And no malware has ever been transmitted through the browser, so another problem brilliantly solved!

Now if only we could remove the OS and only have a browser that does exactly what the OS did but under a different name, the world would be a far better place...

I can render a PDF perfectly on all OSes I own (Windows, OS X, iOS, Windows Phone 7) already!

Where the fuck did anybody officially say they dropped support for Silverlight?

So, Microsoft has changed one of its websites from Silverlight to HTML 5. That's a standard, so it's always A Good Thing.

Silverlight remains there, a good way to build animated user experiences; Silverlight 5 will be integrated with XNA. Having the chance to push a reduced version of my game (I am a game developer, and I can assure you this is VERY IMPORTANT TO MY COMPANY) through the browser as a demo/for betas, etc. is great. Easily deploying an application with a complex logic (nope: a dynamically typed language such as Javascript is worse than C# for complex reasoning) to many users through the browser with the possibility of right-clicking it to install it offline is another Good Thing.

So from where I sit Microsoft has done a good job because HTML 5 is better for that kind of website, and Silverlight is very alive even though it will be reduced to the only thing it was successful at: medium/large applications that must be easily deployed.

The fact that many books will be supplanted by digital versions is obvious and is already happening at a very fast pace. The idea that this trend will continue linearly is very dumb. There are applications for paper books, be it because you want the object for your physical collection, be it for taking notes or be it because a prestigious conference wants to print its proceedings.

We will probably end up in a world where most "perishable" low-cost/read-once books exist only in digital because they are not interesting enough that anybody may care about printing them, where high-value publications, proceedings, etc. will remain on paper because the value of the medium is by far surpassed by the value of the contents and a hard copy still makes a lot of sense.

You often see this kind of asinine ideas that trends will never stop when some equilibrium will be reached: smartphones and tablets are growing, therefore the PC is going to die soon, etc. Wake up: new and old find ways to live together, and a successful innovation does not necessarily displace everything that was before it...

In my book you need some studying to do if you think .Net (one of the major managed runtimes of today) is a language.

Plato was Greek, so I doubt he wrote originals in Latin :)

Win 7 infections went from 3/1000 to 4/1000, that is infected ratio went from 0.3% to 0.4% (yes, it is a 33% increase, to be precise), while XP went from 18/1000 to 14/1000, that is infected ratio went from 1.8% to 1.4%. The numbers actually mean that Microsoft is doing a good job on security, since over 1000 PC the combined metric is not an increase of 11% (as the article seems to imply) but rather we went from 2.1% infected to 1.8%, which is a nice step.

It's just a very cheap way to make my users try a full, free (ad-supported), on-demand version of my game by using the same assets of the Desktop/Windows and Xbox versions. Also, I can let paying users access the SL out of browser system to let them install the application and use it offline, without even having to build an installer package. Development time is very costly for an indie team, and for us this is already making a large difference, especially given how happy our publisher is about this opportunity...

Honestly I don't get the point of your snarkiness about my humour...

Mostly I do the following: I write reusable meta-libraries in F# that generate the same code-behind that others would repeatedly build by hand in Visual Studio with C#. So I clearly hear what you are saying, but rather than conclude negatively that an easy-peasy avenue makes a library "dumb", I appreciate the fact that the underlying model is clean enough to allow both library makers and "regular coders" to be productive. More often than not you find libraries that are good for idiots but are rather poor representations of whatever they wish to represent, other times you find libraries which are pure shit, and rarely you find stuff which is clean and elegant but which arguably has no possible practical use (http://www.haskell.org/arrows/ :D)

Uh? It runs *already well* in wp7?

Sounds like a problem with the project developer...

Well, I know a shitload of languages too: C/C++/C#/Java/OCaML/Haskell/Lisp/Scheme, so my intellectual dick does not look shorter than yours...

Btw, I know the difference between a library and a language and so I know that it's quite irrelevant how many languages you know to judge a software library.

Silverlight is not "pointy clicky development". It is a clean Reactive Programming model that strongly emphasizes the distinction between general layout, data templates (how you represent your app objects) and application logic. The three layers are put together, respectively, by XAML, templates and styles, and the very powerful mechanism for data-bindings.

I do not wish to offend, but you may not know much about Silverlight. Up until a couple of versions ago it did not even have a visual plugin for Visual Studio...

Actually, dev support is possibly *the only* truly great thing in wp7...

A very interesting move is the integration between Silverlight and XNA: this will allow (I am developing such a game right now!) web-based 3D accelerated games that are also playable on wp7, the XBox and as a desktop Windows application. The framework, at least from the pov of an indie game dev, is truly exceptional and very little out there compares favorably. Unity, maybe, but then it's an engine rather than a framework and so it offers less generality...

wtf? What on Earth does that mean?

A software has compatibility issues on some specific hardware. Amazing and never seen before. So what?