Still no Opera support?

I think I will stick with pure AJAX, rather then hop in bed with the devil, thank-you very much

Is the licence DFSG free?

"availability tomorrow (Tuesday) of Silverlight 2.0, which supports Mac, Linux , Firefox and Safari "

This is going to be one of those funny 'supports' which translates as either 'doesn't' or 'just until you rely on it, then doesn't'

I was tempted to install it once but i woke up and really asked the hard question: Do i really want err need to go to that site? Nope, my life still goes on, Tivo'ed the highlights of the Olympics instead. I no longer use any MS products so MS GFYS i'm not putting that vulnerability on my system. Ohh, its not yet? Watch it will be......... DRM? have another GFYS and have an ESAD while you're at it.

In the old days of Windows NT (V3.x, circa 1995), MS made sure that NT provided both POSIX and some common Unix driver models to help people tick the boxes needed to migrate their Unix servers to NT. The support was quite good at the start of the beta period but seemed to get worse.

Many companies selling server based products got sucked in and said they'd be launching their products on NT (cheaper than Unix) and started pre-selling to customers. However, the POSIX support was too broken to make a shippable product and MS were not particularly motivated to fix the problem but instead steered developers to switch to native NT mode.

Of course by this stage the marketing engine had prepped the customers to switch to NT and so everyone was committed to break with POSIX and move to NT. Wise ones kept a compatability layer of sorts, but many didn't.

A few releases later MS cut the POSIX support entirely.

Silverlight under Linux sounds very similar. Once the Silverlight bait has been swallowed, expect the alternative OS support to dry us., forcing all that Silverlight base to be moved to MS.

Kick me in the balls once, shame on you. Kick me in the balls twice shame on me!

Yeah, I'm sure that Microsoft hasn't ever cheated their partners or clients or competitors by breaking such "promises", and they'll CERTAINLY never do it in the future.

An Open Source project "supported" by Microsoft ? But, Steve said that Open Source is a CANCER !!

Obviously he doesn't know about this project. It's impossible that he could possibly accept that his oh-so-virtuous-and-professional company be sullied by such a dangerous leprosy.

It has to be the doings of a fringe group that has infiltrated the Redmond compound.

Time for a purge, Steve !

"Microsoft announced availability tomorrow (Tuesday) of Silverlight 2.0, which supports Mac, Linux , Firefox and Safari ..."

I was under the impression that there was no Silverlight on Linux! I thought there was only a clone called Moonlight by Miguel 'I love Microsoft' De Icaza, which does not even do most of what Silverlight 2 does!

Hopefully, you will get left behind, when it is eventually released completely open source.

Uh, yeah, right...

Hmm, it's open, yeah great, but is it FREE as in FREEDOM?

I think I'll avoid it like the plague.

Rob

"Silverlight Digital Rights Management (DRM) using Microsoft's PlayReady technology.®"

I doubt it.

We don't need no more stinkin' plugins!

I'm sure it won't overtake flash, but if you want to get a bit of rich content and you don't want to fork out for/find a warez torrent of the latest version of the Flash development tools, it might be passingly useful.

I rather like the idea of being able to use Ruby to write stuff with too, although until I've explored it in detail I'm not entirely sure whether the IronRuby implementation is any use at all.

...embrace.

I wonder what the extend phase will be before the extinguish?

"Embrace, extend, extinguish". Does this sound familiar to anyone? Do the people working with Microsoft on Silverlight, Mono, and other projects learn anything from history? Or are they so short-sighted that they don't believe Microsoft will do it to them this time around? Unlike the dozens ir not hundreds of times Microsoft has done it to others in their 30 years of sucking people in then cutting them off at the knees?

Work with Microsoft, get burned. Can't help but wonder when the current crop of idiots will get theirs. Me, I'm staying far, far away. Dealing with Microsoft is like dealing with a Daveel from Asprin's Myth Adventures. If you think you got a good deal you need to first count your fingers, then your limbs, then your relatives (and teeth, and testicles, and wallet, and everything else you own), because some of them will likely have been included as part of the deal.