Why Isn't There More Telecommuting?

It's time for America to start using the internet to enable more people to work from home. The benefits of telecommuting instead of spewing exhaust fumes for 30 miles to and from work are enormous - environmentally, energy independence-ly, and personally.

Aside form the fact that it would solve the World's most pressing problems, if more people worked from home - instead of neighborhoods being a ghost town from 9 to 5, they could be vibrant communities again. Parents could be there to greet their children when they get home from school at 2:30 instead of picking them up from a holding pen at 6:20 PM.

The new approach to setting depths in AS3 sucks.

Am I missing something. Or is the new approach to setting depths in AS3 far inferior to the old AS2 way?

With the old way, you could specify an absolute depth. This enabled the creation of a sort of depth tree that you could reference to see exactly where every layer was in relation to the other layers - like this:

With AS3, depthing is relative. It's not trivial to "sandwich" a layer in between two layers that already exist. I like AS3 - but the new depthing is a step backward.

Resizing the Flash Stage At Runtime

Check out the demo here

The conversation regarding Flash vs. DHTML (aka. AJAX) got me wondering about some of the old Flash bugaboos.

1. SEO - I think we've put that one to rest now. Using Faust and Progressive Enhancement (swfobject), there is no difference in SEO value when using Flash vs. HTML. And it's easy to implement.
2. Can Flash resize itself on the fly ? Yes (see test)
3. Does Flash performance degrade when the Flash Stage is very large? No (see test)

Enter any value in the width / height boxes. The Flash object's dimensions will increase / decrease accordingly. Even at ridiculous sizes (say 3000 X 3000) there is no degradation in performance in the video. Video is very processor intensive.

I dare you to find a browser this doesn't work in.