Wow...this kind of levels the playing field. A big reason I stayed away from IE was because of the extensions. If people's favourite extensions start working on Edge, then I'm sure many will give it a serious go.
Edge will have to prove itself as a browser first. IE is inferior to all the others, currently. Edge, as "Spartan", has shown positive results in Microsoft's "lab tests" but they showed same results in the past so viewing such "reports" should be taken with a grain of salt.
If they can make this work seamlessly, its a great way to steal users from both the Chrome and Firefox camps. Single-browser extensions are in effect "bricks" for building a walled garden around a browser.
So I'm happy if MS is able to break down those walls and take us more toward an open browser standard, as yefim commented.
Many reasons. Leaky abstractions, possible slight incompatibilities/quirks due to having to maintain two extension layers at once. Generally development times split between two completely different environments.
>>So I've been thinking about this for basically months, but the way I work, I actually want to have a good mental picture of what I'm doing before I start prototyping. And while I had a high-level notion of what I wanted, I didn't have enough of a idea of the details to really start coding.
This might be a tangential discussion. Earlier, I used to have a similar approach. Can't code until I have the complete picture. But, it's tough to do in a commercial world and you have deliverables. So, nowadays, I start with what I know and scramble my way until I get a better picture. There are times when that approach works. But, there have been days where I was like - "wish I had spent some more time thinking about this".
I am curious how folks on HN handle this "coding block".
I've got a few strategies that might help, depending on the circumstances.
A notebook: I'll write down some notes and just kind of free write whatever thoughts come to mind. If there's something that I think is important to come back to, I'll draw an empty box in the left margin (to be filled with a check mark later)
Readme: start writing the Readme for the project, even if you're not entirely sure of the details. Include code examples. If you don't like how the API is coming together, change it. It's way less work to modify the API now than it will be later.
Write a test: I don't always unit test, but when I do I test first :). This works well on projects that already have a decent test suite. It's kind of an executable version of the Readme.
Branch and Hack: branches are cheap. Make one and start playing. Don't like how it's turning out? Make a new branch and try again!
Ctrl-Z: maybe the answer won't come to you right away. Let it sit and run in the background for a while and come back to it. If I'm worried about forgetting details, I'll write it down in a notebook first.
This is beautiful work! I see small shades of inspiration from the .Net TPL[1] and the more recent async-await paradigm[2] in C#. But, this is way more concise and beautiful implementation :-)
Thanks! I was wondering if someone would make that comparison. I saw async-await a little after I started working on this and felt it was good confirmation that this was actually a reasonable idea.
I agree with this comment on the Ars thread[1]. I know this was discussed extensively here[2]. But, the comments on the thread seemed a bit biased towards one side.
With that logic, Google could block any other phone like the Ubuntu Edge for "business reasons", Google deserves to be sued for this anti-competitive behavior.
its not anticompetitive to not allow a third party to release your product on their platform without following your rules (reasonable or not).
Hundreds of millions of dollars in engineering effort and bandwidth go into Youtube. In reality Google is completely within its rights to no do anything to support any platform it chooses not to. Why allow a platform and company to leech off that if they're not willing to. Microsoft is just trying to win in the court of public opinion here.
Can't you use that exact same logic to argue that Comcast has spent billions of dollars laying cable into the ground and that it's completely reasonable for them to not allow content that doesn't fit within the goals of their "platform" like netflix traffic?
That comparison seems weird because the relationships aren't the same. Comcast's customers are the people who pay for Comcast service at their homes and businesses. If Comcast favors its own content over other content, and they have a local monopoly on internet service, then they are using their monopoly to abuse their customers.
Neither Microsoft, nor owners of Windows Phone handsets, are customers of YouTube. The only people who are customers of YouTube are people who pay to have their videos hosted there.
Is YouTube purporting to provide me with Internet access or otherwise operate as infrastructure? I must have missed that.
If Comcast wants to provide a digital network that provides connectivity between selected entities (such as end-users and companies that have elected to pay Comcast additional fees), that's fine. But they don't get to call it "Internet". They don't get to pass it off as something different from the AOL and CompuServe of old.
Comcast and many cable ISPs have a monopoly for high speed Internet in many parts if the US. YouTube is not forced on anyone due to where they live, and there are plenty of alternatives to YouTube out there that you are free to use.
That would be OK is the rules weren't arbitrary, it is not OK to allow native API calls to some and to force to use HTML5 to others, it is inexcusable.
There are no "others" and no "rules". Google makes the iOS and Android apps, not third parties. The Windows Phone YouTube app would be the first significant (1) phone OS to have a YouTube app not made by Google, there are no others to compare Google's behavior on for fairness. This is the first event of its kind.
(1) If you consider single digits market share to be significant.
Actually, there are phone YouTube apps not made by Google, such as Jasmine for iOS, as has been brought up repeatedly. Unlike Microsoft, they complied with the rules, rather than throw a hissy fit.
The rules are arbitrary if Google doesn't abide by them when making publishing its own versions of YouTube apps on the dominant platforms. It's behavior is anti-competitive if it uses its position as gatekeeper to YouTube to stifle Windows Phone by placing requirements on Microsoft that it doesn't place on itself.
The rule exists to ensure the continued compatibility of third-party applications with requirements of the YouTube service. Google can fix its own apps, and it can fix the content of an iframe loaded from its servers, but it can't fix apps it doesn't control.
There are good reasons for this very simple rule that everyone but Microsoft seems able to comply with. By definition, such a rule cannot be "arbitrary".
It's disingenuous to say "everybody but Microsoft" when the group size of third-party apps that act as realistic YouTube viewers is something like 2-4.
If you pride yourself and market yourself on openness any rule that flies in the face of said openness is entirely arbitrary, because there shouldn't be any rules limiting your openness.
It's disingenuous to treat your religious dogma on the word "open" as shared by everyone else. I don't believe for a second you understand how Google is using the term nor what they are applying it to.
>The Windows Phone YouTube app would be the first significant (1) phone OS to have a YouTube app not made by Google, there are no others to compare Google's behavior on for fairness. This is the first event of its kind.
It's also the only significant phone OS that doesn't ship with Google search as the default.
How is this any different than me releasing my code under something like the LGPL, which would allow those folks who dynamically link to not release source to their app, but force those who are required to statically link (due to platform or other reasons) to release source to their app?
Note that it's a similar situation. If I release code under the LGPL, i don't have to abide by it, only others do.
Twitter requires third party API users limit themselves to 100k users (or whatever it is), but, even though they use the same API, does not require it of itself.
They also have decided some folks don't have to abide by this.
How is this different?
None of this is "anti-competitive" behavior.
Would you think it anti-competitive behavior if Google provided no API and also told people finding ways to embed it to stop?
It's anticompetitive because Google is using its dominant online video platform to promote its mobile OS, even though those are really two separate industries. It's no different from MS selling an internet server that uses nonstandard extensions and only making those available on windows.
HTML5 seems to be the only public API they expose, and obviously they don't want random apps to depend on other, possibly undocumented APIs intended for internal use. Google can use any kind of whatever internal API they have in place in their own apps, I don't see why they should follow their own third party usage guidelines.
>its not anticompetitive to not allow a third party to release your product on their platform without following your rules (reasonable or not).
That is actually the definition of being anti-competitive. Google is gaining an unfair advantage w.r.t. Android vs WP by manipulating terms of their extremely popular video service to make it not work on their competitors product.
"The goal is actually to not make a huge profit too early, and Bezos manages it perfectly. You want to avoid showing your cards too early as you continue to lay the groundwork for an ever-larger business"
That just doesn't sound right. 10 years in market is not too early. And because it is working for Bezos and Amazon, it doesn't mean that this strategy will work for others.
Hmm..that's weird. Surface RT is 1.5lbs and Surface Pro (yet to release) is 2 lbs[0]. Both versions (11, 13 inch) of Macbook Air are more than 2lbs[1].
That update is particularly hard to find - you have to dig several windows deep into the control panel in desktop mode ... it's one of those inexplicable things that just dumbfounds me - they leave a pre-release version of Office on the tablets and then almost guarantee nobody will install the proper version by making the update UI impossible to find.
seriously? you can just type windows update (search will open for you) then select it to install - i don't know how it's too complicated. Especially since most people use windows already.
Azure, in general, is just burning money with no significant uptake. Friends who work there say there aren't even significant internal uses. Just based on that I'd be dubious of any new Azure service dominating their segment. Maybe they'll buy themselves another Xbox situation, but I don't see it yet.
Not exactly. When you consider the legacy Desktop also as an app, the behavior is consistent. Windows key just swaps between the start screen and the current app.
Start screen appears on the last monitor you launched the modern app or charms.
For switching Start screen between multiple monitors, try Windows + PageUp (or Windows + PageDown).
You can change the taskbar settings. Right click on taskbar -> properties -> Taskbar where window is open (under show taskbar buttons on).
I think so. I do recall attempting to install the hyper-V on a server core installation. However, I think the problem was that the management tools required either windows server 2008 (which I didn't have) or Vista (which I didn't have). I don't know why the management tools aren't just a win32 binary (like VWWare Vsphere).
