ppog

They di seem to have fixed this, at least as far as WSL is concerned. If I open a bash shell on Win10 and do `echo foo >/mnt/d/temp/like:this` then I can open the resulting file in Notepad and see the content `foo`. `mkdir like:this` works too. The file or directory name does appear a bit mangled in Explorer, but still works (and still looks like a colon from inside bash).

I think you are right that this used not to work in earlier versions of WSL. You could use colons within the WSL home directory, but not on the mounted NTFS drives. But it seems sorted now.

New Zealand's timezones are full hours, not 45 minutes. You might be thinking of Nepal? (Picky - your broader point is of course right.)

Draft can watch for code changes via a `watch` setting in draft.toml. (Disclosure: I work on the containers team at Microsoft.)

It seems like this relies for some of its safety guarantees on checks in (their fork of) the C# compiler. For example, owner non-copy guarantees seem to be enforced at the C# front end level rather than in the CLR. That could cause problems for getting it into CoreCLR (and much more so the desktop CLR), as this is meant to support multiple languages; relying on a specific language front-end for safe use of a feature feels at odds with the 'common language runtime' philosophy... It would be great to see it though!

Auckland has had a few for at least 10 years. They are used for some of the very busy intersections on Queen Street (a busy shopping street that also carries a lot of cars and buses), and seem to work well. Regarding Wellington, I can think of only one, which I think was put in a few years ago at a 5-way intersection that had a lot of foot traffic and was quite accident-prone; I think it's been successful in simplifying how pedestrians use the intersection and reducing accidents, and doesn't seem to have worsened traffic flow.

"Scanning a cond for me is almost instantaneous." This is a very subjective concern though. Consider the subtype example. For me, reading that 3x3 table, especially with the grouping of blocks, was a lot easier than mentally parsing a big pile of 'and/or' expressions, or nested switches, etc. And my impression is that a lot of programmers do initially visualise some parts of their work as tables or diagrams.

Our tools on the other hand are indeed 'so finely attuned and specialised to text' that other methods of representation have and will struggle to get traction...

"They are able to do it so well, so quickly because Windows Visual Studio has much of that functionality already in it." I don't believe anything is shared between Visual Studio and VS Code except the branding (Microsoft playing to their traditional strengths in confusing marketing). Where I do agree is that VS Code drew on a lot of the institutional expertise and design learning from the folks who develop Visual Studio and Visual Studio Online. Perhaps also there are shared editor components across VS Code and VS Online, I'm not sure - but again this is _not_ the same editor as Visual Studio's (again with the confusing branding).

(Disclosure: I work for Microsoft, but not on VS, VS Code, VS Online or VS Floor Wax.)

"Everything is contracted out to Datacom, Catalyst, Frondie, Solnet, etc. etc."

It's true that there's a big services sector, especially around government work. But there's also a lively startup/R&D scene. I worked 4 years for Mindscape (a dev tools startup, later to become Raygun), and then moved to GreenButton (HPC in the cloud, later acquired by Microsoft; the R&D team is still based in Wellington). Xero is a thriving, lively product company, although now large and mature; same with TradeMe. Weta Digital has a lot of in-house tech. And there are companies like 8i, just kicking off doing amazing things in motion capture and rendering.

So what you're saying is fair for "IT services" tech - if you want to do that, then yeah, Datacom is it. But there's so much more to the Wellington tech scene than IT services.

That's fine for US citizens entering the US, but any 'travel mode' needs to work for the outbound trip too. If the country you're visiting has adopted a US-style border stance, then you're in no better a position than a non-US citizen visiting the US: the border forces of that other country can detain you until travel mode expires if they want. It seems like "They can't hold me for days while they wait for the mode to expire" only works for citizens returning to their own countries.

Yes, this is possible. The Azure A8-A11 VMs have Infiniband, as do the 'r' (RDMA) variants of the new H series. Azure Batch includes support for MPI-like runtimes although you need to get the MPI runtime and application onto the virtual cluster yourself. There's documentation for it here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/bat... and some more Linux-focused material here: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/windowshpc/2016/07/20/in...

Disclosure: I'm an Azure Batch engineer.

I think MichaelGG is thinking of the Rotor "shared source" implementation for BSD, which was released around the same time as .NET for Windows as a proof of concept for implementing the .NET standards on other platforms. (These standards included CIL and the Common Type System, not just C#.) But as Michael says though it fell way short of full .NET, lacking many libraries and a lot of the optimisations of the Windows .NET implementation; and it wasn't open source in that you couldn't fork it, you could only look at the code 'under glass.'

There is a cross-platform CLI (based on Node.js), which runs on OS X and Linux as well as Windows - I don't specifically know if it has commands for opening ports though. There's information and links at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/xpl... if you want to check it out.

They've said that the first version isn't targeted as a consumer device. They initially see it as a professional piece of kit for use by, for example, product designers. (At least that's how it was presented at the New Zealand MS conference.)

Of course, then they show it off using Minecraft demos, recipe books, and a parent helping their kid in another city fix their sink. So sure, marketing it to consumers is the long game. But I'd guess that's some way off.

It's resolved at compile time. It's exactly equivalent to the literal "x", but enables refactoring tools to pick up renames, compilers to error if the name is typoed, etc.

Driving up the Whanganui River Road in 2001:

Local: "Now, that's a good possum."

Me, having missed it completely: "Uh, I didn't know there were any good possums."

Local: "That one was dead."

Your comment about changing a field to a property being a breaking change in C# is correct, but in practice, C# programmers tend to use auto properties (e.g. public int Left { get; private set; }) rather than public fields. These are fully fledged properties, but the getters and setters are implemented by the compiler (and back directly onto a compiler-generated field). Because they are properties, they can then be changed to computed properties (or e.g. validation added to setters) without breaking binary or reflection compatibility.

"IIRC ... Microsoft required computer manufacturers to purchase an Office license for every Windows license. As a result, every new computer came with Office installed."

I think you recall incorrectly. I bought a couple of computers in the early 90s and neither came with Office installed. Admittedly this was in the home and small business market rather than enterprise -- it's true that Microsoft pushed Office harder into the enterprise market, but I still don't recall an antitrust suite over Office bundling, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#United_Sta... doesn't mention an antitrust suit over Office bundling. You may be thinking of the allegations that Microsoft withheld details of Windows APIs:

"The Novell v. Microsoft case was a complaint about Microsoft deliberately withholding Windows technical information in order to thwart its competitors in the applications market. The case brought to light an Oct. 3, 1994 memo from then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who indicated that Microsoft should withhold namespace extension APIs in Windows 95 from its competitors, WordPerfect and IBM, in order to gain market advantage for Microsoft Word."

http://redmondmag.com/articles/2014/04/28/court-nixes-novell...

Windows has allowed extensions longer than 3 characters for about 20 years now. I'm not sure what you mean by "natively create" but it also definitely doesn't require anything before the "." -- e.g. I have files called ".gitignore" etc. just as on any other OS.

I passed the "The Counting Kingdom" and "Mathbreakers" links on to a friend for her children (aged 7 and 9). Not only were they enthusiastic about what they saw, but they decided then and there to create their own "monster maths game" for show and tell. There is no better way to learn than to teach, and if this new breed of educational games not only motivates children to exercise skills, but also engages their creativity to create their own learning tools, that would be an astounding success.

...and, indeed, these XML namespaces (MS Office and data types) and the CustomDocumentProperties tag are already known to be added by SharePoint, and apparently for well-established reasons (though not ones I understand not being a SP user): http://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/30626/why-is-s...

It's not that anyone believes "shelf space is running out." It's signal to noise -- or, to be less judgmental, "findability." Sure, SO or Wikipedia have the storage capacity for people to post anything they wanted anywhere on the site, but that would make much more work for users to find the content they need -- they'd have to trawl through a much bigger mass of semi-relevant or irrelevant stuff.

This is not to say SO or Wikipedia has the balance right; but it's a sensible reason to "limit their users' contributions."

Observable, Scan and FirstAsync are from Rx. (FirstAsync is roughly equivalent to LINQ First(), except that it doesn't block.) This particular Subscribe method is also part of Rx, but it's basically a helper method around the BCL System.IObservable<T>.Subscribe(IObserver<T>) that saves you having to implement IObserver.

I'm amused by the contention that running a business isn't like developing software because in business "There’s rarely a perfect decision. You’re always making trade offs. Balancing risk." That sounds like exactly what I do in software development! I guess that when I'm thinking about those things while building software I kind of have a business hat on, but it still seems an integral part of software development to me.

His underlying point about business being "soft, not hard," and the different kinds of tradeoff and risk that a CEO needs to think about, are well taken though.

Paul Hudak's "The Haskell School of Expression" (http://www.amazon.com/The-Haskell-School-Expression-Programm...), while it doesn't lead to a finished desktop application, does go deeply into its motivating example of building an animation library and a GUI for displaying and interacting with animations. (It also applies the techniques developed in the animation library to music.) It's not a "practical product" but it is "doing something significant," and much more than "a bunch of language constructs."

A friend's children (aged 6 and 8) use my Surface occasionally, mainly for the Fresh Paint drawing application. They love it, and have very few problems using it -- sometimes they misjudge the swipe gestures but they have learned how to recover in most cases. (They also enjoy ArtRage on the iPad, so it's not that Surface is the only thing they know.)

That's probably not down to a censorship 'lens' though.

A more apt US analogy might be how many people were aware of the scale of protests against the Iraq war -- especially the vast opposition to it in Europe. My impression is that US mass media self-censored and barely reported those protests. (I may be mistaken: I don't live in the US, but that's what I've heard from people who do.)

Of course it's a far cry from self-censorship by the mass media to state censorship of the Internet. But for many people it results in the same distorted view of the world.

It's news because we only just found out about it. If we'd known about it for the last 12 years, sure, it would be silly to report it as news. But I'm not comfortable with the implication that if something can be swept under the carpet for a couple of years, then meh, it's no longer interesting or important when it comes to light.

Our process of making laws mostly listens to the people, but it it is contingent on the government's willingness to listen. The problem is the lack of rules around urgency (http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/parliaments-urgency-provision-b...). For non-Kiwis, urgency allows a government to force through a bill in a hurry and without consultation. The loophole is that urgency doesn't require a supermajority and there are no limits on the kind of bills that can be passed this way: if the government decides to bypass the normal legislative process, there's not much anyone can do to stop it.

The result is that governments have used urgency as a way to pass major and controversial laws without full consultation or debate. Examples include 'three strikes' (http://boingboing.net/2011/04/15/new-zealands-3-strik.html), the 'Hobbit Act' (http://www.3news.co.nz/Hobbit-bill-becomes-law/tabid/419/art...) and the GCSB (spy) bill (http://parliamenttoday.co.nz/2013/05/house-goes-into-urgency...). Whether you agree or disagree on the merits of the bills, I do think it's fair to say that all deserved more debate and consultation than they got.

And I'd argue that all of these examples were driven by lobbying (from the media industry, the Hobbit producers and the espionage agencies). Our process of making laws is generally healthy and open, but it does have dangerous blind spots.

I second rafaelj's recommendations, and there is also a good interactive tutorial from the F# team: http://www.tryfsharp.org/Learn. You may find it a bit slow paced given your FP experience but it may be a good way to actually try out the syntax rather than just reading about it.

"Why not switch the kettle on during a commercial break?" The BBC doesn't have commercial breaks. Most UK stations that do have commercial breaks spread them out at about 20-minute intervals, so if you switched the kettle during a commercial break, it would have got cold again by the end of the programme.

Besides, if everyone switches the kettle on during the commercial break, you just shift the spike forward a bit.