At last, Dell is going to ship Ubuntu on certain machines! This is great news for consumers (who will pay less – no OS license), it’s good news for the Ubuntu community, and it’s bad news for Microsoft, who can’t be too happy with Dell’s decision to start shipping XP again, as no-one wants Vista 
I first installed Ubuntu about a year ago, while I was testing a MythTV setup, and i’ve pretty much been a convert ever since. However, as most of my work involves Flash, it’s tricky to move away from Windows completely – I can’t afford the downtime that might be caused by using an OS that doesn’t run Flash natively.
Hopefully i’ll find a solution to this problem as Ubuntu really is a fantastic OS, and i’d like to use it exclusively.
Silverlight – the next big thing? It certainly could be:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/30/silverlight-the-web-just-got-richer/
Some interesting points from the article:
- It’s a 4MB plugin for IE, Firefox, and Safari.
- A subset of the full .NET platform can be accessed from within the browser.
- You can code in C#, Javascript (ECMA 3.0), VB, Python and Ruby.
- Developers take their existing Javascript, copy it into Silverlight and have it perform multiple times faster than it does in the native browser environment.
- Silverlight applications can access and manipulate the browser DOM
- Silverlight Streaming allows users and developers to host their Silverlight content and apps with Microsoft, taking advantage of their extensive global network of datacenters and their content delivery network. This service is free, and while currently it is only in alpha it allows users to upload up to 4GB of content, and to stream up to 1 million minutes of online video delivery at 700kbps, around DVD quality.
With MS behind it, this could be huge…. Although i’ve not yet seen anything impressive that’s been made with it.
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