Perhaps you've noticed the "Universal Service Fee" on your telephone bill. This is a government-mandated subsidy to support phone access in rural areas. Fair enough, perhaps. Here in Hawaii, SandwichIsles Communications Company receives more than \$16M dollar per year to service... are you ready? ... 1,238 customers. That's \$13,345 …

In a forthcoming column in SD Times, I predicted that one of the first things written using XNA GSE would be a Bittorrent client for the XBox360. Wrong. The current version of XNA does not allow network access.

Hmm...

Holy smoke, the new version was supposed to have hit the storeshelves 2 days ago. Man, I bet they regret not having had the opportunity to put "the lowest-swinging signifier of programming studliness" on the cover.

Joel Spolsky, one of the ablest commentors on the industry, recently made the mistake of combining advice and self-promotion without realizing that what he was writing combined "do what I say, not what I do," with a flame-baiting slap at non-mainstream languages. He's been hammered in the blogosphere, but the …

Ah. Although you cannot develop with XNA GSE inside a VM (either VMWare or Virtual PC), you can install Visual C# Express side-by-side with Visual Studio 2005. There's a slight weirdness in that VC# Express can only install to \$PROGRAM FILES, while I normally keep my dev tools on a …

Oh, bummer! Given that XNA GSE is a beta and given that it requires C# Express, not Visual Studio, I installed it in a VMWare OS, but when I went to run the sample SpaceWar game, I received a "No suitable graphics" message. I think that leaves me out of …

Nope, not a clever job-related post. I've been listening to my "5-star" songs on Windows Media Player and, y'know, is there any better minute of rock than the end of "Won't Get Fooled Again"? (Tell it to the hand, Zeppelin fans.)

I'm kicking myself for having two weeks ago written a column on Microsoft's outreach to non-professional programmers. If I had waited until my current deadline, I would have an excuse to spend the day programming a game for the XBox. As it is, I have GSA sitting in my /Downloads …

DevX has published my introductory article on concurrent programming in C# (a companion piece to my earlier article on C++/CLI and OpenMP). The interesting thing is that OpenMP makes parallel constructs easier to express in C++ than is possible in C#. On the other hand, C#'s memory management …

I had a preview last week of Intel's new threading products, including "Threading Building Blocks," a C++ runtime library (template-based) that provides high-performance thread-safe data structures. I was very impressed by the slides showing performance:

I look forward to trying out the tools myself.