They are still requiring Microsoft software. Linux users need not apply.
You'll be eating your words when Moonlight supports SL2 content & codecs. But by then I'm sure all the linux users will move away from the "it's not available" argument to the "it's binary only" argument (for codecs). Silverlight usage is only going to increase.
Re:It propably won't..
on
Linked In Or Out?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
People don't hand out job offers, on or off LinkedIn. What may happen is recruiters may attempt to contact you if your profile is desirable.
I've had dozens of recruiters mail me through linked in over the last couple years, atleast one every couple of weeks. But that is missing the point. I'm less interested in making the recruiter's job easier and more interested in watching where my colleagues and former colleagues find new employment. *This* is the tool that is most interesting about linked in, traversing the connection tree of people you've work with from now to 10 years ago. And the person with the right mindset could use it to their advantage when looking for a new job.
Hell, I installed Windows, so I might want to run Downadup/Conficker. If you've got a new whiz-bang add-on for firefox, show an ad during the.NET SP upgrade or on next login (for silent installs). I might just download and use it if I think it's good to have. Secretly installing this add-on and restricting its removal is malware behavior.
So by this definition, Adobe also produces malware because the Acrobat Reader installer silently installs plugins for firefox and IE. I disagree, I don't think it's malware, it's tiny helper that improves the over all usability of the app. Same goes for the.NET FF extension.
I think majority of the people here, with a handful of exceptions, are bent out of shape just because it's Microsoft. The rest are discriminating firefox users that don't know what clickonce is.
Yes, I did RTFA. FFClickOnce makes automated installation of.NET code (the successor to Visual Basic) much easier. Have you ever heard the phrase "drive-by download"??? Many people fled from IE to FF specifically to avoid this very problem. Now MS throws in code that may enable this in FF. No thanks. BTW, there was a plugin for FF that provided ActiveX support for FF (For crying out loud... WHY?). Let's just say I wouldn't want it on my work machine either.
ActiveX has a horrible security model, so much so that versions of IE newer than 6 will warn you before using them.
ClickOnce apps are sandboxed. They are also announced plainly to the user. It cannot be installed without the users knowledge (coincidentally enough).
Instead, MS chose to act like Apple. Remember the flak Apple caught for trying to sneak in Itunes and Safari for people who install/update Quicktime? We happen to be "equal-opportunity-bashers" here. MS acts like Apple, they catch flak like Apple.
You definitely get credit for bashing someone other than microsoft, but the situation is different. It's akin to being pissed at Apple for installing a quicktime-enabling plugin in firefox when you've installed quicktime.
You've installed.NET, so you might actually want to run a.NET application, deployed as an XBAP (embedded in the browser, sandboxed, facilitated by a seperate plugin by the way), as a clickonce app, or as a traditionally installed application. The extension enables the clickonce scenario for a non-microsoft browser. It's not a whole other application, and as I mentioned in another comment, it's not gonna log your bittorrent usage or shoot your baby.
Well I don't deploy via ClickOnce either, but I use many clickonce apps. It's nice that it works in my browser of choice, one that Microsoft didn't write.
So if you build and deploy apps for macosx and linux, you're using mono. Why did you bother updating your.NET to 3.5 SP1 at all?
If it's going to kill you to have a Microsoft-authored ff extension, you can remove it (read the wikipedia link I referenced).
Blame firefox for this. A quick google search reveals a large number of extensions for firefox must be uninstalled manually. These include vendors such as Skype, AVG, Sun Microsystems, etc.
I think it's bad design that it's possible. But "Wasn't there some laws being pushed that made this sort of covert install procedure illegal"? Are you high? It's a bootstrapper for clickonce, a feature that comes with.NET, not some extension that's gonna log your bittorrent usage or shoot your baby.
The amount of venom/vitriol/nerdrage comments in this story is fucking astounding.
Install.NET 3.5 SP1 (the latest version of.NET) you get this firefox extension. It enables the use of ClickOnce within firefox. You guys know what clickonce is right?
One can only assume if you install.NET, you might actually want to run.NET apps, and some of them are deployed using ClickOnce. The FF extension is a convenience.
The only valid critique I see here is necessity for more people to prune back the Opt-In settings for Windows Update. The rest of you though..
Much can be explained as artistic license, or perhaps convenience, in Star Trek canon. Sometimes the writers work to have the audience understand that the story is from the human's perspective, but in many other ways this perspective is simply implicit.
If you must have an answer, consider that our current maps of the globe have no "center" because we understand it as a whole. Imagine the very first attempts at cartography where centered ideologically, with the unknowns at the fringe. This could also be said of Star Trek canon, that there are many unknowns of the universe, and that the Federation is mapping out what is understood as it's learned.
silverlight 1.0 had not XAML controls for the simple datagrid control. OMG what a stuff up! You had to go to xceed to get one and pay for it. That little detail made me so mad that I have sworn off silverlight. The message was clear, if your a small development shop, you cannot afford silverlight.
Silverlight 1.0 development was a pain, most people opted to wait for 2. Silverlight 2 includes a datagrid for free.
Oh by the way, where is the automated testing framework for writting automated UI tests against it? anyone?... anyone?...
Estimates for how much coal and uranium the planet would need to sustain itself do not successfully go passed the end of the century. The more conservative exercises place global uranium depletion between the years 2040 and 2050.
In my opinion, nothing less than a major, unified effort between several historically autonomous government departments (Department of Energy, Department Of Interior, Department of Agriculture) would be successful in mitigating any damage inflicted by Peak Oil. In the US, we've grown to rely on cheap oil, and merely replacing/offsetting that dependence with another limited resource won't solve the problem.
Call me jaded, but when McCain says he wants to do this with public money, I just see another Neocon Republican initiative to pat themselves and their friends on the back of their bank accounts. I don't see in him the ability to help solve the problem, I just see another reactionary who will blame Iran or Saudi Arabia or whoever for increased oil prices and wield the increasingly imperialistic US Military against it.
So they're essentially recreating Apple's Quartz + OpenGL + standard image formats with Photosynth + DirectX + WMPF. Simply put, apple does an incredible job visually representing itself, it's technology and providing a user experience that is very hard to match.
That said, I disagree that microsoft is recreating any preexisting technology. You could argue that DirectX is just like OpenGL, but that's likely grossly oversimplified.
Similar hurdles exist for indexing silverlight content as they exist with flash. Silverlight is mainly for media and data/info visualization.
It's technically possible to index silverlight 1 content, because it's content is "loose Xaml files", which means the site has xml files alongside html/js/etc, that is rendered by the silverlight 1 engine.
Silverlight 2 has the same capabilities, but noone will use them, because using C# for application/interaction logic is way more productive than using Javascript. Silverlight 2 sites using C# have the following structure
SomeSite.XAP (zip file containing all code and assets) - AppManifest.xml - ApplicationCode.dll (.NET Assembly containing Entrypoint and embedded assets) - SomeResources/ (compressed folder) - SomeResources/SomeImage.jpg (...)
AdditionalContent.XAP (supplemental resources and code) - AppManifest.xml - SupplementalCode.dll
This makes silverlight 2 apps and content updates really easy to, but are a barrier to extract information.
In both cases the information gained isn't nearly as useful as textual html content, and completely different heuristics would be necessary to analyze the importance of one unit of textual content vs another. Indeed, nearly all the visual cues (The relative position, color, highlights, animations, and reactions to the user) would likely be lost in the process. Perhaps the search engine that can index flash and silverlight content is one that analyzes both visual and textual content.
The earth-shaking innovation is in the form including deep zoom as part of a plugin featuring a fast 2d compositor with video decoding and animation support, common RIA application components and controls using a small.NET Runtime, packaged in a 4.3mb download, "installed in 20 seconds or less", and all of it designed to run on multiple platforms.
MS Devs have done some amazing things within their allotted size quotas./perspective-and-koolaid
You may find reason to install it when it reaches RTM and companies start using it for production work. Right now it's beta1 (beta2 is going to be released sometime in the next couple weeks), and it's mostly for customers/developers wanting to experiment with it.
What becomes of silverlight content, whether it's all eye candy or not, is anyones guess. What I can say is, developing for Silverlight 2 kicks ass.
Silverlight's MultiScaleImage control (aka deep zoom) is a version of the SeaDragon renderer. The image format it uses is a custom tree structure that contains pixel details relevant to both it's position in the tree and relative to it's peers. Essentially, it's a hierarchical image with very smooth transitions.
.NET always had good support, since it was architected as a common language runtime (CLR). The Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) adds a small set of key features to the CLR to make it dramatically better.
It adds to the platform a set of services designed explicitly for the needs of dynamic languages, including a shared dynamic type system, standard hosting model and support to make it easy to generate fast dynamic code.
it could be great, as long as the TV crew and leadership can use the material to create something evocative. A TV show that can frame Leeroy Jenkins (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkCNJRfSZBU) and Gnome Vasion (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxD7p0rcBVM) in some sort of context and retain the original humor/drama/etc would absolutely be worthy of note.
If or when MS adds support for 3D in silverlight, it would use the same API and capabilities that WPF currently has. (Silverlight borrows all of it's 2D API from WPF; storyboarding, animation, primitives, etc).
Very different from embedding DirectX into a browser, which I think would be pretty useless.
The 3d features of WPF let you present 3d content in a way consistent with the rest of your apps UI. As long as you keep your polygon count low, you'll get decent perf out of it.
Silverlight will have 3D eventually. The biggest problem to get around is supporting hardware acceleration equally across the targeted platforms.
I spoke with one of the devs working on SL, and he told me the issue is gaining access to the accelerated rendering devices. Most if not all browsers don't let plugins create a 3d surface (Maybe you can do this with ActiveX in IE *shrug*), so it'll involve a fair amount of hackery to get this working uniformly on all their targeted platforms. There are some interesting features planned post 2.0, but thats for Microsoft to divulge when they're ready.
It's interesting (but not surprising) that noone here pointed out that flash is far superior to silverlight 1.0 and 1.0 is the only version that allows sites to go live to end users.
For those who don't know, 1.0 is essentially a 2d-and-video compositor with a relatively nice API, but programable only using javascript, which depending on what you're doing can get really slow really fast.
Actionscript is much faster than javascript, and with flex is much easier to use imo. But (again imo) C# trumps both.
Silverlight 2.0 is in beta, with beta 2 coming sometime soon, and that's the tech most MS/C# web developers are interested in using. A cut down.NET runtime with relevant APIs and zero fat. The install footprint is a little over 4megs and thats not likely to change much until version.next.
If java applets were seemless with a 4meg footprint that installs in 20 seconds, it would've stolen the application programming market long ago. Flash has steadily gotten better instead, but again, I think C# is better:)
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They are still requiring Microsoft software. Linux users need not apply.
You'll be eating your words when Moonlight supports SL2 content & codecs. But by then I'm sure all the linux users will move away from the "it's not available" argument to the "it's binary only" argument (for codecs). Silverlight usage is only going to increase.
People don't hand out job offers, on or off LinkedIn. What may happen is recruiters may attempt to contact you if your profile is desirable.
I've had dozens of recruiters mail me through linked in over the last couple years, atleast one every couple of weeks. But that is missing the point. I'm less interested in making the recruiter's job easier and more interested in watching where my colleagues and former colleagues find new employment. *This* is the tool that is most interesting about linked in, traversing the connection tree of people you've work with from now to 10 years ago. And the person with the right mindset could use it to their advantage when looking for a new job.
"Nobody does it like molten boron"
http://theinfosphere.org/images/thumb/7/78/Molten_Boron.jpg/200px-Molten_Boron.jpg
Hell, I installed Windows, so I might want to run Downadup/Conficker. If you've got a new whiz-bang add-on for firefox, show an ad during the .NET SP upgrade or on next login (for silent installs). I might just download and use it if I think it's good to have. Secretly installing this add-on and restricting its removal is malware behavior.
So by this definition, Adobe also produces malware because the Acrobat Reader installer silently installs plugins for firefox and IE. I disagree, I don't think it's malware, it's tiny helper that improves the over all usability of the app. Same goes for the .NET FF extension.
I think majority of the people here, with a handful of exceptions, are bent out of shape just because it's Microsoft. The rest are discriminating firefox users that don't know what clickonce is.
Yes, I did RTFA. FFClickOnce makes automated installation of .NET code (the successor to Visual Basic) much easier. Have you ever heard the phrase "drive-by download"??? Many people fled from IE to FF specifically to avoid this very problem. Now MS throws in code that may enable this in FF. No thanks. BTW, there was a plugin for FF that provided ActiveX support for FF (For crying out loud... WHY?). Let's just say I wouldn't want it on my work machine either.
ActiveX has a horrible security model, so much so that versions of IE newer than 6 will warn you before using them.
ClickOnce apps are sandboxed. They are also announced plainly to the user. It cannot be installed without the users knowledge (coincidentally enough).
Instead, MS chose to act like Apple. Remember the flak Apple caught for trying to sneak in Itunes and Safari for people who install/update Quicktime? We happen to be "equal-opportunity-bashers" here. MS acts like Apple, they catch flak like Apple.
You definitely get credit for bashing someone other than microsoft, but the situation is different. It's akin to being pissed at Apple for installing a quicktime-enabling plugin in firefox when you've installed quicktime.
You've installed .NET, so you might actually want to run a .NET application, deployed as an XBAP (embedded in the browser, sandboxed, facilitated by a seperate plugin by the way), as a clickonce app, or as a traditionally installed application. The extension enables the clickonce scenario for a non-microsoft browser. It's not a whole other application, and as I mentioned in another comment, it's not gonna log your bittorrent usage or shoot your baby.
Well I don't deploy via ClickOnce either, but I use many clickonce apps. It's nice that it works in my browser of choice, one that Microsoft didn't write.
So if you build and deploy apps for macosx and linux, you're using mono. Why did you bother updating your .NET to 3.5 SP1 at all?
If it's going to kill you to have a Microsoft-authored ff extension, you can remove it (read the wikipedia link I referenced).
Blame firefox for this. A quick google search reveals a large number of extensions for firefox must be uninstalled manually. These include vendors such as Skype, AVG, Sun Microsystems, etc.
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/internet/firefox/manually-remove-skype-extension-from-firefox/
http://www.technipages.com/firefox-3-cant-uninstall-avg-safe-search-extension-because-uninstall-is-grayed-out.html
I think it's bad design that it's possible. But "Wasn't there some laws being pushed that made this sort of covert install procedure illegal"? Are you high? It's a bootstrapper for clickonce, a feature that comes with .NET, not some extension that's gonna log your bittorrent usage or shoot your baby.
The amount of venom/vitriol/nerdrage comments in this story is fucking astounding.
Install .NET 3.5 SP1 (the latest version of .NET) you get this firefox extension. It enables the use of ClickOnce within firefox. You guys know what clickonce is right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClickOnce#Firefox_extensions
One can only assume if you install .NET, you might actually want to run .NET apps, and some of them are deployed using ClickOnce. The FF extension is a convenience.
The only valid critique I see here is necessity for more people to prune back the Opt-In settings for Windows Update. The rest of you though..
Much can be explained as artistic license, or perhaps convenience, in Star Trek canon. Sometimes the writers work to have the audience understand that the story is from the human's perspective, but in many other ways this perspective is simply implicit.
If you must have an answer, consider that our current maps of the globe have no "center" because we understand it as a whole. Imagine the very first attempts at cartography where centered ideologically, with the unknowns at the fringe. This could also be said of Star Trek canon, that there are many unknowns of the universe, and that the Federation is mapping out what is understood as it's learned.
Damn I hate my government so much.
silverlight 1.0 had not XAML controls for the simple datagrid control. OMG what a stuff up! You had to go to xceed to get one and pay for it. That little detail made me so mad that I have sworn off silverlight. The message was clear, if your a small development shop, you cannot afford silverlight.
Silverlight 1.0 development was a pain, most people opted to wait for 2. Silverlight 2 includes a datagrid for free.
Oh by the way, where is the automated testing framework for writting automated UI tests against it? anyone?... anyone?...
http://blogs.msdn.com/sburke/archive/2008/09/30/unit-testing-with-silverlight.aspx
Written by the PM in charge of most of the control development to date.
Your message was FUD. Any more that I can dispel?
-ds
SL Eclipse Tools project
http://www.eclipse4sl.org/
MS Press release (interestly enough, it plans linux as a supported platform)
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-13Silverlight2PR.mspx
Silverlight 2 release is imminent.
some of my colleagues are still using an old DOS shareware planetarium app. It still runs on Windows XP
Have they seen http://www.shatters.net/celestia/?
Nuclear isn't an option by itself.
Estimates for how much coal and uranium the planet would need to sustain itself do not successfully go passed the end of the century. The more conservative exercises place global uranium depletion between the years 2040 and 2050.
(Sources)
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/secondpage.html
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=340148&area=/insight/insight__economy__business/
http://www.amazon.com/End-Oil-Edge-Perilous-World/dp/0618562117/ref=sr_11_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1213899543&sr=11-1
In my opinion, nothing less than a major, unified effort between several historically autonomous government departments (Department of Energy, Department Of Interior, Department of Agriculture) would be successful in mitigating any damage inflicted by Peak Oil. In the US, we've grown to rely on cheap oil, and merely replacing/offsetting that dependence with another limited resource won't solve the problem.
Call me jaded, but when McCain says he wants to do this with public money, I just see another Neocon Republican initiative to pat themselves and their friends on the back of their bank accounts. I don't see in him the ability to help solve the problem, I just see another reactionary who will blame Iran or Saudi Arabia or whoever for increased oil prices and wield the increasingly imperialistic US Military against it.
-ds
Am I the only that imagined Kyle from southpark say in response, "You... Asshole..."
That said, I disagree that microsoft is recreating any preexisting technology. You could argue that DirectX is just like OpenGL, but that's likely grossly oversimplified.
Photosynth and Seadragon are demoed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHsYnkLnepk
Neither of those are similar to things that apple has done.
Similar hurdles exist for indexing silverlight content as they exist with flash. Silverlight is mainly for media and data/info visualization.
It's technically possible to index silverlight 1 content, because it's content is "loose Xaml files", which means the site has xml files alongside html/js/etc, that is rendered by the silverlight 1 engine.
Silverlight 2 has the same capabilities, but noone will use them, because using C# for application/interaction logic is way more productive than using Javascript. Silverlight 2 sites using C# have the following structure
SomeSite.XAP (zip file containing all code and assets)
- AppManifest.xml
- ApplicationCode.dll (.NET Assembly containing Entrypoint and embedded assets)
- SomeResources/ (compressed folder)
- SomeResources/SomeImage.jpg (...)
AdditionalContent.XAP (supplemental resources and code)
- AppManifest.xml
- SupplementalCode.dll
This makes silverlight 2 apps and content updates really easy to, but are a barrier to extract information.
In both cases the information gained isn't nearly as useful as textual html content, and completely different heuristics would be necessary to analyze the importance of one unit of textual content vs another. Indeed, nearly all the visual cues (The relative position, color, highlights, animations, and reactions to the user) would likely be lost in the process. Perhaps the search engine that can index flash and silverlight content is one that analyzes both visual and textual content.
The earth-shaking innovation is in the form including deep zoom as part of a plugin featuring a fast 2d compositor with video decoding and animation support, common RIA application components and controls using a small .NET Runtime, packaged in a 4.3mb download, "installed in 20 seconds or less", and all of it designed to run on multiple platforms.
/perspective-and-koolaid
MS Devs have done some amazing things within their allotted size quotas.
You may find reason to install it when it reaches RTM and companies start using it for production work. Right now it's beta1 (beta2 is going to be released sometime in the next couple weeks), and it's mostly for customers/developers wanting to experiment with it.
What becomes of silverlight content, whether it's all eye candy or not, is anyones guess. What I can say is, developing for Silverlight 2 kicks ass.
Silverlight's MultiScaleImage control (aka deep zoom) is a version of the SeaDragon renderer. The image format it uses is a custom tree structure that contains pixel details relevant to both it's position in the tree and relative to it's peers. Essentially, it's a hierarchical image with very smooth transitions.
Silverlight: silverlight.net
SeaDragon: http://labs.live.com/seadragon.aspx
.NET always had good support, since it was architected as a common language runtime (CLR). The Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) adds a small set of key features to the CLR to make it dramatically better.
It adds to the platform a set of services designed explicitly for the needs of dynamic languages, including a shared dynamic type system, standard hosting model and support to make it easy to generate fast dynamic code.
it could be great, as long as the TV crew and leadership can use the material to create something evocative. A TV show that can frame Leeroy Jenkins (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkCNJRfSZBU) and Gnome Vasion (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxD7p0rcBVM) in some sort of context and retain the original humor/drama/etc would absolutely be worthy of note.
> As the article points out, Prince seems to have a love-hate relationship with his fans.
Fixed
If or when MS adds support for 3D in silverlight, it would use the same API and capabilities that WPF currently has. (Silverlight borrows all of it's 2D API from WPF; storyboarding, animation, primitives, etc).
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.media.media3d.aspx
Very different from embedding DirectX into a browser, which I think would be pretty useless.
The 3d features of WPF let you present 3d content in a way consistent with the rest of your apps UI. As long as you keep your polygon count low, you'll get decent perf out of it.
Silverlight will have 3D eventually. The biggest problem to get around is supporting hardware acceleration equally across the targeted platforms.
.NET runtime with relevant APIs and zero fat. The install footprint is a little over 4megs and thats not likely to change much until version.next.
:)
I spoke with one of the devs working on SL, and he told me the issue is gaining access to the accelerated rendering devices. Most if not all browsers don't let plugins create a 3d surface (Maybe you can do this with ActiveX in IE *shrug*), so it'll involve a fair amount of hackery to get this working uniformly on all their targeted platforms. There are some interesting features planned post 2.0, but thats for Microsoft to divulge when they're ready.
It's interesting (but not surprising) that noone here pointed out that flash is far superior to silverlight 1.0 and 1.0 is the only version that allows sites to go live to end users.
For those who don't know, 1.0 is essentially a 2d-and-video compositor with a relatively nice API, but programable only using javascript, which depending on what you're doing can get really slow really fast.
Actionscript is much faster than javascript, and with flex is much easier to use imo. But (again imo) C# trumps both.
Silverlight 2.0 is in beta, with beta 2 coming sometime soon, and that's the tech most MS/C# web developers are interested in using. A cut down
If java applets were seemless with a 4meg footprint that installs in 20 seconds, it would've stolen the application programming market long ago. Flash has steadily gotten better instead, but again, I think C# is better
Flame on.
-DS