January « 2010 « Tim Anderson's ITWriting

Apple’s proxy war with Amazon over ebook pricing and market

By tim, on January 31st, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

Amazon has apparently withdrawn all Macmillan titles from sale (print and electronic) because of an argument with the publisher over the terms of sale. Macmillan CEO John Sargent says:

This past Thursday I met with Amazon in Seattle. I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for ebooks under the agency model which

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Windows 7 booms for Microsoft, everything else is flat

By tim, on January 29th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft has had a bumper quarter driven by Windows 7, as expected. I’ve put this into a table as I have before.

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Apple’s lock-in works. Can anyone improve on App Store?

By tim, on January 28th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

Timothy B Lee writes of the App Store/iPhone and now iPad lock-in:

The store is an unnecessary bottleneck in the app development process that limits the functionality of iPhone applications and discourages developers from adopting the platform.

While instinctively I agree, the evidence for the damaging effect of the App Store is not there. On

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Apple iPad vs Windows Tablet vs Google Chrome OS

By tim, on January 27th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

Apple has announced the iPad – essentially a large-size (242.8 x 189.7mm) iTouch. Large multi-touch screen, claimed 10 hour battery life, flash drive of 16GB up to 32GB, browse the web, play music and video, read eBooks. Keyboard dock for the desk, virtual keyboard for when you are out and about. App Store support and

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The insecurity of Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode

By tim, on January 27th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

An article on the H points to this paper by Steven Murdoch and Ross Anderson, from the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, on the poor security design of the 3-D secure (3DS) protocol used by Visa and MasterCard in the UK and catching on worldwide. In addition, 3DS undermines privacy by sending a full description

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The mystery of the slow Exchange 2007: when hard-coded values come back to haunt you

By tim, on January 26th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

Following a migration from Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 to SBS 2008 users were complaining that Exchange was slower than before in some scenarios. How could this be? The new machine had 64-bit goodness and far more RAM than before.

I checked out the machine’s performance and noticed something odd. Store.exe, the Exchange database, usually

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A Silverlight UI for Windows Mobile 7, backward compatibility in doubt

By tim, on January 24th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

Note: speculative post; I have no official information on this.

It’s been rumoured for ages; but at this point I would be surprised if the Windows Mobile 7 UI were not built with Silverlight. Consider:

Silverlight has to be supported – it should have been in 6.5 – otherwise nobody will take mobile Silverlight seriously

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Windows Azure is too expensive for small apps

By tim, on January 22nd, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

I’m researching Windows Azure development; and as soon as you check out early feedback one problem jumps out immediately. Azure is prohibitively expensive for small applications.

Here’s a thread that makes the point:

Currently I’m hosting 3 relatively small ASP.net web applications on a VPS. This is costing about $100 per month. I’m considering transitioning

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Silverlight 4 with COM can do anything – on Windows

By tim, on January 22nd, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

At PDC Microsoft played down the significance of adding COM support to Silverlight 4 when run out of the browser and fully trusted (you can also be out of the browser and not fully trusted). The demos were of Office automation, and journalists were told that the feature was there to satisfy the requests of

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Why F# rather than IronPython in Visual Studio 2010?

By tim, on January 21st, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

Dynamic languages are all the rage; and after JavaScript, Python is perhaps the dynamic language of the day, loved by Google and gaining increasing attention. IronPython, built on .NET, is stable and at version 2.6. Now Visual Studio 2010 turns up with an additional language in the box, but it is not IronPython; rather it

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