Microsoft has released Silverlight 1.0, the company’s intended Flash-killer, and has announced that it will be working with Novell to provide support for the open source, Mono-based implementation, Moonlight.
Archive for the ‘Opinion’ Category
I read this article on OSNews a couple days ago: Competition Is Not Good by Kroc. I admit that I’m slightly baffled by the case that is being made for why competition is not a good thing. Here I present my reasons for this and some alternative arguments for the points raised.
After reading about Sony basically pulling the plug on their primary ATRAC-encoded content delivery service, the format seems to be coming to the end of its downward spiral into oblivion. I think that ATRAC actually has a few nice features that have a place in the world of audio formats and it’s a shame to see Sony simply throw that away. I think that a “solution” to this is for Sony to open up the ATRAC standard for use by anyone.
I was originally intending to be writing something else right now but - unfortunately - I just managed to erase it all by accidentally clicked the home button in my browser. Gah! Even though Wordpress periodically saves your work via JavaScript it seems that you need to explicitly save your work before it actually stores these periodic saves somewhere accessible to the user. (Although it’s not in the database either so apparently the “saved at -” message is just plain lying.) Perhaps something to look at?
I also had a pleasant experience last night when I deleted the entire web site for one of the software engineering subjects I’m involved with. Thank God for backups.
Anyway, very annoyed right now. Once I’ve calmed down I’ll return to my original topic of discussion.
UPDATE: A different take on Firefox blocking.
Blocking users who have certain browsers is a rather baffling practice to me. Recently a site explaining why Firefox should be blocked and how it can be done was featured on digg and it got me thinking about the issue. The practice of blocking Internet Explorer is actually substantially older than blocking Firefox so I’ll cover both.