90% of users don't need the old windows/msdos shell. If people had a shell that was as good as bash, then they would use it. As it is now, using the shell in windows doesn't provide any benefit, so nobody bothers to use it.
Oh 90%! Just like those 90% of statistics that are made up on the spot. What a coincidence.
I wish they'd kept "monad" as the name. It was a deft tip of the hat to Leibniz's Monadologie, which held that monads were the windowless metaphysical atoms of perception itself.
Why, what's wrong with WCLFFCSIOPCAU (Windows Command Line Framework For Creating Shell Input-Output Processing Commands And Utilities)?
But if the community wants it strong enough, they've planned to rename it to SilverShell, and put this nonsense as a logo.
Find that Microsoft internal email where they say "cross platform will never work" and "lets steal Java" and then come back and tell us how much effort Microsoft put into.NET
I'd prefer to eat my own gonads than infect my system with a CLR, speaking of which haven't Sun just open sourced Java:P
I've read the memo, and I don't think it's so terrible. Microsoft has reasons to not have believed in crossplatform, because they've tried it before and it failed - the first version of MFC was cross platform (OS/2, Windows and more) and it was so slow and bloated they had to scrap it and redo it slim, just for Windows.
Even if a high level exec says "let's steal Java" it doesn't mean they downloaded the sources from Sun and did s/java/net. The fact they said that outlines their strategy, not the amount of effort it took to develop.NET.
If you *actually* worked a lot with Java and.NET you'll see how different they can be in some areas, the similarities are only in some of the basics (we got IL, we got runtime, we got Java/C++ like language syntax, called C#)..NET was developed highly modular, so today, it can be cross-platform. If Microsoft doesn't want it to be, it's their product, it's their call.
If they did announce "hey we're making it officially run on OSX and Linux", we'll have people like you come here to whine "omg it's a trojan hourse designed to kill Linux with patents and all that!".
If Linux companies were smart they'd actually stay away from.NET, as it could for very real make Linux dependent on Mictrosoft technology. Microsoft would love that.
The reason you can't use.net on Linux has got nothing to do with.net.
If the only consideration was.net then Microsoft would make more money by making it available for as many platforms as they could rather than restricting it to Windows [...]
all their products are forced to bow down before the overwhelming goal of maintaining a Windows monopoly rather than being allowed to fulfil their true potential.
Why is any company expected to kill its most profitable product, so some other less profitable product can realize "its full potential"? No one can ask from Microsoft to take active steps in destroying its profits and going bankrupt.
Imagine you worked your ass off for long years to afford a good house and a shiny car, and some hippie asks you to move out and let homeless people live in your own place and drive your own car, since it's "realizing your asset potential" better. Do you do it, or tell the hippie to piss off.
It sure seems like ANY company who makes software for Microsoft Windows is Microsoft's competition these days. Get it?
I wonder if you actually get it. Windows-only applications that are useful and popular make Windows stronger. Microsoft will lead the desktop OS market for a long time to come, because apps make it useful.
Adobe's a danger to Microsoft not because it's making software for Windows, it's making *cross-platform* suite that makes Windows less relevant, and now they're owning the cross-platform runtime (Flash) that replaces many uses for rich applications and WMP on Windows. This makes Windows, again, less relevant.
So Microsoft can stay idle and look how Windows is made less and less relevant by Adobe, or move in and claim that market with its own solution. Which is what they did.
10% faster for $200 (+/-)? How's this a deal? For that price it'd better do dishes, too.
It's possible the benchmarks they tried had hit another bottleneck (hardware or software), but either way, the top-range of cards are *all* overpriced and more of a status symbol than a practical purchase.
Anyone buying 8800 today (ultra or not) apparently has money to waste, and if 10% more cost $200, so be it.
Indeed. If Microsoft has a fault, it's the fact their marketing does claim they'll be just as cross-platform and open, as Adobe Flash is, as a web platform (talking about Silverlight and the open-sources CLR here).
Adobe open-sourced part of the platform as they feel the heat from Microsoft. Microsoft did the same as they feel the heat from Adobe (yes, having 50 billion in the bank doesn't mean they're immune to failure, so they DO react quickly to competition).
It's stupid to expect they should spend years developing.NET and then give it all away randomly to make MS-bashers happy (which they will never ever be, anyway).
Acknolwedge the amount of effort that went into.NET and accpet it as a great platform, that's more or less tied to Windows, and has limited deployment on other platforms. That's all you need to do: see through Microsoft marketing, and use technology where it's best fitted.
I'm a Flash developer and would still see lots of uses for.NET/Silverlight, that in some cases even mix Silverlight and Flash in the same experience - why not? Why should I be a nazi and not just give it to Microsoft for having a great runtime, when they do.
Apple makes a lot of money from schweet laptops, and they are not about to ditch the best laptop CPU money can buy for a contender. Also, Apple iPhone is going to use ARM CPUs [...], and Io and Behold, Intel also has an offering in that area.
I see, I see. So your point is Intel should buy Apple? It makes sense, you totally defended that viewpoint, interesting indeed.
And I always thought Microsoft should buy Adobe. I mean, they keep trying replicate Photoshop and Flash, Adobe tried to replicate Flash before, and when they failed, they just bought Macromedia, and see them now.
Also, what's with those Windows Media monopoly suites, right - Microsoft should buy EU. It makes sense it should buy EU since they're already paying 2 million/day in penalties to EU, why rent EU when you can just buy it. In the longer term it comes cheaper, as anyone knows.
But I think also Adobe should buy Autodesk, you know, integrate Maya and 3DSMax with CS3? Movie studios will be all over that.
McDonalds should totally buy Roche or Pfizer, I mean with all the health troubles burgers cause, wouldn't it be great if they pre-injected them with medicines to help you lose fat?
NASA should buy CNN, NASA keeps complaining media coverage of their missions is very poor since people got used to them: well there you go, a perfect solution.
In the end, who's the richest guy though - Bill Gates. He should buy Earth and get over with it, since apparently it's where we're heading and why delay the inevitable.
If a lot of you, previously unexposed to the CLR gain access to it, you will discover that it is not the crap that so many of you have read it to be.
Who actually claimed the CLR and C# is "crap". No one said that. Microsoft business is more of politics and the burden of supporting obsolete legacy architectures..NET's CLR engineering isn't hindered by either of those.
For those people on the newer intel based Macs, CS3 brings intel native binaries -- not running Photoshop in "emulation" is likely worth the upgrade price to many professionals.
Right, but I'm on Windows. So I'm basically paying to help my Mac colleagues have native performance. Nice (since of course I'll need to open their CS3 PSD files).
Yes, C# is supported. Silverlight supports any.NET language, not just the DLR ones.
Silverlight runs from source, imagine the plugin size if it has to have a compiler for "any".NET language. There's a C# to JS transcriber, which apparently MS is working to integrate in Visual Studio, so you can compile your SilverLight app from C# code.
i remember seeing dell machines that offered linux instead of windows in the past.. but the prices were the same or HIGHER for linux! Dell will need to address this, and offer these dellbuntu boxes at lower price. the OS is free! if they need to include a price to cover support costs, it should still not be equal to or greater than the cost of including Vista!
That's just a bunch of wishful thinking up there. Dell will charge whatever is costs them, not whatever you want. There's no free lunch.
Facts that cause Linux machines to be the same price or more expensive than a Windows machine:
1. it's a new product, initial costs of preparing support scenarios, integration work, testing 2. no craplets for Linux 3. expected way more support calls ("omg Half Life 2 CD doesn't start! Cd-ROM broken!")
People on the Internet (places like Slashdot in particular) have been begging Dell for this for years. Now, it's time to see how many of those people were doing it just on principle or to be part of the crowd, and how many did it because they actually were planning on purchasing such a box.
Let me whip out my precog abilities: people will keep buying Windows as the Linux machines won't be cheaper. you can legally download Linux for free, but not so for Windows.
I am following with a great interest how Dell markets those machines. For too long Windows software has been marked as "PC Software" and "PC CD-ROM"... I don't think Dell wants to really sell "PC" which isn't compatible with "PC" stuff.
Before you jump on the MS bashing bandwagon please take a look at the linked video. Even better, download the client plugin and view the demos. It's cross platform and supports a ton of languages including C#, Ruby, Javascript, etc.
How cool is it, is not the issue at hand though. Flash is in virtually every visitor's browser (that matters) right now, except for certain business cases, you can assume everyone has Flash, just as much as you can assume they have HTML/CSS/JS (doesn't mean no fallback if otherwise, but you catch my point).
Silverlight is just trying to be Flash, but:
1. there's no version for Linux/Solaris 2. the guarantee for Mac support is questionable 3. there aren't planned authoring tools for OS other than Windows 4. it has some benefits in video quality codec, but Microsoft maybe doesn't realize sites aren't after that. YouTube could serve at least few times better videos and stay with Flash. They don't do it since it means more traffic, and apparently is not needed. The sites are after a piece of technology that's guaranteed to be always there, everywhere.
BTW it doesn't support C#. C# is not a dynamic language, and the "DLR" doesn't support non-dynamic.NET languages.
The benefits of having Ruby and Python are kinda questionable to me, on the client side. What exactly will you do in Silverlight with Ruby, that you can't as easily do in JavaScript2 (which is what ActionScript 3 is). I beg you to tell me. Web devs *do* know JavaScript right? Shame on them if not.
Microsoft's idea of cross platform is do it till its popular and then EOL everything but Windows. The only reason they're doing this at all is that Flash video is killing WMV.
Adobe knows Flash is killing WMV, Microsoft known Flash is killing WMV. Interesting why EU doesn't know it.
The perspective of the whole situation is hilarious. Somehow I don't think EU's going after Adobe and their closed source ridiculously expensive media servers, but oh well. There's at least acknowledgment there's competition out there.
Microsoft looks panicked right now (to be truth Adobe's panicked too, but they're snapping out of it). When they start copying the competition step for step, it's obvious they have no better plan what to do, but it doesn't mean they won't succeed.
XBOX360 had success pushing PS3 out of the leading position (at least seeing the projections show so, although PS3 is still a very strong player),.NET pushed out Java for enterprise in lots of places.
Silverlight 1 is a turd, and MS knows it, but they're just warming up. The real battle will most likely be in few years from now, I suppose around Flash 10-11 and Silverlight 2-3.
The problem is that Flash doesn't integrate in with anything ASP or.NET . XML is good in some ways for this, but no.NET developer wants to learn ActiveScript, buy FlashMX, learn a whole new way of creating UIs, and learn about AJAX to get Flash integrating with their current systems.
A client-side developer who's afraid of XML, JavaScript (ActionScript is JavaScript) and AJAX. Not good, my man, not good.
NET developers really have a big problem on their hands if they all think that.
Here's a summary of the article (which I incidentally read yesterday):
Why sites go in Google hell is a total mystery.
Story 1: A guy sold diamonds on his site. One day he went to Google hell, but he had no idea why. Why is Google not telling him? He had no idea why this happened... ok... ok... so he paid 35 grand to a SEO "expert" who filled his pages with trash. He removed the trash and few months later he went out of Google hell. To this day he doesn't know how he went out of Google hell.
Story 2: A guy had a site with lots of visits from Google. One day, he went to Google hell, but he had no idea why. Why is Google not telling? Ok... ok... so he had paid for a ton of links from spam sites, and he had to email each of the sites to get the links removed. Few months later he went out of Google hell, and this guy also has no clue what helped him.
Summary: It's a total mystery, that Google hell, I tell you.
Some of us hate flash - small tip if you don't have a T1 connection and things are slow Block flash and the internet really speeds up.
Do you think Silverlight has some magical algorithm that shrinks 500kb of JPEG and audio into 1kb? A blank flash file is below 30 bytes. The script is stored as bytecodes, the vectors are stored as a compact binary format, bits are bits, numbers are numbers. All of this as then compressed with zlib.
Silverlight uses XML, everything is a string (even numbers) and compresses that with ZIP. Silverlight files will actually be a bigger for the same kind of content Flash would have.
If people wish to develop sites that we cant view (think scfi channel) or adverts in it then its not a problem here as we associate flash with rubbish/spam.
Also a defacto standard is not if no 'upto' date linux plugin is available. It is possible to live without flash, and yes the world is a better place.
The current Flash Plugin for Linux is ver. 9. This is 'upto' date. Silverlight has no immediate plans to release for Linux yet.
Just killing some FUD in your post is all. Trust me, if 1995 home pages are an example, you can easily create blinking colorful spam/crap in HTML, of GIF-s or what have you. It just happens Flash is currently the easiest way, so people target that.
Just wondering.. Is the price hike with higher bitrate a similiar justification to the older change in format from cassette tapes to cd. Didn't the record labels do that? Claiming its new technology! so it'll cost ya. But is it apple doing this now?
You could draw some parallels I guess. Everyone does that.
I'm, for example, now under the dilemma whether to pony up the upgrade price on Photoshop CS3, given they added almost nothing of value to me as a web dev except a new intimidating interface and few obscure photo editing tools. Maybe not.
Of course, if you got the CD or DRM tracks, you could play that on your iPod and noone stops you.
"People asked for DRM-free content, and EMI said fine, but we'll charge more. So we said, ok, we'll up the bitrate and justify the higher price with that."
Actually here's an even better translation:
"EU asked for DRM-free content, and EMI wanted higher prices. So we said fine, we give you higher prices (we'll justify with bumping up the bitrate), you give us DRM-free tracks & we got a deal."
Slashdot Mirror
90% of users don't need the old windows/msdos shell. If people had a shell that was as good as bash, then they would use it. As it is now, using the shell in windows doesn't provide any benefit, so nobody bothers to use it.
Oh 90%! Just like those 90% of statistics that are made up on the spot. What a coincidence.
- A heavy windows shell user
I wish they'd kept "monad" as the name. It was a deft tip of the hat to Leibniz's Monadologie, which held that monads were the windowless metaphysical atoms of perception itself.
Why, what's wrong with WCLFFCSIOPCAU (Windows Command Line Framework For Creating Shell Input-Output Processing Commands And Utilities)?
But if the community wants it strong enough, they've planned to rename it to SilverShell, and put this nonsense as a logo.
I can see how you might FEEL safe in a MS Windows-only world but that is NOT the world I see.
So, isn't it still being like a caged animal when all you are ALLOWED to see is the Microsoft Windows desktop?
Reread my post. I never said how *I* feel about any of this, just the actual forces causing the decisions we see took place.
And drop the caps, and the psychobabble, about my supposed feelings and caged animal mentality, please.
Find that Microsoft internal email where they say "cross platform will never work" and "lets steal Java" and then come back and tell us how much effort Microsoft put into .NET
:P
.NET.
.NET you'll see how different they can be in some areas, the similarities are only in some of the basics (we got IL, we got runtime, we got Java/C++ like language syntax, called C#). .NET was developed highly modular, so today, it can be cross-platform. If Microsoft doesn't want it to be, it's their product, it's their call.
.NET, as it could for very real make Linux dependent on Mictrosoft technology. Microsoft would love that.
I'd prefer to eat my own gonads than infect my system with a CLR, speaking of which haven't Sun just open sourced Java
I've read the memo, and I don't think it's so terrible. Microsoft has reasons to not have believed in crossplatform, because they've tried it before and it failed - the first version of MFC was cross platform (OS/2, Windows and more) and it was so slow and bloated they had to scrap it and redo it slim, just for Windows.
Even if a high level exec says "let's steal Java" it doesn't mean they downloaded the sources from Sun and did s/java/net. The fact they said that outlines their strategy, not the amount of effort it took to develop
If you *actually* worked a lot with Java and
If they did announce "hey we're making it officially run on OSX and Linux", we'll have people like you come here to whine "omg it's a trojan hourse designed to kill Linux with patents and all that!".
If Linux companies were smart they'd actually stay away from
The reason you can't use .net on Linux has got nothing to do with .net.
.net then Microsoft would make more money by making it available for as many platforms as they could rather than restricting it to Windows [...]
If the only consideration was
all their products are forced to bow down before the overwhelming goal of maintaining a Windows monopoly rather than being allowed to fulfil their true potential.
Why is any company expected to kill its most profitable product, so some other less profitable product can realize "its full potential"? No one can ask from Microsoft to take active steps in destroying its profits and going bankrupt.
Imagine you worked your ass off for long years to afford a good house and a shiny car, and some hippie asks you to move out and let homeless people live in your own place and drive your own car, since it's "realizing your asset potential" better. Do you do it, or tell the hippie to piss off.
It sure seems like ANY company who makes software for Microsoft Windows is Microsoft's competition these days. Get it?
I wonder if you actually get it. Windows-only applications that are useful and popular make Windows stronger. Microsoft will lead the desktop OS market for a long time to come, because apps make it useful.
Adobe's a danger to Microsoft not because it's making software for Windows, it's making *cross-platform* suite that makes Windows less relevant, and now they're owning the cross-platform runtime (Flash) that replaces many uses for rich applications and WMP on Windows. This makes Windows, again, less relevant.
So Microsoft can stay idle and look how Windows is made less and less relevant by Adobe, or move in and claim that market with its own solution. Which is what they did.
10% faster for $200 (+/-)? How's this a deal? For that price it'd better do dishes, too.
It's possible the benchmarks they tried had hit another bottleneck (hardware or software), but either way, the top-range of cards are *all* overpriced and more of a status symbol than a practical purchase.
Anyone buying 8800 today (ultra or not) apparently has money to waste, and if 10% more cost $200, so be it.
.NET is basically Java without the portability. .NET?
So why bother with
And you're basically a sack of carbons. This is why, they say, the devil's in the details.
Indeed. If Microsoft has a fault, it's the fact their marketing does claim they'll be just as cross-platform and open, as Adobe Flash is, as a web platform (talking about Silverlight and the open-sources CLR here).
.NET and then give it all away randomly to make MS-bashers happy (which they will never ever be, anyway).
.NET and accpet it as a great platform, that's more or less tied to Windows, and has limited deployment on other platforms. That's all you need to do: see through Microsoft marketing, and use technology where it's best fitted.
.NET/Silverlight, that in some cases even mix Silverlight and Flash in the same experience - why not? Why should I be a nazi and not just give it to Microsoft for having a great runtime, when they do.
Adobe open-sourced part of the platform as they feel the heat from Microsoft. Microsoft did the same as they feel the heat from Adobe (yes, having 50 billion in the bank doesn't mean they're immune to failure, so they DO react quickly to competition).
It's stupid to expect they should spend years developing
Acknolwedge the amount of effort that went into
I'm a Flash developer and would still see lots of uses for
Screw bashers.
The deal would be a disaster for Apple
Thing is, we all know that, except the article author (and maybe even he knows that but that's why he wrote it). Don't feed the troll submissions.
Apple makes a lot of money from schweet laptops, and they are not about to ditch the best laptop CPU money can buy for a contender. Also, Apple iPhone is going to use ARM CPUs [...], and Io and Behold, Intel also has an offering in that area.
I see, I see. So your point is Intel should buy Apple? It makes sense, you totally defended that viewpoint, interesting indeed.
And I always thought Microsoft should buy Adobe. I mean, they keep trying replicate Photoshop and Flash, Adobe tried to replicate Flash before, and when they failed, they just bought Macromedia, and see them now.
Also, what's with those Windows Media monopoly suites, right - Microsoft should buy EU. It makes sense it should buy EU since they're already paying 2 million/day in penalties to EU, why rent EU when you can just buy it. In the longer term it comes cheaper, as anyone knows.
But I think also Adobe should buy Autodesk, you know, integrate Maya and 3DSMax with CS3? Movie studios will be all over that.
McDonalds should totally buy Roche or Pfizer, I mean with all the health troubles burgers cause, wouldn't it be great if they pre-injected them with medicines to help you lose fat?
NASA should buy CNN, NASA keeps complaining media coverage of their missions is very poor since people got used to them: well there you go, a perfect solution.
In the end, who's the richest guy though - Bill Gates. He should buy Earth and get over with it, since apparently it's where we're heading and why delay the inevitable.
They could've just used the CLR instead of having to code their own, but alas. Microsoft open sourced only now when put under pressure by Adobe.
Pitty.
If a lot of you, previously unexposed to the CLR gain access to it, you will discover that it is not the crap that so many of you have read it to be.
.NET's CLR engineering isn't hindered by either of those.
Who actually claimed the CLR and C# is "crap". No one said that. Microsoft business is more of politics and the burden of supporting obsolete legacy architectures.
For those people on the newer intel based Macs, CS3 brings intel native binaries -- not running Photoshop in "emulation" is likely worth the upgrade price to many professionals.
Right, but I'm on Windows. So I'm basically paying to help my Mac colleagues have native performance. Nice (since of course I'll need to open their CS3 PSD files).
Yes, C# is supported. Silverlight supports any .NET language, not just the DLR ones.
.NET language. There's a C# to JS transcriber, which apparently MS is working to integrate in Visual Studio, so you can compile your SilverLight app from C# code.
Silverlight runs from source, imagine the plugin size if it has to have a compiler for "any"
i remember seeing dell machines that offered linux instead of windows in the past.. but the prices were the same or HIGHER for linux! Dell will need to address this, and offer these dellbuntu boxes at lower price. the OS is free! if they need to include a price to cover support costs, it should still not be equal to or greater than the cost of including Vista!
That's just a bunch of wishful thinking up there. Dell will charge whatever is costs them, not whatever you want. There's no free lunch.
Facts that cause Linux machines to be the same price or more expensive than a Windows machine:
1. it's a new product, initial costs of preparing support scenarios, integration work, testing
2. no craplets for Linux
3. expected way more support calls ("omg Half Life 2 CD doesn't start! Cd-ROM broken!")
People on the Internet (places like Slashdot in particular) have been begging Dell for this for years. Now, it's time to see how many of those people were doing it just on principle or to be part of the crowd, and how many did it because they actually were planning on purchasing such a box.
Let me whip out my precog abilities: people will keep buying Windows as the Linux machines won't be cheaper. you can legally download Linux for free, but not so for Windows.
I am following with a great interest how Dell markets those machines. For too long Windows software has been marked as "PC Software" and "PC CD-ROM"... I don't think Dell wants to really sell "PC" which isn't compatible with "PC" stuff.
Before you jump on the MS bashing bandwagon please take a look at the linked video. Even better, download the client plugin and view the demos. It's cross platform and supports a ton of languages including C#, Ruby, Javascript, etc.
.NET languages.
How cool is it, is not the issue at hand though. Flash is in virtually every visitor's browser (that matters) right now, except for certain business cases, you can assume everyone has Flash, just as much as you can assume they have HTML/CSS/JS (doesn't mean no fallback if otherwise, but you catch my point).
Silverlight is just trying to be Flash, but:
1. there's no version for Linux/Solaris
2. the guarantee for Mac support is questionable
3. there aren't planned authoring tools for OS other than Windows
4. it has some benefits in video quality codec, but Microsoft maybe doesn't realize sites aren't after that. YouTube could serve at least few times better videos and stay with Flash. They don't do it since it means more traffic, and apparently is not needed. The sites are after a piece of technology that's guaranteed to be always there, everywhere.
BTW it doesn't support C#. C# is not a dynamic language, and the "DLR" doesn't support non-dynamic
The benefits of having Ruby and Python are kinda questionable to me, on the client side. What exactly will you do in Silverlight with Ruby, that you can't as easily do in JavaScript2 (which is what ActionScript 3 is). I beg you to tell me. Web devs *do* know JavaScript right? Shame on them if not.
Microsoft's idea of cross platform is do it till its popular and then EOL everything but Windows. The only reason they're doing this at all is that Flash video is killing WMV.
.NET pushed out Java for enterprise in lots of places.
Adobe knows Flash is killing WMV, Microsoft known Flash is killing WMV. Interesting why EU doesn't know it.
The perspective of the whole situation is hilarious. Somehow I don't think EU's going after Adobe and their closed source ridiculously expensive media servers, but oh well. There's at least acknowledgment there's competition out there.
Microsoft looks panicked right now (to be truth Adobe's panicked too, but they're snapping out of it). When they start copying the competition step for step, it's obvious they have no better plan what to do, but it doesn't mean they won't succeed.
XBOX360 had success pushing PS3 out of the leading position (at least seeing the projections show so, although PS3 is still a very strong player),
Silverlight 1 is a turd, and MS knows it, but they're just warming up. The real battle will most likely be in few years from now, I suppose around Flash 10-11 and Silverlight 2-3.
The problem is that Flash doesn't integrate in with anything ASP or .NET . XML is good in some ways for this, but no .NET developer wants to learn ActiveScript, buy FlashMX, learn a whole new way of creating UIs, and learn about AJAX to get Flash integrating with their current systems.
A client-side developer who's afraid of XML, JavaScript (ActionScript is JavaScript) and AJAX. Not good, my man, not good.
NET developers really have a big problem on their hands if they all think that.
Here's a summary of the article (which I incidentally read yesterday):
Why sites go in Google hell is a total mystery.
Story 1: A guy sold diamonds on his site. One day he went to Google hell, but he had no idea why. Why is Google not telling him? He had no idea why this happened... ok... ok... so he paid 35 grand to a SEO "expert" who filled his pages with trash. He removed the trash and few months later he went out of Google hell. To this day he doesn't know how he went out of Google hell.
Story 2: A guy had a site with lots of visits from Google. One day, he went to Google hell, but he had no idea why. Why is Google not telling? Ok... ok... so he had paid for a ton of links from spam sites, and he had to email each of the sites to get the links removed. Few months later he went out of Google hell, and this guy also has no clue what helped him.
Summary: It's a total mystery, that Google hell, I tell you.
Some of us hate flash - small tip if you don't have a T1 connection and things are slow Block flash and the internet really speeds up.
Do you think Silverlight has some magical algorithm that shrinks 500kb of JPEG and audio into 1kb? A blank flash file is below 30 bytes. The script is stored as bytecodes, the vectors are stored as a compact binary format, bits are bits, numbers are numbers. All of this as then compressed with zlib.
Silverlight uses XML, everything is a string (even numbers) and compresses that with ZIP. Silverlight files will actually be a bigger for the same kind of content Flash would have.
If people wish to develop sites that we cant view (think scfi channel) or adverts in it then its not a problem here as we associate flash with rubbish/spam.
Also a defacto standard is not if no 'upto' date linux plugin is available. It is possible to live without flash, and yes the world is a better place.
The current Flash Plugin for Linux is ver. 9. This is 'upto' date. Silverlight has no immediate plans to release for Linux yet.
Just killing some FUD in your post is all. Trust me, if 1995 home pages are an example, you can easily create blinking colorful spam/crap in HTML, of GIF-s or what have you. It just happens Flash is currently the easiest way, so people target that.
You cannot even abide by the very laws you were founded on these days, so why do you expect others to do the same?
Here's the only law that ever worked: everybody can take a shot.
If USA has mechanisms to pressure other countries, it'll do so. If it has ability to avoid its own laws, it'll do so. It took a shot and succeeded.
Laws are only as strong as the mechanisms built to withstand them. Interests and power always will achieve more.
Just wondering.. Is the price hike with higher bitrate a similiar justification to the older change in format from cassette tapes to cd. Didn't the record labels do that? Claiming its new technology! so it'll cost ya. But is it apple doing this now?
You could draw some parallels I guess. Everyone does that.
I'm, for example, now under the dilemma whether to pony up the upgrade price on Photoshop CS3, given they added almost nothing of value to me as a web dev except a new intimidating interface and few obscure photo editing tools. Maybe not.
Of course, if you got the CD or DRM tracks, you could play that on your iPod and noone stops you.
Translation from Jobs-esque:
"People asked for DRM-free content, and EMI said fine, but we'll charge more. So we said, ok, we'll up the bitrate and justify the higher price with that."
Actually here's an even better translation:
"EU asked for DRM-free content, and EMI wanted higher prices. So we said fine, we give you higher prices (we'll justify with bumping up the bitrate), you give us DRM-free tracks & we got a deal."