mycroft

• Windows Scenic Animation Overview

  Jan 09, 2009 at 7:21 PM

  You're right, clearly Microsoft doesn't have much confidence in their own technology given how few of their internal projects use it. This extends to .NET as a whole and how poor managed access is to the win32 apis. 

  WPF got there before Core Animation, but like so much of Microsoft's technology, they don't exploit it nearly as well as Apple dogfoods theirs. So why should anyone else?
  

• Nick Baker: XBox 360 Architecture

  May 26, 2007 at 4:47 AM

  Good stuff. You should have gone on longer, you'd just warmed up.
  

• Windows Home Server

  Jan 12, 2007 at 3:48 PM

  You probably just have to manually ensure the login/passwords match on each computer, and if not you get a login dialog as usual. Some kind of AD-lite would be awesome for the future though. There was that serverless Castle idea that got dropped from Vista.
  
  I'd like to know how disks and shared folders map to one another. Can you share an entire disk belonging to a particular PC, and if so, how do those permissions work? Is a shared folder just a folder belonging to one of the PCs? I thought I read somewhere that the Music, Picture folders etc aggregate content from multiple PCs, or am I confused?
  

• Windows Home Server

  Jan 10, 2007 at 7:16 AM

  This product appeals to me and I'm an IT Pro. Knowing how to do backups isn't enough for me to actually do them, its just too much hassle to manage it, never gets done. If it becomes successful it'll start from the more tech savvy who know what can happen, don't think most people are aware of how unreliable HDDs can be. I'd definately recommend to friends, so many horror stories of lost photos.
  
  Even though backup is the coolest feature, I think a central media store would be the appealing thing to most people. Eg/ Shows downloaded on xbox live could be uploaded to the server automatically for sharing around the house, and spare the puny xbox hdd.
  
  Releasing the software separately would be a great way to start off, no more of that Media Center tie in stuff please. The mirroring and one copy store filesystem should be brought to Vista too.
  

• Windows Home Server

  Jan 09, 2007 at 7:54 AM

  This is really exciting, even though there are similar NASs out there none seem as smooth or powerful as this. I wonder if I'll be able to run AD on this and have myself a little domain.
  
  I didn't understand how the shared folders worked exactly, do they aggregrate everything contained within each individual users special folders like Video and Pictures into a virtual folder? How about privacy, are permissions set on the computer retained? Can you view each disk backup separately and see all the files? Does the search link into Vista search? I thought network search was cut from the release.
  
  This really seems like a good time to reintroduce the castle concept that was cut from Vista, or something domain like for central management in a simple way. Maybe V.2
  

• The Best XNA Movie in the UNIVERSE

  Jan 01, 2007 at 10:34 AM

  Scoble? Demeaning?
  
  Rory? Obnoxious?
  
  Are we watching the same videos?
  

• The Best XNA Movie in the UNIVERSE

  Dec 18, 2006 at 4:38 PM

  Very nice. The furthest I've ever got with graphics programming is painstakingly drawing out a field and flowing river with basic shapes in OpenGL, with some terrible collision detection and movement. A weekend of coffee-sustained mania.
  
  2 days for Shawn's Shooter is impressive. High quality model with animation, nice shaders, 2 players. If you can create something like this so fast it's going to convert alot of people, most of the initial hassle is gone = instant fun. Anyone know if the demo code is available?
  

• Looking at XNA - Part Two

  Nov 28, 2006 at 4:56 PM

  This is amazing. Allowing us to code to the Xbox at all is cool, but to go to so much trouble to make it as easy as possible! Should make game coding fun again.
  
  

  Machaira wrote:

  This was mentioned in the XNA webcast this morning. I didn't expect it to be up today. Sweet!

  
  
  Can you point me in the direction of the webcast? :O
  

• Windows Vista WAVE - Windows Audio Video Excellence

  Sep 02, 2006 at 8:23 PM

  Cheers Scoble, thought it maybe something like that, I noticed a few parts were edited slightly.
  
  @DigitalDud - You don't find the developers views on DRM interesting? They are the people implementing content protection for next generation media, I thought it was refreshing to hear it from them. Glad Scoble asked some tricky questions to someone enthusiastic about the issues like Steve Ball. Some more technical detail would have been cool, but it wasn't that kind of interview.
  
  I'd love some more interviews with this group, and related groups in media areas like video encoding, HD-DVD etc.  Have Channel9 thought about interviewing Amir Majidimehr? He's a pretty prominent feature on the AVSForums and sounds like a cool guy
  

• Windows Vista WAVE - Windows Audio Video Excellence

  Sep 01, 2006 at 3:58 PM

  Very nice video, how come it was delayed so long?
  
  The user rights focus was interesting and not something I expected the video to cover. Nice honest answers, looks like a passionate team.
  
  Does this system require any new APIs to take advantage of? What I mean is, is it only WMP that will support this out of the box or will all programs immediately benefit? Is this magic happening at the DXVA layer to determine what threads are audio/video related? If that's the case apps such as Quicktime won't immediately support this?
  
  What happens if multiple video threads are started, not that that would be a particularly useful scenario, I'm just curious. Would things then start to glitch or does it refuse to render them entirely? This Quality of Service kind of thing is something that doesn't sound like an immediate killer feature, but once you actually start using it in the real world it becomes indisposable. Has there been any new work in Vista regarding QoS for media streaming over networks? My system doesn't behave nicely when downloading or using P2P, but I suppose that's partially a router issue.
  
  Great work guys
  

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