I think this sort of thing could find a lot of use in school programs, whether robotics, engineering or programming courses. Schools would like the MS part and being able to use a "high level" language would make it popular to supplement some programming courses. MS would certainly cut deals on price to get the schools involved.

While all of us here know that it's really simple to program an arduino, or propeller, or for that matter a pic with assembler, I think schools will be able to more easily justify an expense if MS is behind it along with a .net api. While I would prefer them to take a different approach, anything that will get kids into tinkering with home made projects is a very very good thing.

I have a fair amount of experience with assembler and some limited c programming on microcontrollers (mostly pic, but some propeller), but I sometimes wish I could just knock off a quick proof of concept with an easy language and a board with enough power & memory that I don't have to worry too much about how I do things. I'd likely never do that for a real project, but in the end the most important/expensive thing is my time.

If a tool is appropriate for a particular job, I don't think you should lose sleep over whose name is on the box. This is the main reason I rely mostly on open source solutions, and also why I sometimes use closed, propriety ones.

In Kurt Vonnegut's 1997 novel Hocus Pocus, the United States is brought to its knees financially by a company called Microsecond Arbitrage. Everyone invests through them and makes lots of money until a glitch happens and someone else's computer is faster that day. Then the entire country loses its shirt.

Word to the wise.....

I feel so dirty when I agree with Steve Jobs.

Pat Metheny is touring now with a "robot band" on his Orchestrion tour. There are a couple videos on the web and a fairly good writeup on Wired: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-02/01/robot-band-backs-pat-metheny-on-orchestrion-tour

Pat's website has more info about his reasons for this approach: http://www.patmetheny.com/orchestrioninfo/

Not much tech weenie info, but pretty interesting for the musically minded.

We're a small AV company, 8 employees, and even we have 40-50 wireless mics. We got rid of our old ones and bought new ones that were all in the allegedly safe bands. However, even though we don't have to worry about breaking the law, now we will never really be able to know if the mics will actually work in any given location.

We travel a lot to convention locations around the country. While the databases that the FCC talks about sound nice, in practice they simply do not exist in any meaningful way. There is no one out there asking us to input our frequencies into a DB somewhere, and even if there was, it wouldn't help when we travel.

We will, of course, invest in spectrum analyzers we can take on the road, but even then we won't know if someone powers up after we've done our sweep and settled on frequencies. This is a big problem because if a mic goes out on the CEO of a big company we may have to comp a portion, or all, of a show to keep them happy.

I'm happy to have better wireless communications available, but it won't come without a big cost to us and companies like us.

VRML was hurt by people expecting to see cyberspace like in the movies. The actual reality was that it was a way to do simple visualizations when you didn't have the horsepower to do it "for real". I still believe that even with all its warts, it was a terrific piece of work for its time period.
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My current (and very talented) designers spend hours producing scenes that can barely be properly viewed on quad core, gigabyte graphics card machines. The scenes are beautifully detailed and very pretty, but I can't seem to get through to them that there is also a place for extremely basic quick "sketches" for mundane functional uses - we do audio visual work and use visualization for planning purposes.

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More than ten years ago, VRML, along with some simple java code for creating it automatically from a 2D sketch, allowed me to, in less than an hour, create a fly through that would run comfortably on a 486 with a 16 MB graphics card. I wouldn't begin to put the simple textures from that up to the beautiful work done today, but it got the job done.

Where did the black holes come from, after only a billion years since the big bang? I think most stars survive for a few billion years before possibly contracting & maybe forming a black hole.

Did these early black holes form in a different way?