barranger

That's good to know.

Is the front end code that is coming from Firefox for Android just for the windowing gui or is the rendering engine the same as well?

My comment was more on the actual nav bar and the icons contained within.

Especially for a browser, I really don't think that the nav bar is where you want to be standing out. Look and feel the way the user expects and get out of the way. Where the browser should be differentiating itself, is displaying web content as fast and as well as possible.

In terms of the look of the tile, I'm not entirely sure I agree with you, however I certainly don't feel strongly enough about it to argue.

Glad to hear that Firefox is looking at providing a Metro Themed browser (even if it's just to get away from IE), but looking at the icon set from the pictures, I think they are missing the boat on the Metro style.

>Not discussing user interface design, it's about visual style. Button should look like a button, but not so much like other site that user confuses your site with someone else's.

If you are relying on the style of your buttons to distinguish your site from all the others, perhaps you should be spending more time on building out the content/functionality of your site.

I often find that designers are more worried about how a site will look in a portfolio than whether the end users will get anything out of the site.

was the media stored in blob storage? From the article it looks like storage accounts weren't effected, just the management api and ~4% of service accounts.

I wonder if this has more to do with Google's push for WebM/VP8 as the defacto standard for HTML5's new video tag? Surely they don't think that Microsoft will pay these fees and will be forced to remove support for H.264

Oh I fully agree that I don't completely understand value branding, it's just that with Apple it goes to a new level. There was an odd Web video floating around (link escapes me) of an animated customer talking to a sales clerk looking for an iPhone (something about does it have the WiFis) that perfectly describes far too many of the conversations I've had with people about apple products.

It's articles like this that basically sum up perfectly why I refuse to discuss anything Apple with people.

Don't get me wrong, I like many of the products that Apple make (I'm currently typing this up with a MBP), however the personal connection that people have with Apple is not something I share.

For many people there exists a strange bond with Apple where they take any negative comment about one of their products or services as a personal affront against themselves.

It's a corporation folks, a wildly successful one, but that's it. It's not your buddy, your soulmate, nor your friend.

As a very happy xbox 360 owner, I'm glad Microsoft doesn't subscribe to this mindset.

or move to the private sector to work on these projects

I've built quite a few WP7 apps now, some for clients, some for fun.

It's really a shame that the phone hasn't had even decent sales numbers as IMHO it has the best developer experience (yeah I know, end users don't care about the dev experience :))

Note that this isn't directed at you personally, but rather towards the instant gratification culture at large:

I'm sorry, but "They took forever to update to iOS5"????

A quick google search shows that iOS5 was released on October 11th 2011. That makes it less than two months ago. In what world/dimension is 58 days "forever"?

Don't get me wrong, if you paying for a service, it should work, full stop, but complaining and saying that two months is forever trivializes your (valid) complaints.

They can, however it really isn't as smooth an experience for the user and Microsoft knows this well.

One only has to look at how it works for Xbox Live Arcade games for an idea on how seamless this is. Give the user enough so that just as they are hooked, the trail runs out. One click of a button is the entire upgrade process. No dumping out to a different application (Marketplace) in order to purchase the full game, just a one second click of a button.

You do realize that this is in regards to the store for Windows 8 that runs on the desktop (as well as tablets)?

excuse my ignorance with these questions, but this is something I've been wondering every time I see an article like this (specifically the batteries needed for solar).

1) shouldn't we be concentrating our efforts on reducing the requirements from the grid to near zero for new housing builds?

Newer builds will (hopefully) also incorporate the latest in conservation technologies (better performing insulation, etc) resulting in a lower energy requirement regardless of the source. One would also imagine that new home builders implementing solar solutions would see cost benefits from scale.

2) wouldn't the efforts of concentrating on new home builds have a two pronged benefit on everyone else?

Not only would technology advances become available for retrofit projects, but the reduced strain on the grid could potentially reduce the costs grid wide?

3) what would be the benefit of having a centralized solar installation?

Any solution that centers around having a mile square cube (from the linked article) seems a bit silly to me, wouldn't houses having their own battery solution make much more sense? Having individual batteries would allow for a market for these solutions and, one would hope, from the competition within this market, new and better solutions would emerge.

I've never quite understood this "I don't know what it is, but I hate it" attitude.

Have we really gotten ourselves into the situation where we have to blindly follow the PR from our favorite phone manufacturer and piss any competing announcement before it's even announced?

Haven't had a chance to test it out, but how is it different than Poker Smash:

http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Poker-Smash/66acd0...

When reports like this talk about total number of apps (which is almost always less than what the platform holder announces) I often wonder if the report is only looking at a single region.

Looks good. Makes me want to start playing around with the Kinect sensor more though, I'd imagine it'd be relatively easy to remove the need for the hat

Interesting to see one of these Architecture blog posts for a site running on the .Net framework.

Does 9.5-10 Million hits a day make them the largest .Net backed site?

The lack of MonoTouch/MonoDroid is the first thing that I noticed. While c# may not be everyone's cup of tea, it can be used to develop across iOS/Android/WP

Nor does Windows Phone, there are already 2 different "other" browsers. The headlines about them restricting it were due a testing error for one app (check the last comment here: http://mobilitydigest.com/microsoft-blocks-alternative-web-b... )

But I guess that wouldn't be juicy enough of a headline.

While not specifically a phone, the iphone does have ancestry that didn't exactly "sweep the market"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)

No they won't.

This isn't something Amazon (or another big player) can do, they simply don't have a large enough profit margin to support giving apple 30% of the full purchase price.

This will end up being nothing more than another straw on the camel's back. When (if?) a true competitor comes out, it seems that the best marketing for the new device will be done by Apple themselves.

No, but to say that their isn't something to be learned by being poor would be incorrect.

I'm sure people will strongly disagree, but nothing replaces the perspective that being down to your last dollar gives you.

What performance can I expect from a single instance? I know that your doing shared hosting on AWS Instances, but not sure which EC2 type, nor how many instances are being deployed to each. Without knowing that, it's hard to comment on whether five cents an hour is worth it or not (also that is time that the application is deployed correct, not compute time?)

I'm not so sure.

They probably make a good amount through both ad revenue and referrals from Fandango, not enough to justify 10 million, but they've said a few times now that Movies are just the first of many verticals that they are looking at.

#1 assumes that "we" all read TechCrunch regularly

personally if it's not linked from a story I've read here, I don't tend to read TechCrunch. Nothing against the site, but I find that if it's something that would interest me, it'll find it's way to HN.

Maybe I just got up on the wrong side of the bed, but am I the only one who was put off by this comment:

"Quora’s membership is growing largely because of the attention that TechCrunch has given it."?

Since it's XBMC based, does this mean we'll see Boxxee soon?