Ramblings of a Coder's Mind

Yes, they are out! You might have been hearing about the two for the past week or two around the interneticle blogosphere. I certainly did and as with every VS release, I was excited. VS is the best IDE I have seen so its no surprise that a new release excites me.

Initial reports state that the editor now uses WPF at points, has a brand new editor and improvements in syntaxes. Another thing they have changed is VS 2010 now has native support for F# :o This release isn’t really high on performance and optimization but gives you a good look as to where this project is going. Seems really exciting the things they have done. You can have a look at the Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit VS 2010 TS B1 :)

All this and much more in this release. I’ll have an initial review up by tonight when I get my hands on it.

People who are waiting to download it can do so off MSDN Premium, Microsoft Downloads or try the Web Installer. I’m sure there are other not so legal ways to do it as well :P If you are looking for a x64 VS 2010 Team System then don’t. There isn’t one :( So its x86 for all of us! Don’t worry, the following OS’ are supported:

• Windows 7 RC (x86 and x64) Ultimate Edition
• Windows Vista (x86 or x64), all editions except Starter Edition
• Windows XP (x86 or x64), Service Pack 2 or later, all editions except Starter Edition
• Windows Server 2003 (x86 or x64), Service Pack 1 or later, all editions
• Windows Server 2003 R2 or later (x86 or x64), all editions
• Windows Server 2008 (x86 and x64) or later (all editions)
• Windows Server 2008 R2 RC (x64) Enterprise Edition

Windows 7 might be supported in this release but Microsoft doesn’t really recommend using VS 2010 B1 on Win7. Why? I guess as with most betas, you want bug reports that are purely based on your product. Two betas working together could do a lot more weirder things than just one.

If you already have Visual Studio 2008 on your machine then don’t worry, VS 2010 B1 will install beside it without disturbing your precious VS 08 install ;) As with any beta, don’t rely on it for your major dev work and avoid installs on your primary machine.

Have you heard of Wolfram Alpha (also called WoflramAlpha or Wolfram|Alpha)? If you haven’t, you best do it quickly. Its going to be brought online in about 30 minutes from now. I can’t wait! :D

Wolfram|Alpha is an answer-engine developed by Wolfram Research headed by British CEO and founder, physicist Stephen Wolfram. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer instead of providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer. It is an effort to make all the information known to man to be made available to everyone at their computational fingertips ;)

Cyc founder Douglas Lenat was one of the few given an opportunity to test Wolfram Alpha before its release:

“The resulting mosaic covers a large portion of the space of queries that the average person might genuinely want to ask. [...] It handles a much wider range of queries than Cyc, but much narrower than Google; it understands some of what it is displaying as an answer, but only some of it [...] The bottom line is that there is a large range of queries it can’t parse, and a large range of parsable queries it can’t answer.”

Wolfram Alpha is built on Wolfram’s earlier flagship product, Mathematica, which encompasses computer algebra, symbolic and numerical computation, visualization, and statistics capabilities. It is written in 5 million lines of Mathematica code and runs on 10,000 CPUs (though the number is upgraded for the launch).

You can watch the launch live on the Wolfram|Alpha launch webcast and you can see an Introduction to Wolfram|Alpha by Stephen Wolfram which shows you the basics of what will be available during today’s release. If that introduction video doesn’t blow you away, I don’t know what will (other than a F5 :P)

I do believe the Wolfram engine has the capability to be the next Google. I’m not saying that Google will lose out because it still serves a distinct purpose. If you need to find webpages, you still need Google. But I believe Wolfram won’t take time to eat up Google’s information based search market as long as Wolfram can solve their performance issues (load handling and providing good response times mainly).

Update: 10 mins since “release” time and all the Wolfram sites seem to be down. Even the blog. Another DDOS in the making and I’m not surprised. I guess users will have better luck over the next few hours/days :) Its a service which seems worth waiting.

First of all, I should say, the only source I have is this youtube video.

Apple wheel is a “revolutionary” laptop with no keyboard, just a giant scroll wheel :| I kid you not, that’s what it says :-/

The guy in that video apparently took 45 minutes to type a mail (with a million mistakes) and he still likes the product… jeez. I like write a few hundred lines of code in that time :|

Me and SK call this Apple’s Reality Distortion Field™. This is single handedly the shittiest technological innovation I have seen in my time on this planet. I’m sure there might be something equally (or may be more) stupid in the past but this certainly is the stupidest thing I have heard of in the mainstream.

It looks seriously slim. I think it was a 12 odd inch form factor which is cool. Its nice to see Apple put stuff in such compact spaces but the idea of removing a key board all together, to me at least, is JUST WRONG! Typing on that machine would be next to impossible. Using it would be really cumbersome too. You want the “next generation” of Hardware User Interfaces? Go Touch Screen. Go take a page from Microsoft’s book (Windows 7, to be precise).

The worst part is that Apple Fanboys are loving it :-/ I admit, I am a slight Microsoft Fanboy. I do like their work but this does not, in any way, mean that if they pull of something as stupid as this, I wouldn’t slap them to oblivion.

Please continue doing what you do best. Keep making products like the new MacBook Pro 17, the MacBook Air and the iPod Classic/iPod Touch/iPhone. Thanks! :)

Bad Apple! :(