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Portugal's Vortalgate — No Microsoft, No Bidding
An anonymous reader writes "Companies using software other than Microsoft's are unable to bid at many Portuguese public tenders. This is due to the use of Silverlight 2.0 technology by the company, Vortal, contracted to build the e-procurement portal. This situation has triggered a complaint to the European Commission by the Portuguese Open Source Business Association; the case is unofficially known in Portugal as 'Vortalgate.'"
What about Macs, and Moonlight. Granted Using Silverlight is a stupid move done by STUPID Developers, and braindead PHB. But still if you wanted to do bidding you had ways.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Good for Portugal. It is about time some country stood up for quality closed-source software in the face of all you open-source zealots who won't take total cost of ownership into account.
...that such a thing could happen.
Incompetence or corruption, which is worse?
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Yeah, because no one here is biased...
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
> This is due to the use of Silverlight 2.0 technology by the company,
> Vortal, contracted to build the e-procurement portal.
I'm sure the bid said, "accessible via any computer with a web browser"? Or "apps available under x, y, and z OS's", or some such?
Quite frankly, although Microsoft getting people dependent on their proprietary APIs is a common business model, this isn't really Microsoft's fault, but Vortal's. Or the doof who put together the RFQ for this particular service for not being more specific about what kinds of computers can access it.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft." Might not hold much longer.
Silverlight is a wonderful programming platform, easier and more elegant than flash will ever be
That's nice and everything, but anyone using Flash OR Silverlight as a required part of a tendering process needs to be put down for the good of humanity. What could possibly have been going on in their tiny little minds? Responding to this insanity by babbling about Silverlight being better than Flash is absurd.
Heh!
What else can we do? Everything said, it is Portugal...
Thumbs up for ESOP for filling this complaint!
Silverlight comes along offering nothing new but plenty of obstacles and lock-out of end user browsers, requiring active download of a plug-in, and yet, there are bozos out there willing to commit paying customers and their websites to an endless, costly, non-standard nightmare in exchange for nothing! You can't make shit like that up, it's real.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/First-Beta-of-Silverlight-for-Linux-Available-for-Download-99110.shtml
...and when Microsoft has wrapped your entire world into a compendium of proprietary digital glop with no hope of improvement, only then will you realize how bad it can be.
...again.
Most of the stuff on
No, it's a trap. Use it at your peril.
It's not about the quality of Silverlight, if you didn't get it go read again.
People with other Operating Systems other than those provided by Microsoft are not able to access a governmental website, that is what is being discussed.
Mono will always be behind and you can count on MacOSX support being dropped quite soon. Using Silverlight now is no different than what using activeX meant in the past.
And even better, if you don't work for Novell, and use it via Mono, you might even get sued! Yay for patent-encumbered software that relies on the goodwill of a multiple-conviction monopolist.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
...would like to apologize to our Portuguese friends for giving them that horrible, overused suffix.
I have a commodore_64 for which has been working just fine for me for many many years, but I am told that I must have a "web browser" in order to post comments to the Slashdot web site. This is DISCRIMINATION and requires a substantial outlay of cash for me. As soon as I can find a government official who doesn't laugh at me, I'll be filing my complaint.
Do other countries/languages use the "-gate" nomenclature for every government scandal/complaint/event too?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
.net was a wonderful platform adopted by everyone. and flash was the driving force behind web.
in an alternate reality perhaps.
Read radical news here
I agree Silverlight is probably better than Flash, but that's setting a rather low bar.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
If I think that I would have a good chance of getting the contract with my bid, I would find a windows machine to do it.
In today's economy, purism is a luxury.
Quite frankly, although Microsoft getting people dependent on their proprietary APIs is a common business model, this isn't really Microsoft's fault, but Vortal's.
Well, sort of. Remember that ongoing prosecution of MS in the EU courts for antitrust abuse? Remember what it is about? MS intentionally broke interoperability with Web standards and prevented Web standards from advancing and being more functional on the majority of user's systems by leveraging their Windows monopoly to artificially promote IE. As a result, it is harder for companies like Vortal to implement a procurement system using Web standards, resulting in more companies using Silverlight (and Flash). But since Silverlight is another Microsoft product... well hopefully you see where this is going.
You can argue Vortal should not have used Silverlight for this project and I'd agree with you. That doesn't mean MS bears no guilt for making developing this with interoperable Web standards artificially difficult for Vortal.
Work for Novell? The Novell-Microsoft agreement does not protect Novell in anyway from being sued. It protects Novell's clients.
I suppose Flash is much better supported on Linux. Hmmm. Yes there are flash versions, but Adobe took their sweet time about it, did they not?
I'm not a FAN of silverlight (or flash!), but Silverlight seems to be better supported on Linux and Mac than Flash was initially. I could be wrong about that.
I don't undrestand why Microsoft gets blamed for producing a product that isn't supported on platforms that Windows isn't supported on. I may as well complain that it took forEVER for Amarok to get Windows support, and it's STILL not available! Or, even better, that Safari took forEVER to be ported to Windows! Or whatever other software you care to complain about.
If developers choose to use a MS only product, that's not MS's fault. Ms is under no obligation to produce software that works with everyone's, including their competitors, operating system. That makes no sense, monopoly or no monopoly. Now, if they were forcing the developers to use Silverlight, or forcing Adobe not to let Flash have a Windows version, that's different.
Another informative jewel by our "friend" kdawson. Silverlight is just another technology, like flash, java, or you name it.
And a closed one at that.
He does bring up a good point: Shouldn't public interfaces use speech-free technologies? Why is Javascript not good enough?
It's just getting more and more popular, and there is direct support for Windows and MacOs. The mono team is doing a wonderful work bringing Silverlight for Linux as Moonlight. True, 2.0 is not really supported yet, but it's on it's way, really soon now (TM).
Translation: if you want to use it without hassles, you'll have to buy something from an american company.
P.S. HURD is "on its way, really soon now (TM)", too.
I don't know why the vortigaunts in question don't just zap the portugese computers and make them work. They do wonders for pretty much anything else. I mean, I don't know anything about computers besides how to play half life 2 and even -I- know that much.
s/Firefox/Firefox on Linux/
My blog
...okay. Do you have a point to make, or did I miss it? If the company were Chinese would that make you happier? I don't understand your logic...
And even better, if you don't work for Novell, and use it via Mono, you might even get sued! Yay for patent-encumbered software that relies on the goodwill of a multiple-conviction monopolist.
Bu... But Microsoft products are an IT industry standard.
"What could possibly have been going on in their tiny little minds?"
Thank you for clarifying that. I agree.
Of course, possibly they were paid by Microsoft.
... I must object to these allegations in the strongest terms. Our QA department went above and beyond the call of duty to ensure compatibility, by testing our software not only on HP and Dell computers, but also Lenovo, Sony, and Acer. Whatever objections these critics have are clearly spurious.
One! Don't you feel dumb.
Two! Look at you.
Three! Don't you ever make jokes about me behind my back or else I'll stomp you into the ground
http://www.mono-project.com/news/archive/2009/Jan-13.html
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Isn't Portugal's current prime-minister (Jose Socrates) notorious for his close association with everything Microsoft?
And isn't he currently at the center of a national scandal involving serious corruption charges?
And didn't his government recently try to sell the notion that the Intel Classmate they are introducing into public schools is a "portuguese invention"?
Anyway, this sort of report does not surprise me one bit...
only to those on the outside
Of course, if it doesn't, you have the source so fix it yourself.
Sorry, what planet were you from again? Telling Aunt Mildred "you have the source, so fix it yourself" isn't going to fly.
As for trotting out apple, you're hopelessly naive if you think that microsoft won't kill the OSX version of silverlight the minute apple's market share gets a little bigger than microsoft would like.
For the government to put microsoft firmly in control of a lever by which which can hurt its competitors as much as it likes is like putting the proverbial fox in charge of the henhouse.
I'm not a FAN of silverlight (or flash!), but Silverlight seems to be better supported on Linux and Mac than Flash was initially. I could be wrong about that.
Why on earth do you imagine you would you need either Silverlight or Flash to submit a bid?
This isn't a frigging high end interactive-video-entertainment application, this is something that shouldn't need anything more than Mosaic 1.0 or Lynx.
If the company were Chinese would that make you happier?
You shouldn't have to pay to use a government website. Especially not someone in a different country.
Am I asking too much?
On Slashdot, that comment is immediately recognized as intended to be humorous.
Mono will always be behind and you can count on MacOSX support being dropped quite soon.
I agree with the first statement. However, when did Microsoft decide to drop Silverlight for OS X?
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
As for trotting out apple, you're hopelessly naive if you think that microsoft won't kill the OSX version of silverlight the minute apple's market share gets a little bigger than microsoft would like.
No doubt just like they killed Office.
I would tend to think you're hopelessly paranoid on the topic, if we're going to be tossing around superlatives.
Mono will always be behind and you can count on MacOSX support being dropped quite soon.
Except ActiveX was more or less impossible to be cross platform. Silverlight is not.
You're also the second person I've seen trotting out the meme that Microsoft is "just about to" kill Silverlight on the Mac. What makes you believe that?
It is rude of them to commune by flux shifting in front of those whose Vortal inputs are impaired. They should vocalize in our auditory language as a matter of courtesy. Unless they wish to say unflattering things about us. Just so.
only to those on the outside
Everyone will be on the outside when the price of watching your own media skyrockets, or your machine is scrubbed of things deemed "illegal".
Most of the stuff on
Are we all forgetting about Moonlight? Silverlight actually has a supported fully open-source alternative. Flash does not-- the open source flash solutions are basically reverse engineered while Mooonlight has support and documentation from Microsoft-- while retaining no licensing snafus.
Basically, you're all letting your fanboy rage over Microsoft blind your sense to the point that you're pushing a fully proprietary non-oss solution (flash) over a fully open source solution. If this site simply keeps in mind that Moonlight support is the base level of silverlight support to shoot for, then they've got a completely open-source friendly solution that has decent development tools (silverlight has a beautiful C# .NET base that is far easier to work with than flash-- not to mention can be developed with free tools).
As far as I can tell, it doesn't matter how much better the development is made by tools, docs, and language, or how open source the project is... all that matters is Microsoft affiliation.
So slashdot isn't necessarily pro-linux, pro-oss, or pro-free software. It's just anti-microsoft. I mean, that's the major crux of slashdot- that is its entire focus. Isn't that a little... you know... sad?
Here's the final word: if Microsoft is beating the Adobe toolchain in a cost-benefit-analysis, then more people should volunteer on Moonlight-- the project is progressing well and should remain at a competitve level with mainline silverlight. It has way more of a chance than gnash or anything, that's for damn sure. If Adobe wants their customers back, they can open source flash. That's that. I could use less binary blobs in my system.
No doubt just like they killed Office.
Microsoft nearly did kill Office for the Mac, but was a required part of a dispute settlement. Now, it's too profitable to kill off. That's called a dilemma.
Most of the stuff on
IE for OSX.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Point is: MS is dominant. MS is proprietary. In other words that means that Microsoft uses it's dominant position to release some stuff that nobody is allowed to know how it works, and so competition is doomed. That means anti-trust. That means that the EU needs to start kicking some serious ass along the lines of "Microsoft, open up the specs, release without a license, stick to your specs, otherwise you are no longer allowed to release new software on the EU. No fines. No multi-billion dollar payments. Just do it or lose the right to sell anything untill you comply.
It. Must. Be. Like. That. And. No. Other. Way.
Here be signatures
Of course, if it doesn't, you have the source so fix it yourself.
And the specs to see what needs to be complied to? Oh wait...
Here be signatures
Not anymore. Flash specs were released by Adobe some time ago. Flash is no longer a plugin, but a protocol/language/standard/whatever. Look at Gnash while they are implementing it...
Here be signatures
Oh for god sake stop trolling! The point is reliance. The 'American company' refers to Microsoft and not 'from America'.
Here be signatures
Seriously, who needs or uses "Silverlight" anyways? With Flash, Javascript and HTML v5 compatible with all popular operating systems: Windows, linux, OS X and others, do we really need or want another MS proprietary protocol to do the same thing, but also lock us into using Windows? Nope, don't think so!
You're also the second person I've seen trotting out the meme that Microsoft is "just about to" kill Silverlight on the Mac. What makes you believe that?
IE for OSX. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
LOL, MS discontinued IE for Mac, so they're going to discontinue Silverlight. Yup, that's bulletproof.
/sarcasm
I do internal development, on a controlled environment, and I have been pushing for moving to Silverlight for the last 3 months or so.
Our users are demanding more 'Web 2.0' styled interfaces, but we're currently supporting IE 5.5, 6, 7, FF 3, and a handful of Opera users.
The incredible mish-mash of CSS/HTML/Javascript/ASP.Net/AJAX/JQuery can do it sure. But it is a royal pain in the ass. The design paradigm looks like something out of a Dr Sues book.
By switching to Silverlight we gain all of the UI features (and more) in a single language that is in the core-competency of the development team. For us, it makes sense. For external sites, it would be a bigger risk until SL gets Flash like penetration.
Comparing SL to Flash though, I think SL is off to a much better start. Both are proprietary. Both have some type of "Open Source" (a lol-worthy quote) model from MS/Adobe. At least we can see the code inside the black box.
SL 1.0 was released for Windows/Mac September 2007.
ML 1.0 was released for Linux January 2009.
About 16 months to get Linux caught up.
Flash 7 (MX04) for Linux was released what, some time back in 2004?
Flash 8 wasn't released for linux (and it wasn't backwards compatible with 7)
Flash 9 was released for Windows/Max late 2006.
Flash 9 was released for Linux early 2007.
About 3 years to get Linux caught up.
It's hard to pull up release dates from before then, but given the current state of Flash on Linux (a mild jump up from pure crap), I can't imagine their support a decade ago was anything more than laughable.
Seeing the Moonlight team's progress so far, and the apparent ease of access they have to Microsoft and the Silverlight team, it seems like the jump to Moonlight 2.0 isn't going to be a 3 year delay like the jump from Flash 7 to Flash 9 was for Linux. And once Moonlight 2.0 is running, further jumps to the inevitable SL 3.0 will likely hinge more on the Mono project keeping up with the 4.0 version of the .Net Framework.
Using either Silverlight or Flash in inappropriate situations is dumb. But the existence of Silverlight and the competition it creates for Flash will truly only improve the functionality of rich browser applications (what I've been trying to get coined as 'Chubby clients').
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Just two cents
- Vortal portal is not about jobs, it 's really about public procurement
- the problem is not only silverlight. The certificates only work on Microsoft, so you can not sign a proposal
What? I believe i'm a pretty well informed guy and I've never heard of this "case" before.. But ye, the government is pretty tight with Microsoft and proprietary software/standards.
My experience with Moonlight on Debian Lenny under Iceweasel:
I play a game called Conquer Club (online Risk). There are greasemonkey scripts for getting data and one of them uses Silverlight to draw graphs. I figured I'd try it. I get linked to the MS site, which routes me to the Moonlight home. I click the install and the plugin is dropped into my browser. Easy enough. I go back to the page that required Silverlight... doesn't detect it. I click on the Silverlight "get it now" picture and my browser crashes because the Silverlight site tries to push some codecs onto my machine.
I'm still waiting to be impressed by Silverlight in some way on Linux. On the other hand, my 64-bit beta Flash plug-in works great even though I had to manually place it in a plug in folder on my machine.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
"Portugal is the leading country in the new MS technology Silverlight"
It's sad, but i bet some of the portuguese media will put a positive spin on this. (if it gets their atention)
Microsoft doesn't maintain Mono and that runs on OSuX just fine.
Microsoft nearly did kill Office for the Mac, but was a required part of a dispute settlement. Now, it's too profitable to kill off. That's called a dilemma.
MSOffice for the Mac is profitable, but not so much that MS could not kill it if they thought it strategic. The reason they don't is because it would not be a good move for them. Nearly everyone knows MS has a monopoly on desktop OS's, but they also have monopoly influence on the office suite software market. They've spent huge amounts of money in settlements making sure no court case ever gets to the point where that is an official ruling, but it is true nonetheless. It is one of their largest lock-ins to prevent Linux adoption which is why they have been fighting open standard formats so hard and in such a dirty fashion. It's also their business plan going forward for software as a service.
Losing the entire Mac chunk of the market would do a lot undermine their ability to maintain that monopoly influence going forward. It would almost instantly triple the market for alternative office suites and MS really, really doesn't want that to happen.
LOL, MS discontinued IE for Mac, so they're going to discontinue Silverlight. Yup, that's bulletproof.
It certainly isn't bulletproof, but it is MS's tried and true business strategy. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Once they have sufficient market share for a technology and the competition is hosed, they tend to make those technologies exclusive to their platform. It's not just IE.
You seem to forget Microsoft attitude towards software patents and Linux. Microsoft is allowing a (mostly unfunctional) implementation of Silverlight in order to get the perception of it being cross platform, but at some point, and by murphy's law it will be the worst time for your deployment, they will pull the patents card from their sleve.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Go to craigslist and search for silverlight under the jobs section for a couple of cities. I bet all of those are also "paid" off by Microsoft. If Microsoft had anywhere near the level of control you Tin foil nutters think they do, they would have already killed of Apple and Redhat/Canonical/Novel/Suse/etc
Can we get a proper conspiracy theory now? Something interesting please..
It would almost instantly triple the market for alternative office suites and MS really, really doesn't want that to happen.
Yes, yet another prong in the dilemma. If they did discontinue Mac Office in 1997, they could viably claim that it wasn't worth maintaining, even though it would be quite obvious why they did it. It could have pushed Apple as a viable platform over the cliff. At this point, I would [almost] welcome them to try it. You're quite right that the vacuum they'd leave would be quickly flooded with competition for the entire class of software - or at least all the current alternatives (some of which are quite good) would step into the light. Oh, and the DOJ would have something to say as well.
Most of the stuff on
Wasn't that some direct to video Dolph Lundgren sci-fi action movie?
(...) Microsoft getting people dependent on their proprietary APIs is a common business model, this isn't really Microsoft's fault, but Vortal's (...)
No! It is the portuguese govern's fault! They should have tested properly what they bought!
Sometime later this year according to the GP.
Silverlight works on 98% of computers (Windows + Mac) and for that other 2% theres Moonlight, Wine, or VMware. This really isn't an issue.
Why use any proprietary system which reaches 70% of the people when you can use Standards and reach 100% of the people? I fault the idiots who can't recognize the trap this is.
The other possibility is the people who spec this system are too young to recall how bad it was under the heyday of the Microsoft Dictatorship. Development stalled, bugs went unpatched, exploits soared, functionality went down, costs went up, better technologies died etc. Now, the younger generation doesn't believe you when you refer to Microsoft as the Evil Overlord. It's just another vendor now.
I guess we have come a long way.
Most of the stuff on
Isn't there an open-source, blessed-by-Microsoft implementation of Silverlight for Linux, released through Novell? (Or was it part of the Mono project?)
Moonlight?
1. IE as an example is ridiculous. It is a HTML renderer, Which BTW was a very simple spec considering the timeline of this. You could switch to nestscape with minimal problems. (minimal being subjective.. considering the absolutely horrible buggy codebase of Netscape)
2. There is no advantage in "appearing" cross platform. Business owners don't think like 2 year olds, they want the real thing.. they wont assume MS is going to deliver a Linux client till they actually do. If they do assume, it probably means they are stupid, and if a stupid business dies, hell, that's capitalism. But anyway considering Linux user base is still negligible it can be safely ignored. Besides don't you guys all use no script and ad blockers? For a group of people actively trying to kill the web you sure do make a lot of demands.
Lets make it more clear then, besides paranoid tin foil conspiracies, do you have any other evidence?
Yawn. People have been trotting out this conspiracy theory since .NET was announced. It hasn't come to pass. How much do you want to bet it never will?
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
... sometime around 2000 give or take a couple of years. The government hired a company to write software so that small businesses could do their tax returns online. The software was supposed to be OS neutral. The company first got the Windows version running and released, and then asked themselves "now ,how do we port all this ActiveX stuff to Mac and Linux?"
Not having any involvement in small business taxes, I don't know how it progressed after that. I hope it involved firings and large penalty payments.
(This is all from my fallible memory, so may not be entirely accurate.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Right! I'm wondering how long it would take for the European Comission to get of Microsoft's back if they say: "you don't like our Media Player, then we won't sell our products in the EU". Probably like 2 days. I wish they really did this, cause this whole monopolies-hiding-around-every-corner-waiting-to-rape-the-consumer stuff makes me sick. See, as a microsoft customer i am not especially happy about them wasting billions because of some Brussels (or DC) retards instead of delivering products i want. Also, I surely am not happy about this as a MS shareholder.
VortalGates
Your beliefs don't stack up with reality. Even if they stop supporting silverlight on mac, Moonlight is out for linux NOW, and silverlight 2 compatibility is already alpha.
This is all from a 100% open source firefox plugin. How will MS kill that?
They have nothing to do with it!! They wrote the spec and are helping the moonlight developers. Don't bring out the "patents will kill mono" card, its not real. MS know any attempt to kill mono (or linux) with patents would do too much damage to themselves.
I agree Silverlight is probably better than Flash, but that's setting a rather low bar.
Agreed - this is setting the bar low. A much better bar would be SVG. The 1.2 draft already supports every feature in Flash or Silverlight and is completely open (comes from the people who made HTML if this is new to you). It's completely xml based with the same DOM programming interface as HTML allowing AJAX as we're now seeing for HTML.
And here's where Microsoft is at fault:
SVG is probably already supported to some degree in your browser natively without any plugins (unless your primative enough to still be using IE) which is because Microsoft has been passively refusing to include it in its browser - presumable because it IS a direct competitor to Silverlight. Check out the MSDN thread about it's support that's been running since 2006 with no proper response.
That sort of brinksmanship would have the potential to hurt both, although I suspect MS has more to lose in it if such a bluff is called. Much more.
Telling Aunt Mildred "you have the source, so fix it yourself" isn't going to fly.
...and thus we understand why the zealots are so horribly out of touch. Aunt Mildred will be listening to Metallica before she uses Linux as her operating system.
"When you see a unixer brainwashed beyond saving, kick him out of the door." - Xah Lee
IE as an example is ridiculous. It is a HTML renderer, Which BTW was a very simple spec considering the timeline of this.
It is an intentionally incompatible/nonstandard HTML renderer.
There is no advantage in "appearing" cross platform. Business owners don't think like 2 year olds, they want the real thing..
They're still at the "embrace stage". That's where they get buy in, remain cross platform, and do everything to gain market share. It isn't until they have significant market share that they break cross platform compatibility.
. If they do assume, it probably means they are stupid, and if a stupid business dies, hell, that's capitalism.
Monopolies can be leveraged to undermine capitalism.
But anyway considering Linux user base is still negligible it can be safely ignored.
No one implementing new technologies today can ignore Linux. There is no guarantee it will ever have significant market share for a use, but it is a reasonable possibility to plan for as a contingency.
Besides don't you guys all use no script and ad blockers?
Us guys?
For a group of people actively trying to kill the web you sure do make a lot of demands.
The first part is a troll and for the second part, when did it become unreasonable to expect companies to obey antitrust laws that have been enforced for a hundred years now?
Lets make it more clear then, besides paranoid tin foil conspiracies, do you have any other evidence?
Where do you think "embrace, extend, extinguish" came from? It was in testimony and internal memos revealed during MS's US antitrust case. It's more than just evidence it is several sources of evidence, vetted by the courts and submitted under oath.
Your beliefs don't stack up with reality. Even if they stop supporting silverlight on mac, Moonlight is out for linux NOW, and silverlight 2 compatibility is already alpha.
Yeah, and what do you expect? MS will maintain compatibility until they have a large market share for the technology. They always do.
This is all from a 100% open source firefox plugin. How will MS kill that?
Well they could use patents, either on already implemented features or on features they extend Silverlight with. They can just come out with Silverlight 3, shift the majority of the developer base (since they make the dev tools) and include items that are patented in it or which they obfuscate the source/API to. That's there usual method anyway. Of course since technology is moving forward they could get more creative and use a signing framework in Windows.
MS know any attempt to kill mono (or linux) with patents would do too much damage to themselves.
Yes it would... today. Once Silverlight is a well established technology, however, that will likely no longer be the case. It's not like they haven't done this before you know. It's not like we have internal memos and testimony from insiders where they discussed this exact strategy to be used to break compatibility with other Web technologies they were implementing.
It seemed terrible from the inside, too,
Aunt Mildred will have no clue what her operating system is anyway, except her bored techie niece or nephew will have had it switched to something saner to ease the maintenance nightmare involved.
websites should use the common denominator in technology for the content they need to expose. In this case some dhtml and ajax would suffice.
In my opinion Vortalgate is the ultimate abuse of power, imagine that you want to work in IT for the government, how can you even apply if the job postings there is the only way you can access the job and you are using linux ? Only MS users would get hired, the MS fortress is safe forever ! This is the ultimate abuse of power from the MS and the portuguese ministry of technology, i.e. if you do not have our shitty alternative to shitty flash you can't apply for a job !
The Portuguese prime minister have shown cases of corruption before and i suspect the same here and with the portuguese magellan laptop.
That being said the MS cancer will spread for everyone needing to exchange documents with the government since the government has made an agreement with MS to only use their products without any public offerings for better options.
And do no say i didn't warn the government, i wrote a letter on their site to both the ministry of technology and the prime minister warning of the deadlock of proprietary formats and the advantages of OSS.
Portugal is either corrupt or ignorant to the bone marrow.
I still have faith that this stupid economic crisis takes care of this kind of problems by makind manking go frugal.
Preferences -> Authors -> uncheck kdawson.
Sheesh, you'd think John Katz was back or something. Hyperbolic misdirection is boring, even when the underlying principle is something you agree on..
FTFY
If the company were Spanish, it would be relevant to me if I were Spanish.
It would not be a pay Americans to play with my government situation then.
Of course, as an American I win in this situation (in the long run reliance on any one provider by people may cause me to lose though).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
And sliverlight runs under what broswers? It will run under IE 5.5 right? Why not just demand all your users get Firefox 3/Opera/Safari 4 and write cutting edge CSS3 pages with XML and SVG for all those cool effects. The only browser that's broken is IE. Yet every body jumps to the "microsoft only" solution as the savior to the problem??? Why???
exactly, Microsoft is "completing" with Adobe Flash here, not Apple or Linux. It's in their interest to embrace everybody using Adobe Flash... and they'll throw PHds at doing it better.
When they get tired of losing money on this hobby project they'll cut and extinguish all the solutions they've built up.. leaving every body in the lurch of choosing the "microsoft way" or another platform. It happens over and over.
The only way to really stop this is to gut all of Microsoft's cash. A court needs to take 150% of Microsoft's cash and give it to the stock holders (it's their money being mismanaged) then put a ban on buying companies and on issuing stocks. They'll do just fine and be a stronger company, but it will force them to sell assets they've been "collecting" simply so nobody else can have them. That will push those assets out in to the world and create voids where Microsoft can't touch for a few years. Imagine investors stuck with only the high margin products that pull 85% margins and none of the dead weight!!
Personally I would not use any proprietary formatted content on any website I develop as I want my content to be available to everyone, regardless of which operating system, browser or other software package that they use.
For the record, I prefer Linux to Microsoft, my choice.
With that said, here are a list of issues and/or problems with Silverlight that I copied down from another website, I thought some might find it informative.
Personally I want a FREE and open source H.264 codec. Not only is the quality superior, you can actually compress content down to lesser resolutions that Microsoft Media Player uses (and other proprietary vendors are using right now).
Here are a list of problems, in no particular order, with Silverlight from either this site or this site or a link from one of those two sites...I did not document the exact link that day, sorry. I basically went through the comments or posts (about a month ago I believe, which is why I do not remember the exact website) and jotted down what people, who mostly like Silverlight, stated were problems they would like to see fixed in the next update. I remember believing at the time that I was on a Microsoft website or at least a person who preferred Silverlight to other solutions. Therefore I figured the gripes were from people hoping to influence the next release of Silverlight to be valid. Granted it would not surprise if one or two of them were wrong for reasons I would NOT know.
For me not having H.264 support is enough to NOT use Silverlight. And I am smart enough to know that when they implement a H.264 codec in Silverlight, they will use a proprietary H.264 CODEC rather than many of the open source and FREE H.264 CODECS. And we all know why. For this reason alone, if you are a web developer or have decision making power within your web development organization you should recommend an open source or FREE CODEC as choice NUMBER 1 and if desired a proprietary CODEC as number 2 for Microsoft, Adobe (80% of the FLASH market) and/or Apple. Is there anyone else, operating system wise that I am missing? My point is, if you use the FREE CODEC, (that all the Linux distros support, (top ten distros)), than everyone even the Microsoft and Apple operating system users will have access to your content. Thus you have net neutrality, should the proprietary player NOT be able to play the FREE video and/or audio CODEC; the user can download a plugin, web widget or software package that will play them...and they do NOT have to switch operating systems to get this functionality, they just need a better player than the one provided by the proprietary company. The reverse can NOT be said to be true can it, if the proprietary CODEC will NOT work with the FREE player, the proprietary company will NOT provide a way to play the content, except with their player. . That alone is enough of a reason NOT to use proprietary players. The fact that the FREE players use SUPERIOR Video and Audio CODECs is icing on your cake! While the new Windows Media player will play H.264, go back and verify the resolution and frame rate that it will play it at. A bit lower then the alternative FREE codecs...no surprise to me there. Consider that before Windows Media Player 8, they would tell people to take the VC-I codec and increase the frame rate by a minor amount in a lame attempt at generating what they called, laughingly,
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People have been trotting this since stupid OSS wannabes at Novell keep trying to cozy up to Microsoft instead of standing and fighting. .Net is not a language but a suite of tools to replace the aging windows APIs. Microsoft has the heck patented out of it. Stupid bozos think they can have mono, which is just the stripped down EMCA submission and then play catchup. Their like Charlie Brown with the football. Instead of leading the way to something new they're chasing money at the coattails of the big bad wolf.
Java is opening up, so there's no need for mono at all. It was the attempt by one proprietary company to "play open source house" with the big player and needs to die to free up resources for real open languages.
The problem with SVG is that it tried to be a "kitchen sink" spec and big companies like Adobe and Microsoft sat on the committee throwing in every thing to get at their competitors. It's a great spec but several dozens of times more complex than HTML/XML/CSS. It's not a "grown" spec, one that grew by specification and implementation like HTML did. It's a "spec by committee" with a bunch of conflicting good ideas that nobody took the time to put into real software. Even the people that are implementing it are all starting in different places because it's so big... so what each browser does have doesn't even act right.
The whole thing needs stripped down into what we can have in 6 months on every browser that's started it. Then write another spec for 1 year's worth of work after that... then see where it goes from there. The same issue with CSS2/3 that the specs are smaller, but too big, there's no synchronization of implementations.. nobody uses ANY of the features.. and none get tested or standardized.
how did this get on /. this is neither news for nerds, nor stuff that matters. one search leads to nearly 5 million hits to refute the story posted.
http://www.google.com/search?q=silverlight+linux&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
maybe the real story should be that portugese companies don't know how to google.
lose != loose
Flash 9 was released for Windows/Max late 2006.
Flash 9 was released for Linux early 2007.
About 3 years to get Linux caught up.
Looks like less than a year.
It is an intentionally incompatible/nonstandard HTML renderer
Intentionally? Stopped reading after this. Damn.. got sucked in yet again feeding a tin foil nutjob...
It fucking sucks, its encumbered, no standard at all and you need to give your ass to MS to develop a port for it.
You know it since you work for microsoft.
NO SIG
Its the fault of the government asshole making some dough on the side by choosing a provider without making sure that they comply with what should be minimal government procurement practice for public facing electronic trading.
Same in portugal as anywhere i guess.
NO SIG
Moonlight 2.0 builds that support Silverlight 2.0.
Mono has a hackathon going:
http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight2Hacking
Which lists the areas they're looking for help with.
My video compression blog
Don't forget WMP on OS X, VBA on OS X, MSN Messenger, and, of course, Rotor.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
There's no reason for accepting an RFP to require either. You want to waste developer hours on dancing baloney, fine, but make the HTML4 and HTTP form version work first or there's no reason anyone should believe anything you claim about competencies.
I thought MSFT incorporated in Ireland so they wouldn't have to bother with those pesky US taxes? So please don't blame us in the USA for MSFT since they are as big of a tax dodging multinational corp as Halliburton. But I just don't understand why anyone would WANT to use silverlight. Didn't anybody learn anything from "playsforsure"? The second MSFT has the monopoly they'll bring out "Silverlight 4.0-Now only for Windows 9 SE!" and everyone else will get boned again. Oh well, history and repeat and all that jazz. Some folks just don't ever learn.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
And the specs to see what needs to be complied to? Oh wait...
here it is. http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-335.htm
Unless you meant the spec for XAML, which you could find at http://robrelyea.com/silverlight/xvSpec
Or perhaps the SMPTE spec for VC-1 ala http://www.smpte.org/news/pr/view?item_key=a135f13b173a982bb71f1cd3ee4403671fcf2057
My video compression blog
Are you kidding? MS knows they're already skating on thin ice. You can't threaten a huge amount of people when the alternative is free. Sure, sure, we're all aware of the various OS office software flaws and shortcomings, but are there any that would cause an entire country, let alone an aggregation of countries, serious pain?
Right now, I'd say that the only real area where public work relies on the MS environment is in GIS, and ESRI is really due to have their apple cart knocked over RSN.
((because their basic interface is Photoshop 5.0, that's why))
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Clever--what you've done (in the few cases when you're not actually factually wrong) is find a list of programs that had minimal usage on Mac and then make them examples of something greater?
WMP for Mac -- there is still a plugin you can get (flip4mac)--MS distributed.
VBA for OSX -- is coming back in the next version of Office (thank god)
MSN Messenger -- can't say I've ever used it on Mac or PC, but a very quick google shows that you are entirely wrong (they are making current releases, and plan a large new release soon): http://www.officeformac.com/blog/An-Update-on-Messenger-for-Mac/
Rotor -- Yeah, project is dead in the water.
IE for OSX.
Microsoft stopped developing IE for OSX when Apple started Safari. Frankly, there wasn't a need for it anymore. Until that point, IE for Mac was a pretty damn good browser, better in many ways than IE for windows, IMHO.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Are we pretending to be profound by appeals to authority through well known quotes? You're wrong--Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Microsoft nearly did kill Office for the Mac, but was a required part of a dispute settlement. Now, it's too profitable to kill off. That's called a dilemma.
When was this?
Of course, if it doesn't, you have the source so fix it yourself.
Sorry, what planet were you from again? Telling Aunt Mildred "you have the source, so fix it yourself" isn't going to fly.
As for trotting out apple, you're hopelessly naive if you think that microsoft won't kill the OSX version of silverlight the minute apple's market share gets a little bigger than microsoft would like.
For the government to put microsoft firmly in control of a lever by which which can hurt its competitors as much as it likes is like putting the proverbial fox in charge of the henhouse.
yeah and aunt mildred uses linux.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Totally true. I work for a company that works directly with ESRI... both of us are quite dependent on Microsoft.
What's really sad is that our software went from "Unix-only" to "cross-platform" to "Windows-only with custom GUI code" to "Windows-only based on MFC" over the space of twenty years or so. I'm scared what the next step will be... At least we use OpenGL for data visualization instead of Direct3D.
When was this?
The Microsoft threat to kill Office for the Mac happened during negotiations leading up to 1997 as outlined in some court documents. Microsoft was in negotiations with Apple over patent disputes and considered abandoning Office for Mac, understanding it would do "a great deal of harm immediately" to Apple. There are a few other stories outlining the questioning of Bill Gates about this and the ultimate outcome of the settlement - the famous $150 million investment Microsoft made in Apple. Some said immediately that "Microsoft saved Apple" (and still say it), except Apple had $1.7billion in the bank at the time and could have operated for quite a while without selling another product. Doing the math, Microsoft profited quite handsomely from the sale of Apple stock in 2003.
Most of the stuff on
Too much bloody marketshare.
The day IE gets less than 50% marketshare, lots of web developers will rejoice.
In fact, that should be a Internet wide campaign: Let's reduce IE to less than 50% marketshare !!!
I approve that campaign (TM)
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
I wouldn't worry a whole lot. There's room for so much improvement in their offerings that (are you listening, semi-rich person who's wondering where to put their money?) you could invest in improving GRASS, repackage it with a sharp UI, and make a fucking mint. Basically, GIS is too big for one company to contain. It's going to blow up in probably three or four years, just judging by the rapid clue-getting by people who do actual work.
It's such a shame that people don't see what a huge impact GIS will have on their lives. This is the second coming of the internet, people. Now is your chance.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Thanks for the links. However from the 2nd cnet article, I don't think an email from a manager to Gates saying that "threatening" to cancel Office was the strongest bargaining chip microsoft had against Apple is at all the same as "Microsoft nearly did kill Office for the Mac, but was a required part of a dispute settlement." From the court document (1st link) that actually has the text of the email, the manager who makes that statement even goes on to say he thinks microsoft should indeed ship Office! Indeed, much of the email is positive about mac as a platform and why office more mac is a good thing! Gates (at least in that email) doesn't say anything about canceling office.
I just don't see it. All the evidence here seems to me to make it very clear that Microsoft viewed the THREAT of canceling office as enough, and there was no intent to actually do so.
Why do you think all this CSS/Javascript/HTML/Ajax/whatever doesn't work in allo those browsers, it's because of what Microsoft did.
This is probably the worst reason to go with Microsoft-technology, because you know you will just create an evironment where it easier for them to create the same bad situation all over again.
Don't push Silverlight, push Firefox or something. Use open standards. Maybe use Firefox Prism.
Just so you know, there are MSI-packages of Firefox for Windows as well if you need them.
Hell, getting people from IE-old to IE8 would be a large improvement.
New things are always on the horizon
But it is a royal pain in the ass. The design paradigm looks like something out of a Dr Sues book.
This is Dr Sue.This is Dr Seuss. You might want to clarify your position. Or perhaps its that very ambiguity you were looking for?
No, it's just the most likely outcome based on past experience...
When MS were trying to gain market share for IE they made versions for Mac, Solaris and HPUX... Once they had achieved a dominant market share and corrupted the market such that many things would only work with their browser, they ditched these versions in an attempt to force people to use windows.
Now they are trying to gain market share for silverlight, and they are making versions for other platforms. There is no reason to believe these versions will continue to be maintained once silverlight becomes a dependency.
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
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I sense a disturbance in the Vortessence.
The incredible mish-mash of CSS/HTML/Javascript/ASP.Net/AJAX/JQuery can do it sure. But it is a royal pain in the ass.
Sounds like a lot of whining.
Using a decent design, and unobtrusive javascript via jQuery, it's really not that hard. And you're in a controlled environment -- why force IE and Silverlight, instead of, say, Firefox 3 and standards compliance -- probably automatically working on Opera, and likely everywhere except IE?
By switching to Silverlight we gain all of the UI features (and more) in a single language that is in the core-competency of the development team.
That has its advantages, sure. But while you're at it, might I suggest another switch -- use CouchDB, instead of SQL Server. Then you can write your map/reduce functions in .NET, using a JSON parsing library.
Of course, SQL is useful, as a domain-specific language, partly because of the queries you can do, but mostly because of the software you're running. CouchDB is new and unproven; there are many existing SQL servers, and while it's not necessarily easy to port, at least SQL Server isn't completely alien once you've used MySQL, or vice versa.
I would argue that many of the same properties apply to JavaScript and HTML. HTML is a domain-specific language for displaying content. CSS is one for styling content -- and it's clearly better at that than JavaScript is, since you have JS to do that anyway.
Using either Silverlight or Flash in inappropriate situations is dumb.
I would argue that any case where you could use an open standard to do the same job, with little or no ill effects, it's dumb to use Silverlight or Flash.
But the existence of Silverlight and the competition it creates for Flash will truly only improve the functionality of rich browser applications (what I've been trying to get coined as 'Chubby clients').
Certainly. But I hope it does so not directly, but by putting pressure on people interested in HTML5 and other interesting things to get it done.
For example, the existence of Flash helped bring about YouTube, which now forces us to think about the video tag. But there's no way I'd prefer maintaining Flash to allow YouTube to work into posterity, when for that purpose, the video tag and simple AJAX is easily superior and likely more compatible in the long run, as it doesn't depend on the way Adobe behaves.
Silverlight really doesn't change that much. The simplest example is patents. There really aren't any patents likely to hit a video tag implementation which provides Vorbis and Theora, and once you have that, it's reasonably easy to separate codecs and distribute them to people who either have permission, or live in a place where US patents don't apply, or simply want to take the risk.
Worst case, you limit yourself to sites supporting Vorbis and Theora. If the Video tag sees wide adoption, I would imagine those codecs might start to -- after all, patent royalties could be a large-ish expense for a site which has to do any sort of video encoding.
However, with Silverlight, it's quite possible Microsoft could drop the patent hammer and kill Mono and Moonlight at any moment. Failing that, since Silverlight is the canonical implementation, and there is no standard, and Microsoft is known not to follow standards (even their own standards), it then follows that Microsoft can always release a new version of Silverlight that is incompatible with Moonlight, and not provide the needed expertise to bring Moonlight (or Mono) up to the task.
Consider that Microsoft's current motivation for not doing these things, and for actually supporting Moonlight, is to position Silverlight as a Flash killer, while claiming to be cross-platform. It certainly looks attractive -- it's probably more cross-platform than Flash is, at the moment. But that's only because they need it to be -- there's no reason to assume it won't go the way of IE for the Mac (or IE for Unix) as soon as Silverlight dominates the marketplace.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Business owners don't think like 2 year olds
You don't know a lot of business owners, do you?
Moonlight only exists because MS have disclosed most of the implementation details to them, it still lags a long way behind the MS implementation and isn't 100% compatible anyway.
When MS move to the extend phase of their plan, they will release new versions with no specs, meaning the moonlight devs will have to reverse engineer and thus be even further behind.
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WMP was ditched, flip4mac is a third party implementation that is not 100% functional (it doesn't support the drm for instance)...
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Other way round, MS stopped developing IE for mac so Apple began developing Safari as a replacement.
IE for mac only saw one version for OSX which was extremely buggy, and a quick dirty port of the last version for OS9, it was never updated after that.
Safari didn't ship with OSX until 10.3, by which point OSX itself was 3 years old, and yet had still only had a single release of IE.
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It hasn't come to pass yet.
MS have demonstrated in the past that they are willing to play nice to gain marketshare, and then try to force users onto their platform later (see ie for solaris/hpux/mac).
Based on past behavior, I would say the chances of them doing it with .net are extremely high if it manages to attain a dominant position in it's market.
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Had you ever actually done any work with XML and SVG you'd know that the browser support they have is no comparison to Flash, and I presume Silverlight (I refuse to look at it so I know no specifics about it).
The company I work for uses a Flash based system to get some things done, Adobe has killed part of what that system used for generating dynamic Flash content, I.E. Macromedia Generator. The OSS/Free clone isn't capable of what we want to do, and rather than fixing it up and proping up a retarded and closed application, we opted for going the XML + SVG + Javascript + A bunch of other crap in order to replace the flash portions.
As the lead developer I'm aware of the problems porting our system over to using standards instead of Flash.
If you think for a minute that SVG + SMIL + A host of other crap is any competition for Flash, then you have never worked with them both. You may have worked with one, but certainly not both.
SVG could have been a Flash replacement, but its not. They missed too many things, most notably, sound. Yes, SVG is a vector graphics standard, but it was created with the purpose of making Flash pointless. This was before Adobe bought Macromedia and they were looking to beat Macromedia in this area. This is also why Adobe made the Adobe Graphics Server, which is capable of doing a lot of what Generator does, but on PSDs, AIs, PDFs and SVGs (as well as some stuff to basic images as well). Note: AGS has been killed as well, with no direct replacement as yet.
So back to the point. I use SVG A LOT. Our entire product line now uses SVG to generate pretty much every image that is put into our websites or services. Most of those images contain dynamic content, animation, ect.
SVG + whatever other 'Standards' you want to throw at it, that work in a browser (any browser for that matter) are no match for Flash as a whole.
Its great to support standards, but if the standards don't do what you need/want to do, then whats the point of supporting them? Especially when not supporting them is less painful to everyone involved than supporting them, with the exception handful of people who scream 'standards compliance or die!!!'
Typically, demanding that your customers do something is not a good way to make a sale. If the 'demand' means little or no work to most of them because everyone already does it, thats one thing. Demanding your users do something different than their daily routine which they know and love is a lot more difficult to sell.
You prefer some browser other than IE, yes? And you get upset when someone demands you use IE, yes? You are a minority. Like it or not, IE is the leader. So what business in their right mind is going favor the minority over the majority, just on principal? We're not talking about standing up against racism here either, no sane business leader is going to be standing up for principals and pissing off his users right now. The nut jobs who do decide to do that now are probably going to go out of business soon, with the exception of maybe Ballmer, he could probably get by with it.
I LOVE using SVG over Flash for what I do. The ability to manipulate the presentation so easily using XML parsers makes dynamic content creation actually logical and easy to program for.
You will however, never see me comparing any current or currently proposed SVG standards to Flash. Its just not there. And that ignores all the actual browser and plugin incompatibilities between SVG implementations.
Remember, SVG rendering is much like HTML rendering. There is of course a standard, and a set of rules, but those rules can still be interpreted differently by different people, and implementations have bugs and missing features, the SVG spec is large and complex, no one supports everything, let alone supporting it the same wa
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
This statement tells everyone that you don't really know what either one of them are, how they work, why the are different, or really what they are in the first place.
Lets make the same statement, plugging in the names used by a different browser:
Using Flash now is no different than what Firefox Extensions meant in the past.
That sounds like a pretty retarded statement, doesn't it? And all that has been done is the technologies you meantioned originally were replaced with comparable technologies, that do the same thing.
Now, if you knew what ActiveX actually was (nothing more than a generic system for plugins) than perhaps your statement wouldn't have been so retarded.
Silverlight is MS's attempt to replace Flash.
Firefox Extensions can and often DO contain XPCOM objects, which are nothing more than ActiveX controls with a slightly different API, they are functionally the same.
XPCom is (literally) Cross Platform COM, COM meaning Common Object Model. ActiveX is another name for Microsoft's second COM specification. Originally you had COM, then COM+, then ActiveX, all just different revisions of the same basic principal. Since Firefox extensions can use and XPCOM objects that run in the browser as native code, the two technologies are pretty much identical functionally and from a security perspective they are identical.
Your post, not only is it not insightful, its devoid of facts and contains wild statements that are outright wrong to anyone who has a clue. Its good to see the slashdot mods promoting the trolls this morning.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
'ActiveX' can be reduced to a single C header file. It is no less cross platform compatible than XPCOM used extensively in Mozilla.
ActiveX is just a newer version of COM. COM in Microsoft OSes was licensed and lifted from DEC I believe, perhaps another old school Unix vendor that I don't recall at the moment.
ActiveX is nothing more than a API that anyone can code for if they wanted to. Anyone who has dealt with the internals of XPCOM, COM, ActiveX and interestingly enough, the .NET Framework, will know that while they are not binary compatible with each other, they really are pretty much functionally identical in general.
Saying ActiveX is not portable is simply wrong. No one chooses to do so because there isn't really a point to the excercise, use the tool that comes with your OS, porting a plugin from ActiveX for IE to XPCOM for Mozilla while time consuming, it isn't difficult. Whats better? That Mozilla XPCOM object isn't portable! Its compiled for a specific OS/Platform ... just like ActiveX. The main difference being that Mozilla runs on multiple platforms so you think that it is inherently more portable. You would be wrong for that thought. ActiveX has always supported multiple platforms and the ActiveX binaries actually contain in them information about which platform they were meant to run on.
They have been known to run on NT under MIPS and Alpha, Itanium, and of course 32 and 64 bit x86 variations.
So please, stop talking about ActiveX like you know something about it, you really don't. Very few people do actually have a clue about ActiveX, but every slashdotter seems to think they know it is the a security problem and that it only exists to serve IE, and of course Firefox plugins are completely different than IE plugins.
In case you couldn't tell, that was sarcasm and all of those statements are false.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
In the 90's a common argument against the GNU project attempt to recreate a free and open source Unix operating system was that the GNU effort will "always be behind".
The same was said of GCC's C++ compiler.
It is still common to hear people say that OpenOffice will "always be behind".
Linux and GCC have both broken through the keeping-up and have become innovators on their own right. OpenOffice is getting there.
But a defeatist attitude will not help you solve these problems. It was not defeating attitudes that got Linux to where it is today, or GCC or OpenOffice. Hard work is what got it where they are.
The open source community around Mono has already innovated in plenty of areas that are not tied to MS (Qyoto, C# REPL, Gtk#, Gaming, server controls, SIMD) just like Linux did back in its day.
Moonlight is an open source project, and they are taking contributions.
To clarify Flex a bit:
- Compiled Flex applications run in Flash Player; it's not an additional plugin.
- Flex applications use ActionScript 3, which is the same programming language that the newest versions of Flash use. It's structurally Java-like, but it's very easy to get powerful things done - for instance dynamically loading and playing a remote video stream can be accomplished in a few lines.
- Flex doesn't require the 'timeline' paradigm with binary source files that Flash had, replacing it with a solid and powerful layout language, making Flex a tool for app programmers rather than for animators. But there's huge crossover - and some workflows involve both tools because it trivially can include assets and videos from Flash.
- Flex Builder isn't free (unless you're a student) But the compiler IS free. So "Builder" is really like buying "Dreamweaver for Flex" more than like buying Flex. (Flex Builder is actually based on Eclipse, not on Dreamweaver, though)
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
The reason why the same CSS/Javascript/HTML/Ajax does not work across browsers is because the specifications for some of those beasts were unclear on the beginning, did not exist and had to be invented (ideally first as proprietary extensions, then as general features that were added to a standard).
For instance, even the "img" tag was a proprietary extension at one point, it just happens that it became mainstream.
The same goes for the "A" in AJAX, it was invented by Microsoft and later adopted across the board.
Browser vendors are too quick to add their own "proprietary" extensions left and right.
Mozilla packs tons of -moz-XXXX CSS tags that are Mozilla specific and of course does not work on other browsers.
WebKit/Safari packs its own collection of specific selectors.
Some become part of standards, but it takes a few years for the standard to percolate to every system.
Attributing everything that has gone wrong with the Web on Microsoft just shows your ignorance in the subject.
Are you going to keep electing politicians who ripped Windows away from you, leaving you high and dry with nothing but Linux?
How 'bout gramma, grampa, mom, dad, and 95%+ of the rest of the population who has problems using the mouse, much less tar -xveffing stuff?
That stuff isn't about you techies -- it's about the masses who vote, which isn't you.
Besides, Microsoft is trading off easing these things in exchange for providing illegal backdoors for law enforcement. "Everybody knows it", so there's no point pretending the actual situmication is on the level we're discussing here.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Why do you think all this CSS/Javascript/HTML/Ajax/whatever doesn't work in allo those browsers, it's because of what Microsoft did.
Believe me, I am right there with you on that one. I loathe MS for the crap that was IE5.5, 6.0 and even some of the 7.0 oddities, and I am pushing hard to get our IT directory to get IE8 or FF3 into the standard build on our network.
Don't push Silverlight, push Firefox or something.
Just a heads up on that one, Silverlight will run in FireFox.
Also, getting everyone onto IE8/FF3 would solve the standards issue, but it does not solve the need to understand multiple different languages and design standards. Even if everyone is on FF3, rich web client developers still need to have a solid knowledge of HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery, AJAX, and ASP.Net(or what ever server side flavor you are using).
Alternatively, by using Silverlight (or Flash), you need to know 1 layout language, XAML, and one programing language, C# (or VB.NET).
That alone makes it an extremely attractive option.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
As for trotting out apple, you're hopelessly naive if you think that microsoft won't kill the OSX version of silverlight the minute apple's market share gets a little bigger than microsoft would like.
Spoken like a true prophet of Doomsday.
Funny that you would bring Apple.
Apple already went ahead and created their own web browser. They took the open source KHTML engine from KDE and created WebKit and surprised the world when they had the balls of basically launching Safari against all odds. Today WebKit is the most versatile engine available.
Open source empowers people.
If Microsoft were to kill Silverlight on OSX and Silverlight mattered, Apple or someone else could take Moonlight and port it to OSX. And there is no doubt that Apple could make Moonlight into a first class citizen in MacOS if the day comes that they have to do that.
Funny how the pundits on Slashdot like to ignore inconvenient facts when it comes to bashing Microsoft.
It's not the politicians who ripped off windows, it's MS who violated the competition regulations and decided to go on the brink.
Also
That stuff isn't about you techies -- it's about the masses who vote, which isn't you.
The masses who vote don't give a fuck what their OS is because they don't have a clue what their OS is, the masses who vote can do everything they want in any *nix OS is a niche.
Moonlight only exists because MS have disclosed most of the implementation details to them, it still lags a long way behind the MS implementation and isn't 100% compatible anyway.
Moonlight exists because we were able to put a prototype together in 21 days (you can read about our hack-a-thon here: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jun-21.html).
Microsoft has since helped us by providing licensed codecs that can be used by Linux users; Providing us with Silverlight specs for a full open source impleentation (Although 100% of it is available on the web at msdn.microsoft.com) and they provided us with test suites to ensure that Moonlight passes every single Silverlight test suite that Microsoft uses internally.
No two implementations will be 100% compatible. In fact even fixing a bug means that version a and version a.0.0.0.1 with the bug fixed are not "100% compatible", so there is not much point in arguing about 100% compatibility in the first case, it is easy to prove that this will never be the case. But in that regard, no piece of software will ever be (not the kernel, not the browsers, not anything that ever gets bug fixed as a platform).
But we can get very close to the indented behavior as articulated in the test suites "This is what it is supposed to do as far as -we- humans could guarantee". There will certainly be bugs, but we do not have a problem fixing those, and the Microsoft engineers have been very helpful in answering any questions we might have.
Sounds like a lot of whining.
Sounds like higher training costs, larger skill sets, and bigger price tags on developers who can handle the full stack to me.
Using a decent design, and unobtrusive javascript via jQuery, it's really not that hard.
Using any language isn't "hard". But understanding the interactions, dependencies, and limitations of 5 different technologies requires significantly more experience and knowledge than understanding 2.
And you're in a controlled environment -- why force IE and Silverlight, instead of, say, Firefox 3 and standards compliance -- probably automatically working on Opera, and likely everywhere except IE?
It's not controlled by me. It is an international corporation with IT decisions being made well above my head. Hell, a few years ago when the Irish and US networks merged, they were trying to decide on what email service to use. The US used Exchange, Ireland/Europe used Notes. The decision was made to switch the US to Lotus Notes. Who in their right mind would ever choose Lotus Notes over Exchange!??! Anyway, I'm pushing hard to get IE8 or FF3 as the network standard in the US, but I'm not getting a lot of traction on it.
Forcing IE5.5 upgrades on an individual basis is something I can push through. But getting the install images changed from IE6 is still out of my reach. In the end, I'm developing apps that are being run in IE6, IE7, FF3, Chrome, and by a handful of Mac users. With the exception of Chrome (not sure if there is a SL plug-in for it) I can develop and deploy Silverlight apps and know that they will run exactly the same for every single user.
I would argue that any case where you could use an open standard to do the same job, with little or no ill effects, it's dumb to use Silverlight or Flash.
There is a lot you can do in SL/Flash that you just can not do in HTML/CSS/JS/JQuery/ASP.Net. There is a lot you can do easily in SL/Flash that can be done in HTML standards, but it is very challenging to get the same functionality.
But I hope it does so not directly, but by putting pressure on people interested in HTML5 and other interesting things to get it done.
HTML5, while a nice improvement over HTML4, will still suck. Sure, we'll have the video tag and a couple of other things to improve media display, but we'll still be stuck with the same crappy non-vector based flow layout, the dependency on CSS, Javascript, JQuery, AJAX, and server side code, etc... And no one will nail the standard 100%, let alone everyone nailing it 100%, we will still have to account for variations in specific cases on a browser by browser basis.
However, with Silverlight, it's quite possible Microsoft could drop the patent hammer and kill Mono and Moonlight at any moment.
I could be wrong on this, but I'm pretty sure that the patents behind Silverlight are bound to an agreement with IBM who is currently funding Moonlight development. Which means that IF MS did drop the patent hammer, it would be on IBM, which would likely be handled in their agreement and result in some amount of pain and suffering for MS. Not saying they wont, but right now there is no incentive for them to do so, and long term it would likely cost them far more than they could gain in royalties/market share.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
It is an intentionally incompatible/nonstandard HTML renderer
Intentionally? Stopped reading after this. Damn.. got sucked in yet again feeding a tin foil nutjob...
Yeah, just because it was revealed as an intentional plan by internal memos and testimony during MS's trial is no reason to think it might be true.
Geez, when you think verifiable facts are tinfoil hat material you need to stop drinking the kool-aid or get better news sources.
It. Must. Be. Like. That. And. No. Other. Way.
Jim? Is that you?
Exactly like I said in my post "there is still a plugin you can get (flip4mac)--MS distributed"
You are correct that it doesn't support DRM, which is something I have never run into on Windows nor Mac, and I suspect the vast majority of users haven't as well.
Which goes back to my point ... what the GP did was "find a list of programs that had minimal usage on Mac and then make them examples of something greater"
Looks like less than a year.
To get something that's still mostly useless since it pretty much doesn't work. So nobody was very impressed.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
No, I don't think you're right. I'm relying on Wikipedia for the dates here (articles "IE for Mac" and "OS X")...
IE5 was first released in 2000, released major point revisions until 2002 and security updates etc into 2003. I believe you're incorrect when you say that "OSX ...only had a single release of IE." Yes, they had a single major version number (5) but point releases that added new features etc. For comparison Windows went from 1999-2001 with "only a single release of IE" and from 2001-2006 again with "only a single release of IE."
Relatedly, Apple released the first beta of Safari in Jan 2003, well before MS announced they would stop developing IE for Mac. Safari was then included with 10.3 which was released later in 2003. WebCore as it was called back then--even though based off of KHTML--isn't exactly a small project, so you've got to assume that Safari was in the works for awhile.
According to wikipedia (though unsourced) IE6 for Mac was under development in 2002.
I see your reasoning for skepticism, although at the time the threat was very real to Apple and their customers. The possibility of losing Office for the Mac was impacting our purchase decisions about six months before the settlement, being relieved by the famous "Big Brother" teleconference with Bill Gates at the 1997 Mac World keynote.
Internally, Microsoft must have discussed the cancellation of Office which probably triggered the plea from Ben Waldman to finish and ship Mac Office 97 (it didn't ship until late 98). He speaks of the "threat to cancel" as if it was real. I don't think he'd make that up and present it to Bill Gates if it wasn't real - he would have received a "what in the hell are you talking about?" response from Gates. Ben knew it was a powerful bargaining chip - and Microsoft is no stranger to using powerful bargaining chips. Ben sounded like he had to beg to keep the project alive, again not something he would do if there wasn't a threat to cancel. If it wasn't real, there was general paranoia that it was in the industry and among users, and even within Microsoft, which helped their bargaining power.
In the end, Microsoft got IE on the Mac for five years, Apple got Office development for five more years and Microsoft put up $150million to give them a downside if they chose to harm Apple. The patent disputes going all the way back to the "Look and Feel" suit was settled this way.
In court, Bill Gates has a reputation for playing real dumb on the witness stand anyway, but the meat of it was the plea from Ben himself.
Most of the stuff on
Personally I don't even like the whole Web 2.0 / Ajax stuff, because it prevents people from getting what they are looking for: text/content. so I could care less about who or what invented the A J or X in Ajax.
The problem with Microsoft is, when they got a really large part of the browser market, they stopped developing it, they made sure people lost interrest in participating in the standards, because Microsoft with their large market share wouldn't implement it anyway.
On the account of Mozilla, they actually do it the right way, they add -moz-XXXX because then it doesn't clash with any future standard.
And they work with the standards people to get new things adopted.
New things are always on the horizon
Who cares if Silverlight runs on the moon, their really is no point in helping them gain marketshare if that means it won't ever be adopted in a vendor neutral way. You are creating a situation where your company will just be locked in to that one technology created by that one vendor.
New things are always on the horizon
Define "vendor neutral"?
Because I'm pretty sure that most people running Java are locked into Sun's Java. Sure, you could write your own derivative of it, but then you would be "locked in" to your specific version.
No matter which language you choose, as soon as you start writing code the opportunity cost starts to rise on changing languages. So even if you aren't "locked in" to Java, the cost of moving production applications out of Java would likely make it an unsound business decision, effectively locking you in.
In the case of Silverlight and .Net, we already have access to the source code, although the license on it kinda sucks. So if you wanted to develop your own derivative of .Net, you can. Moonlight is also being developed by a team funded by IBM with IP rights and direct support from MS.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
It's not controlled by me. It is an international corporation with IT decisions being made well above my head.
Fair enough. But that doesn't make Silverlight a good solution, it makes it the solution that's forced on you -- which is a bit like arguing in favor of Access and Visual Basic.
Forcing IE5.5 upgrades on an individual basis is something I can push through. But getting the install images changed from IE6 is still out of my reach.
And yet, Silverlight and .NET are on the install images?
Moronic decisions are not less moronic because they're made by management.
we'll still be stuck with the same crappy non-vector based flow layout,
Except in browsers which support things like canvas. There was an impressive demo involving rotating a video, which was playing in a video tag.
the dependency on CSS, Javascript, JQuery, AJAX, and server side code...
That is true. But again, you're not going to get away from dependencies on multiple external DSLs.
And no one will nail the standard 100%, let alone everyone nailing it 100%, we will still have to account for variations in specific cases on a browser by browser basis.
Is this something you don't have to do with Silverlight/Moonlight?
That is: Can you do something in Silverlight and just assume it will work on Moonlight, and vice versa?
Other comments here suggest this is not the case at all, but I could be wrong...
Not saying they wont, but right now there is no incentive for them to do so,
Key words there being right now -- indeed, right now, they would very much benefit from appearing open and friendly, as it gives them an edge over Flash.
But, how much do you know about that agreement with IBM? How would the situation change if Silverlight did gain significant market share?
And for that matter, how is trusting IBM any better than trusting Microsoft? Doesn't this mean they could both sign another agreement, then turn and kill Moonlight?
None of this changes the fact that, thanks to the US patent system, it's going to be another 15 or 20 years until we can assume that the Silverlight of today is patent-free, and I don't expect Silverlight to stand still, in the mean time. I don't think any of the open standards carry anywhere near as much risk in that regard -- no one's going to suddenly bust out a patent of HTML.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"all of this has happened before and all of it will happen again"
1) So your solution to having to support "IE 5.5, 6, 7, FF 3, and a handful of Opera users" is to use Silverlight, making most of them incompatible. Great. (I agree though, a complex site based on CSS, Javascript, AJAX, etc. could get pretty nasty fast.)
2) Your characterization of flash support is poor. It took TOO LONG to go from flash 7 to flash 9. Flash 10 is actually decent on linux, not horrible like you say. And, extrapolating the flash 7->flash 9 delay backwards 10 years is incorrect. Most of the time before flash 8, the Windows & Linux versions were in parity, or a month or two apart at the worst.
Are you sure you did not mean Novell instead of IBM ? IBM would be one of those vendors that created a Java-runtime. But you seems to be moving this discussion to server-side languages. I was trying to convey HTML/JavaScript/CSS is vendor neutral.
New things are always on the horizon
LOL, you are correct, Novell, not IBM. I've spent too much time beating on the main frame lately.
HTML/JS/CSS is vendor neutral, but it is extremely limited in its functionality with out a server side component, be it PHP/Ruby/.Net/Java.
So if we exclude server side functionality, then yes, going with Silverlight is effectively a vendor lock in where as HTML is not.
That said, how often are we developing static HTML/SL pages that have no server side functionality? And as soon as you start working in any language on the server, you are effectively locked in, even if it is an open source language, due to the opportune cost of changing languages late in the SDLC.
If you are going to be locked in anyway, the issue of SL being a vendor lock in is relatively insignificant.
So you get to the real issues. The huge boon to using HTML/CSS/JS/AJAX/JQuery is that with sufficient effort you can make it render the same on almost any browser on any OS (no matter how much work you do, /. will not look the same in Lynx as it does in Chrome). The down side to that though is that it takes significant effort to get the functionality to match identically across all browsers (IE6 is the main pita, but even FF and Chrome have their little quirks), and you have to have knowledge of all involved technologies and how they interact.
The boon of using Silverlight is that it only requires knowledge of XAML (and a minimal at that since you can do almost everything WYSIWYG style in Blend and the output doesn't suck horrendously like Dreamweaver/frontpage) and your .Net language of choice. Another boon of SL is that it will function absolutely the same in all supported browsers. On the down side, it will only function in supported browsers on supported OSs, and it requires the user to download and install a plug in. The plug in install is highly automated with only 1 or 2 basic "ok to install?" prompts. And the list of supported OS/Browsers, thanks to efforts both from Microsoft and the Mono/Moonlight team is growing.
So:
If your goal is to have a "web 2.0" styled page that runs in a controlled environment, Silverlight is likely going to be a better option.
If your goal is to have a "web 2.0" styled page that runs in the wild, HTML is likely going to be a better option.*
If your goal is to have a vanilla styled page, HTML is going to be a better option.
* This is where things get hairy though. The decision should be made based on user base, penetration of SL, development costs, and lost sales due to technology barriers. By and large, HTML will be the safest bet, but it will also have a higher development costs than SL IMO.
To put my view in context, in the last 2 months I have released two new applications. 1 was a Silverlight app that runs on a kiosk, the other is a web 2.0 ASP.Net app that any of our CSRs can access. Both apps perform async interactions with a web service and database, both apps feature caching, lazy loading, dynamic moving/expanding content containers, etc... The Silverlight app took about half the time to develop, contains a fraction of the code, looks nicer, and has a lot more of what I call 'developer confidence' in it.
That's not to say that the ASP.Net app is bad, on the contrary I am quite pleased with the way it turned out and I think it is quite stable, highly functional and give the user a much better experience then they would get from a vanilla styled website. But the possibility of huge page renders, javascript performance, and AJAX communication has my confidence a little lightened as I'm looking at pushing it out to a couple of hundred users.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I believe there was only one point release of IE for OSX aswell, as it was one point release higher than the OS9 version...
They may have announced they had stopped development quite late, but actual development stopped quite some time before.
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Yes, a plugin which is not fully functional, ie it's inferior and probably intentionally so.
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And what leads you to believe that when MS come out with future versions they will continue to make the associated specs, codecs and test suites available?
There is always the risk that they won't, and based on past behavior i would suggest that's quite a likely proposition.
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Oh, now that i think of it...
Is it always going to be you following them, or do you think MS will actually accept input towards the spec from third parties? and potentially open up the development of the spec? Or will the future versions always be developed internally to MS and then released to the public before you even get the opportunity to start playing catch up?
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Have you used it? I actually prefer the plugin to WMP for Mac.
Seems odd that you make a big deal out of the plugin not being made by MS one minute, and the next claiming that it's intentionally crippled (by not supporting *1* scarcely used feature?). Odd.
I believe there was only one point release of IE for OSX aswell, as it was one point release higher than the OS9 version...
No quite...OSX since 10.0 came with a release of IE5. 10.1 came with 5.1. The final release of IE for Mac was 5.2.3.
Maybe you were confusing the fact that IE for Mac 5.2 was released ONLY for OSX, whereas earlier releases still supported OS8/9?
They may have announced they had stopped development quite late, but actual development stopped quite some time before.
That doesn't jive with the timeline I attempted to describe, nor what I've been able to find out about past releases. But if you have other information, I'd be glad to take a look.
I've often wondered why everybody will hit the "feeder bar" to update to Silverlight or Flash V.27 but getting somebody to switch from IE6 to FF3 takes an act of $deity when the FF3 download is smaller by a power of 10.