Regarding all of the Silverlight criticism -- yes, the videos could have just been posted in ogg vorbis or something to make everyone happy, but the Silverlight app adds many additional features in support of learning. Think of it as the bonus content on the DVD release. It's actually pretty cool. Silverlight isn't evil, and as someone who's very familiar with both Flash and Silverlight, I can tell you that badly-behaved Flash apps are more likely to make your system unstable than Silverlight apps will.
As a Flash developer, you shouldn't switch. You should be aware of and work with both technologies, know which is best for which project, and become a more valuable and sought-after developer because of it. At least that's what I do.
A bunch of replies to this thread have mentioned Flash as a potential solution. "Real" developers don't like Flash though, because the IDE sucks. (I use it every day, it does.) Macromedia has an answer for that too, and it's Flex, which doesn't require any specific IDE. (However, they're working on one, and it looks pretty hot so far.)
It's kind of weird that there are no names on the posts unless people "sign" them (as Evan did, but as the second poster did not). Who knows if that's a marketing wonk or the real person.
The Seattle Weekly just did cover story on amateur baseball stats geeks who claim to know more than MLB:
"It is a wonderful thing to know you are right and the rest of the world is wrong." Bill James wrote those words nearly 20 years ago in one of his groundbreaking series of annual Baseball Abstract books. The founding father of the objective performance analysis movement came to realize that baseball is the one game in which virtually every aspect of performance can be measured and value-weighted through the compilation and analysis of statistics, in much the same way a business can use data about sales and revenue, weigh them against market-force indicators, and make quarterly projections about expected future performance. He found that the statistics can be used to predict, with reasonable accuracy, what teams will win and which players will be effective. James also found, to his surprise, that the people who ran Major League Baseball organizations didn't much give a shit.
The real reason he did this was that he felt the flourescent lighting above was keeping him from acheiving that optimial geek paleness that drives the ladies wild. Now the only light he'll have to worry about reaching his skin is that CRT glow.
...it's not quite CVS, but Windows XP already has the notion of "restore points" to bring your system back to however it was when the restore point was made. Some software installers automatically create the points before installing themselves. I haven't ever tried to recover a system with one, but it's a neat idea at least.
"What's the EOS 300D's weakness? Feature set. Canon are caught in a dilemma, they had to have a camera with a reduced feature set otherwise nobody would consider the EOS 10D (or any camera which replaces it). Almost laughably the majority of the EOS 300D's limitations are 'programmed in', that is they are simply software features which have been disabled."
If that's the case, call me when it's been hacked to enable everything.
Stephen Hawking's "Universe in a Nutshell" is a good start on physics and relativity. I've never taken any physics and was able to understand it fairly well.
You don't need anything more than a browser and one of the billion online tutorials to learn JavaScript. It's simple enough to be productive quickly, but complex enough to get into something like "actual" OOP as you go. As a first language I think it's a great choice.
From the BBC article: "SpaceShipOne will start its mission with a climb to 50,000ft under the twin-engined White Knight. SpaceShipOne will then fire its hybrid rocket engine, fuelled by a mixture of nitrous oxide and rubber, to reach the blackness of space.
"After experiencing weightlessness at the top of its trajectory, the ship will extend its wings and tail and glide back to the runway that it left 90 minutes earlier."
Okay, so we have a plane with a "spaceship" under it, and we're going to go up real high and then fling it up into what's just barely "space," and watch it fall down. So you'll actually be in "space" for just a few minutes? No orbiting around and trying to see if you can find your house from up there? How much fun is this really, when the majority of your time is spent screaming your head off as you fall back to Earth? Maybe the inflight meal will be really good.
Shame on me for not knowing the name of the product, but the search engine that Microsoft and BP use on their intranets has this sort of functionality. When you do a search, you can check a box that says "list me for future people that search for this" (or something). Then the next person that searches for the same thing gets your name as well as the results, so they can perhaps collaborate with you on the same topic.
A friend of mine interned for a summer at Sun, working on the Solaris kernel team. It sounded like he had a good time, got paid decently, and they even arranged his accomodations. He's got a more-or-less offer from them for when he graduates, too.
Although I imagine you have to be fairly hot shit to get an offer like that. I think they only had a few interns.
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Regarding all of the Silverlight criticism -- yes, the videos could have just been posted in ogg vorbis or something to make everyone happy, but the Silverlight app adds many additional features in support of learning. Think of it as the bonus content on the DVD release. It's actually pretty cool. Silverlight isn't evil, and as someone who's very familiar with both Flash and Silverlight, I can tell you that badly-behaved Flash apps are more likely to make your system unstable than Silverlight apps will.
As a Flash developer, you shouldn't switch. You should be aware of and work with both technologies, know which is best for which project, and become a more valuable and sought-after developer because of it. At least that's what I do.
I think the poster was trying to be clever by equating "warm" to "on."
A bunch of replies to this thread have mentioned Flash as a potential solution. "Real" developers don't like Flash though, because the IDE sucks. (I use it every day, it does.) Macromedia has an answer for that too, and it's Flex, which doesn't require any specific IDE. (However, they're working on one, and it looks pretty hot so far.)
It's kind of weird that there are no names on the posts unless people "sign" them (as Evan did, but as the second poster did not). Who knows if that's a marketing wonk or the real person.
Thought I'd share this:
http://mr.unpopular.com/pwgen/
It's a password generator written in Javascript, which can give you passwords from severely-jumbled to memorable-but-not-from-the-dictionary.
Yes it's cool, especially since it's also on AT&T, provides exactly the same service (probably with better accuracy), and is free.
Does the right hand not know what the left is doing over there, or what?
See Xplane. They make those product tours. They're pretty brilliant.
The real reason he did this was that he felt the flourescent lighting above was keeping him from acheiving that optimial geek paleness that drives the ladies wild. Now the only light he'll have to worry about reaching his skin is that CRT glow.
Installed the update on WinXP, rebooted, and no iTunes won't start. Nothing at all happens, really. Awesome patch.
...it's not quite CVS, but Windows XP already has the notion of "restore points" to bring your system back to however it was when the restore point was made. Some software installers automatically create the points before installing themselves. I haven't ever tried to recover a system with one, but it's a neat idea at least.
"What's the EOS 300D's weakness? Feature set. Canon are caught in a dilemma, they had to have a camera with a reduced feature set otherwise nobody would consider the EOS 10D (or any camera which replaces it). Almost laughably the majority of the EOS 300D's limitations are 'programmed in', that is they are simply software features which have been disabled."
If that's the case, call me when it's been hacked to enable everything.
Pinky, are you thinking what I'm thinking?
The poster (and others) might find this interesting: http://www.internetisshit.org/print.html
Why not just download some from spam archive?
"Unidentified," yet it says SAMSUNG right there in the background of the screenshot.
Stephen Hawking's "Universe in a Nutshell" is a good start on physics and relativity. I've never taken any physics and was able to understand it fairly well.
Yup. Here's his site. Pretty funny guy.
You don't need anything more than a browser and one of the billion online tutorials to learn JavaScript. It's simple enough to be productive quickly, but complex enough to get into something like "actual" OOP as you go. As a first language I think it's a great choice.
Sounds like they overestimated the market demand by about 990 units.
"After experiencing weightlessness at the top of its trajectory, the ship will extend its wings and tail and glide back to the runway that it left 90 minutes earlier."
Okay, so we have a plane with a "spaceship" under it, and we're going to go up real high and then fling it up into what's just barely "space," and watch it fall down. So you'll actually be in "space" for just a few minutes? No orbiting around and trying to see if you can find your house from up there? How much fun is this really, when the majority of your time is spent screaming your head off as you fall back to Earth? Maybe the inflight meal will be really good.
Shame on me for not knowing the name of the product, but the search engine that Microsoft and BP use on their intranets has this sort of functionality. When you do a search, you can check a box that says "list me for future people that search for this" (or something). Then the next person that searches for the same thing gets your name as well as the results, so they can perhaps collaborate with you on the same topic.
Uh... Dupe?
A friend of mine interned for a summer at Sun, working on the Solaris kernel team. It sounded like he had a good time, got paid decently, and they even arranged his accomodations. He's got a more-or-less offer from them for when he graduates, too.
Although I imagine you have to be fairly hot shit to get an offer like that. I think they only had a few interns.