Fighting the second law of thermodynamics

T-13 days

An understanding of physics, I always maintain, is a useful foundation for living.  It helps to understand why launching a product can feel like an uphill struggle.  The reason is that the entropy always increases.  Put another way, the natural order of things is to descend into ever greater degrees of chaos.  If you want to replace chaos with order, it takes a great deal of energy.  There's no point fighting that - its just the way the universe works.

This helps to explain why my email inbox has quadrupled during launch and why getting anything done seems to take unbelievable amounts of energy.  The reason is that we are vastly reducing the entropy of the universe by launching what is the most incredibly integrated and ordered set of products in a decade so naturally, it takes a lot of energy.

We are doing very well though with everything coming together.  I know a lot of people are wanting the code now to play with - trial should be available for download soon.  In the meantime, it is available on MSDN now if you are a subscriber.  SharePoint Server 2007 is available for trial to everyone though here:

Links to download the RTW versions:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 x86 English Evaluation

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

I am back in the UK today after IT forum.  Here are some of the heros of IT forum who I caught up with while I was there.  These people know more about fighting ever increasing entropy than anyone.

Andrew Cheeseman (looking slightly wierder than in real life it has to be said, above left) heads up the team that builds the infrastructure at the events like teched it forum.  An absolutely incredible achievement all running vista and office and a wireless network.  Mark White had the tricky job of owning all the content for the tracks.  These guys are legends and officially the nicest blokes you could ever meet!

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 28, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2006
  Consider the logical conversion of the assumption A into the important conclusion B: in 1865 Clausius converted the assumption "Any irreversible process can be closed by a reversible process to become a cycle" into the conclusion "THE ENTROPY ALWAYS INCREASES". In the era of Postscientism a strict rule says: Whether the assumption A is true or false is immaterial, even if the falsehood is obvious. Unless a more profitable theory is offered the current theory involving the inference A->B should be praised and obeyed. So the assumption "Any irreversible process can be closed by a reversible process to become a cycle" is obviously false but the rule is so strict that, after 140 years of scrutiny, references to the falsehood amount to a single hint: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/ p.39: "A more important objection, it seems to me, is that Clausius bases his conclusion that the entropy increases in a nicht umkehrbar [irreversible] process on the assumption that such a process can be closed by an umkehrbar [reversible] process to become a cycle. This is essential for the definition of the entropy difference between the initial and final states. But the assumption is far from obvious for a system more complex than an ideal gas, or for states far from equilibrium, or for processes other than the simple exchange of heat and work. Thus, the generalisation to ‘all transformations occurring in Nature’ is somewhat rash." Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

• Anonymous
  December 05, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 05, 2006
  Unfortunately I have no more information about this, just I have got an URL an it is hungarian. As I know the guys afraid to publication and they created a Hungarian Patent similar to GE  US Patent, HYTEC.

• Anonymous
  December 12, 2006
  Goodness, what a useful thing a physics degree is but it just goes to show that the perenial educational cliche of "everything we taught you last year was basically an oversimplified view you should discard"  continues even after degree level.  I must come clean though, thermodynamics was never my best subject as my erudite and amusingly named tutor at Oxford, Dr Jelley would attest to.  Maybe I should send this thread to him for some comment..