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The National Parks: America's Best Idea: | PBS

Just watching 12 hours of magnificent program, from a local library...
I love national parks, and I am interested in history, so this is great...

There was not a "grand plan" for national parks,
but instead many individuals from all walks of life
driven to protect the beauty of nature.

And more often than not, creating of national parks
was severely opposed by some businesses looking for quick profit.
In most cases protection prevailed, to make even bigger profit,
and enjoyment for great many people and generations :)

Highly recommended.

Web Browsers Chess tournament

JavaScript vs Silverlight
Silverlight wins, every time, for now...

I am wandering if speed advantage of JIT-ed .NET with Silverlight
will be maintained on long run, given huge push for HTML5
in particular by Google and Apple.
Even Microsoft IE9 apparently is using native graphics APIs
to make IE competitive again..

Here are some results of my testing in various browsers
on a netbook, with first-generation Intel Atom N270 CPU (1.6 GHz)
Speed in approximate 1000x nodes/sec, more is better

Chrome: C#: 300 JS: 20
Safari: C#: 300 JS: 10
Firefox: C#: 300 JS: 1
IE8: C#: 300 JS: 0.7

Current conclusion: (JIT) compiled code is still much faster, even on fastest of web browsers
Chrome: 15x, Safari: 30x, Firefox: 300x, IE8: 400x

HTML5 has much more than javascript for web applications
in particular CSS3, so this is not complete comparison,
but for games (semi-)native apps are still faster than web apps.

JavaScript used for apps could be a "disruptive innovation"
(Innovator's Dilemma metaphor), and on long run
that may be the main platform for apps, not only web apps!

But for now, C# on WinPhone7, Java on Android and Objective-c on iPhone
is the way to get max performance of mobile devices...