Friday, January 23, 2009

Thursday, January 22, 2009

AIR for BatchEncoder

AIR for BatchEncoder
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http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-pros-and-cons-of-adobe-air
Cons:
Database access limited to SQLite or web services
No way to external applications - to maintain cross-platform compatibility

If we cannot call external applications, then we cannot call mencoder


Multithreading in FLEX
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http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui/2008/01/threads_in_actionscript_3.html
http://blog.barncar.com/?p=10
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/communityengine/index.cfm?event=showdetails&productId=2&postId=12026

Using AIR to launch other applications
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http://www.jeffryhouser.com/index.cfm/2008/4/22/Using-AIR-to-launch-other-applications
Synopsis - launch the exe as URL using URLRequest and let the OS launch the correct application ( for .doc, OS will launch MS Word etc)

Monday, January 19, 2009

Economics Books to read

Against Intellectual Property

Economics - Dollar, Mandrake Mechanism

http://goldismoney.info/forums/showthread.php?t=3993
Above link talks about Mandrake Mechanism.

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/01/25/1828046.php
Above link is an interview with the authors of the book The World is Flat? (a critique on The World Is Flat)

From a Amazon Forum - has good 'further reading' references -
What goes up must ultimately go down and the further up it goes, the further down it must go. Right now, we are living on a bubble of debt backed by a currency based on debt, created out of thin air (Google "The Mandrake Mechanism" for the facts on how our currency is created by the Federal Reserve) and redeebable in nothing. (Go to http://www.edwinvieira.com/ and select the "What is a Dollar?" link for a description of the value of our currency in a pdf format. Very revealing description of the facts few Americans are aware of regarding the specific value of the dollar as determined under the Constitution by the first Congress)

Alexander Hamilton the First Secretary of the Treasury stated: "There is scarcely any point, in the economy of national affairs, of greater moment than the uniform preservation of the intrinsic value of the money unit. On this the security and steady value of property essentially depend."

Our current monetary unit has no redeemable value. It is simply a non-redeemable fiat piece of paper that can only be exchanged as legal tender for all debts public and private. The problem is since it has no intrinsic value, it derives its value from the willingness of others to accept it. However, as the number of Federal Reserve Notes in circulation increases, their value goes down as value does with anything with exchange value.

Obama's stimulus plan will utimately drive the value of the Federal Reserve Note further down in value since there will be more FRN's in circulation with no real increase in actual wealth. Our manufacturing has been steadily declining due to NAFTA, CAFTA and outsourcing of manufacturing to foreign nations. Thus, we are not producing wealth but rather consuming it. To pump more money into an economy floating on debt is simply to add to the source of the problem not correct it. If one is deeply in debt, the first thing one must do is stop spending. Our nation is no different.

We have gone from the worlds largest producer of goods just after WWII to the world's greatest debtor nation. The only thing holding this house of cards built upon a bubble of debt together is the reluctance of trading partners to cash in the debt they are holding such as China, Japan and the Arab Nations. Once they lose confidence on the bogus, non-redeemable FRN's and start cashing them in, the debt bubble bursts in full and the crash you say will never come will come with a vengeance that could potentially dwarf the Great Depression.

The dollar has been reduced to a political abstraction that contains no fixed amount of intrinsic value. Consequently, it can be reduced in value infinitely and it has been. Obama's policies such as piling yet more debt on top of debt as in the "stimulus plan" and cabinet selections like Timothy Geithner, President of the NY Federal Reserve, will ultimately hasten the inevitable correction to an economy built on debt and fluff.

The crash will come of that you can be assured. It is only a matter of when and how long it will last. The higher the debt level that is built up, the deeper will be the correction and the longer it will last. (Read "Crash Proof" by Peter Schiff for some additional facts and preservation ideas. Visit Ron Paul's site for some reality on our current political and monetary system. visit the the Ludwig Von Mises Institute website for some common sense economics at http://mises.org/. You also may want to check out "America's Great Depression" by Murray Rothbard which is most likely available from Amazon.com, mises.org or dowloadable on scribd.com or "Web of Debt" by Brown as well.)

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

new streaming developments - Microsoft, Akamai, Adaptive Streaming, OpenVideoPlayer etc

http://www.akamai.com/smoothhd
http://www.openvideoplayer.com/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/397411/whats-the-best-solution-to-create-a-streaming-video-website

IIS will do Adaptive Streaming - depending on bandwidth, the quality will vary for users.

A similar architecture, but used to distribute mainly sound is the Conversations Network. They leverage Amazon S3 and EC2. The whole architecture is documented. Have a look at the interview of Doug Kaye. This project is also documented on Amazon's case studies. You dont have to use Amazon, but the concepts outlined in those articles can be reused in other projects.

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