The question is, what the heck is it?

Can anyone explain it in Laman's (hyuck-hyuck) terms?

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/10/29/apples_ios_pushes_microsoft_to_dial_down_silverlight_for_html5.html

You know how some videos are Flash files? Flash, made by Adobe, used to be bundled on PCs running Microsoft operating systems, but they stopped bundling Flash when Vista (HAHAHAHAHAHA!) came out. BTW, iPhones didn't support Flash either, which pissed off some folks who wanted to see pr0n and other Flash video on their iPhones. Supposedly Flash will be available on iPhones and iPads in the near future.

Silverlight is just another way to deliver video and other interactive media to your computer or phone or whatever, and software developers are negotiating with hardware developers to see what will run on certain pieces of equipment. Silverlight is owned by Microsoft, so Adobe is freaking out a bit.

Back in the day, you could run Netscape on your PC that ran a version of one of Microsoft's operating systems (OS). But then Microsoft started bundling their own browser (Explorer) on PCs (theirs and clones), and Netscape was losing market share. There was this big antitrust lawsuit, and things are still not quite right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft

This Silverlight thing is a similar situation. It's all a question of will Microsoft have a monopoly over hardware and software and edge out other competitors? Silverlight's been around for a few years, and it's generally been viewed as crap and programmers have complained that the code isn't open source (the code isn't available to programmers to tinker with). IIRC there's going to be an open source version called Moonlight, if there isn't already.

I get all stupid when it comes to Linux, open source, and stuff like that, but Silverlight is just another software turf war.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 10/30/2010 12:27AM by Beth.

I downloaded it last week and suddenly I started constantly getting that fatal blue screen. I took it off again and my computer is okay now.