When I got to the airport, I noticed my outbound flight was delayed. Even though the airplane itself was there, the flight attendants were coming in on another flight, which had been delayed because of the wind. The delay was long enough that by the time the flight left, I would have missed my Huntsville flight and thus been consigned to spend the night in Dallas. The American gate agent helpfully offered to put me on a United flight SFO-DEN-HSV, so I let her and took off at a dead run for Terminal 3, where United/Continental’s SFO flights (mostly) leave from (some are now in Terminal 1, as I soon learned.) However, I only had about 25 minutes to exit terminal 2, enter terminal 3, clear security, and board the flight– clearly not possible. I found a helpful United agent who led me to the “additional services” desk. After a rather lengthy wait, which gave me a good chance to see how disorganized UA’s current SFO operations are, I spoke with an agent who told me I’d have to go back to American to get rerouted again… so I did. I ended up on the redeye SFO-ORD, which connected to a Huntsville flight that got me in about 10:20 the next morning– so only about 12 hours later than planned.

The flights were uneventful, but then when I got to Huntsville I discovered that my luggage was still in Chicago. Ooops. I gave the ticket agent a delivery address for my bag, picked up my rental car, got the boys, and went to the hotel. Later in the day, I noticed that large clouds of white smoke were coming out of the rental car whenever the engine exceeded about 3500 rpm. I called Avis and they quickly sent over a replacement, so that went well. It ended up being quite a good weekend, but it certainly reminded me that when you travel, you will occasionally, and inevitably, end up with a trip with a much higher than average hassle factor. Such is life. All things considered, this one wasn’t too bad; I was only 12 hours late and didn’t have any real major problems, just a string of annoyances. Hopefully now things will revert to the norm of trouble-free travel.

(Oh, and as I write this, I’m on an American flight DFW-SFO. It’s a new-ish 737-800, which means that it has in-seat power in coach. For some inexplicable reason, though, it does not have Gogo wifi. For some reason I always assume that such a new aircraft will have wi-fi. Delta has spoiled me in that regard, I suppose…)