On second thought

Team is smarter? I don’t think so.

2012-01-05T01:50:42Z

Whether the group is smarter than the individual depends on the individual. Individuals who produced amazing results Teams that produced amazing results Michelangelo Mozart Einstein Voltaire Aristotle Shakespeare Newton Darwin Laplace Pythagoras Socrates Sophocles Homer Pasteur Werner Von Braun Porsche NASA in the sixties The Roman army Sparta at Thermopyle 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...(read more)

ValueConverter and the mapping domain quandary

2011-10-08T13:48:36Z

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...(read more)

When I were a lad

2011-07-06T22:22:49Z

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....(read more)

Why the carbon tax is a bloody stupid idea

2011-06-24T03:22:02Z

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...(read more)

Silverlight as the new UI

2011-06-16T00:30:37Z

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...(read more)