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It's not OEM, it's Microsoft. The only reason iPod/iPhone/iOS had conquered the market was a consolidated marketplace where developers/publishers/artists can with minimum startup cost publish their work and start making money and end-user doesn't have to browse around forever to find piece of media/software they need. Any music player would play MP3 files but iTunes made it easy to find, check review and download. Up until recent Microsoft Store, user would need to hunt down and struggle with download of the content they want. That's by the way is the reason Kindle Fire took off - plenty of easy-to-find contents.
Besides there is a "good enough" factor. If price difference is substantial user may decide to settle (as they do with $300 laptops). If components are priced similarly, there is no reason to settle. Low end android devices are crap. High end - priced similarly to iPod and there is no reason to go for second best - might as well get the best.
Microsoft have an uphill battle. Just because the Metro interface is arguably better is not sufficient. They need to create a marketplace (which they started with they new store) and make sure it's loaded with contents, create devices that are either better than iPod or significantly cheaper - which might be a problem.
A lot of content developers I imagine will take a wait and see approach - you don't want to spend your development dollars to build a contents for the marketplace w/o future or the marketplace where backing company doesn't honor backward compatibility.
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After computers were made of bronze cogs but before they were made of integrated circuits, they were made of paper, they were found in books. All of this is just another dimension of the relationship between book and computer. More than containers that sometimes compete for the same information, they are on the family tree of a daunting ambition to compute and compile all that can be known. Each in their own time they are the best-fit materials for the job. Lullian Circles and the long history of paper computing.
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Have you ever wanted your users to click your links, but didn’t know how to get them to act? When some designers run into this problem they’re tempted to use the words “click here” on their links. Before you give in to the temptation, you should know that using these words on a link can affect how users experience your interface. To learn more, click... er, read on!
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It's certainly safe at this point to say that flash has won the war in the mobile space—I don't think we'll ever see another tablet or phone based on anything other than solid state storage. The war for the proverbial desktop (which includes most laptops) is far from over, with hard disk drives still outnumbering SSDs in most traditional computers. Still, SSDs are in enough places doing enough things that modern operating systems have changed to accommodate them. Long live Flash RAM! You've saved your Earth. Have a nice day.
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The touchpad problem illustrates why Microsoft had to build the Surface rather than let its hardware partners take the lead on Windows 8 tablets. Making a great trackpad isn’t easy. Humble as it seems, perfecting the interface depends on a host of skills that most companies don’t possess—top-notch industrial design, perfectionist control over manufacturing processes, and, most importantly, software that’s finely crafted to work with the hardware. If PC vendors can’t even get this small thing right, how could they possibly make something as polished as an iPad? If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.
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Software licensing is and will remain a viable revenue stream for the foreseeable future. But both public market valuations and observed behaviors of strategic software players indicate that the days of software licensing as a primary revenue stream are potentially over. If the world’s largest software firm pivoting into hardware doesn’t convince you that the world is changing, my question to you is: what would? The value of software in general is not in decline... just bad software.
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It is time for the participants in the Tracking Protection Working Group to take a long, hard look at where the process is going. It is time for the rest of us to tell them, loudly, that the process is going awry. It is true that Do Not Track, at least in the present regulatory environment, is voluntary. But it does not follow that the standard should allow “compliant” websites to pick and choose which pieces to comply with. No means no, and Do Not Track means Do Not Track.
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Really sad to read about it... it's amazing how many bad moves AOL has made in its lifetime (as a company). You'd figure they would have rebranded themselves by now, considering just about everyone considers AOL old news by now.
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Future MS Office to be loaded with social features [Ars Technica][^]
modified 25-Jun-12 18:15pm.
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Windows systems infected with Trojan.Milicenso are spitting out pages with random wingdings on thousands of printers. [ITworld]
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In one year the number of tracking firms have doubled and the amount of data they collect has grown more than 400 percent, according to a study by Krux Digital. [ITworld]
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Who is Stephen Hawkins? 
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He is Stephen Hawking's stunt double.
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When I was learning PowerShell, I thought of it as a scripting language that has a shell. But the right way to think of it may be the opposite, a shell that has a scripting language. Apparently others have followed this same change of perspective. Don Jones and Jeffrey Hicks first saw PowerShell as a VBScript replacement and taught it that way.
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That seems to be an improvement over the first power shell tutorials that started by trying to convince you that monads are simple, really.
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One of the biggest problems Microsoft will face with the Windows 8 platforms is that they’re effectively starting from zero apps. What can Microsoft do to encourage developers to create great Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 apps? Are you ready to develop apps for Windows 8?
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Quote: Ever wonder why there are more games?
Easier development, more developer resources more tools.
Being MS developer, that what I wanted to believe but the reality is that Eclipse and xCode are both pretty good, I would say up-to-par with Visual Studio. iOS has 500,000 apps and Android has close to 400,000 - apparently both have enough developers building apps - and much more than WP7. The name of the game is how big the market is. So far MS failed to capture mobile/tablet space. If they can produce and sell quality device in sufficient numbers - developers will follow, if not - doesn't matter how good Visual Studio is.
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Nope. Not much call for development tools running on Metro!
Anna ![Rose | [Rose]](https://codeproject.freetls.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/rose.gif)
Tech Blog | Visual Lint
"Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
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If you build websites for a living, you'll undoubtedly use the obvious web design tools - Firebug, Browsershots, plus the various font embedding services and page speed analysers. So this article isn't about them. Instead it's about the more underrated tools that we use that can help you improve client-side (browser) development and rigorously test everything that you build. Pro tip: learn the keyboard shortcut for developer tools in all your browsers.
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Write code that communicates well what and why is done so that your co-workers and future maintainers can take it over without too much cost. (Yet you have to assume some level of skill and knowledge in you audience.) You cannot foresee the future so keep your code simple and sufficiently flexible so that it can evolve. I don't always program like Kent Beck, but when I do, I program like this.
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Me I program like Jeff Beck. 
Clickety[^]
Life is too shor
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