Discussions

That's no coincidence.  Amazon search products show up in other ads all over the place.  I've seen that many, many times.  (They are far from the only ones doing it too.)  It's more than a little creepy.

1 day ago, SteveRichter wrote

Where is the driverless forklift?

The driverless forklift very much does exist and has in some places for years.  (I know a guy who works on them,)  Fully automated picking is used in some places to great effect.  Amazon certainly could build such a system if they decided to do it.  The fact that they still use humans says that they have found that to be more efficient/cost effective.  For something on that scale, I imagine that it would be more efficient to let humans handle it.  Otherwise you would have to have a smart conveyor system that would make UPS look like grade school.

If Verizon had the 920 I probably would have ordered one by now.  I'm not willing to move to AT&T, so it looks like I will probably be getting the 8X.

I'm no expert on MVVM, but to my thinking it should be done in the viewmodel.  The view should only be handling presentation, so that I can swap out the view without changing the behavior of the content.  The view should provide a means of setting a viewmodel property for what zone (format) I want the time in, and the viewmodel should then return the time property in that form.  However, that does not mean that any other code should use the presentation property.  Internal code should be operating on the UTC form, for the obvious reasons, letting the viewmodel maintain the translated version for the view. That particular case doesn't seem like it should be very difficult to implement (certainly some things are difficult to implement cleanly for a variety of reasons).

Of course, that is speaking generally.  Specifics of whatever technology you are using may influence your decision.

Oh no!  That's terrible to hear.  Bill was one of those rare gems that you just wish you could have spent more time with.  You will be missed Bill.

Ouch.  At those prices it's off my list.  They can't gain market share with a premium priced device when they don't even have any apps yet.  They are wasting a perfect opportunity to spend a bit of marketing money and build market share almost over night.  This isn't going to convert any users of other products.  Another disappointing move.  It does make it clear that the Surface Pro is going to be somewhere around $1400 or more.

I have one of those natural keyboards, and the gap in the middle didn't screw me up for more than a few minutes when I first got it. That was a surprise -- I expected it to be more of a problem. They are nice to type on -- as long as you are typing with both hands. If you are working on something that requires mouse use, and are therefore entering keystrokes with only one hand, that is a big pain in the butt with the split keyboard. For that reason, I have been moving back to straight keyboards again.

.NET, ASP.NET, SQL, and even Access ... none of those are going to go away any time soon, and definitely not without a long amount of warning and transition time.  .NET is a very safe place to be right now.  Don't make any major changes unless you have a driving reason to do so.  Migrating slowly away from Access might not be a bad idea anyway. 

Whether or not an interface is intuitive (familiar) is not the key point.  People will quickly adjust to and accept an non-familiar interface as long as it provides real improvements in usability.  If the interface doesn't improve, or worse yet harms usability, the interface change will be rejected, and the user will be even more unhappy at putting effort into learning something different that doesn't work as well.

The concept of "superior" is a much more difficult, and subjective, concept.  It is also more important for the success of a UI than familiarity.

The issue raised by Dr. Herbie is discoverability.  People have to be able to figure out how to use your interface, and the majority of people are not going to go through tutorials and tips to figure them out, or memorize a bunch of shortcut keys.  If a user needs to phone a friend or Google to find out how to use your interface, you have a problem and an unhappy user.

(This is a general comment and makes no implications good or bad about Win 8 in particular.)

@spivonious:  That's right.  Avalon became WPF, which was a much worse name for consumers.  WPF/E became Silverlight, which actually was a good name while it lasted.