Silverlight

[kandr]

First Windows Phone 7 handsets sell out ? The Register Oh look. You're wrong.

Also, define "bomb". They aren't expecting to overtake iPhone, only gain market share for the long-term.

"Quite where the problem lies isn't clear: a shortage of the AMOLED screens so beloved by Samsung has been fingered as causing problems with the Omnia 7, while HTC seems to be having some software problems with its pair of Windows Phone 7 handsets. But what is clear is that this isn't an artificial shortage created to give the impression of popularity, attractive as that explanation might be."

So the launch is screwed up already, not sold out because of people buying.

Bomb : see Kin.

[d000hg]

You can't sell out if nobody is buying.

[kandr]

You can't sell out if nobody is buying.

Very true.

[MarillionFan]

One of the clients I am at at the moment is embarking on a major Silverlight project. They;ve spent 40k on a prototype which I knocked up in a copy of Xcelsius in a couple of days.

Seems over complicated to me.

[DimPrawn]

One of the clients I am at at the moment is embarking on a major Silverlight project. They;ve spent 40k on a prototype which I knocked up in a copy of Xcelsius in a couple of days.

Seems over complicated to me.

Yes, it's not a very productive development platform and full of holes and missing functionality. I can't see Silverlight lasting many years, MS will replace it with something else I'm sure.

[d000hg]

Seems over complicated to me.

That might be a sign your brain is losing the ability to learn new things. Better find a niche and stick to it, leave the new stuff for us youngsters

[NickFitz]

Is that really about to be released, or is the spec about to be agreed on and it'll be another 5 years before there's enough browser support to use it?

Currently implemented in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and on the Nokia N9000 PR1.2 firmware update. I'm not sure if Opera are working on it. Microsoft are now completely driven by internal management politics rather than technology, so it's impossible to know what they're likely to do.

That's a good example of what I was saying. Javascript can do 3D and everybody goes "OOOOOH!", but that level of 3D was simple 10 years ago. So why are we impressed?

A similar argument would be that "We had object-orientation with Smalltalk in the 70s, so why be impressed by C++?" - the point being that there were more people willing and able to make the transition from C to C++ than had ever been persuaded to use Smalltalk, which was undoubtedly a superior language.

JavaScript is the single most widely-deployed programming platform in the world. There are huge numbers of people who wouldn't know what to do with a C compiler but can get to work with a new JS API in no time. It's all about shipping.

Nick's obviously very impressed by a webserver written in Javascript, but as good as v8 is, it's still slower and more CPU intensive than just doing the same thing in C++.

I'm aware of at least one live site in Japan that has been able to handle Comet connections from over 100,000 concurrent users on a single box running eight node.js processes - they adopted this solution after having tried both C and Java implementations, neither of which were able to scale to meet the demand.

[d000hg]

JavaScript is the single most widely-deployed programming platform in the world. There are huge numbers of people who wouldn't know what to do with a C compiler but can get to work with a new JS API in no time. It's all about shipping.

1. Can you show any figures for % in different languages?
2. Are you including every person hacking code, or only professional developers?
3. Most of those people who can hack JS but don't know a 'proper' language know nothing about writing server software and I'd rather they weren't given an easy way to do so. It's like VB and PHP all over again

[xoggoth]

Bit off topic but what I can't understand about jscript is the slow speed with which it manipulates images. OK, it's interpreted so you expect long scripts to be slow, but a single statement to move an image by a few pixels should take about the same time in any language, they would be using the same compiled dlls I'd have thought.

[d000hg]

I think that's more a DOM issues than JS itself.