Mono Abandons Open Source Silverlight

mikejuk writes "The Mono project is about the only group of people actively talking up .NET and developing it, but in an interview Miguel de Icaza has admitted that Moonlight, the Mono version of Silverlight, isn't worth the effort any more. He said, 'Silverlight has not gained much adoption on the web, so it did not become the must-have technology that I thought [it] would have to become. And Microsoft added artificial restrictions to Silverlight that made it useless for desktop programming. These days we no longer believe that Silverlight is a suitable platform for write-once-run-anywhere technology, there are just too many limitations for it to be useful.'"

Comments

Netflix

[jakimfett]

Now, if only Netflix would abandon it so that I don't have to boot into windows to watch movies...if it can be done for android, why not PC?

Re:Netflix

[Qwavel]

How do they handle Android - do they use a completely different technology or do they implement silverlight in their Android app?

Re:Netflix

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Yeah. OSX, too. HA! A joke. MS spend years and many tens of millions to derail the corpulent and putrid hulk that is Adobe Flash. Instead, they manage to build a custom DRM container for NetFlix, as the sole volume partner/customer.

Anybody else who tried walking out on this limb, wound up getting screwed, per the usual MS bait-and-wait.

Re:Netflix

[axx]

It would make running XBMC on GNU/Linux even better for those in the areas Netflix covers too :)

Re:Netflix

[nukeade]

Exactly. If it weren't for Netflix, I wouldn't even know what Silverlight is. It doesn't even run reliably on Windows VMs under VirtualBox.

Re:Netflix

[DdJ]

...if it can be done for android, why not PC?

Is that a rhetorical question? I'm not quite sure. I'll play along and assume it's not.

The answer is: DRM. The reason various set-top boxes and iOS and Android devices can do Netflix without Silverlight is because those platforms are locked down enough that they don't need Silverlight's DRM to discourage copying.

Sure, they could make their own dedicated "app" for Windows, and implement DRM in there. I bet under Windows 8, they will.

Re:Netflix

[JSBiff]

I've got mixed feelings about this. It's been my experience that Silverlight/Netflix give me better video streams (higher definitions, good framerates, very few times it needs to stop to buffer), and my PC runs cooler, than Flash videos, for whatever reason.

I especially noticed this when I had a laptop - I would notice the laptop get VERY hot when watching videos from Hulu (which uses Flash), but it only got warm, not hot, with Netflix videos. The Netflix videos consistently seemed to have higher video quality (although, to be fair, Hulu's video quality seems to have gotten quite a bit better, so that's probably less a limitation of Flash and more of the way the videos were encoded by Hulu a couple years ago).

Still, for all that can be said bad about Silverlight, and it does suck that it's Windows-only, it does have some redeeming values.

Re:Netflix

[jakimfett]

Is that a rhetorical question? I'm not quite sure. I'll play along and assume it's not.

Nope, definitely rhetoric. It was asked in an "whyfor do they shoot themselves in the foot so frequently?" sort of way, whilst facepalming and headdesking.

Re:Netflix

[poetmatt]

What they don't use: silverlight. I don't know what they do, but it's explicitly not that.

I can only wonder how much money was under the table from MS to get netflix to do this, in the face of common sense.

Re:Netflix

[King InuYasha]

Netflix on Android and iOS use raw video streams. No DRM or other funny business.

Re:Netflix

[Nikker]

If it runs on dalvik and dalvik is already ported to x86 then what is really stopping us?

Re:Netflix

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to implement Silverlight, just the audio/video codecs and one of several possible transports. Silverlight builds on the pre-existing Microsoft Media infrastructure. For example, in many cases I can transcode a Silverlight audio stream by connecting to the legacy RTSP transport and decoding the Windows Media Audio packets. Neither FFmpeg nor GStreamer can do this, because while they have good codec support they have shit transport support.

I've build a custom HTTP/RTSP library and ASF decoder, and then heavily refactored the WMA decoder from FFmpeg. In fact, I've written a daemon which can transcode Windows Media Audio and Flash FLV/FLA audio (plus the easy ones, like Shoutcast and vanilla RTSP), and transcode in real-time for whatever the connecting device requires (various HTTP streaming formats, RTSP, etc; and from, e.g. WMA to Vorbis).

The daemon is both event oriented and multi-process. I can transcode (with resampling) 4 live broadcasts and reflect to 50+ clients while using a fraction of the CPU a browser takes just to playback one stream. Again, FFmpeg, GStreamer, and VLC have all the wrong optimizations for this kind of scaling. Internet media streaming is still in the dark ages.

Re:Netflix

[jakimfett]

Flash vs Silverlight? I'd definitely go with Silverlight.

But Silverlight vs raw video streams? Absolutely no contest, I'd go with raw video. Why? Because my netbook can't play netflix videos without major stuttering (even when running absolutely nothing else, and at reduced resolutions, when hardwired into my network), and my old Droid 2 Global plays them fine over wireless.

Re:Netflix

[ZeroSumHappiness]

Netflix isn't getting paid off by MS for this. There are two interesting aspects to the Netflix-on-Linux problem, one obvious, one not.

Obvious problem: Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix is on the board of directors of Microsoft. This, almost definitely, gives him sips of kool-aid and some self-interest in growing Microsoft's market share for its pet projects.

Non-obvious problem: The studios that actually own all the distribution rights to the videos on Netflix are, for the most part, wary about DRM on Linux, under the belief that obscurity grants security. Now, we all know that's stupid, but we also all know they are stupid.

From what I understand, the actual minds at Netflix wanted a Linux product, know how to make it happen (to the point where they have internally tested it and it works) and would release it if it were feasible but the studios are hogtying them with contracts.

Re:Netflix

[amicusNYCL]

if it can be done for android, why not PC?

That's not the right question to ask. It CAN be done for PC. The reason why they chose to do it that way isn't because it can't be done any other way.

Re:Netflix

[Mister Whirly]

I support about 60 PCs at work and Silverlight is a required application. I haven't had a single Silverlight problem yet that couldn't be fixed by a re-install. Maybe the problem is running in a VM? Although I have a few VMware boxes running Windows and they don't have problems with Silverlight either.

Re:Netflix

[HarrySquatter]

That's not insightful. Netflix uses DRM on all platforms. It's a requirement of the media companies.

Re:Netflix

[Old97]

Silverlight runs on the Mac too. I had to install it for Netflix.

Re:Netflix

[TheRaven64]

LoveFilm in the UK just switched from Flash to Silverlight, because of reason 2: the studios refused to keep licensing them for streaming with Flash, believing that Silverlight was somehow more secure (which it probably is, on the basis that it's so unpopular that no one as yet has cared enough to crack it). This has effectively rendered their streaming useless to me, as neither of the machines that I want to stream video to run a Silverlight-supported OS.

Re:Netflix

[squiggleslash]

Non-obvious problem: The studios that actually own all the distribution rights to the videos on Netflix are, for the most part, wary about DRM on Linux, under the belief that obscurity grants security. Now, we all know that's stupid, but we also all know they are stupid.

If that were the case, then surely the same movies wouldn't be available via Amazon's instant streaming thing? Or Youtube's commercial play.google.com video service?

Netflix is very much the odd one out for the major commercial movie streamers in not using Flash. I really don't think the studios are mandating the technology, I think it's a straightforward case of them going to a major technology vendor to get a "solution", and getting the solution that vendor, Microsoft, found most in their interest to sell.

Amazon, YouTube, and, for that matter, Hulu (which streams stuff from different divisions of the same media companies, who are just as obsessive about piracy), are more tech savvy enterprises, being made up of people who were expecting to deliver stuff via the web from the get-go, so it's not surprising they'd go with an established technology like Flash rather than Silverlight. The only surprise, to a certain extent, is that Real didn't ever manage to muscle in on this market.

Re:Netflix

[ZeroSumHappiness]

Except, of course, the whole contract problem you are willfully ignoring...

And obviously I meant a general-purpose Linux OS rather than Android or BoxeeBox since every Netflix subscriber who has wanted a Linux product has seen all the "it works on Android/BoxeeBox so it should work on Linux" posts around the net.

Re:Netflix

[ZeroSumHappiness]

I didn't say the contracts with Netflix were reasonable, just that the reported reason Netflix doesn't support Linux is that their contracts either require the MS DRM or DRM in general and that the studios are unhappy with what options Netflix have provided. Of course, this would all be solved if MS just put out a general C# DRM library instead of some weird Windows-only one. I guess I've just never been desperate enough to try to reverse engineer it.

Re:Netflix

[42sd]

Complete guess, but long term it is going to work in Linux through chrome.

It works for chromebooks which are based off of Linux. It appears that they are using Pepper/NaCl api in the chromebooks, so I would wager it is all there, except the DRM.

Per a possibly outdated web page, Pepper is marked as experimental in Chrome, so maybe when that settles down, we'll see it included.

Re:Netflix

[Elbows]

I'm using a VirtualBox VM for Netflix streaming and it actually works pretty well for me. Haven't had to boot into windows for a few months now. The only issue I had was some audio lag which turned out to be caused by PulseAudio.

What problems have you run into?

Re:Netflix

[Hatta]

Non-obvious problem: The studios that actually own all the distribution rights to the videos on Netflix are, for the most part, wary about DRM on Linux, under the belief that obscurity grants security. Now, we all know that's stupid, but we also all know they are stupid

The problem is, they're right. The only security possible with DRM is obscurity. Every DRM system has to decrypt the data eventually. At that point it can be captured, it's only a matter of doing the right gymnastics. This is the case on Windows too, but perhaps the open source nature of Linux makes the required gymnastics a little less demanding.

Re:Netflix

[mcgrew]

That's why I don't use NetFlix. The computer plugged into the TV runs Linux, and I don't want to watch movies on the notebook (which will likely not have Windows much longer eaither).

Re:Netflix

[nukeade]

I actually don't use Netflix myself, but installed a Windows XP VM under VirtualBox on my girlfriend's Ubuntu 12.04 laptop for the sole purpose her using Netflix. The install is fully updated, with no software except for Windows updates and Silverlight installed on the VM.

The odd part is that its behavior is random. Sometimes you'll reboot the VM and it will work just great for a few shows, and sometimes you'll reboot it and get an unhelpful error message that I don't recall exactly right now. "An unexpected error occurred" would be pretty close.

So, it's usable, but just unreliable and annoying. I told her she could keep the laptop if she agreed to switch over to Linux, but I guess it's sufficiently bad (No native iTunes support, PlayOnLinux only works well with iTunes 7, and unreliable Netflix) that she's planning on turning down a free Core i7 laptop at the end of our month-long "convert to Linux" experiment.

Re:Netflix

[gorzek]

Yeah, I remember when MLB.com was using Silverlight. It was such a disaster they ended up ditching it for Flash, too.

Re:Netflix

[squiggleslash]

I didn't say the contracts with Netflix were unreasonable!

I'm saying that it's highly improbable that Netflix is subject to an entirely different set of contracts than other online streamers. Both Amazon and Google have licensed the same Hollywood content, and Hulu has licensed content from the same studios, and all three are using Flash.

There's no reason to believe Netflix's choice of DRM had to do with the studios. It's more likely they, a company whose web presence prior to the instant streaming thing had been in the form of a fairly limited website for editing lists of movies to mail, found a company willing to do the work for them, in this case Microsoft, and asked them to do it.

Realistically, I don't think Hollywood would have cared if Netflix had gone for Flash, or even if they'd gone for RealPlayer. All they cared about was that some form of DRM was implemented.

Re:Netflix

[recoiledsnake]

>which it probably is, on the basis that it's so unpopular that no one as yet has cared enough to crack it

Netflix moves a huge amount of video on the web, so I doubt it's that unpopular. Most people seem to be accessing it on their TVs, XBoxes and Roku style set top boxes though.

On top of that, who wants to rip Netflix streams when you can get way better quality on the Bittorrent version?

Re:Netflix

[recoiledsnake]

"From what I understand, the actual minds at Netflix wanted a Linux product, "

IF it's on Android, it's on linux. It's trivial to move it over to the Linux platform and into a XBMC plugin.

It is the CEO of Netflix that hates Linux and linux users. Otherwise he would green light a XBMC plugin.

No,it was because RMS warned Hastings that he would bite him if DRM'ed streams ever came to Linux.

Re:Netflix

[LordLimecat]

I bet 10 minutes of filesystem digging with ProcMon and the creation of some hardlinks would be enough to "crack" silverlight.

Re:Netflix

[PCM2]

Of course, this would all be solved if MS just put out a general C# DRM library instead of some weird Windows-only one. I guess I've just never been desperate enough to try to reverse engineer it.

Generally speaking, effective DRM is more difficult to engineer than you make it sound. The systems that have been effective have been tied deep into the OS level (say, the Windows video drivers), so porting them to another platform would be difficult. I'm not saying you can't crack Windows DRM schemes -- people obviously have -- but cracking them isn't the same thing as porting them.

I recall that Sun Microsystems was working on some kind of open source DRM platform that sounded pretty promising, I think it fizzled out before Sun was acquired by Oracle, though. I don't think the customers were lining up, and the open source community has an innate distaste for DRM.

Re:Netflix

[Guspaz]

It is, of course, impossible that Netflix might have chosen Silverlight because of technical reasons, such as the effectiveness and seamless nature of its bitrate scaling support... If memory serves, the browser-based alternatives to Silverlight for this functionality at the time they switched didn't work as well.

No, it's obviously a conspiracy. Microsoft isn't capable of developing an effective platform for anything.

Re:Netflix

[lgw]

I watch Netflix streaming from a Win2008-R2 VM running in VMware Workstation. Works great for me - better than on the host, actually (for some crazy reason, IE on the host will blank the screen after 10 minutes or so of inactivity).

Could be a WinXP thing maybe? Since it doesn't support recent versions of IE? I've never had much luck with VirtualBox myself, but it seems others are seeing that work. I could certainly see running an old IE causeing problems.

Re:Netflix

[lgw]

I have a Roku box for his purpose. As a bonus, it supports my non-HDMI TV via component video, which looks great at 480p. (I don't know why I don't get a modern TV instead.)

Re:Netflix

[DarwinSurvivor]

Hmm, I wonder if that could be intercepted at the network level (hacked router, unprotected wifi, etc) to get the stream to other devices....

Re:Netflix

[Dcnjoe60]

There's always a virtual machine. Still not a great solution but keeps you from having to reboot just to watch a movie.

Re:Netflix

[carnalforge]

Netflix moves a huge amount of video on the web, so I doubt it's that unpopular. Most people seem to be accessing it on their TVs, XBoxes and Roku style set top boxes though.

Netflix FWIK is limited to the US market. /me checking... :

Sorry, Netflix is not available in your country... yet

(I'm in EU)

On top of that, who wants to rip Netflix streams when you can get way better quality on the Bittorrent version?

And when it's not even impossible to do it even now

Re:Netflix

[jakimfett]

I tried that for a while. But even with my i7-2600k based system with a GTX 550ti graphics card, I had noticeable stuttering when watching stuff on my 32inch monitor. It's easier to kick on my PS3 than boot up a VM, so that's what I've been doing...but you can't browse by actor in the console interface.

Re:Netflix

[Kalriath]

That's a good point actually - IIS/Silverlight have really good smooth streaming support, while Flash Media Server tends to have to restart the stream every time it adapts the bitrate.

There's also Apple's HTTP streaming solution too, which is supported by IIS also, and can be consumed by a plethora of devices.

Re:Netflix

[Guspaz]

Apple's HTTP live streaming solution does have pretty widespread support, but it was only released in 2009. Netflix switched to Silverlight (or at least was doing public beta testing) in late 2008. It's important to keep in mind that Netflix's decision would have been based on available solutions in 2007 or 2008, not in 2012.

Re:Netflix

[nukeade]

That's probably what has to happen, because my friends report that Netflix works fine with newer versions of Windows under VirtualBox.

Ugh, I won two copies of Windows 7 in programming competitions, then gave them away because "why on Earth would I want this?"... now I'm kicking myself.

Re:Netflix

[gbjbaanb]

the thing that makes it all more interesting is that Flash will be a part of the OS in Windows 8, and I guess Silverlight will not (not on Metro apps at least).

I guess Netflix will start migrating to flash when Win8 comes out.

Re:Netflix

[NFN_NLN]

Netflix moves a huge amount of video on the web, so I doubt it's that unpopular. Most people seem to be accessing it on their TVs, XBoxes and Roku style set top boxes though.

Netflix FWIK is limited to the US market. /me checking... :

Sorry, Netflix is not available in your country... yet

(I'm in EU)

It is available in Canada as well.

Re:Netflix

[jasomill]

Why would they choose this over a Metro-style app?

Re:Netflix

[sk999]

Wasn't aware of that. I subscribe to mlb.com exactly because it DOES use flash and thus works on Linux.

The other partner for Sliverlight is NBC, for its Olympics coverage. Nothing I will ever watch.

Re:Netflix

[ninetyninebottles]

You're thinking of DReaM. It is CDDL but the OSS community does not really have a lot of drive to build DRM.

Re:Netflix

[ninetyninebottles]

Question: Why would you try to force your GF to use Linux when obviously the software she requires doesn't work and in fact you had to cook up a VM just BECAUSE it won't do what she needs natively?

Generally, many of us end up being obligated to support our immediate friends and family in an IT capacity. If you've ever been there, you want to support what you know and preferably something low maintenance and remotely accessible. Stipulating what you'll support makes reasonable sense.

Re:Netflix

[Osty]

And obviously I meant a general-purpose Linux OS rather than Android or BoxeeBox since every Netflix subscriber who has wanted a Linux product has seen all the "it works on Android/BoxeeBox so it should work on Linux" posts around the net.

It works on Android/Boxee/Tivo/WDTV/other Linux-based hardware because of hardware-based DRM chips. This is why, for example, not all Android devices are supported by Netflix, or why the WDTV Live device was not supported but the WDTV Live Plus device was, or why Boxee supports Netflix on its physical hardware but did not do so in the now-dead software distribution.

Silverlight uses PlayReady DRM, which is what Netflix uses on devices without dedicated DRM hardware. PlayReady is designed to be cross-platform. The only thing stopping it from appearing on Linux is the cost of licensing PlayReady from Microsoft, building a Linux-compatible implementation (shouldn't be too difficult, as it already exists on OS X), and hooking it into Moonlight. But now Moonlight is dead, and nobody's going to pay for PlayReady licensing anyway, and even if they did it might still end up being incompatible with the GPL at some level needed to make it fully work.

Re:Netflix

[SomePgmr]

Wasn't Netflix streaming originally Flash?

Re:Netflix

[PCM2]

Effective DRM isn't difficult. It's impossible. Anyone who understands what it's supposed to do and isn't making money from it should have an innate distaste for it. It's unnecessary and a collosal waste of time.

By "effective" I did not mean "perfect" -- that's why I chose the word. "Effective," in this case, means it will keep a respectable majority of people following the rules.

Re:Netflix

[amicusNYCL]

Again you just can't do that on Windows and OSX easily because you don't have the source to the files you'd need to alter but this is available on Linux.

Right, you can't do it easily, but you can do it. The cost for a user to crack might be less on Linux, so they would have to decide if they want to spend more of an effort to support and secure a Linux use case. Since Netflix doesn't have plans to support Linux, then I guess there's your answer. Netflix doesn't see the return on investment that would come from them spending the effort to make their service available for that platform.

Re:Netflix

[jonwil]

I doubt the studios would allow an implementation of PlayReady/NetFlix on an OS where there is no way to be sure you are sending the decrypted content to an appropriately "protected" source.

On Windows its possible to verify that everything is secure (i.e. approved GPU, approved signed drivers, no hardware or software tampering, HDCP in place and functioning etc) through the "Protected Media Path" (and with the secure boot in Windows 8, the protection will become even stronger). I dont know how OSX works but I bet there is something similar.

Linux does not have this (and due to its nature could never have this)

Re:Netflix

[CodeBuster]

How about a push to github?

Re:Netflix

[drinkypoo]

Indeed. I always assumed the batshit insistence on silverlight for the desktop had much to do with Reed Hastings being the CEO of Netflix and on the board at Microsoft.

The two events are highly temporally related, so it's essentially impossible not to see a connection there...

The world will be a better place when silverlight finally dies. I wish Netflix would just release something, yes with the mandatory DRM, that just works.

Pretty sad when Flash is better than what you're using

Re:Netflix

[coaxial]

Sounds great. Where is it?

Re:Netflix

[nukeade]

Hah. It's actually not quite like that.

The company was selling a bunch of basically new but wiped laptops that belonged to employees that left on the cheap, so I bought one for myself and installed Ubuntu 12.04 to decide whether I wanted it on my other systems. She saw it and got jealous of the sweet deal I got on the laptop, so I told her she could keep it if she kept it as a Ubuntu machine. I was actually just using her as a guinea pig so that I could blog about the things that are keeping a typical user from switching to Linux on the desktop, and assumed that a free laptop would be enough of a carrot to get her to play along.

Re:Netflix

[gbjbaanb]

who knows, maybe its designed to let you write metro apps in flash.

Re:Netflix

[hairyfeet]

Makes sense and you probably made a few bucks on ad views to boot. if you need Windows cheap just talk to any friends or relatives that are in school as most students with a .edu address can get Win 7 cheap and if you don't know any students get the OEM as it isn't like you're gonna be moving it from machine to machine. Not that MSFT really gives a crap, i've got the OEM Win 7 and I've replaced every part in my machine but the case and had no complaints from MSFT or hassles when i had to reactivate when i switched out the board.

Isn't it funny though how anyone who doesn't rigidly follow the groupthink and drink the koolaid is modded down? Kinda sad when considering even one of the big cheeses at Red Hat says Linux is a failure of design and then goes on to say what we are witnessing is the "death cries" of the platform. But hey, I bet he's a super sekret M$ Ninja, right?

Re:Netflix

[hairyfeet]

The FOSSies can waste mod points going "La la la M$ Ninja!" all they want but that still doesn't change the fact you didn't even come close to answering the question which is HOW is it possible? The entire design of Linux is based on data being able to be piped from one interface to another and the kernel can't be locked down so HOW can one implement a DRM system when you could just recompile the kernel to say its outputting to a display when really its outputting to a file?

And that is of course ignoring the GPL which I'm sure if you tried the FSF would be happy to file suit. Like it or not RMS DESIGNED IT THAT WAY from the start, or did everyone magically forget the printer story? TINSTAAFL folks and the price you pay for openess is less content, simple as that. No DRM no content, like it or lump it. Or is everyone here saying that a Linux that locked the OS at the TPM level would be welcomed by the community and the FSF?

Re:Netflix

[tehcyder]

Microsoft isn't capable of developing an effective platform for anything.

I think that's at number two on the Slashdot Top Ten Commandments, right after "there shall be no god but Linus Torvalds" and in front of "Apple make reasonably priced consumer electronic devices"

Re:Netflix

[mcgrew]

I don't know why I don't get a modern TV instead

I don't, because it would be rather wasteful and the one I have is sufficient; it's 42 inches, has a flat CRT, displays widescreen format at 720p (36 inches in widescreen mode), and I paid a grand for it ten years ago. I'll probaby replace in 3 to 5 years, the phosphors are starting to dim.

Plus, it weighs 215 pounds and getting it in and out of the hoouse is a pain.

Re:Netflix

[tehcyder]

The only issue I had was some audio lag which turned out to be caused by PulseAudio.

Who'd have guessed?

Re:Netflix

[Snaller]

They fear someone will pirate the crappy lowres material.

Re:Netflix

[nukeade]

That's an interesting article. I don't entirely agree that the platform is dying, but I do agree that Linux is not ready for the average user right now. Most of all, users just want things to work out of the box, including their favorite apps. No Netflix (Silverlight) and no iTunes is showstopping for some people.

Also--shh! Don't anger the hive mind! ;)

Re:Netflix

[lister king of smeg]

you could use a loadable kernel modual they seem to be able to get around the gpl licensing issue. If i remember correctly that is how zfs on Linux, and kvm on solaris work.

Re:Netflix

[amicusNYCL]

The FOSSies can waste mod points going "La la la M$ Ninja!" all they want but that still doesn't change the fact you didn't even come close to answering the question which is HOW is it possible? The entire design of Linux is based on data being able to be piped from one interface to another and the kernel can't be locked down so HOW can one implement a DRM system when you could just recompile the kernel to say its outputting to a display when really its outputting to a file?

Sorry, are you asking me to produce a technical specification for a DRM system in an open source operating system, inside a Slashdot post? There's a ton of research and thinking that would be required to even approach that subject, and I'm not familiar enough with the Linux internals (outside of a class on the kernel I took in college 10 years ago) to even attempt to describe a solution off the top of my head. Is it possible in Linux to implement a secure DRM system? I'm sure it is, even if you have to distribute binaries instead of source and your own video and audio drivers, but I'm not going to try and guess how I would expect something to be implemented.

The fact of the matter is that today, with the effort (or lack of) put into it, it's not possible. That doesn't mean that someone wouldn't be able to design a secure DRM system for Linux, just that no one has bothered to put in that level of R&D required in order to see little to no return on investment.

Re:Netflix

[hairyfeet]

Nooo..I'm asking you to give even the roughest idea of how such a system could possibly work, not just "say its possible". After all I can say that building a car that gets 500 miles on a tank of gas is possible, but if I don't give anyone even a rough idea of how one would do that I'm just pulling it out of my ass.

But I have a feeling that if you looked into even the basics of how Linux works and the way data is treated you'd see DRM simply can't work with that design, its too trivial to bypass. Remember that ALL CONTROL in an OS starts with the kernel PERIOD. The kernel controls ALL I/O so without control of the kernel you are screwed. Now with a non general device like a TiVo you can use hardware to enforce the integrity of the DRM, but we are talking about a general purpose Linux OS like say Ubuntu, this would simply not work as the code for the kernel is freely available and there is simply no hardware to enforce the DRM so it WOULD fail and fail quickly. Again the smart cow, all it takes is one and then the forums and flooded with how to tutorials.

So I'm sorry friend but you are saying you could throw money at the problem and fix it when this wouldn't help, the OS simply isn't designed for what you are wanting it to do. Everything from the kernel to the FS is fully documented and available so the only way it MIGHT be possible would be for the small subset that have TPM hardware which again is hardware backup for the DRM. This simply wouldn't work for the majority as they don't have TPM modules so again the DRM would be bypassed. It hasn't been done not because nobody ants to do it but because there is no practical way it CAN be done.

Re:Netflix

[amicusNYCL]

Nooo..I'm asking you to give even the roughest idea of how such a system could possibly work, not just "say its possible".

I don't have enough information to declare that it is definitively not possible, so therefore I assume it's possible. If you can disprove every possible method that anyone can think of, then I'll agree that it's not possible.

this would simply not work as the code for the kernel is freely available and there is simply no hardware to enforce the DRM so it WOULD fail and fail quickly.

Well there's the thing - what if the encrypted stream would only be sent to hardware that supported your proprietary drivers to decrypt the stream? Sort of like how TiVo already works, how it runs Linux, but you need specific drivers and hardware to decrypt the stream.

I'll agree with you that a fully open-source environment can't have protected content like this. I'm assuming there is a way to add proprietary hardware and drivers to an existing open-source environment which will make content protection like this possible. I don't see a reason why that would not be possible.

Re:Netflix

[hairyfeet]

Meh I don't give a shit about groupthink, anybody who has read any of my posts see i call it like it is and don't give a shit about moderation. So far I've been told i'm a sekret ninja for MSFT, Comodo, AMD, Apple (still haven't figured that one out yet, I don't even own an iPod) Oracle and pretty much any company that some basement dweller might not like. but I call a spade a spade and bullshit is bullshit.

And as for that article i'd say it gets right to the heart of the matter why linux sucks on a desktop. I mean you can't even do the biannual upgrade without drivers crapping on themselves, and we're not talking some weird drivers either, we're talking AMD, Intel, Realtek, SiS, the same bog standard hardware that is in more than 80% of the machines out there, why? because by trying to control EVERYTHING the devs have simply spread themselves so damned thin that QA has become a bad joke. you simply can't have a handful of guys do QA on 100,000 drivers, not to mention a couple of hundred thousand packages, its simply impossible.

So I have to agree with him, make an appstore style model for software with a sandbox so that its not "all or nothing" when it comes to software installs, have a hardware ABI (which to this day you see zealots scream about even though after 20 years the damned driver model in Linux is STILL crap, it would be like MSFT sticking with VXD drivers all this time) so that those that actually make the hardware can write the drivers, and instead of spreading themselves out so thin just concentrate on the core OS and making sure that its a rock solid foundation for everyone else to build on. As he points out it would make the platform even freer than it is now while at the same time increasing QA and improving quality.

Re:Netflix

[hairyfeet]

Because then you'd just have a TiVo and not a general purpose OS like Windows and OSX? The reason one can have DRM on OSX and Windows is because of protected path, you have a proprietary kernel that feeds the input to proprietary drivers that is decoded by hardware protected by trade secrets which then feeds that signal to a monitor that also follows this proprietary spec and can thus read it.

Now do you see why it just can't work in Linux?All it takes is a single one of these things to be open for the entire system to fall apart. Believe me companies like netflix doesn't want to limit their potential customers but if something simply can't be done no matter how much money you spend it just can't be done. it would be like saying you can build a car that runs 200MPH on a teaspoon of gas, it is simply not possible. For protected path you need the entire stack, OS, drivers, I/O, A/V, all have to be onboard for the system to work. The fact that simply can't be changed is that the kernel is under GPL V2, even Linus can't change this because too many people have worked on it for him to ever be able to put that genie back in the bottle. and as i said the core of the problem is that ALL data ultimately is handled by the kernel which means one could recompile the kernel to simply lie to the DRM and its game over. Now with Windows and OSX that simply isn't possible because neither OS will run on any kernel but one built and approved by the parent corp but that simply isn't the case with Linux and simply can't be changed.

So i hope you can see this isn't any bias, on the contrary I think the GPL did exactly what RMS wanted it to do which was to keep companies from locking down the code after the fact. But you simply have to take the bad with the good and the bad is that as long as the content providers insist on DRM in simply can't be run on a Linux desktop. Sure you can buy boxes like TiVos and Boxxee boxes but those use hardware to enforce the DRM, not only could you not do that on Linux because hardware to enforce the kernel simply doesn't exist but legally even if you did manage to magically pull it off you'd run afoul of the TiVo clause of GPL V3. Remember that groups like TiVo have to be VERY careful to not include GPL V3 in their offerings or they would be forced to open the device and as far as i know nobody makes a purely GPL V2 Linux distro, hell if they did many packages would be so far behind it probably wouldn't be usable as a general purpose OS. In the end its a catch 22 in that Linux enforces freedom but for one to have the freedom to play DRM content you'd have to take away one of the four freedoms which you can't do because Linux enforces freedom.

Re:Netflix

[amicusNYCL]

Because then you'd just have a TiVo and not a general purpose OS like Windows and OSX? The reason one can have DRM on OSX and Windows is because of protected path, you have a proprietary kernel that feeds the input to proprietary drivers that is decoded by hardware protected by trade secrets which then feeds that signal to a monitor that also follows this proprietary spec and can thus read it.

And in that case the OS doesn't really matter. All the OS does is send the encrypted stream from the source to the driver. Linux is capable of doing that also. Everything else can still be closed and proprietary.

Now do you see why it just can't work in Linux?All it takes is a single one of these things to be open for the entire system to fall apart.

Hence the "system requirements" portion in the hypothetical service you'll be using. You can only use the service if you have the protected path.

Believe me companies like netflix doesn't want to limit their potential customers but if something simply can't be done no matter how much money you spend it just can't be done.

I don't think that's the issue. It might cost Netflix 10 million dollars to create the entire pathway they need to protect content on Linux, but then they have the challenge of convincing Linux users that they need to buy all this additional hardware if they want to use Netflix, and I really doubt they would see a 10 million dollar increase in revenue to offset the cost. It CAN be done, but there's no reason to do it if it's only going to get you another 500 or 1000 customers (how many Linux users are really going to buy a new video card, monitor, and potentially move to a different distribution that the binary drivers support?). The potential customer base, given the hardware requirements, is just not big enough to justify the cost to develop and support the system on Linux. That doesn't mean it can't be done. It means it can't be done profitably.

and as i said the core of the problem is that ALL data ultimately is handled by the kernel which means one could recompile the kernel to simply lie to the DRM and its game over.

Not if the kernel never has access to the decrypted stream. The kernel sends the encrypted stream to the drivers which send it directly to the hardware.

Re:Netflix

[AvitarX]

I'd say effective is anything that prevents a perfect copy.

This means if you are required to use the analog hole, or capture the decompressed stream and compress it, it is possible. I think some schemes have lived to that standard for quite a while.

Also required is enough leniance for users that they don't feel hindered (e.g. steam or Netflix).

Re:Netflix

[hairyfeet]

And if netflix spent that 10 million again you'd have a TiVo and NOT a general purpose OS. And the OS simply can't not touch the decrypted stream because its the kernel that has to deal with caches, timings, and schedulers. If you have access to the kernel then by the very fact that for an OS to function (and for your video to not be a slideshow) the kernel HAS to have access to determine when the buffer, when to lower the priority of other tasks, and when additional resources is needed the DRM simply wouldn't hold.

Its like how many games and videos will use the Readyboost on my Win 7 system. there is NO worry about using that, even though it can be simply unplugged at any time, because the entire cache is encrypted and the user doesn't have the key...but the kernel does. if one could reprogram the kernel one could lie and simply tell it to buffer onto this SSD that is "encrypted" but in reality would be encrypted with say all zeroes for the key. Again there is no way for the DRM to know this without layers of checks that would slow the whole system to a crawl and even then it would only work on a tiny subset on Linux distros and even then in only certain releases because the amount of testing would be insane.

With Windows and OSX they only have one release every 3 or so years, only one version (all the higher versions of Windows are just supersets with the same core) and most importantly it restricts the user from the core files so that one can't simply substitute core files or the kernel after installation so those extra checks simply aren't needed.

If you look at the way kernel are built and behave what you are asking for simply can't be done on an open monolithic kernel, it just won't work. it MIGHT work on a microkernel, where nearly everything is done as a module on a higher level than the core but Linux isn't a microkernel and to design the system around that idea would basically mean starting over from scratch. I mean do you honestly think in the entire 20 years of Linux development that someone hasn't wanted to add a DRM module? The reason it hasn't been done isn't a question of money, its a question of design. Its like saying you could build an economy car that could pull the same load as a full size dualie pickup. Sure you could eventually bolt in a big enough motor, transmission, suspension, etc but by the time you are done its really not gonna have anything in common with an economy car is it? I bet if you wrote Linus himself he'd tell you the same thing, there just isn't a way to put protected path into Linux, it just can't be done.

Re:Netflix

[Guspaz]

You're accusing Netflix, who probably support more platforms than any other pieces of software known to man except for DooM and Tetris, of not being available to "a shit load of devices"? Umm, that's a funny concern, seeing as how you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a TV/bluray player/settop box/computer/laptop/console/smartphone/handheld/etc that supports Netflix. I'd argue that the chances of a typical household NOT having a non-PC Netflix compatible device is very slim. As for other countries, that's licensing, and there's nothing Netflix can do about it. They're expanding to new countries as fast as their business allows, and that's all anyone can ask.

Your proposal to pirate content isn't a legitimate alternative.

Re:Netflix

[gorzek]

Here's an article about it, in case you're interested:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10212843-93.html

He was told that in the first place.

[Anonymous Coward]

It just took a LOT of wasted time for him to believe it.

Same old microsoft

[LingNoi]

1) Create new technology
2) Market the hell out of it
3) Everyone gets hyped up, next big thing etc
4) Microsoft drops technology
5) repeat step 1

This has been their standard order of business for decades. Watch for the same thing to happen to "Metro" Microsoft's latest big thing..

Re:Same old microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah because Microsoft is the only company that does this right?

Here, I'll tell you who else does this because I'm positive that you won't have a clue who I'm talking about since you posted such a stupid response.

Google.

Re:Same old microsoft

[djdanlib]

Google surely wouldn't create a Buzz in the marketplace unless they were sure their product would be the Wave of the future, would they? ;)

Some of us are in fact non-Plussed by their entirely-too-sanitary products...

Re:Same old microsoft

[poetmatt]

Actually, 3 is wrong.

In this case 3 was: nobody wanted this shit ever, forever and ever. People warned and warned and warned it was horrible, and Miguel along with Florian were the only people pushing for "oh, this is great, and it's open source!" (while not mentioning it was like 2+ years behind the entire time and MS would deliberately only support the latest versions) 4 and 5 still occur.

Same thing with windows ME, windows 8, the Ribbon bar, games for windows live, DRM pushed by intel/MS, etc.

Re:Same old microsoft

[Sarten-X]

Like most R&D-heavy companies, Google will promote and hype their new product, but if it doesn't take off, it'll die a quiet death. Their successful products will be promoted continually, as a means to build up the brand.

Microsoft, on the other hand, promotes its new technology, and when nobody cares, they promote it more, deprecate the old system, tack on a new name, integrate it with their next new project, then finally declare it deprecated (but still fully supported) when the new replacement comes out.

Re:Same old microsoft

[lilfields]

Metro? You mean we'll go back to a work where we have just icons with no description of anything related to the programs content? I guess the GUI won't be updated until Apple says so! Metro's Live Tiles are essentially what Microsoft tried to do years and years ago with the active desktop, which were subsequently killed after their spat with the U.S. government. Guess who no longer has the government on their back? (hint: Microsoft.) Your insightful on Slashdot, but in reality your post is more trollish.

Re:Same old microsoft

[dkleinsc]

What I've noticed is that it's gotten worse since Bill Gates left Microsoft to Steve Ballmer. I'm guessing this has a lot to do with the fact that BillG was quite able to evaluate the technical merits of different proposals, while SteveB was not. BillG could act as a filter between the research teams that need to come up with the Next Big Thing (TM) to justify their existence and the MS marketing machine that is quite capable of hyping just about anything in the press.

Re:Same old microsoft

[sjames]

MS isn't the only offender, they're just the only offender to try using it for OS lo0ck-in and then throwing their weight around trying to cram it down people's throats.

Google creates a lot of things. Some stick, some are dropped. Some die quietly and just fade away. They tend to be multi-platform right out of the gate.

Re:Same old microsoft

[SplashMyBandit]

Well, it wasn't like the community didn't try and warn the Mono dudes. Microsoft does this sooner or later with all their technology (lose focus on something to try and sell 'teh new shiny' instead).

Re:Same old microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

What I've noticed is that it's gotten worse since Bill Gates left Microsoft to Steve Ballmer. I'm guessing this has a lot to do with the fact that BillG was quite able to evaluate the technical merits of different proposals, while SteveB was not. BillG could act as a filter between the research teams that need to come up with the Next Big Thing (TM) to justify their existence and the MS marketing machine that is quite capable of hyping just about anything in the press.

Bill Gates thought the internet was a fad and tried to push their own closed wall AOL style web.
Microsoft got to the top of the computing world by adopting a criminal behaviour for decades. Whatever standard of excellence there was in Redmond (and it's hugely debatable) we'll never know since MS hasn't been able to compete honestly ever. Not a single time. Microsoft is a criminal enterprise from top to bottom.

Re:Same old microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

it's gotten worse

We have lots of words in the language so that you don't have to use such ugly compositions.

How about "deteriorated"? That's a splendid word.

Re:Same old microsoft

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Very nice post, I wish i had mod points.

A difference - MS creates platforms that you're supposed to build on. When MS pulls the rug from underneath you, you were building for quite a while. Wave got pulled early, too early to be a platform. Buzz never was. It makes for a lot lower impact.

Re:Same old microsoft

[Darinbob]

The difference is that when Google does this everybody yawns (except for the 10 or so who post blogs about how game changing it will be). But when Microsoft does this for a half-finished technology of theirs, everybody starts to go nuts and IT houses start hiring people with 5 years experience in it, all the analysts claim you need to have it, corporations create internal policies regarding it, and the Mono team starts investigating a cross platform version.

Re:Same old microsoft

[DarwinSurvivor]

If you believe the OS X version of silverlight is the same as the Windows version, you are only kidding yourself.

Re:Same old microsoft

[sjames]

Google seems to manage Linux support OK. Flash runs in Linux.

Silverlight isn't MS's only attempt at lock-in.

Re:Same old microsoft

[m_gol]

If you believe the OS X version of silverlight is the same as the Windows version, you are only kidding yourself.

Could you elaborate more on that?

Re:Same old microsoft

[m_gol]

Flash runs in Linux.

Except Adobe's already abandoned Flash in Linux, there will only be security fixes during next 5 years and a Chrome implementation. I expect Flash experience to derail in the next couple of years when players start demanding newer Flash version. It will be Chrome's Flash or nothing. I hope the plugin will be useless by then.

Re:Same old microsoft

[sjames]

I never claimed Google to be a paragon of virtue, only that lockin isn't amongst their sins. A big reason I don't mind Google so much is that there is a lot less attempt to cram it down my throat. I can more easily avoid their sins.

I do find it amusing that MS so over-played the lock-in strategy that they even locked themselves in.

Re:Same old microsoft

[sjames]

That's probably because flash is going away and gnash is starting to work well anyway. The Adobe plugin is becoming irrelevant in general.

Re:Same old microsoft

[hairyfeet]

Well then you are supporting a company whose co-founder said "privacy is dead, get over it" but if you are cool with that? Fine and dandy. Unlike those that treat software as a religion I think you should use what works for you and if Google tracking everything (ever see how much shit Chrome collects?) is cool with you then far be it from me to judge.

That doesn't change the fact that NONE of the companies I named have clean hands, not one. No matter how much PR they spin the big multinationals are just that, multinationals and frankly if they could boost their profits by 15% by throwing you in a cage with a horny silverback you'd be getting gorilla loving before sunset. So maybe if others here would stop treating corps as ballclubs then maybe they too could make informed decisions.

Re:Same old microsoft

[sjames]

WOW this must be a hot-button issue for you (or you REALLY want to marry MS and have children).. I had no idea damning something with faint praise was now considered to be support.

Re:Same old microsoft

[djdanlib]

I know. Kin you believe it? It's almost as bad as trying to read the Web on your TV... that's for Watch-ing video, not reading text in Courier or whatever other ugly font. Yessiree Bob. They sure do make a lot of mistakes. But I guess I'll get off my Soapbox Zuner or later.

Bad sign for good technology

[TheNucleon]

Silverlight really is a well thought out technology. It does a great job of abstracting the presentation layer from the code, and is pleasant to program. The tools for developing in Silverlight are nice, too. Too bad that it is showing signs of fading away - I think it had a lot of potential.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[cpu6502]

I thought the necessity for Silverlight (and Flash) was obsoleted by HTML 5? I think both these programs need to disappear.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[Sarten-X]

Potential that could have been useful in, say, 1993...

Silverlight was supposed to be Microsoft's answer to Flash, but HTML 5 is already the generally-accepted answer to Flash. It was supposed to enable web-based applications to run on the desktop, but the widespread adoption of AJAX and other browser technologies has made that goal unnecessary, too. It was supposed to be a mechanism for Microsoft to claim dominance of up-and-coming technologies, but it's just yet another failure on Ballmer's running list of "too little, too late" achievements.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[Enderandrew]

Many Microsoft sites that used Silverlight have moved to HTML5, and Microsoft is telling Silverlight developers to embrace HTML5.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[BaronAaron]

The various browser implementations of HTML5 still haven't matured enough to reliably replace browser plugins in all cases. Specifically video playback support is still a mess due to all the codec patent issues. A recent project I worked on required us to encode the video in three different formats to cover all the major browsers. If we used Flash we would have only had to encode once. There is also no DRM solution for HTML5 video. This is a non-starter for many streaming companies like Netflix.

HTML5 get better everyday though, it's only a matter of time.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[jellomizer]

Silverlight is part of Microsoft recent trend of systems that were too little to late, and not marketed well enough.

Microsoft actually lately has been developing some nice stuff... However they are failing to catch on because they are seen as near identical replacement of an existing product that is widely used.

Why develop for Sliverlight when everyone has Flash installed... Besides HTML 5 standards would be out soon.
Why get a Zune and buy software on the Microsoft channel, when Apple already has one, and it is already really big.
Why get a Windows Phone, when you can an Android or an iPhone....

People will stick with the older technology even if it is a little bit worse then the new stuff, mostly because unless it is really that much better you are wasting your time coding for something that then you need to evangelize the user community to adopt.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously coming from someone who has never had to develop with JS/HTML5. It's a miserable experience compared to Flash or Silverlight and it takes a lot longer since there is less tooling and you have multiple browsers to target.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[jason777]

Yeah, but building XAML in Blend in really nice. I don't think there is an HTML equivalent for building vector UI, animations, and all the bells and whistles Blend gives you. Granted, I really hope Microsoft comes out with a nice XAML to HTML5 conversion tool.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[Darinbob]

If it had potential it became moot when it was used as a tool to lock people into Windows.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[dkf]

Potential that could have been useful in, say, 1993...

Excessive hyperbole detected. The web was pretty awful and slow in 1993; it was all forms and fully synchronous page loads and total inability to find anything. Remember, you're two years before the first public appearance of Java and JavaScript at that point. Five years pre-Google. The company that created Flash (though never gave it that name) was founded in 1993.

Silverlight would have done very well if it had been released in 1997 (a mere 10 years prior to its actual release) assuming that the computers of the time and networks of the time could have coped. As it is, it never had the traction; too many developers were never interested in switching. (Myself? I just didn't care. Still don't.)

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[Sarten-X]

Granted, 1993 might be a bit far back, but that was part of the point. If .NET and the CLR spec were mature (or at least functional) in the mid-90's, then by the time the rest of the Web was ready for it, it would have been able to be the platform of choice.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[Mathness]

it's just yet another failure on Ballmer's running list of "too little, too late" achievements.

Just a few more and he unlocks the achievement that grants a vanity pet (demonic chair) that follows him around everywhere. :p

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[Eponymous Coward]

If we used Flash we would have only had to encode once

Yes, and it would have been available on any device running Flash.

You could have used H.264 and only had to encode it once. Just like Flash, it would have only worked on devices that support it.

HTML5 get better everyday though, it's only a matter of time.

Yep. Your experience developing with HTML5 has value going forward. People with Flash expertise are finding a shrinking market for them to work in.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[Eponymous Coward]

WP7 is a dead end. WP8 is basically another reboot of Microsoft's mobile platform. Does anybody really wonder why they are having a hard time attracting developer interest these days?

I partially agree with you though. WP7 is very pretty and works well. Unfortunately, too many of the apps (not all though) are very rough and buggy. IME, when it comes to app polish and quality, iOS > Android > WP7.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[DarwinSurvivor]

The tools will come. You will probably see 2 types of dev tools arrive, editors and frameworks. The editors will be like qtcreator where you only see the code for the logic part and the frameworks will resemble jQuery and the like.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[DarwinSurvivor]

Why get a Windows Phone, when you can an Android or an iPhone...

Well that one is easy - WP7 is simply a nicer, snappier, more polished experience than Android. (With Android you have to worry about getting updates, about uninstallable crapware, if&how you can root, malware, laggy UIs, etc...)

Yeah, with win7 phones it's just a straight-up "no", SOO much better...

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[countach]

If you read all the links it says that probably WP7 phones won't get the WP8 upgrade. Say what you will about Apple, but they've been pretty good about supporting phone and tablet users with upgrades to the OS. I don't know that you can trust any of the other vendors to not abandon your hardware a lot quicker than Apple does.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[triffid_98]

Right...Netflix should switch their PC streaming over to HTML5 right away. Except for the tiny problem that HTML5 has no encrypted video support.

I'm all for aggressive HTML5 adoption, that will get us the features it's missing much faster. At least in the right now Flash and Silverlight do things HTML5 won't.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[Kalriath]

What part of "Many Microsoft sites that used Silverlight have moved to HTML5" didn't make sense? And need I point out the HTML5 support in IE10, and the HTML5 application support in Windows 8?

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[Eponymous Coward]

WP8 is based on WinRT. WP7 has a WinCE kernel. They are very, very different.

It isn't even clear if WP7 phones will be able to be upgraded to WP8. Most sources say it won't be.

Re:Bad sign for good technology

[Karma's A Bitch]

Would you care to elaborate on this? It'd be interesting to know what they got right (especially the separation of presentation layer from the code).

Am I a bad person?

[demachina]

Am I a bad person to experience a Schadenfreude rush everytime Miguel, Facebook, Zynga or Groupon fails?

Re:Am I a bad person?

[sycodon]

Absolutely Not.

I was actually kind of giddy when Facebook shares started dropping the first day out.

I just head they are predicting $25 by mid-summer.

Re:Am I a bad person?

[OzPeter]

Absolutely Not.

I was actually kind of giddy when Facebook shares started dropping the first day out.

I just head they are predicting $25 by mid-summer.

By mid summer?? It's $28 and falling TODAY

Re:Am I a bad person?

[elsurexiste]

Most likely a sadist or a psychopath. ;)

Re:Am I a bad person?

[Col. Klink (retired)]

> Am I a bad person to experience a Schadenfreude rush everytime Miguel, Facebook, Zynga or Groupon fails?

There's a whole online support group for people like us.

Re:Am I a bad person?

[rrohbeck]

Compared to Google's P/E, it should be around $16. And nobody knows yet if they can monetize their customers as well as Google.

Re:Am I a bad person?

[demachina]

The underwriters usually have a 15% over allotment of the stock that they can manipulate to support the price if it breaks the syndicate bid. If Morgan Stanley did't have to buy more than that 15% of the issue to support the price on the day of the IPO then they might not have lost any thing.

Reference Greenshoe Green Shoe Manufacturing was the first IPO to have this allotment which is why its been called that ever since.

Re:Am I a bad person?

[hduff]

Absolutely Not.

I was actually kind of giddy when Facebook shares started dropping the first day out.

I just head they are predicting $25 by mid-summer.

By mid summer?? It's $28 and falling TODAY

Facebook has invented time travel !

Hasn't silverlight been abandoned

[vlm]

Hasn't silverlight been abandoned?
First release in '07 and according to the wikipedia article the staggering market penetration of 0.3% (thats zero point three, I didn't drop a leading 9 or something...)

Re:Hasn't silverlight been abandoned

[sangreal66]

It's still alive on Xbox. It drives all of the new media applications

Re:Hasn't silverlight been abandoned

[The MAZZTer]

Microsoft has decided to never implement WelGL in IE (IIRC) and supposedly this is because they're trying to push 3D features in Silverlight.

Oh look, Flash has built-in 3D features now, and actually has a user base...

Re:Hasn't silverlight been abandoned

[tom17]

One word.

Netflix.

Re:Hasn't silverlight been abandoned

[MightyMartian]

And another legacy monster is born. Microsoft has a peculiar expertise for loading itself down with this kind of cruft.

Re:Hasn't silverlight been abandoned

[jedidiah]

A $60 ARM appliance makes far more sense for that particular use case.

Re:Hasn't silverlight been abandoned

[tom17]

Wait, so Netflix works on my Win7 laptop, so I should go out and spend money on a $60 device so I can.. watch Netflix?

How should I hook up this device to my laptop when I am on the train?

Re:Hasn't silverlight been abandoned

[Sir_Sri]

Why? The Xbox 2 will be dead within 3 months of the Xbox 3 launching.

Even if that wasn't coming relatively soon on the scale of software lifecycles, the Xbox is big enough they can have their own dedicated framework and tools. If those tools are basically silverlight, well, so what?

Re:Hasn't silverlight been abandoned

[tom17]

The GGP said (and in fact is the title of this thread) "Hasn't silverlight been abandoned".

I was merely highlighting one reason why it may NOT have been abandoned yet. There are many people who like to use Netflix on their laptops.

When I want to watch something on my laptop (i.e. when I am not near my TV) then, yes, it is my preferred viewing platform as it's the only (feasible) Netflix viewing platform. My phone has too small a screen and I don't have a tablet.

If you were on a train, would you take your TV with you to watch on that? Where would you plug it in?

Re:Hasn't silverlight been abandoned

[vlm]

At 0.3% market presentation after 5 years, does that imply Netflix might be the only non-MS website using silverlight? Gotta wonder about that.

Re:Hasn't silverlight been abandoned

[wed128]

Watch netflix on your cellphone on the train. It's lighter and easier to carry.

Re:Hasn't silverlight been abandoned

[tepples]

How do you hook up your laptop to the Internet while you are on the train? Or did Netflix get an option to preload the whole movie while I wasn't looking?

Re:Hasn't silverlight been abandoned

[tom17]

That's why I said ONE word. One app, One word :)

Ahh!

[gQuigs]

I'm no fan of .NET, but I'm pretty sure the Mono developers aren't the only ones using it.

He is saying there is no future for Silverlight (the .NET based web plugin), not all of .NET. And that they won't put resouces into developing Moonlight (the open source version of Silverlight).

...or maybe I was the only one confused by the summary....

I know of two sites that use Silverlight, netflix and xfinity. They both use it just for the Microsoft DRM, afaik.

Re:Ahh!

[jellomizer]

Perhaps if you actually sit down and learned it, you may actually get a job. .NET is prevalent in Windows Application. If a company chooses windows for whatever motive knowing .NET will probably get you in.

Re:Ahh!

[RightSaidFred99]

First sign someone doesn't know what they're talking about: They blather about how sick .NET makes them and how much they hate it, before proceeding back to their Emacs/vim session to edit some Perl, Bash, or Python script.

.NET != Silverlight

[Empiric]

It isn't terribly surprising that Mono is abandoning Silverlight, since Microsoft seems to be doing much the same in favor of HTML 5.

The .NET Framework and tools in totality are a different story, though.

By the way, for those who haven't looked at it recently, MonoDevelop has come a -long- way. It's feature-comparable to Visual Studio, nowadays.

Re:.NET != Silverlight

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad its built on a foundation of sand... combined with a swamp.

Re:.NET != Silverlight

[Empiric]

Well, since I was a developer at Coldwell Banker a few years back, whose worldwide real estate search and "tour" sites were running handily on .NET and SQL Server, I happen to know directly that it was a relatively-small percentage that were built on sand and swamp. But you could filter those out by price range. ;)

Re:.NET != Silverlight

[Orion Blastar]

Considering that the Visual Studio 11 Express Edition will only develop Metro Apps the MonoDevelop is looking pretty good as an alternative.

Re:.NET != Silverlight

[Dwedit]

Monodevelop still can't do Edit and Continue.

Re:.NET != Silverlight

[Just Some Guy]

By the way, for those who haven't looked at it recently, MonoDevelop has come a -long- way. It's feature-comparable to Visual Studio, nowadays.

Please tell me it's not screenshot compatible, because that's the ugliest freaking mess of a horrid GUI editor that I've encountered. Otherwise, no wonder I've seen so many Windows devs with multiple huge monitors: they'd need them to be able to see a useful amount of code at one time. Seriously, those screenshots dedicate, what, 20% of the window to actual content?

Re:.NET != Silverlight

[gbjbaanb]

its sort-of true, but nearly everyone has the side-panels either docked together, tabbed or slide-out from a hidden position. I never liked the slide-out bits, and choose 3 or 4 tabs in the left hand panel so I get a large area for text - just a side panel at the left and bottom.

But MS IDEs have always had more dialogs and panels than you can shake a stick at.

Re:.NET != Silverlight

[gbjbaanb]

oh, I was talking about real Visual Studio - got knows what MonoDevelop is like, all my linux dev is done using Code::Blocks or Eclipse. And I think more of my Windows dev will be done in those too!

HTML5 convergence

[johanwanderer]

This is just another sign of the industry converging to HTML5 as the primary display API. Flash is going away, now Silverlight is, too. Hopefully the companies will increase their efforts to allow users / developers to migrate existing applications to the new API.

Re:HTML5 convergence

[ArhcAngel]

Flash is going away,

Flash is the new IE6. Ten years from now corporations will still be clinging to it while everyone else is running HTML17.

Re:HTML5 convergence

[tokul]

Your thoughts will look better, if you stop converging things. Now it is just something coming from smoked html5 marketing department.

Re:HTML5 convergence

[jimshatt]

Didn't you hear HTML is going on a fast release cycle too? Actually, in ten years we'll have HTML22.04 "Horrid Hypertext" (October release will be "Imbecile Interwebs")

How do we strong arm Ultra Violet distributors now

[pecosdave]

If you want to watch many companies Ultra Violet distributors movies you're stuck with Silverlight, at the prompting of one I tried to get Moonlight going but there wasn't a 64 Bit version.

Of course Sony takes and overall screw Linux position even banning Linux browsers from logging into their website with cryptic error messages.

What will it be replaced with?

[Qwavel]

Silverlight, and even Flash, are dying out.

Don't get me wrong - that is a good thing - but I want to be able to watch Netflix, Youtube Videos, etc. in my browser and that isn't going to happen unless there is some way for my browser to handle DRM'ed video streams.

So, either HTML5 needs to add support for DRM'ed video, or users will only be able to use these services via 'apps' and obscure platforms will be at a huge disadvantage (e.g. Netflix isn't writing an app for the Playbook because the platform isn't popular enough).

Personally, I think that the hate that is felt towards DRM should be redirected towards proprietary DRM so we can break down platform lock-in and give the obscure platforms a chance with the average consumer.

Re:What will it be replaced with?

[Hatta]

Personally, I think that the hate that is felt towards DRM should be redirected towards proprietary DRM so we can break down platform lock-in and give the obscure platforms a chance with the average consumer.

Can't be done. Any open DRM platform will be trivially circumvented. In cryptographic terms, DRM is an attempt to send a message from Alice to Bob without it being read by Charlie. The problem is that in DRM, Bob and Charlie are the same person. The way DRM companies get around this is by hiding the private key in the software. If their DRM systems were open, then they would be unable to hide anything anywhere.

Re:What will it be replaced with?

[hobarrera]

Or maybe DRM needs to die once and for all, which is what most consumer are expecting.

Re:What will it be replaced with?

[Bert64]

Any form of DRM has to be proprietary, the entire premise is based on security through obscurity... If the platform is not obscure, then it becomes even more trivial to circumvent.

It is DRM that should be abandoned, it serves only to screw legitimate customers through lack of player choice and bugs etc... It does absolutely nothing to stop piracy, if anything it encourages it because it enables the pirates to offer a superior product...

DRM is inherently broken because you have to give users everything they need in order to play the stream, you just need to reverse engineer it and work out how to extract the data or keys. For any DRM scheme which has content worth pirating, this always happens, and it only takes one person to work it out and distribute his tools to the warez scene.

Re:What will it be replaced with?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Personally, I think that the hate that is felt towards DRM should be redirected towards proprietary DRM so we can break down platform lock-in and give the obscure platforms a chance with the average consumer.

Trouble is, there is nothing but 'Proprietary DRM'. If DRM is 'open' it becomes quite trivial to produce a tool that is conformant in all respects, except that it silently ignores the various customer-hostile features(like those little HDMI converter boxes, that aren't supposed to exist, that report themselves as an HDCP compliant sink on one side; but spit out an unencrypted video stream on the other).

Thus, we see either single-party proprietary DRM(eg. 'Fairplay' where only one company holds the keys) or multi-party proprietary DRM(eg. WMDRM, where you can license the DRM system; but only by agreeing to cripple your product in specific ways). There might be a hypothetical 'open' DRM, developed under some sort of OSS model; but for it to remotely work in practice, it would just be rolled out on tivoized platforms only. And what good is 'open' in that case?

Re:What will it be replaced with?

[Qwavel]

Microsoft, Google, and Netflix made a proposal for a plug-in system for DRM. It is probably the closest we will come to open-drm, and about the only chance that companies like Netflix will be able to support an HTML5 browser without plug-ins.

I see that the first 5-rated above says that Netflix doesn't use DRM on mobile platforms, and many other herald the arrival of the new DRM free world - both are nothing but wishful thinking.

If we keep up that sort of wishful thinking and freaking out about any DRM then services like Netflix will only be available via apps on locked down platforms in the future.

Would you rather that the browser plug-in was proprietary and locked down, or the entire platform?

Re:What will it be replaced with?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

When it comes to DRM peddlers, it isn't clear that that will be the choice.

. Take a look at this 'Encrypted Media Extensions' proposal. Most of it just lays out a bunch of proposed javascript for requesting keys and passing them to a decryption module whose implementation is left vague(aside from the one, seemingly completely pointless, 'simple' case where a static, known, key is used for no obvious reason).

Now, have a look at the goodies: In the diagram at the beginning "CDM may use or defer to platform capabilities". And look also at section 8.5:

"Can I ensure the content key is protected without working with a content protection provider?"

"No. Protecting the content key would require that the browser's media stack have some secret that cannot easily be obtained. This is the type of thing DRM solutions provide. Establishing a standard mechanism to support this is beyond the scope of HTML5 standards and should be deferred to specific user agent solutions. In addition, it is not something that fully open source browsers could natively support."

"Can a user agent protect the rendering path or protect the uncompressed content after decoding?"

"Yes, a user agent could use platform-specific capabilities to protect the rendering path."

So, unless you want to use the (seemingly entirely pointless) 'clear-key' case, this 'open' proposal boils down to a mixture of hot air and admissions that the good stuff would necessarily be implemented in closed (probably 'platform', which increasingly means 'cryptographically locked firmware') sections.

Can an OSS browser protect the key from the user? No. The specification explicitly says as much. And if the key is known and the cyphertext has been downloaded, the game is over. Period. So, right there, only closed (either binary-only or OSS-tivoized) implementations of key handling need apply. Can an OSS media rendering path protect the content from the user? No. The specification says as much. Only if media rendering is handed off to a binary or hardware/firmware component can that be provided.

Essentially, this proposal achieves the magnificent breakthrough of allowing a DRM streaming stack to use the browser's HTTP transfer mechanisms instead of those in the flash plugin. Key handling and media path? Those are either completely in the clear, or necessarily handed off to user-opaque sections.

Further, if you want to 'protect the media path' and ensure key security(even in a binary module) that implies such radical capabilities as protected memory regions that cannot be read by even the highest-privilege user-controlled processes(so, either a locked kernel, or an 'open' kernel under a locked hypervisor, PS3 linux style) as well as locked audio and video output paths, potentially locked cache areas on mass storage devices, and so forth.

Given this, it really comes down one of two ways: The first option is Tivoization: Yeah, it's 'open'; as in 'you could build the code and run it on some other hardware without a locked bootloader'. The second is some sort of TPM-style 'secure remote attestation' setup: It's 'open' as in "yes, you can modify it if you want; but remote hosts will refuse to deal with you if your attestation signatures come back nonstandard"(see also: Google/android DRM and what happens if you root your device...)

For good or ill, you can't make a piece of hardware serve two masters. If you want DRM to work, the platform must ultimately be controlled by the vendor, possibly with little sandbox areas for the user to amuse himself. If you want the user to control the platform, DRM cannot be more than a (perhaps frustrating, perhaps trivial) exercise in obfuscation and cat-and-mouse trickery.

Re:What will it be replaced with?

[Eponymous Coward]

It isn't exactly the same situation, but Tivo is (or at least was) built on signed open source software. IIRC, this was part of what brought about GPL3.

Re:What will it be replaced with?

[jasomill]

What could work, however, is an inexpensive "trusted media coprocessor" that takes DRM video and renders directly to the video hardware. Probably too wasteful of silicon on small mobile devices, but it could be reasonable on the desktop. Ideally, this would be subsidized by the media companies themselves, complete with open source reference drivers. Fine with me if they want to "own"the playback hardware, so long as they're willing to pay for it...

No. Shit.

[EjectButton]

"we no longer believe that Silverlight is a suitable platform for write-once-run-anywhere technology, there are just too many limitations for it to be useful."
If only someone could have warned you, oh wait someone did, _everyone_ in the world who has paid any attention to Microsoft's behavior over the last 20 years.

Miguel has supported:
the Microsoft "partnership" with Novell (disaster for Novell in the community)
OOXML/docx (deliberately obfuscated format mess)
C# (has a constant vague patent cloud over it that he dismisses)
Moonlight/Silverlight (a patent-encumbered flash clone, in an era when flash is going away, now shown to be a bad idea)

I used to wonder if Miguel was a Microsoft plant, now I wonder if he just has a learning disability.

Re:No. Shit.

[Spykk]

C# (has a constant vague patent cloud over it that he dismisses)

So, what is the alternative then? I'm sure that you are aware that Java has its own vague patent cloud these days. The market has shown that there is a need for a JIT compiled platform for architecture neutral binaries. If Java and .net are out then what can we use?

Re:No. Shit.

[SplashMyBandit]

There is no patent cloud over Java. This was proven less than two weeks ago. Plus, you are explicitly allowed to create compatible versions of the JVM (but cannot use the trademark Java unless you pay for the Test Compatibility Kit).

Note that the patent cloud over .NET is not for the C# language itself - that is indeed open. The .NET libraries are proprietary and protected by patents.

In short, if you are worried about creating a Java or .NET implementation then Java has a *much* safer legal foundation for doing so (just say you are compatible with OpenJDK :) ). For users this is all irrelevant, users are safe usig Java or C# (but I still prefer Java, it will be around long after Microsoft have abandoned .NET).

Re:No. Shit.

[gadzook33]

Please don't throw Java in the same boat as C#. Yes, they're both managed languages but C# is much a better thought-out language and is actually pleasant to use. Granted it had the benefit of hindsight, but then that's what MS is good at - taking good ideas and polishing them. I know a lot of people will say ruining them, but that's typically people who are so mired in their particular religion that they can't see past their noses. I've spent years working in Linux, Java, Windows, C, C++, C#, and Mono. In my opinion, anyone who dismisses MS tech out of hand hasn't really given it a chance.

Re:No. Shit.

[prefect42]

I'd disagree. Encourage a swift and tidy wind up if you genuinely believe it to be a waste of effort. Do everything you can to wrap it up like that, *then* put it on github and see what happens. OSS developer time isn't an infinite resource, and it'd be best to divert as much attention as possible away from dead ends.

Re:No. Shit.

[byuu]

There is no patent cloud over Java. This was proven less than two weeks ago.

Although I believe you are correct, risk averse businesses are still going to want to wait for the 12 years of appeals to complete first.

Re:No. Shit.

[jasomill]

The .NET libraries are proprietary and protected by patents.

Maybe so, but how could a valid utility patent on a .NET library routine not extend to a functionally equivalent routine on Java or any other platform?

Re:No. Shit.

[SplashMyBandit]

> Maybe so, but how could a valid utility patent on a .NET library routine not extend to a functionally equivalent routine on Java or any other platform?
Because the JDK license includes a patent grant for a compatible implementation (or at least, it used to). Note that Dalvik is not compatible with the JDK, but then Google do not claim it is - which is why Oracle felt they could do Google for copyright infringement.

Silverlight was temporary anyway

[Dhrakar]

Silverlight just like Flash was only ever going to be temporary anyway. They were both technologies trying to do the same thing of abstracting the GUI to something that crosses OS versions, platforms, etc. Once Flash started giving way to HTML5, the writing was on the wall for Silverlight. Soon, I imagine, we will have native apps for things the need deeper/privileged access to the platform (phone, tablet, desktop, whatever) and web-style HTML rendering for everything else.

Sometimes a manager's gut is right

[MyLongNickName]

My lead developer wanted to adopt Silverlight a couple years back for a key application we were developing. I am sure he had strong technical reasons, but getting tied to a highly proprietary Microsoft technology just smelled bad. .NET is one thing, Silverlight scared the hell out of me. I pulled out one of my rarely used veto cards and I'm glad I did.

Re:Sometimes a manager's gut is right

[uhuru_meditation]

I wish you were my manager 2 years ago. In his under-educated retardation, that guy opted for the future development of a program on a Silverlight that will affect millions of children. I left possibly one of the best companies in the world, because this product line will ultimately fail over it and it seemed unethical for me to linger on. I tried my best to convince peers, stakeholders, everyone involved - out of their ignorance they just kept the development on track - waiting for the incoming train. Such a sad story...

Refrain

[Corson]

"The Mono project is about the only group of people actively talking up .NET" -- You made this up, right? tiobe.com shows C++ at 9.8% and C# at 6.8%.

Re:Refrain

[Sonic McTails]

I think the article means that mono is the only re-implementation of the .NET stack that attempted to implement Sliverlight, not that they are the only group coding in .NET.

Still worded awkward as hell ...

Re:Refrain

[Corson]

Oh, and Objective-C at 8.3% but, unless and until the business world switches to Mac OS X/iOS, I think it's fair to label it as "entertainment".

Re:Refrain

[squiggleslash]

And VB. Large amounts of VB stuff these days is back-end .NET stuff, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it, but is easy to ignore if you're living in a Java/Unix world.

Re:Refrain

[shutdown -p now]

TCPI is bullshit. It is only vaguely useful when comparing relative popularity of languages (and even then there are plenty of gotchas), but their percentage values are completely useless.

Re:Refrain

[carnalforge]

I'm curious on this one. From when .NET first came till now, I've yet* to see something based in that server side in any place I've been professionally working.
And BTW I'm interested in other people's experience on this, i keep an eye in technology that i don't particularly like. Just in case.

* Yes, being working only on UNIX probably my view is distorted. But no, being working in data centers with mixed UNIX/MS systems in my experience the only MS stuff you see in those places is Exchange, some solitary ISA / IIS / ASP / .NET servers for the intranet and that's it. Note that i'm not counting the client side part.

Re:Refrain

[squiggleslash]

It's fairly common, especially in MS-only shops. Even my employer, which uses a mixture (although sadly mostly PHP on the GNU/Linux side, urgh) has their entire back-end in .NET, mostly VB.NET.

Don't underestimate the influence of VB. There's lots of business logic coded in VB, originally glued to Crystal Reports libraries and Access databases, which has been migrated to more centralized, sane, infrastructure thanks to VB.NET. And because small portions got ported in that way, the end result has been massive .NET apps, using SQL Server, all written in VB. It's seen as easier and safer for many businesses, especially the types of business that wouldn't touch a *ix box in a million years.

Re:Refrain

[Shados]

Never looked at Dell's website or Newegg?

Its also really big in the finance industry, which is generally Unix based, but ends up making compromises to get some stuff out of the door faster (right tool for right job philosophy, so the big financials usually end up having stuff written in every language you can imagine, but java and stuff usually takes first spot, but they end up with a couple of IIS server farms here and there).

Yes and No

[pavon]

Silverlight (and XNA, and Windows Phone 7, etc) basically refer to overlapping collections of .NET libraries (often referred to as profiles) which different environments support. The set of libraries that Xamarin provides for Android development is a superset of the libraries available in Silverlight 4. However the intent isn't for you to write Silverlight applications that happen to run on Android. The idea is to write all your common code using the .NET Base Class Libraries (BCL; which are included in the ECMA standard), and then write your interface using (wrappers) around the native libraries for Android (or iOS or WP7 or Silverlight or WPF or ASP), for each platform you release on.

Re:Yes and No

[elabs]

That sounds good in theory, but what about apps that are 90% UI code? Most games have very little in the way of common code (i.e. business logic) that can be shared across implementations. Most of the code is just to make the user interface run. Under this new pattern I would have to rewrite my game for every platform, including Microsoft's own platforms. That should not be.

restrictions

[l3v1]

"Microsoft added artificial restrictions to Silverlight"

Uhm, what do we say now... let's try: We told you so!

How many endless debates in forums back in the day when Mono development started, all in vain.

Re:How do we strong arm Ultra Violet distributors

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I get this funny little feeling that "Ultraviolet" will come to occupy the same in history footnote as as "DIVX"(the phone-home video player attempt by Circuit City, not the codec), "Flexplay", and "DVD-D"...

I can't think of any ways that the 'consortium' behind it could make it any more of a user nightmare; but they seem to be doing their best.

Re:Time to abandon Mono itself....

[Enderandrew]

.NET never was that huge for desktop apps for most users, but it is HUGE in the enterprise world. HTML5 is the path for Metro tile apps, but Microsoft isn't abandoning all their enterprise customers with internal apps. .NET isn't going away. Mono in theory could allow these customers to shift to Linux, but I'm not sure anyone has really tried that.

Re:So Miguel . . .

[jellomizer]

Do you say that about the StarOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice developers to make sure their products support Microsoft Office files.
How about those hard working people in the WINE project.
Heck those guys who make DOS BOX.

I for one would like much more positive community support from the Open Source community toward Mono. De-Windows .NET would open the door towards more cross platform applications.

Re:How do we strong arm Ultra Violet distributors

[Microlith]

The funniest part about that Talk page is that "JimTheFrog" is, according to his user page:

Jim Taylor is Head of Technology and Product Development for UltraViolet/DECE, the online entertainment equivalent to DVD and Blu-ray.

So basically, that entire talk page is about the lead of that DRM-centric disaster defending what is fundamentally a customer-hostile technology. I'd call him a shill but he's probably tasked with "maintaining the message" on places like Wikipedia to make UltraViolet seem less fundamentally shitty than it is. And his dickish attitude towards Linux seems unsurprising, given that he

was DVD Evangelist at Microsoft.

DRM vs. locked bootloaders

[Rob Y.]

That's why the Nook Tablet came with a locked bootloader, whereas the original Nook Color spawned a large ROM'mer community. Netflix required it in order to let them use their app. I think I'd rather deal with DRM for paid downloads than have my whole device locked down.

Re:DRM vs. locked bootloaders

[idontgno]

Along the same lines, I've noticed that Netflix is available pre-installed and pre-validated only* on Android platforms that aren't root-available out-of-the-box. My recollection is that it takes some hacking around if your phone isn't one of the ones Netflix already trusts. Too bad for them they can't tell I rooted my Motorola Droid 4 after they foolishly trusted it. MwahahahaHAHAH!

*I haven't made a point of comparing Netflix implementations in the Android universe, so I may be just talking out of my ass** here. Believe me at your own peril.

**This is Slashdot, so you already know that.

Re:DRM vs. locked bootloaders

[tlhIngan]

That's why the Nook Tablet came with a locked bootloader, whereas the original Nook Color spawned a large ROM'mer community. Netflix required it in order to let them use their app. I think I'd rather deal with DRM for paid downloads than have my whole device locked down.

If you want Netflix HD you need a locked down Android. Netflix (with standard def) is available for all Androids - locked or not. It's why the Nook tablet's netflix video is better than the Kindle Fire's - the Fire's drawing from the SD low res stream, the Nook from the HD stream.

Re:DRM vs. locked bootloaders

[arbulus]

My Nexus S is rooted and running cyanogenmod and Netflix works just fine and dandy.

Re:DRM vs. locked bootloaders

[RabidReindeer]

That's why the Nook Tablet came with a locked bootloader, whereas the original Nook Color spawned a large ROM'mer community. Netflix required it in order to let them use their app. I think I'd rather deal with DRM for paid downloads than have my whole device locked down.

Is that what prompted that idiotic move?

We like Netflix in this house. Every week a new disc arrives in the mail and we're good for the weekend.

But we've never used the streaming service on any device. Not Windows, not the Wii, not the Nook. We're not interested.

I was interested in an easy-rooting Nook, however. It was a major selling point for me. And the first time they updated the dang thing, that's what they took away.

I hate B&N software updates. They never say what they're really doing to you. It's always simply listed as "minor updates".

Re:DRM vs. locked bootloaders

[hairyfeet]

And that is why I have said HTML V5 sucks and isn't the way to go, as so far there isn't any DRM specs that work in HTML V5 so the only way to have things like Netflix is lock down the whole OS. That is fine and dandy for Apple and MSFT, and I doubt Google will have much of a problem with it either, not so fine and dandy for the rest of us. No matter how much you may hate flash and silverlight at least one could avoid it without having to jailbreak your entire OS. I have a feeling all the jumping on HTML V5 is so that corps can just lock everything down and force everyone to go with the appstore model, where only approved apps get run. Fuck that!

Re:DRM vs. locked bootloaders

[CodeBuster]

I think I'd rather deal with DRM for paid downloads than have my whole device locked down.

This problem will be largely solved by the proliferation of cheap yet higher quality Android tablets entering the marketplace in greater numbers. The coming commoditization of the tablet will drive down prices and splinter the user base. This will have two major effects. First, it will make standards based technologies essential to apps or services designed to be accessed via these cheap iPad clones running Android. Second, it will make DRM and lockdown meaningless and counter productive because people will simply buy the tablet that doesn't have these restrictions. As for software, what's available on iOS that cannot be found on Android? Do we really need 10+ me-too apps that all do basically the same thing? At some point, the number of apps on the platform becomes a meaningless statistic because most of them are either worthless or essentially dupes of other better apps or services.

Re:So Miguel . . .

[rubycodez]

LibreOffice is just file formats.

screw WINE and DOS BOX, virtual machines run windows for those who want it, with a far superior compatibiliity.

Re:How do we strong arm Ultra Violet distributors

[Lumpy]

IT already has. Most people that buy a BLuRay disc that try to use the "UltraViolet Digital Copy" get pissed as it's already expired most of the time.

I get questions a LOT about it, I point the people at Handbrake and AnyDVDHD so they can make their own that will work on all devices and never expire.

Re:Time to abandon Mono itself....

[rrohbeck]

And it's HUGE on patch Tuesday, especially if it breaks the update completely and is retried repeatedly until MS fixes it.

Re:Time to abandon Mono itself....

[squiggleslash]

Microsoft isn't deprecating .NET in favor of Tablet form factor Metro apps because that wouldn't make any sense whatsoever. .NET is usually used as a back-end technology, huge amounts of the web are delivered using .NET applications. You wouldn't use Metro for what you normally use .NET for, and vice versa.

Yes, certain media outlets have hyped the fact Metro isn't .NET as some kind of evidence Microsoft doesn't like .NET or whatever. You can safely ignore any media outlet that does that. I'm not saying there's no desktop stuff in .NET, there's plenty around, but that's not where the focus is in .NET world, any more than it's the focus in Java world.

Write-once run anywhere

[SplashMyBandit]

From Miguel: "These days we no longer believe that Silverlight is a suitable platform for write-once-run-anywhere technology, there are just too many limitations for it to be useful"

Who was he trying to kid (besides himself) ? .NET was never designed to be "write once, run anywhere" and never will be (since Mono will never implement all the libraries of the Microsoft implementation). If you want "write once, run anywhere" then just stick to Java, which is designed for this purpose - and yes, it means it can't use every feature of every platform, eg. Windows, but at least your software will run. everywhere (which gives you a better return-on-investment since you can sell to Windows *and* Linux *and* Mac, etc).

Re:Write-once run anywhere

[countach]

I think he was saying that Silverlight was supposed to be write once run anywhere. Which is kinda true, given the platforms it supports.

Business oriented

[Corson]

How many of the posters here have developed software solutions that actually sell, that help make money? Being for open standards is great but if you want to put food on the table and gas in the car then you need to get paid. In a business environment it makes sense to choose the dominant platform and the development tools that are optimized for it. These happen to be MS Windows and Visual Studio. For a rich GUI application you can choose WPF for desktops and Silverlight for mobile. There is still Adobe Flash out there but its size and the Apple effect on smartphones/tablets have all but made it irrelevant on mobile. De Icaza and the gang opened up the iOS and Android platforms to .NET devs, which decreased the MS dominance to some extent. If you are an exclusive Java/C/C++ fan then you can just ignore the 8% .NET developers but that number is not so far from the 9.8% C++ developers. And BTW, I have developed and published Web apps (HTML5/CSS/JavaScript) for mobile and then I decided to stop wasting my own time.

One reason

[ThatsNotPudding]

IIRC, The Netflix CEO is still on the board of Microsoft. Though I am surprised it works on Android - too big to ignore, perhaps? Or just until the Motorola patent attacks bore fruit...

Re:How do we strong arm Ultra Violet distributors

[pecosdave]

I missed that so far - you deserve many informative mod-ups!

No wonder he compared Linux to Mozilla 1.0 (which I liked back in the day BTW)

Silverlight MS Wait and Switch

[RyanNerd]

As a developer that started learning Silverlight and later abandoning it (mostly for technical reasons in that Silverlight forces you to use an ascyronous model leading to racing conditions and UI insanity).

In any case I got out early enough that I didn't get burned by MS Silverlight Gingerbread House. I do still feel a bit like Hansel and Gretel.

Re:How do we strong arm Ultra Violet distributors

[pecosdave]

The worst part about the UltraViolet fiasco - it could actually work.

Finally a DRM technology that (is supposed to be) platform agnostic, works on (ahem -non-rooted) portables as easily as it does PC's (and theoretically digital renderers). It's convenient (as long as the instructions are clarified), can be downloaded (to arbitrarily few devices) or streamed.

Take out the stuff in parenthesis and it's a tech that could actually work for both the content providers and customers.

Re:Time to abandon Mono itself....

[DragonWriter]

And even .Net is being deprecated by Microsoft in favour of the Tablet Formfactor Metro apps.

.NET isn't being deprecated in favor of Metro. It may be the case that, for client UI for non-web applications, Microsoft is favoring Metro-style apps over WPF or Windows Forms. But .NET isn't a client UI library (it has WPF, WinFomrs, and even Metro libraries), and preference for one UI-style over another is pretty much orthogonal to the use of .NET.

Lessons learned the hard way.

[bmo]

And Microsoft added artificial restrictions to Silverlight that made it useless for desktop programming.

Everyone tried to tell you this, that Microsoft would stab you in the back, Miguel, but you wouldn't listen.

--
BMO

Re:Lessons learned the hard way.

[Stormwatch]

Everyone tried to tell you this, that Microsoft would stab you in the back, Miguel, but you wouldn't listen.

Exasperating fact: smart people often do blatantly stupid things.

Re:Lessons learned the hard way.

[hduff]

Everyone tried to tell you this, that Microsoft would stab you in the back, Miguel, but you wouldn't listen.

Exasperating fact: smart people often do blatantly stupid things.

He does not seem so smart now, does he?

Re:So Miguel . . .

[cyber-vandal]

And if you don't want to pay Microsoft?

Re:Time to abandon Mono itself....

[cyber-vandal]

No it isn't. There is nothing to replace ASP.NET in the pipeline and Microsoft are hardly going to rewrite Visual Studio, Sharepoint and Dynamics CRM in Javascript/HTML5.

Re:Time to abandon Mono itself....

[shutdown -p now]

HTML5 is the path for Metro tile apps

HTML5/JS is a path for Metro apps. You can also write them in .NET and C++. In fact, writing them in C# is the easiest of three, because Metro APIs are heavily asynchronous (continuation-passing style), and C# 5 has convenient syntactic sugar for CPS; whereas in both C++ and JS you have to write out callbacks explicitly as lambdas.

Re:Time to abandon Mono itself....

[shutdown -p now]

You wouldn't use Metro for what you normally use .NET for, and vice versa.

That doesn't really make sense - not only Metro and .NET are orthogonal technologies, but writing Metro apps in .NET languages is a fully supported scenario.

Re:Time to abandon Mono itself....

[squiggleslash]

Note the term "normally use" and the rest of my comment.

You don't "normally use" .NET for desktop applications. Some people do, but I said "normally", not "ever". You would use Metro for desktop apps, however.

You don't "normally use" (actually, I think "ever" would work in this context) Metro for back-end, Enterprise web app type stuff. Some people may for reasons that are related to dominatrices and whips, but few would. The most common use of .NET is for back-end, Enterprise web app, type stuff.

Re:You're kidding right?

[gbjbaanb]

they already have abandoned .NET - the new APIs for Windows 8 is called WinRT and its the only API supported. Its a native API meaning performance we never quite got with .NET.

However, there are wrappers for C# apps to consume WinRT APIs, so you won't notice too much of a difference, but ou will have some porting to do as they're not 100% compatible with the old .NET assemblies.

Java is the new COBOL, and that means it will survive for a long time. C# is the new Java, as MS seems keen on native stuff this decade. We'll have to give it a couple of years for industry to catch up to where MS is going, but catch up they will, so while there are a lot of C# jobs out there today, they will start to diminish and C# apps will become legacy desktop apps as the cool new stuff goes HTML5 GUIs with C++ cloud backends.

Does not support C# 4

[INowRegretThesePosts]

Its website advertises support for C# 3.

Re:Time to abandon Mono itself....

[csumpi]

Most mobile games you play are using mono http://www.unity3d.com/ .

Re:So Miguel . . .

[SuperAlgae]

.Net has plenty of potential to become a good cross-platform system. It's too bad Microsoft shows no interest in having it achieve that goal.

The difference with the other projects you mention is that they have already accepted that MS has no interest in them succeeding, and they have found ways to operate successfully under those conditions. I'm not sure that's possible with .Net. An ecosystem needs developers, and how many cross-platforn developers want to use a system controlled by a company that does not value cross-platform support. For the most part, developers targeting .Net won't bother making sure their code works on Mono, and developers wanting real cross-platform support will look elsewhere. This leaves Mono in a very tough position.

Note that none of this implies I agree with hduff. I'm ignoring his comment an carrying on a meaningful conversation instead.

Why not?

[pavon]

Games can be written 99% in OpenGL ES, and just the user controls will vary from platform to platform.

The part that needs to be rewritten are GUI panels, widgets, layout, etc. Since all these platforms have significantly different interaction models (not just appearance) then any attempt to use the same interface will result in very poor user experience. Furthermore, if you really do have an application that is just GUI forms, then it must not be a very complex, and shouldn't take long to redo.

DRM solution for Android/Linux - please help

[incalito]

A few weeks ago I started to manage the new VOD platform. It's local, working only in my country, so its name is not relevant here. Project was started by a movie distribution company, seeking diversification and alternative to their DVD sales business, without the technical competence. They hired programming company, deeply Microsoft-related (partnership and so on). As you can expect, the platform was based on .NET/Windows Server, using IIS Smooth Streaming with PlayReady DRM, and Silverlight player. Then the problems with interoperability have started, as CEO quickly discovered, this solution has not worked on his iPad or iPhone, nor the Mac OS X playback was free from errors (most people in the company are appleheads, after all its movie business).

I come to the company as the manager with technological expertise (working a few years as the hosting guy/web developer, mostly in open source technologies), to oversee the work done by these external programmers. Our business strategy was to rely on presence on many different platforms, but now we're locked in. Luckily we were able to come on Samsung SmartTV platform, but only due to PlayReady implementation on these devices. We find a developers to prepare for us iOS app (Apple devices are PlayReady certified) and Sony PS3 app (also PlayReady certified). The advisors declared that there is no chance in moving our platform to Android and Linux, because THERE ARE NO DRM SYSTEMS AVAILABLE for these platforms.

The problem is that we have partners building their own settop boxes with Android on board, who want to use our VOD service as the source of premium video content for their users. The Android app would be great, but we cannot stream movies from our catalogue without DRM protection. I know that DRM sux, and is easy to circumvent, but you know, its a requirement put there by major movie producers - we cannot ignore that.

With these restrictions, we're looking for technological solution to bring our VOD content to the Android, and if it could be possible, to desktop Linux (at least Ubuntu). I've found Google DRM system: http://www.widevine.com/drm.html. Does anyone here has expertise in working with it? Can we use IIS to stream content encoded with this Widewine DRM? Please give your advice, maybe the Flash-based solution would be better, at least AdobeAIR still works on Android?

Re:So Miguel . . .

[sproketboy]

Correction: ".Net HAD plenty of potential to become a good cross-platform system." .Net has been around since 2000 and it's still nowhere near cross platform. Even within differing versions of Windows itself. The only good cross-platform solution is still Java.

Wow, these guys are SLOW.

[jonadab]

> These days we no longer believe that Silverlight is a
> suitable platform for write-once-run-anywhere technology

It took you HOW long to figure this out? It wasn't extremely obvious to you, for example, when you saw the original Silverlight announcement from Microsoft?

Better late than never I guess. At this rate it'll be 2105 before they finally realize there's absolutely no point in emulating .NET either.

Re:So Miguel . . .

[Richy_T]

How do you intend to De-Windows .NET when it is owned and controlled by Microsoft who have every reason (and prior form of doing so) to stop at nothing to ensure that any other version will never be quite compatible.

Many of the failures of recent Microsoft technologies are because the truth does finally sink in eventually.

Already works

[INowRegretThesePosts]

It seems it already works. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/deceagebecbceejblnlcjooeohmmeldh/details

Re:Time to abandon Mono itself....

[shutdown -p now]

I would still disagree with that. .NET is not used on the desktop all that often in "consumer space" - i.e. your typical home desktop (though even there there have been a fair few .NET apps over the years). But in enterprise, .NET WinForms apps are a very common sight.