Microsoft Silverlight on Linux using Moonlight 3

Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight technology. For those of you who don't know, Silverlight is that thing that Netflix made you install so you could watch all those B horror movies from the 80s on your laptop in bed. The rest of us refer to it as another one of those proprietary "flash-like" technologies that everybody hopes will die an inglorious unmerciful death at the hands of HTML5.

Anyway, Moonlight 3 is in pre-release/alpha stage, and is available now. You know, just in case you're a linux user, and you're in the mood for something terrible and stupid, you can now watch olympic ice dancing on the NBC website:


And now to answer your next question (the one you didn't even know you had), no you still cannot watch netflix movies on linux. You can get a little further if you use a fake user agent to tell Netflix you're a windows box:


But even then, you'll only make it as far as this:


Wahhh wahhhh DRM fail. Maybe someday.

Windows 7

I hate Microsoft. I admit I hate Apple more, but I hate Microsoft. Why? Because they've won. They have goaded me into buying an operating system for the first time. Ever.

I of course blame this on their open Beta/Release Candidate program, and I kind of saw it coming. In January of last year I had just built my dream machine, and I needed on OS that would play nicely with DirectX 10, so I could make use of my overclocked $500 graphics card. Well, I had a Windows 7 beta key, and that was free, so why not? It worked fine, and I was happy with it. So I upgraded to the release candidate when the beta version started warning me it was going to start automatically shutting down every two hours out of spite. Literally.

I've been using Windows 7 RC since then, and to be honest it has pissed me off less than any version of Windows previously. The only thing that drove me into a homicidal rage was the indexing service which causes an inordinate amount of disk access. This mostly annoyed me because the hard drive LED on my case is like 75 million candle power or something, and when it's blinking incessantly at a high rate in a dark room it feels like you're about to either be abducted by aliens, or have an epileptic seizure - neither of which are good things to do if you're in the middle of a World of Warcraft raid. Fortunately you can disable the indexing service, which is "not recommended," but hasn't affected me in any tangible negative way.

So, yesterday I get one of those messages - "Hey Ben, it's Microsoft. Your shit is going to stop working soon, so buy a license or die in a fire." was the exact wording I think. SHIT. So today I bought the OEM version of Microsoft Windows 7 Professional. As my friend Cliff put it, I drank the Kool-aid. So, here are some redeeming qualities from my experience using the OS for basically the last year:

• It doesn't crash. Bonus.
• It boots and shuts down quickly.
• Plays nice with my Xbox.
• DirectX 10 & 11

That's all I'm asking of it, that and ripping all my DVDs from netflix. And I just spent $140. I feel asahmed. I'm going to go compile something from source to make myself feel better.