It matters because Windows 8 is intended to target low end ARM hardware as well as high end Intel/AMD. At //build/ Microsoft kindof made a big deal about the wide range of hardware they want to run on, and when someone buys a low end slate for $300 instead of getting an ipad, Microsoft wants that experience to be as good as it can be.

Totally agree with the file system gripes, though.

Yes, someone cares.

Other useful answers include:
Yes, someone still builds (good) products in C#.
Yes, .net on mobile is actually useful.
Yes, this thing has legs.

Which you can do with Skype. A subscription offers you very reasonable rates for making call and an online number (which he mentions) where normal people can call you and if you're offline either get voicemail or forwarded to another normal number.

There are still quality concerns, as I mention here: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2031828&cid=35448288

I've had some success doing the same. The iPod touch 4 is a good device, but the service of Skype over wifi for making and receiving calls isn't as good as plain old cellular voice. When it's good, it's better than celluar, when it's bad, it introduces jarring audio artifacts or plain drops calls (really bad).

I totally agree.

The ipad puts alot of design constraints on apps. Most games turn part of the touch screen into a controller input that plays similar to a portable console (think gameboy). Doesn't work for a game like WoW, or Blizzard would've ported it to consoles long ago.

-ds

Perhaps you should click on the "Learn what these numbers mean" link. Here, I'll do it for you:

The number of searches in google has no objective relation to the number of deployments, for either flash or silverlight.

Farnsworth: "Bunk! Bunk, I say! Bring me a bag of Bigfoot's droppings, or shut up!"

From TFA:

The difference in rendering between IE on Windows and Safari on Macosx is a reality, whether silverlight is involved or not. The purpose of the HTML Control is to allow scenarios dependent on the HTML Bridge, the part of silverlight that blurs the lines and allows communication between the html dom + javascript and C# code, to run correctly when the app is hosted out of the browser. It's essentially a crutch to allow developers that want to use siverlight a way to leverage existing investments in web application development.

This is a fairly obscure feature, and I'm fairly surprised that it was included at all, but doubt it'll be of use to the vast majority of current and future silverlight developers out there. Like the html control, it's a crutch, to allow developers that want to use silverlight a way to leverage existing investments. The mantra I've heard out of the silverlight team is to focus on unblocking customer scenarios (scenarios they cannot unblock themselves) without compromising the overall feature goals (like keeping the runtime download small).

I don't think it'll matter. Any developer that is seriously considering using silverlight over Adobe AIR, but is then persuaded not to because Silverlight's Trusted Out-Of-Browser scenario has COM support on Windows and not on Mac is "Doing It Wrong". It's an edge case feature that doesn't affect Silverlight's over all "Cross-Platforminess".

Flame On.

The Wong Library, it houses the largest collection of literature in the universe.
http://theinfosphere.org/File:MarsUniversityWongLibraryLitCollection.png

Not to belittle the editorial staff, but gmail was back up and running before the story was posted publically

Some friendly competition from the bogeymen:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/470460 [Doom/Hexen in Flash]
http://www.innoveware.com/ql3/QuakeLight.html [Quake in Silverlight]

Processing is a Java library, parts of which has been ported to javascript.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processing_(programming_language)

Major League Baseball Advanced Media totally botched the transition not once, but twice. When switching from Flash to Silverlight last year their new Silverlight-based streaming player didn't work, leaving paying customers without service for days. This year they decided to switched back to a Flash-based player ON OPENING DAY. Unfortunately, the new player doesn't work either, and in many ways was worse than the silverlight player, requiring additional installation plugins for HD capabilities, and left these same paying customers without the opening day experience they're paying for two years in a row.

Also I'm sure politics played a role too.

MLB 2008
http://www.pcworld.com/article/144035/mlbs_web_video_strikes_out_on_opening_day.html

MLB 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-j-elisberg/major-league-baseball-str_b_185158.html

.. the next logical step? Can't wait to see the day where global warming is not only caused by cars but by exhaling our fat asses.

Major League Baseball Advanced Media totally botched the transition not once, but twice. When switching from Flash to Silverlight last year their new Silverlight-based streaming player didn't work, leaving paying customers without service for days. This year they decided to switched back to a Flash-based player ON OPENING DAY. Unfortunately, the new player doesn't work either, and in many ways was worse than the silverlight player, requiring additional installation plugins for HD capabilities, and left these same paying customers without the opening day experience they're paying for two years in a row.

New York Times Reader was a different case. It worked fairly well, but NYT got thoroughly flamed for introducing the reader for windows only, basing it on WPF's FlowDocument capabilities which aren't available for the Mac. Similar text features are eventually going to make it into Silverlight, but things like Printing are a much higher priority for the SL guys. The silverlight version of the reader used a complicated templating system rather than true adaptive text layout. Adobe's Text Layout Framework may not have been the first to market, but that + Flex + AIR are the first to bring it to a wider audience and may ultimately resonate more.

Also I'm sure politics played a prevalent role in both cases, especially in the case of NYT where the Mac User's vitriol for anything microsoft played out.

MLB 2008
http://www.pcworld.com/article/144035/mlbs_web_video_strikes_out_on_opening_day.html

MLB 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-j-elisberg/major-league-baseball-str_b_185158.html

NYT:
http://www.itwriting.com/blog/1424-new-york-times-switches-from-wpfsilverlight-to-flash-for-reader-2.html

Yet another rule for the higher-ed equivalent of the rat maze. If they already have understanding, will students still be forbidden from using the tool to make life easier?

I wrote for the TI-82 that would show various equation solutions as well as their stages of reduction. Not surprisingly I had alot more fun writing the program than copying the complete answers of ~60 problems to paper.