Colin was a team member of TSI.

Microsoft: Technical Strategy Incubation - Intern, Program analysis work (Summer 2011)
Microsoft: Technical Strategy Incubation - Full Time, Kernel developer on an unannounced systems project. Worked on kernel debugger implementation, interrupt handling, post-mortem debugging, platform abstractions, all work interacting with other subsystems. (August 2008 - September 2009)

The paper is: Uniqueness and Reference Immutability for Safe Parallelism
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/csgordon/papers/oopsla12.pdf

Abstract: A key challenge for concurrent programming is that side-effects (memory operations) in one thread can affect the behavior of another thread. In this paper, we present a type system to restrict the updates to memory to prevent these unintended side-effects. We provide a novel combination of immutable and unique (isolated) types that ensures safe parallelism (race freedom and deterministic execution). The type system includes support for polymorphism over type qualifiers, and can easily create cycles of immutable objects. Key to the system's flexibility is the ability to recover immutable or externally unique references after violating uniqueness without any explicit alias tracking. Our type system models a prototype extension to C\# that is in active use by a Microsoft team. We describe their experiences building large systems with this extension. We prove the soundness of the type system by an embedding into a program logic.

Let the anticipation begin.

My money is still on the new Xbox being named simply "Xbox".

Both of my way of holding the phone (eith horizontially or vertically) will let me easily accidentially hit the "Back" button, so I need a equally easy to find "Forward" one.

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Alternatively, I'll be grateful if WP8 can have that touchpad setting exist on many laptops, that it'll not response to big area of pressure - recognising it's my palm and not finger.

I've been working on project which recreates an XNA style game toolkit, except for every (soon!) platform.  I thought maybe this long holiday weekend some people somewhere might look at it and give me feedback (watch the video):

http://www.baregame.org/

The class library written around SDL 2.0 and optionally includes a compiler+IDE as well as recent binaries of SDL 2.0 for 32/64 bit Windows an Linux.

And when I say modern I mean the library features a lot of C# ness to it (even though it's not C#) ...

e.g.

TEventHandler<T> = procedure(Sender: TObject; var Args: T) of object;
IBitmap = interface(IClonable<IBitmap>)
TPointF = record public class operator Implicit(const Value: TPointI): TPointF;
TMatrix4x4 = record public class operator Multiply(const A: TMatrix4x4; const B: TVec3): TVec3; overload;

namespace Bare.System:

https://github.com/sysrpl/Bare.Game/blob/master/source/bare.game.pas

If you look at the site, please bear in mind i haven't had time to write up everything yet. Let me know what you think.

The real solution is that we want the application and data as physically close to the user as possible to get the best performance and best experience. Now you can't always get the app on their device and have to move back to the browser, but you want that host be also physically close to be cost effective. Ie. Internal users on the local LAN stay there and external user to the cloud server. But ouch, that's a lot of code, infrastructure and money, especially for a small app.

So, finally to the point. Why can't we have tools that reverse the scale out concepts to scale down to 1? Ie. Everything is plural. Code that uses all the CPU cores by default but can be configured to scale down to 1, applications that runs on multiple machines or works through multiple sub services which scale down to 1, data store that runs on multiple devices which can be scaled down to 1.

Is this a functional vs imperative vs actor based development? Or NoSql vs Relational vs Graph database data stores?

So is this an impossible dream? The cloud in its current form for non-large apps doesn't look cost effective, but like with MvvmCross, could we have as much of the app and core/cached data as close to the user and service out the other parts plus major data store as steps away? That to me would handle ALL types of future application development. This would stop the cycle of, let's build small quickly and cheaply and rebuild to scale out when needed (while trying to keep the original alive).

What if; start the app, installed locally? Download or call logic service/browser. Need data, is local? Check local store, else check server store, else check cloud store. Maybe like how the PC data works by calling further down the stack. Any thoughts?

Recently I was looking at Asus Me400c, Atom based "Tablet PC" running full Win8, in UK the cheapest price is about 340 GBP, while Surface RT is 399 GBP.

1, I suppose that Atom is faster than the Arm inside RT?

2, About same weight?

3, Me400c with full Win8, means it runs Visual Studio, runs Windows Store, runs App

Then what is the point to let RT survive? Is there any reason except RT does look much better?

On another issue, given the UK only got the Surface Pro released today or yesterday, I feel it's very unlikely the Surface Pro 2 with haswell will come out for purchase at least for half a year? Or even make the announcement in Build, cause otherwise who is going to buy the old one? (Unless they are pretty sure how to clean the stock.)

Opinions welcome,

Best,

Dong

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/05/xbox-one

The Xbox One simultaneously runs three separate operating systems. First comes the tiny Host OS, which boots the machine and then launches two other hard-partitioned systems: the Shared partition, an environment that runs any apps (Skype, Live TV, Netflix, etc.) and helps provide processing power for the Kinect sensor and its gesture and voice controls; and the Exclusive partition, which is where games run. Because of the way memory is apportioned in the Shared partition, you can switch between apps with little to no load times, and even snap them into another app or game to use both at the same time.

And its built by Dave Cutler, Hoi Vo, among others.

http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-xbox-one-whats-windows-got-to-do-with-it-7000015684/

In an under-the-hood architecture panel following the Xbox One reveal, Boyd Multerer, Director of Development for Xbox, confirmed that the team started with Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor in building the Xbox One operating system. Multerer said the team stripped out all the general-purpose "goop" to create an OS that allowd two virtual machines to run in side-by-side partitions. One of the partitions runs apps; the other runs games. 

"David Cutler built the hypervisor that does the switching back and forth," Multerer confirmed.

I wonder if we can get more insights about this at BUILD, or if not, maybe Channel9 can do something ?

http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-tt/app/tournaphrase/df497b9e-053e-44ab-9b4e-ac0c7970068a

Please try it out and let me know what you think. I'm also looking for a partner to port the game to WinPhone

thanks!

the first Xbox was an x86 system,  the 360 went to a different cpu and the Xbox one is now an x86 based system.

what kind of reasons for the return to x86 ?

was this driven more by the hardware performance or by the  windows 8 core OS  work or by the costs of the hardware or by other factors ?

what can you tell us about the way the system is different than a normal pc ?

will the Xbox one be able to talk to any of the current media extension like the windows 7 windows media center ?

what about writing games for the new system ?

will there be a market / support for non game apps for the new Xbox ?

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/native-level-performance-on-the-web-a-brief-examination-of-asm-js/

In case anyone is unaware, it's a subset of javascript created by the Firefox team to make code on the browser a lot faster than full javascript, details:

http://asmjs.org/spec/latest/

Only problem is, it only runs really fast in Firefox. So does Microsoft have any plans for this technology?

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/04/12/why_pc_sales_are_declining_old_pcs_still_work_just_fine.html

tl;dr: PCs have reached good enough. A decent computer from 5 years ago will probably run productivity software today just as well as it would have done then (my office PC, for instance, is running Office 2010 on XP). There's nothing to be gained by upgrading for most users so they don't. Hence PC lifespans are greatly increased.

I must say, I think there's probably some truth in this. For many people we've reached the point where upgrading will not offer enough tangible benefit to be worth the cost so they either upgrade infrequently or not at all. Probably, although he doesn't touch on this, we've reached a point where the market is saturated - the majority of new sales today will be upgrades/replacements rather than completely new adoptions. This drop in growth of the userbase manifests itself as reduced sales, but is to be expected.

In case you missed the Keynote, here is the two minute overview:

Given this setup, I think it's only a matter of time before it user-identification through the camera is REQUIRED before using the console (according to rumors, your real name is a requirement for using the PS4, so this will be only a step-up). Maybe this will happen in the next version. You know, to prevent abuse, hackers, cheaters, pedophiles in in-game chats etc.. don't worry, an excuse will be found. Don't call me alarmist. Just a few years ago, the thought about blocking used-games and an mandatory always on-power/on-line console would have been absurd.

I also like it how the new Xbox SDK installer uses the Matrix font. Freudian slip?

Using footage from a movie about being a slave for machines from birth to death sets the mood quite nicely for Telescreen 720.

here's an excerpt:

its expected, but still interesting.

My guess: this is from someone young and fresh, landed in WinDiv recently and get frustrated somehow.

I'm not knocking the sites in general as they both look well done. I'm just puzzled at the apparent exclusion (or burrying thereof, or I'm just stupid). Is it because ASP.NET was open sourced?

Microsoft Research page
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/embassies/

Usenix presentation
https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi13/embassies-radically-refactoring-web

Web browsers ostensibly provide strong isolation for the client-side components of web applications. Unfortunately, this isolation is weak in practice; as browsers add increasingly rich APIs to please developers, these complex interfaces bloat the trusted computing base and erode cross-app isolation boundaries.

We reenvision the web interface based on the notion of a pico-datacenter, the client-side version of a shared server datacenter. Mutually untrusting vendors run their code on the user's computer in low-level native code containers that communicate with the outside world only via IP. Just as in the cloud datacenter, the simple semantics makes isolation tractable, yet native code gives vendors the freedom to run any software stack. Since the datacenter model is designed to be robust to malicious tenants, it is never dangerous for the user to click a link and invite a possibly-hostile party onto the client.

http://www.buildwindows.com/