Comment Re:This makes no real difference! (Score 4, Informative) 465
That was a research paper on ILX from 2001.
The research work from ILX was folded into
All of the instructions that you listed are deprecated, they never really made it into
That was a research paper on ILX from 2001.
The research work from ILX was folded into
All of the instructions that you listed are deprecated, they never really made it into
The current Silverlight 3 preview release supports in addition to the proprietary codecs a pluggable framework for developers that wish to do so to use their own codecs.
As part of the Moonlight effort we now have implemented Vorbis, Theora and ADPCM and have a partial implementation of Dirac almost ready to use.
Our codecs work in both Silverlight 3 and our open source Moonlight implementation.
This means that the specifications can now be used to implement third party implementation and can be used by open source efforts to recreate Flash.
In the Silverlight world that was already possible as Microsoft publishes pretty much all of the specs necessary to implement Silverlight.
Both the Flash plugin from Adobe and the Silverlight plugin from Microsoft are proprietary products. Gnash, Sfwdec and Moonlight are open source implementations of these technology.
I agree that Visual Studio is a very nice tool.
Luckily the code that you produce with Visual Studio will run on Mono (no recompilations necessary) including code that uses ASP.NET MVC. And with the new support for ASP.NET precompiled sites in Mono (available in Mono 2.4) you do not even need to copy the source code to your target server.
Click "Publish" in visual studio, enter the location for your shared directory, and you have a fully working ASP.NET MVC app running on Linux, without leaving Windows.
We are working on various integration points for Visual Studio that will give developers even more: debugging from Visual Studio remote applications deployed on Linux systems and producing packages ready-for-distribution on Linux.
ASP.NET MVC runs on Mono 2.4 out of the box.
Not only does it run, but you can now install a MonoDevelop plugin that will provide all the tooling to get the Linux developer experience to match the Visual Studio experience for MVC development.
It is quite sweet.
Silverlight supports Firefox as well as it supports IE on both Windows and MacOS.
I do not remember the last time I even used IE on Windows to browse the web, and there have been *no* sites that use Silverlight that fail under firefox (we try a lot of them when looking for the "next sample to get working on Moonlight" from http://silverlight.net/Showcase).
If what you were implying though was that Moonlight 2.0 was not ready to run Silverlight 2.0 content, you are right. Moonlight, the open source version of Silverlight is not yet ready to render all of the 2.0 content, but it is very close to it.
Perhaps the Portugal government would like to fund the accelerated development of Moonlight by hiring a few developers to assist the project. That seems like a win-win for everyone involved. Faster Moonlight 2.0 and 3.0 and the warm cozy feeling that they made the world a better place.
Moonlight only exists because MS have disclosed most of the implementation details to them, it still lags a long way behind the MS implementation and isn't 100% compatible anyway.
Moonlight exists because we were able to put a prototype together in 21 days (you can read about our hack-a-thon here: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jun-21.html).
Microsoft has since helped us by providing licensed codecs that can be used by Linux users; Providing us with Silverlight specs for a full open source impleentation (Although 100% of it is available on the web at msdn.microsoft.com) and they provided us with test suites to ensure that Moonlight passes every single Silverlight test suite that Microsoft uses internally.
No two implementations will be 100% compatible. In fact even fixing a bug means that version a and version a.0.0.0.1 with the bug fixed are not "100% compatible", so there is not much point in arguing about 100% compatibility in the first case, it is easy to prove that this will never be the case. But in that regard, no piece of software will ever be (not the kernel, not the browsers, not anything that ever gets bug fixed as a platform).
But we can get very close to the indented behavior as articulated in the test suites "This is what it is supposed to do as far as -we- humans could guarantee". There will certainly be bugs, but we do not have a problem fixing those, and the Microsoft engineers have been very helpful in answering any questions we might have.
It is worth pointing out that the real problem is not really the democrats or the republicans but with the system that has allowed anyone with deep enough pockets to make government do whatever they want.
The NAFTA agreement was not really aimed at helping any of the people in the three participating countries, NAFTA was always designed to help the big corporations reduce their cost of operations. At the same time, NAFTA contained enough provisions that it undid a number of constitutional guarantees and local laws (at least for Mexico it did) and new trade courts ended up having more power than national courts for any trade dispute.
Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.
