Slashdot Mirror
Silverlight On the Way To Linux
Afforess writes "For the past two years Microsoft and Novell have been working on the 'Moonlight' project. It is a runtime library for websites that run Silverlight. It should allow PCs running Linux to view sites that use Siverlight. Betanews reports 'In the next stage of what has turned out to be a more successful project than even its creators envisioned, the public beta of Moonlight — a runtime library for Linux supporting sites that expect Silverlight — is expected within days.' Moonlight 2.0 is already in the works."
At last! Now we will have world domination!
While Windows is getting version 2, and the Mac is almost version 2, Linux is almost getting version 1. Awesome job MS.
With what is being achieved with Javascript and dynamic HTML, I see less and less need for technologies such as Flash and Silverlight. The only thing they really have going for them are the development environments. To see some of the games already implemented using plain old Javascript and HTML:
http://www.apple.com/webapps/games/
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Standards anybody ?
I still think there should be a new standard that would obviate the need for flash, you can keep your silverlight and shove it.
MP3 Search Engine
Is there any reason not to think that this linux support will falter if Silverlight becomes widely used?
I can't say I have much love for Adobe and Flash, and I simply do not trust Microsoft, but if Linux support is going to be a key point-scoring device in the corporate pissing contests of today then I suppose a few good things might come of it. Let battle commence!
"For the past two years Microsoft and Novell have been working on the 'Moonlight' project.
Translation: for two years, Microsoft has been using Novell to pretend they're not working on the Linux platform and aren't trying to embrace/extend it.
There ain't no way Silverlight will end up on my hard-drive. Having the Flash player is bad enough already.
Gah, where's my insightful modpoints when I need them? ;)
I would have expected MS to write a new app like that in 100% managed code. I assumed that the Mono project would allow me to run most managed code, maybe with some effort (but not 2 years by two major software houses)
If so, then I would have expected it to "just run" under Mono.
One of my assumptions is wrong.
So, anyone know if Moonlight is a runtime library for running Silverlight apps?
This guy's the limit!
Unless there was an advantage to the lock in of flash why is there a reason to swap to another propitiatory product? Especially a linux clone that will always be behind Microsoft's offering.
If Silverlight was GPL and available for use by all then there might be a reason to adopt it over flash, but to just swap monopolies, no thanks.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
I imagine how those developers working on Linux would be looked by the other MS employees. 'Oh, man, they're in the Dark side. They wear dark clothes, long hair, a beard, this can't be a good thing.'
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
Moonlight is great but it's for Linux only. (Mono itself runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.) That reduces its suitability for making dynamic websites, because Mac and Windows users don't have a free browser plugin to run them with. They only have Microsoft's proprietary Silverlight plugin, and if you're going to require a binary-only plugin then you might as well just use Flash. So I think a Windows version of Moonlight would be cool; just as many people prefer to run the free Firefox browser even though Windows includes the proprietary Internet Explorer, so Moonlight could provide a free alternative for dynamic content.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
This sounds more like a threat than a promise.
The future ain't what it used to be.
While there may not be much damage that they can do to the system, with Microsoft's track record, you can be sure that Moonlight will be a complete compromise of the user account in which it is run. I'll bet the EULA for Moonlight gives Microsoft explicit permission to access all of your data, just as all of the OS EULAs have since 2K SP4 (at least; I never tried to load 2K SP3). Novell has already shown their colors by becoming a Microsoft "subsidiary". Why would you install software from either of them on a Linux box?
I suppose you could set up a virtual machine, and allow a very limited user in it to export an X application to your "regular" user root window, but then you have to maintain the guest, too.
Anyone got a pointer to a good HOWTO for setting up VMs on Ubuntu 8.10, just so I can see what's involved?
Ok, now it's official: with Silverlight, 2009 will sure be the year of Linux in desktop!
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
Steve Ballmer and Miguel de Icaza were recently spotted leaving a costume party dressed as Dr. Evil and Mini-Me. When interviewed about his Mini-Me outfit, Miguel reportedly launched into a speech claiming that Dr. Evil is really a well intentioned individual who is just understood and he wishes that we would all just give him a chance.
"Web 2.0" seems to be nothing more than a non-stop assault of useless animations, personalized/targeted advertisements, and automatically-loading and starting background music to make up for poorly-organized sites. Animated .gif banners, despite often being gaudy, were not so offensive as scripts that scour for statistical data about me to offer localized advertisements. The addition of new, non-standardized software to each user's browser is the worst way to embrace "The Cloud"; it focuses on style alone while only marginally catering to the needs of companies and their clients.
Silverlight will see some adoption by Linux users who cannot bear to browse the internet without clicking monkeys to win iPods. I doubt it would hit even that level of popularity before its current audience becomes so fed up with its more obnoxious aspects. The process of understanding Silverlight will be akin to that of installing Flash:
1) Install Silverlight/Moonlight to be amazed by a few useful applications
2) Install advertisement blocking add-on to avoid the droves of awful applications
3) Tweak blocking black/white-lists until Silverlight loses its appeal
4) Remove Silverlight/Moonlight
On the fringe out here I'll stick to elinks where I can get a majority of my information while avoiding information overload.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
Yes, but will it be halted by FlashBlock?
Summation 2
It's a real treat when you find a site that is static html. It's fast, clean, and refreshing. Flash and Ajax have their place, but more often than not they just irritate me. I'm tired of sites that peg my CPU and crash my browser.
Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical, but I'm sure Moonlight will only contribute to web bloat and add to my frustrations. And that is being generous and not bring up that MS is part of the equation.
I just hope this fails to catch on and people forget about it.
Now please add a XAML designer to Monodevelop so I can create Silverlight/Moonlight apps without Visual Studio. AJAX, etc... is too twitchy and cumbersome. Silverlight is a great way to make real apps that deploy over the web, and without having to waste time fighting with JS+HTML+CSS (Ugh!).
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
So let's keep the facts straight. Microsoft is trying to push a Flash-me-too Silverlight and invests. They also invest in other platform implementations via Novell. All customers use Flash.
I installed Silverlight on my Vista PC to view a boring Microsoft developer Website video. No one else uses the software. It is nice that provided Silverlight achieved the necessary market penetration which requires marketing investments of Microsoft, the Linux implementation Moonlight would be just one generation behind.
But more likely is that Microsoft will drop the Silverlight project and then you have open source developers who wasted their time on the moonlight implementation.
n/t
you had me at #!
what silverlight seeks to achieve that isnt currently offered in the web browsing experience?
I have flash in linux, and spend more time blocking it than enjoying it. i have javascript but also spend more time blocking that from shooting popups, redirects, and ads to me than actually enjoying it.
id enjoy java, but its been embraced and extended by MS to the point that no Java on the web works well, if at all in IcedTea (and icedtea explicitly meets all the requirements for java!)
activeX has turned into a security laughingstock...so perhaps this is why we're seeing silverlight?? if thats the case, i recommend linux stay the fuck away from it.
and imho, i think CSS has been the only tech offered to the web i've really enjoyed. the point of the web is to offer something everyone can share, and the megacorps seem to be diligently working to ensure we cant do that.
Good people go to bed earlier.
just turn ur display sideways...aye wah-lah!;-)
Javascript cannot be used to build true in browser applications.
You can build GUIs with it, interact with server side stuff, and you can make pretty games, but not a great deal more.
With Flash you can write whole applications, including pretty complex logic, and Silverlight is even better for application development.
Yes, yes, its a Microsoft product, evil, blah blah.. I get it. Moving on...
If you are being tasked to write applications that run in a browser then Silverlight is a great option. Now you can write one and have it be cross platform as well, that's a god thing.
The version number difference between platforms is a problem, but lets not be asking Microsoft to rush anything, you know how badly that goes.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
In capitalist America, Microsoft fucks you.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Just curious, is there an open source alternative with javascript/ajax and Ogg Vorbis available which can compete with flash and Silverlight? I mean free server components, free developer tools and free web plugins if needed. If not, why not?
Plus we already have Flash too :-x
*company releases software*
*People complain it's not on linux*
*company ports software to linux*
*people complain it's not OSS*
*company GPLs software*
*people complain it's not GPLv3*
*company forces a GPL2 or later licence*
*people complain that the company has a trademarked logo*
*company curls up in the corner, quietly sobbing*
*people complain that the design of the corner it's crying in isn't covered by creative commons*
It should allow PCs running Linux to view sites that use Siverlight.
The number of accessible websites just increased by three. Oh happy day!
At the very least, Flash and Silverlight provides a uniform platform across Linux and Windows for a developer to work on, making life that much easier for users of Linux and Windows
....and that much PITA for all others.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
http://svg.startpagina.nl
You better ship some decent development tools with that standard.
Standards are specifications. They are not software products. Nobody "ships" standards. They just make software products (in)compatible with standards.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
i loled . by the way i love fucking with Microsoft every day 7 days a week. Long live Microsoft.
Or more concisely:
- someone does something
- someone else complains about it.
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
If we are looking at silverlight as a flash replacement, it is just a flash clone with no market share, so that makes it a non starter. Also, flash comes installed by default this days on every operating system and browser. Silverlight doesn't. That is enough of a show stopper on itself.
If on the other hand, we are looking at it as a way to code the client side of business apps with a rich interface using a strongly typed, compiled language, it could have some potential, except for one thing. No printing support. Printing support is essential for business apps and Silverlight doesn't provide it, at all.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Silverlight is mostly obsolete before its even got started thanks to html5 and the video tags.
I also wont let mono anywhere near any linux computers i control.
HTTP/1.1 400
Microsoft today announced the release of version 2.0 of its world-beating Silverlight multimedia platform for the Web. As a replacement for Adobe's Flash, it is widely considered utterly superfluous and of no interest to anyone who could be found.
"We have a fabulous selection of content partners for Silverlight," announced Microsoft marketer Scott Guthrie on his blog today. "NBC for the Olympics, which delivered millions of new users to BitTorrent. The Democrat National Convention, which is fine because those Linux users are all Ron Paul weirdos anyway. Major League Baseball, er, forget that one. It comes with rich frameworks, rich controls, rich networking support, a rich base class library, rich media support, oh God kill me now. My options are underwater, my resume's a car crash, Google won't call me back. My life is an exercise in futility. I'm the walking dead, man. The walking dead."
Silverlight was created by Microsoft to leverage its desktop monopoly on Windows, to work off the tremendous sales and popularity of Vista. Flash is present on a pathetic 96% of all computers connected to the Internet, whereas Silverlight downloads are into the triple figures.
"But it's got DRM!" cried Guthrie. "Netflix loved it! And web developers love us too, after all we did for them with IE 6. Wait, come back! We'll put porn on it! FREE PORN!"
Similar Microsoft initiatives include its XPS replacement for Adobe PDF, its HD Photo replacement for JPEG photographs and its earlier Liquid Motion attempt to replace Flash. Also, that CD-ROM format Vista defaults to which no other computers can read.
In a Microsoft internal security sweep, Guthrie's own desktop was found to still be running Windows XP.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Silverlight is not open source. Moonlight is. It is not a port, it is a sanctioned, but independent, rewrite, which is also related to advances in the Mono support for quite a few things that weren't there 2 years ago.
Those two words are contradictory: you need Microsoft's sanction (permission, as i understand) if you want to develop a 100% silverlight-compatible browser. (by the way, THAT's the difference between JavaScript and Silverlight). So how is it "independent"? Am I missing something here, my fellow slashdotters?
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
... sites using Silverlight
All five of them!? Really?
@neonux
First Adobe 64-bit flash and now this. It looks like commercial vendors are realizing that they can't just ignore Linux anymore. It's odd that so many people are favoring Flash over Silverlight here when at least Moonlight is GPL. I guess it's all the irrational Microsoft hatred that exists on Slashdot.
Time makes more converts than reason
I am just so sick and tired of the sites using Flash for stuff that could easily and better be done with other things like a simple JPG.
As for Mono/Silverlight...MS can stick it. I won't install that for Linux and I am not allowing on the machines I control that still have to use winslopper. Most of them don't even have a current flash version installed, its whatever came with XP which is 6 or something.
With that so outdated alot of the crap sites and ads are defacto blocked. Happy happy joy joy. :)
1311393600 - Back to Black
Silverlight doesn't even support Windows 2000, why does anyone expect it to run under Linus?
If Adobe could figure out a way to 'kill' Flash (buy Macromedia out and make it their own, M$ style), why doesn't M$ just do Adobe the 'old fashioned way' ... buy 'em!?!?!?! Then maybe the M$ product could get traction on some platform?
Really though ... who needs/wants Silverlight? I'm behind the improved js engines 100%. Not remotely interesting in Silverlight on any platform.
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
adapt
overcome
survive...
and microsoft's special little addition:
engulf
Somebody is running scared.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
... PROFIT?
...and not even the godamn good courtesy of a reacharound. Unless it's for your wallet.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Let's face it, if (hypothetically) Silverlight happens to become a common-place tech used on the Internet, then we're better off with an implementation in Linux than without. Even if that means binary-only and proprietary.
It's not ideal sure, but few things are in life. Give people who want functionality the means to do so in their OS of choice. If others wish to stick to their own principles, that's fine. They don't have to install the plugin, and can choose to miss out on the next Olympics stream or ability to use an upcoming HD movie service or whatever. But if people want such features, then cool beans, they've got the choice now.
I don't trust Microsoft either, but I've given up complaining about missing functionality in Linux. I just take whatever I can get, proprietary or not (including Flash and NVIDIA drivers). MHO.
I could not possibly agree more.
I'll be opening a site next year that will be static html. There are wonderful tools to make static pages that are easily updatable. The use of static html doesn't mean a site can't be fresh. Yes, I'll have some fancier stuff in an associated forum but even the user-contributed content will be edited and added to the main site as static html.
Why am I doing it this way? I think the key (well, one of the main keys) to a successful site is simply knowing your audience and giving them what they want and need. If the first reaction of your target audience to a plain page of static content is "This is boring; I need to click somewhere else", then you need to employ fancier tools. If the first reaction of your target audience to a plain page of static content is "I need to read this to see if it contains information I can use", then static html is fine and dandy. Because I'll be targeting an audience that is older and cares far more about good, updated, detailed information than about eye candy, static html for my core pages is the right choice.
It is irrelevant to consider the desktop the only place where people surf the net anymore. The mobile market is huge and growing daily, and a lot of those devices are now or will be soon running Linux. And mobile devices with internet capability are now a much larger market than desktops, that has changed over the last two years with more laptops/netbooks/smart phones being sold than desktops. Websites that ignore both the realities of smaller screen and lower resource surfing and operating systems other than the big two* will find out that could be an unwise decision they have made. If you look at all computing devices in use today, Linux is king, from supercomputers to the tiniest controllers. Of course a lot of that is embedded or in appliances and consumers don't notice it, but it is the trend and will just keep getting more pervasive because the operating system and kernel itself is so malleable and adaptable and the developer community is simply massive and it makes a lot more sense business wise looking to the future, for various reasons, cost being one of them.
*sort of like the Detroit big three "too big to fail". Reality changes fast, cyberspace is no exception, companies will be top of the heap one day and be near bankrupt the next. Stuff changes, that's all.
I refuse to use Silverlight or Moonlight. Microsoft has no obligation to ensure 100% compatibility between Silverlight and Moonlight, and Moonlight will always be playing catchup to Silverlight. And once Microsoft destroyed Flash on Windows, there very little chance of it cooperating with Moonlight developers, there is no incentive anymore, and basically Silverlight will become another lock-in mechanism to lock people into Windows.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I've not seen any Silverlight outside a MS product.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
standard C call.
But that doesn't work for MS...
The above post is modded "Funny" but I'm afraid there's a lot of truth to it. I'm all about OSS - Microsoft didn't need to do this you know. They are being nice and [a lot of] people whine that it's not good enough.
why didn't this make it onto slashdot then???
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
The thing is this bastard is smelling like my old pants. This bastard strategy I mean. Even Flash is not so bloody working well in Linux and it is not a product of an opponent, a company which is making OS's.
So as one commentator said it will be a white lie, saying we are giving support to every OS, excepting minorities like AmigaOs or other, so build your stuff with *light.
Bleh, why are they using a strategy that cheap?
Not to defend the pro-OSS but...
*company* has screwed over every *partner* it has come across with bent-nailed baseball bat and an office chair.
Yeah, imagine what if companies did the right thing right away so costumers wouldn't have to be so annoying when they cry for their basic rights...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
These remote exploits aren't happening often enough on Linux and OSX. We need to get the creators of ActiveX to level the playing field.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Sites which depend on it are usually pretty awful, and it's usually used totally frivolously (like stupid and pointless click through splash pages)...
Maybe we need a CRH (Campaign for Real HTML).
If the author has anything of interest to say, there's nothing to stop him (or her) doing so in plain text. Otherwise, s/he might just as well piss off and stop wasting everybody's bandwidth.
Yes, I realise there are cases (I'm talking financial transactions here) where something a bit more complex is required, but for the most part Flash in particular is grossly overused to little purpose.
They are not fucking being nice, for god's sake... They want to make the web 100% MS dependent, and then they will OBVIOUSLY pull the plug out of moonlight, not to say that you need to use SLED if you want moonlight legally (And this comes from MS and Novell reps' mouths).
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
MS didn't _need_ to make IE free upon inception either.
MS didn't _need_ to bundle IE to Windows either.
MS didn't _need_ to make a Mac version of IE either.
MS didn't _need_ to make an "open office specification" either.
MS didn't _need_ to make their own JVM either.
Or did they?
I am going to treat MS for what they really are... a cut throat business that looks after itself, and a damn good one at that. Nice, charity, evil, and backstabber don't really come into the picture.
So Silverlight is the new Flash huh? well, I'm running Windows (most of the time) and I'm not letting that thing on my computer. Silverlight and Flash are both essentially trying to do what Java does, except Java already is free software and there's lots more useful Java software around than useful Silverlight and Flash software. Why should I want yet another framework on my computer? The only reason I've got Flash is because of YouTube and Google video's misguided use of little ill-designed Flash-based video players instead of serving up a normal Xvid file I can stream in my standard media player like everone else does. But I disable it by default, because guess what, it's mostly used for annoying animated banner ads, some of which even make noise. Adobe, I hate you. As soon as I've figured out how to replace the Flash applets on YouTube and Google Video with a direct link to the .flv file, I'll deinstall Flash. You can probably imagine that promoting Silverlight as a Flash replacement isn't going to make me install it. By the way, Flash is slowly being overtaken in its own field by HTML + JavaScript. And the establishment of SVG, which can also be manipulated easily by JavaScript, as the standard vector format is also interesting. But there are still lots of things these unfortunately don't support, not just on the user-side but also on the developer-side, so Java won't be obsolete anytime soon, if ever. Anyway, to get back on topic, one framework should be enough. It is unfortunate that the native Windows and GNU/Linux APIs suck so hard and are incompatible, otherwise I'd say that'd be the one framework, but as it stands, we have Java and I'm reasonably happy with that, so Microsoft can shove Silverlight where the light doesn't shine.
Oh good, Microsoft is happy. Gather close for your kool-aid, people!
No tyrant thrives when every subject says no.
Actually [Zune 1.0/Silverlight 1.0/Vista] is crap, [Zune 2.0/Silverlight 2.0/Vista service pack 1] is the real deal, MS will now get the marketshare it deserves.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
and automatically-loading and starting background music to make up for poorly-organized sites
That is so web 1.0. I mean, you've got to have come across a GeoCities homepage with X-Files Theme.mid playing!
yep, the Novell/Microsoft agreement only covers stuff downloaded directly from Novell. So, if you do apt-get moonlight on Debian, you may get sued or end up having to pay royalties. :)
So does the latest Moonlight version work with the Netflix "Watch Instantly" feature? If not then this isn't a very interesting announcement.
In fact, the US Federal, state and local governments hold around 70% of the publicly traded shares. It's already too late, the US government owns their citizens more severely than Stalin could have imagined.
Having companies or people open source their software when not required (ie due to infringements or legislation) should always be treated as a generous act.
In the butt?
You only need to get Microsoft's binary codecs from Novell/Microsoft directly, but afaict, the Moonlight packages doesn't include them, so you can get them from anywhere. What Moonlight seems to do is dynamically download the codecs the first time they are needed (at least that's how it worked for me).
Pretty sneaky of Moonlight, but it gave the devs brownie points in my book. Stickin' it to the man.
The problem with Silverlight is pretty much the same issue I have with Flash: It is a proprietary third party protocol. I can write my own web browser because all the protocols are known, and there are open source tests I can use to check my browser.
Flash and Silverlight are different. I can write my own browser and browse away, but then I need Microsoft or Adobe to write a flash client for my browser and platform. Every page that insists upon Silverlight or Flash is another part of the Internet I can't get to. Even worse, what worked for one version of Silverlight or Flash doesn't work with the next. I am not only stuck on third party plugins, but I am hoping they keep them updated. What version of Silverlight will Microsoft decide it's not worth supporting for non-Windows non-IE platforms?
Apple started WebKit and created it as an open source project because it is extremely important to them that the web does not become proprietary. Otherwise, Apple products could be locked out of much of the computing world. That's why Flash doesn't run on iPhones. Apple does not want to encourage the usage of Flash.
My prediction is that Apple will eventually buy Adobe, then put Flash out as open source and attempt to get Flash adopted as part of the web standards. Apple will need to do this because Flash has become important in many websites and Apple doesn't want their products to depend upon third party plugins. Apple also does not want Microsoft to dictate web content. Apple went through that in the 1990s as more and more Websites insisted they could only support IE and Windows. Apple doesn't want to go through that again.
The distributions (especially Ubuntu) should refuse to carry this (let medibuntu do it if they want). By definition, Linux support for silverlight will remain one cycle behind Windows support.
This is Microsoft's way to "push" Linux into the slot of an inferior OS on the desktop. Adobe flash is the way forward. Its ubiquitous. Its well specified. Its fairly well supported.
Of course, Adobe is a commercial vendor as well, which has been tardy in releasing Linux support in the past. But it has no vested interest per se in retarding the growth of Linux.
Silverlight isn't widely used enough yet for anybody to care.
I'm going to keep all my corporation-badgering efforts aimed at Adobe for their Flash plugin for Linux.
Of course, if Microsoft could make Silverlight run Flash video smoothly on Linux, I'd totally download it.
Or if popular video sites could use regular video formats instead of Flash. I really can't imagine who said, "You know, Flash is good for animations, but I heard it does video too. And even though there's actual video formats and plugins already... Let's have a video-hosting website in Flash just for the hell of it."
there are websites that use silverlight?!
not only is time travel possible, it's irrelevant.
If/when v2.0 is available for Linux, we may finally see Netflix instant-viewing supported for Linux.
I don't know if this should be considered welcome/good or not, but it's a fact that netflix instant-view requires it and a fact that they've chosen silverlight as part of the delivery platform.
My dear friend, I pretty agree with you. Silverlight sucks. It's just a desperate tentative to overcome flash, and make more Microsoft's "standards" (developer's nightmare). I am bored about MS f***ing the world and imposing its imperialism. And I cannot bear that companies such as novell cowardly bow down before Microsoft and cooperate. We really do not need that.
So yeah... F*** Microsoft, and Novell.
Yeah, they aren't basic rights anymore just because your companies have managed to make a right of theirs to screw consumers, now you have turned respecting the users into a generous act, good. And a moron gave you insightful, grats.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
re: "If Gnash is too limited, stick to the minimum version of Flash that supports the feature you need...unless you're extremely advanced, that version should be available on all major platforms."
Actually, it's most practical to go with the H.264 version of Player 9, which 90% of consumers successfully installed into their browsers within its first nine months:
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html
If you're going live in December, clientside support on "major platforms" should be up above 95% by then.
Last month's Player 10, with its pixel-manipulation and P2P and all, is already used on some early-adopter sites, but will be mainstream by next summer.
The interesting thing is mobile. Adobe Flash Player is now moving to a single coding profile across devices of all form-factors... there will still be profiles of device capability, but not of runtime codebase. The goal is predictable capability across all display screens. It will take time and work to get there, but it's a good goal.
jd/adobe
I understand what MS is trying to do with Silverlight. There's clearly a market for Flash type stuff. People know how to code in .NET. Let's let people use .NET to make functional and pretty things!
The problem is that all the people who make things pretty are already allied with Adobe. Technologies like Flash and Silverlight are only valuable if there are artists making it look cool. There are certainly some great looking Silverlight apps, but I worry that it lacks the critical mass of design support to make it a viable competitor.
Steal my band's record! Seriously,
... no one cares about Silverlight.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Yeah, I guess if you're into that sort of thing, lots of people say "Jesus saves," and he's been around for way longer.
Silverlight is more targeted at making functional apps than pretty apps. While it has the functionalities and the tools to do the same things you'd do in Flash, the base functionalities are to make apps similar to what you'd see on the desktop. So its not a huge loss.
Better to go back to using a old gopher client rather than a web browser tainted with mooning-light.
Last thing we need is a web littered with sites that use this garbage where Microsoft control the client. At that point you can simply forget about using anything Windows and ieeeeeeee to effectively do anything online with a web-browser.
It is bad enough that Adobe Flash has such a strong grip on the web content. I for one would hate to see Microsoft holding the reins of a replacement or alternative for flash.
Last time I checked:
- Pigs don't fly.
- Sun, Moon, and the Stars don't rise from the West.
- Lions don't eat grass.
Similar to above, I will not use this mooning-light on Linux.
No Thanks!
We're capitalist still. It's not like the government owns the banks. Wait a second...
Finally I can enjoy the vista ads on microsoft.com... or is there anything else using silverlight?
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
He was careful to say "OSX", so his statement is technically true.
Which is an evolution of NextStep which got re-branded as "Mac OS" once Apple took Steve Jobs back.
(Which in turn is hugely based on BSD under the hood)
That show us interesting thing things :
- It has been around for quite some time.
- Only when Apple put massive efforts in polishing NextStep into Mac OS X did it catch up imense mind share.
- The strong marketing helped al lot too, as you suggest.
There are no "Ubuntu Stores", no Ubuntu counter at Best Buy...
About Ubuntu counter at stores :
Well that's going to be difficult, because whereas other brand are very exclusive (you use Apple hardware on Apple machine - or at least that the image that marketing want you to keep in mind, no matter if USB and FireWire are universal), Linux is fundamentally oriented toward a "should work everywhere, plays nice with everything".
I.e.: the hardware which should go in a hypothetic "Ubuntu corner" would be almost everything else in shop.
On the other hand, a thing that Canonical (and other Linux brands) could do is sell a special line of hardware, certified to work well and easily with Linux' default drivers.
That's something that is currently missing : lot of hardware have "Windows XP/Vista comptible" and "Mac OS X comptible" logos, but very few have a "work with Linux too" penguin (I've only seen it on HID- and Storage- class USB device) although a lot more hardware is actually usable thanks to the wide array of drivers in the linux Kernel.
Some kind of organized and marketed "supports linux" campaign could help.
Nonetheless, I'm in Europe here and it's fun to spot that lots of shops have small Linux corners. (Mostly distribution, some time also a couple of softwares sold in shrink wrap. One more scientific-oriented book&soft shop even used to have some shelf space devoted to Linux ports of games - the same kind you find in Mac OS X corners).
Note that Linux products that are advertised can be quite successful... EeePC, phones, routers, TiVo, server products, etc.
The sad thing is that very rarely is it advertised that the hardware runs Linux. Linux has almost completely taken over the market and near reaching monopoly is some market (modem/routers/firewalls, NAS/SAN/RAID boxes, print-servers, multimedia harddisk-enclosures, other server products, ...)
Yet all of these are advertised as appliances. As a box which gets its job done. What's inside doesn't matter.
We're soon reaching a strange point where everything in someone's home including the fridge and the mirco-oven will be running some form of embed BusyBox/Linux or even full GNU/Linux, but the average Joe will consider Linux to be an OS that nobody use except a couple of geeks in their basement. Rhat failed desktop OS that never caught up and got overtaken by the Mac OS X Joe has on his laptop.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
But infinitely threatening to Microsoft.
Luckily, Microsoft is dying.
you had me at #!
French, do you write it? :)
you had me at #!
100% MANGLED code. Their reputation precedes them...
you had me at #!
LOCK-IN.
Clever, isn't it.
you had me at #!
Why is this modded 'funny'?
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
but what exactly is it that cant be done with the web already that needs this Silverlight thing please? Or is it just that webmonkeys like shiny new things?
Sun knows that the Java plugin sucks. So they fixed it. The latest release -- Java 6u10 -- has fixed the crappy Java applet problem. Install the sun-java6-jre package on Ubuntu 8.10 and enjoy.
http://acko.net/files/bacon/animation-demo.html
This demo works in Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome. What's more, the animations are smooth and beautiful in Chrome thanks to it's v8 Javascript engine. Now we just need to get people weaned from IE6.
because it's funny?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I just spend a little time reading thought the MS web site, and it never really says!
WTF is Silverlight?
Is it some web server? or a browser? or some scripting language?
I don't get it, and I don't feel like downloading it and installing it to find out, or watching there video.
Am I the only one confused by all this meaningless marketing speak?
I mean it talks about XML and features, but never says what the hell the damb thing is!!!!
Did I miss the memo on this somewhere?
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
ahhh... another /. idiot, willing to expropriate the fruit of another's labor as a "basic right"--and it's ALL OK, since it's a "evil company"
Extrapolate this to individuals and see how far you get when you try and take someone's car, for instance.
But does it run Netflix?
... but there are plenty of times I do feel that way. It seems like Gameday and Gameday Audio break every damn year; this sometimes includes the Mac platform as well. MLBAM has almost no concern for minority platforms.
Dog is my co-pilot.
...does Linux really need Silverlight ?
It is just another, probably faulty by design, gimmick from a dying company. ...and stable ?
It may be nice but is it secure ?
And let us not forget it is a great boon for MSFT, especially if they get a great deal of the developers to switch away from flash. Why is it a great boon? Because like the old days when half the websites looked like shit and sometimes didn't work at all unless you ran IE, Moonlight will ALWAYS be a couple of versions behind and feature incomplete. So while it will work, most of the time, it will be a much crappier experience that simply using Silverlight on Windows.
So they can then sit there and say "For the full benefit of the Silverlight experience please use a genuine Windows Operating System." . You see, folks seem to forget that MSFT doesn't have to make something not work at all in Linux, in fact that would hinder adoption. They just have to make sure you get a BETTER experience in MSFT land than you do in Linux land when using Silverlight. So I don't know about you but I'll be sticking with flash since I haven't seen anything to make be believe that they should be trusted on this.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I love this one!
The people here are the ones who've had to deal with all the problems Microsoft software and business practices have caused, throughout the industry, for more than 15 years.
There's nothing irrational about it. Microsoft has *earned* our vitriol.
How's that for a name choice?
To do list for Windows
Tower Defense in javascript
http://ejohn.org/blog/processingjs-tower-defense/
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
I guess I was expecting a 'Redundant'.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
I guess the Open Source community should hire more or better programmers.
no... scratch all that...
*Microsoft never said you can use this except Novell*
*people say Silverlight will ALWAYS be ahead of the copy*
*people say it's not even about linux only, IT'S ABOUT COMPETITION*
quite frankly, are you a MS robot? This is about communication, you want that proprietary? Are you joking?
Owning the web with a flash replacement. Interesting. You've gone and lost it there my friend. To think a company could even do such a thing is ridiculous.
So we're switching from Adobe owning the web to Microsoft then?
DO NOT WANT!
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
Are they allowed total and unfettered access to the source code? Because I can't really picture MSFT, the same company that not too long ago was spreading patent FUD and had employees stating with a straight face that GPL was an "infection", would allow complete and unfettered access to the complete source code for their newest toy, especially one they hope to get a nice chunk of the Internet tied into. It just doesn't fit their MO.
More likely after signing enough NDAs that they could wallpaper Steve Ballmer's house they are shown a tiny portion of the core code. Probably just enough to get the basics to work, nothing more. Because if there is one company in the entire history of corporations that loves vendor lock in more than MSFT I have never heard of them. It has simply made them too much cash in the past for them not to try it now when their OS division is looking weak and they need to get a toehold into the web badly.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Linux is just an evolution of Minix. {...} The fact is that Linux is distinct from Minix just as much as OS X is distinct from Nextstep and the BSDs.
No, in the sense that Linux doesn't contain a single line of code from Minix and doesn't even follow the same overall design at all. (As documented by the Linus vs. Tannenbaum flame wars - they in fact flamed each other because they shared 0 lines of code and each one was persuaded and arguing that his personal creation was better in terms of monolithic vs. microkernel).
Whereas, for making Mac OS X, Apple hired back Steve Job, which simply continued the work on Next Step. Mac OS X is the descendant of Next Step in the sense that they share a lot of code. They started from the same code base and "simply" improved some component and rewrote a couple of other (in the GUI department mainly, with th much more beautiful graphics-hardware-accelerated PDF-based Aqua replacing the old coprocessor-accelerated PostScript engine). It's not a spiritual descendant, it's the same code base that got edited (a lot).
NextStep in turn has borrowed a lot from BSD but isn't a direct successor as it is not the same code base that got edited, but a separate project which borrowed a lot. The kernel for instance don't share the same structure (BSD is a monolithic kernel, whereas NextStep & Mac OS X have a somewhat microkernel-ish structure) That's why I put that in parenthesis.
Actually both {...} trace their ancestry back to UNICS
Some overall approaches in the design can be traced back to the original UNICS.
But several of the modern Unices are separate re-implementation of the same standard.
BSD, Minix, Linux : all where attemps to rewrite the same kind of OS.
NextStep borrows significant portion of code from BSD but ends up an entirely different beast.
By my logic, we can't say that all played 39 years of catch-up : there all different project written by different people with few code shared in between. (Specially given the incompatibilities of licenses between BSD and GPL).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
::borat style:: Linux users flock to download silverlight
NOT!
By your definition ODF isn't open since it is *controlled* by Sun.
You're simply wrong. Sun controls OpenOffice.org but not ODF. ODF is maintained by OASIS committee whose membership is open to all. Currently, it has representatives from OpenOffice.org, KOffice and probably some others too.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
How do you do it and stay safe? Fucking with Microsoft, I mean.
I am not devoid of humor.
LOL... good one mate
IF MS provided "total and unfettered access to the source code" the Open Source community wouldn't need programmers.
PS : The GPL IS infectious. It would be useless if it wasn't.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Silverlight, WPF, and the rest of .Net 3.5 are documented. I guess building the core UI libraries that Windows uses from scratch, along with a .Net runtime is just a big job. Maybe that requires resources and some decent project management, two areas that Open Source is generally lacking in.
It is only "infectious" if you try to steal someone's work and close it down in your own proprietary app,which of course is the point. If you use GPL code you should share it under GPL,it doesn't mean you can't make a hardware app and sell it, just supply the source code for it on demand. That isn't hard, yet for some reason companies keep trying to steal GPL code. Does BSD code suck? It is old and crappy? Seriously, I don't use BSD but since they can do whatever they want with BSD for free I just don't understand why they keep trying to snatch GPL code like Busybox. Is there no BSD code that does the same job?
And as for the other poster saying that Silverlight and .NET are "documented" WTF does that mean? Do you have full access to the source code? Documented how? I mean we saw them with OXML have documentation with lines like "make it act like Office 97" so they can "document" until hell freezes over and that doesn't really help if the documents suck.
And now I am going to go off on a little rant,so feel free to mod down if you wish. I got Karma to burn. hey Linux guys: Do you want to get a serious leg up on MSFT? You do? Well then listen up. You want to get a serious leg up on MSFT then PUT IN SOME VB6 SUPPORT! Surely to God it can't be that damned difficult to put OS support for something that has been around as long as VB6. I have plenty of SMBs that would love to get off the MSFT merry go round but can't simply because way too many mission critical apps require VB6. If a Linux distro like SimplyMEPIS or Ubuntu came out with VB6 support OOTB it would be a hell of a lot easier to get the SMBs to switch.
And let us be honest here: It is the SMBs that can give you the home users. Because folks get used to using an OS at work and like to have the same experience at home. And the engine that powers the American SMB is VB6. There is a good reason why even after MSFT spent years trying to kill it that VB6 is still the number 3 business language. Because as a RAD platform you simply can't beat VB6 for small business. So please, add support for VB6 by default in ANY major distro. I don't care if it is Mepis, Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, etc. Because I have tried and getting consistent VB6 support without shelling out a crapload of money for RealBasic is pretty damned impossible. With default VB6 support and a bad economy you could make Linux a real value for the SMB, and from there it will be easier to get the users. But trying to go after Joe and Jane Home User is just the wrong way to go. Get the SMB that Joe and Jane work at and they will follow along.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"*company releases software*
*People complain it's not on linux*
*company ports software to linux*"
But they haven't even gotten this far. I have no licensing concerns, I run flash, SecondLife, Java (I ran it before it was open sourced...) and so on. But:
a) They've been *claiming* Moonlight is "almost done" for years. The last I tried it, the "alpha" was really more a "Microsoft alpha". The code would basically do nothing useful, but run a few demos.
b) I don't know if it's a open-source beta (which usually is nearly bug-free) or a Microsoft-beta, which would be considered alpha by anyone else's standards... but anyway, even when done it's only going to be comparable to Silverlight 1.1, while all interest is in 2.0 now.
c) For Silverlight 2.0 purposes, they plan to not actually ship it with any video codecs, and pretty much make sure it won't hook into the regular video libraries. *rolls eyes*.
d) Given especially points b and c above, Microsoft clearly plans to give lip service to a portable Silverlight, while MAKING SURE using it on anything but Windows is a second-class experience. I will not stand for this and encourage everyone else not to stand for it either.