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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."
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
PTD is good enough as a demo:
http://ptdef.com/
A few things: you cannot write a (Mozilla) browser plugin all in managed code, there is simply no interface. You at least need a bridge. Silverlight is also related to WPF/Avalon, which has a native component on Windows. Most importantly, though: 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.
n/t
you had me at #!
The Silverlight framework is related to the .Net framework, but does not match it 100% - there are features and functionality unique to Silverlight not currently available in the latest .Net framework.
The first one. Like most Microsoft-shipped .Net libraries, Silverlight class library is heavy with Windows API calls.
Also, the sound and video codecs are native binaries, not managed code.
If it all was 100% managed code AND Microsoft licensing would allow it to be run outside Windows, you'd only need to package Mono as a browser plugin - which itself was not a trivial task because of various Mozilla quirks.
java
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
http://svg.startpagina.nl
You mean the Java plugin? Because Firefox doesn't use Chrome's JavaScript engine, it uses SpiderMonkey.
Java != JavaScript.
IIRC, FF3.1B1 uses something called "TraceMonkey" to optimize Javascript, while Chrome uses something called V8. I'm no expert on the subject, but I'm willing to bet they are not the same thing (just as Java and Javascript are not the same thing).
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."
A bit of history. Silverlight 1 is a joke as a product, Silverlight 2.0 is the real deal. To start with, Silverlight 1 does not have the CLR (.Net runtime), it was pretty much useless for anything complex. Even back when v1 was released, companies (and Microsoft itself) were releasing all the cool stuff in v2.0 alpha.
So mono never really had to chase v1, which had zero chances of succeeding. Which is probably why Mono is still at v1. However, getting v2.0 running would not be too difficult. It is mostly a scaled down .Net runtime, with some multimedia added.
And if you have ever used Mono, you would notice that they have a remarkably complete implementation of .Net, with compilers compatible with the newest from Microsoft.
Life is just a conviction.
While Silverlight does have a "different implementation of CLR", it's not specifically to support dynamic languages. Dynamic language support in Silverlight and the upcoming .NET 4.0 is done via DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime), which is built on top of CLR. CLR itself doesn't have any dynamic-language-specific features (such as the "invokedynamic" Java proposal). DLR uses Reflection, and some smart caching techniques, to achieve good performance.
On the whole, CLR in Silverlight 2.0 seems to be a trimmed version of the mainline CLR somewhere in between 3.5 SP1 and 4.0.
I'm not sure it is even technically true. I can't think of any year when desktop mac sales were as low as desktop linux sales. The lowest point mac ever hit was well into the OSX era and it still had 2-6% depending on how you counted.
Well, sure if you measure sales as opposed to installations. But remember that OSX didn't just take off... I'm pretty dorky, and even I mostly used OS9 for a long time since OSX was pretty raw at first. It took a few years before Apple stopped shipping systems that would boot OS9.
Anyway, by definition, anything starting from zero has to intersect the Linux line if it is going to exceed it - so his comment wasn't all that insightful.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The source code for Moonlight is LGPL (the managed parts we wrote are MIT-X11 while the Silverlight Controls that Microsoft have released fall under MS-PL).
The main thing to do to port Moonlight to BSD is to implement an OSS backend for audio, other than that it should "Just Work" under BSD afaik.
I'm pretty sure more people use Linux than have Silverlight installed. Actually, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if more people use NetBSD than have Silverlight installed.
The Olympics used Silverlight to stream video and managed 8 million downloads per day of the Olympics. The Democratic National Convention streamed videos via Silverlight. So did Major League Baseball until next season. Estimates of Silverlight users are between 15% and 20%, which means that it has a significantly larger install base than that of Linux and NetBSD combined.
I mean, yeah, most people are using Windows XP, and most of the rest are using Windows 98, but as a general rule they don't have Silverlight installed.
Close. Most people are using Windows XP (68.11%) and most of the rest are using Windows Vista (19.29%). Behind that are the Intel-based Mac users (5.94%). Total, that covers 93.34% of the potential audience. Windows 98 comes in at 0.31%, which is incidentally immediately behind iPhone users (0.33%), and less than half of the Linux users (0.71%). But don't feel cocky, more people use Windows NT 4.0 (0.78%) to browse the web than Linux.
There *are* people who have installed it, because, you know, Microsoft says it's going to be the Next Big Thing, and that's good enough for them. But we're talking about a very small number of people here, probably a single-digit percentage of Vista users.
Or because they went to a site pushing video via the Silverlight media player, saw a little icon that said to click here to update, and 5 seconds later were viewing that video. The Silverlight rollout is significantly less intrusive than a Flash update, and a good percentage of people manage to keep Flash current. Microsoft will have no issues pushing Silverlight, and Moonlight will open up the market a little further.
How do you measure sales of something that is free?
Linux distros don't have to be purchased, in many cases, so are we comparing the number of Linux desktops in use or the number of desktops sold with a given operating system?
Who knows that I am running Ubuntu on a desktop and a laptop at home? As a Linux desktop user, am I the share of some market? Which one?
Well, if you're still "learning" C#, then there's a good chance that 99.9% of what you're writing will already run flawlessly under mono. It's not until you start doing a lot of tricky and OS specific things that compatibility breaks. Simple thing to do: Download the VMWare image of Suse with Mono installed (or install Mono yourself on a Linux or Mac system) and then just try to run your compiled .NET apps directly. There really isn't much more to it than that.
Tips for maintaining cross platform compatibility in general:
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
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"Linux" (who?) hasn't spent billions on advertising, unless I'm missing something in between all the "I'm a PC" and "Think Different" commercials.
Like it or not, that's what makes the difference to the masses: product placement and brand recognition, not technical superiority. And people generally don't buy Macs because they "work when they should". The majority of Mac users are just as clueless as the majority of Windows users. They might believe the hype that a Mac "just works" but anyone with a clue will tell you it has just as many problems as any other OS.
And finally, a huge percentage of Mac users bought the Mac because they think it's pretty. The OS and technical merits had nothing to do with their decision.
So Linux has very little name recognition, isn't advertised, and the average person has no idea what it is -- yet it's doing okay and gaining numbers every year. Meanwhile, Apple spends billions per year on advertising to the masses about how awesome Macs are -- and they, too, are doing "okay". Kind of sad.
By the way, Macintosh came out in 1984. Apple has had twenty four years to pimp their commercial product. Linux wasn't even around until 91 or so, and desktop penetration wasn't even a goal until maybe a few years ago. Trying to compare the two is absurd, but if you really want to, it makes Apple look pretty pathetic.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
The problem was the US governments retarded export restrictions on encryption and SSL. Thanks Clinton. Like its going to stop terrorists from downloading the codes illegall...
The result has been that many Asian banks switched to activeX controls for transactions since hackers can easily de-encrypt a 64-bit encryption algorithm. The browsers were all crippled so activeX was the only solution available for true 128 bit encryption.
The result is that activeX is the defacto standard for e-commerce and banking so many users do not want a mac because their bank or ebay asain edition requires activex for authentication. I am not too sure on ebay but plugging in an activeX control for any credit transaction is the norm over there.
The Japanese had a love affair with Apple for some time before the internet took off. But now its useless so this is they do not like anything non Microsoft today. Its amazing what happens when one company gets to decide standards to see a monopoly form in the marketplace. I hate ms for this more than anything as its the only reason they are still around.
http://saveie6.com/
There are Ubuntu certifications, actually, and a well established corporation behind it.
Silverlight is basically a .NET-based version of Flash or Java. Being based on .NET instead of a sandboxed interpreter it should be faster, and they get to work with Novell to try and get some open source street cred.
We want open standards, is what we want, we don't care about the actual software implementation. Both Adobe and Microsoft are using closed standards. They don't want anyone else making software for their proprietary standards because they want you using their own implementations. Having an open standard would actually mean easy access for any and all software to implement it, and encoders/decoders wouldn't have to be playing a reverse engineering game of catchup.
The W3C needs to develop an open standard for displaying and manipulating SVG in browsers to allow implementation to be easy.
WMV, H.264, and other codecs are also proprietary formats. The fact that x264 and Xvid and others exist and are open source doesn't change the fact that they are still controlled and patented video codecs. We want actual open systems which are not encumbered by anything, i.e. neither Adobe nor Microsoft can control. Unless those companies completely open up, or until an actual open standard comes about, users will be chained to these two companies, which is what they want.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.