On second thought

Whether the group is smarter than the individual depends on the individual.

Conceivably, a group made up of outstanding people would also be outstanding, but I doubt it because to exercise its advantages a team can only pursue one vision at a time.

Assigning a team to support a virtuoso can shorten delivery time, and it can extend his reach, as NASA extended the reach of Von Braun. It is uncommon for people of rare talent to be suited to teamwork because it is difficult for them to communicate or even instruct lesser mortals. From their point of view the people around them really are slow and small of mind.

The Roman army is a good example of how mediocre people can be extremely effective when they are systematic, consistent and act in concert. The success of the Roman army also demonstrates the helplessness of virtuosity when opposed by vast concerted mediocrity.

ValueConverter seems like just the ticket for handling data types whose domains are finite sets of named values (think enum). But how do you get the domain definition into scope? Resource dictionaries are wonderful until you find they’re out of scope. And they’re always out of scope for the code of a ValueConverter. You can’t pass them in as ConverterParameter because it isn’t a DependencyProperty.

What you can do is use a MultiBinding and a MultiConverter, and pass the resource as one of the binding values. This rather good trick also works for DynamicResource, so you can declaratively marshal into scope a completely arbitrary value that doesn’t even exist till run-time.

The whole declining standards thing is generally nothing more than old people disapproving of people running around being offensively young.

Last night, the Queensland State of Origin crowd was graceless, bad-mannered and profoundly unsporting. Booing a defeated team during their concession speech was appallingly bad behaviour.

“No one gives a crap, ok thank you.” would have normally be unacceptable but under the circumstances I think the NSW captain handled things well.

Behaviour modification taxes work by changing the path-of-least-resistance. People choose options that don’t involve paying the tax. Since there aren’t any options that avoid the carbon tax, it will have absolutely no effect on taxpayer behaviour.

Buy an electric car? Where do you think the electricity comes from? And there will be a great deal of energy expended creating the new car, so this would increase liability.

Buy a PV array to generate your own electricity? Not a completely stupid idea but it will cost you $20,000 and take 15 years to recover your money. The units last for 25 years, assuming you don’t get hail damage. And a great deal of energy is expended making them.

Build a wind farm? You need a lot of room. Your neighbour’s wife will complain to the council, which will run interference and insist that it’s a commercial operation requiring rezoning. If you do manage to build them, your girlfriend will whine almost as much as the turbines because they’re noisy.

I can think of several effective strategies, but all of them depend on the end of life as we know it, because our society and our economy will not support the required behaviour and organisation.

With things as they are, the only thing a carbon tax can achieve is making taxpayers poorer. Canberra will take our money, count it, and give it back less processing fees. Unless they spend it on something else first.

There is a lot of FUD about Microsoft allegedly abandoning Silverlight for HTML5/script.

The first big mistake here is assuming it’s an exclusive choice. Why can’t it be both? Windows has two primary markets. In the home market, it sells to users, not developers. It sells on the user experience, and the most visible, most interactive aspect of the new UX is the integration of the Metro touch interface.

Metro tiles are basically Sidebar Gadgets on steroids. Sidebar gadgets have always been built with HTML and script. This is an approach that works extremely well for small, simple, largely stateless applications, and it works even better when you add in all the interaction and multimedia support of HTML5.

The other big mistake is thinking that the home and business markets are unrelated. They are intimately related, because business users are home users.

In the business sector, Windows is chosen for compatibility on two levels. It is compatible with dominant business applications and business application development tools. It is compatible with the user’s skillsets.

User skills are the real reason the not-very-profitable home market is important. Users make a significant investment in acquiring basic interaction skills and committing them to habit. This is why Windows and Mac users both think the unfamiliar platform is horrible whenever they are forced to use it: lack of compatibility with their interaction habits, a bit like driving a foreign car and finding the indicator knob is on the wrong side – it doesn’t matter how many times they experience it, it’s always jarring and annoying when the equipment responds “incorrectly”.

So capturing the home market is a major step towards securing the business market. This is why it is incredibly important to Microsoft to market Windows to home users.

And this brings us back to the FUD about HTML5/script “versus” Silverlight. Recent Windows previews are pitched at home users. Mix11 focused on HTML5/script because these are the new tools for pouring glitter on Windows in ways that will cement user commitment. If Microsoft moves fast enough it gets to define the habits of the (desktop) touch-screen generation in the same way that Apple captured the smartphone market.

The only significance of all this from a Silverlight or WPF perspective is that Windows will continue to be the dominant home platform, and therefore the dominant business platform. HTML5/script is perfect for building tile UX but completely inappropriate for building line of business applications.

Silverlight/RIA and WPF on the other hand are extremely well suited to producing larger scale distributed applications with longer lifecycles and bigger budgets. Business applications, in fact. Well suited to the dominant platform, which will only be the dominant business platform if Microsoft makes very sure that it is also the home platform of choice.