JonoW

> Last I heard, 3G infrastructure was pretty spotty outside of select areas of Johannesburg

Perhaps a good few years ago. You should get HSDPA in all the major cities in SA. A lot of people actually use mobile broadband in place of fixed-line broadband.

Node.js might not be a bad option seeing as you already know JavaScript, so could save you time learning new syntax. The other options are more mature though.

I enjoyed the article, but I just can't completely agree. The microwave is seen as essential because it gives us humans such a valuable asset - time. Our time is hugely valuable. I don't see tablets, iPad or other, having that same impact. Sure they have some great qualities and they can make some tasks easier and more convinient, but not significiantly quicker. That doesn't mean they're not going to successful of course, I just don't seem them becoming ubiquitous.

I would imagine the average hacker on HN would be more anti-Microsoft than your average man on the street.

They're sort of damned if they do, damned if they don't.

They need to let people know what the long term plans are to keep the interested in what the platform will become (especially with the Nokia deal), but at the same time it feel frustrating how far away these new features seem (talking about the "Mango" update with multi-tasking, IE9 etc coming "later" this year).

Personally I agree with you, I'd like smaller, more frequent updates, but at the same time I definitely want to know the long term roap-map.

I disagree about there being too many phones, it's a fraction of the number of Android variants out there, and the phones are much more similar to each other due to the minimum hardware specs. With that in mind, there was no excuse that the first update a few weeks ago wasn't flawless; they should have easily picked up any issue on all available models during testing.

Excellent work Chime. Do you have any plans to try and generate income from your apps, or are they just a fun side project?

You're being unreasonable, they're not exactly the same thing. Most popular sites are derivatives of similar ideas.

To any nuclear experts, question I've got: The Fukushima plant is a 1970's design I believe, what would the situation be if the plant was as modern a design as possible, would the situation there be different?

That's hardly a widely experienced problem. Google "windows phone 7 text messages corrupt"; first result is a MS answers submission by DanTup - the same guy who's blog is referenced in the HN post.

Which critical bug fixes are these? I've owned and used a WP7 since a few days after launch, all of the bugs are in the "annoyance" category, I don't know of any absolute show-stoppers.

Yeah I don't understand why these plants weren't built on the West coast, and why they weren't built on higher ground to mitigate against tsunamis.

This is a cool idea. I'd also like to use the "full" OS when using it as a tablet if I want to, and maybe vice versa.

Just as Windows on a tablet sucks because it's not optimised for touch, isn't WebOS on a desktop PC going to suck when using a mouse?

> So yeah, you can try to spin it as 'Linux is just as bad as Microsoft', but if one takes 5 years and is a complete disaster, and the other one takes 2 years and has a few hiccups, I know which one I prefer.

The point being made is that the problems in both the previous and current systems were probably nothing to do with the underlying OS/platform, but because of some incompetency in the design or implementation of this specific project.

Compatability mode doesn't support ie6, and I believe its only for the renderer, not the JavaScript engine.

MS really don't help themselves though. My company won't upgrade from IE7 because they are worried about breaking a legacy,critical web-app. If MS could build a feature into IE9 that allowed you to specify a white-list of URLs/domains (set by AD group policy) that always used the IE6/IE7/IE9 renderer/js engine for the tab it was opened in - boom corporates could start upgrading. It's also holding back adoption of Windows 7.

> There are ways to get AirPrint working with any Windows or Mac shared printer

This is my main beef with the current tablets; it can't be your only computer, you have to have another to update it from/print from (if you don't have a wireless printer) etc. I would love a tablet that was powerful enough to run a full blown OS, be it Windows or OSX, but run with a tablet specific skin over the top. 95% of the time I would use it just as one would use an iPad now, but in those 5% of times allow me to use the full OS, load up Word and edit a document, run some random Windows program, connect to a VPN etc.

Nice

I'm not sure if this is technically possible, but an import/export to Visios format would be killer

I'm a South African living in the UK, so I need Schengen visas when ever travelling to the EU. I have found the staff at the borders fine (have travelled to the EU about 10 times); I've never had any problems. Sure, they're not the friendliest, but I've never found a country that did have friendly border staff.

My issue with the Schengen scheme is the process of getting the visa itself. The requirements are a bit over the top, and it's expensive, think its's about £80 for a French Schengen.

That's an app with a one off payment, we're talking subscriptions here. The point being, do you get that 30% (ok 27%) value from Apple when they take it every month. Also, note that I'm not saying I disagree with Apple taking a cut of subscription fees, I just think 30% is insanely high, it should be around 5%. Also, I don't think it should be mandatory.

But every app developer who has a subscription model for their iOS app already has this in place. And they can do it for a 3% fee from PayPal, where is the other 27% of value?

I would imagine the license costs for dev tools for a startup are neglible. If you run Azure you would setup test/staging instances and tear them down when not in use, again because of scale, I would imagine that cost is negligible.

As for usage costs, doesn't Azure use the same model as all the others, e.g. EC2, in that cost = compute hours (i.e. instance running) + data transfer + storage? So if by usage you mean ultra accurate per CPU millisecond billing, then I don't anyone does that? Would be great though. Happy to be proved wrong though, I'm no expert on this...

> I'd say you get a lot of convenience with this Apple offering

Question is, is that convenience worth 30%? I'd say most companies wouldn't think so.

I'm not in a startup or anything, but consider this; cloud computing is gaining momentum fast, and lots of startups will use cloud platforms like EC2, AppEngine, Azure etc.

The one thing about this change is that traditional licensing concerns go away. If you use Azure, you are paying by usage, so Windows licenses aren't in play. I guess my point is that the fear of launching a startup and having to face spirling license costs (for using MS products) is going to decline as more people adopt cloud platforms.

If offering user choice is a bad idea, why is Android doing so well? I believe they're out-gunning apple in market-share now, and there are tons of Android phones to choose between.

Why do people think Microsoft has the ability to "inject" their man as CEO into another company? Nokia's board would have chosen and appointed him with full knowledge of his MS past, probably for the sole purpose of getting the deal done with MS.

There are already WP7 phones with keyboards, so I don't see why Nokia won't make some

Your views on WP7 apps are a bit off, there is a huge pool of C# devs who are eager to get into a viable app-market. The WP7 tools are free and have been downloaded 2 million times (according to MS). The app store is growing well, and there are about 8000 apps, which is pretty good considering the plaform is v1 and is only about 4 months old. I've found the quality of apps good, and most of the major players have released apps (e.g. facebook, twitter, amazon etc). The Xbox live games are particularly good (although a bit expensive)

Teleconferencing and airlines solve a common problem, but what common problem do Azure and Silverlight share? They've got basically nothing to do with each other, except for as you say, that they're marketed at developers (?)