RealMerit? RealNetworks allege that "From October 2001 to March 2003, for example, Microsoft's 'tying' ensured that Windows Media Player was preinstalled on about 95 percent of PCs shipped...RealNetworks' digital media player was preinstalled on less than 2 percent....Microsoft used contractual restrictions and financial incentives to 'force PC makers …

Scoble's learning to program in C#. Next year I'm going to be writing a book for people learning to program. Lately I've been thinking a lot that it might be based on manipulating Office from C#. The gap between "Hello, World!" and "controlling my computer to do cool things" is …

Jeroen Frijters wrote a C# program that displays an artificial horizon on his new Thinkpad T41p by reverse-engineering the [IOCTL]{.caps} that corresponds to the data provided by the built-in accelerometer in his T41p.  via [iunknown.com]

I think he should "take it to the next level" and write a …

InfoPath and XAML

The scales fell off my eyes this morning when I was answering an email to my recent SD Times article discussing InfoPath. I wrote that column before the PDC and hadn't really thought about it since (it's mostly a criticism of InfoPath's licensing model). But now I …

[W]hat does the inventor of Tetris do for MS?

I don't want to make any stupid assumptions, but my guess is that he designs the cubicle layouts while listening to catchy music... via [Neopoleon.com]

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p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> Rory's witty.

::: {dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"} Jim Hugunin, of AspectJ and JPython/Jython, has made a preliminary version of Python that runs quickly on .NET. This is a very big deal big in that to date the only third-party dynamic languages for .NET have been conspicuously low-performance. At the "Alternate Languages …

Rory wrote a post about strong AI and whether we should spend money there rather than going back to the moon to which Eric replied "...the best goal to push for is solar power satellites...."

I think that solar power satellites is a world-transforming goal that requires government funding, while …

In a post that's mostly about resource management, Eric Gunnerson mentions an API that I didn't know existed:

desktopWindow.Image = Win32Window.DesktopAsBitmap;

This is quite apropos the discussion of novice versus expert users. Here I've been a user of the .NET BCL for more than 2 years and when I …

Like skiers, the average user is a permanent intermediate, neither beginner nor expert. It is a mistake for UI designers to heed debates such as going on in Scoble's comments on UI requests for Longhorn. Even more dangerously, intermediate skills are easy to overlook in usability labs: sit a person …

Intel Research has released an Open Source Machine Learning toolkit based on Bayesian learning. (Hmmm... at the moment, they don't seem to have deployed any... oh, what is the word? ... files.)