There is a wave of wondering on Twitter, why Microsoft speaks so little about Silverlight on this year’s PDC conference. Mary Jo Foley even goes so far citing Bob Muglia saying that Silverlight is [only] the development platform for WP7 apps in her provocative article “Microsoft: Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted”. I’m not sure if Muglia …
Category Archives: tech-and-biz
PDC10 Sessions
Is it me, or PDC10 looks very strange? There are only two main topics – the phone and the cloud. There are less sessions than in 2009. And the PDC web site (build by Vertigo, who else) doesn’t even allow to link into session detail pages. I might understand such a limitation if the session …
Silver Bullet Found
It is time to say it aloud: most of software development books are dangerous. And when I say books, I don’t mean the shameless waste of not renewable resources like ASP.NET in 21 days, Visual Studio for Dummies, and other printouts of help pages, screen shots, tutorials, and code sample listings. No, I mean books …
10 Mistakes of Creative Teams
Building a team for a creative task in a situation where one person would do fine. Expecting absence of flames and philosophical discussions for teams who haven’t been working together, on the same kind of tasks, day to day, for more than a year. Critisizing work of the other team members in the way so that it can be taken personally. …
3D now
Yesterday I’ve received the latest issue of ”test”, which is a magazine of Stiftung Warentest, German counterpart of “Customer Reports”. One article was quite shocking: they have tested 3D TV devices. Wow, we’re really in the 3D era now. So, now I would expect that 3D glasses will appear in mass usage pretty soon and obtain …
Trading the Unknown
A prospective customer asked for a feature requiring a technology I’m not very comfortable with. I have just never used this technology before, but because of my extended experience of commercial software development, I still could give a reasonable cost estimate, which was 15000€. Before this figure was communicated to that customer, a decision has …
Making money
APPL: making money by being evil. GOOG: making money by not being evil. MSFT: making money by making platforms to make money. ADBE: making money by making software to make beauty. Open Source: not professional software developers.
H.264 or VC-1?
Alex Zambelli has provided a simple rule of thumb in his Media Processing Workflow slidedeck: –H.264 decoding is typically more CPU intensive than VC-1 decoding for the same resolution and frame rate –In Silverlight 3: H.264 decoding requires about 15-25% more CPU time than VC-1 decoding with similar content properties Good rule of thumb (for now): …
Video delivery debugging tool
Eric Schmidt in his presentation about Microsoft Silerlight Media has demoed a cool smooth streaming quality monitor. At Axinom, we have our own inhouse tool for debugging Silverlight video delivery and playback problems, so I thought why not sharing it too?
New Features in Silverlight4 PlayReady DRM
In Silverlight4 RC, Microsoft has added a few important new features enabling some interesting scenarios related to PlayReady support.