I have to agree with the parent, this just seems like the initial Java hype all over again. Not to say that Java is a bad concept, but it simply hasn't achieved what some of its early proponents thought it would.

In terms of the article itself, the author has clearly got caught up in the hype and forgotten that:
a) Microsoft's core market is the business market, not the consumer market.
b) Even if they would go for it, big software houses would be very uncomfortable writing applications which anyone could view the source code of and rip off.

I mean, try telling enormous ERP vendors like SAP or Sage that they need to rewrite their software in HTML5 + JS. Yeah, sure, they'll get right on that. Companies have huge investments in traditional applications (as opposed to 'apps') and that's not going to change anytime soon considering most of the big players still consider .NET to be new and fancy, especially not when it threatens their IP. Not to mention that the article completely neglects to think about the Windows Server product line - do they seriously expect people to be writing server-side applications in this way?

My prediction is that we'll see a few HTML5 weather widgets to go on the tiles interface and that everything else will continue down the .NET line. Maybe by the time Windows 8 see widespread business adoption sometime around 2020 then there'll be a couple of HTML5 intranet widgets and company stock tickers too, but the idea of all software going this route anytime soon is pure fantasy.

Safeway trialled this in the UK 15 years ago in the mid 90s at several of their largest supermarkets including the one I shopped at. The device itself was a bit more crude (basically a barcode scanner with a memory and 16x2 LCD screen) but the concept was identical. It was also a massive failure, because people would do everything they could to steal things up to and including stealing the scanners. Then, because of the increased shrinkage, the chances of being forced to 'randomly' go back through the normal checkout anyway in order to double check your scanning shot right up, and because of that ("What's the point if I'm just going to have to go through the checkout anyway?") people stopped using them and they were gone in under a year.

It sounds like a nice idea but relies on honesty. You'd be surprised how many petty thieves there are when people think they can get away with it.

Yeah that was my thought too. Although you could consider defrag to be a secure destruct mechanism... ;)

If you believe that then man, I hope you never find out how an Airplane works!

This is likely to be the first game I will "obtain for free" for several years. Like you I liked AC1 and like you I was going to buy AC2 but fuck that noise, my net connection regularly goes down and I am NOT going to be denied an offline gaming experience because of it.

Get a grip Ubisoft.

First we had submitters who didn't read the stories they were posting. Then we had editors who didn't read the stories they were approving. Now we have companies who don't read the articles they put out. Seriously, it's called a file cache. That's how it's supposed to work. Nice job, idiots.

I mean really? A bug in beta software? This is outrageous, haul Microsoft up before congress immediately.