Second again
Second with disk compression,
second with windows,
second with browsers,
now, second with 'flash'
AND their second venture into linux.
Now THAT'S what I call innovation.
An open source version of Microsoft's potential Adobe Flash challenger, Silverlight, has been developed within two months of being unveiled as a beta. Miguel de Icaza and a team of dedicated open source coders have hacked together an implementation of Silverlight they are calling Moonlight, for Linux and Unix. De Icaza came …
@Morely Dotes: You didn't even read the article did you? To quote you "They're both proprietary", erm... moonlight isn't, its open source and free, and cross platform. Read before you comment your ignorance read first, this is intended to kick the proprietary butt of microsoft.
@Anthony: to quote "I hadn't heard of this particular branch of the Mozilla project ;)", This is nothing to do with Mozilla, its from Novell's mono project of which Miguel is the shining example of how to reinvent the wheel without needing to buy the car :)
"Miguel de Icaza and a team of dedicated open source coders have hacked together an implementation of Silverlight they are calling Moonlight, for Linux and Unix."
Hmm. I hope it's 'hacked together' slightly better than Mono was ... talk about a missed opportunity.
Personally, I'll be giving it a miss - OpenLaszlo (www.openlaszlo.org) does the job just as well for me even if it does lack the feature-set of whatever the latest Web 2.0 plaything is.
Once again Mircosoft is letting down more potential users.
Why do we developers always end up forgetting about Opera. I mean if they are aiming to write code that is standards compliant then they should be aiming to have their content apearing perfect in Opera.
Maybe the same hack for using Flash in Opera on Gnu/Linux could be used for Moonlight. (aka copy the plugin into the plugins folder)
Karl, you should really read the comments (and their titles) before jumping in with both feet!
Morely Dotes was refering to SilverLight and Flash as both being proprietory, and Anthony was being amusing about a typo. Lighten up, man, it's Friday and I didn't get blown up by a bomb :-)
Chris
"Second with disk compression, second with windows, second with browsers,"
Um not if Linux is seen as a continuation of Unix. I was using X-Windows on Unix around 1986, long before Gates cloned the Apple Mac clone of X.
Most Windows/MSDOS users abandoned disk compression after they tried it and discovered how much harder it was to recover data after an error disabled their filesystem. Microsoft didn't invent this, they violated Stac Electronic's patents to catch up with DR-DOS which had filesystem compression first, and Microsoft had to pay to settle this one with Stac later. Linux wasn't second with disk compression - this idea just never caught on perhaps because Linux users value the integrity of their data more. Besides, Linux has less need for this if you compare the sizes of files created by typical applications.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS#Legal_issues
The web was developed with a browser and servers on NeXTSTEP in 1991 and the first browser to combine text and graphics in the same window, NCSA Mosaic was developed on Unix and released in 1993 prior to the Windows port.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_%28web_browser%29
It seems that someone needs to study his computing history. Zero marks if you were one of my students.
Linix is not a continuation of UNIX. Linux is NOT UNIX, otherwise SCO would be laughing their asses off right about now, rather than near bankrupt.
Apple's GUI was a copy of / clone of / inspired by the Xerox PARC desktop, run on the Xerox Alto machine, not X
1986 is not long before Windows, v1 of Windows was released in 1985 and v2 was released in 1987. They weren't that brilliant at the time, but at least you didn't have to have a massively expensive UNIX workstation to run them.
Most DOS users abandonded disk compression when the prices of hard drives fell. Data recovery isn't that much harder with a compressed disk, although the impact of a disk/image file corruption is far higher (typically you have to recover everything on the compressed volume's host file.)
Other than that, top marks on your computer history lesson.
De lcaza is spending a lot of his lifetime on porting the windows apps to linux/unix/whatever, and there's a serious reason why he's doing that. Although I can't prove it, and will never prove, but I'm sure he's getting direct support from MS for doing that, be it money or anything else.
MS has now another good reason to say that Linux is infringing on its patents.
I hope Silverlight will have a slow death just as the MS version of Java had.
MS hates interoperability, but most notably fear Linux: they claim Linux is too unimportant to create a Silverlight version for it, but it's the ONLY OS they are bulling and fighting on their 'get the FUD' page.
www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/facts/default.mspx