dop’s blog

The other day I was at a small Microsoft Techfest in TAMU - well, basically, it was more of a college student recruiting event. Nevertheless, I always go to those events, since they always have something interesting to hear and who knows, you might also win a XBOX (some would say that their food is also good, but I do not care, as I always have food at home).

Anyways, this last event was far better than I expected, due to Mr. Bill Hill. It is always exciting to meet people that have made quite a research in the Computer Science or Computer Engineering fields, but it is a lot more thrilling to meet people that are not Computer Scientists (Mr Hill was a journalist) and after so many years they have the motivation to make things better. We only had a small talk around why the user is not been given total control on how his document looks in an ebook reader and my being an ignorant fool on this topic made things worse, but I realized how much impact his ideas have - and will have - in future’s “computers” (they might not be as they are now).

Mr Hill is one of the inventors of ClearType technology, which I think it delivers the best readability on screen - and I have to admit that readability in Windows is way better than in Linux or anything else. He is the “reading guy” in Redmond and a very prestigious researcher. I stumbled upon a couple of videos that explain his way of thinking (here and here). He really thinks out-of-the-box and guys like him are what is needed for computer science which makes a loop over the same stuff again and again.