Linux Not Supported For Democratic Convention Video

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.'"

Comments

Tech Savvy Convention

[n3xg3n]

This Page claims:

Building on a commitment to bring more people into the Convention experience than ever before, the Democratic National Convention Committee has taken a comprehensive approach to ensure the 2008 Democratic National Convention will be the most technologically-savvy event of its kind.

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:Priorities

[electroniceric]

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:No, Security Related

[multisync]

The need for political parties to protect their content from hackers has been discussed on /. before

Funny, I thought it was the hackers who needed to be protected from the political parties.

Re:Doesn't matter to me

[penix1]

Maybe you should read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes

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.