Wednesday, February 28, 2007

WPF Books

Having looked at Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (aka: WPF) recently here's 3 books [in order of preference] I can suggest looking at. Please note the 3rd book by O'Reilly has examples that seem to be outdated and therefore I don't recommend it:


See also the Amazon List Mania.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Future of [Movie] Posters

There's so much new technology these days it's amazing. Here's just another example: 3D Posters.

Shake: Price Decrease but with a catch...

Apple has dropped the price of Shake their compositing software from: $2999(US) to $499(US)! And it's now, with v4.1 a Universal version. But what's the catch, "Apple is stopping development on this particular product while it develops its next-generation compositing program. From what I can deduce, Shake finally got to a point where it was time for a ground-up rewrite. In addition, the program’s interface is decidedly non-Mac-like; it shares nothing at all with other pro apps such as Final Cut Pro." - Franklin McMahon. Edit Review: Apple Shake 4.1.

The pace of technological change in computers has slowed down tremendously. Don’t think so?

"The pace of technological change in computers has slowed down tremendously. Don’t think so? Stop and think about it. As I write this sentence in early 2006, there are people, lots of people, still running Windows NT 4.0 domain controllers because they still haven’t gone to Active Directory. Windows NT 4.0 was released in 1996, ten years ago as I write this in 2006. Heck, you may know someone still using Windows 95! That would be like someone running Windows 3.1 in the year 2000, or, to choose amore ancient example, MS-DOS 3.3 in 1992—examples that would have been practically impossible to find in those days. While I personally wouldn’t want to have to live in 95-land, I can understand why people do—it still gets the job done. They can surf the Web, get email, play a lot of games. That would, again, not be a possibility in the past: someone using Windows 3.1 in the year 2000 would find that virtually not a single application on the shelf would run on 3.1. But computing is tending to plateau these days, as hardware vendors are hitting limits in at least two ways. First, Intel has said that it’s not possible to create a Pentium chip faster than 3.8 GHz and, second, hard drive vendors claim that they’ve nearly hit the wall on data density." - Mark Minasi ("Mastering Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Upgrade Edition for SP1 and R2")

Saturday, February 10, 2007