Microsoft is killing themselves. Lowering the cost of porting applications is no substitute for generating organic demand for a platform people see value in using.

MS has a technologically sound platform yet their desperate attempts at "Apple emulation" is costing them dearly in terms of hackers and developers in a position to want to write software for WP.

The platform is openly hostile to customization and demonstrates no respect for privacy or rights of its users.

In addition to failing to offer basic features available in other platforms including insanely enough even features present in previous generations of "Windows Mobile".

Until this changes good luck getting anyone to care about using the platform much less develop software for it.

It's pretty straightforward really, you take your iOS app, you throw away everything other than int main( int argc, char **argv ), and then you replace the rest of the code with the Windows 10 equivalent.

No, no, no, that's not true! I once met a guy who had a Windows phone and he said his wife had one too, so they've sold at least two pieces. There may even be a third Windows Phone user out there (although I've never met him/her/it).

Well, the strategy worked so brilliantly for the Amiga (Emulate an Atari ST! Emulate a Mac! Emulate anything that isn't an Amiga!) that obviously Microsoft have decided to give it a go too.

This sounds like just an EBay style market for last mile delivery... I think if structured properly it could work with feedback, policing and policy structures in place to reinforce good behavior and quickly weed out bad actors. You can use tamper evident seals/photograph/signoff procedures to keep drivers on the hook legally.

EBay has buyer protection schemes which work for all buyers regardless of seller. Uber could do the same and essentially offer insurance itself for the service as well as requiring their drivers to be properly insured.

While mom's car has no prayer of matching the global throughput of FedEx... For rapid one-off deliveries those physical economies of scale are quite worthless anyway. The big guys hate covering the last mile as it is.

Ah, that makes sense. It'll be interesting to see what snipers make of this, whether it's a help or more extra complexity to get in the way.

It isn't straight awesome, it's an awesomely expensive techno-toy that'll end up like Excalibur rounds, where you practically need a written order from the president every time you fire one because they're so exotic and expensive. The damn things get delivered in private jets by a butler carrying them on a silk cushion, and there's more brass than gunners standing around when they're used. Given that for the cost of a single $80,000 Excalibur you could get an entire battery to carpet the area with $500 M107's, and then carpet five more targets and still not equal the cost of the one Excalibur, they are at best fancy technology demonstrators/toys. Now scale that down to whatever this thing will be called when it's deployed in 5-10 years time and you're still better off using a 5-10-round burst (with 4,990 rounds left to spare for the cost of one of the trick rounds) than using one of these toys.

(And before the first person leaps in to say "yeah, but give it time and they'll get cheaper", these things never get cheaper, for every development cycle they have more crap larded onto them so that, at best, the cost remains more or less constant, although more frequently it tends to go up).

Cute toy though...

What is the difference between a crackpot spouting nonsense and a skeptic spouting ad hominem nonsense? Neither activity appears to communicate any useful information of any kind.

Good point. I did the same thing, starting from Tripadvisor, and found Google Maps' behaviour pretty annoying, both what you've found (I don't want paid product placement for other hotels, that's what I'm using TripAdvisor for) and the fact that the location marker would randomly disappear (e.g. when scrolling around to find nearby amenities) so I'd have to close the window and go back to the link from TripAdvisor to reset things. I'm not saying Bing maps is perfect (far from it), but it sure sucks a lot less than the new Google maps, and now that Google are shutting down the "?output=classic" capability (which was, in turn, better than Bing) they're not giving you much choice about what to use.

You want a rant? Here's a rant:

(Courtesy Bryan Price).

Just because al gore gets on TV and spouts unsupported nonsense about climate change does not mean climate change isn't real.

Here is another link you might be interested in:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

The problem as I see it stems from well deserved suspicion and lack of trust in government institutions. People see the revolving doors and power of money (Ag lobby especially) and influence... they simply don't trust authorities for historically defensible reasons.

Even if you take the question of safety off the table and simply grant for the sake of argument aspartame is perfectly safe... industry and government still seem quite deserving of every last bit of public rejection.

Actually it was a reference to this discussion, but thanks for playing anyway.

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That's something that's always amazed me about Google, if Microsoft did something like this (which they did in the 1990s), the masses would be at the gates with pitchforks and flaming torches screaming for blood. When Google behaves like Microsoft did 20 years ago... well, meh, it's Google, they can do that. What's changed?

Or "improving" them, like Google Bet^H^H^HMaps, where the new version is so bad I've switched to Bing Maps. That's Microsoft's Bing Maps. Over Google.

Thanks for the link, the VB one contained the info I was after. Looks like a nice piece of work, and definitely a Gatekeeper bypass, just like the Linux repository signing bypasses where they didn't verify metadata.