Those up top (the Presidential Inaugural Committee) chose to utilize Microsoft's Silverlight technology to stream the upcoming inaugural events for the new president of the United States. Though Microsoft certainly likes this idea, this leaves out thousands of people in the US and elsewhere who still cannot run Silverlight or an open source alternative on their systems from viewing the streamed video online. Update by Thom: Linux and PowerPC Mac fans rejoice, as they can watch the inauguration as well using Moonlight. Migel De Icaza wrote: "Microsoft worked late last night to get us access to the code that will be used during the inauguration so we could test it with Moonlight." Microsoft and the Moonlight team fixed this issue in one afternoon, so it might be a little rough.
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Member since:2006-06-01
Yeah - and a great way to say to everybody that does not use windows, to drop their "broken" OS and go to the nice and warm mindless Windows OS. How helpfull.
There was no reason to get out Silverlight other than to make anything incompatible for a non-window-OS on the web again. It's the whole "you have to use IE" story again. Slightly modyfied, but with the same end result again.
And don't say the guys at Novell are working on a Linux version. They got a "Novell-only" disclosure of the protocols and inner workings, so nobody else but the "partner" of Microsoft can use it. Also they got only some tiny bits to get it working, but not the full inner workings to get it really work good - so the Linux version will always be more crappy and lags behind.
Sure - flash is not at all great too, but at least Adobe is giving some good working implementations for Linux (even a 64 bit version too). Microsoft itself does absolutely nothing, but leaves everything to Novell (and nobody else as I explained before). So if Moonlight (Linux version of Silverlight) works crappy they can blame Novell and keep clean hands their self. Also by disclosure only to Novell they are sure the implementation can only be developed by a small tiny subset of the whole Open Source Designers potential. This almost ensures Linux will never ever have a full working version of Silverlight...
So - yes... Using Siverlight is same Microsoft practices as usual...
Member since:2007-11-29
but for Microsoft, it's a really good opportunity.
Member since:
2007-11-29
Might be a good thing for Microsoft actually. There will be lots of people who want to watch that, so it's a very quick way for Microsoft to gain some serious marketshare inside the Flash world.