53 minutes ago, Harlequin wrote

From experience, enterprise-scale Windows 8 apps in HTML5 are a nightmare. Xaml/C# has such an awesome rapid development it doesn't compare.

On the other hand, with TypeScript and modern Javascript frameworks, the balance is tipping.

4 hours ago, Sven Groot wrote

*snip*

I'm no expert in this area, but it seems to me that all the DRM stuff is things MS is doing because the games' publishers want them. If that is the case, it could end up that more publishers prefer the XBO which means MS might end up with more exclusive games.

I believe you're right here. DRM is a publisher feature. I don't see any consumer having a need for DRM. If the initial momentum is weak, then this strategy to increase profits will perhaps prove to be a poisoned chalice.

3 hours ago, figuerres wrote

unless the human brain has even more cpu power than all that hardware then the current approach to computers is way off course.  I also think of the small scale, very small insects with very few neurons in their whole body are able to fly, to forage and to survive.   they do a lot with very little cpu power.

I don't believe the computational capabilities of (non-artificial) neural networks are fully understood. Some state that there might even be computation within individual neurons.

Jeopardy, IBM and Wolfram|Alpha

@SteveRichter: Search engines are also evolving, now scraping for knowledge and concepts (see http://schema.org/) (and probably trying to infer it a la PowerSet (absorbed by the collective) and Evi (formerly True Knowledge)).

Just for fun, I asked Evi and Wolfram|Alpha:

"What is the first name of the prime minister of Denmark?"

Evi gave the names of the last two. Wolfram|Alpha almost appeared to understand it but came up with an empty result set. It's pretty cool to expand and see Evi's chain of reasoning.

22 hours ago, cbae wrote

@exoteric: I hope they add F# support to Roslyn. That'd be kind of an awesome way to learn a new language.

I believe the free and open-source F# compiler tools are already written in F#.

Also, check this out http://tsunami.io

1 day ago, vesuvius wrote

Yes it will be out just about a year after Visual Studio 2012.

No announcements from the C# Team or whether TypeScript will be a part of Visual Studio? What of Roslyn and the usual announcements for Client and Web based development stacks like WPF or ASP.NET? I feel things have changed direction at Microsoft in the last few months, but I can't quite figure out what it is.

The lack of news is not an indication of a change of direction. But sure, the only constant is change, to quote a cliche.

There's already a VS plug-in for TypeScript, so that's kind of a non-issue.

Roslyn must be a large undertaking and besides large language infrastructure developments, the development team also has to catch up with the latest C# and VB language developments, so patience is in order here.

Besides Roslyn, we know of a spin-off version of C# being used in an incubation project which appears to have significant scale - but is still under wraps. This might be a "change of direction" when or if it materializes, in terms of new API's using new language features. One wonders if this language is also bootstrapped and has a compiler written in itself a la Roslyn.

Some form of NIITL (Not Invented In This Language) is inevitable and probably even desirable insofar as the language has features that provide desirable properties.

So far I have a good eye for Version One. It seems very comprehensive and has lots of visualizations to get an overview. 

Anything from JetBrains is bound to also be worth checking out.

What Scrum/Agile software do you use to organize your backlog, plan sprints, get an overview, etc. and why?

12 hours ago, FuncOfT wrote

@felix9: Wow, another UI framework ... not sure what to think about that, but M# sounds interesting overall.

Well we know some of what M# will bring to the table in terms of concurrency and parallelism for software development in general. Another question is then what principles and design patterns the UI framework will be built on.

3 hours ago, evildictait​or wrote

*snip*

Most virtual machines run well over 99.9% of the instructions of the virtualized application directly on the processor. They always run slower than the "real thing" because there's always some degree of abstraction compared with a real machine, but they are pretty fast.

For example, all of the Windows Azure boxes are VMs. And they run pretty fast

I have always thought that (for whatever reason) GPU virtualization is the hardest part (somewhat counter-intuitively, due to its relative homogeneity) - but I guess this is now a solved issue (or never was)?

9 hours ago, wastingtime​withforums wrote

One of the most popular videos on Youtube right now, no joke:

 

235.000 views and 25.000 comments within a day.

That guy is funny as hell! I don't know if he's been smoking strong stuff or had one dr. Pepper too much but he has a sense of humor. I wish your rants were as funny (as they are many and long).

Whatever they do, don't call it "the new xbox"

19 hours ago, Charles wrote

One can imagine some operational hierarchy among watchers. Some watchers watch some non-watchers and some watchers watch some watchers.

C

How about a virtual connectome; a transient graph of peer subjects:

public interface ISubject<in TSource, out TResult> : IObserver<TSource>, IObservable<TResult>

Awaiting actors...

@felix9 I thought Bass would have beat you to this posting

How about http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/ ? Git support and NuGet dependency management for extensions.