The WorldWide Telescope team has released a web client for WorldWide Telescope, written in Silverlight and currently in alpha but from my testing works quite well.
It doesn't support the 3D solar system view yet, but pretty much everything else is in there, including tours. Performance isn't as good compared to the full Windows client which makes use of 3D hardware acceleration. Nevertheless it is pretty useable, and the servers at the moment don't seem to be under as much load as they were when the full client was released last year....
Internet Explorer 8 is probably going to be released very soon. So I thought I'd do a quick article on how to tidy the thing up a bit - I'm not happy with how the UI is configured out of the box, It's not as clean as IE7. This is what it looks like right off the bat:
The most obvious addition is the favourites bar running along the top I'm not the world's biggest fan of this thing....
With Windows 7 Microsoft is expanding BitLocker so users can easily encrypt USB flash drives. What does this look like? Well it looks a bit like this:
It then has a look at the drive for a few seconds and asks you how you want to unlock the drive, using either a password (8 characters minimum) or using a smart card and a PIN.
It then forces you to either save the keys used for encryption or print them off, good for sticking in a safe somewhere - good idea because if you forget your password and don't know the keys your data is gone....
So as one might expect the Steam servers have been hammered today. And it seems a number of people who have actually brought the retail version, are having Empire Total War get downloaded via Steam instead of actually off the discs.
It took six attempts to get the install to work off the discs when I tried about 2 hours ago. You'd run the installer from the disc, Steam would throw an error saying its too busy to handle the request, and the installer would die....
So the government's plans to sell off about 30% of Royal Mail are again getting attention. Most of the newspaper world are of course siding with the government on this.
The Sun says that this "shambolic" operation should of been sold off long ago. I say The Sun newspaper should of been thrown in the bin ages ago, and Rupert Murdoch sent down into our underground sugar caves. I'd also suggest that this would be a good time to try and push your Sun-reading friends over to better newspapers....
The Empire Total War demo went up today, after waiting almost 6 hours for it to download (Steam was under a bit of strain, the UK server was trickling it down at 12KB/s, so I had to use the US East Coast server which wasn't much better at about 100KB/s), Like previous Total War games this feels a bit glitchy - in fact it has crashed once. Load times are also a bit on the long side....
I had a comment posted on my original Questions for "Evolutionists" post by someone called Eli, they make some highly effective arguments.
Something that evolutionist can not answer is why are there planets that spin in the opposite direction? Remember now..Conservation of Angular Momentum? Now your answer has to be a fact not a guess.
Ignoring the minor detail that "evolutionists" study biology, not stellar and planetary formation. Young solar systems are chaotic places....
A new feature that WorldWide Telescope implemented in a recent release was the Cosmos view.
This takes data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey which is in the process of mapping the distance to a million or so galaxies. You've probably seen images like this one:
Which are taken from the SDSS and similar surveys. Now however you can view the data in 3D in WorldWide Telescope.
No these images don't do it justice....
The Daily Mirror seems to have found out about the Moon hoax nonsense, and of course - are republishing the nonsense, with just some minor token sceptisism thrown in. So let's sort em out, again.
But were the Moon landings really mankind's greatest scientific leap or the most fantastic hoax ever pulled?
Well I wouldn't call it mankind's greatest scientific leap. I'd call it humanity's greatest engineering triumph.
But anyway on with the nonsense:...
Yes this thing just won't go away will it. Crippling the user experience to keep companies that are mostly a waste of space like Opera (although their mobile browsers are capable and fairly successful) in business is unacceptable.
We've seen this before, when the Java VM was unbundled from Windows it caused pain, not just to a few people but hundreds of millions who were forced to go to Sun's website and dig around and find the Java runtime - sure that was slightly different to this - but the end result is the same the user experience is reduced and millions of hours are wasted....