the case against .NET

Spotted yesterday lunchtime, soaring high over the petrol station at Tesco, West Durrington, a pair of buzzards.

Buzzards have spread quickly over the UK in recent years, and have become increasingly common around urban areas. Nevertheless, this is the first time I’ve seen them so close to work. This pair was causing a minor stir, appearing to the untrained eye like small eagles.

Wednesday last I attended my first Sussex Geek Dinner. I’ll never be a proper blogger, because it’s taken me four days to record the fact. Simon, on the other hand, knows how this stuff is meant to work: he went home and updated his blog within about an hour of us vacating the venue.

I don’t have much to add to Simon’s account - it was indeed a very enjoyable evening. Many thanks to Simon for coordinating, and Hugh MacLeod for sponsoring by supplying the very pleasant Stormhoek rosé.

It’s also worth mentioning the venue. The Highlands pub in Uckfield, East Sussex offered very good food at outstanding value, and allowed us to bring our own wine (the aforementioned Stormhoek) without charging corkage. Recommended!

The MSDN Subscriber Downloads feed just listed something called “Update Rollup 1 for Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 v2 (All Languages)”.

Why can’t we just have Update Rollup 2 for Windows 2000 Service Pack 4? How about Windows 2000 Service Pack 5?

On the other hand, perhaps we should be grateful there wasn’t an Update Rollup 1 for Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 v2 (All Languages) Beta 1.

A few weeks ago I enthused about Pandora, a personalised Internet radio station based around your favourite artists and similar music. At any time, you have the option to purchase the track you’re listening to, from either iTunes or Amazon.

So why didn’t I subscribe when my free trial expired? In short, I can’t stand the feeling that I’m being ripped off.

I don’t know what the financial arrangements are between Pandora and the music business, but I suspect our subscription fees are used partially to pay licensing fees for use of the recordings. If so, this is totally the wrong way around: the music biz should be paying Pandora, which is essentially a billboard for their products. This expense would comfortably be recouped via the iTunes/Amazon purchases.

Pandora is essentially an update of the listening posts you find in your local record store. I can’t help thinking that the music industry has sidestepped yet another opportunity to maintain its relevance in the Internet age.

Toshiba has introduced a new “VACF” display option on its Tecra M3 series of business notebooks.

The VACF (Viewing Angle Control Filter) feature may be turned on or off as needed. When enabled, it limits display readability, allowing the screen to be viewed only by someone sitting directly in front of the computer. Anyone sitting to either side sees a brightly lit checkerboard pattern, making the true screen contents indecipherable.

The point of VACF is, of course, security. It will be interesting to read reviews to find out whether VACF has any negative impact, e.g. on screen sharpness or battery life.

More about the Tecra M3 with VACF may be found in this Toshiba news release.

FWIW, the VACF feature would not be needed on my Tecra M4 laptop - the polycarbonate display on this system does a plenty good enough job of restricting viewing angles on its own.

In recent years, Sony has acquired a reputation for marring its usually cute products with at least one cripplingly stupid design flaw. Most notoriously this included an audio player which wouldn’t play MP3 files.

The most common fault with Sony’s products is the inclusion of a MemoryStick slot of some form (there seem to be numerous MemoryStick variants), when the rest of the world has standardised on SD for small-format flash memory cards.

The latest PC Pro, however, has a review of a superb small-format Sony laptop - the VAIO VGN-TX1XP (try this Google search for more info) which includes an SD slot! (Whatever next - maybe Microsoft will renounce DRM?)

There’s apparently much else to like about the VGN-TX1XP, including the availability of a battery offering up to 11 hours life!

Opera recently made their browser free for a couple of days as part of their 10-year anniversary party. At the time, I said I hoped they could find a way to make it free permanently, so it stood a chance of being taken seriously.

This has now happened! Opera 8.50 is completely free, and with no advertising banners. I’ll certainly be running it regularly as an alternative to Firefox, to see whether it stands up as a primary browser. I’ve also reconfigured it to “Identify as Opera” rather than as IE 6.0. I hope this will soon be the default setting, to ensure more accurate reporting in web stats.

Since Apple introduced the first Macintosh computer in the mid eighties, there’s been no significant change to the way people interact directly with PCs: the mouse/keyboard/menu interface has hardly evolved at all in over 20 years. When you consider the other advances in computing in the same period, this seems fairly remarkable.

I’ve been convinced for some time that Microsoft’s Tablet PC concept offers the best chance of breaking this mould. Progress to date has been slow. In the past few months I’ve become satisfied that the current XP tablet platform offers significant benefits, but I can understand why it hasn’t yet broken through to the mainstream.

However, PDC offered/confirmed lots of new information about Microsoft’s plans for the tablet, particularly for Windows Vista and Office 12: see this post from Warner Crocker for a pretty good round-up. I’m pretty excited by all this - I think it brings the inevitable Tipping Point (should that be “TIPping Point”?) for tablets a great deal closer. Personally, I can’t wait.

As well as bringing a sea change in personal computing, the Tablet PC should also offer Microsoft a new lease of life. The company desperately needs this paradigm shift to open up the gap between itself and the Open Source movement which is banging on its door. Microsoft has been pouring research dollars into the tablet for years - this investment could well be about to bear fruit, leaving its competitors in the dirt.

.NET brings rich class libraries, garbage collection, code portability (at least nominally), and a few other benefits. But we’ve had most of this for years: .NET is a minor evolutionary step on from what already existed in Java, Delphi and other development systems. It doesn’t bring anything new that’s of real consequence.

What would be revolutionary, what developers really need, is something to help us sort out multi-threading. There’s been no real language/tools progress in this area, yet multi-core CPUs continue their inexorable march.

Performant applications of the next few years will need to take advantage of parallel processing architectures, yet the human brain is clearly not designed to work out the issues associated with simultaneous parallel execution paths. We desperately need platform/tool support in this area, so where’s the right place to implement it? I’d suggest that a virtual machine environment such as .NET would be the place, along with appropriate language extensions.

I’m sure this area must be a primary research topic for Microsoft and others, so why is so little being said about the issue? Why is Microsoft’s PDC all about cute toolbars rather than where the real issues lie? FWIW, the only time I remember hearing a major tool vendor comment on the multi-threaded development problem was an interview with Borland Chief Scientist, Danny Thorpe.

Microsoft is currently staging its PDC in Los Angeles. To say I’m underwhelmed would be an understatement.

PDC stands for Professional Developers Conference (sic), but most of the news seems to be about a cute new toolbar design for Microsoft Office. If this is a developers’ conference, where’s the information about how to use this stuff in our own apps? Why is this eye candy a feature of Office, rather than a feature of the Windows platform (or maybe Microsoft wants us to think of Office as the platform)?

After Office 12, there’s lots of stuff about yet another Konfabulator rip-off.

By far the most interesting (best?) news concerns Microsoft’s recent love affair with RSS. Having embraced RSS, let’s hope they can refrain from the urge to extend it.