On Jan 3, 10:44 am, Roy Schestowitz <newsgro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> First Look: Popfly
> Popfly for Silverlight: a beta glimpse.
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Linux Left Out
> | The animations are equal to those of Flash in terms of quality. However,
> | Popfly does have one flaw, which is no Linux support.
In an article in Redmond Developer, promoting Microsoft's proprietary
platforms, touts Popfly as "way better than Flash" - but has to
mention that there is no support for Silverlight (the engine used in
the Popfly application).
Back in 1997, Microsoft could convince web publishers to use ActiveX
controls, which could only be run on Internet Explorer, because those
who warned of security flaws, extremely high security and virus risks
were ignored. They even provided working examples of how to do
everything from suck every file out of a computer, to completely
shredding a hard drive to the point where it can't even be
reformatted, were ignored. They were even slapped with court ordered
injunctions to cease and desist publishing this information, because
it "damaged the Microsoft Brand".
Since then, we have had Melissa, Nimda, ILoveYou, Jane's Resume, Sky,
Bagel, BugBear, and over 250 million viruses, including variants
designed to avoid detection by the antivirus and antispyware
applications (including Windows). Today, the estimate is that
viruses cause over $200 billion in damages, including lost
productivity, make-up overtime, and other secondary damages as well as
back-up, recovery, and re-image costs.
Ironically, many spyware publishers even paid Microsoft and it's
subsidiaries for the right to plant their viruses, worms, and trojans
(by buying certificates). In fact, Microsoft even considers blocking
or removing such spyware to be a violation of the Vista End User
License, and if detected, they can completely disable your computer.
And here is Microsoft, trying to foist yet another proprietary
replacement for a tried and trusted industry standard, Adobe Flash,
because Adobe Dared to port Flash to Linux.
We should all pay Adobe $10 each for Flash player, just as a thank you
for doing the port to Linux.
> | Novell Inc. is
> | developing a Linux version of Silverlight called "Moonlight."
I've heard that song before. Microsoft gives some 3rd party developer
a limited license to implement some subset of the package they are
trying to foist, so that those committed to multi-platform standards
will be placated long enough to force it into about 200 million
corporate PCs and consumer PCs, making their undocumented proprietary
software, with all it's back doors, a "de-facto standard".
Remember when Seimans was going to implement DCOM for UNIX? They
implemented enough of a subset to attempt to displace CORBA servers,
and when they tried to start implementing client software, Microsoft
revoked their license and took control of the UNIX version, where it
died a quick and painful death.
When IBM ported MQSeries to Linux, Microsoft announced MSMQ and
promised it as a new feature for Windows 2000 server. When WebSphere
was ported to Linux and was able to use forked processes to get better
and more reliable performance, Microsoft introduced MTS.
Of course, to use all of these new features you had to rewrite all of
the software you had originally written for NT 4.0, which meant you
were going to have to take a loss on the money you had spent on the NT
4.0 version.
And just about the time you thought it was safe to go into the water,
out came COM+, which meant you had to rewrite everything again.
And just about the time you released your COM+ applications, Microsoft
announced .NET, which meant you had to invest another boatload of cash
into developing or replacing your existing software.
And each time Microsoft introduces these wonderful new "Enhancements",
they came with a nice big fat hefty price tag. License costs went up,
MSDN subscription prices went up, support contract prices went up, and
yet, after you paid all that extra money, you ended up having to pay
subscription renewal fees for almost 5 years before you got the Vista
operating systems, and almost 5 years waiting for the Upgrade to
Windows 2003 server (Windows 2008 is due out "real soon now").
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
These days, many CIOs and CTOs are under much more scrutiny by the
CFO, the COO, and the CEO, as well as the business operations units,
to make sure that if the IT department forks over huge amounts of new
money to Microsoft, the layoffs will come from the IT budget.
> | Whether
> | Microsoft likes it or not, Linux is here to stay and is a growing force on
> | the desktop thanks to universal-audience distributions such as Ubuntu.
Yep. Let's face it. Linux is MUCH easier to get than it was in
1997. These days, you can use VMWare Converter to generate Virtual
Machine Image files of Windows, exactly as it was installed, store
that on a USB drive (even a thumb drive for XP), then install Linux,
install VMWare player, and then install that Windows VM from the thumb
drive.
The good news is that when you use Windows, you can take snapshots to
get regular backups. When you use Linux, you can install other
distributions as VMWare images.
Not quite ready to jump into Linux installation yet? VMWare will also
let you install VMWare player on Windows, and then download Linux VMs
via a high speed internet connection. These "appliances" can be use
"as is", or they can be used as the foundation for installing
additional software using distribution DVDs.
With laptops having 160 gigabyte hard drives, and Desktops having 300
gigabyte drives, and USB drives with 500 gigabytes costing around $100
each, these virtual desktops are becoming very attractive.
VMWare is being very aggressive in the marketplace, and many of those
who download VMWare player and try a few VM appliances find that they
like it so much that they are willing to pay for the VMWare
workstation package.
Of course, the VMware files can also be archived using tar or zip, and
stored on DVDs for longer term backups.
> | Popfly could help Silverlight garner new users quickly, but the platform
> | still has a long way to go.
These days, the whole industry is starting to say "Show us the spec".
One of the advantages of an OSS implementation, is that it proves that
the specification is complete. It also helps identify bugs in the
specifications, and get them clarified or corrected. When the OSS is
written by undergraduates writing small modules using ONLY the
specification, the availability of 20-30 implementations, all
different and all functionally correct, can pretty much guarantee that
the specification can be protected from software patents (since
similar implementations can be intuitively derived from the publicly
available information).
At the same time, the OSS implementation isn't the only possible
implementation. There can be numerous implementations of the
specification, but it's easy to validate the proprietary
implementations against the OSS implementation.
Even PDF and PostScript have OSS implementations, yet most people,
even Linux users, often prefer to use Adobe Acrobat Reader, because
it's well supported.
On the other hand, betting the farm on Microsoft is a sucker bet. If
you come up with a massively successful product, there is a very good
chance that just as you are about to start making some real profits,
Microsoft will only offer enough to get you out of debt, and if you
don't take the deal, they will buy some 3rd rate competitor and put
their product on Windows as "shovel-ware".
> | After all, Silverlight is a first-generation
> | platform, whereas Flash has had eight additional software generations to
> | achieve its market penetration.
This is the 21st century. Firefox has achieved 40% market
penetration, with absolutely no help from Microsoft or OEMs, and is
more successful than IE7, which has been pushed out by Microsoft as
Shovel-ware, and has to be actively blocked to prevent it from being
automatically installed.
These days, about 90% of the PC user population has access to high
speed internet, in some form. They may go to an "internet cafe", they
may go to Panera or StarBucks, or they may have a high speed Cable
Modem or DSL connection. There are even Cellular phones or modems
that let you access the internet at over 1 megabit per second. At 1
megabit per second, you can download a CD-ROM sized application (600
mb) in about an hour. WiFi is usually 10 megabit/second - which means
it takes less than 20 minutes.
And OSS can be passed from a downloaded copy stored on one computer to
dozens of computers using "thumb drives" plugged into the USB ports.
Many of these flash drives are now up to 4 gigabytes for less than
$70.
> http://reddevnews.com/news/devnews/article.aspx?editorialsid=930
> The "Microsoft Web". Microsoft calls shots and decide who enters and who is
> denied proper access.
This is not always a good thing. If you are turning away 200 million
FireFox users, there is a good chance that you are turning away
$millions, or $billions worth of customers. Can you really afford to
say "go away, take your money to one of my competitors" a few million
times a month? a week? how about a few thousand times a day, or an
hour? How about a few hundred times per second?
Corporations spend lots of money to develop sites which encourage all
visitors to come, look around, spend money, get support, and come back
and spend more money. Telling 40% of those customers to "take your
money elsewhere" really defeats that purpose.
Keep in mind that even though we don't see public statistics from
these huge corporations, they are keeping track of who logs in (most
big-money sites want you to register, at least get a user id and
password). They know what browser you were using, what operating
system you were using, and whether you spent 1 minute at the site and
were turned away, or spent an hour browsing the catalog and placed an
order.
And the companies that have these kinds of sites, and spend this kind
of money, hoping to make this kind of money, are very sensitive when
somebody comes in, follows a few links, and then suddenly gets
"bounced out" because he was running Linux, or because his browser
wasn't supported. This is even more of a problem if the pages he was
looking at were related to the possible purchase of a product worth
$500 or more, and 2,000 customer were driven away. It means that that
"Microsoft Only" web page just drove away up to $1 million in orders.
Think about it. The company is using Linux and OSS, which means they
may have more money that they are not spending on Microsoft, available
to spend on your products and/or services.
> Related:
>
> First Look: The Popfly Development Environment
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | However, the Silverlight platform -- and Popfly -- does have one flaw, which
> | is no Linux support. Even Adobe releases its current builds of the Flash
> | runtime to Linux users. Whether Microsoft likes it or not, Linux is here to
> | stay and is a growing force on the desktop thanks to universal-audience
> | distributions such as Ubuntu.
This is really important to look at. Linux users are generally a bit
more intelligent, which means they are likely to be in a higher income
bracket. They are likely to have more interests, and more likely to
be willing to look "off the beaten path".
If you are selling Miller Beer, Chevy SUVs, and K-mart to soccer moms,
it might be safe to turn away Linux users, but remember, Mom may be
using Linux to keep control of the family computer.
On the other hand, if you are selling fine wines, hybrid cars, and
botique retailers to a crowd that is looking for something "new and
different", they probably already have Linux, or a Mac. If you tell
these people "Microsoft Only", you are probably turning away some
really highly qualified customers.
Microsoft Windows appeals to the "good enough" crowd. It appeals to
he sheep who follow every little fad. It appeals to the people who
buy at Sears, Penny's and Macy's but usually wait for the clearance
sales and only buy from the clearance rack.
Linux splits into two camps. One group uses Linux because it's
cheap. They can get an old used Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0
computer, load it up with Linux, and have most of the same features
that Windows XP and Vista users have to pay extra for. These people
are intelligent, they think things out, they are resourceful, and they
are on a tight budget because they are young, but they are more
interested in computers than basket-ball. These are the vunder-kids,
who by the time they are 15 understand the finer points of day
trading, options, and limit and stop-loss orders. These people grow
up and get academic scholarships, or just put themselves through
college using the money they have raised in their own businesses.
And when they buy a car, they are looking for value. They want
comfort, economy, and reliability, and are willing to pay a little
extra to get all three in one package. These people don't buy the
cheapest laptop, they order one via the web, with higher resolution
displays, larger 7200 RPM hard drives, and more RAM, using the money
they saved by not paying extra for Vista Ultimate, Office 2007, and
may even purchase an extra hard drive, so that they can put the
Windows drive on the slow one, and use the faster bigger one for
Linux. This way, if there are hardware problems, they can put back
the Windows drive and get service (though many vendors are now
offering hardware/replacement service without windows support for a
lower price).
These early Linux users may be working as consultants, running their
own businesses, or working as corporate managers, because they are
focused on how to provide the best service to a company or industry
that interests them, rather than just trying to get some one to "give
me a job" so that they can get some money. They are the people
companies want to hire, because they are focused on providing the best
value, service, and support to their employers or clients. They are
often vested in the success of their clients, and look at how to get
the best value and performance and reliability for those who are
paying the bills.
They are also pragmatic. They don't trash Windows completely, they
just relegate it to a minor role, since they can get so much more
value, performance, reliability, security, and satisfaction from using
Linux as their primary operating system.
They are guys like Bill Gates was in 1977, or Linus Torvalds in 1991,
or Jeff Bezos, or so many of the other people who took a great idea,
built it up from a shoestring, and generated a team who could create
huge value at very low costs.
> | Popfly is a shot in the arm for Silverlight for the purpose of gaining new
> | users quickly, but the platform still has a long way to go.
Popfly is Beta. It's a Microsoft product. Silverlight is a
proprietary, undocumented (no published standard), and unknown engine
that has been strategically NOT ported to other platforms. No Linux
version. No Mac version.
It's yet another attempt by Microsoft to seize a market and gain a
monopoly in a market established by a competitor, and force that
competitor out of the Windows market completely, by offering it's own
"shovel-ware" replacement bundled in Windows.
Keep in mind, Linux has had the same technologies used by Pixar, ILM,
and other big studios, along with military simulators, and all of that
isn't really promoted because it's considered a niche market.
On the other hand, Linux also has a great suite of collaberation tools
that Microsoft can't even touch. CVS, SubVersion, BugZilla, private
jabber and IRC servers, LDAP industry standard security, sync, and
dozens of other utilities to coordinate the efforts of workgroups of
anywhere from 10 to hundreds of people located all over the world,
that has been the Linux "stock-in-trade", and they do it very well.
The same technology Linux developers use to coordinate the development
and testing of over 6,000 packages using teams all over the world, can
also be used to organize huge corporations working on marketing,
manufacturing, shipping, and servicing products produced using
components produced all over the world.
Microsoft is trying to get corporations to buy systems that let users
watch DRM movies and listen to DRM music - instead of working. They
have done almost nothing to improve the productivity of users who use
Vista instead of XP. At the same time, their efforts to try and
"force" companies to upgrade to XP is pushing them to become more
interested in those Linux contingency plans. Microsoft isn't
deliberately sabotaging XP, but most of the type-A hyper-achievers are
chomping at the bit to support Vista, and don't really care much about
XP, leaving XP to the underachievers and the more laxe support staff.
If you have a company with 100,000 or more PCs, and you don't like
Vista, and XP problems have been increasing lately, purchasing 100,000
Macs isn't an option, but switching 50-60,000 of those PCs to Linux,
with XP as a secondary OS, may become a much more attractive option to
those who want more "bang for the buck".
And for the 40-50,000 PCs you don't convert to Linux, you can put
Linux "Appliances" on those computers, use OpenOffice, FireFox, and
encourage the users to start learning these OSS tools. You might even
want to consider commercial versions of ODF software such as Notes8,
and StarOffice.
> | After all,
> | Silverlight is a first-generation platform, whereas Flash has had eight
> | additional software generations to achieve its market penetration.
That won't stop Microsoft from bundling it as shovel-ware in Vista SP1
and XP SP3.
The only question is whether Microsoft will wait until Judge Kollar-
Kotelly decide not to extend the DOJ settlement another 5 years.
> http://campustechnology.com/articles/56377/
> Microsoft's Silverlight Promises to Disrupt Linux Web Users
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Just as it seemed that Linux users (especially 64-bit users) would
> | finally be able to enjoy streaming content with a minimum of
> | hassle,
Linux has had streaming content for years. UNIX was used for
streaming content for decades (telephone switching, cable TV
switching, satellite feed processing,...), even video conferencing -
all existed on UNIX back when Microsoft was trying to call TSRs
"Multitasking" in MS-DOS 4.0.
Pixar used Athena applications in the 1980s. ILM used SGI graphics.
Linux finally made headlines when Titanic came out, because there was
this huge array of Linux processors that allowed the studio to create
highly detailed animations that appeared to be real, in near-real
time. Windows did make an appearance in the movie, in the cheesy
animation shown to the old lady on the salvage boat.
> | Microsoft's new Silverlight software promises to throw a
> | wrench in the works.
Yet another Microsoft "revolution" where partners who invested
$billions in time and money on Microsoft platforms are rewarded with
anticompetitive shovel-ware designed to drive them into bankruptcy.
Netscape Communicator replaced with Internet Explorer (you lost the
HTML editor, the e-mail, the security, VRML, CORBA, and LDAP, but you
got a "Free" browser).
CORBA was replaced with ActiveX (and Melissa, ILoveYou, Nimda, and 250
million other viruses,worms, trojans, spyware, and other malware
variants).
Java was replaced with C# (oops, Microsoft changed their mind, sorry
about that).
Lotus 1-2-3 was replaced with Access.
WordPerfect was replaced with Word
DBase-IV was replaced with FoxPro - I mean Access - oops SQL Server.
Corel Draw was replaced with Paint - or Draw , oh yeah , I mean
Visio.
Symantic Antivirus, McAffee Antivirus, and Norton Antivirus was
replaced with Windows 95 antivirus, oh yea - I mean Vista Antivirus.
Don't worry, if you trash Adobe Flash right away for the free PopFly,
we'll give you a version that is almost as good, in the version of
Windows we release in 2012 (but we'll announce it as coming out in
2009 so you don't buy Linux instead).
And don't worry, by the time PopFly is as good as flash, the operating
system it is included with will need 16 Gigabytes of RAM, a 10
terabyte hard drive, a 16 way Intel processor that will still be
running 32 bit applications that pause for 20 seconds every 5 minutes,
and of course, will only cost $2,000, of which $1000 will be the
Microsoft Licenses, but the price will drop to $1200, $1000 of which
will be the Microsoft licenses, of course, for an extra $1000, you can
upgrade from "home" edition to "business" edition, and we'll even let
you plug it into a corporate network. But if you cheat, we will
revoke your license, disable your computer (down to the BIOS), and
charge you $2000 to purchase the licenses we think you should be
paying for.
> | Because of sites like Google Video and
> | Youtube, Flash video has become a common means of streaming
> | multimedia over the Internet.
Maybe Google knows something Microsoft doesn't want us to know. Maybe
they have been counting Linux users a bit more carefully than some of
these IP counters do. Maybe they are counting each individual, and
how many different operating systems each user is using to access
Google, Google groups, YouTube, and other user-identified Google
sites.
> http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry1418.html
> Microsoft's 'Everywhere' excludes Linux
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | This browser add-on enables rendering of WPF content, but
> | "Everywhere" doesn't include Linux.
Which makes sense, since Microsoft has named Linux "enemy number
one". Microsoft might also know more than they want the public to
know.
Apple has limited production capacity. They can't even keep up with
demand.
Linux on the other hand, can be installed on about 70% of the PCs
produced in the last 10 years, about about 80% of the PCs produced in
the last 4 years. And Linux "appliances" using VMWare Player can be
installed on 100% of these PCs and give people a "taste" of Linux,
enough to help them decide that their next computer has to be able to
run Linux, which means it won't be running Vista Aero-Glass.
> http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/7794/53/
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