Linux Not Supported For Democratic Convention Video 794
bucketoftruth writes "If you browse to the Democratic Convention website and attempt to check out any of their upcoming streams, you bump into the following limitation: 'We're sorry, but the Democratic Convention video web site isn't compatible with your operating system and/or browser. Please try again on a computer with the following Compatible operating systems: Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, or a Mac with Tiger (OS 10.4) or Leopard (OS 10.5). Compatible browsers: Internet Explorer (version 6 or later), Firefox (version 2), or, if you are on a Mac, Safari (version 3.1) also works.'"
Obama hates linux! (Score:4, Funny)
Vote McCain/Whoever 2008
Re:Obama hates linux! (Score:4, Insightful)
McCain hates Net Neutrality.
There really isn't a win here.
Flamebait? It's true! (Score:5, Informative)
Sheesh, we even had a story about McCain's tech platform [slashdot.org] (once he finally formulated one).
It specifically says that he believes in protecting children from porn and the RIAA's War on Sharing, but NOT 'prescriptive' legislation like Net Neutrality.
Protecting chidlren from the RIAA? (Score:5, Funny)
It specifically says that he believes in protecting children from porn and the RIAA's War on Sharing, but NOT 'prescriptive' legislation like Net Neutrality.
Well two out of three isn't bad. Children should be protected from all three: porn, the RIAA war on sharing and prescriptive legislation like net neutrality.
Re:Protecting chidlren from the RIAA? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps this is just my 70's showing, but I still fail to see any real tangible harm being done. Even your supposed study shows nothing more than that girls will do stupid shit to get guys attention. (Duh)
Whenever I see this talk all I can hear is "We slipped up and let the sexual revolution happen. Now nobody's feeling guilty so we can't manipulate them anymore. Perhaps we can undo it slowly with a bunch of psycobable."
For example there's this:
As long as nobody gets diseased or pregnant or commits a criminal offense, why is it my business at all how someone else felt about their sex partner at the time? And why earth would *you* care if I care? It most assuredly isn't *your* business.
I'll agree that if someone were to look to pron material for relationship advice, the results would be pretty disasterous (not to mention the immense competition there'd be for the position of Pizza Delivery Boy). However, I'm pretty sure my kids aren't that dumb. They don't seem to be getting their physics from Looney Tunes, or their self-defense pointers from Jacky Chan, so I'll take my chances on this one, if its all the same to you.
Re:Obama hates linux! (Score:4, Informative)
me@LiMac:~$ lynx -head -dump http://www.barackobama.com/ [barackobama.com]
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:35:02 GMT
Server: PWS/1.3.22
X-Px: ht dal-btn-n15
ETag: "74ea62-af3-48b339d1"
Content-Length: 1220
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Last-Modified: Mon, 25 Aug 2008 23:01:37 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=1446
Expires: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:59:08 GMT
Connection: close
me@LiMac:~$ lynx -head -dump http://www.johnmccain.com/ [johnmccain.com]
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 106909
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Location: http://www.johnmccain.com/Home.htm [johnmccain.com]
Last-Modified: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:35:41 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: W/"18c861ab137c91:280"
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:35:59 GMT
Connection: close
You can also try: http://www.barackobama.com/index.php [barackobama.com]
Most signs point to the fact that McCain hates Linux, not Obama.
Re:Obama hates linux! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Obama hates linux! (Score:5, Funny)
Vote McCain/Whoever 2008
Finally! A VP candidate with no bad positions on any of the issues!
Well hell, we should just skip waiting for McCain to drop dead of old age for the VP to move up to president. Whoever is the better half of that ticket! I say we just elect Whoever as President in the first place!
Who's with me? WHOEVER FOR PRESIDENT! Hell yeah!
-
Re:Obama hates linux! (Score:5, Funny)
Well, he is the bigger evil. The bigger and the better evil(I mean, he could be the devil's great-great-grandfather).
That's why he gets my vote. Because Obama is a lesser evil and I don't like to vote for lesser.
Re:Obama hates linux! (Score:5, Funny)
Well, he is the bigger evil. The bigger and the better evil(I mean, he could be the devil's great-great-grandfather).
That's why he gets my vote. Because Obama is a lesser evil and I don't like to vote for lesser.
If you take that thought to it's conclusion, I believe you'll find a preferable candidate here: http://www.cthulhu.org/ [cthulhu.org]
OS Related? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't get it. If they say they're compatible with Firefox - as in web browser - why does that browser need to run on a particular operating system? Since invention of flash video we are free from unnecessary plugins and related burden. Just enter address, and let it play.
But I guess politicians never opt for easy solutions.
Re:OS Related? (Score:5, Funny)
Since invention of flash video we are free from unnecessary plugins and related burden.
Right, because Flash is free software, so it works with every current OS and browser.
Re:OS Related? (Score:5, Insightful)
In 2004 that would have been great. ;)
Re:OS Related? (Score:5, Informative)
From what I gathered at the Ubuntu Forums this is an issue with Flash 9 and PulseAudio, hopefuly it will be fixed with Ubuntu 8.10.
So, Flash works on Linux, but not very good, and especially not very good on one of the major Linux distributions.
Re:OS Related? (Score:5, Funny)
Since invention of flash video we are free from unnecessary plugins
Plugins like, oh, I don't know, maybe, FLASH?!
No, Security Related (Score:4, Interesting)
"For virtual attendees, the Democrat convention site is providing a progressive web experience (high definition Silverlight video [demconvention.com] , Digital Rights Management [microsoft.com]), while the Republican convention site is providing a more conservative web experience of..." - excerpt from August 21st Journal [slashdot.org]
Re:No, Security Related (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny, I thought it was the hackers [2600.com] who needed to be protected from the political parties.
Re:OS Related? (Score:5, Funny)
"Since invention of flash video we are free from unnecessary plugins"
*headexplodes*
Re:OS Related? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes. The video object is independent from the connection object which is independent from the streaming object. It's rather trivial to setup a live stream.
And in case you're wondering how I know that, I was mucking around with creating a Flash 7 video player last night. Does anyone know how to get MTASC to output uncompressed SWF files rather than compressed SWC files? (Not to be confused with the confusingly named SWC class libraries. Bleh.) Flash Studio has a nice option for that, but SWFMILL and MTASC don't seem to want to listen. :-/
Re:Does flash do live streaming? (Score:4, Informative)
Flash certainly can do live streaming. In fact, the APIs for streaming vs. on-demand are very similar.
User agent (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how the website might respond if you spoof the browser's user agent string. Would it function well enough, or is their notice legitimate?
Re:User agent (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Any chance this works with Moonlight? Or is that plug-in a Window-only plugin, rather than some sort of Silverlight plugin?
Re:User agent (Score:4, Informative)
Would it function well enough, or is their notice legitimate?
It wouldn't work: this is Silverlight rearing its ugly head again.
You might be able to get away with user-agent spoofing and Moonlight [mono-project.com], but I don't know how far along Moonlight actually is.
$ apt-cache search moonlight
mono-smcs - Mono C# 3.0 compiler for CLI 2.1 (Moonlight / Silverlight)
I'll take that to mean "not far enough." Although you can download builds directly from the Moonlight [mono-project.com] site itself.
These builds do not include media codecs (video or audio), for that, you must currently build Moonlight from source code.
That would seem to settle it: not quite far enough, unless you're willing to build it from source. Which I'm sure someone, somewhere, will, and let us know how it goes.
Furthermore (Score:5, Informative)
Biden his VP choice is against net neutrality [gizmodo.com]
I think Obama has lost his mojo.
Re:Furthermore (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Furthermore (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm.
McCain is old, yet:
-it's Obama who needs a week-long vacation
-it's Obama who thinks there are 57 or 58 states
-it's Obama who is afraid to debate McCain at 10 town-hall style meetings, after saying he would debate him anywhere and anytime.
McCain doesn't know his position on issues, yet Obama:
-After his initial weaselly response on the Russian-Georgian conflict, then condemns Russia, deciding that it is better to sound like McCain.
-was the only IL state senator to speak out on the statehouse floor against a measure that would prohibit "finishing an abortion" in the case of a botched abortion where the child was actually born alive, and still thinks the question of when life begins is above his pay grade.
Good lord.
I'm not necessarily a McCain supporter, but if you're going to criticize him, please come up with something better than that.
Tho I'm sure Obama knows where his house is, too. Right next door to a convicted felon. Tell me again why Gov Blago isn't speaking at the convention this week?
-john
Re:Furthermore (Score:4, Insightful)
He's 71 years old. Its really really highly unlikely that somebody with the ammount of money he has (think nutrition, health care, etc.) is going to develop dimentia at his age.
Because, it's not like Reagan developed Alzheimer's [wikipedia.org] or anything in his 80s... especially since he was such a poor, sedentary guy his entire adult life and couldn't afford the best health care during his senior years.
Totally preposterous idea...
Plug-in overload (Score:3, Interesting)
When I get to the site I am told I need the Silverlight plugin AND 'Move Networks Player'. Oh, and it proposes a Java Applet to install it!? Couldn't they just streaming WMV or something less complicated? Looks like they need someone to go over and give them an explanation on how to do things right.
Tech Savvy Convention (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? If it were the "most technologically-savvy event" wouldn't it at least make an effort to support ALL operating systems, especially the one used mostly by the "technologically-savvy" people. It isn't a difficult feat to use technology which is supported by the three major OSes on the market. This isn't acceptable in this day and age. =/
Re:Tech Savvy Convention (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Tech Savvy Convention (Score:5, Funny)
Really? If it were the "most technologically-savvy event" wouldn't it at least make an effort to support ALL operating systems
Damn right! If it doesn't work on either my Amiga 5000, NeXT cube, or BeBox, Obama's DEFINATELY losing my vote!
Re:Tech Savvy Convention (Score:4, Funny)
obviously the best technical solution is that which requires minimal investment, is an open standard, and available to the largest number of platforms with the least additional per platform support cost.
the most technically savvy event would use moving ascii art, and it would be sweet
Well, same deal as... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm watching it on xine right now (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the direct link to CSPAN's feed
http://play.rbn.com/play.asx?url=cspan/cspan/wmlive/cspan1v.asf&proto=mms?mswmext=.asx [rbn.com]
use this with VLC (Score:5, Informative)
http://cnn-cnnlive-2-primary.wm.llnwd.net/cnn_cnnlive_2_primary?MSWMExt=.asf [llnwd.net]
Re:use this with VLC (Score:5, Informative)
Except it's the no-sound version. With a little guesswork, I was able to figure out the right one:
http://cnn-cnnlive-2-primary.wm.llnwd.net/cnn_cnnlive_1_primary?MSWMExt=.asf [llnwd.net]
Re:use this with VLC (Score:5, Funny)
Except it's the no-sound version.
You say that like it's a bad thing...
Email Time (Score:5, Informative)
Rather than everyone speculating WHY they chose to use such an annoying setup and complaining here, let's just all Email them and let them know we are not happy and why. I did (not that I even WANT to watch the video). Doesn't take long.
Here is the Email address: info@demconvention.com
Hah! (Score:5, Funny)
We're sorry, but the Democratic Convention video web site isn't compatible with your operating system and/or browser.
Phew. That's a relief.
The party is screwed up (Score:5, Interesting)
They lost my vote when Obama voted for immunity for Telco's.
I was hoping that they were going to be on the forefront of technology issues. They weren't even close. During the computer/technology meeting they spent 45 + minutes during a 2 hour session talking about Short Wave Radio issues.
Finally some other people took over the meeting and it started getting more towards computer and technology issues. but basically a lot of it was hog wash.
They spent a lot of time talking about caps on downloads. They were upset that they couldn't download more than 10 movies during a month.
I'm sorry but I feel there are more pressing issues, like broadband for rural areas, software usage in schools and government, open internet. Just to name a few. They were all more interested in who got elected, not what they were getting elected for.
Later I had someone come talk to me about my blog. He told me there were some things we just shouldn't talk about. He never mentioned my blog, but I think it was more than a coincidence that he came and talked to me the day after I posted the info.
I met some good concerned people there, but the people in charge were totally off the wall and I felt that it was more of a way to pacify the masses, making them have a feeling that they had an input to the party. I left the convention feeling like they were so screwed up that they could actually lose the next election.
And I bet it is going to be a lot closer than they thought.
It's going to be interesting, a large number of Republicans don't want McCain and a large number of Democrats don't want Obama.
Re:The party is screwed up (Score:4, Insightful)
"there are more pressing issues". And yet you thought that immunity for Telcos was more important than social justice, patriot act abuses, guantanamo, iraq, afghanistan, healthcare, missile defence?
Re:The party is screwed up (Score:5, Insightful)
one more reason to vote republican, eh?
Ummmm.... help me out here.... I looked through the grandparent post trying to find your "one reason", but I was unable to locate it.
Lets see... Obama reluctantly voted for telecom immunity?
McCain was not only FOR telecom immunity but some of his staffers were the ones running around lobbying congress to manufacture legislation to grant that immunity in the first place.
Lets see, Obama being anti-tech?
They botches this issue on their website, but Obama is FAR FAR more favorable to our side on these issues than McCain.
Lets see, Obama being clueless on tech?
Again, yeah they botched this issue on their website, but McCain may as well be Ted Steven's grandpa. McCain LITERALLY needs a few good lessons from Ted Stevens teaching him how to use e-mail.
Lets see, conventions where they don't take real input from the masses?
Buahahahahaha. Yeah, McCain is real big on that. Snicker. The closest McCain comes to "taking input" is to run and cover his ass when he gets caught out as pro-life-pandering-bullshit-artist after leaking Tom Ridge for VP.
So ahhh, perhaps you could help me out and be a little more specific? What exactly is the one reason you had in mind to vote republican instead? I must have overlooked it.
-
File Complaints Here (Score:4, Informative)
Not working on my Mac (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay, on my Mac it doesn't work in either Firefox or Safari. I have intentionally not installed the Silverlight plugin; but it doesn't tell me I need it! It just says it's not compatible with my browser - and then tells me to use... my current OS and browser.
There's a web developer that's on the ball...
Re:Not working on my Mac (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me get this straight, you went to the site, got the "install silverlight" message, declined, and you were surprised at getting an (incorrect) error message?
Nope. I never get the "Install Silverlight" message - my browser (whether FF3 or Safari, on 10.5.4) is apparently being disqualified before that point.
The only reason I know the streams require Silverlight is because it's been mentioned in this Slashdot discussion.
They're not supporting Macs, either (Score:4, Interesting)
At least, not mine, despite their page stating that they support "Mac with Tiger (OS 10.4) or Leopard (OS 10.5)." and "Firefox (version 2), or, if you are on a Mac, Safari (version 3.1) also works." I have a Mac running Tiger, Safari 3.1, and Firefox 2, and I got the "We're sorry" message with both.
Aren't Mac users a big chunk of the core Democratic Party base? ;-)
So what? (Score:4, Funny)
So what? You're gonna vote for the candidate whose website supports Linux? Pfft, how silly. I'll only choose my candidate based on their web server's OS.
In 2008 vote for the candidate whose server runs FreeBSD!!
Those elitist snobs! (Score:5, Funny)
They want me to pay for my operating system??
Oh well, I think I have windows installed in a PC in one of my seven houses....
But the server runs RedHat (Score:5, Informative)
Netcraft confirms it. [netcraft.com]
I can't believe you guys didn't notice this yet. You're slipping.
Re:But the server runs RedHat (Score:4, Interesting)
Change? I don't think so. [salon.com] There will be no change. People who are old enough to vote don't really believe that stuff, do they?
What I posted to their technical "contact" address (Score:4, Insightful)
Is there any reason, any reason whatsoever that you have made your web site and videos inaccessible from anything other than a machine running Microsoft Windows? I had to go over to my neighbours house just to write this. It's ridiculous. When I made a donation to the ACLU earlier, they had no such requirement. I also heard Sen Biden is against network neutrality. Perhaps it's time to pop over to johnmccain.com. I do notice his videos are available in flash which works everywhere. Careful democratic party- you are showing a bit of plumbers crack and revealing your true allegiances. Fix this, fix it now.
Just try to email them about it (Score:5, Funny)
This Message was undeliverable due to the following reason:
Your message was not delivered because the destination computer refused
to accept it (the error message is reproduced below). This type of error
is usually due to a mis-configured account or mail delivery system on the
destination computer; however, it could be caused by your message since
some mail systems refuse messages with invalid header information, or if
they are too large.
Your message was rejected by mail.demconvention.com for the following reason:
5.7.1 Message rejected as spam by Content Filtering.
The following recipients did not receive this message:
Please reply to
if you feel this message to be in error.
Reporting-MTA: dns; xxxxx.xxxx..xxx
Arrival-Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:07:40 +0200
Received-From-MTA: dns; [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]
Final-Recipient: RFC822;
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Remote-MTA: dns; mail.demconvention.com (67.132.2.16)
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 5.7.1 Message rejected as spam by Content Filtering.
From: xxxxx xxxxx
Date: 26 August 2008 11:07:39 GMT+02:00
To: info@demconvention.com
Cc: news-tips@nytimes.com, letters@washpost.com
Subject: How much did Microsoft pay you?
Hi,
at http://www.demconvention.com/dncc-video/ [demconvention.com] clicking on the link asks me to install Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in in order to view the videos streamed there. Given that around 90% of the world's computers already have Adobe's Flash plug-in installed which is the basis behind sites such as youtube, etc (and, yes it does do HD video and streaming), and about 0.1% of the world's computers have Microsoft's Silverlight technology installed and that Flash works on all browsers on Windows, Mac and Linux (and most mobile phones), one really has to ask oneself what incentive Microsoft gave you to get you to use their technology, and how one can square that incentive with the claim that the Democratic Party is a party with a platform aiming to avoid the stain of lobbying and corruption?
One also has to ask oneself how and why a supposed convention interested in reaching out to as many people as it can is using technological means that almost guarantee a smaller audience than using existing ones.
I've already written to a number of newspapers, including the NYT and the WashingtonPost, alerting them to this.
I would truly love to hear what you have to say about it.
Regards
xxxx
xxxx
xxx
for real irony (Score:5, Funny)
From netcraft:
Linux Apache/2.0.52 Red Hat
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:5, Funny)
They should get a hold of Ted Stevens. He knows alot about computers and networking stuff.
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:5, Informative)
If I recall correctly, he was the head of the commerce committee that was in charge of the network neutrality bill being pushed through a couple years back.
The guy was in charge of regulating the internet. And called the internet a series of tubes.
I don't even know what analogy to come up with in comparison. Car analogies are welcome ;)
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:4, Interesting)
Car analogies are welcome ;)
Well, it's not a big truck. We know that much.
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you should read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes [wikipedia.org]
I really don't think that was the bad part of his speech. The bad part was:
"an Internet was sent by my staff"
This from the guy who is supposed to be overseeing the ISPs.
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean this part?
Stevens' speech was analyzed by Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten, who said that he disagreed with Stevens' argument but felt that the language "series of tubes" was entirely reasonable as a non-technical explanation given off-the-cuff in a meeting.
Clearly not at his most lucid, but it's obvious that he meant "email".
As I said, I'm not a fan of Ted Stevens, and I'll go further and say I don't want him in charge of the Commerce committee. But I still fail to see why this basically sound—if ineptly and overexcitedly delivered—part of his speech is more than a simple malapropism, or why /.ers continue to find it so blindingly hilarious two years after the fact.
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:4, Insightful)
You persist in misquoting him. Again, he did not say that he "created" the Internet.
Really, go read the Wikipedia article I mentioned earlier. Read the statements by Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Newt Gingrich, et al. And learn a little more history. Gore's initiative in the Senate didn't begin with the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991; it went all the way back to his work as a representative in the 1970s. Note, for example, a few tidbits from this statement [nettime.org] from Vint Cert and Bob Kahn (you should read the whole thing):
Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development... No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time... The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening... As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept...
And it goes on like that.
The facile, misquoted interpretation you are regurgitating is exactly the sort of distortion that was used to undermine Gore back in 2000.
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:4, Insightful)
It's unfortunate that the "series of tubes" phrase is what everybody pounced on. Network connections have been referred to as "pipes" for years; it's a useful metaphor.
The trouble is, Stevens didn't use the metaphor correctly. I was going to post a reply essentially agreeing with you about the "series of tubes" thing, but then I actually listened to the rest of what he said [publicknowledge.org], and it quickly became clear that he really doesn't understand what he's talking about, but he can make it sound like he is fighting for rights of the average consumer while advocating a policy of laissez-faire.
Some of the juicier bits:
And what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10:00 in the morning on Friday; I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things that are going on the Internet commercially! [...]
And here we have this one situation where enormous entities want to use the Internet for their purpose, to save money doing what they're doing now. They use FedEx, they use delivery services, they use the mail, they deliver in other ways, but they want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet, and again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on - it's not a big truck, it's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled, and if they're filled, when you put your message in it gets in line; it's gonna be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material - enormous amounts of material. [...]
Maybe there is a place for a commercial net. But it's not using what the consumers use everyday. It's not using the messaging service that I think is essential, I think, to small business, it's essential to our operation of families - the whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there's something that's been done that really is a violation of Net Neutrality that is you and me.
Stevens is saying that commercial use of the Internet (to do things like offer video streaming to paying customers) is clogging up the Internet, causing the rest of us (individuals, families, small businesses) who rely on the Internet for communication to have our e-mail delayed just like his was, and that maybe the companies who want to offer these kinds of services should go build their own network and leave ours alone. After all, the Department of Defense has its own network - why? Because they can't afford to rely on the same Internet the rest of us use, in case it should be clogged up by whatever it is that big corporations our polluting the Internet with.
So what's the solution to this? The solution is to not pass legislation to require Network Neutrality, because there haven't been any actual violations of Network Neutrality yet - or rather, there haven't been any that directly affect "you and me". Instead, we should say "no" to the greedy corporations that support NN, and revisit the issue if not having NN starts causing problems that Stevens can actually understand.
Unbelievable.
I want this man out of my Senate. I wish he could be kicked out for this, but if he loses his seat for lying about the bribes he's been taking instead, I guess that will have to do.
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:4, Insightful)
You totally misunderstand Network neutrality.
NN is about making sure that individuals have equal access to all parts of the net, and not letting the big corps providing big services pay extra money to the access providers to have their traffic take precedence over hobbyist sites, etc.
Its about making sure that the access providers (AT&T, Charter, Comcast, Verizon) can't set up protection rackets where if you are a website (hobbyist, small business, nonprofit), unless you pay them to use 'their pipes' then the access providers customers cant access your site. Its about ensuring that when you, as an individual, or even as a company, pay for 'Internet access' you actually get full and equal access to every other network on the Internet, as opposed to only the ones that might want to pay your ISP to get access to you. Any person or organization with a website already pays *THEIR* ISP/webhost for access, why should they have to also pay the other ISP's to allow that ISP's customers to access their site?
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:4, Funny)
He does admit some confusion as to when the company name changed from 'Electrolux', though chalks it up to some re-org that happened during his tenure at the Hanoi Hilton.
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Doesn't matter to me (Score:5, Informative)
I think considering his experience he has an idea of what Linux is.
http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/cbcd3a48-4b0e-4864-8be1-d04561c132ea.htm [johnmccain.com]
Re:"considering his experience" (Score:5, Funny)
Heh, who said I could install Windows?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I do not want the Democratic party wasting its money on a partisan Operating System war by supporting a fringe OS that has less than 1% share of the desktop.
So you'd rather have them spend their money actively blocking it?
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's be serious here - nobody's spending money to block anything. The DNC didn't build anything themselves, nor should they - they're a political party, not a software shop. They chose a vendor to build out and operate a video infrastructure for the convention, and that vendor happens to have built on Silverlight (that's where incentives and support from MS likely came in, not directly to the DNC). Why the vendor did that, I have no idea.
I'm a pretty big believer that these things should be built on open technologies, not the least of the reasons being that it's GOOD for political parties to have their content built upon and reused (that's much of what fuels political blogs). As such I'm a little miffed that they chose a vendor that didn't support open technologies, but my guess is that someone's list of questions didn't extend past "can you run it on a Mac" (thereby showing that they're not part of the old Windows-only generation, they're part of the new Mac generation). Given the size of the Linux market, I think the use of content question is much bigger than the runs-on-a-particular-OS question.
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
The DNC didn't build anything themselves, nor should they... They chose a vendor....
First, we do agree that they chose this vendor -- so they probably should have gone with a different vendor, right?
Second, whether it's the DNC, some vendor, or Microsoft itself, there was, at some point, someone who made a choice to spend a bit of extra work on "choosing an OS"... which implies that money was spent (somewhere, somehow) to block that OS, instead of letting the site fail (or succeed!) on that OS.
Silverlight does exist for Linux. Perhaps not in a usable form, but it does exist. Because of the user-agent detection here, someone would not only have to get Moonlight working, they'd also have to spoof their user-agent -- which, among other things, tells the DNC that they have no Linux users.
Now, what's the alternative? sakusha was implying that getting Linux support would mean spending extra money, but you've made it very clear -- it would, instead, be about choosing a vendor who's already implemented Linux support (or simply Flash support).
I believe it would be worth it, even if there was some cost. But I don't think there would be.
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Interesting)
I do not want the Democratic party wasting its money on a partisan Operating System war by supporting a fringe OS that has less than 1% share of the desktop.
Odd.
If it is compatible with the firefox 2 browser, then they have already spent the money on supporting a fringe OS. In fact, it would have taken them MORE effort to give error messages based on OS type as well as browser type like they have than to leave well enough alone.
So in effect, they wasted your money on a partisan operating system war by thinking theres even a difference between the two once its browser compatible. Malice or stupidity, it's still a waste of manpower as that stands right now.
Not exactly a platform (heh) breaking issue, but still rather ignorant of them.
Re:Priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd rather see them showing another form of commitment to open governance, by making sure their communications are in open and non-encumbered formats. Not to mention not aiding and abetting a convicted monopolist in continuing and extending their monopoly.
What video codec has a W3C spec? (Score:3, Informative)
It costs less to just design a page for W3C spec.
There is no W3C spec for codecs to be used for live streaming video and audio. When W3C tried to specify that browsers SHOULD [ietf.org] decode Theora and Vorbis in an object element (HTML 4) or a video element (HTML 5), Nokia female-dogged [slashdot.org].
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Why was this called a troll?
Because if sakusha knows that Linux has approximately one percent desktop penetration, then he should also know that the cost of adopting and supporting Silverlight would be higher that other more open methods.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
It says you have to install Silverlight to see it.
I hate to say it, but Flash has existed, and been a viable option, for long before Silverlight, and it's got a far greater install base. Why'd they choose Silverlight over Flash?
I'm sure there are valid reasons, I'd just like to hear them.
Does silverlight for linux exist?
Short answer: Yes [mono-project.com].
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Free (as in beer) web design and hosting was probably enough to buy them out.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well it certainly wasn't because they care about openness. I suggest next time you offer a more plausible reason they chose this technology, rather than just dismissing what is at least a mildly plausible explanation as kooky.
I can't think of one that doesn't make them come off as flakes, though. YMMV.
-hobo
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Contributions?
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
agreed. This is the exact same setup as the olympics. Gotta hand it to microsoft, when they lock people out from anything other than their own solution, they go all the way.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
Ever try exporting messages from Thunderbird to anything else? I'm trying to do it right now, and oh yeah...
Tbird stores email as the text mbox format. Just copy/ftp the file. No problem!
Still, you've got to be a geek to know that. But as a /. reader, you are supposed to be a geek and therefore know how Tbird stores email.
At least in any MS product that I've ever seen, there's ALWAYS an option to export data out as a lowest common denominator
Outlook gives you the "opportunity" to export emails as tab- or comma-delimited files. What app, besides Outlook, knows how to import tab- or comma-delimited email files????
Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
At first I thought your post was tongue-n-cheek until I read some of your other posts.
Thunderbird uses the mbox format to store e-mail, which is a lowest common denominator (ie: flat file).
Here are a couple of super-duper-secret links, but shhh, don't share these with anybody else.
http://www.google.com/search?q=convert+mbox [google.com]
- or -
http://www.google.com/search?q=convert+thunderbird [google.com]
By the way, where do I sign up to Astroturf? I could really use the extra money.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny you should say that since I use Thunderbird to extract email out of Outlook's PDB format into an mbox file so I can do something useful with it.
In other words, it already stores the mail in a lowest common denominator format. Of course, since it performs decently well with an IMAP server, you can just push it all up that way if necessary.
In contrast, Outlook offers to throw away half of the relevant metadata and excrete a tab delimited mess.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you have to ask someone else you may never know...
But on the other hand the fact that Microsoft might think Linux running on the same hardware that Windows generally runs on is a bigger threat than over priced MAC hardware running OSX is interesting enough for me.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm no Microsoft fanboy or anything, but I've been pretty impressed with Silverlight.
I spent a lot of time watching live streaming Olympics video at NBCOlympics.com, and the Silverlight video feed and functionality was much, much better than I've ever seen from Flash. I'm not even sure if Flash can do live streaming video, especially at that high quality with any efficiency.
"Impressed with Silverlight" (Score:5, Insightful)
"I'm no Microsoft fanboy or anything, but I've been pretty impressed with Silverlight."
There's this bullshite meme here on dotslash that supposes Microsoft does nothing right. But while they've had their legendary failures(who hasn't? Hello, Apple Newton), we don't give them enough credit for what they do right. For all it's instability, Windows 95 was a lot of fun, and 98 was a pretty good game platform. Windows 2000 was a very good OS with what has become an almost cult following. Face it, once the first service pack arrived, Windows XP was pretty fast, pretty stable, and pretty useful. Their servers since 2000 have been very popular with the enterprise, and those people just love Sharepoint, all for good reasons. They're great products. Office got it's foot in the door because of the OS monopoly, but it eventually beat out Wordperfect because it became better than Wordperfect.
They made good games even before they bought Bungie, and just about everyone can agree that their hardware is top notch. It ought not to be a Karma sin here to give them credit when they actually earn it.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
Why'd they choose Silverlight over Flash?
For *live* streaming, I suspect that it's far cheaper to set up a bunch of Windows Media servers than it is to set up a bunch of Flash servers.
Flash Streaming Server licenses are *extremely* expensive. There are open-source alternatives, but so far as I know none of them are very good at handling thousands (or tens of thousands) of simultaneous connections.
Windows Media servers, however, are just regular ol' Windows servers -- couple hundred dollars per box with no user limits, and they do quite well with heavy loads.
Unless Adobe manages to compete better on pricing, or unless some of the open-source alternatives get better at scaling to thousands of users, then I bet we'll see more and more developers pushing Silverlight without Microsoft having to pay them to do anything.
And note that I'm talking about *live* streaming, not streaming prerecorded stuff like YouTube.
Deep Throat Say: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ugh. What could these possibly offer that couldn't be done with, say, Flash?
Development paid for by Microsoft?
Switching to higher or lower rate streams (Score:4, Informative)
Ugh. What could these possibly offer that couldn't be done with, say, Flash?
I just went to Move Networks' web site, and the FAQ mentioned one thing that FLV doesn't appear to offer: automatic switching to lower or higher rate streams depending on network conditions. (Remind you of RealPl[buffering...]ayer?) Now all we need to do is start politely female-dogging to Move Networks to port its player to Moonlight, the Free implementation of Silverlight.
Re:Silverlight (Score:4, Informative)
There may be some Flash based solution similar to this, but Limelight seems like a viable option to stream live video to a LOT of people.
Limelight is a content provider so if the content were Flash they could provide that as well. The Silverlight packaging of the DNC video probably has nothing to do with Limelight
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Anyone considering watching these things have their minds made up, and are just joining a circle-jerk.
Ever joined a jerk-circle, Anonymous Coward?
Thought not.
They're fun, and stopping people from taking part is not cool.
Re:What's a better option? (Score:5, Informative)
There's Flash, Silverlight, QuickTime, RealPlayer, and Windows Media Player to choose from.
I'd suggest h.264 in an mp4 container. Quicktime will play it, Media Player should play it, and Linux (totem/kaffeine/xine/etc) will play it.
Flash is the known quantity -- it works on Linux, just not very well.
But I think pretty much all of the ones you suggested are a better choice than Silverlight, in its current state.
Don't forget the Move Networks aspect! (Score:4, Informative)
There's a huge TCO advantage in the Move Networks delivery technology, as it can take advantage of ISP web caches so that multiple viewers on the same network can watch the same file chunk, cutting ISP's in-stream bandwidth requirements hugely, as well as outgoing bandwidth needed. For content like this which has a huge simultanous audience, that means scaling up is much, much cheaper.
http://www.movenetworks.com/why-move/frequently-asked-questions [movenetworks.com]
Move Networks also offers pretty seamless rate adaption, so you don't get buffering messages as available bandwidth changes.
I'm not aware of anything else like this availble in FOSS or generic MPEG-4. Most MPEG-4 software players and live encoders don't even support RTSP stream switching.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And so... ? Many websites don't do Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Rather than complaining on Slashdot, send the Democratic Convention people an Email at tell THEM you are not happy. I did. Took about 2 minutes to compose a polite and informative message.
Linux/*ix users might be in the minority, but they do tend to be more vocal.... and often it works (to my utter surprise)