My old buddy Eric Faurot (we used to work together on the Software Development Conferences) cancelled Comdex.

via [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Sara Ford got a four-word email from Bill Gates (in response to an email from her) and apparently this is cause for celebration, skepticism, and general up-roar-ary. That's extremely disturbing. Gates' is the boss\^h\^h\^h\^h ... er... "Chief Software Architect" of a 50 …

One of the t-shirt hurling contest entrants sent some photos of their entry. via [James Gosling: on the Java road...]

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p dir="ltr"> For those who've never been to JavaOne, the hurling of t-shirts to the audience (and let's face it: that is what keeps the conference industry alive) in …

The "Tablet isn't for consumers" story is a myth. Tell it to the students using Tablets. Tell it to the start ups that leverage the flexibility of the Tablet in their highly fluid states. Tell it to the doctors, lawyers, managers, engineers, and on and on, that purchased a Tablet …

Loren laments that ultra-portable computers aren't Tablet PCs. Check out the Sony U-70:

Man, I'd buy a Tablet in that form-factor in a microsecond! But I've come to realize that I'm more pen-centric and more note-taking centric than most people (I have dozens of paper notebooks going back to High …

There has been a fair amount of discussion about key bindings in VS.NET, and the fact that they seem to be changing yet again in VS.NET 2005....But the thing that bugs me most about the current set of bindings is the amount of arbitrary stuff you have …

Richard Callaby's favorite geek movies are:

1. Sneakers
2. War Games
3. Hackers
4. Anti-Trust
5. Startup.com
6. Triumph of the Nerds

Mine are:

1. Minority Report (I loved that pre-crime interface! Oh, and you must check this probably-not-intended-for-public-consumption page at Microsoft Research: http://research.microsoft.com/\~dcr/minority/functionality_01.htm)
2. Blade Runner
3. War Games
4. Matrix …

....Why don't I just bill the user via email using something like PayPal? Think about it, the user enters their email and phone number on their phone, promises to pay the 99 cents when they get to a real computer and that's it. Done. No middle man, no carriers, no …

Apparently some top Xbox execs are quietly confirming that the Xbox 2 isn't going to be backwards compatible with original Xbox games. via [Engadget]

MSDN Magazine: 2, Raymond Chen: 0!!!!

On rereading Joel's article, I think his argument boils down to:

He's not denying the need to rely on "external dependencies," he's advocating that such dependencies be localized. Why? Because when there are several external dependencies, they have a tendency to have internal dependencies, and you tend to need a …