vogonj

Windows 8 HTML5 apps are designed completely differently from on-the-Web HTML5 apps and Native Client apps.

the carryover is significant but you don't get a Windows 8 port for free.

> The Xbox 360 also does constant updates that need a reboot.

however, unlike the PS3, 360 updates tend to take 30 seconds to a minute, except for big things like the NXE and the whatever-the-newest-Dashboard-thing-is-called; PS3 updates can take anywhere from 30 seconds to an hour and a half (literally, that's how long it took my PS3 to patch out-of-box the first time I started it.)

again, even if you're doing the same thing as your competitors, there is a lot of space to do it poorly. :)

"This is easy to say as someone who has never managed a product, but I feel silent self-update is table stakes for consumer-facing products at this point."

yes, but no. saying that silent self-update is table stakes is missing the point: table stakes from your users' perspective is "shipping software that doesn't need to be consciously maintained."

whether you ship rarely and get the bugs out before you do, or ship frequently but have automatic upgrades that don't break things, doesn't matter.

not to ruin it for you, but IE 6 usage is so high in China because China has a bunch of pirated XP SP0/SP1 installs; IE 7/8 is XPSP2+ only, and IE 9 is Vista+ only.

this same piracy is why the Business Software Alliance was originally a SOPA supporter.

the added value of a Windows 8 tablet over a Windows Phone device is that a heavily-encouraged subset of applications will run across those devices and a traditional desktop. Windows Phone will only run desktop Silverlight applications out-of-the-box (and even those require some cajoling.) Windows 8 Metro-style apps will run across desktops and tablets without any additional work.

and 90% of the world still runs Windows on their "traditional" computers, so this is an appealing proposition.

this is either hilarious (if he's just kidding around for PR's sake, and in reality he read the thing and took it to heart) or tragic (if he's really as dismissive as he suggests.)

Roboto may be clumsy, but it's far from a patchwork of existing pieces. (if you look, really look, at those comparison charts, you'll notice that even the "frankensteined" source fonts have significant differences from the Roboto glyphs they inspired, in weight, shape, and proportion. the bar on the capital Q looks nothing alike, for the most blatant example.)

it's not the case that Roboto is a ripoff of an existing face, or even four existing faces (for the special case of "an existing face" == Helvetica, I posted about this at length here at my blog, complete with ranting and bad photoshops: http://http204.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/all-sans-serifs-are-...). it is the case that it's a product of its times and took inspiration from faces which already existed -- because if you create a font from scratch, intentionally trying to do only things which have never been done before, you're likely to end up with something completely unreadable.

that said, to me, it's super unrefined, chunky, and challenging to read -- it's outright broken at small sizes (and, thus, on low-DPI displays) where letters blob out around the edges due to poor hinting.

I'd much rather they just bring back Droid Sans. :(

inclusive of that, the best term is probably "machine state" or similar.

to some extent, though, this devalues lytro pictures as "photograph-as-artistic-statement" in favor of the much more contemporary "photograph-as-infallible-chronicler-of-the-coffee-you-got-this-morning."

(that said, I really want one of these.)

as someone who's tried to use Mono.Cecil, it kind of sucks if you're not already developing on the Mono toolchain (among other things, there's no interoperability between System.Reflection types and Mono.Cecil types, and even if you're on Mono, I don't think you can "vivisect" running Assemblies.) Microsoft has a product called FxCop (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb429476(VS.80).aspx) which does style analysis and linting -- however, the code analysis is all embedded in the FxCop binary and undocumented.

suffice to say, I'm psyched about Roslyn -- more about code transformations than correctness aids.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBKDF2

use PBKDF2 (plus a SHA-family hash function.) use PBKDF2. use PBKDF2. use PBKDF2. use PBKDF2. use PBKDF2. use PBKDF2. use PBKDF2. use PBKDF2. use PBKDF2.

if you consider SMTP+IMAP/POP3 to be APIs, then this is a simple corollary to Zawinski's Law. the reduction is left as an exercise to the reader.

how do you know that this isn't due to the (small, even if we're being charitable) size of the community rather than a G+ design choice? if it's the former rather than the latter, your days of liking G+ are numbered.

this link is some tech blogger's recapitulation of a Forbes tech blogger's expose of a Daily Mail article announcing Chitika's press release.

how is it any more trustworthy? at least Chitika's page has a graph on it (though they're tight-lipped about what that graph represents.)

http://insights.chitika.com/2011/failure-to-launch-google-gr... is the source article.

the 1200% number came from "Reportedly, Google+ saw a surge in traffic of over 1200% due to the additional publicity, but the increased user base was only temporary, as was projected in an earlier insights post." and the 60% drop came from "But, soon after, traffic fell by over 60% as it returned to its normal, underwhelming state."

but the graph right below that shows Google+ going back (in Chitika's "traffic index", whatever that is) to just about where it was before it was made public. as a result, I don't think those two numbers can be composed, and the "heh, guess 480% doesn't count for anything" smugness I've seen from a couple different places is based on everyone else's misconception of what the numbers mean.

it's not as clear-cut as that -- it's mostly a combination of a traditional "you should work on these things and get better at having X, Y, and Z desirable qualities" conversations with your boss and Microsoft's love of creating systems with jargon that is inscrutable to the outside.

(disclaimer: I'm a Microsoft employee with about 3 years served.)

it's not "nostalgia" in the sense of old/classic things, or at least that's what I get from his thesis. it's nostalgia in the sense of doing things because, gosh darn it, that's the way we've always done them.

his argument is that the Apple of "the crazy ones, the rebels, the troublemakers" would ignore what's profitable and what the rest of the industry does, and make wide-open systems, humanely -- because Steve would've seen what doesn't work about the current model, thrown it out, and done it his own way.

The Beatles and historical figures are (arguably) timeless classics which don't grow worse with age; walled gardens and overseas manufacturing are (arguably) relics of an era where Apple was struggling to gain a foothold in the industry, and that's what the author claims passes for nostalgia.

no, obviously they went to the trouble for the licensing fees. but they did, as a side effect to the licensing fees, agree to make their invention freely-practicable -- as opposed to the default, where it would be protected by trade secret laws in perpetuity -- after their monopoly period ended.

so that's worth something, I guess.

a) nice "taxation is theft" dig in there.

b) the entire purpose of the patent system is that ideas can be entered into a register and time-limited monopolies granted by the government in exchange for their public release at the end of the monopoly period.

the only weird part about non-practicing entities -- and I say this from the perspective of a Microsoft employee with no patent cubes yet to his name, who works in the same room as people with 15 -- is that they are effectively outsourcing the entire process of reducing their inventions to practice.

among other things, Intellectual Ventures filed an amici curiae brief in Microsoft v. I4I, another piece of patent litigation. on behalf of the respondents.

http://www.jdsupra.com/post/documentViewer.aspx?fid=49803802...

Intellectual Ventures has no loyalty to anything but its own inventions.

edit: incidentally, the outcome of Microsoft v. i4i (and the parent lawsuit, i4i v. Microsoft) was an out-of-court settlement where Microsoft paid i4i $300 million, at the hazard of an injunction against selling Office in the United States: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I4i

or, if you look at it from their perspective, they came up with the idea, went to the trouble of formally describing it and filing paperwork so that it could be released to the public, and then another company either independently invented it or just read their description and built one.

say IV had the patent for a burr coffee grinder. even if they never build a non-prototype grinder, they went to the trouble of conceptualizing, prototyping, and writing down their idea for an invention so someone else could build it. that invention has merit, even if Intellectual Ventures doesn't build one.

the question is whether (ignoring particular types of inventions like computer software, which is legitimately tricky to reason about) all of the inventions are legitimately novel inventions which go through an inventive process of discovery (for lack of a better phrase), or whether they are rote improvements on concepts which are already state-of-the-art, or shots in the dark hoping to land some profitable patent litigation later. and nobody but Intellectual Ventures knows what their intention is.

(AND DISABLE AUTORUN!)

on the topic of disabling autorun, there was a patch earlier this year to disable autorun on non-shiny media by default in XP and Vista (it's already turned off in 7.)

http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2011/06/14/autorun-a...

infections by autorun-abusing malware families dropped by over 60% as everything got patched, and total infection rate dropped by almost half.

yup.

"Microsoft thanks the following companies for working with us and for providing details of limited, targeted attacks against customers of Internet Explorer 6:

Google Inc. and MANDIANT; Adobe; McAfee; French government CSIRT (CERTA)"

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/MS10-00...

the service is ideas. if patents are, indeed, on non-obvious concepts, they can provide the spark for new inventions, and -- if you sign a licensing agreement with the patent troll -- you are paying them for the right to build, market, and sell something they invented.

the question is whether the patent review process is working or not.

IV is funded by Google, among others.

"Intellectual Ventures was founded in 2000 by Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung of Microsoft as a private partnership. It lists Peter Detkin of Intel, and Gregory Gorder of Perkins Coie, a Seattle-based law firm as co-founders. They reportedly have raised over $5 billion from many large companies including Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, Google, SAP, Nvidia and eBay, plus investment firms such as Charles River Ventures. Reported statistics indicate over 30,000 purchased patents and applications[3] and over 2000 internally-developed inventions. Licenses to patents are obtained through investment and royalties.[4]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures#Reference...

You're as sound in your logic as saying that because IV was founded by the author of Modernist Cuisine, it's obvious that the molecular gastronomy movement is responsible for Google's patent troubles.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/evaluate/eval...

spoilers: Microsoft has a significant enterprise support organization, which the military is probably already dealing with, and Windows scales farther down than you'd think.

one particular aspect of VirtualBox has pissed me off in recent days. the system-level debugger is complete trash; it totally fails to do even simple things like inserting working breakpoints. at one point I had to resort to dropping int 3s into my code wherever I thought I might eventually want a breakpoint, and even that doesn't work most of the time.

so I gave up on VirtualBox and switched to QEMU, which works significantly better.

the engine doesn't exist. this is just a renderer for Source maps.

edit: and here's the source for the renderer: https://github.com/toji/webgl-source

now writing a high-throughput server is simply a matter of writing a high-throughput worker to generate fibonacci numbers and connecting it reliably through interprocess communication to your node.js shim.

thank god node.js was there to save me all that work.

yeah, Microsoft's main competitive shortcoming against Apple in desktop strategy is twofold:

- Apple can let OS X be its loss leader, whereas Microsoft doesn't have a thing to let Windows be a loss leader for (the Windows Store, maybe, post-8?)

- breaking backward compatibility hurts Microsoft's sales, since there's no single source of application updates, and since so many Windows licenses are in the enterprise; it doesn't affect Apple's sales (maybe even helps them) because it sells shiny new Macs for shiny new features and because Apple doesn't live or die on OS X revenue.

its saving grace is that retail sales of Windows licenses are probably dominated by people refreshing their computers.