It's a great keynote going on this morning out here at the Venetian, learning about the newest of the new from Microsoft. The new beta bits for Silverlight 1.0 are now available for download, with the RTM is coming this summer. And surronding Silverlight is also the announcement of the featureset to be included in Silverlight 1.1. For that Laurent already mentioned some of the great news. Especially important is that a scaled-down version of .NET will be included in that v1.1 release. We've been...

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I can see why Jim wanted out. First you make an operating system (XP) that is flashy, but get ridiculed for having security problems. Then you make an operating system that's extremely secure (Vista), and people start complaining that they are missing out on all the flashy stuff. Geez people, make up your minds! Or at least buy some more RAM and be happy

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Sometimes, especially when you're working with SQL Server, it's really handy to know the scale of a decimal number. The .NET version of decimal chews up 128 bits, i.e. 16 bytes. The first 12 of those bytes are used for the numbers (the "mantissa"). Taken all in sequence, when converted to decimal, they offer 28 digits of numeric information. So what about the other 4 bytes left over of the original 16? Well, two are totally unused, one is used for the sign, and another points to where the decimal...

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This post was prompted in part by the creationist views that D'arcy blogged earlier today. But it's also a collection of thoughts that have been on my mind for the past few years. As a species, it's interesting that we've "woken up" in the past several thousand years to find this wonderful world, full of diversity, looking the way it does. Before our current era of recorded history this earth certainly has been a very busy place, almost as if it were getting ready for us to arrive. Life forms have...

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