Media formats are pretty orthgonal to the browser; most playback is via plugins, and there are WMV playback plugins available for all major browsers. Microsoft has a NSAPI implementation for Firefox, Distributes Flp4Mac for free. And of course Silverlight supports WMV (along with MP4 and MP3), and is supported in the codec pack for Moonlight.

WMV is quite widely used for premium content where the studios require DRM, as Windows Media DRM and PlayReady is the only widely deployed DRM available for license (Apple's FairPlay is only available to Apple as a publisher and Apple as a device vendor). So WMV is used for Netflix, Blockbuster, and other services in the USA, and it's used even more widely in Europe and Asia's video services.

But again, nothing to do with the browser.

With Silverlight supporting H.264 and AAC now, the actual codecs and media formats aren't the interesting point of competition. The big differences between Silverlight and Flash today are much more systems layer stuff like adaptive streaming and rich presentation layers. HTML5 is interesting, but even the proposals are well behind what Flash and Silverlight have already deployed for complex players.

I'm 38, and have been loathing cursive for a good 30 of those years myself :).

In the Portland Public Schools, we had some crazy oscillation between cursive and "italic" - I vividly remember a school or district-wide switch from the cursive we'd been learning for a few years to a new italic form of writing that I found much preferable. Probably 4th-5th grade? And then when I got to middle school everyone else was still doing cursive and it threw me for a loop.

Wikipedia may have solved the mystery for me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty-Dubay
The Getty-Dubay handwriting method was developed in 1976 at Portland State. We must have been a test location or something.

Anyway, I was a bit of an outlier. In 5th grade I was simultaneous in TAG and advanced English and math classes while doing special ed for spelling and handwriting. I've also been prone to hand cramping trying to push the pencil down so hard. It was a 10th grade math teacher who came up with the idea of trying other writing implements. I found that a fine-point felt tipped pen was much more legible and much less tiring. And I was able to apply a calligraphy class I'd taken before, which made a huge difference. Erasers are one of those good-only-in-theory things anyway; just crossing out a mistake worked fine. And a calligraphic technique, since it felt more like art than a burden, slowed be down enough to not be so sloppy, which probably sped things up on net. "Make haste slowly" is an important lesson I've been trying to teach my own kids :).

My 9 year old son's in a similar boat, in a TAG magnet school, but well below grade level in handwriting. Since he's quite good at drawing, I'm hoping to get him interested in calligraphy as a way to apply those skills and thoughtfulness to handwriting, instead of treating it as a burden he's racing through to get over.

My parents had gone to Reed in the mid 60's when they had a famous calligraphy teacher, and my father has continued to use that as his formal handwriting style since. On a trip to Europe he bought me a nice Lamy italic nib fountain pen, which really did nicely for calligraphy, and I started using it for everything. It kind of wigged out my physics teachers when I started turning in exams and homework that looked like an illustrated manuscript, but it sure was much more legible than cursive pencil ever could have been.

For all the time I spent learning handwriting, and the many classes I actually enjoyed, I have to say the single most valuable class I took in all of school was typing in the 6th grade. I do a good 120-130 words a minute these days, which sometimes is an almost linear productivity gain.

Speed? That's the best argument to run Aero Glass. It offloads compositing from the CPU to the GPU, improving performance for apps.

Easy test to try with Glass On/Off. Open up Task mangager.

Open up a nice big JPEG image or something.

Grab the window and shake it like crazy. Watch your CPU meters

With Glass off, you can peg a whole core trying to render all that motion. But with Glass on, the GPU's doing the work and your CPU load hardly goes up.

Windows 7 improves this over Vista, as it pushes GDI-style 2D rendering to the GPU as well, and adds hardware YUV overlay support back.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/04/25/engineering-windows-7-for-graphics-performance.aspx

It's one of those offhand jokes that slowly reveals itself as multifaceted brilliance, no?

I'd say in life the big challenge is almost always getting people on board with your idea at all. Trying to titrate between getting them to believe in it enough to figure out the flaws but no so much that they run with it seem more difficult than useful. But if you have to, pitch it to the people you'd want to work with on the project. If they get psyched and want to run with it, you can run with them.

But as many have said, ideas aren't hard. It's implementation, revenue, and luck that are hard.

To that end, here's a million-dollar idea I'm not going to do anything with.

It's Bitter - Binary Twitter, for the geeks.

Because for lots of us, 140 characters are too imposing. It's like doing multiple Haikus at once. But binary we can do.So, with Bitter, you just get a bit. Your status is 0 or 1. You change it as appropriate. Eat a yummy peach: 1. Miss your bus: 0.

And it saves a ton of time for the author AND the audience: you can immediately see the status of a million friends in a 1000x1000 bitmap! Just try that with Facebook.

And just think of the data-mining and mashup possibilities. Track how and when people flip their bits. Tie it into Facebook and other profiles to see what coorelations there are between activities there and bitflipping. It would be glorious!

Oh, and the million bucks? Just sell $1M in advertising. An idea like this, it can't miss! What could possibly go wrong? :).

Anyway, it's only half a joke. It'd be an amusing little Facebook app or whatever. Could make some money maybe, but maybe wouldn't. But I've got a book to finish, and a third of another book after that, and a house remodel, and making Silverlight awesome. No way I'd ever get to it.

Ideas are cheap. Attention is expensive. And other people's sustained attention is REALLY expensive (=employee). That's the hard part.

Which patent issue? Is there something specific you're thinking of that hasn't been covered under the Community Promise etcetera?

It's more complicated than that; it's not just classic stream switching. The big differences compared to past approaches are that there's not buffering on stream switching, http is the only protocol required, and the indivdual chunks of video are small enough to get picked up by proxy caches. The latter delivers a lot of the scsalability value of multicast, but with the existing web infrastructure.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=03d22583-3ed6-44da-8464-b1b4b5ca7520

WINE doesn't have the active support of Microosft and a clear license for implementation details.

This player is already doing stuff that was in Silverlght 2 that's not even being proposed as part of HTML5, like Smooth Streaming.

Are you running the current Moonlight Preview? That's required for managed code support, and hence Smooth Streaming.

This definitely works in Moonlight. If you can see it, you've got it installed correctly.
http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming

Yeah, there wasn't some magic point where it started. It was probably the first big worms when the mass audience became aware of the threat.

I was a callow MacOS 9 hipster video nerd back then, so it wasn't something I was that focused on myself.

Yep, pretty much any OS is going to get at least one security patch a month, it seems. And it's a lot harder to harden after the fact than it is to have security a clear focus and mandate before the first dry-erase marker hits whiteboard. Plus we have the benefit of the scarred veterans of many exploits to help us avoid making old mistakes with new products.

Sure. Nothing is ever provably secure. But code heritage matters, and so does track record. It's no guarnatee of future security, but it's something.

Yep. It's always a matter of relative security versus importance of features. If users are going to be watching vidoe in browsers, the question is Silverlight's relative security compared to other plugins, players, and now browsers available. Comparing both architectural design and breech history between those is probably useful.

Er, no, they aren't.

QuickTime Media Layer back in the day did some of those, but tool development was abandoned after Jobs came back to Apple, and client-side support for interactive features have slowly been dropped for security reasons.

QTSS/DSS are actually pretty bad choices for long-form on-demand content delivery, due to the lack of bandwidth negotiation.

Well, first lets start with a feature request.

Do you think the Linux community would be okay with us integrating DRM support into the downloadable codec pack? It seems like the kind of thing we're going to get yelled at about one way or another :).

Yep, right there in my email address.

My blog: http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg

For about 3.5 years now, I'd hit the karma cap here will before then :).

Yep, when it comes to Hollywood content DRM is a contractual obligation.

The stuff that we publish in Smooth Streaming ourselves rarely uses DRM, but that's not an option for Netflix.

You're getting stuttering with this player? What's your connection speed and system specs? Where are you located?

These should be fine as long as you can sustain 300 Kbps or higher.

Or did you just mean that internet video stutters for you in general?

It would be lovely to live in a world where historical physics lectures where the killer app to drive installs, but I doubt they'll make a material impact on installed base :).

Silverlight's already on more than a third of internet-connected devices, so it'd take tens of millions of ne installs for any single site to make a significant market share bump .