isani

Sure, you can get pretty far with a fairly simple solution. But lot of the time, you get two (or more) ways to split the string into dictionary words. For a simple English example, is it "justice was served" or "just ice was served"?

Japanese is usually written without spaces. Words and sentences just run into each other. When writing in hiragana (syllabic characters), word boundaries are often ambiguous.

Englishwouldbemuchhardertoparseifwrittenlikethis.

"A fox was brown" is a perfectly ordinary sentence in the active voice. "Speed was involved in an incident" can also be parsed as active, if "involved" is an adjective. If the sentence is passive, then the active equivalent is "An incident involved speed", which is hardly any better.

That "ultimate in passive voice" is certainly convoluted, but it has very little if anything to do with passive voice.

Factoring into powers of 2 seems to me like an unnecessary complication. It's possible to calculate an arbitrary power in O(log N) time without memoization.

  def __get_matrix_power(self, M, p):
    if p == 1:
      return M
    if p % 2 == 1: # odd power
      return self.__multiply_matrices(M, self.__get_matrix_power(M, p - 1))
    else: # even power
      K = self.__get_matrix_power(M, int(p/2))
      return self.__multiply_matrices(K, K)

A maximum spanning tree might be misleading, as it's easy to interpret no vertex as no correlation. When building a tree, weak correlations may be included out of necessity, while stronger ones that lead to cycles are omitted.

If several dimensions are correlated just about equally strongly, you can get very different trees based on small random variation. There's no guarantee that all significant correlations are displayed, or that correlated dimensions are visually close to one another.

I'm on a desktop and they're telling me to rotate my screen.

I agree. I'm not sure what kind of an algorithm they use for kerning, but it seems to ignore how letters interact optically. Pairs like "ve" and "ro" are set too far apart.

"VLC for Windows 8 might not be applicable for the store."

And that's a major problem. Without distribution on the Windows Store, this thing isn't going to see any kind of mass adoption. I'd be wary about funding until they work out whether their code and licenses pass the Store certification requirements.

It seems they are doing something similar, but with vertical scrolling/swiping. Swipe up from notifications to get to running apps, swipe again to get to the full list of apps.

Actually, A4 has an aspect ratio of one to the square root of two. Your point still stands, as this is even closer to the iPad screen than 2:3.

"The apps will allow for basic editing"

I find it interesting that Microsoft now has several versions of Office that don't support the full feature set of their file formats. There's already Office Web Apps and Office Mobile, and now the new apps. I wonder if they will settle on a single subset of features, a kind of Office Lite? Otherwise, it'll be quite confusing to tell what works in which app.

They're killing the client. Messenger accounts continue to work, and users can sign in to the Skype client with their existing Messenger credentials. Messenger will be run on the same infrastructure as before, not on the Skype peer-to-peer model. As far as I can tell, third-party clients should continue to work as well.

The introduction text is misleading. Besides these enumerated values, you can also use a custom PNG. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh70048...

This makes me wonder why "settings" is included in the default icon set. Settings should be accessed via the charms bar as well.

No, Silverlight doesn't run on IE10 Metro. I just tested that it doesn't run on an arbitrary site, and I don't think it's possible to even whitelist it.

Earlier, the plan was to have no plugin support at all in IE10 Metro. Microsoft is positioning the whitelist approach as a backwards compatibility shim for high-profile sites that won't or can't give up Flash.

Yeah, I want to see that too. The UI differences between the platforms go far beyond chrome and metrics. An app that runs on three platforms may have a different set of views and different navigation logic for each.

I wonder if native UI rendering APIs will be available for these platforms. Will this be a simple wrapper and compile with few native hooks, like Flash on iOS? Or will they take a more integrated approach?

I think this is a demotion for desktop apps. The phrase "Windows 8 style UI" implies that the colorful rectangle look is the style for Windows 8. The classic desktop environment, by implication, is not Windows 8 style.

"75 percent of applications are already designed in HTML5, with an overlay to fit smartphones from Apple or Google."

I'd really like a source for this. He seems to be saying that 75% of apps on the App Store and Google Play are HTML with a thin wrapper – the PhoneGap model. This doesn't match the top apps on either store, they're overwhelmingly native code.

Is there some kind of a long tail of HTML5 apps out there? Does Mozilla count every app that uses some kind of a web view? Or did they just make the number up?

I would add the following:

* A short-lived redesign of MSN around the concept of "channels" and "shows" with a focus on animation and video (1996!)

* Partnering with broadcasters to deliver interactive content over a TV broadcast signal (circa 1996-1998)

* Including WebTV software and TV receiver support in Windows 98

Basically, I think that Microsoft followed a strategy focused around the early 90s "Information Superhighway" vision way into the late 90s. A key piece of that vision was that the superhighway would enter people's homes trough television, not computers. When the Internet started to gain popularity, many people still felt that it was a "baby superhighway" or a step along the way to the real superhighway.

K-means clustering gives you a set of centroids which are the calculated means of each cluster. If you only want actually occurring colors, just look up the color closest to each centroid.

Similarly, there's the lineage of:

1. Microsoft Passport

2. .NET Passport

3. Microsoft Passport Network

4. Windows Live Passport

5. Microsoft Account

It seems that whenever Microsoft releases a new strategy white paper, the Passport brand changes.

When browsing product categories, the page title says "Search results for ''". For €40 million, you could check for empty strings.

From a consumer point of view, I can see two problems. The selection is muddled, and the prices aren't all that good.

They say they have 194,614 products, but that includes things like 5000 rubber mats and 2000 hex keys. Meanwhile, there's a single television and a single MP3 player.

For the few products that I checked, the price with international shipping was always higher than what you could get from a local store.

Funnily enough, some of these pages are nearly valid HTML5. This one, for example: http://home.mcom.com/docs/product/netsite.html

The only issues are a missing doctype and a couple of stray tags. This is because (parts of) the site were written before Netscape went wild with extending HTML.

Apple is leading the way if you're talking about mobile phone sales in the sense of making money. The lead by a great margin in both revenue and profit.

"All apps for ARM are going to come through the Store, which means they’re going to be Metro Apps."

– Windows president Steven Sinofsky http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/09/13/windows-8-on-arm/

Was it worth it for Microsoft, though? Their entertainment unit made 32 million dollars in profit last quarter – a quarter which they considered an immense success. With that kind of income, the project will never break even, never mind turn an overall profit. Even if you consider intangibles like strengthening the Windows platform, it's hard for me to believe that those billions were best invested into Xbox.

This thing is full of pointless UI weirdness. For example:

* None of the back buttons look like iOS back buttons or state where they lead.

* The tab controls are taller than usual, taking up room for no good reason.

* The open in Safari icon looks like nothing I've ever seen and it displays an alert view instead of an action sheet.

* The People view has a tabs on bottom and a segmented control on top. The segmented control is treated as primary (changes the entire view including tabs).

* It takes five taps to get from your stream to the posts of a particular circle.