speculative

What powers Google Charts?

Does any body know what powers Google Charts? I have been using it for a while but not sure what Google used to build it. ...

Will Google Android ever support .NET?

Now that the G1 with Google's Android OS is now available (soon), will the android platform ever support .Net? ...

What optimizations today are going to be useless tomorrow?

I hope we all know by now that Premature optimization is the root of all evil. One side of that quote means by optimizing you are increasing complexity and complexity is evil. The other less known side is today's optimization might be meaningless tomorrow. What I mean is we used to think that, "Floating-point operations are slow, ther...

W3C Involvement In Flash & Silverlight

It seems to me that the key USP of Flash/Silverlight is the ability to provide access (albeit indirectly) to the graphics subsystem of the client, enabling video, smooth transitions and "fancy" visual effects. This sounds like a good idea, and a natural evolution/extension of HTML. But surely it would be better if someone like the W3C c...

What are the performance characteristics of sqlite with very large database files?

I know that sqlite doesn't perform well with extremely large database files even when they are supported (there used to be a comment on the sqlite website stating that if you need file sizes above 1GB you may want to consider using an enterprise rdbms. Can't find it anymore, might be related to an older version of sqlite). However, for ...

Will Visual Studio 2010 combine the express editions into a single product?

I remember in a VS express survey that Microsoft asked whether you'd like to see the express editions merged together into a single express product (i.e. so you could notably do multi-language solutions). I'm unable to locate any specific information on this topic, as my attention has only newly turned to VS2010 now that the beta is out,...

When will Silverlight 4 come out? What features will it have?

When will Silverlight 4 come out? Mary Joe Foley at ZDNet speculates (from a slideshow) that VS2010 will be released in the April 2010 timeframe. Will Silverlight 4 make it to RTW by then? What features will it have? Will Silverlight RIA be part of the SDK, or a seperate "Stable/Preview" library like parts of the Silverlight Contro...

Hibernate and Scala

I have been toying with Scala and I was wondering if anyone had had any experience with using hibernate and mysql as a persistent store for scala objects? Does it work out of the box or is there a lot to do? ...

Could CouchDB benefit significantly from the use of BERT instead of JSON?

I appreciate a lot CouchDB attempt to use universal web formats in everything it does: RESTFUL HTTP methods in every interaction, JSON objects, javascript code to customize database and documents. CouchDB seems to scale pretty well, but the individual cost to make a request usually makes 'relational' people afraid of. Many small busine...

Haskell speculative parallel execution

I am thinking about exploiting parallelism for one problem I am trying to solve. The problem is roughly this: given input (sequence of points) find a best output (biggest triangle composed from these points, longest line etc.). There are 3 different 'shapes' to be found in the sequence of points, however I am interested only in the one w...

ActionScript 3 in other runtimes besides Flash?

I find ActionScript 3 one of the best high level dynamic languages out there, but because it only runs in Flash/Flex/AIR (to my knowledge) its uses are fairly limited. Are there alternative and/or generic runtimes available which would allow running it on a server, or on the desktop without the Flash API? I suppose not, but is there a c...

Navigating through a sea of hype

This is a vague, open question, so if you have no interest in these, please leave now. A few years ago it seemed everyone thought the death of desktop software was imminent. Web applications were the future. Everyone would move to cloud-based software-as-a-service systems, and developing applications for specific end-user platforms like...

Will html5 change everything for designers?

What impact do you think html5 will have on the workflow/way graphic design is done for the web? Right now most designers stay in an Adobe tool, doing most of the design work there, and implement some elements with graphics and some with code. Checking out http://www.apple.com/html5/ it seems that almost everything done in a graphic can...

Next developing language

Hi, I`m C# .Net developer. First of all I want to emphasize: I do not want any holy-war appear in this topic, please I think, I'm a little bored of .net. Now, I'm seeing there many things, that I do not want to see in a language, I've caught feeling, that nowadays C# is obsolete, and I (and other developers) need to have something more ...