What I really want is Silverlight, which won't ever happen because of strictly political reasons between MS and Apple. It's stupid, these companies get into pissing matches with each other and their customers suffer from it.

I dunno bout you, but I have a record collection of about 5k vinyl records. If I wanted to synch that to an Ipad, I'd have to have ... a computer?

Seriously 64G, the most expensive one sold, just don't cut it, it's just not enough space.

That, and I have learned that when companies like this CAN change the rules at any time, they inevitably do... at will.

ALL my content is > TB on any given day. Now what?

yeah its screwed up isn't it?

Apple's approach to developers is

1) We get to claim 30% of your revenue
2) You have to live in a box and learn "our way" to stay there
3) We can change the rules at any time

It's almost dystopian, how the hell do they expect to attract developers with these kinds of restrictions?

It has never been more clear that Wonziak did all the work, and Jobs did the marketing, and we all know who ended up running the place.

Seriously, in the early 90's I wrote a lot of software on a 7200 PPC Apple, and loved it, but I just can't get into the new Macs. They feel like the government with all the rules.

I was hoping for some new iphone ... or flash support... or SOMETHING new. Icloud? SERIOUSLY?

I think it's painfully evident that programmers and marketing people think completely differently about tech at this point. To me, The Cloud (TM) was the SAN 10 years ago (storage area network), and it changes absolutely NOTHING. Except maybe now apple can cut you off from your own computer whenever they feel like it.

No thanks, come back when you guys learn to innovate again though and we'll try again, mmk?

I like the Metro style MS has going on here, but there seems to be a lot of concern in the .NET community that they are tossing the "traditional" developers overboard to chase HTML5 over Js. We have been working with WPF/XAML/C# for the last year, and it's not even entirely baked yet, so I just don't understand why they feel the need to start bolting new shit onto it. They SERIOUSLY need to fix VS2010 before doing anything radical like this, or who the hell is going to develop for this thing... and with what? Right now, XAML is non-debuggable, takes twice as much time as forms did to develop with, is SLOW, doesn't deploy well, is incomplete (even after you add all the codeplex add-ons and toolkits), and WPF and Silverlight are nowhere near as "interchangable" as MS marketing wants everyone to believe. And javascript/HTML? Apparently we should all throw out VS2010 and start working with Eclipse?

I guess Apple has them so scared that they are in danger of hopping on trends to try to catch up, and that's going to be a MAJOR PROBLEM if they screw all the .NET developers along the way.

I mean, look, touch is cool and all, and we have been able to make some really cool interfaces on early windows tablets, but I have to agree with Enderandrew above that turning the OS into a giant phone is a bad idea. Sheesh, one would think that MS, one of the largest software shops IN THE WORLD, could do both at the same time, but it appears not ....

Consequently... fingerprints are a huge problem for us (we make medical workstations where smudges can screw up diagnostic quality), so I wonder if anyone is out there working on a smudge-less touch interface? Maybe self-cleaning? Too much to hope for?...

I absolutely agree with you, these should be tested and regulated as medical devices. As your article link noted they should be calibrated, QC'd and logged daily, and by someone who knows how to do it (an unqualified check is actually worse than not doing anything, since the wrong setting can be a very bad thing). And you can bet with the number of them out there already a lot slipping through maintenance cracks. The deal is, you can't tell if one's bad, you just get a bunch of passengers with a rash a week after flying who all drop dead 6 months later...

I make radiology stations for a living. The 3 companies that make the "backscatter" x-ray machines aren't people like "GE' or "Siemens", they're defense contractors. There's many radiologiests who won't fly commercial because of these things. All it takes is ONE screw up in configuration and maintenance and you get Therac-25... except these things are everywhere now...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

I didn't expect it to be so accurate, but jesus it came out really cool. Playing Table Tennis on a 12 foot projected surface is surreal.

MS is probably being honest to say they left it open. It's an obvious PC interface, at least IMHO, and I'll bet it get released with the next iteration of the DirectX SDK. I can see a lot of dedicated environments for business where this makes complete sense as a mouse replacement. It's not a "wireless" anything, it's completely hands free, which sounds like a trivial difference but in reality changes the entire experience.

We make medical software, and right off the top of my head I could see a quick interface to let a doc work on you and use something like this to navigate medical histories (say, by voice with some limited hand waving for selection). Seriously, most folks are trying to do that kind of thing with tablets atm, but in an emergency room or surgery having your hands free is priceless (not to mention, no contamination from physical interfaces).

I agree with you really, note that before Google and Apple came Dell... who closed within 5 years or so after receiving a ton of tax breaks. That said, what makes rural areas a little different is that when there is a tech concentration, that's just about all there is so the economy for the local area really does get directly affected (instead of Atlanta, DC, New York, et al. who all have super-diverse industrial makeups... out here its farming or IT) . You are right though, subsidies seem to rarely pay for themselves.

It's been strange to see this happen. We live right in the center of all this (near Winston-Salem, apple is 45 minutes south, and google is 20 minutes west) and I have to say, these places are not subtle. These places are HUGE. I think the Elkin/Google installation is like 250 acres, which is silly huge. It makes sense, land out here is cheap but you are still 5 hours from DC which in itself is priceless for corporations (the big ones). Add in tax breaks, an evolving biotech industry (like us... we hope!), and lots of geeks near-local (the triangle with IBM/Glaxo/Redhat/Epic Games/Etc. is 2 hours east) and it seems obvious. The nice part for people who live here is that bandwidth is really really good in order to feed all these guys. REALLY good :)

You are welcome to defend your employer, and at Oracle I don't blame you for using AC to do it, but this is not exactly an observation I came up with out of the blue sky...

I'll just leave this here for you bud.

http://news.cnet.com/The-pitch-Inside-the-pressure-cooker/2009-1017_3-897414.html

Please understand, I think Oracle is a great product at its core. It almost literally runs the world at this point, I just question from both public articles (such as linked) and personal experience (15 years as a DBA, architect, developer, and now Development Officer) Oracle's tactics. Even if they were the greatest employer EVER, it still wouldn't excuse they way they treat their customers. They routinely overcharge for services and pad consulting gigs.

I've been deposed by Oracle in court before (as part of a PS lawsuit), and watching them treat their customers like dogs speaks volumes. I refuse to believe anyone with the kind of sleazy ethics I watched performed (on more than one occasion I might add) can somehow magically be paradigms of humanity internally. On one particularly memorable occasion, I watched Peoplesoft almost destroy a company by trying to implement a beta version of a SQL Server based product(before Oracle bought them), and then got to watch Oracle (via the courts, after the PS buyout) trying to defend Microsoft as a perfectly viable platform. These weren't lawyers,by the way. When it's 25M$ or so of trainwreck, you get real life VP's to show up and lie.

I was a DBA forever, and while I loved the 10 or so years I spent supporting Oracle I noted that consultants (for what its worth) seemed to uniformly hate the place (a note, I supported Peoplesoft Installations for awhile and we saw a lot of consultants come through from Oracle among other places..).

It's really a shame, but when 9 came out and Oracle co-opted java for the first time, they screwed it up and it hasn't really gotten any better since. I think a big reason for this is that the office culture of the place is a reflection of Ellison's arrogance, which is somewhat demotivating (even if only privately) to the people who work there, and their products suffer. So here we are with Oracle now owning java and, surprise surprise, Ellison is out to monetize it. Folks, that's what he does. There's a reason he's one of the richest men alive, he finds choke points in the software market and either buys or kills (and replaces) them.

He reminds me of the Wall Street people who see no moral issues with destroying everything in their path to turn a profit. It's sick, it's wrong, and this is America where for better or worse its legal. Ultimately, these super-arrogant folks will be the death of software as an industry because they simply have no concept of 'enough'. One guy told us (unconfirmed personally, but I have no reason to doubt it) that at Oracle, if you weren't in a position to replace your boss after the first year, your career there was basically over. Ellison calls this 'samurai management' or some such nonsense, but I call it bad business. It's this kind of crap that leads to workplace incivility, and this grudge-holding shit Emperor Larry is famous for is plain old simple hubris. It's ok though, he's getting too old to do it for much longer, and Oracle is rapidly becoming a product worth 1k$ instead of 100k$ per installation. Not that he'll ever be poor, but boy wouldn't it be fun to watch him be humbled.

Am I the only one who looks around these days and wonders where the hell we went wrong? Look around you folks, because we the geeks are the last remaining american product this side of hollywood. The guy in the white house is too cool to solve pretty much anything, and the last guy was about the dumbest, most self-interested shill in history. At least this Assange guy is trying to preserve some semblance of the truth, so people of the future can learn from it (not that knowing the truth has really helped much before). I think the guy deserves protection, and good for him if he back-doors his way into it. He is serving the public whether they like it or not, which is ballsy and will probably end badly, but hey more power to him.

I find it fascinating that we are losing Afghanistan to the most primitive people on earth, and at the same time ONE GUY is able to stymie the entire Intelligence community by telling the truth about it. So with these facts before us, what exactly is worth 700$Billion per year that we spend on defense? Oh and lest we forget, even with google maps we haven't found Bin Laden's cave either. I think we as a country are wasting our time, and letting our best resource (young people) learn lessons in war and imperialism that we should have learned from Vietnam years ago. 10 years... my god.

I have spent a LOT of time (like omg just too many hours to count) designing medical software, and I have to agree with this guy... these MDiety suckers can be the most arrogant people on the planet. They just look right over patients as a statistic.

I'm willing to allow that some guys just really can't deal very well with people, but even that does NOT excuse their dealings with staff. Some of these folks are mindblowingly self centered jerks, and see even praising their office folks as somehow beneath them. I do think that trying to enforce a 'please' policy is fairly dumb, but at the same time I think it is important to remember that typically people who don't have to be forced to say 'please' don't have this kind of problem in the first place (i.e. the guy who already knows and acknowledges the lab staff and works with them in reasonable ways can probably leave this kind of shit off anyway and have it be presumed...).

Seriously, if you take the worst BOFH in history and add a 500k/year salary you get a typical surgeon.

Ummm FTFL?

Timestamp equivalent * Eventually, MS will convert the current timestamp of a unique row number, to an actual date and time. * Use ROWVERSION instead of timestamp. Row version provides the same functionality and the same value as the current timestamp.

MSSQL 2008 and above is fine, and we use timestamps almost to an atomic precision in medical imaging... eventually came right after that post ... in 2007. SQL Server Vs. Oracle/MySQL is the only fight worth wasting time on. Here's the thing about RDBMS. Not only has it been the standard for 20 years, virtually assuring their own persistence because by very nature they grow.. a LOT, but it is one of the few standards that actually has a solid foundation. You see, in this age of marketing driven products, there are still a few things out there quietly running the world. And I assure you it's not XML pages.

my 2cents.

--chitlenz