M$'s attempts to dominate the Web via incompatibility torques off old M$ users and others
Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by gewg_
(4444 messages posted)
Steve wrote:
|[...]I started seeing a few Web surfing Browser problems
|with Windows 9X in general a year ago, and finally unplugged the 9X Box.
Video-related? Sounds like Silver-Lie
(a M$ proprietary technology that M$ won't port to earlier platforms).
http://www.google.com/search?q=silverlight+moonlight+mono+"c-sharp"
There's a big stink about this in the Free Software community as well.
cache
of http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/24/1939214#22539402
Miguel de Icaza (an influential guy who now works for Novell
--the very M$-friendly vendor of SuSE Linux)
is reverse-engineering the M$ crap so it will work under Linux/BSD
and is building ostensibly gratis and libre versions of those:
C# --> Mono
Silverlight --> Moonlight
Most of the Software Libre guys realize that whatever M$ touches, they corrupt
and that M$ screws every "partner" they've ever had
so those guys are just watching and waiting for the other shoe to drop
expecting at some point that M$ will sue the folks who "used M$ technology"
whereupon the greybeards can say "See. We told you so".
The fact that M$ can extend the protocol at any time
and instantly make anyone else's implementation obsolete
is another tactic we've seen used before (Embrace, extend, extinguish).
{Sigh} We learn from history that we don't learn from history.
Ubuntu's recent release actually had an app that not only used Mono/C#,
the app was a startup item.
It rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
The fact that "Tomboy" was a simple note-taking app
--a function that most folks don't care about--was one thing;
having to install extra libraries to get that single app working was yet another.
There was a mad scramble to get the apt-get command to uninstall all the crap
and another in parallel to create the Gnote app that does the same task
--without using Mono/C#.
...so, there are MANY big ripples
coming from M$'s latest effort at Web domination via lock-in.
Heh. I loved it the other day when Google took a page out of the M$ playbook
causing Google stock to rise while M$ stock sank
--all because of an announcement of vaporware
which has a tentative release date of mid-2010.
.On the other hand, it DOES show the power of just saying "Linux".
http://google.com/search?q="Google.Chrome.OS"+"Linux.kernel"
If the "new windowing system" they said it would have replaces X Window,
I don't see Chrome OS having much lasting effect.
It won't have support for old hardware--being mostly a cheap vendor pre-install
(so there won't be any benefit to the Linux community at large
due to expanded device driver support)--
and you can get more than a start-up-to-a-browser thing with a current distro
that WILL support old hardware
and I expect most folks who get Chrome OS pre-installed
*will* end up installing a different Linux spin.
...and the One Laptop Per Child attempt at reinventing the wheel
shows how that questionable notion can bog down your project to crawl.
http://google.com/search?q=Sugar+"OLPC.XO"
The in-the-cloud apps Google's new thing will use will have to be build as well.
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 | |  | |  | M$'s attempts to dominate the Web via incompatibility torques off old M$ users and others (gewg_: Thu, Jul 16, 2009, 1:39 pm) |
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