Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Moves in on the Graphics Market
Ian Lamont writes "Microsoft has quietly been building up graphics-related R&D, reports Computerworld, noting that Microsoft employees will be presenting one out of every eight papers at SIGGRAPH 2007. And it's not a fluke — other recent Microsoft graphics-related developments include Photosynth, which has been discussed on Slashdot several times, as well as the Silverlight/Expression Studio graphics suite, which will compete with Adobe's Flash/Illustrator/Lightroom/Dreamweaver offerings. At SIGGRAPH, Microsoft will supposedly have demos of some new software including image deblurring tools and Soft Scissors, which 'solves the vexing problem of how to cut and paste an image from one background to another if the image's edges — hair blowing in the wind, blades of grass — are very complex.' Microsoft's competitors aren't sitting down. Adobe's CEO, calling Microsoft a '$50 billion monopolist,' has questioned whether Silverlight will be compatible with non-Windows operating systems, and Google has also been building up its own graphics-related software products, such as the 3D modeling tool SketchUp, and Google Earth."
Web Browser: IE6, IE7, Firefox 1.5 and Firefox 2.0
Memory: 256 MB of memory is a bare minimum; 1GB recommended.
Disk: This technology preview uses almost no disk space. The ActiveX control is less than 5MB in size, and no local disk storage is used when the code is running.
Graphics: We have tested Photosynth on graphics cards that are "Vista Aero Ready". This includes: support for DirectX 9 graphics with a WDDM driver, 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum), and 32 bits per pixel. If you want to find out whether your card is suitable, the Vista Upgrade Advisor tool will tell you. Photosynth may run on cards that do not meet this requirement, but performance may be poor and functionality may be impaired. I think we can all see where this is going...
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
o really? check out pictures of Silverlight on Linux from Miguel's blog.
Mono demonstrated Silverlight support in 3 weeks. They plan on having full support, packaged nicely by the end of the year (iirc). Microsoft has stated they will support Linux, even if you are skeptical, the standard is open and anyone can implement it. The Mono project is.4
Check it out: Indeed, the collaboration has been ongoing. The Moonlight product team has made requests for resources; Microsoft has put them in touch with the "right people" inside and outside of Microsoft, according to Icaza.
The Mono team has been invited to participate in a roadmap presentation for Silverlight next week and will provide its recommendations for the platform. "Novell and Microsoft have an ongoing relationship," Icaza noted.
To Microsoft, an 'open standard' is one in which they get to hide certain details so that only their implementation works properly, of course.
ECMA standards are pretty transparent. And not run by Microsoft. Not to mention, they already have a working implementation working on Linux, did you not read the links I posted?
In Microsoft-speak 'cross-platform' (which is a term used on the Silverlight MSDN site) means that it runs on Windows XP and on Windows Vista.
Windows, Mac already officially supported on microsoft.com. Microsoft is in collaboration developing the Linux port. What more do you want?