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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.'"
Vote McCain/Whoever 2008
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Quite possible, and the McCain camp is still trying to figure out what Linux is, and if it is a threat to national security.
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.
Plain old sigh.
NASA's site is no better for NASA TV In fact, it streams just fine in Linux (assuming codecs, etc), _if_ you can get to the correct URL to stream.
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?
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Biden his VP choice is against net neutrality
I think Obama has lost his mojo.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I have not used it, but for what it's worth. Moonlight
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
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.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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.
Ice Cream has no bones.
I never understand why companies/groups/whoever make these sort of checks in the first place. Why does it matter at all what OS you're using? Isn't displaying the webpage the browser's job? And clearly the browser is installed on your OS correctly or you wouldn't be on the internet at all. Silly.
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Ugh. What could these possibly offer that couldn't be done with, say, Flash?
Development paid for by Microsoft?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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. =/
...with the Beijing Olympics. They are using Silverlight on the site for the streaming video. Out of curiosity, was the error reported the error given when one tries to use FF on Linux to view the streaming stuff, or does it pop that up when you try to view the stream in FF with Moonlight? The Olympics streaming video on the site refused to work even with a tested Moonlight install with me.
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
http://cnn-cnnlive-2-primary.wm.llnwd.net/cnn_cnnlive_2_primary?MSWMExt=.asf
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
I saw an article on Slashdot about the recent Olympics streaming using a network called Limelight. Sure enough, the democratic convention is using it too. 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.
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.
"For virtual attendees, the Democrat convention site is providing a progressive web experience (high definition Silverlight video , Digital Rights Management), while the Republican convention site is providing a more conservative web experience of..." - excerpt from August 21st Journal
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.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
The "valid reason" is almost certainly that Microsoft paid them a lot of money.
.there is enough of everything for everyone.
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 thank God, thank a doctor!
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 decode Theora and Vorbis in an object element (HTML 4) or a video element (HTML 5), Nokia female-dogged.
Contributions?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I attended a number of conventions within our state and if it is as screwed up everywhere else as it is here, they could actually lose.
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.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
Complaining about this on Slashdot does little to change it. Instead, please send your complaints to: info@demconvention.com
Of course anything done by NBC will support their overlords (Microsoft) to the exclusion of others. That should not be a surprise to anyone. But a political party best think twice before immediately shutting out at least 10% of the possible viewers (Linux) and making it slightly to extremely difficult for at least 33% of everyone else.
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...
#DeleteChrome
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.
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.
You should be able to do both with ogg theora. GNU/Linux has done streaming media well for ages. If you don't believe me contemplate the flexibility of MythTV front and back ends.
They are, at least bright enough to use Apache (Red Hat).
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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)
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.
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? ;-)
Sheesh, we even had a story about McCain's tech platform (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.
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!!
You just got troll'd!
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.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
No, I think the McCain camp is still trying to figure out how to turn a computer on, let alone the different operating systems
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.
Flash certainly can do live streaming. In fact, the APIs for streaming vs. on-demand are very similar.
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.
Free (as in beer) web design and hosting was probably enough to buy them out.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
They should get a hold of Ted Stevens. He knows alot about computers and networking stuff.
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
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....
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Leapin' Lizards!
Who in their right mind CARES? You pick a well-supported standard format: Um... let's see, MPEG, XVID, VIDX, AVI container, MPEG container, MP3 sound, AC3 sound, whatever... and put the video up.
What? They didn't do that? They picked a new format for some reason; one that requires a platform refresh, and unholy amount of effort. Didn't even use (gasp) FLASH video?
Why on Earth would anyone do that?
The only 'splaining here is why a Political Party that will (most likely) be running the most powerful country on the planet is actually allowed to get a rim-job from a private company. Not that *I* could care -- but that is pushing the classic boundary commonly known a facist. Along with the rim-jobs the US gov' received from terrestrial radio, And etc.
Oh -- I here you saying "But the Dems didn't get a rim-job from Microsoft! They did it by themselves!" In which case, I think it's worse -- they SHOULD have held out for lots of plums before forcing that move.
Me? I don't care; enjoy yourselves!
Vote Democrat! Vote Microsoft! Vote Republican! Vote Microsoft! Just be sure to Vote!
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
No, no, McCain fondly remembers the neighborhood Linux salesman going door to door, selling those shiny new models.
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.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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.
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.
What the hell does Cat Stevens have to d......oh. TED. Nevermind.
I gave up religion for Lent.
Why write Nader in, he's on the ballot in most states (the good ones anyways).
Netcraft confirms it.
I can't believe you guys didn't notice this yet. You're slipping.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Actually, JohnMcCain.com uses Flash for video, and I can watch it fine on my Linux box. (To be fair, so does BarakObama.com.) Regardless, the site uses Silverlight, which is a bit ridiculous. Flash has been around for years, and works on most computers that you need video. Not that I care what they're saying anyway ...
Interesting how these half-wit Microsoft conspiracy types get +5 Insightful when the site also supports OSX and Firefox.
I'd say a Mac running OSX and Firefox is a much larger enemy to Microsoft than Linux is, given the install base, but what do I know?
You are right, this was about money. It costs less to use this solution. Adobe wants your arm and a leg and possible your left nut for licensing for streaming flash. Windows media is essentially free.
If someone has the wherewithal to actually get Moonlight working, I am sure they could figure out the user agent spoofing, its not that hard.
I hate to let this go any further, but the bronze age didn't have digital computers. I think they used bronze punch cards. Gee I can't wait for the youth of tomorrow to cannibalize us all. At least they'll know how many houses they have. They can keep track using emacs or vi.
And why should they, when they can cheerfully levy that fee on the taxpayer?
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????
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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
-HobophobE
Nothing laughs forever.
I'm getting the same error on Mac OS X 10.4 in both Firefox and Safari, as well as Safari on Windows Vista. In Firefox on Windows, it asks me to install Silverlight and the Move Networks plugin.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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.
Money is the root of all evil?
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
- or -
http://www.google.com/search?q=convert+thunderbird
By the way, where do I sign up to Astroturf? I could really use the extra money.
-rd
Actually it isn't silverlight that is the problem. If you forge a safari user agent* then you can see it's the "move player" plugin that isn't linux friendly.
* Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/XX (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/YY
Sometimes the truth hurts.
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
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.
My video compression blog
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 ;)
This is not the funny you're looking for.
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.
I don't even know what analogy to come up with in comparison. Car analogies are welcome ;)
Like the lead engineer at Ford saying that brakes could be removed as a cost-cutting measure?
It's like hiring an Amish guy to design the next generation fuel cell sports car racer.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
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.
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
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.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
I agree completely! The options are mutually exclusive, when you think about it. The concept of a 'Download this video' button on a website with streaming video is utterly ridiculous -- nay, utterly impossible. That would require some kind if 'hyper' linking technology, a ludicrous fantasy in a world with browser-embedded video players such as ours. They don't care what the cost is, those damn those Linux nerds will ruin the Internet for all of us normal folk!
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.
One thing that made it very funny for me was not the /. adoration but Jon Stewart's treatment of it on The Daily Show. I remember not only the dissection of Ted's speech but the quite hilarious animations that elucidated the concepts Ted was describing.
I'm unaware of TDS' presence on Youtube any more after effective copyright chasing, but a clip of this comedy genius may be stuck in a lesser-used tube somewhere.
Couldn't stand the weather
"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.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The Democrats (and the Republicans, for that matter) don't mind offending about 50% of the population anyway. Why would anyone think they're afraid of offending another 5% or so? :)
I'd say a Mac running OSX and Firefox is a much larger enemy to Microsoft than Linux is, given the install base, but what do I know?
Apple is no threat to Microsoft in the server arena. Linux is no threat to Microsoft in the desktop arena. Microsoft uses both markets to leverage each other. IIS supports proprietary extensions and it just so happens that IE supports them as well.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
"an Internet was sent by my staff"
Clearly not at his most lucid, but it's obvious that he meant "email".
Seems to me he just thought Al Gore was on his staff and could create an internet anytime he wanted to.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I don't know what the internet is, but this pile of money has led me to the following conclusions...
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
In other words, given his experience being tortured in Vietnam, he's very familiar with what it feels like trying to get Linux installed and running on your computer.
Car analogies are welcome ;)
Well, it's not a big truck. We know that much.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
"I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Doesn't get more clear than that. There's no double talk, no misleading, no "taken out of context." He said that, and what he said is joked about because obviously the internet as we know it was not created by Al Gore. "I took the initiative in helping to bring forth the commercialism of the Internet" would be far more accurate. And yes, I read what Al Gore actually said.
One of the things that always makes politicians look untrustworthy is saying one thing, and doing another.
If you look at Obama's technology platform, he is quite clear about what an "open internet" means. See http://www.barackobama.com/issues/technology/#open-internet. A small extract from this statement follows
"Making government data available online in universally accessible formats to allow citizens to make use of that data to comment, derive value, and take action in their own communities."
To me, using a technology such as Silverlight is NOT a "universally available format". It assumes one is using a specific type of operating system and/or browser combination, and the particular technologies required are neither freely available, nor universal.
I don't doubt that Obama means what he says in his policy statement, but SOMEONE has to follow through with making sure this actually happens. I am not a US citizen, but if I was, I would probably vote for him because he is more likely (I think) to follow through on the sorts of statements contained in his technology statement than a certain other contender for the job. But you have to mean what you say, and you have to make sure it happens.
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, 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.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Wonderful. I love progress that involves government supporting a monopoly instead of non-proprietary, open standards. Oh, and they definitely need Digital Rights Management. I mean, it's really crucial that people don't freely copy these convention videos.
Nevermind the big, gaping analog hole. All they are doing is inconveniencing people and pandering to corporations.
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 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.
In addition to Silverlight, DemConvention.com uses Redhat: searchdns.netcraft.com/?position=limited&host=www.demconvention.com
And it runs on SilverStripe open source CMS/framework, which requires PHP, MySQL, Apache.... (Just do a view-source of the homepage, or check out silverstripe.com/powering-4-days-of-political-history-dnc-2008/)
Source of demconvention.com has: <meta name="generator" http-equiv="generator" content="SilverStripe 2.0 - http://www.silverstripe.com/" />
I can see them jumping around and yelling:
DONATIONS! DONATIONS! DONATIONS!
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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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/ 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
Linux is a multi-headed hydra
I thought it was a pinguin. Maybe we can come to a compromise; can someone paste a few heads onto Tux ?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
the "Linux not supported" error message is delivered by a Linux server.
From netcraft:
Linux Apache/2.0.52 Red Hat
Tech Public Policy stuff
Which means the company they paid to design the site is full of no talent hacks and they screwed it up.
Nice, can we find out what the company is so we can spread the word that that company is one to NOT use?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
We already know the Democrats are just as much the party of corporations and big business as the Republicans are. Whether it be granting immunity to the telcos or their website design. Corporate is as corporate does.
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?
Free (as in beer) web design and hosting was probably enough to buy them out.
Microsoft paid for the software, the programming, and even the hardware for the Library of Congress's network to convince them to use Silverlight. It worked.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Wow, where to start. The only thing I agree with is that a President cannot and should not be expected to know everything. The problem is McCain I'm sure has been informed on what Net Neutrality is and came down on the wrong side of it. He is for easier challenges to patents but then comes down on the side of copyright holders even though that house of cards is already collapsing.
Now you have a point that Bush is not the smartest man on the earth but then you mention greed, terror and imply that he is evil. I would like to point out to you that he didn't try to seize power and stay in office after his two terms like Chavez did in Venezuela. He also has never squashed his critics and in fact the Unites States still has the freedom of speech and it is one of the few countries to have it. Therefore I have to argue that you mentioning greed, terror and evilness are disingenuous arguments if not simply for matters of scale. He's not infallible and makes mistakes but he is far from evil.
Then you say that Obama would not be a total disaster. But is not experience mostly how we look towards the future and this is the most inexperienced candidate in the history of the Presidency. He is also the most liberal in the history of the Presidency. I'd be very afraid of disastrous consequences if Obama wins.
Then you go on to compare McCain to Bush using the already false assumption that Bush is obsessed with power (that is why he is stepping down in February 2009 right?). Secondly you say that McCain wants to destroy all Democrats but he is THE ONLY Republican that has stepped across the isle to create legislation as many times as he has. So your argument makes no sense. In fact he may still declare a Democrat as his VP candidate.
Now is he taking stabs at some of the Dems stupid policies? Of course! This is an election year and yet the Democrats are doing some stupid shit. For instance they are trying to say all that stuff you learn in Economics 101 is a lie and that the laws of Supply and Demand are a fraud. They repeatedly say that drilling for more oil will not lower the price of crude. This is an all out lie on their part. If they want to argue against drilling for another reason then fine but to attack the intelligence of the American People is moronic and dangerous.
Lastly, I actually hate Diebold or whatever they changed their name to now and I want votes to count for real even if my candidate doesn't win.
Holy crap! You actually admit that you are for allowing babies to be killed by their parents because it is inconvenient for them to have a child.! What is next?! Can you kill any child who is less than a year old? Two years old? Any age? Where does it stop.
Only on Slashdot could you post something to morally repugnant and get away with it with not even a flinch by the readers.