Posts by Mark Rendle 225 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Aug 2006
The reason people spend gazillions of money on iPhones is because they are actually usable as mobile devices, so you do go online for more than a few minutes every month. It is now -- finally -- not alone in this respect, with the latest batch of Android phones providing strong competition and the Palm Pre doing many of the same things almost as well, but during the life of the original and 3G iPhones, there was no competition. Certainly not from Nokia's n Series.
Everybody has had enough of your whining now. You lost. It happened because your product offered nothing compelling, especially after Firefox appeared. It's time to strip the assets, burn down the offices, defraud the insurance company and move on with your lives.
@Florence: Running Windows Update in a browser? What a quaint idea. I vaguely remember that from all those years ago, when Windows XP was the current version.
The problem with WinMo for developers is that if you use the .NET CF, the out-of-the-box controls look like shit, and there's no XAML/WPF to help you style them. I'm guessing Windows Mobile 7 is the solution to these problems, and will probably have some kind of Silverlight-based environment for productivity apps and Zune/XNA for game developers, but I can't help wondering why the hell they've been wasting time on WM6.5, which is clearly going to be the Windows ME of Mobile.
Me, I'm releasing apps on Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and Pre until they make me enough money to buy a Mac, then I can do iPhone too. Whenever they do finally release 7, maybe then I'll be interested.
PS: Red Bren: they're not talking about IE-only sites, they're talking about Flash Player. WinMo has it, iPhone doesn't.
I'm developing applications for Windows, Linux, the web and several mobile phone platforms, and I use VirtualBox VMs for each different combination of OS and SDK (mostly "#! Linux" instances). It keeps each instance reasonably clean, and stops the host (a 3Ghz quad-core 8GB WIndows 7 x64 box with a Samsung PB-22J system disk) from getting clogged up.
The biggest advantage is that all the VM disk files get backed up to an external hard drive and to Carbonite, so if anything goes pear-shaped, I can be up and running again on another machine in minutes.
Opera has not failed because of Microsoft "bundling" IE; it's failed because its competitors are:
1. the world's biggest software company;
2. the world's biggest shiny-computer company;
3. the world's biggest open source project;
and 4. the world's biggest web company.
Sometimes, it's best to just find a new market to compete in, although under the leadership of their current CTO, I'm not sure there is a market in a bad enough state for Opera to break into. Possibly UK government health IT contracts.
I remember using Wyse terminals back in the early nineties. I remember getting upgraded to the 120 from the 50 and thinking it was the dog's.
They were exploitable back then. We used to echo control characters to /dev/ttyN to lock each other's keyboards, then run libellous sendmail commands while the hapless victim watched.
</nostalgia for the bad old days>
Way to flaunt your ignorance. If you took one minute to actually look at the Codeplex page for PHPAzure, you'd see that the system requirements are "PHP 5.2.4 or later". All it contains is a bunch of .php files and the documentation. No special Microsoft branch of PHP, no need to host the application in Azure or on IIS, nothing. It's just PHP classes which simplify access to the Azure storage stack. And it's open source.
What I find irritating is the number of people who berate Microsoft for everything they ever do on the basis that they're a successful company, regardless of the positive progress they're making and the quality of the actual products. The fact of the matter is, developing on the Microsoft stack with Microsoft tools these days is, overall, a more coherent and pleasant experience than with any of the competition. Silverlight extends the reach of that stack and toolset into the RIA arena, and better tools help developers produce better end-products.
I assume the significant section of web users to which you refer are the Linux crowd, to which I'd say you get what you pay for.
My mistake. I haven't really been keeping up with Adobe for the last few years, much like you appear to have been ignoring the improvements Microsoft have made to IIS.
I may be mistaken, but the System Requirements for FMS 3.5 specify Red Hat Linux (and Windows, obviously: everything runs on Windows). Does FMS not run on other distros?
Anyway, it's apples and oranges. FMS is a standalone product, whereas Smooth Streaming is part of the IIS Integrated Media Platform extension, so obviously it's restricted to IIS. Maybe when there's an Apache extension with similar capabilities, the Silverlight team will add support for that.
Can't remember the specific posters, but:
Why does Flex score a "pro" for an XML UI description language but Silverlight doesn't?
The Silverlight download is roughly the same size as the Flash player.
The Silverlight 3 tools work with Visual Studio 2008 Web Developer Express Edition, which is free.
Silverlight is cross-platform, unless Mac's aren't a platform.
Moonlight 2.0 already includes some of the Silverlight 3.0 features, and it probably won't take them long to get full 3.0 support.
IIS only why, exactly? For the smooth video streaming, which is a feature that Flash doesn't have regardless of where it's hosted? Hardly a win for Flash, then. Plus, I believe MS are providing free Live hosting for video for Silverlight.
I'm using Silverlight 3.0, and for professional development, it's superb. The amount of the .NET framework that is supported is mightily impressive considering the size of the runtime, and it includes key features that a genuinely useful, such as WCF, LINQ and a fair bit of the WPF data-binding model. The (open-source) supporting frameworks that are available from Codeplex, including Prism, the Silverlight toolkit, the unit-testing libraries and others, are brilliant. Prism in particular includes a very useful tool for sharing source code between Silverlight and full WPF projects, allowing for meaningful code reuse. And the third-party control suites from the likes of Infragistics are extensive and highly-polished.
But more than any of that, and a point that is consistently underplayed by knee-jerk MS detractors, is the ability to write your back-end code in so many first-class languages: C#, Ruby, Python, F#, C/C++, and more becoming available all the time. And the architectural model of the application is the same as for .NET Windows applications. That's a huge advantage for existing, experienced developers looking to move into web-based systems.
Microsoft have got several shipping products which are themselves open-source, including ASP.NET MVC, the WPF and Silverlight toolkits, several application blocks, and a heap of other stuff all available on Codeplex. And of course Visual Studio and ASP.NET include first-class support for jQuery.
What could have been an excusably pointless "Corporate Entity Sponsors Not-Entirely-Accurate 'Research'" article rapidly descends into the kind of whiny bitching that should only be found on message boards, and even then only in threads that have been closed by the moderators. Maybe you should keep Mr Kay's contributions in the comments threads from now on.
Words can't even begin to describe how newsworthy this isn't. If your desperation for content so outweighs the need for substantiation, I can send you some not-from-Apple-HQ renders of a cigarette-pack-sized handset that folds out to an A4 tablet running OSX Bornean Clouded Leopard.
I suspect the next IE JavaScript engine will involve .NET 4.0, with the all-new, all-singing, all-dancing CLR and DLR, and will probably make Javascript interchangeable with IronPython, IronRuby and any other language available with added Iron.
Which means it won't land until after those do, and I'm still waiting for my not-in-a-VM beta of VS2010 so that's looking more and more like next year.
Tom, I can't be entirely certain, but your counter-factual hypothesis appears to be that Javascript, had it continued to be developed sans standards, would by now be able to do all the things Silverlight 3.0 can: complex GUI interfaces with dynamically-rendered controls; GPU-accelerated 3D graphics; H264 video decoding; allow developers to write Rich Internet Applications in Ruby, Python, C#, F#, Scheme or any other CLR-compliant language...
I disagree. I think that in any eventuality, Javascript was always going to end up as a very powerful but also horribly messy cobbled together scripting language which regularly got stretched far beyond its intended use by some very talented individuals. But it was never going to remove the need for Flash or Silverlight.
ODF is basically proprietary and controlled by $un Micro$y$tem$, and about as capable of supporting all the features of Microsoft Office as RTF.
Microsoft have submitted OOXML to ISO because various important public sector customers have responded to hyperactive lobbying from the ODF crowd and decreed that they will only use software which works with file formats defined by ISO. So obviously MS are going to do everything in their power to rush through the process; otherwise (big letters now for the hard-of-thinking) THEY'D LOSE MONEY. And they're a business, with shareholders, and shareholders don't like it when you lose money.
I responded to a survey about this, don't know if it was this one or not.
Personally, as long as the ads fit with the setting of the game, then I see no problem. I'd rather not have Coke ads in Total War, or nVidia ads in a WWII shooter, but then again, having proper ads for proper products can add depth to a game like GTA or PGR. Futuristic games could have clever/funny brand awareness ads. And if it helps developers make more money to spend on developing better games, then I'm all for it.
Obviously, if a developer creates a game that stops every fifteen minutes and shows you non-interactive ads for toothpaste, nobody's going to buy that game. But that's not what's on the cards here.
It is. It's better for collaborative working, with the integration with SharePoint and InfoPath. It's better for developers, with Visual Studio Tools for Office. I've yet to try a group e-mail/calendar/contact manager that comes anywhere near Outlook running against Exchange. And then there's OneNote, Project, Visio, etc, all of which integrate with the core products very well.
Most importantly, Office 2003 and 2007 both just feel more polished than OpenOffice and its derivatives. Maybe it's because they're targeting a specific OS, rather than adopting that lowest-common-denominator GUI of apps that run on Windows, Mac, KDE, Gnome. Maybe it's because it's a more coordinated development effort, with proper product managers and UX specialists.
It's not just Microsoft, of course; look at Adobe's products versus the open source alternatives (Photoshop or GIMP? I know which I'd rather use). On the desktop, at least, the bazaar still has to do some catching up with the cathedral.
Still no penguin-with-horns icon, I see...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
