Visual Studio is also given away to students for free. I haven't had the time to learn .net and I intend to learn it and work with Silverlight and Live Mesh. I like what MS is doing with these plateforms.
Oh right. Do they give the only operating system Visual Studio works on out for free too?
Actually, they do. It's a shame that its the only operating system that Visual Studio works on, though, because I like to use another certain operating system. But I guess people who've never used anything but Windows never think about that sort of thing.
At this point I have no doubt that porting VS to other platforms would most likely just result in a mess. You can use Eclipse or something if you're dead set on using a different OS for development (if you're doing web development and don't have a Windows machine around to test with you're crazy anyway). It looks like there's tools out there for Silverlight development in Eclipse, although I have no idea how well they work. Or the old, load it in a virtual machine adage.
I don't do much (anything) in Silverlight though. I just think it looks like nice, interesting tech. And you don't even need a compiler to start to use it. Although, as was said, if you want to do anything really serious you'd probably be up shit creek without one. If you just want to embed a little video player in your site with Play/Pause/Stop/Seek/Volume though, I don't see why you'd ever need to touch C#.
You wouldn't have to touch C#, and in a sense, that's part of the problem. The "fast track" to video publishing with Silverlight is totally code obfuscated, so you can't really manipulate anything. You load up some bullshit Expressions app, pipe the video through it, select your player style, and it spits out a terrible hive of generated files with no less than two largeish required javascript files. These files are essential to make the player actually function *within* silverlight, so if you want to embed the player al a Youtube, you can't. You have to iframe it in.
The only alternative to that is to actually make a player, which, as of 2.0, is a total clusterfuck.
What's killing Silverlight (assuming it wasn't stillborn) is the fact that the level of effort to do small tasks that would be more or less immediate in Flash is absolutely vulgar.
As far as Visual Studio, the argument is moot. Microsoft's plan from day 1 was to get the .NET community on board with Silverlight and go from there, and they still haven't succeeded in that to the extent required to get true positive exposure. In the meantime, they've pretty much dug an impassable rift between themselves and every multimedia designer and developer on the planet by releasing an absolutely awful 1.0 and a nearly inexcusable 2.0. 3.0 looks decent, but it hardly matters anymore, they are officially behind the curve.
*edit* It's moot because the .NET community is largely subsidized by Microsoft. It's called the Microsoft Partner program and it basically gives free software to businesses for hiring MCPD's. Which means, in general, anyone with the prerequisite skills and knowledge to actually use Silverlight effectively is already getting free copies of Windows and VS2008 anyway.
There is no reason to bash on C# or Silverlight. They may be made by Microsoft, they may not be suitable for every task (which applies to any language or platform), but they are good products that a lot of people use (okay maybe not a lot are using Silverlight yet).
No, Silverlight is terrible. I've used it. Unwillingly, and it is astoundingly bad. And it's not C# or the .NET framework that is hurting it. OK, maybe it's a little bit of .NET's fault but C# is fine and dandy.
Silverlight suffers from the fact that the production tool itself and everything surrounding it with the exception of Visual Studio is absolutely inexplicably terrible. No code hinting for XAML, very little real documentation, an ass-backwords video publishing software design that nearly prevents remote embedding are just SOME of the huge problems facing Silverlight.
MSDN documentation is pretty good from an API point of view, there are a lot of silverlight examples to be found with google, and stackoverflow is great for clearing up any lingering problems you have. Intellisense does indeed work with XAML. There is a bug where if you install the Windows SDK after VS 2008, intellisense breaks. However you can fix that pretty easily.
As for the video publishing, I have not used it so you may be right. However Silverlight has been progressing at a staggering pace. Silverlight 3 is coming out very soon; the releases have been less than a year apart and add a whole lot each time.
The biggest problem however is that they are just way slow off the line. I would argue that the primary purpose of Silverlight was three fold.
1) Simplify data interfacing using .NET's provider/SQL manager shit.
2) Implement HD video is a somewhat more open way.
3) Carve out a place in the interactive desktop app market.
The problem is that Adobe has pretty much already done 1 and 3. Adobe Air is about as powerful as you can make a secure web distributed application framework, and there are a dozen good solutions to the data problem up to and including entire libraries for direct connection to SQL databases.
#2 is turning out to be a non-issue due to HTML5, and Adobe is probably not even going to seriously pursue it.
Also it lets you write web apps in C# rather than AS, and separate presentation from data with XAML.
And HTML5 isn't a cure-all for web video. It still has significant problems. IE doesn't have plans on implementing it until the spec is done, Apple refuses to support Theora and Mozilla refuses to support H.264. Silverlight, on the other hand, works everywhere.
Also Silverlight is way, way lighter than Adobe Air and not a separate install. So it's much more likely to get widespread adoption.
I think people here in general make the mistake of assuming that Adobe's livelihood is somehow based on video, it really isn't. These sites like Youtube and Dailymotion are not licensing out hundreds or thousands of Flash Media Server licenses, they write their own custom streaming servers, their own custom players, and so on. The only thing they sell to that industry is Flash CS4 licenses, maybe. If Youtube died today, Adobe would be fine. Flash thrives because Flash developers are making triple digits per hour writing incredible interactive applications for wealthy clients who can afford fancy marketing.
As a "flash guy" I am struck when people meet the concept of Adobe with hostility for somehow cornering the market. They are no more guilty of anti-trust or "controlling teh interwebz" than Google is. Flash earned itself a terrible stigma in the early century, but if anything it has been making a resurgence, and it will *never* go away within the relevant future, because no matter how good you are at Javascript, there are some things you simply cannot do with it.
They don't hate Adobe for cornering the market, they hate it for cornering the market with something so awful. Flash's performance is downright awful on Mac/Linux and still crashes a whole lot on Linux. And how long have we been waiting on a 64-bit version now?
Adobe will get there with video, but they've had a lot of loose ends to tie up in the last 5 years. They only just last year got all their damn programs under a uniform interface, and they have already started hardware accelerating some of their studio apps. If CS5/Flash Player 11 does not include hardware accelerated video, I would be shocked.
Oh wow, hardware accelerated video, what a goddamn breakthrough that would be. Let's just wait around for another few years and hope they run out of loose ends they need to tie up before getting around to making video playback not suck. Meanwhile the entire internet has been suffering with it as a defacto standard.
As far as Visual Studio, the argument is moot. Microsoft's plan from day 1 was to get the .NET community on board with Silverlight and go from there, and they still haven't succeeded in that to the extent required to get true positive exposure. In the meantime, they've pretty much dug an impassable rift between themselves and every multimedia designer and developer on the planet by releasing an absolutely awful 1.0 and a nearly inexcusable 2.0. 3.0 looks decent, but it hardly matters anymore, they are officially behind the curve.
Double standard much? "Oh flash was bad early on but they're cleaning up and I promise they'll have hardware accelerated video playback soon! Also Silverlight had bad early realeases and is behind the curve and no one will ever forgive them."
RandomEngy on
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If you want a good example of how well silverlight works take a look at the last olympics. NBC was able to stream everything with Silverlight without problem to a large scale audiance. 1k+ were watching the streams. Roughly a week later NBC switched back to their normal flash for a football game and the stream was crashing like crazy.
Then there is Netflix. They switched over to silverlight and it's been saving them time and money. It's able to change scale on the fly and it can play HD video on much older PCs or low end netbooks because it's hardware accelarated.
MSDN documentation is pretty good from an API point of view, there are a lot of silverlight examples to be found with google, and stackoverflow is great for clearing up any lingering problems you have. Intellisense does indeed work with XAML. There is a bug where if you install the Windows SDK after VS 2008, intellisense breaks. However you can fix that pretty easily.
It didn't work in Blend 2.0, ever, and that's important.
As for the video publishing, I have not used it so you may be right. However Silverlight has been progressing at a staggering pace. Silverlight 3 is coming out very soon; the releases have been less than a year apart and add a whole lot each time.
I am right, because I have used it. Can the javascript bullshit be circumvented? Probably, but I shouldn't have to buy a goddamn book to sort through obfuscated JS to do remote embedding.
Also it lets you write web apps in C# rather than AS, and separate presentation from data with XAML.
I'm waiting for you to explain why AS is somehow bad. It and the entire Flash framework was designed from the ground up to handle multimedia applications. C#.NET was not. C# is way more keystrokes and way more code for virtually everything, even the best programmers are always at the mercy of MSDN and Intellisense to get any meaningful C# code written.
Also Silverlight is way, way lighter than Adobe Air and not a separate install. So it's much more likely to get widespread adoption.
Are you saying that the .NET framework is not a required installation to run a desktop silverlight app? Because this is news to me. Nevermind the fact that the .NET framework installer is and will always be a hideous process.
They don't hate Adobe for cornering the market, they hate it for cornering the market with something so awful. Flash's performance is downright awful on Mac/Linux and still crashes a whole lot on Linux. And how long have we been waiting on a 64-bit version now?
We? Yeah, there's a whole line of people outside the Linux store complaining that there's no 64-bit version of Flash, oh wait, there isn't. There's no market for it, and as I said, Adobe had better things to do than to cater to the pissings of a micro-percentage of the user base. It's like being angry at Blizzard for not making a linux port of WoW. Could it run? Of course it could! Is it worth it? No.
Now that linux and netbooks are gaining traction, the support will come. Also keep in mind that netbooks are not intended to be all-purpose machines, and despite your wishes, Flash is an advanced multimedia platform which doesn't mean it's supposed to run on every shitty motorola cell phone and Acer laptop that comes off the line.
Look how much good it did Microsoft to support Linux and Apple from the outset with Silverlight. Oh, it did fuck all for them, that's right. In fact, probably an even smaller percentage of Linux and Apple users even have Silverlght installed than Windows user. Nice!
Oh wow, hardware accelerated video, what a goddamn breakthrough that would be. Let's just wait around for another few years and hope they run out of loose ends they need to tie up before getting around to making video playback not suck. Meanwhile the entire internet has been suffering with it as a defacto standard.
See above. You're making terrible terrible assumptions, and it shows how little you know about large scale software development. Adobe has been doing a ton of work on Flash, you can't just hire infinitely more people to work on the same piece of software, lest it become unmanageable. They made the right move in focusing on Air and Flex, and that's why Silverlight 3.0's new controls are a total joke and won't win them any supporters. Software rendering of video is 100% manageable on anything more sophisticated than a cell phone. You're assuming that even if it could run well on an iPhone that Apple would use it. Not sure if you noticed, but they've got their own goddamned native video library to play with.
Oh yes, don't forget about the part where Apple has a massive business motivation to ban Flash and Silverlight from the iPhone since it would allow those developer to write Safari borne apps that would complete with the iPhone native development API, thus stealing potential hardware sales and dev licensing from Apple.
Double standard much? "Oh flash was bad early on but they're cleaning up and I promise they'll have hardware accelerated video playback soon! Also Silverlight had bad early realeases and is behind the curve and no one will ever forgive them."
The difference is Flash started on the 90's when John fucking Delancy was doing promos for Compaq, and Mario 64 was revolutionary. They pioneered the field, so of course it wouldn't be perfect from the beginning, but since Adobe's acquisition, the platform has been nothing but solid and has gotten exponentially better every year since.
They don't hate Adobe for cornering the market, they hate it for cornering the market with something so awful. Flash's performance is downright awful on Mac/Linux and still crashes a whole lot on Linux. And how long have we been waiting on a 64-bit version now?
We? Yeah, there's a whole line of people outside the Linux store complaining that there's no 64-bit version of Flash, oh wait, there isn't. There's no market for it, and as I said, Adobe had better things to do than to cater to the pissings of a micro-percentage of the user base. It's like being angry at Blizzard for not making a linux port of WoW. Could it run? Of course it could! Is it worth it? No.
Oddly enough, the 64-bit Flash alpha is currently Linux-only.
Visual Studio is also given away to students for free. I haven't had the time to learn .net and I intend to learn it and work with Silverlight and Live Mesh. I like what MS is doing with these plateforms.
Oh right. Do they give the only operating system Visual Studio works on out for free too?
Actually, they do. It's a shame that its the only operating system that Visual Studio works on, though, because I like to use another certain operating system. But I guess people who've never used anything but Windows never think about that sort of thing.
At this point I have no doubt that porting VS to other platforms would most likely just result in a mess. You can use Eclipse or something if you're dead set on using a different OS for development (if you're doing web development and don't have a Windows machine around to test with you're crazy anyway). It looks like there's tools out there for Silverlight development in Eclipse, although I have no idea how well they work. Or the old, load it in a virtual machine adage.
I don't do much (anything) in Silverlight though. I just think it looks like nice, interesting tech. And you don't even need a compiler to start to use it. Although, as was said, if you want to do anything really serious you'd probably be up shit creek without one. If you just want to embed a little video player in your site with Play/Pause/Stop/Seek/Volume though, I don't see why you'd ever need to touch C#.
You wouldn't have to touch C#, and in a sense, that's part of the problem. The "fast track" to video publishing with Silverlight is totally code obfuscated, so you can't really manipulate anything. You load up some bullshit Expressions app, pipe the video through it, select your player style, and it spits out a terrible hive of generated files with no less than two largeish required javascript files. These files are essential to make the player actually function *within* silverlight, so if you want to embed the player al a Youtube, you can't. You have to iframe it in.
I'm totally confused by this, but you can include a media element in the same html file you're serving to the web browser:
That shows a video just fine for me locally, on OSX+Firefox nonetheless. You could with a tiny bit of extra effort add some buttons for play/pause/etc, and control the mediaelement through JavaScript. Heck, they could be HTML elements. How is that obfuscated? Its not the best way to do it for sure. It doesn't handle errors or people who don't have Silverlight. But it took 5 minutes, so who can complain? It works! You could even put the embed inside an HTML5 video element and use it as a fallback for browsers without video support.
And it's all notepad (Komodo Edit, but same thing really). No Expression. Nothing else. At work I use VS2008, and I love its code-completion shit for objects I know nothing about. But the point was you can do it with free tools. Maybe you can do the same thing with FLEX too. I've never really tried. Are you scared to death of XML or something though? It won't bite you.
Uh oh... Looks like Steve Balmer is laughing at Chrome OS. That must mean Chrome OS will be a huge successes. :P
That is a completely BS article that does nothing but take shoots at Balmer for doing the same thnig Jobs does. Talk up their own company and products. It only gives one slight quote of what Balmer says and ignores everything else about the presentation and what was said. And guess what Balmer is right to laugh at what is going on. The article at Techcrunch is a prime example of that.
All we know about Chrome OS is that it will first be for Netbooks and then Desktops. It will use the Linux kernel and be designed to launch quickly to get people to load the Chrome Browser. It will use Google's web apps instead of local apps. And won't be coming out for another year and a half at least.
Meanwhile MS is showing Office 2010 with a free Web version that completely tops Google Docs as well as a new Mobile version. Not to mention updates to their Live Services and what's being planned with Live Mesh. The Netbook market is currently owned by XP and both Bing & Yahoo picked up share at the expense of Google. All of this combined with the Netbook version of Win7 and Bing picking up the #2 search position are good reason for MS to be laughing.
Are you sure google lost market share? I wanted to read about it so I did a search but the data seems to indicate that yahoo lost some ground and google / bing both gained some.
Are you sure google lost market share? I wanted to read about it so I did a search but the data seems to indicate that yahoo lost some ground and google / bing both gained some.
I was trying to find the article, everything went crazy there for a month. Anyway yes Google did loose some market share, 78.48 percent down from 78.72 percent. Here is the best article I've found.
Edit, yeah I'll stick with that article. It's probably the more up to date one. I for one am sticking with Bing, I'm getting much better results that Google and I already used MS's other services over Google's because they were better. When I installed Chome a few days ago to take a look at the updates I imported from IE. Chrome was practically begging me to change from Bing to Google, I should have taken a screen shot. Now if only I could set it to work on my PS3 & Wii.
Microsoft couldn't have a company picnic without the open source community launching shit filled baskets at them.
That being said, office is shit but I have absolutely zero interest in using google docs and storing all my shit on google's servers. Much the same way the film-makers I'm friends with refuse to host things on YouTube because it gives Youtube a ton of control over the rights and distribution of said film.
EDIT basically I'm throwing poop all around. I'm like a firehose of poop at the software industry in general
I am right, because I have used it. Can the javascript bullshit be circumvented? Probably, but I shouldn't have to buy a goddamn book to sort through obfuscated JS to do remote embedding.
You bought a book an Javascript just so you could embed Silverlight videos?
I'm waiting for you to explain why AS is somehow bad. It and the entire Flash framework was designed from the ground up to handle multimedia applications. C#.NET was not. C# is way more keystrokes and way more code for virtually everything, even the best programmers are always at the mercy of MSDN and Intellisense to get any meaningful C# code written.
It's got cruft from previous versions that were not object oriented, which makes it not quite an elegant of a language. Plus, C#/Java/Ruby/Python developers can pick it up much more easily. And since Flash was built from the ground up to play videos via timeline, it's not quite as easy to build an application with a UI around it, which Silverlight is good at.
Also there's the better performance.
Are you saying that the .NET framework is not a required installation to run a desktop silverlight app? Because this is news to me. Nevermind the fact that the .NET framework installer is and will always be a hideous process.
Yes. Silverlight is the .NET framework stripped down and streamlined. You don't need to install the .NET framework to get Silverlight apps to run out of browser.
We? Yeah, there's a whole line of people outside the Linux store complaining that there's no 64-bit version of Flash, oh wait, there isn't. There's no market for it, and as I said, Adobe had better things to do than to cater to the pissings of a micro-percentage of the user base. It's like being angry at Blizzard for not making a linux port of WoW. Could it run? Of course it could! Is it worth it? No.
The lack of 64-bit Flash has been holding back the development and use of 64-bit browsers. The majority of desktops today are shipping with a 64-bit OS, and a lot of users could benefit from a native 64-bit browser.
Now that linux and netbooks are gaining traction, the support will come. Also keep in mind that netbooks are not intended to be all-purpose machines, and despite your wishes, Flash is an advanced multimedia platform which doesn't mean it's supposed to run on every shitty motorola cell phone and Acer laptop that comes off the line.
That is an absolutely awful attitude to have. Oh, lots of people are using a netbook? We could support you, but I don't think you deserve to have your hardware efficiently utilized. Believe it or not, netbook users would still appreciate having smooth playback of video in fullscreen. If Silverlight does it and Flash does not, they are going to like Silverlight better. "They shouldn't want to watch videos on the internet" is not exactly a convincing counter-argument. Especially when they could play the same videos just fine on computers 1/10th as powerful.
And Silverlight performs the exact same functions without bringing many current-day computers to their knees. The whole "but it's an advanced multimedia platform" thing is just a garbage excuse.
Look how much good it did Microsoft to support Linux and Apple from the outset with Silverlight. Oh, it did fuck all for them, that's right. In fact, probably an even smaller percentage of Linux and Apple users even have Silverlght installed than Windows user. Nice!
Completely ignoring OSX and Linux would have definitely hurt adoption of Silverlight. If you hear "by adopting this technology you completely shut out everyone who owns a Macbook" it would not exactly be the most encouraging thing. It would also play directly into the hands of critics pointing out that it's just another propreitary Microsoft boondoggle doomed to failure because it only works on Windows.
Oh wow, hardware accelerated video, what a goddamn breakthrough that would be. Let's just wait around for another few years and hope they run out of loose ends they need to tie up before getting around to making video playback not suck. Meanwhile the entire internet has been suffering with it as a defacto standard.
See above. You're making terrible terrible assumptions, and it shows how little you know about large scale software development. Adobe has been doing a ton of work on Flash, you can't just hire infinitely more people to work on the same piece of software, lest it become unmanageable. They made the right move in focusing on Air and Flex, and that's why Silverlight 3.0's new controls are a total joke and won't win them any supporters. Software rendering of video is 100% manageable on anything more sophisticated than a cell phone. You're assuming that even if it could run well on an iPhone that Apple would use it. Not sure if you noticed, but they've got their own goddamned native video library to play with.
First off it's not just iPhones. This applies to netbooks, HTPCs that have been repurposed from older computers, Macs and Linux boxes. Machines that are perfectly capable of showing smooth video but cannot, using Flash. Also, you don't need to hire an infinite amount of people to get hardware accelerated video working in less than 5 years. Just put a few people on it. Or hire a few people that know what they're doing. It might make sense to improve the experience for what is by far the #1 use of your platform. Do they ignore this because they've already completely won the market for internet video? I don't know and don't really care, it still pisses me off.
Oh yes, don't forget about the part where Apple has a massive business motivation to ban Flash and Silverlight from the iPhone since it would allow those developer to write Safari borne apps that would complete with the iPhone native development API, thus stealing potential hardware sales and dev licensing from Apple.
Unfounded conspiracy theory. They also have motivations to sell more iPhones by improving its web browsing capabilities.
Double standard much? "Oh flash was bad early on but they're cleaning up and I promise they'll have hardware accelerated video playback soon! Also Silverlight had bad early realeases and is behind the curve and no one will ever forgive them."
The difference is Flash started on the 90's when John fucking Delancy was doing promos for Compaq, and Mario 64 was revolutionary. They pioneered the field, so of course it wouldn't be perfect from the beginning, but since Adobe's acquisition, the platform has been nothing but solid and has gotten exponentially better every year since.
Wow, except what I was talking about was serious shortcomings in Flash that exist right now that you waved away, saying they will fix soon. While shortcomings in Silverlight are somehow major rift-forming monstrosities that not even a major release cycle of more than once a year could possibly overcome.
RandomEngy on
Profile -> Signature Settings -> Hide signatures always. Then you don't have to read this worthless text anymore.
Guys, going off topic a bit. So to try and keep things in check: Both flash and silverlight suck.
There, we can now focus on Chrome. Also, in order that some suspense be kept there is a plugin that doesn't suck. However, in order to keep that level of suspense it shall be revealed at a later time.
GrimReaper on
PSN | Steam
---
I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
Visual Studio is also given away to students for free. I haven't had the time to learn .net and I intend to learn it and work with Silverlight and Live Mesh. I like what MS is doing with these plateforms.
Oh right. Do they give the only operating system Visual Studio works on out for free too?
Actually, they do. It's a shame that its the only operating system that Visual Studio works on, though, because I like to use another certain operating system. But I guess people who've never used anything but Windows never think about that sort of thing.
At this point I have no doubt that porting VS to other platforms would most likely just result in a mess. You can use Eclipse or something if you're dead set on using a different OS for development (if you're doing web development and don't have a Windows machine around to test with you're crazy anyway). It looks like there's tools out there for Silverlight development in Eclipse, although I have no idea how well they work. Or the old, load it in a virtual machine adage.
I don't do much (anything) in Silverlight though. I just think it looks like nice, interesting tech. And you don't even need a compiler to start to use it. Although, as was said, if you want to do anything really serious you'd probably be up shit creek without one. If you just want to embed a little video player in your site with Play/Pause/Stop/Seek/Volume though, I don't see why you'd ever need to touch C#.
You wouldn't have to touch C#, and in a sense, that's part of the problem. The "fast track" to video publishing with Silverlight is totally code obfuscated, so you can't really manipulate anything. You load up some bullshit Expressions app, pipe the video through it, select your player style, and it spits out a terrible hive of generated files with no less than two largeish required javascript files. These files are essential to make the player actually function *within* silverlight, so if you want to embed the player al a Youtube, you can't. You have to iframe it in.
I'm totally confused by this, but you can include a media element in the same html file you're serving to the web browser:
That shows a video just fine for me locally, on OSX+Firefox nonetheless. You could with a tiny bit of extra effort add some buttons for play/pause/etc, and control the mediaelement through JavaScript. Heck, they could be HTML elements. How is that obfuscated? Its not the best way to do it for sure. It doesn't handle errors or people who don't have Silverlight. But it took 5 minutes, so who can complain? It works! You could even put the embed inside an HTML5 video element and use it as a fallback for browsers without video support.
And it's all notepad (Komodo Edit, but same thing really). No Expression. Nothing else. At work I use VS2008, and I love its code-completion shit for objects I know nothing about. But the point was you can do it with free tools. Maybe you can do the same thing with FLEX too. I've never really tried. Are you scared to death of XML or something though? It won't bite you.
That's not what Expressions Media converter does though. I'm just telling you what Expressions pumps out when you set up a video player. Expression spits out hideous javascript. I didn't say there wasn't a better way, but I shouldn't have to go digging for it. If there's a better way, then why doesn't Microsoft's own goddamn software do it in the first place?
Kind of having a weird issue with Chrome in the W7 RC...
Sometimes when I start typing into a text box, or move my cursor on to a link, the browser will hang for a second or two until the text shows up or my cursor changes to the pointing finger hand.
Anyone know what this could be? I really hate to return to Firefox...the minimalist interface of Chrome is where it's at!
Uh oh... Looks like Steve Balmer is laughing at Chrome OS. That must mean Chrome OS will be a huge successes. :P
That is a completely BS article that does nothing but take shoots at Balmer for doing the same thnig Jobs does. Talk up their own company and products. It only gives one slight quote of what Balmer says and ignores everything else about the presentation and what was said. And guess what Balmer is right to laugh at what is going on. The article at Techcrunch is a prime example of that.
All we know about Chrome OS is that it will first be for Netbooks and then Desktops. It will use the Linux kernel and be designed to launch quickly to get people to load the Chrome Browser. It will use Google's web apps instead of local apps. And won't be coming out for another year and a half at least.
Meanwhile MS is showing Office 2010 with a free Web version that completely tops Google Docs as well as a new Mobile version. Not to mention updates to their Live Services and what's being planned with Live Mesh. The Netbook market is currently owned by XP and both Bing & Yahoo picked up share at the expense of Google. All of this combined with the Netbook version of Win7 and Bing picking up the #2 search position are good reason for MS to be laughing.
Just trying to be funny...
And yeah, Jobs does knock other products... Then he comes out with his improved product that he feels is better. It's endlessly debatable wether his products are better or not and thats not the point I'm trying to make.
Ballmer's reaction to the iPhone was that it was too expensive to be popular, and that windows mobile phones were fine the way they were. Now his company is in a mad scramble to copy every aspect of the iPhone, from its graphics interface to the app store.
Perhaps you see a difference in strategy?
Yeah it's all marketing BS, but its just damn funny to see a company knocking a product only to end up copying it when it becomes wildly popular. :P
Google Docs... we get Office 2010 Web Apps.
Chrome OS? we will see.
Question... does this MS Office web app work in all web browsers?
lilB on
0
Blake TDo you have enemies then?Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Registered Userregular
Kind of having a weird issue with Chrome in the W7 RC...
Sometimes when I start typing into a text box, or move my cursor on to a link, the browser will hang for a second or two until the text shows up or my cursor changes to the pointing finger hand.
Anyone know what this could be? I really hate to return to Firefox...the minimalist interface of Chrome is where it's at!
Uh oh... Looks like Steve Balmer is laughing at Chrome OS. That must mean Chrome OS will be a huge successes. :P
That is a completely BS article that does nothing but take shoots at Balmer for doing the same thnig Jobs does. Talk up their own company and products. It only gives one slight quote of what Balmer says and ignores everything else about the presentation and what was said. And guess what Balmer is right to laugh at what is going on. The article at Techcrunch is a prime example of that.
All we know about Chrome OS is that it will first be for Netbooks and then Desktops. It will use the Linux kernel and be designed to launch quickly to get people to load the Chrome Browser. It will use Google's web apps instead of local apps. And won't be coming out for another year and a half at least.
Meanwhile MS is showing Office 2010 with a free Web version that completely tops Google Docs as well as a new Mobile version. Not to mention updates to their Live Services and what's being planned with Live Mesh. The Netbook market is currently owned by XP and both Bing & Yahoo picked up share at the expense of Google. All of this combined with the Netbook version of Win7 and Bing picking up the #2 search position are good reason for MS to be laughing.
Just trying to be funny...
And yeah, Jobs does knock other products... Then he comes out with his improved product that he feels is better. It's endlessly debatable wether his products are better or not and thats not the point I'm trying to make.
Ballmer's reaction to the iPhone was that it was too expensive to be popular, and that windows mobile phones were fine the way they were. Now his company is in a mad scramble to copy every aspect of the iPhone, from its graphics interface to the app store.
Perhaps you see a difference in strategy?
Yeah it's all marketing BS, but its just damn funny to see a company knocking a product only to end up copying it when it becomes wildly popular. :P
Google Docs... we get Office 2010 Web Apps.
Chrome OS? we will see.
Question... does this MS Office web app work in all web browsers?
Isn't Office 2010 (the web version) essentially the exact opposite of what a web app is? Isn't it essentially a silverlight/.net app?
I don't think MS have yet to really understand the concept of a web app, zoho, google docs.. those are web apps. They're consistently getting better and better too.
GrimReaper on
PSN | Steam
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
Uh oh... Looks like Steve Balmer is laughing at Chrome OS. That must mean Chrome OS will be a huge successes. :P
That is a completely BS article that does nothing but take shoots at Balmer for doing the same thnig Jobs does. Talk up their own company and products. It only gives one slight quote of what Balmer says and ignores everything else about the presentation and what was said. And guess what Balmer is right to laugh at what is going on. The article at Techcrunch is a prime example of that.
All we know about Chrome OS is that it will first be for Netbooks and then Desktops. It will use the Linux kernel and be designed to launch quickly to get people to load the Chrome Browser. It will use Google's web apps instead of local apps. And won't be coming out for another year and a half at least.
Meanwhile MS is showing Office 2010 with a free Web version that completely tops Google Docs as well as a new Mobile version. Not to mention updates to their Live Services and what's being planned with Live Mesh. The Netbook market is currently owned by XP and both Bing & Yahoo picked up share at the expense of Google. All of this combined with the Netbook version of Win7 and Bing picking up the #2 search position are good reason for MS to be laughing.
Just trying to be funny...
And yeah, Jobs does knock other products... Then he comes out with his improved product that he feels is better. It's endlessly debatable wether his products are better or not and thats not the point I'm trying to make.
Ballmer's reaction to the iPhone was that it was too expensive to be popular, and that windows mobile phones were fine the way they were. Now his company is in a mad scramble to copy every aspect of the iPhone, from its graphics interface to the app store.
Perhaps you see a difference in strategy?
Yeah it's all marketing BS, but its just damn funny to see a company knocking a product only to end up copying it when it becomes wildly popular. :P
Google Docs... we get Office 2010 Web Apps.
Chrome OS? we will see.
Question... does this MS Office web app work in all web browsers?
Isn't Office 2010 (the web version) essentially the exact opposite of what a web app is? Isn't it essentially a silverlight/.net app?
I don't think MS have yet to really understand the concept of a web app, zoho, google docs.. those are web apps. They're consistently getting better and better too.
I believe MS has said that the office web apps will work in firefox and safari and that silverlight is not required, but will "enhance the user experience."
Isn't Office 2010 (the web version) essentially the exact opposite of what a web app is? Isn't it essentially a silverlight/.net app?
I don't think MS have yet to really understand the concept of a web app, zoho, google docs.. those are web apps. They're consistently getting better and better too.
You do not need .net installed to run Silverlight which is why Silverlight runs on OSX & Linux. And those web apps don't hold a candle to MS Office. That being said if an App runs off a web server and doesn't require install then it's a web app.
Isn't Office 2010 (the web version) essentially the exact opposite of what a web app is? Isn't it essentially a silverlight/.net app?
I don't think MS have yet to really understand the concept of a web app, zoho, google docs.. those are web apps. They're consistently getting better and better too.
You do not need .net installed to run Silverlight which is why Silverlight runs on OSX & Linux. And those web apps don't hold a candle to MS Office. That being said if an App runs off a web server and doesn't require install then it's a web app.
So... applications you access through remote desktop? Oh, or Java web-start apps!
Isn't Office 2010 (the web version) essentially the exact opposite of what a web app is? Isn't it essentially a silverlight/.net app?
I don't think MS have yet to really understand the concept of a web app, zoho, google docs.. those are web apps. They're consistently getting better and better too.
You do not need .net installed to run Silverlight which is why Silverlight runs on OSX & Linux. And those web apps don't hold a candle to MS Office. That being said if an App runs off a web server and doesn't require install then it's a web app.
Meh. Docs is more than enough for me. I know a lot of programmers who use it. It's very lean, which is actually a really good thing. Many companies are still using older versions of MS office on their PC's which are old and bloated. Working with something like docs can be really refreshing.
Isn't Office 2010 (the web version) essentially the exact opposite of what a web app is? Isn't it essentially a silverlight/.net app?
I don't think MS have yet to really understand the concept of a web app, zoho, google docs.. those are web apps. They're consistently getting better and better too.
You do not need .net installed to run Silverlight which is why Silverlight runs on Linux.
Wut?
Moonlight (the Linux version of Silverlight) doesn't need ".net" if you're only using the 1.0 profile. If you're using the 2.0 profile it has a dependency on Mono, an implementation of .NET that lags behind Microsoft's. Even the Mono project describes Silverlight as "an extended subset of the 2.0 .NET framework."
Barrakketh on
Rollers are red, chargers are blue....omae wa mou shindeiru
Yeah, generally a good cloud service will get better uptime than all but the best internally managed systems.
When they go down, it's brief, and there's a flurry of blog and news posts about how it spells the doom of cloud services. Except for the fact that it only happens once every few years.
Isn't Office 2010 (the web version) essentially the exact opposite of what a web app is? Isn't it essentially a silverlight/.net app?
I don't think MS have yet to really understand the concept of a web app, zoho, google docs.. those are web apps. They're consistently getting better and better too.
You do not need .net installed to run Silverlight which is why Silverlight runs on Linux.
Wut?
Moonlight (the Linux version of Silverlight) doesn't need ".net" if you're only using the 1.0 profile. If you're using the 2.0 profile it has a dependency on Mono, an implementation of .NET that lags behind Microsoft's. Even the Mono project describes Silverlight as "an extended subset of the 2.0 .NET framework."
And notably, Moonlight still doesn't actually work. It only works with a tiny fraction of Silverlight 2.0 content, and 3.0 is already out. And Microsoft's agreement with Novell to allow the Moonlight team still specifically reserves the right to sue the shit out of anyone other than Novell that distributes it, so don't expect it to be installed by default by any major distributions or OEM's. I don't know why people persist in thinking that Silverlight runs on linux in any meaningful sense. In an attempt to be vaguely on-topic, it's yet another reason Google is pushing stuff like HTML5, so people don't have to deal with all this stupid plugin bullshit while using AdSense supported content.
And Microsoft's agreement with Novell to allow the Moonlight team still specifically reserves the right to sue the shit out of anyone other than Novell that distributes it, so don't expect it to be installed by default by any major distributions or OEM's.
And Microsoft's agreement with Novell to allow the Moonlight team still specifically reserves the right to sue the shit out of anyone other than Novell that distributes it, so don't expect it to be installed by default by any major distributions or OEM's.
And Microsoft's agreement with Novell to allow the Moonlight team still specifically reserves the right to sue the shit out of anyone other than Novell that distributes it, so don't expect it to be installed by default by any major distributions or OEM's.
That's not completely clear. This post seems to indicate that Moonlight is covered by the promise. When they list what is not covered, they mention ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Winforms as examples, but do not mention Silverlight.
RandomEngy on
Profile -> Signature Settings -> Hide signatures always. Then you don't have to read this worthless text anymore.
And Microsoft's agreement with Novell to allow the Moonlight team still specifically reserves the right to sue the shit out of anyone other than Novell that distributes it, so don't expect it to be installed by default by any major distributions or OEM's.
That's not completely clear. This post seems to indicate that Moonlight is covered by the promise. When they list what is not covered, they mention ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Winforms as examples, but do not mention Silverlight.
There's a different agreement in place with Novell specifically for Moonlight that was last updated two weeks before Microsoft's announcement, and the promise only covers what's in the ECMA 334 and 335 standards.
Silverlight isn't in any of those AFAIK.
Barrakketh on
Rollers are red, chargers are blue....omae wa mou shindeiru
Kind of having a weird issue with Chrome in the W7 RC...
Sometimes when I start typing into a text box, or move my cursor on to a link, the browser will hang for a second or two until the text shows up or my cursor changes to the pointing finger hand.
Anyone know what this could be? I really hate to return to Firefox...the minimalist interface of Chrome is where it's at!
Switch to the Dev Channel?
I haven't had that problem before.
This was a while ago, but I just now fixed it. Turned out to be the campus DNS server or whoever they're paying for. Started using OpenDNS' servers and everything is working silky smooth.
Dev Channel is awesome though, didn't know about that. Thanks!
Anyone finding that Facebook no longer has that friend chat button thing. Its like that friends online button is just gone and the only way to get it back is to pop the chat client out in its own window, wtf!?
Posts
You wouldn't have to touch C#, and in a sense, that's part of the problem. The "fast track" to video publishing with Silverlight is totally code obfuscated, so you can't really manipulate anything. You load up some bullshit Expressions app, pipe the video through it, select your player style, and it spits out a terrible hive of generated files with no less than two largeish required javascript files. These files are essential to make the player actually function *within* silverlight, so if you want to embed the player al a Youtube, you can't. You have to iframe it in.
The only alternative to that is to actually make a player, which, as of 2.0, is a total clusterfuck.
What's killing Silverlight (assuming it wasn't stillborn) is the fact that the level of effort to do small tasks that would be more or less immediate in Flash is absolutely vulgar.
As far as Visual Studio, the argument is moot. Microsoft's plan from day 1 was to get the .NET community on board with Silverlight and go from there, and they still haven't succeeded in that to the extent required to get true positive exposure. In the meantime, they've pretty much dug an impassable rift between themselves and every multimedia designer and developer on the planet by releasing an absolutely awful 1.0 and a nearly inexcusable 2.0. 3.0 looks decent, but it hardly matters anymore, they are officially behind the curve.
*edit* It's moot because the .NET community is largely subsidized by Microsoft. It's called the Microsoft Partner program and it basically gives free software to businesses for hiring MCPD's. Which means, in general, anyone with the prerequisite skills and knowledge to actually use Silverlight effectively is already getting free copies of Windows and VS2008 anyway.
MSDN documentation is pretty good from an API point of view, there are a lot of silverlight examples to be found with google, and stackoverflow is great for clearing up any lingering problems you have. Intellisense does indeed work with XAML. There is a bug where if you install the Windows SDK after VS 2008, intellisense breaks. However you can fix that pretty easily.
As for the video publishing, I have not used it so you may be right. However Silverlight has been progressing at a staggering pace. Silverlight 3 is coming out very soon; the releases have been less than a year apart and add a whole lot each time.
Also it lets you write web apps in C# rather than AS, and separate presentation from data with XAML.
And HTML5 isn't a cure-all for web video. It still has significant problems. IE doesn't have plans on implementing it until the spec is done, Apple refuses to support Theora and Mozilla refuses to support H.264. Silverlight, on the other hand, works everywhere.
Also Silverlight is way, way lighter than Adobe Air and not a separate install. So it's much more likely to get widespread adoption.
They don't hate Adobe for cornering the market, they hate it for cornering the market with something so awful. Flash's performance is downright awful on Mac/Linux and still crashes a whole lot on Linux. And how long have we been waiting on a 64-bit version now?
Oh wow, hardware accelerated video, what a goddamn breakthrough that would be. Let's just wait around for another few years and hope they run out of loose ends they need to tie up before getting around to making video playback not suck. Meanwhile the entire internet has been suffering with it as a defacto standard.
Double standard much? "Oh flash was bad early on but they're cleaning up and I promise they'll have hardware accelerated video playback soon! Also Silverlight had bad early realeases and is behind the curve and no one will ever forgive them."
If you want a good example of how well silverlight works take a look at the last olympics. NBC was able to stream everything with Silverlight without problem to a large scale audiance. 1k+ were watching the streams. Roughly a week later NBC switched back to their normal flash for a football game and the stream was crashing like crazy.
Then there is Netflix. They switched over to silverlight and it's been saving them time and money. It's able to change scale on the fly and it can play HD video on much older PCs or low end netbooks because it's hardware accelarated.
It didn't work in Blend 2.0, ever, and that's important.
I am right, because I have used it. Can the javascript bullshit be circumvented? Probably, but I shouldn't have to buy a goddamn book to sort through obfuscated JS to do remote embedding.
I'm waiting for you to explain why AS is somehow bad. It and the entire Flash framework was designed from the ground up to handle multimedia applications. C#.NET was not. C# is way more keystrokes and way more code for virtually everything, even the best programmers are always at the mercy of MSDN and Intellisense to get any meaningful C# code written.
Are you saying that the .NET framework is not a required installation to run a desktop silverlight app? Because this is news to me. Nevermind the fact that the .NET framework installer is and will always be a hideous process.
We? Yeah, there's a whole line of people outside the Linux store complaining that there's no 64-bit version of Flash, oh wait, there isn't. There's no market for it, and as I said, Adobe had better things to do than to cater to the pissings of a micro-percentage of the user base. It's like being angry at Blizzard for not making a linux port of WoW. Could it run? Of course it could! Is it worth it? No.
Now that linux and netbooks are gaining traction, the support will come. Also keep in mind that netbooks are not intended to be all-purpose machines, and despite your wishes, Flash is an advanced multimedia platform which doesn't mean it's supposed to run on every shitty motorola cell phone and Acer laptop that comes off the line.
Look how much good it did Microsoft to support Linux and Apple from the outset with Silverlight. Oh, it did fuck all for them, that's right. In fact, probably an even smaller percentage of Linux and Apple users even have Silverlght installed than Windows user. Nice!
See above. You're making terrible terrible assumptions, and it shows how little you know about large scale software development. Adobe has been doing a ton of work on Flash, you can't just hire infinitely more people to work on the same piece of software, lest it become unmanageable. They made the right move in focusing on Air and Flex, and that's why Silverlight 3.0's new controls are a total joke and won't win them any supporters. Software rendering of video is 100% manageable on anything more sophisticated than a cell phone. You're assuming that even if it could run well on an iPhone that Apple would use it. Not sure if you noticed, but they've got their own goddamned native video library to play with.
Oh yes, don't forget about the part where Apple has a massive business motivation to ban Flash and Silverlight from the iPhone since it would allow those developer to write Safari borne apps that would complete with the iPhone native development API, thus stealing potential hardware sales and dev licensing from Apple.
The difference is Flash started on the 90's when John fucking Delancy was doing promos for Compaq, and Mario 64 was revolutionary. They pioneered the field, so of course it wouldn't be perfect from the beginning, but since Adobe's acquisition, the platform has been nothing but solid and has gotten exponentially better every year since.
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"> <head> <title>Silverlight Hello World</title> </head> <body> <script type="text/xaml" id="xamlContent"> <?xml version="1.0" ?> <Canvas xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"> <MediaElement x:Name="VideoControl" Width="500" Height ="500" Source="myvideo.wmv" AutoPlay="True"/> </Canvas> </script> <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" id="testControl" width="500" height="500"> <param name="source" value="#xamlContent"/> </object> </body> </html>And it's all notepad (Komodo Edit, but same thing really). No Expression. Nothing else. At work I use VS2008, and I love its code-completion shit for objects I know nothing about. But the point was you can do it with free tools. Maybe you can do the same thing with FLEX too. I've never really tried. Are you scared to death of XML or something though? It won't bite you.
Switch: 6200-8149-0919 / Wii U: maximumzero / 3DS: 0860-3352-3335 / eBay Shop
That is a completely BS article that does nothing but take shoots at Balmer for doing the same thnig Jobs does. Talk up their own company and products. It only gives one slight quote of what Balmer says and ignores everything else about the presentation and what was said. And guess what Balmer is right to laugh at what is going on. The article at Techcrunch is a prime example of that.
All we know about Chrome OS is that it will first be for Netbooks and then Desktops. It will use the Linux kernel and be designed to launch quickly to get people to load the Chrome Browser. It will use Google's web apps instead of local apps. And won't be coming out for another year and a half at least.
Meanwhile MS is showing Office 2010 with a free Web version that completely tops Google Docs as well as a new Mobile version. Not to mention updates to their Live Services and what's being planned with Live Mesh. The Netbook market is currently owned by XP and both Bing & Yahoo picked up share at the expense of Google. All of this combined with the Netbook version of Win7 and Bing picking up the #2 search position are good reason for MS to be laughing.
I was trying to find the article, everything went crazy there for a month. Anyway yes Google did loose some market share, 78.48 percent down from 78.72 percent. Here is the best article I've found.
http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSTRE56027F20090701
Edit, yeah I'll stick with that article. It's probably the more up to date one. I for one am sticking with Bing, I'm getting much better results that Google and I already used MS's other services over Google's because they were better. When I installed Chome a few days ago to take a look at the updates I imported from IE. Chrome was practically begging me to change from Bing to Google, I should have taken a screen shot. Now if only I could set it to work on my PS3 & Wii.
That being said, office is shit but I have absolutely zero interest in using google docs and storing all my shit on google's servers. Much the same way the film-makers I'm friends with refuse to host things on YouTube because it gives Youtube a ton of control over the rights and distribution of said film.
EDIT basically I'm throwing poop all around. I'm like a firehose of poop at the software industry in general
You bought a book an Javascript just so you could embed Silverlight videos?
It's got cruft from previous versions that were not object oriented, which makes it not quite an elegant of a language. Plus, C#/Java/Ruby/Python developers can pick it up much more easily. And since Flash was built from the ground up to play videos via timeline, it's not quite as easy to build an application with a UI around it, which Silverlight is good at.
Also there's the better performance.
Yes. Silverlight is the .NET framework stripped down and streamlined. You don't need to install the .NET framework to get Silverlight apps to run out of browser.
The lack of 64-bit Flash has been holding back the development and use of 64-bit browsers. The majority of desktops today are shipping with a 64-bit OS, and a lot of users could benefit from a native 64-bit browser.
That is an absolutely awful attitude to have. Oh, lots of people are using a netbook? We could support you, but I don't think you deserve to have your hardware efficiently utilized. Believe it or not, netbook users would still appreciate having smooth playback of video in fullscreen. If Silverlight does it and Flash does not, they are going to like Silverlight better. "They shouldn't want to watch videos on the internet" is not exactly a convincing counter-argument. Especially when they could play the same videos just fine on computers 1/10th as powerful.
And Silverlight performs the exact same functions without bringing many current-day computers to their knees. The whole "but it's an advanced multimedia platform" thing is just a garbage excuse.
Completely ignoring OSX and Linux would have definitely hurt adoption of Silverlight. If you hear "by adopting this technology you completely shut out everyone who owns a Macbook" it would not exactly be the most encouraging thing. It would also play directly into the hands of critics pointing out that it's just another propreitary Microsoft boondoggle doomed to failure because it only works on Windows.
First off it's not just iPhones. This applies to netbooks, HTPCs that have been repurposed from older computers, Macs and Linux boxes. Machines that are perfectly capable of showing smooth video but cannot, using Flash. Also, you don't need to hire an infinite amount of people to get hardware accelerated video working in less than 5 years. Just put a few people on it. Or hire a few people that know what they're doing. It might make sense to improve the experience for what is by far the #1 use of your platform. Do they ignore this because they've already completely won the market for internet video? I don't know and don't really care, it still pisses me off.
Unfounded conspiracy theory. They also have motivations to sell more iPhones by improving its web browsing capabilities.
Wow, except what I was talking about was serious shortcomings in Flash that exist right now that you waved away, saying they will fix soon. While shortcomings in Silverlight are somehow major rift-forming monstrosities that not even a major release cycle of more than once a year could possibly overcome.
There, we can now focus on Chrome. Also, in order that some suspense be kept there is a plugin that doesn't suck. However, in order to keep that level of suspense it shall be revealed at a later time.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
That's not what Expressions Media converter does though. I'm just telling you what Expressions pumps out when you set up a video player. Expression spits out hideous javascript. I didn't say there wasn't a better way, but I shouldn't have to go digging for it. If there's a better way, then why doesn't Microsoft's own goddamn software do it in the first place?
Sometimes when I start typing into a text box, or move my cursor on to a link, the browser will hang for a second or two until the text shows up or my cursor changes to the pointing finger hand.
Anyone know what this could be? I really hate to return to Firefox...the minimalist interface of Chrome is where it's at!
Just trying to be funny...
And yeah, Jobs does knock other products... Then he comes out with his improved product that he feels is better. It's endlessly debatable wether his products are better or not and thats not the point I'm trying to make.
Ballmer's reaction to the iPhone was that it was too expensive to be popular, and that windows mobile phones were fine the way they were. Now his company is in a mad scramble to copy every aspect of the iPhone, from its graphics interface to the app store.
Perhaps you see a difference in strategy?
Yeah it's all marketing BS, but its just damn funny to see a company knocking a product only to end up copying it when it becomes wildly popular. :P
Google Docs... we get Office 2010 Web Apps.
Chrome OS? we will see.
Question... does this MS Office web app work in all web browsers?
Switch to the Dev Channel?
I haven't had that problem before.
Satans..... hints.....
Isn't Office 2010 (the web version) essentially the exact opposite of what a web app is? Isn't it essentially a silverlight/.net app?
I don't think MS have yet to really understand the concept of a web app, zoho, google docs.. those are web apps. They're consistently getting better and better too.
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
I believe MS has said that the office web apps will work in firefox and safari and that silverlight is not required, but will "enhance the user experience."
You do not need .net installed to run Silverlight which is why Silverlight runs on OSX & Linux. And those web apps don't hold a candle to MS Office. That being said if an App runs off a web server and doesn't require install then it's a web app.
So... applications you access through remote desktop? Oh, or Java web-start apps!
Or hey, what about Native Client?
PARADIGM SHIFT!
Meh. Docs is more than enough for me. I know a lot of programmers who use it. It's very lean, which is actually a really good thing. Many companies are still using older versions of MS office on their PC's which are old and bloated. Working with something like docs can be really refreshing.
Wut?
Moonlight (the Linux version of Silverlight) doesn't need ".net" if you're only using the 1.0 profile. If you're using the 2.0 profile it has a dependency on Mono, an implementation of .NET that lags behind Microsoft's. Even the Mono project describes Silverlight as "an extended subset of the 2.0 .NET framework."
That's hilarious.
When they go down, it's brief, and there's a flurry of blog and news posts about how it spells the doom of cloud services. Except for the fact that it only happens once every few years.
And notably, Moonlight still doesn't actually work. It only works with a tiny fraction of Silverlight 2.0 content, and 3.0 is already out. And Microsoft's agreement with Novell to allow the Moonlight team still specifically reserves the right to sue the shit out of anyone other than Novell that distributes it, so don't expect it to be installed by default by any major distributions or OEM's. I don't know why people persist in thinking that Silverlight runs on linux in any meaningful sense. In an attempt to be vaguely on-topic, it's yet another reason Google is pushing stuff like HTML5, so people don't have to deal with all this stupid plugin bullshit while using AdSense supported content.
That has been completely fixed.
That only applies to Mono, not Silverlight.
That's not completely clear. This post seems to indicate that Moonlight is covered by the promise. When they list what is not covered, they mention ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Winforms as examples, but do not mention Silverlight.
Silverlight isn't in any of those AFAIK.
This was a while ago, but I just now fixed it. Turned out to be the campus DNS server or whoever they're paying for. Started using OpenDNS' servers and everything is working silky smooth.
Dev Channel is awesome though, didn't know about that. Thanks!
I've heard that Safari continues to work so it isn't an issue with webkit.
Even IE 8 is giving me issues, the friends box comes up, but the letters and some of the images are like tabbed over. This is just fucking dumb.