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Longhorn's Flash Killer?
SunSaw writes "Erin Joyce reports on internetnews.com that "Top developers at Microsoft are working on a new graphics and animation toolset for Longhorn (the next generation of Windows) that could spell trouble for Macromedia's popular Flash MX and Director MX animation tools".
Flash's yet-to-be-released competition from M$ is code named "Sparkle" but it wasn't demonstrated during Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles last week.
Is this the beginning of the end for Macromedia?"
They purchased Dimension X, the owner of Liquid Motion in order to kill the product and help kill off Netscape. You see, Liquid Motion was a Java based application that Netscape was using for it's authoring tool. Microsoft found out that Sun Microsystems was looking to purchase Dimension X and got into a bidding war with Microsoft winning.
This was also the period where Microsoft purchased Coopers and Peters too. They had a Java based product too and it too was killed.
So goes the way Microsoft competes and "innovates". Don't take my word, history is a better instructor.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I don't see them releasing a standalone IE for ... os/x
uhh...
Point your browser to http://www.creaturehouse.com and read the fine print.
I _really_ hope this doesn't mean that Expression will die a second death...
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I wholeheartedly agree. I recommend this solution for mozilla users though: http://www.squarefree.com/userstyles/xbl.html
It shows a place holder in each flash frame until you click on it to play the flash. This gives you the best of both worlds: flash is blocked by default, but where you actually want to see it, it is only a mouse click away.
So, let me get this straight.
MS is going to be embedding technology into their browser and OS that ensure that every computer running their operating system have a built-in, "native" version of the software (and likely use it by default), whereas users and corporations will have to go out of their way to install the competing product (it's difficult to convince OEMs to do ANY extra work that they don't have to do when building these bigger, cheaper, faster McComputers).
Microsoft used this tactic to kill Netscape.
They're using it to attempt to crush Java and related middleware platforms (.NET), competing web technologies (IIS/ASP), Media (WMP), and, it sounds like, embedded vector animation ("Flash-killer").
Yes, I'd say the DoJ settlement is doing a bang-up job ensuring that Microsoft doesn't abuse their monopoly power and perform monopolistic anti-competitive practices...
Guess what?
That means they paid nothing to Spyglass for Mosaic.
True, there was a version of IE for Solaris, but it was extremely slow and buggy. IIRC, it never got past version 4.0, either.
End of line..
You are correct. According to Microsoft, twhen they released NT, they called it NT because it had "new technology" 32 bit processing perhaps? What is funny about the nt moniker is that 'nt' is a trademark of Northern telecom (now Nortel Networks). and Microsoft has been paying them a lot of money to use that branding for NT.. Probably why Windows 2000 wasn't called Windows NT 5..
Haver fun!
Partnership for an idiot free America!
Remember that SVG is a W3C standard.
For that reason, it is imperative that Microsoft to make its own superceding one (embrace, etc.). A lot of other organizations suffer from the NIH malady, but it's extra painful when it is a company with this much influence.)
The community really needs free, powerful, robust SVG renderers and authoring tools using public standards to become popular, or else Microsoft will own yet another "standard".
"Provided by the management for your protection."
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashplayer/li
It's not open to me. I just filled in the form and my request to look at the source was denied.
In any case, some people say that the Flash player is open source because the swf format is open, but that's just like Bill Gates saying that the Internet Explorer is open source because the html format is open.
Actually for a while NeXT had hardware-accelerated DPS for its cubes, via a graphics board called NeXT-dimension. At the time (1990) it was simply amazing. This board did accelerated Display Postscript at something like 1080x960 in 32-bit colour and even had video capture (PAL or NTSC). It sounds like not much right now, but there was nothing like it at that price range at the time.
Homestar Runner is one of the best sites on the net. XiaoXiaoMovie is awesome as well. I can't think of any other sites like these off the top of my head, but I'm sure others can add to the list.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."