Somehow I never knew that. A design infringement makes a lot more sense. (Unless of course, Samsung now has to release a triangular tablet with sharp corners.) I'm pulling for Samsung here.

We need someone to sneak into Ballmer's room while he's sleeping and play a recording with subliminal message: "USERS USERS USERS. USERS USERS USERS! YES!"

(Or maybe some would argue he already got this message and that's why they're doing this. Maybe replace it that with power users, or else they may jump to Linux like the parent says. (Might Google take Android to the desktop and open it up for power users? Or are they too engrossed in the web to believe in the future of the desktop?))

As a reasonably happy (cross platform and OSS) .NET developer for 7 years now (and Linux fanboy before that, so maybe that's saying something) it has been a relatively long time since Microsoft ticked me off. The walled garden thing is a big reason why I can't stand Apple, and it is invading the Windows desktop? I've got the heebie jeebies. But if Microsoft thinks they have a green thumb that will make a for a pretty little ecosystem like Apple (and hopefully not as annoying), I can see how they think it may help their image in software quality and ease of use and wish them the best in providing Apple with competition in the tablet and phone (and maybe eventually desktop app store) spaces, while hoping for a trivial way to break the walls of the walled garden for even the least of the power users.

Or to sum up, Metro is "boxy but good"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_ArDB7AJAI

Do you know what you're talking about? A quick google makes it looks like their lawyers should be fine with it:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-us/Vsexpressinstall/thread/7390B2FE-54CA-4A5A-BE4F-EC044BE9545D

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/Vsexpressvc/thread/3030a179-f7be-4f40-84ff-debd6d290b2c

I think it might be nice for us Canadians since the levies are not too high, but still a horrible compromise.
Conceding that everyone who buys MP3 player or blank media is a sort of criminal by putting a levy on the player is a horrible idea to me. It gives everyone in the country a license to be a legitimate pirate, because they're paying the penalty whether they like it or not. What kind of logic is "don't do this, it's bad, but even if you don't, we're taking your money anyway"? I've heard Indy producers get hurt by the blank media tax (not sure how much that is true). And where does the money go? In communistic fashion it gets redistributed in some horribly inefficient and inaccurate way to people who some government agency thinks deserves it, and it is a breakdown of the free market.

As for music (and movies), I think part of the answer is to make stores more convenient. The first music store I bought a lot from was allofmp3, but I don't think it was legit. It was awesome, had a very large library, letting me download previews and buy in any format I wanted. I wouldn't have minded paying more to a legit store. I currently subscribe to emusic and they give super short music samples, which is idiotic and I plan to unsubscribe when I finish getting what I want from there. (I can't speak for iPod/iTunes because I hate all the Apple DRM and proprietary lock-in.) A lot of people care about convenience more than freeness, and a lot of people also want to contribute back to the artists they love who they think does deserve something. Perhaps a radical idea is that it would be great to have more of a culture of honour and tipping. Magnatune.com lets the customer decide how much to tip, and most of their customers do, knowing 50% goes directly to artists. I also think Beatport.com has a great interface overall.

I think our government should take an anti-draconian stand in the world and against the US lobbies, and committing (in legislation) to never sell the souls of consumers to content companies. This legal and technical arms race in **AA is a cancer in the world and needs to be stopped. The forced obsolecence of the HD analog mentioned recently on /. makes me mad. Soon they will want to plug the analog hole by injecting devices into our eyeballs do degrade our viewing experience to standard def unless we pay extra money for the full experience, and throw everyone who takes the device out in jail.

Hey...! Speak for yourself. As an Albertan, I think Quebecois are important part of our country and that we all need to grow up and learn to get along, even if it means we westerners and other english canadians have to grow up first.

Sure the federal politics and apparent provincial idiocy regarding language protection have been very annoying for a very long time, but I believe in our nation of Canada, and I do not want to throw my fellow Canadians under the bus (even if some of them would throw me as an Albertan under the bus -- although it seems people from other eastern provinces do it too.)

Relations between french and english Canada seems to have always been difficult, but I don't think it is impossible. Hating each other and saying we wish Quebec would separate is not going to help. We don't need a big hole of alienated or separated people in the middle of our country.

We are supposed to take pride in our identity as one that celebrates diversity, contrasted to the melting pot to the south. For one, it is nice to have people from Quebec here who enjoy culture and life in a way that we who are more conservative Albertans can appreciate.

Maybe you are just trying to be funny, and let the world know that we non-Quebec canadians have quite a few differences with Quebec countrymen, but I have been concerned lately about the reckless hatred that seems to be growing among us.

    We are supposed to have an identity as a peace-keeping nation. We have so much peace in Canada to be thankful for. Let's not throw that away.

Seems like overreacting to me too. The grandparent was pointing out the bizarre logic of how a francophone government trying to promote the french language in a francophone province (so as to not be overwhelmed by an english-dominated continent) had the reverse effect of forcing someone to learn english and to gain academic credentials in english.

Can you name some examples?

(The rest is more my thoughts than a reply to anyone in particular...)

I have been experimenting how to do this in a generic way with db4o in C# (an object database for Java/.NET), and putting my own notification on top of the objects as well as the database events to enable (as an option) immediate persistance of object changes the way you mention you do with config files. I still had to do work to do this, though -- it's 2009, and this has probably been done in feeble and fantastic ways 100's or 1000's of times, if not more, and where is the reusable wisdom gained? I get upset with the naysayer crowds who want to stick with tried and true methods of doing everything manually over and over, just because they've gotten comfortable with it and don't want to learn or think about anything new.

People mention Squeak/scheme/smalltalk, and I have marveled at how cool it is and wished I could delve into it, but seriously, is it a practial platform ready for mainstream? Being a mainly .NET guy now (apologies to the Java/C++ world), I just googled a .NET bridge but it was talking ActiveX garbage which I don't want to touch, and then another bridge link that looked broken. (I just found Bigloo.net, which looks interesting, although experimental.) (And I don't have any ancient IBM machines from the 80s and their obscure OS, the names of which I have already forgotten, to do this either.)

I did set up and do a bit of coding for Zope (Plone) on Python, and loved some of the advantages of the object database system there (even though it was still hierarchical), for finer-grained objects where it would be annoying to create files everywhere.

Sure, big monolithic files have their place, like OpenOffice documents, but nobody's putting a gun to your head to tell you that you must chop that OOo doc up into 1000 tiny objects... that would be insanity, and to assume someone else is insane just shows close-mindedness and a lack of imagination. (Quote from the FAQ: "And objects can be huge. No limit.")

In general, I like to see common design patterns like this moved lower and pushed as a standard, either into the language or widely-used libraries. I'm glad C# made events and properties first class entities. I'm glad the SOA bandwagon camped around the observer pattern and basically built a sub-industry that pushed standard ways to do MOM and topic based routers with JMS AMQP etc. What do we have for objects that should be persisted? How are we going to make the semantic web with interesting bits of information if nobody bothers to notice that the barrier to entry to bridging semantic web to monolithic file structures is too high?

I think a good programming framework (probably cross-language... I know there are some ODBMSs out there like Objectivity that are more multiplatform than db4o's Java/.NET) would be great, and while I am not the type to venture out and create an entire OS around this concept, it will be interesting to see if someone can create a sound foundation with a suite of desktop-domain apps that establish that there are some useful low-level mechanisms that may be reasonable foundations for (a chunk of) general development. I think all this may have been tried before with WinFS, and quite a few interesting things came of that (hierarchical db structure, big files in the RDBMS, a generalized extensible sync framework). Hopefully this Russian guy knows what he's doing and will do something interesting with this, and maybe take a standardized workable environment further than MS did (or go more mainstream than Squeak / Zope, etc).

Anyway, while I may share some of the skepticism of the scoffers commenting about the near-term viability of this as an OS, I applaud the effort to rethink some things, and hopefully some bits of progress will come out of this experiment. I think things like Squeak, Zope/Python, and WinFS have started popularizing and standardizing some useful capabilities that have not yet had a top-notch execution.