Windows 8 HTML5 apps are designed completely differently from on-the-Web HTML5 apps and Native Client apps.

the carryover is significant but you don't get a Windows 8 port for free.

Well, event for web apps you have to make sure all the browser work as expected...

> The Xbox 360 also does constant updates that need a reboot.

however, unlike the PS3, 360 updates tend to take 30 seconds to a minute, except for big things like the NXE and the whatever-the-newest-Dashboard-thing-is-called; PS3 updates can take anywhere from 30 seconds to an hour and a half (literally, that's how long it took my PS3 to patch out-of-box the first time I started it.)

again, even if you're doing the same thing as your competitors, there is a lot of space to do it poorly. :)

"This is easy to say as someone who has never managed a product, but I feel silent self-update is table stakes for consumer-facing products at this point."

yes, but no. saying that silent self-update is table stakes is missing the point: table stakes from your users' perspective is "shipping software that doesn't need to be consciously maintained."

whether you ship rarely and get the bugs out before you do, or ship frequently but have automatic upgrades that don't break things, doesn't matter.

not to ruin it for you, but IE 6 usage is so high in China because China has a bunch of pirated XP SP0/SP1 installs; IE 7/8 is XPSP2+ only, and IE 9 is Vista+ only.

this same piracy is why the Business Software Alliance was originally a SOPA supporter.

the added value of a Windows 8 tablet over a Windows Phone device is that a heavily-encouraged subset of applications will run across those devices and a traditional desktop. Windows Phone will only run desktop Silverlight applications out-of-the-box (and even those require some cajoling.) Windows 8 Metro-style apps will run across desktops and tablets without any additional work.

and 90% of the world still runs Windows on their "traditional" computers, so this is an appealing proposition.

this is either hilarious (if he's just kidding around for PR's sake, and in reality he read the thing and took it to heart) or tragic (if he's really as dismissive as he suggests.)

  "But I was being sarcastic at the time," Brin said.
  One thing the Google founder and the Google+ VP do agree
  on: the Circle feature. "I love them, I have dozens of
  circles," Brin said.

Somehow I don't think Sergey takes this very seriously.

Roboto may be clumsy, but it's far from a patchwork of existing pieces. (if you look, really look, at those comparison charts, you'll notice that even the "frankensteined" source fonts have significant differences from the Roboto glyphs they inspired, in weight, shape, and proportion. the bar on the capital Q looks nothing alike, for the most blatant example.)

it's not the case that Roboto is a ripoff of an existing face, or even four existing faces (for the special case of "an existing face" == Helvetica, I posted about this at length here at my blog, complete with ranting and bad photoshops: http://http204.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/all-sans-serifs-are-...). it is the case that it's a product of its times and took inspiration from faces which already existed -- because if you create a font from scratch, intentionally trying to do only things which have never been done before, you're likely to end up with something completely unreadable.

that said, to me, it's super unrefined, chunky, and challenging to read -- it's outright broken at small sizes (and, thus, on low-DPI displays) where letters blob out around the edges due to poor hinting.

I'd much rather they just bring back Droid Sans. :(

inclusive of that, the best term is probably "machine state" or similar.

to some extent, though, this devalues lytro pictures as "photograph-as-artistic-statement" in favor of the much more contemporary "photograph-as-infallible-chronicler-of-the-coffee-you-got-this-morning."

(that said, I really want one of these.)

as someone who's tried to use Mono.Cecil, it kind of sucks if you're not already developing on the Mono toolchain (among other things, there's no interoperability between System.Reflection types and Mono.Cecil types, and even if you're on Mono, I don't think you can "vivisect" running Assemblies.) Microsoft has a product called FxCop (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb429476(VS.80).aspx) which does style analysis and linting -- however, the code analysis is all embedded in the FxCop binary and undocumented.

suffice to say, I'm psyched about Roslyn -- more about code transformations than correctness aids.