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Microsoft's Silverlight Strategy 'Has Shifted'
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like Microsoft might finally be realizing that Silverlight can't cover every platform, according to this conversation with Bob Muglia: '... when it comes to touting Silverlight as Microsoft’s vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime, "our strategy has shifted," Muglia told [ZDNet]. Silverlight will continue to be a cross-platform solution, working on a variety of operating system/browser platforms, going forward, he said. "But HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple's) iOS platform," Muglia said.'"
Moonlight works ok.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I'm talking about the 3.5-inch floppies that Apple was first to include in its Lisa and Macs. They were removed in the late 90s when nobody was using floppies anymore. If you're seriously arguing that 1.5MB floppies were still widely used by 2000, I don't know what to say.
Firewire was started in the mid-80s to replace parallel SCSI, nearly a decade before USB's existence. It is still the standard for data transfer between devices such as A/V equipment. Apple's been phasing it out over the years has always been a supporter of USB, adopting it in the original iMac to the exclusion of older keyboard and mouse connectors, forcing hardware manufacturers to support the new standard.
the more to the right you get, the more portable you inherently become.
No, you don't. That is only the case if the language(s) you're dealing with are transportable due to having a virtual machine/runtime compilation design - and those languages have a multitude of platform-specific interpreters.
Examples: perl, python, java, javascript, .NET.
Silverlight is a very 'high level' language - but it only has runtimes for Firefox and Safari on OSX, and (essentially) Windows. There are no mobile implementations (except for possibly Windows Mobile 6.x, couldn't find any info on it.) Flash is much more portable and cross-platform.
Even javascript isn't all that cross-platform/portable due to the use of different browsers/javascript implementations.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Though 3.5" floppy drives had been around since 1982, they did not meet with success until the 3.5" floppy drive was chosen for the original 1984 Macintosh (quickly followed by the Atari ST and Amiga the following year). Apple was not too far ahead of their time when they killed the floppy in 1998, but they saw where things were going and made the right call-- Mac users who still really needed a floppy drive were able to buy an external one. Windows users questioned it because they weren't (really, still aren't) accustomed to being able to boot from any device with an OS on it that's connected to their computer, so floppies were their lifeline.
Though USB had been on PC motherboards beginning in 1996, nobody did anything with it until Apple put it in the iMac in 1998 and excluded all other port types. Lots of people will argue that Microsoft finally adding USB support to Windows (in Win95 OSR2) was the tipping point, but that's bull. Windows users had the option of clinging to their peripherals that used the ancient parallel and serial ports, and cling they did. iMac users had no such option, and the popularity of the iMac meant that if hardware makers wanted iMac owners' money, they had to start churning out USB-based peripherals for them.
As an aside, Firewire did not appear in a Mac until the Blue & White G3, in January of 1999. It did not appear in an iMac until the 6th revision, in October of 1999. Apple's view was that USB and Firewire were complementary... USB for low-bandwidth stuff like keyboards and mice, and Firewire for hard drives, video cameras, and other high-bandwidth devices. Intel was the one that had the apparently inferiority complex and started working on USB2, to compete. Based on my experience using both, Firewire 800 is superior to USB2, and if I have the choice between those two I'll always pick Firewire. (As for the future, Firewire 1600 and 3200 have been approved by the IEEE but aren't in any shipping product, I haven't seen a USB3 device in the wild yet, and Light Peak is a wildcard at this point.)
To sum up, Apple is the tech company that is not afraid to chop off legacy stuff at the knees, and by doing so indeed often drags the rest of the industry kicking and screaming with it.
~Philly
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You'd be wrong. Sort of.
Netlix never "banned" Linux. If you can get it to work with the site, great, they'd be happy for you. The problem comes in with the studios, who demand that Netflix use DRM when a user streams a video on their site. So they use Silverlight's built-in DRM API, which the studios are okay with. The only problem is that Moonlight does not implement Silverlight's DRM scheme. The details are proprietary, and although Novell has asked Microsoft for permission to use their DRM scheme in Moonlight, Microsoft has said "no." They don't want to share it, they definitely don't want it open-sourced (what's the point of an open-source DRM implementation?). This all makes sense from both parties' perspective; the only one really making a stupid mistake is Netflix, for using Silverlight in the first place. (Although I don't know whether their licensing terms played a part in that or not---in any case Flash nowadays has lots of DRM support, and would of course be a viable solution should Netflix decide to switch.)
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
You're talking about two different things.
Firewire has DMA. So does eSATA. I don't see anyone whining about DMA there. In fact, they'd whine if eSATA didn't support DMA. And there are methods available on both busses to require devices to be authorized before DMA requests work.
Firewire is also a master-less system. USB can only connect one master to multiple slaves. This is why you can't connect your camera to your phone or visa versa -- both devices are setup as slaves and can only connect to a host. This also means you can't connect two computers together via USB, as they are both masters. Firewire works like SCSI or Ethernet, where all devices are peers -- any FW device can talk to any other FW device on the same bus. You can even interconnect electrical busses with relatively intelligent routing to give you multiple collision domains while maintaining connectivity among a large number of devices. This again is a feature -- if your computer, phone, and camera all had FW instead of USB you could connect them in arbitrary combinations and still have them work. You can also use FW for IP networking and other Ethernet-like functions (and in fact modern FW provides support for cat-5 connectors that automatically switch between FW and Ethernet).