"Windows Phone Has A Totally Unique UI" - I don't think this is a valid point. Unique does not automatically win anything. Better might be a winner, but the article does not say that.
It matters in that it's something that people can't complain about. If it had a non-unique UI, then it would be dismissed almost immediately.
"Originality Means Fewer Forays Into The Patent Wars" - Why? Just about everything is already patented ("An object oriented interface to the operating system" by Apple), so I don't think this is a valid claim.
They got this wrong; in actual fact the reason they don't need to worry about patents as much with WP7 is because they have the patents from windows mobile to attack pretty much anyone who tries to sue them.
"Uniformity Across All Devices and Carriers" - Apple has that too. Also, the non-uniformity is one of the selling points of android.
It's also one of the major annoyances of android, as we've seen updates go completely ignored by OEM's and carriers. From a developer point of view it's also a more challenging experience due to fragmentation.
"Zune Is Baked Right Into the Operating System" - Remember Zune? No? It was the next iPod killer. By the way, the iPod is baked into iOS.
Not every music service/player is born equal, and far too many people gloss over its excellence. Zune has the Zune pass, which is unique to it and allows it to have a far richer music discovery experience, which is unrivalled in the marketplace. Speaking of which, also has as much content as iTunes these days (same # of songs etc.)
"Xbox Live Gaming Support" - IMHO this is the only valid point. Still it's not a unique point, with play station integration into Sony's androids...
This is actually one of the lesser interesting parts of WP7, as there aren't many multi-player games.
Someone else mentioned press releases - this article is far too error-prone to have come from Microsoft. It's more likely just someone with a passing interest who's been asked to write something on it.
Well, the first problem you'll run into is, which SQL implementation do you use? I think pretty much all discussion of the topic stops here since there are so many differences between the actual SQL standard and what the varios modern RDBMS' actually use.
The only real way past this hurdle is to create an intermediate SQL parser that uses your own interpretation of the standard, and at this point you may as well just use OData.
I'm not sure how valuable a discussion about just using the SQL implementation that comes with your RDMBS is, as doing this defeats all the effort we put into making our front ends ignorant of the underlying schema by locking the front-end into a specific SQL implementation for queries.
This problem has already been solved; it's called OData (http://www.odata.org/). Personally, I've been using it with Microsoft's new Web Api to great benefit.
It provides a very rich query API on top of basic http, and as you can see works naturally with REST services. I'm not aware of how other frameworks provide OData support, but some quick googling reveals that most web frameworks have odata libraries available.
It's an incredibly bad idea to allow SQL directly, for obvious reasons (would require executing user provided SQL among other things.)
I believe that having a single REST api that serves multiple front-ends (web, mobile, thick client etc) is the future as it removes the need to maintain an entirely different codebase just for a web interface. Indeed, many major websites have moved to this model.
Some people seem to have forgotten that the reason MSE is so good is because Microsoft have an entire department that explores those DrWatson errors people send them. Some of the time the reports include virus authors' early attempts which are accidentally sent and then used to create virus definitions.
If MSE was installed by default, the data MS would have to improve it would increase by a substantial amount. Also, MSE is generally rated the best AV in pretty much every independant review I've seen.
"Malware authors. You don't think they're going to ignore this development, do you? If most budget-conscious home users stick with Microsoft's built-in offering, then surely the first thing the bad guys will do is make sure their latest creation can slip past Microsoft's scanner."
While misguided, this point raises a problem. By having a single 'default' AV installed, it might mean the attack surface is made simpler as malware writers need only target a single scanner. With MS' demonstrated speed in addressing issues however, I doubt this is a great threat.
While certainly not free, SQL Server 2008 introduced some pretty nice spacial data tools. It can find points within a radius, capture points within a polygon, intersections/unions, and quite a bit more. It also has full support for true spacial indexes which makes dealing with large amounts of data very fast.
I've just completed a project using these tools quite extensively, and found them a really nice way of handling all my geo data. Being T-SQL, there's not much to learn to make use of it either.
I haven't written any python in a while, but a 15% speedup from inlining a function call? Really? This reinforces my preference for statically typed languages.
He has an ordered, referenced critique that explains exactly why java's fork/join doesn't belong in the JDK.
I don't think it's really appropriate to call this a conflict of interest; industry professionals do this all the time. Java should be under special scrutiny from the smartest people we have, now that it's owned by Oracle.
I don't know where you get the impression that this is badly written, but in my opinion this outshines much of the writing we see on HN.
> We were now rendering our site index in 1.5 seconds or less, compared to 3 seconds before.
This is the real WTF. What kind of queries take three seconds to run, that is ridiculous. Even with indexes 1.5 seconds is insane.
Deciding against premature optimisation isn't permission to throw away good, efficient design. It's clear from the rest of the article that these guys really have no idea what they're doing. Quoting the results of all their optimisations:
> In the end, we did not go down. The last round of load tests with httperf showed us handling 200 GETs a second indefinitely, with an average response time of about 1.2 seconds. We served thousands of requests without even a hiccup, and we did it without spending any money.
This is really poor performance, and it shows in the site when you change page or select a different category/filter. I'm guessing that they also chose a nosql solution for the wrong reasons, as it seems everything there could be done much faster/better by using an ACID compliant database.
And therein lies the problem. When people buy these awful computers it sends a message to the companies that there's a market for them. If they wanted to change their image they'd need to only compete with apple, which is a losing strategy in the short term.
The author seems to be generalising on a massive scale. The reason there's so much crap in the PC laptop market is because there's a lot of demand for cheap hardware.
Many of his negative points about windows are flat out wrong, and are either because he bought a shitty 5400rpm hard drive or hasn't adjusted his power settings. It's easy to tell windows to shutdown/hibernate when you close the lid.
In terms of looks, there are a couple of manufacturers that 'get it', and I think Lenovo lately with their edge series and some others are starting to really stand out in terms of design. The author seems to miss the point that there's a trade-off between price/quality and size/quality in terms of price. There are cheap small laptops, and good, expensive small laptops. There are cheap big laptops, and good expensive big laptops (not nearly as useful.)
I think this is one of the major causes of consumer confusion these days, since most people jump on the shitty cheap stuff and complain when it breaks in 3 months. If you spend the same amount on a high end lenovo/sony you'll get a lot more power than a mac, and better battery life too.
I'm sorry but users aren't going to upgrade to iOS 5 for the same reasons they haven't upgraded in the past: they just dont care.
Unless a user is actually frustrated with something, they won't bother investigating how to fix it. Most of the time they probably won't even know there IS a fix unless someone tells them.
Users aren't going to want to use an iOS only messaging service, and they certainly won't want to use two different services depending on who they're messaging. This has already happened before with FaceTime; some people used it and found it interesting but there was no mass appeal because not everyone has an iOS device.
It matters in that it's something that people can't complain about. If it had a non-unique UI, then it would be dismissed almost immediately.
"Originality Means Fewer Forays Into The Patent Wars" - Why? Just about everything is already patented ("An object oriented interface to the operating system" by Apple), so I don't think this is a valid claim.
They got this wrong; in actual fact the reason they don't need to worry about patents as much with WP7 is because they have the patents from windows mobile to attack pretty much anyone who tries to sue them.
"Uniformity Across All Devices and Carriers" - Apple has that too. Also, the non-uniformity is one of the selling points of android.
It's also one of the major annoyances of android, as we've seen updates go completely ignored by OEM's and carriers. From a developer point of view it's also a more challenging experience due to fragmentation.
"Zune Is Baked Right Into the Operating System" - Remember Zune? No? It was the next iPod killer. By the way, the iPod is baked into iOS.
Not every music service/player is born equal, and far too many people gloss over its excellence. Zune has the Zune pass, which is unique to it and allows it to have a far richer music discovery experience, which is unrivalled in the marketplace. Speaking of which, also has as much content as iTunes these days (same # of songs etc.)
"Xbox Live Gaming Support" - IMHO this is the only valid point. Still it's not a unique point, with play station integration into Sony's androids... This is actually one of the lesser interesting parts of WP7, as there aren't many multi-player games.
Someone else mentioned press releases - this article is far too error-prone to have come from Microsoft. It's more likely just someone with a passing interest who's been asked to write something on it.