Archives
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Halo The Movie: Microsoft > Hollywood
"However, negotiating a movie deal proved as challenging as taking down a Covenant dropship, as several studios surprisingly passed on producing a Halo movie. The reason: Film studios may be used to kowtowing to A-list actors' demands, but they don't typically cave in to requests from non-Hollywood players. Initial reports saw the software giant asking for $10 million against 15 percent of the gross (whichever is higher), a below-the-line budget of $75 million (budget before hiring actors and crew), near-immediate production of the movie, and a large say in the creative development of the movie.
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Screenweaver
The popular Screenweaver tool that gives Flash applications native API support is now open source.
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Google Talk Review
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BitTorrent.net
If you need to implement bittorrent functionality in your .NET application, you will most likely come across btsharp in your initial googling. However, if you do manage to get the site to load and download the source/dlls you will notice that they are all designed to work with VS.NET 2005. After much frustration and many google queries, I now present you with an alternative that works fine with Visual Studio 2003: BitTorrent.net. Initial tests show the torrent files downloading perfectly.
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Xamlon vs. NeoSwf: Initial Impressions
So, I've had a chance to play with both the Xamlon and GlobFX (NeoSwf) C#->SWF compilers. Here are my thoughts:
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Another C#->SWF Tool
I just ran across this tool from GlobFX:
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You Snooze You Lose
PDC is sold out.
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David Mendels Needs a Blog
David Mendels is one of those guys at Macromedia who I really would like to see get a blog. He is active in the online community and sure does a lot of blog reading and commenting. I'm sure he has plenty of interesting things to say. So, all you MM folks like JD, you need to start bugging him about getting one.
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Another One Bites the Dust. Palm + Windows = Love?
"In an interview, Palm Chief Financial Officer Andrew Brown said that building a Treo that runs on the mobile version of Windows might help the company woo corporate customers who have been reticent to buy its Palm OS-based gadgets. " [1]
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Goodbye RISC. OS-X runs faster on Intel
Wired has an interesting tidbit about a group of hackers that have managed to get OSX running on the PC.
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America's Top Model + Survivor + HTTP = beautifulpeople.net
Maybe this is off-topic, but it is amusing as hell that this exists:
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Mark Anders On The Zorn Team
David Mendels gave some great feedback:
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Macromedia Zorn: The Answer I've Been Looking For?
Thanks to Mike Chambers for pointing me to this:
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Flash 8 Revolutionary?
There is a ton of hype going around about how Flash 8 is really going to revolutionize the web. This is just nonsense. Don't get me wrong, the new version of Flash is extremely cool and exciting when it comes to visual effects. The new version of Flash has some really amazing things--like support for real-time filters and VP6 video--but, once again, Macromedia has almost completely ignored developers with the latest Flash release. As I have said in the past, Macromedia is a very designer centric company. They have a great tool with a ton of potential; however, until they realize that developers make the applications people use, not designers, Flash is going to continue to be used soley for banner ads and frilly web sites. It really amazes me that after the big push with Central to get Flash on the desktop and the big push with Flex to get developers using Flash, Macromedia is still failing to give developers what they need to be successful. Here are some questions I have for Macromedia:
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WSE 2.0 Progress Bars That Work
Ite's been a while since I posted some amazingly useful, but insanely impossible to find code for you. But, I am still alive and kicking and working on all sorts of interesting projects, so it was only a matter of time until I ran into another Microsoft oversight that needed a workaround. If you have ever tried to implement a progress bar with WSE 2.0 in your application, it probably wasn't a fun experience. In fact, if you were using something like DIME, you probably gave up. Yes, theoretically, there are ways to use the DimeReader / DimeWriter to do the task, but that requires a lot of extra work and doesn't fit nearly as nice and neat into the framework as the auto-generated WSE classes that you are used to. Personally, I like using the WSE auto-generated code, but I was amazed to discover that there is absolutely no way built-in for you to obtain progress information while a large DIME message is being streamed to the server. What is worse is that due to the way that WSE was built, you cannot even plug into WSE to provide this functionality yourself... well, at least that is what everyone was saying. But, as is often said, "Where there is a will, there is a way." Today, ladies and gentlemen, I present you with the way.