My thoughts exactly. It seems to me that the user should enter the pin, the bank and store should exchange keys, encrypt the pin, send it to the bank for decryption/verification, and that's it. What would be the point of storing the pin at the store?

This.

They've got a framework extension for .Net that works similarly, not coincidentally named "Reactive Extensions". The typical sample usage is iterating through a collection of mouse events. The enumeration is observable, so the code can be written as a traditional foreach loop, but the iterator will increment a step every time a mouse event occurs. Simple, yet very powerful, like much of .Net's newer asynchronous constructs.

This is the first site I've come across that has interprested Larson-Green's presentation to indicate MS is ditching RT. Every other one has assumed that they're just going to merge the WinPhone shell into RT and make Modern UI more scaleable across screen sizes.

Still holding on to Clippy jokes, are we?

Common sense is what a politician believes his or her opinion is.

I've lost count of how many projects I've been on where the architect decides to "make his mark" by using unconventional design choices. Then the project gets stuck in a dev hell where the actual developers struggle with either integration headaches or difficulties with the code not acting like they expect. There's something to be said for plain vanilla.

This almost makes up for all those stupid family films he's been making. Well, this plus 21 Jump Street puts him over the top.

Read Michael Abrash.

For the runtime errors. The lovely, lovely runtime errors!

Because they're the latest versions, and they're free?

It's Slashdot; what do you expect?

The web site turned out like every other v1 web app that gets rushed out to an externally-set deadline?

As a brick

What's the point of that? As someone who has terabytes dedicated to local media storage rather than counting on the cloud to reliably stream (or even carry) a particular album or movie, this trend is really ticking me off. I'm going to take a guess that XBone won't serve as a Media Center Extender as well. Was hoping for a single device to play games, watch TV, and listen to music, but it looks more and more like I need to get a separate NUC (or equivalent) for the media server access (although that was going to be necessary anyway, since XB360 won't play ripped DVDs)