If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Microsoft has been working like gangbusters to create the perception that its cross-platform multimedia runtime Silverlight is a viable alternative to Adobe’s Flash, and the vendor will soon put updated tools in the hands of Silverlight developers. In a Thursday blog post, Microsoft developer Ashish Thapliyal said Microsoft is “targeting late Summer” for its release of Silverlight 2.0, which is currently in its first beta release.
Silverlight 2.0 supports VC-1, WMV, MP3 and WMA content, but Microsoft has no plans to support the Flash video (.flv), used by Youtube and many other Websites, said Thapliyal. Microsoft’s rationale here is to avoid paying licensing fees and to keep the Silverlight download file size as small as possible, he added.
“Silverlight isn’t designed with an extensible codec model in mind, so there is no date/version announced for this,” wrote Thapliyal. A second Silverlight 2.0 beta is due in May, and this version will be very similar to the final release, according to Thapliyal. He said no details are available about the roadmap for Silverlight for mobile, or Silverlight v.Next, also known as Silverlight 3.

News Source: Information Week

THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.
David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.
The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.

News Source: Times Online