Comments

• Goblin

  2008-11-30 10:09:27

  Interesting article.
  
  I remember the olympics being broadcast with Silverlight on a major USA site, only for it to be droped a little while after.
  
  Here in the UK, the BBC site does not use it, and infact its running its own player project with Ubuntu. (which is good because the BBC player site, is one of the best examples of online TV and is very popular)
  
  I have no real "discoveries" of the Silverlight, as the sites I visit dont pimp it. I, like many many other users simply have no use for it. At least people are aware of it.
  
  I would like to think Silverbloat has had enough bad PR for people to be wary of it. Its certainly not got the mainstream deployment that MS would have liked, and I would hope this time next year it will all but be a distance memory of another unsucessful MS lockin attempt.
  
  Im sure there will be a place for it with Windows 7 though, and I think by the time that particular binary slug slops onto the market, MS's lucrative customer base will be severely depleated.
  
  Could I also just say a big thank you to the people who decided to spam up my email with offensive material as a result of my emails identification here (via my blog). You shillers are really desperate. Some of the emails take a more sinister tone, and if it continues I will be reporting the matter. I will say that only once.

• aeshna23

  2008-11-30 13:04:25

  I use Fedora and I didn't run into any browser issue with the Silverlight site. My experience is that Linux is better than Windows at stopping pointless crashing, and I have absolute confidence that Linux programmers can beat any MS effort to deliberately crash Linux. MS can't be dumb enough to go there. So, we should put your browser crash in the realm of the accidental.
  
  The Samsung issue brings up an important issue. What hardware manufacturers should I boycott because they are too much in bed in MS? Are there hardware manufacturers I should tend to favor.

• Roy Schestowitz

  2008-11-30 13:36:42

  aeshna23,
  
  Do you suggest that some sort of index ought to be compiled? I think it was advised last year.

• aeshna23

  2008-11-30 13:58:26

  I suppose an index could be compiled, but how could we ever weight such an index? Perhaps, a short paragraph on the pro and the cons of each company would be better?
  
  At the bottom of whatever is done, I suggest a link to http://waste-reduction.suite101.com/article.cfm/environmental_hazards_of_electronic_waste just to remind people that maybe it would be better not to buy something, unless they really need it.
  
  I could help and do some work and investigate the companies, or at least investigate other people's investigation.

• Roy Schestowitz

  2008-11-30 14:23:47

  It's difficult to rank companies. One thing I could do trivially is assign recent (and relevant) articles to each company like Broadcom, Samsung, etc., letting people draw their own conclusions with regard to F/OSS friendliness.

• ml2mst

  2008-12-01 05:49:25

  [quote]Yes, my whole KDE session practically became unmanageable, which is exceptionally rare (could not see an ad in Firefox, so tried Konqueror, [b]which had it frozen[/b], needed killing, which then brought down kwin[/quote] Hehe, I wonder if DFS's Freeze-script will catch this :-)