There seems to be a good deal of Microsoft stuff over the past few editions of Scientific American (SCIAM), and before you ask yes I do live in the UK, but I find Nature a bit too academic for me and New Scientist has too many job adverts. SCIAM is just ‘popular’ science enough to read over breakfast.
The March edition has two such articles, but not on mainstream Microsoft products:
- One is on the Microsoft Theory Group of Microsoft Research and is called Graph Theory and Teatime. This looks at the team of top flight mathematicians choosing to work at Microsoft Research, as opposed to a more traditional career in academia, in much the same way as AT&T Bell labs operated in the past.
- The other on Digital Life, the current research and possibilities of using computers as external memory. It is written by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell again of Microsoft Research who are working on the www.mylifebits.com research project. Raises some interesting issues of security and archiving.
Both of these are every interesting and I think still available free on the web via the links above. I think they show a move by Microsoft to make their more academic and blue sky research known to the general public (or at least the ones who read pop science magazines!)
There was also an article by Bill Gates in the January edition A Robot in Every Home, now is it me or has this been promised to be about 10 years away since the 1960s - usually by Raymond Baxter on Tomorrows World. I will just have to wait and see.