Archives
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Vista RTM Installation Cannot Update Boot Configuration
If you get this error, I'll save you all the trouble I went through figuring out how to resolve this:
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WPF/E CTP Around the Corner
SWEEET!
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Zune Thinks I'm a Kid - No Explicit for Me
Everything was sailing along perfectly till I tried to download a comedy album that just happened to have an explicit label on it. If you sign up for a Zune account, do not use an old x-box Live account tag if you're x-box live subscription has expired. You might end up in customer support hell with customer support trying to figure out why marketplace thinks you are a kid.
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Zune Marketplace: First Impressions
Zune marketplace is sweet. Slight snag getting it up (had to restart the marketplace after signing up), but other than that, I'm impressed.
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Why the Zune is Better Than They Said
So, I was thinking about getting a Zune for myself today. I had shown the zune site to my girlfriend last night and she thought it was pretty neat. So, I call her and let her know I'm heading out to pick up my Zune and she tells me to get two, because that is what she wants for Christmas (mind you, I had previously offered to buy her an iPod for Christmas when she mentioned she needed an MP3 player, and she wasn't all that interested). I swing by her work for lunch and we go down to Best Buy, where we have to stand in line just to get a look at it (and they said there wasn't going to be any lines). We walk away happy customers with a Zune for each of us.
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Official Vista Download Date
"...we look forward to adding Windows Vista to our slate of offerings beginning November 17."
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Articulate: Hot Job Opening
Location Anywhere, USA
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Download Vista Tonight?
Subscriber downloads are going to go down shortly for a few hours of matinence. I wonder why... :)
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Vista RTM Today?
According to Mary Jo Foley The day has finally come: Windows Vista is going gold.
Foley mentions "the public announcement that Windows Vista has been released to manufacturing is going to happen tomorrow, November 8, around 11 a.m. PST, sources close to the company are saying."
Once the RTM has been announced the build should appear on MSDN at the same time according to Microsoft's press release of yesterday. -
The Future of Search
Riya is at it again. Like.com is amazing. Google should have bought those guys... Note to Microsoft: snatch Riya before Google wises up.
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Adobe Confusion
As I pointed out earlier, Adobe has just donated their action script VM to Mozilla to be used in Firefox. This is really cool. For one, the VM is supposed to provide huge performance boosts. Secondly, it will ensure that your JS code works in both Firefox and Apollo to ease the migration path. However, I have to scratch my head and ask, "Why the hell didn't they donate it to WebKit/Safari?" After all, they are writing Apollo on top of WebKit, not the Mozilla's code. It is really quite amazing to me that they are investing so much in Mozilla when they are building their own platform on top of a completely different code base. Why not just build Apollo on top of Mozilla and reap the benefits of your Mozilla improvements?
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Mozilla + Adobe = Love
[1] http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/2006/11/tamarin_project.cfm
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Sprint EV-DO
Right now, Sprint is offering a sweet deal. Free wireless PCMCIA cards (after $150 instant rebate and then a small mail in rebate). With unlimited access at $59 a month and a very high speed wireless network, it's worth checking out. Much better deal than Verizon, who doesn't give you a free card and charges something like $80-90 a month for "unlimited" access. Verizon's package is not really unlimited though, because you get like 5 GB of transfer before you are cut off according to the TOS and you aren't allowed to use the connection to do anything but download simple HTML pages (therefore, if you are doing more than their monthly transfer limit they immediately cut you off saying you must have been downloading music or some other activity that violates the TOS).
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Adobe Apollo: First Impressions
The first glimpse of Adobe Apollo has arrived: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1551903488172905143 (via Mike Chambers http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh/archives/2006/11/video_leveragin.html)
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Marc on Macromedia
"...here goes Macromedia again trying ot jump start their own ecosystem. Haven’t they learned by now? Nobody wants to hang out with slimeballs? Does anybody remember Grand Cenral or their earlier attempts at capturing and locking up a content distribution network? This latest attempt is just pathetic. Someone please tell Kevin Lynch to just go cash out his stock and buy a mansion and chill. They just don’t get the web or us. The technology and platform we handed to them (or one could say “stole”) is ALL they’re ever gonna innovate with. That juice ran out years ago. Just cause you’re called Adobe now - doesn’t mean all your problems go away. Throwing $100M at something doesn’t make it right. IMHO"
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Proud to be Part of the 15th Fastest Growing Company in North America
Exciting times over here at Articulate:
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The Kid with the AK-47 Tries to Escape
Here's a newsheadline you probably won't hear anywhere else. Yesterday, a kid walked into a school in Joplin Missouri with an AK-47. He shot the ceiling, then his gun jammed and he couldn't kill anyone. The cops came and took him to jail and he was taken to the detention center. My old friend (and old roomate actually), Jared Martin happens to work there, and this kid is one of the ones he watches over. In any case, the kid tried to escape last night, but Jared stopped him. Maybe not the biggest news, but it was cool to hear.
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AJAX > Flash in 2007
"Ektron and SitePoint did a survey of 5,000 web developers over the US summer, and have just released the results in a report entitled The State of Web Development 2006/2007. It's packed full of useful data, even in the 25-page preview (which is free). The bits that particularly interested me were the following two charts, on which web technologies developers and organizations are using now - and plan to use in future.
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Udi: 3.0 is Meh
Udi thinks 3.0 isn't all that great. His response to my recent post is:
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Open Source: It Costs Too Much
Our startup honestly wanted to use OSS products. We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official support for all OSS products-. We thought were prepared to pay the price for OSS products, but then we got a price sticker shock. Now behold: QT is $3300 per seat. We have dropped the development and rewrote everything to C# (MSVS 2005 is ~$700). Embedded Linux from a reputable RT vendor is $25,000 per 5 seats per year. We needed only 3 seats. We had to buy 5 nevertheless. The support was bad. We will go for VxWorks or WinCE in our next product. Red Hat Linux WS is $299. An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140. A Cygwin commercial license will cost tens of thousands of dollars and is only available for large shops. We need 5 seats. Windows Unix services are free. After all, we have decided that the survival of our business is more important for us then 'do-good' ideas. Except for that embedded Linux (slated for WinCE or VxWorks substitution), we are not OSS shop anymore. [1]
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Screw 2.0, I'm Going Straight to 3.0
Recently the discussion came up about using .NET 2.0 in some future products. I work on server products, and we've been using 2.0 there for a while. However, there is a bit of concern around deploying the 2.0 framework with our desktop apps. Our software is shipped ESD style and a lot of customers like to download the trial app before making the purchase. If they try to install the app, but can't because they need to be an administrator to install the .NET framework 2.0, we probably just lost out on the sale. I would venture to guess that a significant chunk of our customers fall into the non-administrator group, so this is a big problem.
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Macromedia Central: A Complete Failure?
It's been out for years now. Guess what, on the official central page, you can chose from a vast array of 22 central applications now (including the ones Macromedia released back in 2003), the last of which was made available over a year ago. This represents a total of 12 people who bought into the whole Central develpment thing. For a company as big as Macromedia, that is beyond sad. It's almost laughable. But, it's not suprising. I told you this would happen. Will Apollo fair any better? We'll just have to wait and see if they have a better licensing model this time around.
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Articulate Engage
It's official.
We just shipped our first desktop product coded from the ground up on top of the .NET Framework: Engage (http://www.articulate.com/engage.html). Engage lets you create Flash based interactions. It's pretty slick for rapidly creating compelling training content. Check it out and let me know what you think. -
VOIP: Coming to a Flash Player Near You
Via JD:
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On2 can shove it. At least H.263 doesn't cost an arm and a leg (Flash Video)
On2, the guys behind the latest video codec in Flash, are celebrating some live streaming stuff. I agree, the codec is nice. What isn't nice is the rediculous licensing costs to use the codec. Note to Macromedia/Adobe: if you are going to try to make an open file format, write the codecs yourself. Don't allow the company that you license your codec from to rape all your customers with rediculous licensing fees.
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Articulate: Deloitte Rising Stars - 499% Growth
"Making Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 Rising Star list is a testament to a company's strategic vision," said Stephen DiPietro, Audit Partner, Deloitte & Touche LLP. "Articulate has exhibited its commitment and ability to innovate over the past three years, and Deloitte salutes their accomplishments." [1]
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The Myspace Lie
Very interesting story about MySpace that claims that MySpace's success has more to do with spam and PR than anything else:
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Dare on Joel
"...There are a couple of other drawbacks to consider that Joel doesn't mention in his post either because they haven't had time to occur yet or probably because FogCreek may be a special case due to Joel's reputation..." [1]
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Web = Minefield
August 31st, 2006
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SVG is Dead
Via JD, Adobe has killed all future SVG player development. With Adobe out of the game due to Flash and Microsoft out of the game with WPF/E, we are one step closer to SVG being know as the vector graphics betamax.
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Microsoft = Evil
Do you see the devil in this picture on MSDN?
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The Adobization of Macromedia Begins
Captivate 2 has been announced. Looks like price will jump from $100 to $599. Sweet!
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Stealing History (Part 2)
Cody Swann has a modified version of the exploit using prototype that works in IE and has support for AJAX requests:
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Replacing the CPU with the GPU
I've been keeping an eye on this type of thing ever since I read a paper about using the GPU for generic tasks. We are beginning to see GPU's enter a new area, where they function like math coprocessors of the old days. This is going to be great for the bioninformatics industry.
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Stealing History
Update: Cody Swan has a version that works in IE and supports AJAX to log the urls somewhere. Info here.
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Simple AJAX Steps for Success
We are doing a ton of AJAX work with [AO]. Here are 10 helpful hints if you are considering using AJAX in an upcoming project:
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Google = Evil
Marc does an excellent job of laying out Google's evil strategy:
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Dare on AJAX / RSS
Great post by Dare
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IContext = Good
Andrew Stopford asks:
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xFruits: Consume your RSS
xFruits is a slick service that lets you transform RSS/OPML/etc. in all sorts of neat ways (Mobile, Web, PDF). Here is a sample, my feed turned into a mobile site
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ORM + You = Lawsuit
"FireStar recently filed a lawsuit (also in East Texas) against Red Hat for the use of the principle of Object Relational Mapping in Hibernate (developed by JBoss), a popular component of Java applications. Jim Farmer of immagic has confirmed that Sakai uses Hibernate and is, therefore, vulnerable to both direct and indirect infringement charges by FireStar. Farmer has also confirmed that while uPortal 2 does not use Hibernate, plans are underway to incorporate the component in uPortal 3. FireStar's patent claim goes beyond Hibernate, which is only one implementation among many of the Object Relational paradigm. Potentially any web framework that uses ORM, including those deployed in PHP, Ruby on Rails, or .NET, is vulnerable."
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C#->Javascript Compiler
You had to know it was only a matter of time. Google has their Java->Javascript compiler and the Xamlon guys have their C#->ActionScript compiler. Soon, we will have a C#->Javascript compiler thanks to Nikhil Kothari (Script#):
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Google Analytics Free For All
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Dave Winer: Macs Crash More
"Every time my Mac crashes in the middle of the night I think of the stupid Apple commercial where they claim that Macs don't do that. It happens about once a week, sometimes every other day..."
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IE7 Native PNG Support a Sham?
"This must be a bug in IE’s filter implementation. So what I did next was to test the same image with opacity applied to it in IE 7, since they now claim they have native transparent PNG support. But… the results were exactly the same. Which makes you wonder if it’s not just the same filter as in IE 6 being applied under the hood.
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Visual Studio Express Should be Part of Windows
Jeroen van den Bos has made the case for adding VS Express to Windows. [1]
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Best Online Aggregator
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OS X + Grammer Check
I found this note about developer improvements on OS X quite interesting:
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IE Beta 3: Officially Unusable.
Don't bother downloading it unless you really need to. Beta 2 worked fairly well on this system. Beta 3 consistanly hangs within 5 minutes of usage for me.
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Live Services are in Trouble
Nial Kennedy is leaving Microsoft. His reason? He joined MS to work on the Live initiatives and after MS stock fell when they announced their Live goals, they scaled back everything. Sounds like Live won't be nearly as cool as it could have been.
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IE Beta 3 Lockups
Seems like every time I send a message in OWA, IE beta 3 locks up. I love IE, but these lock ups need to stop. To be fair, FireFox locks up on me occasionally too... but not nearly as much as this new IE build. If you are listening IE team, my biggest IE peeves have to be the lockups and the fact that the javascript debugging / error experience blows serious chunks. As AJAX gets more and more popular, people are going to prefer Mozilla more and more simply because it gives decent error messages and its javascript console's error log is far superior to IE's javascript error handling.
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Asynchronous "For" Loops
With processors set to scale at the CPU level instead of the Mhz level, wouldn't it be great if you could write some code like:
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Linus Gets Censored
So, Linus started cussing up a storm in a recent GPL 3 debate and got his post deleted. In part of his criticism about GLP3, he states:
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Insane Web 2.0 Tool
Aptana. Download it now and add it to your list of must have tools. It's open source and it will rock your world.
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Rory > Joel
Seriously, not only does Rory provide 10x more insight than Joel Spolsky's "I'm 10x Smarter than Anyone at Microsoft but My Software Still Sucks" blog, but he is a million times more entertaining. Take, for instance, his recent article about the Ballmer criticisms:
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Chris Pendleton on Where 2.0
Chris Pendleton has some interesting comments about Where 2.0, O'Reilly's mapping and local search conference:
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Business Week on Elop
Via JD:
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Ballmer Ain't Goin' Nowhere!
Contrary to a lot of talk lately, David Kirkpatrick--the Senior Editor of Fortune--thinks Ballmer is here to stay and that it is a good thing.
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More Calls for Ballmer to Step Down
Looks like Business 2.0 is in agreement [1] with Joel [2] that it's time for Ballmer to step down from Microsoft.
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Joel On Ballmer
"As of now, Microsoft stock is surprisingly quiet given the announcement that Bill Gates will step down. It should probably be going down. Ozzie is smart but not in the same class as Bill Gates. And it's really Ballmer that needs to go." [1]
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Adobe Earnings Down, Macromedia's CEO Gets the Boot
In today's non-Microsoft related news:
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Say Goodbye to Mr. Gates
Looks like bill will be stepping down from full time at Microsoft to focus on the Gates Foundation. Ray Ozzie and Craig Mudie will be taking over in his place.
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WinFx = .NET 3.0
If you haven't heard, Win FX is going to be known simply the .NET Framework 3.0. Ok, that makes sense. However, changing InfoCard to Windows CardSpace? Not so sure about that one...
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Windows > RedHat
via Scoble:
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SWF, is it Really Open?
So, Adobe is threatening to sue Microsoft in regard to supporting PDF and XPS in Office... I wonder what is going to happen with the supposedly open SWF format... It's a good thing Microsoft didn't follow JD's advice and integrate it into their products. But I wonder.... if Microsoft bundles WPF/E with future Vista or IE versions, will Adobe sue to remove WPF/E?
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Adobe Screws You Over
If you haven't heard about the whole Adobe nonsense lately, you should. Adobe is really doing a good job of being a little brat and complicating matters for millions of Office users around the world.
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Tim O'Reilly's Big Fat Head (2.0)
Apparently, Tim O'Reilly is in agreement [1] with his company's moves on trying to monopolize the Web 2.0 term. The worst part about this ordeal is that his company is acting as if we wouldn't have any term to call this whole next-generation web if it wasn't for his conference. I have news for you Tim, you didn't popularize the term, the people who spoke at your conference did. You didn't invent anything, you just came up with a catchy term to describe something that already happened and now you want to act like you own the concept.
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Google is About to Get a New Face
Doug Bowman, who had a hand creating the awesome Google Calendar UI, has been hired as Visual Design Lead to help "the company establish a common visual language across all their collaborative and communication products." Maybe this means the days of google's hideous UIs are numbered? I hope so. Google Calendar is slick, everything else is just blah.
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Deceiving for Dollars
Madcap software has the following statement on their site about their screen recording tool:
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WPF/E
Tim Anderson has some commentary on WPF/E. He sums up his thoughts like this:
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Introducing Language Oriented Programming
We have Object Oriented, Component Oriented, Service Oriented, and now Language Oriented programming. Take a look at this interesting project from JetBrains called Meta Programming System which seeks to make defining their own languages to solve their own problems something that any developer can do.
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Windows Mobile 5.0 + 30 GB!
I've been waiting for something like this for a long time.
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FREE Calls in the US / Canada with SkypeOut
Till the end of the year, all calls in the US and Canada are FREE with SkypeOut. Wow.
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More WPF/E News
Channel9 has a WPF/E video up here.
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TechEd Gone Wild
Roy is reporting that 2000 people, including himself, walked out of a TechEd session he was attending because of the presenter. Wow.
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Microsoft and OpenAJAX
Looks like Microsoft is looking at joining the OpenAJAX group. This just after Adobe, Backbase, Fair Isaac, ICEsoft, Innoopract, Intel, JackBe, Opera, SAP, Scalix, Software AG, Tibco and XML11 joined the group. This could be interesting. Combined with the other members BEA, Borland, the Dojo Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Google, IBM, Laszlo Systems, Mozilla Corporation, Novell, Openwave Systems, Oracle, Red Hat, Yahoo!, Zend and Zimbra they could really accomplish something great.
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Blog With Word 2007!
Joe Friend says that Word 2007 will support metaweblog API and Atom API for posting direct to blogs. Not only that, but it posts with clean HTML and will let you specify image upload information (via ftp in beta 2, more options coming later). Speaking of Office 2007, go sign up for the beta if you want an early look.
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The Ajax Experience
JD, reporting from the Ajax Experience conference says:
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Thinking In Code
Bruce Eckel has some great interviews with people like Anders Hejlsberg and Martin Fowler available for download.
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Mix Sessions Online
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Flex.NET
Joe Orbman sent me the following email, which I thought I would pass along. Great news.
I thought this would be of interest to you. We just launched a public beta of the 2.1 version of our product - WebORB, the new release is a full implementation of Flex Data Services for .NET. We have added AMF3 support and now anyone using Flex on the client-side can integrate it with the .NET backend. Currently we fully support the RPC services functionality from FDS and are working on adding Messaging and DataService. Essentially, WebORB will become a .NET implementation of FDS, and anyone using Flex Builder can continue to develop the client side there.
There are a few articles describing the integration: First is an overview of creating a Flex application and wiring it up with the .NET side. You can access the article here: http://www.themidnightcoders.com/articles/flextodotnet.htm
The other article describes a new feature we added for Flex clients. The feature enables developers to fetch any type of object from the server, modify its contents and then automatically sync the changes from the Flex application into the original object instance on the server-side. The feature is called object auto-update. There is a live example, client and server-side code in the article: http://www.themidnightcoders.com/articles/objectautoupdate.htm
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Flash File Format 8
Ok, it's a month late, but you can download the Flash 8 Specs from Macromedia if you haven't already. http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/
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Sun Gets a Real CEO
I would think that this is good news for anyone who uses Sun products.
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Cross Browser SOAP/WSDL Support
My latest project that is taking up all my blogging time is very slick. I think it's safe to say we will blow all our competition out of the water once again :). In any case, we are doing a lot of AJAX communication with the server. I really liked the way Microsoft approached AJAX in ATLAS by using WebService calls to communicate back to the server, so I wanted to follow a similar approach with Articulate Online. The problem though is that there isn't a standard way to make webservice calls in the browser yet. Atlas will support this, but Atlas is still beta :(. So until then, there is a cool lightweight SOAP/WSDL javascript lib that you might want to check out:
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Mesh on WPF/E
Ok, Mesh got mad at me and posted his own thoughts in response:
Well, I tried to post in the comments on the site, but they didn't seem to take.
Here is my response:
Here is what I think is a more accurate and relevant comparison between Flash Player 8.5 and WPF/E.
Programing Support
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Flash : Heavy (ActionScript 3, MXML / Flex Framework)
WPF/E : Heavy (C# / XAML / .NET)
3D Support
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Flash : None. Some limited hardware acceleration
WPF/E : None (don't know about hardware acceleration.
Declaritive Programming Support
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Flash : Yes. MXML
WPF/E : Yes. XAML
Bitmap Effects Support
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Flash : Yes. Medium - extensive
WPF/E : Assume yes
(Flash has pretty extensive bitmap effects and filters. I am not as familiar with .net on this)
Animation Model
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Flash : Timeline and programatic. Both authortime, and runtime.
WPF/E : Trigger-based: timelines control the animation, but the timelines are controlled by triggers;
Timelines Required:
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Flash : No
WPF/E : No
Cross platform Support
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Flash : Extensive
WPF/E : Committed to Mac and Windows (MS doesn't have good track record with cross platform plugins / support).
Drawing Tools
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Flash : Heavy
WPF/E : Low to Medium (I put low since the tools are not released, and there is not a market of designers using them yet).
Availability
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Flash : Summer 2006
WPF/E : First half 2007?
You can find more info on Flash Player 8.5 and Flex at labs:
http://labs.macromedia.com
mike chambers
I don't exactly agree with your comparison either, its obviously a little biased toward Flash.
1) The Flash runtime doesn't really have MXML support, MXML is something you compile into SWF. I assume XAML support in WPF/E is going to be runtime, not authortime.
2) Programming support in WPF/E is way better than anything in SWF. WPF/E will support ANY .NET language as long as it meets a few requirements. IL is far more powerful and flexible than what the ActionScript bytecode model allows. Additionally, you will be able to use both VS.NET (which is undoubtedly the BEST dev environement there is), Sparkle, or even notepad and a command line compiler to create your stuff.
3) Cross Platform Support: Mac and Windows is enough for a 1.0. There is nothing really preventing MS from providing Linux, Windows Mobile, etc. support down the road, but you can't expect all those in 1.0. If a Linux user really wants to use it, they can install WINE (and most Linux users are advanced enough and have enough time on their hands to do such things if they haven't already). Probably a moot point anyway, since Andrew Stopford points out that "Linux and Solaris support partnered with third party to do." Outside of the desktop, you really are dealing with a different beast and probably need different designs anyway, but Macromedia's support isn't exactly the best thing since sliced bread in that arena.. last time I checked, there still isn't a player for my Windows Mobile 5.0 phone, and its been out for quite some time.
4) Drawing tools: Drawing tools aren't really as important with WPF/E, because it is about creating applications. With Flash it is a huge deal, because Flash is about creating pretty movies... that said, it's not like Sparkle is a piece of crap.
Some things to consider as well:
5) The SWF format is far more closed to 3rd party devs, as it requires getting the specs and building your own SDK or buying one from a 3rd party. Since Macromedia doesn't have SDKs available for SWF generation and takes forever to get the specs out, Macromedia is always two steps ahead of any 3rd party content producers.
6) If you are going to point out the availability of drawing tools and people with experience using them as such an important part of your comparison, then you should be fair and add the availability of Microsoft dev tools and the legions of Microsoft programmers that are out there. As this is about creating applications, not drawing cute little movies, an army of developers is far more significant that the comparatively small number of Flash UI designers. Not only are there legions of MS devs, but there are legions of MS devs that will be using the exact same IDE that they will be able to use to create WPF/E content. The similarity between WPF/E and WPF is hugely important, as it means that developers could provide both a rich web client and a full desktop client while reusing a lot of the same code (or transition from a web to desktop client for that matter).
7) Video support: Both support video, but with WPF/E supposedly supporting WMV across platforms, that could really be great for content providers if MS decides to add DRM capabilities in WPF/E 2.0. MS DRM is proven and trusted by a lot of media companies that would never think about offering their content as FLV. This is not to mention that there are a free tools directly from MS to create WMV content, but things like On2's video codec or Sorenson's H263 codec were not written, owned, or designed by Macromedia, so they can't really guide those technologies and don't have free tools for creating them. Why do we really need a completely different proprietary video format from a different company every other Flash release? If Macromedia is really serious about video, why can't Macromedia bite the bullet and hire some people with brains to write their own video codec instead of licensing everyone elses? -
WPF(/E) vs. Flash Debate Rages On
The lines have been drawn, and a lot of interesting talk is going on.
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Best WPF/E Description Yet
Jon Galloway has the best description of WPF/E I've seen yet. Most interesting details:
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WPF/E = Flash Done Right?
Finally some screens of WPF/E with a few details:
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XP Activation Blows
I decided today to upgrade my desktop's BIOS. Of course, Windows decided that this was a big enough change that I needed to reactivate. Not suprising, but what was suprising was the trouble I had to get to in order to reactivate. Apparently, Microsoft changed the activation policy a while back so that you can't reactivate a copy of Windows over the net. Unfortunately, at least in my case, it didn't say this when I tried to activate, it simply hung forever on the "Detecting Connection..." screen. So, after about 20 minutes of waiting and retrying, I decided to try phone activation. That ended with the same result 3 times in a row. The automated attendant said, "Sorry, I couldn't activate your copy of windows" and hung up on me. So I do some searching online and no one seems to have any information on the problem except that you need to speak to a customer representative... unfortunately, none of the options given on the phone let you speak to any live customer representative. Not wanting to settle for a broken desktop, I tried calling again and mashing the 0 button. I had to wait about 30 seconds for all the messages to finish before it worked and I was informed that I was being transfered to a live representative. Finally, after entering a new product key and clicking a few buttons, they were able to provide me with a working code. Now, why in the hell was this so hard to get working? At the very least, Microsoft could add a little message after the failed activation that says, "If you are sure your installation ID is correct, please press 0 to speak to a customer service representative." Apparently, the rep I talked with knew I needed to enter a different product key simply by looking at the first couple numbers of the installation ID, so why can't the automated service make the same judgement and transfer me straight to a rep after this first 6 digits instead of making me say the whole thing and then hanging up on me?
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XBOX360#
Developers can now use C# for XBOX 360 programming. Sweet.
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Mix 06 Webcasts
Keep an eye on http://blog.mix06.com/virtualmix/ for webcasts if you didn't make it to Mix06. Gate's keynote should be up soon...
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DMCA Reform
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has been wreaking havoc on consumers' fair use rights for the past seven years. Now Congress is considering the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA, HR 1201), a bill that would reform part of the DMCA and formally protect the "Betamax defense" relied on by so many innovators.
[1] http://action.eff.org/site/Advocacy?id=115
HR 1201 would give citizens the right to circumvent copy-protection measures as long as what they're doing is otherwise legal. For example, it would make sure that when you buy a CD, whether it is copy-protected or not, you can record it onto your computer and move the songs to an MP3 player. It would also protect a computer science professor who needs to bypass copy-protection to evaluate encryption technology. In addition, the bill would codify the Betamax defense, which has been under attack by the entertainment industries in the "INDUCE Act" and the MGM v. Grokster case. This kind of sanity would be a welcome change to our copyright law.
Last year we sent 30,000+ letters of support for the DMCRA, and the bill got a hearing on Capitol Hill. It's time to double that number - take action at the link below, then urge your friends and family to support HR 1201, too! -
MySpace.Com does .NET
- Aber Whitcomb, CTO, MySpace.com
- 65m registered members (#2 trafficed site on net, passing google, ebay, MSN)
- using SQL Server 2005 and ASP 2.0
- next-gen portal, social networking platform
- 9m members - converted to ASP.NET
- saw significant perf gains
- tool advantage of full OO
- 17M members - launched middle tier cache with ASP.NET
- 64bit asp.net, used huge amounts of ram, reduced server count
- 26M Members - SQL Server 2005 64Bit
- MySpace Home Profile page .NET 2.0 perf gains
- Reduced CPU usage from 85% to 27%
- Reduced web farm from 246 servers to 150
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Rapid Revolution
It seems that the people at Adobe/Macromedia just can't get it through their heads that the Flash player doesn't compete with the Windows OS as a platform, it competes with ASP.NET. If they want to get it up to par for desktop application development, they have a very long way to go, but they could start by making it so that you can launch a SWF file in standalone mode from explorer after you install the darn plugin on your machine.
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Why I Hate Frameworks
Great amusing post by Benji Smith about general purpose frameworks.
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Laszlo Does DHTML
Back in the day, Laszlo told us they would support other formats. Well, by the end of this year, they will have DHTML output. [1]
[1] http://news.com.com/2110-7344_3-6046308.html?part=rss&tag=6046308&subj=news
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Josh Robinson Xbox > PS3
A while back, a guy named Josh Robinson, who was working on PS3 dev for Sony caused quite a bit of a stir when he mentioned that, from what he was hearing from people working with the XBOX360 and PS3, the XBOX360 was just plain better:
"To hear people talk, you’d thing that a processor revolution was about to happen. So I’ve been pretty excited to say the least. Now in my opinion it doesn’t matter how good the PS3 is. If the XBOX 360 is better, then it doesn’t really matter how the cell processors work or how good they say it is. Realistically one of them will be better over all. Now I’ve spoken with people who are on the technical side of the PS3. I’ve also talked with people on the technical side of the XBOX 360. The consistent comment I am hearing from people on my end is, “The XBOX 360 is better”. They are saying that it is capable of just doing more. (shrugs) Now take that for what its worth. If you watch all the videos on the PS3 they will say how much more powerful it is than the XBOX and vice versa. Im just telling you what I am hearing. " [1]
Well, he got fired for these comments, not suprisingly. PS3Week has an interview with him about this whole ordeal. [2][1] http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=27287
[2] http://www.ps3week.com/blogs/ps3week.php?title=title_6&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
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Microsoft Promises to Upstage Google Search
""What we're saying is that in six months' time we'll be more relevant in the U.S. market place than Google" [1]
[1] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11627670/from/RS.2/ -
The IT Crowd
So, you really liked The IT Crowd when you downloaded the first episode. But, to your dismay the channel4 site now restricts downloads to only UK visitors? You're in luck, because Google video has all the episodes just waiting for you to download:
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Flash 8 Specs in QA
Here is the latest news from JD:
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Vista a Day Late
Looks like the next Vista CTP is coming on Feb 22 instead of today:
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Stallman
Joe Stagner has some great commentary on some recent Stallman antics: http://blogs.msdn.com/joestagner/archive/2006/02/19/535099.aspx
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Windows Mobile 5.0 + EVDO = Mmmmm
So I had a couple hour drive up to big bear last week for the company's Engineering Summit. I didn't feel like listening to music, I was in the mood for some podcasts. So, I fired up my Treo 700, launched channel9 and streamed some audio and video over my phone instead of listening to the radio. It worked suprisingly well... I never would have imagined even 5 years ago that I would be able to drive down the road, streaming audio/video from the net on a cellphone instead of listening to the radio.
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SWF 8 Specs Still Incoming
JD is still working on getting the updated SWF specs out to the public. Seems to be some hang-up with the legal team still, but here is the latest related news from Emmy (via JD):
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Eggheads and the Sales Team
Thanks to Graham Elliott for passing this one along:
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Flex 2 Free
So, Adobe has announced that they will be making Flex 2 available free. A lot of this probably has to do with the fact that Laszlo has been free for quite some time now:
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Windows RSS Platform
"Hello, Walter from the land of IE Program Managers here. You might have seen or read about the RSS functionality in the user interface of IE7 Beta 2 Preview. There is a bit more to it then just letting users subscribe and read feeds from the IE7 user interface. The RSS functionality in IE7 is "powered" by the Windows RSS Platform. The Windows RSS Platform API encapsulates 3 main components: Common Feed List, Feed Synchronization Engine, and Feed Store.
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/02/01/522481.aspx
The RSS functionality in IE7 is built on top of these components. While we previously announced that the Windows RSS Platform would be available for Windows Vista, we are extremely pleased to announce that the Windows RSS Platform will also be available as part of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows XP 64-bit.
The Windows RSS Platform is available to any application. The idea is that applications can utilize the Windows RSS Platform to become RSS enabled without having to re-implement basic RSS building blocks. This can significantly reduce the time and effort application developers have to invest in order to integrate RSS into their programs." -
IE7 Still Randomly Hangs
Well, it took a whole 24 hours to get my first hang at least...
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SalesForce.Com Outages
I'm not sure what is worse, the fact that it was down all day, or the fact that they claim that it being down all day is a minor outage. I'd really hate to see what a major outage is.
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Treo 700w, Windows Mobile 5.0, and Microsoft's Stupidity
Ok, so one of the reasons I got this Treo 700w is so that I can sync my windows media protected music that I paid for to my phone and plug some headphones into it, rather than carrying yet another device around with me every time I go to the gym. Sounds simple enough. And it looked like it was working fine when I finally got around to installing ActiveSync 4.1, upgrading my USB drivers, etc. and clicked the button in Windows Media player to sync some music... that is, of course, until it got to file #26. Apparently, there is some idiotic bug that won't let a Windows Mobile 5 device carry more than 25 songs:
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Download IE 7 Today
If you haven't heard, you can get the beta now:
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The Great Sucking Sound Returns
I guess it was only a matter of time till MS snatched up Clemens too.
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JD on Flash 8 Specs
Here is JD's feedback on the Flash 8 file format specs:
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Flash 8 File Format Specs
Well, like usual Macromedia (er.... Adobe) is really lagging on getting the specs out. From what I understand, Macromedia was really disorganized in regards to the SWF spec even internally, so it shouldn't be suprising that it takes forever to get this stuff out to everyone else. In the mean time, go visit:
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Treo SmartPhone is Here
I've been waiting a long time for this:
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Gates on Google
...in a phone interview preceding his keynote, Gates downplayed a Google threat.
