Outside The Box blogs, Autodesk University anecdotes, articles, blog digests, and product news in chronological order. See Articles for the same material by subject.
The Library of Congress announced yesterday that they are archiving every tweet ever published. I think a lot of people consider their tweets (and Facebook messages) as ephemeral writing that disappears into the ether, without thinking about the implications of its survival (mildly NSFW).
Visual Studio 2010 shipped today (http://blogs.msdn.com/visualstudio/archive/2010/04/12/visual-studio-2010-is-now-available.aspx) accompanied by .NET Framework 4.0. I blogged before about the switch to using the MSBuild build system, and how that theoretically could be helpful in targeting multiple AutoCAD versions from the same solution. The shipping VS 2010 does not support non-Unicode response files, so out-of-the-box it cannot target VC 7.0 (for AutoCAD 2006 and earlier). When time permits, I’m planning to see if I can find a workaround; in the meantime, I’ll continue to use VS 2008 for ObjectARX.
Tyler Ochoa (law professor and two time “Jeopardy!” champion) writes an interesting post about the 300th anniversary of the first copyright law, called the Statute of Anne. Referring to the motivation behind the original law, Ochoa says “Although the Stationers were chiefly concerned with restoring and perpetuating their monopoly, they framed their petition to Parliament in terms of justice for authors.” In many respects, not much has changed since 1710.