Microsoft launched .NET two years ago last Friday. My short take: CLR and C# are unqualified successes; Managed C++ was a failure, but they'll turn that around with C++/CLI; and that the jury's still out on VB.NET. The most disappointing thing to me is the relative dearth of …

K5 thread analyzes the comments in the leaked W2K code. It doesn't quote the code at all other than a general comment that the code is quite clean, with most functions fitting on a single screen.

Paul Allen's company Vulcan is bankrolling three competing teams that are attempting to create software that does well on the SATs. Early results show that it's possible to get the computer to deal with quantitative questions like "If you mix these two chemicals, what will the resultant pH be?" but …

An article in the February 2004 Communications of the ACM by Yossi Lichtenstein says, in the hedged terms of a small sample size and an academic paper: "current outsourcing practices [contracting, not technical] may fall short of the sophistication prescribed by theories." In other words, outsourcing is being seized on …

Recently Wacom released an updated version of their graphics driver for penabled Tablet PCs. This release apparently solves the problem of ink lines being jagged, which was caused by the previous version. via [Tabula PC]

Holy palsy, Batman! I thought my digitizer was going!

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p dir=ltr> Update: For my …

Well, that's what the Cross site now says anyway. via [Tabula PC]

The greatest saga in the history of the Tablet PC has been the wait for a well-designed digitizing pen. Why Cross has had such a hard time (more than a year delay) wrapping a decent barrel around the …

Function points are a programming-language-independent way of describing the size of a piece of software. However, a given programming language has a typical amount of lines-of-code per function point, allowing a rough estimate of function points from LOC and vice versa. Even more importantly, a programmer or team tends to …

My sudden loss of network connectivity was caused by a disabled Norton Internet Security application on my machine. Despite having disabled it after my subscription ran out in August of last year, I manually ran the Symantec "Smart Updater" and my capabilities came back. Grrr... I dedicated 4 3/4 …

Why do spammers bother being clever? Isn't the set of "people who buy from spam" a subset of "people who aren't trying to defeat spam"?

Here's an article from Sun that describes a working group that achieved more transparency. The way that Java evolves (the JCP: nice in theory, clumsy in practice) is one of that platform's biggest problems. The article is a bit of a puff piece, but at least it acknowledges that major …