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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.
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.
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.
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!
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. =/
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
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 "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!
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
Funny, I thought it was the hackers who needed to be protected from the political parties.
I don't care why you're posting AC
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
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 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.
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.
"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
Heh, who said I could install Windows?
This Message was undeliverable due to the following reason:
Your message was not delivered because the destination computer refused
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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/ 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
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