Over the 3 years during which a fellow is on tenure, the NSF gives $30K/year in “stipend” and $10.5K/year in “cost of education allowance,” also known as “tuition supplement.” The fellow doesn’t see a cent of this directly: it goes to the school. Graduate tuition at top institutions these days runs at $40K/year — outrageous, but that’s what it is. Then standard research and teaching assistantships are $25K/year. To the school, $65K/year is the standard price for a graduate student. NSF gives it $40.5K/year for free, so the price has been reduced to $24.5K/year. That’s a super deal for the school, but here’s the funny thing — some schools don’t see it that way.

To the school, the $10.5K/year in “cost of education allowance” given by NSF is just another source of general funds. Kaching! Now, being generous, the school passes on the $30K/year in “stipend” to the fellow instead of the $25K/year they’d normally pay, but then charges a “tuition shortfall” of $29.5K/year ($40K – $10.5K) to the fellow! What is the total value of the NSF fellowship now? $500/year is your answer.

Of course, the school, in a rare stroke of humanity, doesn’t expect you to actually live on $500/year, so instead of ponying up the remainder of the tuition like they are supposed to (per their tacit agreement with the NSF), they coerce the fellow to seek regular funding in a research or teaching assistantship and pay back all of the stipend from that. This quid pro quo service to the institution for purely financial reasons is about as blatant a violation of both the letter as well as the spirit of the fellowship terms as you can get.

Now I’ve brought up this ridiculous situation on several occasions when the NSF solicited commentary much like this survey and I’ve even called NSF, but NSF does not want anything to do with it, preferring to defer to the school’s coordinating officer — essentially letting the school’s own financial decisions override program policy. The student is caught in the middle. This is unconscionable bureaucratic buck-passing. For practical purposes, the true benefit of the fellowship, financial or otherwise, is not seen by the student, and this miserly arrangement does not befit the fellowship’s ostensible prestige.

Microsoft has for years tried to get into mobile devices. Here you see Bill Gates really uncomfortable with the notion that Apple has succeeded more than Microsoft in this space. He is not wrong, since for a time Windows phones and tablets were the only ones out there, while Apple’s Newton was forgotten memory. Those devices either used a slightly modified Windows OS or one that copied all of its metaphors. The latest Windows phones are an exception, but with Windows 8, it will no longer be. It cannot be disputed that there are important applications that do not exist on mobile devices (currently), and therefore mobile devices are not complete (currently). So people argue that mobile devices will be full-fledged computers or desktops will not die. The idea of a dual interface seems to be aimed in this direction. However, a third possibility exists. Applications, after all, merely solve real life problems. They are not themselves holy. If there were a different way of accomplishing the same things, the applications could be replaced. One could argue that data is the rather more holy object. Back to this later.

While devices are converging, it becomes a question of what the hardware distribution of the future will look like, and how functions will be partitioned among them. In this video, Steve Jobs posits a rather linear, functional view of computing history, where things moved from desktops to more mobile devices as usage functions evolved from scientific and office work to entertainment and socializing. Bill Gates posits a more encompassing and parasitic view, seeing computing power spreading to colonize all niches, a niche for each device, none really going away. To him, the kind of space or niche makes a difference, like whether a device fits in a pocket or not.

What they are both getting at is that there are constraints — some hardware, some social convention — that limit what functions can be used where. Because if it were at all possible, why wouldn’t one want all functions on all devices? But there are power, weight, screen-size, and input device constraints that are fundamental. Given that, you can’t possibly have all applications run in all devices.

To address this, one way is to have all devices become one device — a hardware solution along with its companion software like Windows 8. This “classic” solution has existed quite a while now, e.g. convertible laptops, some better than others. The problem is in both hardware and software. The equivalent tethered power and heavy-case computing power cannot be had with mobility at any given time, even though mobile devices are more powerful than computers of even a few years ago. And the software interface is also different — requiring a stylus for mouse-like precision (although I like the stylus, it’s one more thing to hold). With Windows 8, the interface problem maybe is solved, but the hardware problem remains. There is talk of some dual-part computer where you can remove a light (both weight and CPU power) piece of it. The non-mobile base of such a computer would have additional processing capabilities as well as keyboard and mouse like a standard docking station. The hardware design for this though, would be enormously complicated if it were to be efficient. For example, two processors separated a great physical distance, does not make for good communication speed. Either that, or when the light piece is docked, its own capabilities are totally disabled for its trivial contribution to total computing power. This would be a waste of hardware and the cost would be even greater than a tablet and a separate non-mobile computer combined.

So what about another way. Forget combining all devices into one device — in hardware. Why not have all these devices, and even let them run all their vastly different applications and interfaces at vastly different processing capabilities, but combine them at the level of data? Given the constraints of the devices, people will write any and all applications that support functions natural to them — we need not worry about that. We only care that these applications can access a common set of data and have seamless sync’ing between them. This also has a buzzword already, it’s called cloud computing. Yet I don’t think it’s about migrating applications to the cloud — not so, although some of that will take place, for “light” applications (light on bandwidth and computation). The full power of each device though, is going to harnessed, I am sure of that. So the best gains from the cloud is data sync’ing. This is a problem not merely of sync’ing, but of a method to record data in a way that is universally available regardless of software or hardware platform. It’s not just document data, but things like preferences, and program states. And I’m not talking about applications that are simple and entertainment-like or applications already on the web for which devices are only terminals. Furthermore, this “cloud” doesn’t even need to be an internet company, it can be managed among the devices themselves or by any mostly-on device that is at a common locus of interaction, like a “cloud server” or some such in the home. I think this is the more likely future, because it makes more sense.

Disk management: There appears to be some rudimentary non-destructive repartitioning functions like “extend” and “shrink,” much like gpart. The disk is also versioned. Creating and destroying symbolic links, however, is still not exposed in the shell.

Network management: A crapload of changes in network management — too much to figure out what’s going on there right now. Most notable is probably exposing IPv6 support.

Privilege escalation: Windows itself now makes the request for administrative privilege if it is needed, instead of saying the current user privileges are insufficient. So far this is saving a lot of time.

Foreign languages: Display of East Asian languages are enabled by the default installation (I guess that just means the fonts and codepages are installed by default). The input methods I use are still the same, although there are a lot more input methods now, including a half dozen minority languages of China. That’s amazing. But, I can’t believe that the language bar is still having issues, not knowing whether to hide itself on the taskbar or how it’s supposed to be aligned.

Other stuff: There is this “Windows Cardspace” thing which seems to be a online accounts manager. There is also a “People Near Me” function that uses the Messenger social network. Some lame games and a “game manager.” BitLocker and ReadyBoost are nice, but kind of over-engineered. I doubt these will be used extensively.

In general, I think there are many good and needed changes here, but very little that I find compelling. From 2000 to XP, remote desktop, multiple user logon, system restore, and wireless support were compelling. From XP to Vista, the only thing I see is Media Center. But that isn’t in most versions of Vista. Add packet writing of optical discs, also, that might come in handy. Some of the other changes might have been compelling years ago (like Sidebars), but at this point are too little too late. If new applications turn up either from Microsoft or others to make a compelling case for the new graphics subsystem or anything else that has been included (pen input? speech recognition? text-to-speech? imaging/color codecs?), things may be different.

In other trials:

• RDP 6 works fine. Sound quality seems better. Not much else exciting going on here. I thought there might be application publishing support, but that requires the server OS.
• Office 12 is fine. XML file format and some UI changes. The thing seems to be the same to me. Outlook doesn’t use the new UI but has improved IMAP support including remote sent-mail folder and auto-purge support, but I had those working with scripts anyway.