And you have no idea whether he was actually considered a terrorist.
I know that he was fired for a stupid reason, which happened to be easier because he was a contractor. The fact that it was easier because he was a contractor is irrelevant. The fact that he was fired for a stupid reason isn't.
implementation of [GDI+] exists for Linux as well.
There's an implementation of Win32 for Linux as well, so what difference does that make... is it based on a Windows programming model or a UNIX one?
It's not based on or related to any Win32 API, though, which was the question.
I'm explaining why I consider it a Windows API. That doesn't mean it's based on Win32, that means it's designed to work well in Windows, and is a poor match for UNIX. I'm not obligated to answer leading questions exactly as sated.
I don't see how it is a failure, either - it does do what it advertises, at least, and what else could you ask for?
What it advertises is the problem. The idea that code can be trusted based on some heuristic based on the apparent origin of the code is a dismal failure, and has led to more security problems than every other bad idea in Windows put together. It has no place in UNIX.
You can still do polymorphic reads and writes on the thing without caring whether it is a file, a socket, or something else,
That doesn't seem to be the case based on my reading of the API. If it happens to work in UNIX (and it probably does, because of course a socket end point IS a file handle) that doesn't mean it will work in Windows where sockets and file handles have separate APIs.
[System.Windows.Forms isn't] part of the BCL and the ISO standards - it's just a proprietary toolkit/API from Microsoft, no more.
If it, or its descendants, are used by real Silverlight applications in the wold, then it will have to be implemented, whether it's in BCF or not (and I've found conflicting statements about THAT). Playing the technical compatibility game only works if you're already Microsoft and (to bring up an example from the other side of the street) only need to implement the POSIX sybsystem to satisfy FIPS-151 ratehr than to be actually useful. If Silverlight-on-Mono is to be more than a checkmark Microsoft can point to to encourage people to jump into the fire (look, there's an independent open source version, see how good we are) then it will have to haul in any API that Windows developers use.
Yes, yes, I understand: that's all part of "why it's easier to fire contractors".
The point of this story isn't whether he should have been "staying on task"... not to mention that you have no idea whether he was sluffing off or not... but the attitude that a vivid turn of phrase is somehow comparable to terrorism.
Then he got released from a position that he can, as a contractor, be released from at any time, for any reason.
Um, yes, it's easier to fire a contractor. What the hell difference does that make?
Whenever there's a school or workplace shooting, everyone always rants about the "warning signs" and "why didn't anyone call the police when they guy was talking about shooting people in the face on the phone the other day?"
Yes, buddy, that is EXACTLY the problem. People ask why completely impractical solutions like firing everyone who has a bad day and vents about it don't happen all the time, instead of when people are being stupid about an unpredictable incident.
System.Drawing is based on GDI. System.DirectoryServices is based on Active Directory. System.Security is just another attempt at the failed trust model in ActiveX. What about the famous System.Windows.Forms?
Not to mention that it maintains the daft distinction between file and socket IO (sorry, between System.IO.FileStream and System.Net.Sockets) that Microsoft inherited from the Lachman TCP socket library they started with in Win16.
It doesn't matter whether the information that's restricted is an encryption key for a movie, or embargoed results of a court case, or secret scriptures. It's about the design of the Internet. The Internet is designed to route around damage. The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
I couldn't say, I haven't examined the posts to see if it's the same people taking the allegedly contradictory positions you're complaining about. Slashdot doesn't seem any more or less prone to groupthink than any other group, and the fact that there *are* so many and so frequent arguments about Microsoft, religion, and (for that matter) groupthink would seem to me to imply that the "slashdot is full of groupthink" meme is self-referential.
The other point is that just because a lot of people on slashdot may be hysterical about Microsoft, that doesn't mean that Microsoft *isn't* trying to pull another fast one.
I'm not talking about relativism other than the mentality of 'since I'm on the Slashdot/Open Source' side of this battle, I therefore must adopt all of these views and reject all views of the other side.
Sorry, I can't keep track of the bogus arguments without a scorecard.
Here you are complaining about people blindly treating a heterogenous organization (Microsoft) as a single entity, and you're falling into exactly the same trap.
Just because some people who read/. are arguing one side of a debate, and some people involved in/. are taking a position in another debate, this doesn't mean they're the same people. If a fairly tightly structured organization like Microsoft shoudln't be treated as homogenous, why do you treat a loose collection of slashdot readers that way?
This has nothing to do with freedom of speech. The Internet's response to censorship is very much stronger than that... the Internet is built on protocols that are designed to avoid information loss and enable communication no matter what. It's got an abhorance of any kind of censorship... no matter how valuable and useful that censorship might be... baked into its genes, and that is one of the things that's made it so successful. Even if you tried to replace it, it can and will outcompete any closed environment that doesn't have that attribute.
So it's not a free speech issue, it's a "you can't win this race" issue. They're not so much *wrong* to try and fight, they're simply foolish and doomed.
Some things simply work better than others. The idea that people should accept bad ideas, like the ActiveX/.NET security model, because "everything is a shade of grey" is often an effective appeal to the "cult of relativism". But not all of us worship at that altar.:)
And you honestly believe that Mono implementing Silverlight will actually make a difference as to whether Silverlight succeeds or fails?
Microsoft thinks that Open Source matters to Silverlight.
I don't know whether it does. I just wanted to point out that Silverlight is not necessarily a good thing. Not all of us are enamored with the Windows programming API and the whole GUI-oriented-API mess.
we have nothing like ActiveX, which allowed a massive ecosystem of third party UI component developers to flurish.
By "flourish" you mean "wither and die or switch to AJAX and/or Flash"?
For a while there were a few websites that mattered that depended on ActiveX. But theer is no way Firefox would have even 10% market share if ActiveX was actually important.
They will not abandon Silverlight because a very few Linux elitists want to refuse it entering 'their' domain.
No, and neither will the fact that a version of Silverlight is available for Linux elitists make much difference to Microsoft's ability to push it over Flash.
I want Silverlight on Linux.
The market that Silverlight is targeted for is:
(a) Windows users. (b) Apple users. (c) Flash users. (d) Wood Seating. (e) ActiveX users.
Linux doesn't even make the top five.
This is all forgetting that Miguel can do what he damn well pleases.
Of course he can. He likes the CLR, he'll work on what he likes. That's the cool thing about Open Source, you can work on what you like. If you're lucky you get paid for it, too.
If you need better tools, acquire them, invest money for people to develop them or build them yourself.
I've done all three, and I've been lucky enough to see some of the tools I've worked on and stuff I've come up with gain some moderate success in the open source community. It's a great egoboo, and it must be a real blast being Miguel.
But... my point hasn't been "Miguel should stop doing this and do that", it's "what he's doing has these problems... don't blind yourself to them".
Even Java, as insular as it is, is more of a native citizen on UNIX than Mono. For that matter, the UNIX API works better as a way to write code for Windows than Mono does as a way to write code for UNIX. Mono is cool, yes, but it's also the Windows programming environment trying to spread over UNIX... and that's a problem, because the Windows programming environment is not a good neighbor.
You can't do video-, sound- or advanced graphics-based web apps (by advanced I mean high performance) without flash or java.
Every time I've run into an "advanced" video- or sound- based web app I've gone looking for a non-advanced one, because video or sound wrapped in Flash or Java is less useful to me, the end user, than one that's just video or sound linked off a web page.
Google Maps might not have all the bling of Yahoo maps, but it's Google Maps that's being embedded in and used by other web applications, by desktop applications, by all kinds of amazingly good tools on every platform.
The web has two advantages over desktop apps. It's a simpler environment to implement 80% of what you need in an app, and it's primarily declarative and self-descriptive rather than procedural. Writing desktop apps in the web, rather than writing apps that use the web, is only a good option because desktop APIs are so fragmented and clumsy. Implementing a desktop app inside a browser is very attractive, but it's never as good for the end user as implementing the same application standalone.
That's why there's Google Maps and Google Earth. If you want more than what you can do in AJAX, Google Earth gives you more than you can do in a browser.
That you haven't seen any apps that build on top of the flash or java platform that impress you is mostly because these are commercial applications.
I've had to use some of these when I was working at ABB. They're very impressive, for something running in a browser... but god they sucked compared to standalone applications.
Someone goes and makes Linux, while someone else makes ReactOS.
ReactOS/Haiku, AROS, OpenDOS... there's been more that I can't recall, all trying to harness Open Source to duplicate proprietary operating systems that failed to take root or are past their "best sold by" date. Other operating systems that were the focus of intense hacker interest in their time like ITS have been released to open source without raising a ripple.
UNIX is a family of independantly developed operating systems that form a single stable API underneath which a huge variety of operating systems can thrive. Interix is UNIX, Linux is UNIX, QNX is UNIX, Amoeba is UNIX, even if the underlying operating systems are utterly different. The UNIX API has already broken the monoculture (and even Microsoft has been able to take advantage of that *multiple times*) by being one that provides an amazingly clean abstraction to the hardware and file system yet can be implemented on top of just about anything.
A better API than the one UNIX provides will take over... on top of UNIX and Windows, and if it can really outcompete them it will evolve its own base. If the BeOS hothouse API was one, it could and would be used right now on top of UNIX and Windows. Good as the Amiga API was, it hasn't survived the death of the Amiga despite multiple attempts to bring it back.
Operating systems exist to run applications. People rarely buy into operating systems on any abstract merits... that's why Be failed in the first place, and that's why Minux and Tunis and other academic and experimental operating systems so aften expose a UNIX API, and that's why Stallman targeted UNIX with GNU even though he probably would have rather drunk his own blood than switch from ITS to UNIX back when ITS was a going concern.
and (the icing on the cake!) has an open-source implementation
PS: I'm absolutely thrilled that Open Source has become so spectacularly successful that even Microsoft thinks they have to pay lip service to it, but there are many failed Open Source projects and failed attempts to harness Open Source in the service of proprietary architectures. There was just such a story on Slashdot recently about a poor set-top-box manufacturer whinging because so many programmers were getting all excited about Apple TV instead of their Linux-based hardware. They completely failed to understand that demand drives Open Source just as much as it drives the traditional market.
There's not enough demand for "a replacement for Flash"... Flash is the answer to the demand for plug-in scripting, and unless Adobe pulls off some major boner in the introduction of Apollo that manages to screw Flash up badly there's not going to be anything pulling a replacement for Flash into the web.
The.NET API is descended from the Windows API. It's a Windows programming environment, and the whole point to it is to emulate the Windows environment... that's why people are (foolishly, in my opinion) on Microsoft's case to release even MORE of their proprietary APIs for.NET
Just like Interix and Cygwin and UWIN are UNIX programming environments even though they all run on Windows.
The big difference is that the UNIX programming environment is based around a set of good abstractions that by the quality of their design revolutionised the programming world back in the '70s and '80s. The Windows programming environment is based around a mish-mash of DEC's old mainframe APIs dragged backwards through the 8-bit world and a snapshot of some of the UNIX APIs as they existed in the early '80s during Microsoft's brief infatuation with Xenix, supporting a superstructure of ever increasing complexity, with a subset of Berkeley sockets badly bolted on the side. They did clean up the underpinnings some with NT, but they didn't really fix the horrible complexity and inconsistent APIs that grew out of them.
Silverlight is in direct competition with Flash. Flash is very popular, which proves that there is demand for such things.
ActiveX and Java and Shockwave and embedded Tcl and embedded Postscript and a bunch of other plugin programming environments I can't recall were also in direct competition with Flash. Flash beat them all out, partly because it *can't* do everything some of them can... which gives it less surface area for attacks, and makes it easier to secure... and because it did *enough*, and it's cross-platform *enough*, and it beat out the technology that *was* backed by MS.
What does ActiveX has to do with.NET, in the web application world or otherwise?
Microsoft didn't include you in the "Dot NET is ActiveX done right" briefing? We had at least two dog-and-pony shows at ABB with Microsoft coming around to try and convince us that not only would Dot NET squash all those pesky security issues (even though the basic security zone and signed applets model was just a twist on the failed ActiveX one) but we could write Dot NET ActiveX applets that would run just fine under ActiveX or Dot NET (with some packaging magic, maybe two versions with most of the same code, I don't recall the details). Google for 'ActiveX dot net' some time.:p
Java is another little platform-in-its-own-world that is generally isolated from the rest of the operating system it runs on (albeit not to as great an extent as Mono), so it's not surprising that...
The problem is that some of us want to have access to content that will be produced with Silverlight
And some of us don't want there to be lots of content produced with Silverlight. It's bad enough that so much of the content on the web is tied up in little obfuscated applets in Java and Flash as it is. Seriously, there's pretty much only three things these are used for: advertising, low-quality DRM, and toys and games. Exceptions like the Java applets at Greg Egan's site are far and few between, and Google has shown us with Maps and Gmail that you don't *need* these plugins to produce rich content.
Thank goodness Microsoft's first try failed, and we don't have ActiveX and its security problems on Mac and Linux.
We don't need a better Silverlight or a better Flash. We need better tools inside the framework that we already have.
I am somewhat sad to see that many of our fellow Slashdotters have chosen the head-in-sand option, rather than recognizing the place that.NET and Silverlight will most likely play in the IT infrastructure of tomorrow. Whether I may like it or not, Microsoft is a major player, and can push new frameworks into prominence easily.
A couple of decades ago that would have read "I am somewhat sad to see that many of our fellow developers have chosen to re-implement UNIX, rather than recognizing the place that Windows and NT will most likely play in the IT infrastructure of tomorrow. Whether I may like it or not, Microsoft is a major player, and can push new frameworks into prominence easily." Following that advice would have kept Linux and BSD from catching on and made the replacement of UNIX by Windows a reality rather than a threat.
Slashdot Mirror
And you have no idea whether he was actually considered a terrorist.
I know that he was fired for a stupid reason, which happened to be easier because he was a contractor. The fact that it was easier because he was a contractor is irrelevant. The fact that he was fired for a stupid reason isn't.
implementation of [GDI+] exists for Linux as well.
There's an implementation of Win32 for Linux as well, so what difference does that make... is it based on a Windows programming model or a UNIX one?
It's not based on or related to any Win32 API, though, which was the question.
I'm explaining why I consider it a Windows API. That doesn't mean it's based on Win32, that means it's designed to work well in Windows, and is a poor match for UNIX. I'm not obligated to answer leading questions exactly as sated.
I don't see how it is a failure, either - it does do what it advertises, at least, and what else could you ask for?
What it advertises is the problem. The idea that code can be trusted based on some heuristic based on the apparent origin of the code is a dismal failure, and has led to more security problems than every other bad idea in Windows put together. It has no place in UNIX.
You can still do polymorphic reads and writes on the thing without caring whether it is a file, a socket, or something else,
That doesn't seem to be the case based on my reading of the API. If it happens to work in UNIX (and it probably does, because of course a socket end point IS a file handle) that doesn't mean it will work in Windows where sockets and file handles have separate APIs.
[System.Windows.Forms isn't] part of the BCL and the ISO standards - it's just a proprietary toolkit/API from Microsoft, no more.
If it, or its descendants, are used by real Silverlight applications in the wold, then it will have to be implemented, whether it's in BCF or not (and I've found conflicting statements about THAT). Playing the technical compatibility game only works if you're already Microsoft and (to bring up an example from the other side of the street) only need to implement the POSIX sybsystem to satisfy FIPS-151 ratehr than to be actually useful. If Silverlight-on-Mono is to be more than a checkmark Microsoft can point to to encourage people to jump into the fire (look, there's an independent open source version, see how good we are) then it will have to haul in any API that Windows developers use.
Yes, yes, I understand: that's all part of "why it's easier to fire contractors".
The point of this story isn't whether he should have been "staying on task"... not to mention that you have no idea whether he was sluffing off or not... but the attitude that a vivid turn of phrase is somehow comparable to terrorism.
Then he got released from a position that he can, as a contractor, be released from at any time, for any reason.
Um, yes, it's easier to fire a contractor. What the hell difference does that make?
Whenever there's a school or workplace shooting, everyone always rants about the "warning signs" and "why didn't anyone call the police when they guy was talking about shooting people in the face on the phone the other day?"
Yes, buddy, that is EXACTLY the problem. People ask why completely impractical solutions like firing everyone who has a bad day and vents about it don't happen all the time, instead of when people are being stupid about an unpredictable incident.
Someone hasn't even been arrested. They've not been fired.
Um.
Read the fucking article.
Hell, read the fucking summary.
System.Drawing is based on GDI. System.DirectoryServices is based on Active Directory. System.Security is just another attempt at the failed trust model in ActiveX. What about the famous System.Windows.Forms?
Not to mention that it maintains the daft distinction between file and socket IO (sorry, between System.IO.FileStream and System.Net.Sockets) that Microsoft inherited from the Lachman TCP socket library they started with in Win16.
[mod parent up informative, someone]
Have to google on "internet 3.0" now.
It doesn't matter whether the information that's restricted is an encryption key for a movie, or embargoed results of a court case, or secret scriptures. It's about the design of the Internet. The Internet is designed to route around damage. The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
I couldn't say, I haven't examined the posts to see if it's the same people taking the allegedly contradictory positions you're complaining about. Slashdot doesn't seem any more or less prone to groupthink than any other group, and the fact that there *are* so many and so frequent arguments about Microsoft, religion, and (for that matter) groupthink would seem to me to imply that the "slashdot is full of groupthink" meme is self-referential.
The other point is that just because a lot of people on slashdot may be hysterical about Microsoft, that doesn't mean that Microsoft *isn't* trying to pull another fast one.
I'm not talking about relativism other than the mentality of 'since I'm on the Slashdot/Open Source' side of this battle, I therefore must adopt all of these views and reject all views of the other side.
/. are arguing one side of a debate, and some people involved in /. are taking a position in another debate, this doesn't mean they're the same people. If a fairly tightly structured organization like Microsoft shoudln't be treated as homogenous, why do you treat a loose collection of slashdot readers that way?
Sorry, I can't keep track of the bogus arguments without a scorecard.
Here you are complaining about people blindly treating a heterogenous organization (Microsoft) as a single entity, and you're falling into exactly the same trap.
Just because some people who read
This has nothing to do with freedom of speech. The Internet's response to censorship is very much stronger than that... the Internet is built on protocols that are designed to avoid information loss and enable communication no matter what. It's got an abhorance of any kind of censorship... no matter how valuable and useful that censorship might be... baked into its genes, and that is one of the things that's made it so successful. Even if you tried to replace it, it can and will outcompete any closed environment that doesn't have that attribute.
So it's not a free speech issue, it's a "you can't win this race" issue. They're not so much *wrong* to try and fight, they're simply foolish and doomed.
Some things simply work better than others. The idea that people should accept bad ideas, like the ActiveX/.NET security model, because "everything is a shade of grey" is often an effective appeal to the "cult of relativism". But not all of us worship at that altar. :)
And you honestly believe that Mono implementing Silverlight will actually make a difference as to whether Silverlight succeeds or fails?
Microsoft thinks that Open Source matters to Silverlight.
I don't know whether it does. I just wanted to point out that Silverlight is not necessarily a good thing. Not all of us are enamored with the Windows programming API and the whole GUI-oriented-API mess.
we have nothing like ActiveX, which allowed a massive ecosystem of third party UI component developers to flurish.
By "flourish" you mean "wither and die or switch to AJAX and/or Flash"?
For a while there were a few websites that mattered that depended on ActiveX. But theer is no way Firefox would have even 10% market share if ActiveX was actually important.
They will not abandon Silverlight because a very few Linux elitists want to refuse it entering 'their' domain.
No, and neither will the fact that a version of Silverlight is available for Linux elitists make much difference to Microsoft's ability to push it over Flash.
I want Silverlight on Linux.
The market that Silverlight is targeted for is:
(a) Windows users.
(b) Apple users.
(c) Flash users.
(d) Wood Seating.
(e) ActiveX users.
Linux doesn't even make the top five.
This is all forgetting that Miguel can do what he damn well pleases.
Of course he can. He likes the CLR, he'll work on what he likes. That's the cool thing about Open Source, you can work on what you like. If you're lucky you get paid for it, too.
If you need better tools, acquire them, invest money for people to develop them or build them yourself.
I've done all three, and I've been lucky enough to see some of the tools I've worked on and stuff I've come up with gain some moderate success in the open source community. It's a great egoboo, and it must be a real blast being Miguel.
But... my point hasn't been "Miguel should stop doing this and do that", it's "what he's doing has these problems... don't blind yourself to them".
Even Java, as insular as it is, is more of a native citizen on UNIX than Mono. For that matter, the UNIX API works better as a way to write code for Windows than Mono does as a way to write code for UNIX. Mono is cool, yes, but it's also the Windows programming environment trying to spread over UNIX... and that's a problem, because the Windows programming environment is not a good neighbor.
You can't do video-, sound- or advanced graphics-based web apps (by advanced I mean high performance) without flash or java.
Every time I've run into an "advanced" video- or sound- based web app I've gone looking for a non-advanced one, because video or sound wrapped in Flash or Java is less useful to me, the end user, than one that's just video or sound linked off a web page.
Google Maps might not have all the bling of Yahoo maps, but it's Google Maps that's being embedded in and used by other web applications, by desktop applications, by all kinds of amazingly good tools on every platform.
The web has two advantages over desktop apps. It's a simpler environment to implement 80% of what you need in an app, and it's primarily declarative and self-descriptive rather than procedural. Writing desktop apps in the web, rather than writing apps that use the web, is only a good option because desktop APIs are so fragmented and clumsy. Implementing a desktop app inside a browser is very attractive, but it's never as good for the end user as implementing the same application standalone.
That's why there's Google Maps and Google Earth. If you want more than what you can do in AJAX, Google Earth gives you more than you can do in a browser.
That you haven't seen any apps that build on top of the flash or java platform that impress you is mostly because these are commercial applications.
I've had to use some of these when I was working at ABB. They're very impressive, for something running in a browser... but god they sucked compared to standalone applications.
Someone goes and makes Linux, while someone else makes ReactOS.
ReactOS/Haiku, AROS, OpenDOS... there's been more that I can't recall, all trying to harness Open Source to duplicate proprietary operating systems that failed to take root or are past their "best sold by" date. Other operating systems that were the focus of intense hacker interest in their time like ITS have been released to open source without raising a ripple.
UNIX is a family of independantly developed operating systems that form a single stable API underneath which a huge variety of operating systems can thrive. Interix is UNIX, Linux is UNIX, QNX is UNIX, Amoeba is UNIX, even if the underlying operating systems are utterly different. The UNIX API has already broken the monoculture (and even Microsoft has been able to take advantage of that *multiple times*) by being one that provides an amazingly clean abstraction to the hardware and file system yet can be implemented on top of just about anything.
A better API than the one UNIX provides will take over... on top of UNIX and Windows, and if it can really outcompete them it will evolve its own base. If the BeOS hothouse API was one, it could and would be used right now on top of UNIX and Windows. Good as the Amiga API was, it hasn't survived the death of the Amiga despite multiple attempts to bring it back.
Operating systems exist to run applications. People rarely buy into operating systems on any abstract merits... that's why Be failed in the first place, and that's why Minux and Tunis and other academic and experimental operating systems so aften expose a UNIX API, and that's why Stallman targeted UNIX with GNU even though he probably would have rather drunk his own blood than switch from ITS to UNIX back when ITS was a going concern.
and (the icing on the cake!) has an open-source implementation
PS: I'm absolutely thrilled that Open Source has become so spectacularly successful that even Microsoft thinks they have to pay lip service to it, but there are many failed Open Source projects and failed attempts to harness Open Source in the service of proprietary architectures. There was just such a story on Slashdot recently about a poor set-top-box manufacturer whinging because so many programmers were getting all excited about Apple TV instead of their Linux-based hardware. They completely failed to understand that demand drives Open Source just as much as it drives the traditional market.
There's not enough demand for "a replacement for Flash"... Flash is the answer to the demand for plug-in scripting, and unless Adobe pulls off some major boner in the introduction of Apollo that manages to screw Flash up badly there's not going to be anything pulling a replacement for Flash into the web.
The .NET API is descended from the Windows API. It's a Windows programming environment, and the whole point to it is to emulate the Windows environment... that's why people are (foolishly, in my opinion) on Microsoft's case to release even MORE of their proprietary APIs for .NET
.NET, in the web application world or otherwise?
:p
Just like Interix and Cygwin and UWIN are UNIX programming environments even though they all run on Windows.
The big difference is that the UNIX programming environment is based around a set of good abstractions that by the quality of their design revolutionised the programming world back in the '70s and '80s. The Windows programming environment is based around a mish-mash of DEC's old mainframe APIs dragged backwards through the 8-bit world and a snapshot of some of the UNIX APIs as they existed in the early '80s during Microsoft's brief infatuation with Xenix, supporting a superstructure of ever increasing complexity, with a subset of Berkeley sockets badly bolted on the side. They did clean up the underpinnings some with NT, but they didn't really fix the horrible complexity and inconsistent APIs that grew out of them.
Silverlight is in direct competition with Flash. Flash is very popular, which proves that there is demand for such things.
ActiveX and Java and Shockwave and embedded Tcl and embedded Postscript and a bunch of other plugin programming environments I can't recall were also in direct competition with Flash. Flash beat them all out, partly because it *can't* do everything some of them can... which gives it less surface area for attacks, and makes it easier to secure... and because it did *enough*, and it's cross-platform *enough*, and it beat out the technology that *was* backed by MS.
What does ActiveX has to do with
Microsoft didn't include you in the "Dot NET is ActiveX done right" briefing? We had at least two dog-and-pony shows at ABB with Microsoft coming around to try and convince us that not only would Dot NET squash all those pesky security issues (even though the basic security zone and signed applets model was just a twist on the failed ActiveX one) but we could write Dot NET ActiveX applets that would run just fine under ActiveX or Dot NET (with some packaging magic, maybe two versions with most of the same code, I don't recall the details). Google for 'ActiveX dot net' some time.
Somehow more choice is supposed to be bad for "us"?
Sometimes, yes. Fragmenting the market really hurt UNIX and it's a big problem for Linux.
And, well, if Silverlight takes off it won't be a choice, it will be a requirement.
I guess you object to abstraction and you would rather poke your way around with proprietary hardware calls.
No, I'm just picky about the quality of my abstractions.
If I understand things correctly, than the Silverlight/Mono project is just a sane way of making sure that Mono remains relevant.
Yes, it's obviously the best option Miguel has, but that doesn't mean it's good for the rest of us.
Well, I'm a Java programmer by trade...
Java is another little platform-in-its-own-world that is generally isolated from the rest of the operating system it runs on (albeit not to as great an extent as Mono), so it's not surprising that...
_.. I don't have any idea what you mean.
The problem is that some of us want to have access to content that will be produced with Silverlight
And some of us don't want there to be lots of content produced with Silverlight. It's bad enough that so much of the content on the web is tied up in little obfuscated applets in Java and Flash as it is. Seriously, there's pretty much only three things these are used for: advertising, low-quality DRM, and toys and games. Exceptions like the Java applets at Greg Egan's site are far and few between, and Google has shown us with Maps and Gmail that you don't *need* these plugins to produce rich content.
Thank goodness Microsoft's first try failed, and we don't have ActiveX and its security problems on Mac and Linux.
We don't need a better Silverlight or a better Flash. We need better tools inside the framework that we already have.
I am somewhat sad to see that many of our fellow Slashdotters have chosen the head-in-sand option, rather than recognizing the place that .NET and Silverlight will most likely play in the IT infrastructure of tomorrow. Whether I may like it or not, Microsoft is a major player, and can push new frameworks into prominence easily.
A couple of decades ago that would have read "I am somewhat sad to see that many of our fellow developers have chosen to re-implement UNIX, rather than recognizing the place that Windows and NT will most likely play in the IT infrastructure of tomorrow. Whether I may like it or not, Microsoft is a major player, and can push new frameworks into prominence easily." Following that advice would have kept Linux and BSD from catching on and made the replacement of UNIX by Windows a reality rather than a threat.