jeffturner.net

Silverlight

Not to beat a dead horse, but what’s up with Microsoft announcing a Flash competitor?

It is with tremendous pleasure that I can reveal Microsoft Silverlight: our next-generation, cross-platform, cross-browser web client runtime. Silverlight (previously codenamed “WPF/E”) is a lightweight subset of XAML for building rich media experiences on the web.

My first thought is, cool, cause the bulk of my Flash knowledge is based around ActionScript. And ActionScript is teh suck. But the more I think about it, this just kind of illustrates my previous post about how Microsoft is becoming irrelevant.

Competition for “rich media experiences” on the web is good, I guess. But something like 98% of people on the web already have Flash installed. That’s going to be very hard to overcome. Even if Microsoft gets to, say 50%, it still makes Silverlight a losing game for the web (as a whole).

I’d bet good money no one will ever create a YouTube with Silverlight.

Fatal shootings at VA Tech

News on TV just broke in to say at least 21 people have been killed, and 21 more injured in two shootings on campus at Virginia Tech.

Obviously lots of details still coming in, but right now it sounds like there was a single shooting on campus this morning, and then a few hours later the gunman went across campus into a classroom and opened fire again.

The Virginia Tech police chief said at least 20 people were killed in twin shootings on the Blacksburg campus Monday morning.

“Some victims were shot in a classroom,” Chief Wendell Flinchum said, adding that the gunman was dead.

My wife and I were watching and we both gasped when we heard the reports, we couldn’t believe it. Just terrible.

Update 2:50PM: Not wanting to get into posting the increasing death toll numbers, but MSNBC has a few updates on the story:

The man did not appear to be shooting at random, NBC News’ Pete Williams reported, quoting federal law enforcement officials. He appeared to have specifically targeted the two locations, a co-ed dormitory and a classroom in an engineering building.

…

Some but not all of the dead were students. One student was killed in the dorm, and the others were killed in the classroom, said Virginia Tech Police Chief W.R. Flinchum.

…

Law enforcement officials said the gunman carried two weapons, a 9-mm handgun and a 22-caliber gun, Williams reported.

Remember Me, Rhapsody (when the candlelights are gleaming)

Those who are within an ear shot and a pint of Sierra Nevada of me know that I love Rhapsody’s streaming music service. I can’t believe I do, either. I’ve always thought the idea was very troubling — I pay a monthly fee and not actually own anything that I listen to? So what happens to all of that wonderful music when it stops?

Looks like I’m going to find out.

Rhapsody is raising their monthly subscription, and sent me this email the other day:

We are increasing the Rhapsody Unlimited monthly price from $9.99 to $12.99. This change will go into effect during your next billing cycle after May 3rd, 2007. It is the first time in six years that we’ve increased the price of Rhapsody.

However, if you switch to yearly billing now you can keep your existing membership rate of $9.99 per month. Under a yearly subscription, you will be billed $119.88 once a year - a savings of $36 over the new monthly rate.

Rhapsody’s on thin ice already being a service that people aren’t very sure they really need*. So if they were smart they’d be saturating current customers with so much love they want to tell everyone what a great service it is. Dropping this email on me 30 days before you’re going to raise my subscription isn’t a great start.

Here’s my real (har har) beef with this: I’m already a customer. Is it really worth the $36 extra a year to risk losing me? I mean, your affiliate program pays $15 for every free trial sent your way. If send 2 new people your way every year (which I’m sure I have), it’s a wash.

I’m not sure how this plays out, but right now I’m thinking I’m done with Rhapsody. It’s a shame, because there is a lot of promise there. I say promise because I’m on OS X and I can only use the web interface, which is terrible. I actually wrote my own javascript library that I use instead.

Frankly, all of my excitement over Rhapsody is over now. And I’ll never be the same, now, except in memory…

(*- I’m not talking about Sonos users here. I’m talking about us po’ folks that can’t drop $1K to have the ultimate setup for this type of service)

Microsoft and the web revolution

Paul Graham’s latest essay “Microsoft is Dead” is a fabulous read. It pretty much sums up why I ditched Visual Studio and .NET and moved to OS X:

… I’m now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft’s anyway.

It’s not about being a fanboy or a snob, it’s about using tools and staying current with technology that’s relevant to how business is being done. Not to mention Windows and SQLServer licensing costs are just not a scalable reality for most web startups.

It’s too bad for .NET, and specifically C#. They did a lot of things right with it. Maybe the Mono project will keep it relevant, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

Jerry Seinfeld on software development

watching “Jerry Seinfeld: The Comedian Award” on HBO… basically Robert Klein, Chris Rock and Gary Shandling are on stage chatting with Anderson Cooper to honor Jerry Seinfeld.

It’s mildly amusing, but the part that grabbed me was how they all work out their new material. Chris Rock, talking about how he tries out new material:

… when I’m working out new material, probably half of it is improvised, every night, over about 6-8 months, just getting an act together.

Seinfeld then goes on to say something like “there’s an energy from the audience that kind of does a lot of the writing for you… they tell you which direction you should go.”

Sounds a lot like iterative web development. Just get something out there, and let the audience tell you where to go.