Marc D.M. - Slashdot User

Comment Well Duh! That was expected (Score 1, Insightful) 580

by Marc D.M. on Thursday June 09, 2011 @01:55AM (#36384290) Attached to: Silverlight Developers Rally Against Windows 8

Silverlight came very late to the internet party. And it came here as an obvious attempt to usurp flash. However, Flash had already been upstaged, somewhat by Javascript and what people call AJAX (thanks jQuery, mochikit, scriptaculus, yui and others).

I'm not 100% sure on this but don't you have to use .NET to work with Silverlight. Anyone who writes HTML, CSS or Javascript code will have a bad taste for how .NET's WebControls generate code. Basically, the code is generated based on discovered browsers that Microsoft acknowledges.

To see for yourself, try to browse a .NET site with Galeon, or Epiphany? Basic things like links and buttons don't work. Debian had to put the words "like Firefox" in the User-Agent string for Iceweasel partly because of this stupid type of browser detection.

Then there's the fact that it always costs less to host on anything but Windows. It also costs less to develop for other platforms as well (e.g. Eclipse is cheaper than Visual Studio).

We already had javascript, actionscript, html and ways to communicate between them. Okay, so flash isn't perfect. Did you (the legion of Silverlight developers), really think that Microsoft could have done better at a cross-platform web-based interactivity player than Macromedia? Forget Adobe, they bought the DJ to get into the club.

I mean seriously, do you remember Microsoft Java from back in the days when applets were popular?

If you ask me, the only good things Microsoft makes (considering their wealth and influence) are keyboard, mouse and xbox.

Comment Quick Charger (Score 1) 586

by Marc D.M. on Tuesday August 04, 2009 @01:45AM (#28936965) Attached to: Nissan Unveils All-Electric LEAF

According to their FAQ the quick charger is a 3-phase 200v connection. This explains the quicker charging time.

Valve Questions Microsoft's PC Gaming Commitment 79

Posted by Zonk on Monday March 12, 2007 @04:24PM from the are-you-in-or-are-you-out dept.

GamesIndustry.biz is reporting on comments from an interview they conducted with Doug Lombardi, marketing manager at Valve Studios. Lombardi criticized Microsoft's recent commitment to PC gaming in the form of the 'Games for Windows' initiative, which we've previously discussed here on the site. In Lombardi's view, this new push for games on the PC platform is nothing more than an extended advertising scheme to sell the Vista OS. "'Sony and Microsoft both have armies of PR people whose job it is to cram that information down the throats of press and analysts every day ... All those people do is say the PC's dying, the console's winning, and nobody on the PC side is championing that platform. And sales data tracks retail, and there's no doubt about it, PC sales at retail are declining ... World of Warcraft is making a whole lot of money outside of the retail channel, we're making a decent bit of cash off Steam, all the casual guys are not tracked - the PopCap games, Bejewelled, all that stuff doesn't show up.'"

Submission + - Microsoft XML fast-tracked despite complaints

Submitted by Lars Skovlund on Monday March 12, 2007 @04:18PM

Lars Skovlund writes: Groklaw reports that the Office XML standard is being put on the fast track in ISO despite the detailed complaints from national standards bodies. The move seems to be the decision of one person, Lisa Rachjel, secretariat of the ISO Joint Technical Committee, according to a comment made by her.

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