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MS Silverlight To Stream Obama Inauguration Events
Ilgaz writes in to let us know that we will have to install MS Silverlight 2 to watch the US President's inauguration online. Everyone running Mac PPC, Linux, and FreeBSD has been left out, as there are no working Silverlight 2-capable alternatives on these systems. Here is Microsoft's press release announcing the selection of Silverlight yesterday. Streaming of various events around the inauguration begins today at the Presidential Inaugural Committee site, which touts its "inclusive and accessible" coverage.
That certainly didn't take long to have the rhetoric fail and the reality take charge.
You can watch it using flash video here
Let's see. Wants to renew Bush's tax cuts, says it will take a while to figure out how best to close Gitmo, and picks a Windows only solution for streaming....
So far so good.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
All hail the OB Me&$iah!
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
The actual copy from the references story is...
Microsoft's Silverlight technology has been chosen to stream U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's swearing-in ceremony live on the Presidential Inaugural Committee's Web site...
Nowhere does it say that all the networks will be using Silverlight exclusively.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I have little use for Flash and less for Silverlight ... and the inauguration will still be on TV (and will be broadcast and re-broadcast ad nauseam anyway) so it's not like we won't get to see it if we don't knuckle under. I wonder what Microsoft will have to give in return for this great boon?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Sweet so something that should be accessible to everyone is only available to people using some propriety piece of software. Why couldn't they just stream in MPEG? Flash would be better, but fails for the same reasons as Silverlight.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
http://www.hulu.com/spotlight/obamapresidency
Typical MS method of crowbaring in technology that no one was interested in or wanted. Now if you want to see something that many people ARE interested in watching, you have to install some crapware which will either be 'uninstallable' or so difficult to remove that you'll just leave it.
Eventually it'll require an upgrade that will break something else you use, but MS will continue to crowbar it in with 'compelling uses', and eventually you'll find the other technology to be not worth your time to upgrade...
And M$ will have another foothold... I for one say 'stomp on that foot as hard as you can'. Don't buy in. Go watch the event at a bar, friend's house, or on tv (if you have one).... Go to a TV store - it'll be on... No need to install SilverTongue
just use hulu or half a dozen other flash based streamers to watch it or turn on the old fashioned Television, 20 different channels including ESPN are covering it.
The story *DOES NOT* say that Silver light will be used exclusivly accross all channels. It says:
Microsoft's Silverlight technology has been chosen to stream U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's swearing-in ceremony live on the Presidential Inaugural Committee's Web site
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
So folks, now that the new Administration is showing itself to be like every other... How do you feel? Like the slut that nobody respects in the morning maybe?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Remember, you of could have had your "lipstick on a pig", and Joe the Plumber would of streamed it for you out of his basement. But oh no. 99% marketshare says no.
Also they will not be supporting fat people who refuse to go on a diet.
This is considered (5, insightful) for neurotypicals (aka not linux users)
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"All hail Pres Bush the 3rd"
That would have been McCain. Obama is Clinton the Second, to judge by his cabinet.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
It's not encouraging that the committee's website will stick to this proprietary format, which is mainly designed to kill JavaScript and launch Microsoft's conquest of the free and open Internet.
However, is this really exclusive? Will the inauguration be streamed in other formats from other sources? Presumably. In which case, this is really not a problem. It's MSFT getting some marketing.
The marketing won't work. Silverlight will die, and pretty rapidly. I predict MSFT will stop pushing it early 2010.
The free and open Internet was a big part of Obama's winning machine and there's no way he or his team can switch to the old cronyisms without losing their entire support base. It will not happen.
My blog
Whatever happened to Moonlight? I thought they covered Silverlight 2.0 just fine:
http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
I just installed silverlight 2 on my mac, so obviously someone didn't do their homework before submitting.
"If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." - George Orwell, 1984
http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight
meant that. I somehow got to the parent mono download link instead. Feel free to mod parent down.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Yes I know there are other sources, but it still pisses me off. They did the same thing with the convention in Denver, and forced us all to download yet another crappy plug-in (Silverlight 1) to do something we already have 15 that can already do. Flash is bad enough, I don't need a shoddy MS knockoff version too.
I went there to see, since there's supposedly a feed from the Whistle Stop tour. Clicking the link I see wide vertical stripes of color with large text letters reading: "iSteamPlanet - CAP01. Osprey-230 #1. Composite. bus.slot=11.4. s/n=8052427."
Good ol' Microsoft.
One has to wonder if this was a matter of Microsoft using its White House lobbyists, the tossing in of a free temporary datacenter, and free infrastructure to get Silverlight 2 as the defacto standard for this Inauguration.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
To me, it sounds like Microsoft is doing everything it can to not lose further market share to the likes of Google or the Mozilla Foundation and to strengthen its supposed "Flash killer" Silverlight technology.
Unfortunately, as IE comes standard with every Windows system, Microsoft will continue to have a majority hold over most of the desktop experience.
None the less, I think the inauguration being broadcast over the net, regardless of the medium, is still a step in the right direction. Too bad the Obama Administration didn't chose to go with a more robust standard of Adobe Flash.
Oddly enough Jan 20th is the official release date for Moonlight 1.0 The Linux implementation of silverlight. But only of the silverlight 1.0 spec. I wonder if 2.0 is really required.
moonlight roadmap
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
He's Bush the 3rd with Clinton's cabinet, talking like Clinton, acting like Bush
The AC is right, we're screwed either way
I think Silverlight is one of the few things Microsoft got right. I've been using Silverlight quite extensively on my Mac since Netflix switched to it, and it's rock solid. This kind of got me interested into looking into the programming aspects of it, and it's pretty darn easy if you know .NET Framework and WPF already, and if you don't, the learning curve is not that bad. I wanted to write a multi-file uploader for one of my apps, and I was able to do so in just a couple of hours, end to end.
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of the internet.
Point nine score years ago, a great Fin, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, wrote the Linux kernel. This momentous project came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Windows slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering computers. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But eighteen years later, the Linux user still is not free. Eighteen years later, the life of the Linux user is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. Eighteen years later, the Linux user lives on a lonely island of disconnectivity in the midst of a vast ocean of information prosperity. Eighteen years later, the Linux user is still languished in the corners of internet society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.
And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the internet dream.
I have a dream that one day this userbase will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every website and every blog, from every newsgroup and every tweet, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, Linux users and Windows users, Mac users and BSD users, OS/2 users and Amiga users, will be able to join networks and tweet in the words of the old Linux spiritual:
Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
Whoops
Fnord.
How could an information so wrong have made it to frontpage?
http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/ there's a mac runtime.
No where do either the submitter nor kdawson claim what you are alleging, The submitted article makes it perfectly clear right in the summary that it is pertaining to the stream off the inaugural website, where *they* claim to be ""inclusive and accessible"", which silverlight is not. The submitter and editor are correct, you are wrong, I hope the mods rearrange those clueless points you received for failing simple English.
I think the moderators really dropped the ball on posting this story. There are lots of other sites you can watch the inauguration on without having to install silverlight. This is just shoddy moderation, and lends credence to people's complaints about /. being horribly biased.
Since I watch Joost shows sometimes on the Mac without having silverlight installed, I assume that it is not a requirement there either.
I'd rather watch Porn.
I guess in a way, it is porn for the Left.
Gee, according to the website all you need is an internet connection to watch live. Not. Send MIX09 a few comments: http://visitmix.com/News/44th-Inauguration-Streaming-in-Silverlight
http://digg.com/
Here be signatures
My G4 Mac comes with internal wifi, so it is quite capable of streaming video.
So this is how Microsoft plans to get Silverlight adopted. They paid a lot of money to get the Olympics streamed using Silverlight and they've probably paid a lot of money for the inauguration too. Meanwhile, anyone building a video site in the absence of Microsoft bribes is using Flash.
Can't say it won't work, but I hope it doesn't.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
The site does not specify Silverlight 2.0; however, considering that is the latest release, lets assume so for the sake of argument...
Everyone running Mac PPC, Linux, and FreeBSD has been left out
Uh?
1) OS X
Silverlight 2.0 is available for OS X.
I do understand that 1.1 and up do not work on the PPC, so if the site does require 2.0, then it probably won't work on the PPC.
So this could be 'technically' accurate; however, Apple has been dropping support for PPC themselves. So why should MS support an Apple platform that Apple no longer fully supports?
(Yes there are many Apple applications that WILL NOT RUN on PPC OS X, and 10.6 is also suppose to drop support for PPC.)
2) Linux
Silverlight 2.0 is available via moonlight (yes the 2.0 support is Alpha, but it works, and especially works for video.)
3) FreeBSD
If you are using FreeBSD, and don't know how to get Moonlight binaries for FreeBSD, you shouldn't be running FreeBSD, and you need to get a Mac or Windows, preferably a system with less 'scary' buttons.
You can run Moonlight (Yes even 2.0 Alpha versions) on FreeBSD, the code and binaries are out there.
---
So, even though they picked Silverlight, it can run on 99.9999% of the computers in the world.
And this still isn't good enough for the SlashDot world. Holy cow...
---
How about from the PIC's viewpoint.
By Using Silverlight they get:
-Unicast stream - one stream for each bitrate, so extremely light server load, meaning if they have 5 bitrates available, they only have to provide bandwidth for the 5 bitrates combined once, even if 500 million people are watching.
-MBR content - this means they can provide several BitRates of the broadcast and depending on what the client's bandwidth is, scale from a 56K modem quality bitrate to a full HD quality bitrate. And do so seamlessly, and even upscale or downscale while viewing if your connection bandwith changes on the fly. (This is why NetFlix uses Silverlight/WMV/VC1 encoded content as well.)
-Quality - Silverlight natively handles VC1/WMV formats, and this is the preferred format for BluRay HD content because of quality. So they can offer broadcast level video if they choose with full 7.1 surround if they got fancy.
---
Microsoft has actually done Ok work with Silverlight, especially in the light video/codec department client with far better quality and lighter bandwidth than Flash or other solutions, and even better client performance.
Anyone watch video with Flash lately? Wow, talk about a freaking pig - version 10 especially. I personally would take Silverlight content on Linux or OS X or Windows over Flash crap any day.
With Flash you get to watch your CPU spike and run around 30% even with GPU acceleration enabled and 70% with GPU acceleration turned off.
In contrast, maybe 10% with Silverlight.
Test it, 99.9% of the time, a Flash Ad or Flash crap on a page will eat more CPU % to show a flashing gopher than a HD Silverlight Video playing on the same page.
I know that just about everything posted by kdawson should be moderated as a "-1 Troll", but what good, cross-platform video codecs exist for streaming video? Obviously, Silverlight isn't that cross platform, Flash is proprietary, so I can't use it on a PPC linux box I have here, etc.
Open, Free Codecs that work everywhere are surprisingly non-existent. I'd like to see that change!
Doh!
Silverlight 2 is nothing like Silverlight 1. I dont even know what Silverlight 1 was, but I gather it wasn't much. Silverlight 2 is basically a stripped down, altered version of .NET 3.5. You can actually make useful things in Silverlight 2. Best, if you already know and use .NET and especially WPF, you can start building Silverlight 2 stuff almost right away. Even better, it is pretty trivial to hook into your existing AJAX layer--you can pretty much call the same server-side goo as your old, brittle javascript code.
Speaking of Moonlight, I've just looked over the website you linked to. I can't seem to find anything about compatibility with Silverlight. For example, will Moonlight be "plug and play" and not require our Silverlight detection javascript to know anything about it? A lot of people, including myself, use Microsoft provided javascript to detect if you are even able to install Silverlight on your platform. I wonder how Moonlight will factor into that?
But seriously, don't discount Silverlight 2. It is one of the cooler technologies Microsoft is pushing these days. Sorry it doesn't run on your platform of choice, but they had to release something. Hopefully they will support more platforms in future releases (I'm looking at you X-Box and whateverPhone).
Why in the world is this moderated troll?
-- Linux user #369862
I respect your choice, but since the 95% of my traffic has a OS/Browser that can install Silverlight, I'll use Silverlight over Flash whenever possible. Why? I already own Visual Studio and I've invested a lot of time and energy to learn .NET and WPF. My bet is that this holds true for a lot of shops--it is easier to find programmers who can speak .NET/C# then can speak ActionScript.
That doesn't mean I wont try to degrade nicely for you. Just don't expect the wiz-bang, more usable stuff to work :-)
Oh my God, turn on the damn TV, it'll be on every frakking channel. I am so sick of techies having hissy attacks because every damn thing isn't instantly streamed to their iPhone or twittered to their PSP.
Can we not use Moonlight instead of MS to view the broadcast?
So I need to use Sliver light, to see the white house change into
the Black house ?
But understand that they are probably using Silverlight because one or more of the following:
a) Their staff was familiar with C#/WPF and not Flash
b) They could have had licenses for all that Windows Streaming stuff.
c) The tech guys handling the streaming stuff knew the Microsoft stuff, not the Adobe stuff.
d) Something else.
Bottom line is follow the money. For whatever reason it was cheaper to use a Microsoft stack over an Adobe stack. My hunch is most of their visitors can install Silverlight. I would imagine they didn't take the decision to go Silverlight lightly either.
Oh goodie! A flamewar is what you want, isn't it!? I'll toss in a log:
Silverlight is a free download for end-users. Oh wait, you mean RMS "Free as in Freedom". Sorry, that won't happen. If it did, it wouldn't be an RMS approved deal either.
I'm glad the administration isn't trying to favor something like GPL. GPL is a very political, ideological license . If the government ever releases stuff under the common definition of open-source, I'd prefer it to be either BSD licensed, or under a homebrew GPL-like license.
There is a reason companies create their own GPL-like license--they like the concept, but dont want to be associated with "the movement". Does it create confusion? You bet. But it is because companies, for whatever reasons, wish to not be perceived as being associated with the FSF/RMS/"Free Software(tm)" movement.
PS: I wouldn't be surprised to see them releasing documents under some Creative Commons license. I have nothing to back this up, just a hunch.
I didn't vote for Obama you insensitive clod!
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
If he did, how would he be able to surf the internet using his email?
And besides, who wants to watch video or listen to music when you can be using Emacs and Free(tm) software? Freedom(tm) trumps everything for him, to a huge fault. "Freedom" trumps usability, marketability, developer freedom, you name it.
That is why most ignore him.
http://citizensbriefingbook.change.gov/ideas/viewIdea.apexp?id=087800000005BUn
Point to a good mutli-file uploader that supports a mod_perl2 backend, not either PHP or ASP.NET? Make sure the said uploaded can be customized to make it easy to send meta-data along with the file upload. Make sure it is free and doesn't suck too.
Like the parent, I too was able to crank out a (rather ghetto) multi-file uploader that bolted right into the same backend hooks as the original form based one. In fact, the upload widget was my first dive into Silverlight because honestly, that is where improving things can yeild major returns in user-experience.
Those who can't support Silverlight can use the old form based one. Those can don't have it but whose platform can handle it will get a cute "hey man, install Silverlight2 and enjoy the sweetness" message they can choose to ignore.
Dont knock Silverlight. It makes it pretty damn simple to kick out widgets that can vastly improve the user experience for a good swath of your userbase. Life is great as you make sure that non-Silverlight visitors can do the same thing, even if it isn't as easy.
They could have offered multiple technologies to access the video on that website I suppose but whats the big deal with them choosing Silverlight?
So it may not have been the best choice for maximum exposure but it IS only one website, I'm sure other websites, including the TV networks online, will be offering it in Flash.
Silverlight is just a technology choice. Once upon a time, I'm sure people would have been upset that something like this was being done in Flash. It's easy to forget there was a time Flash wasn't found on every computer since it's enjoyed many years without serious competition... but hey, thats only an issue when its Microsoft right?
I use Ubuntu at home, and I use it by choice. We all now that if we're running FreeBSD of a PowerPC Mac there are certain things that aren't available for us either. It's the price we knowingly pay for the choices me make. We're the exceptions, not the rule.
My hope is by using Silverlight (or Flash), I can send a message to the W3C and friends to get their damn act together and make my life easier. It seems the W3C guys think we developers want yet another pile of semantic tags (like anybody uses the existing ones...). They'd be better severed by generously ripping off XAML and adding useful things like stylesheets. HTML should be more layout oriented, not "semantic" oriented.
Semantic languages work fine for a describing the contents of a book (or creating a PDF file), but are horrible for the web. With books or PDF files you can semanticly describe your content and since you know exactly what device you are targeting, you can make a stylesheet that looks good for that device. With the web, you have no clue what your output device is, so you need a very robust language for layout to make sure things arrange themselves properly.
Bottom line is Silverlight and Flash both make it easy to control the layout and functionality of your application. HTML + Javascript + CSS can do the same thing, yeah, but only in a very brittle non-robust way (though jQuery helps a lot).
I saw Hulu's front page advertising that they'll have a live feed. They use Flash.
Someone else in this story is also pointing out that YouTube will have it.
In short... Sensationalism. Yes Microsoft wants to promote Silverlight with things like this. Can you blame them? But they don't have a monopoly in streaming web video; very far from it, they are a minority player..
If anyone gave a whit about freedom they would not vote for a Democrat OR a Republican.
People who don't own a computer cannot watch the stream. Outrageous!
Mod me down if you must, but what, pray tell, is anticompetitive about Silverlight? How does it block competition? If anything, it is anti-anti-competitive in that it forces Adobe to improve.
More important, and more pro-competition is that it forces the luddites at the W3C to get their act together and produce something useful for once. For too long W3C has been able to produce crap because they assumed that developers had no choice but use HTML and CSS. Having two plugins that run on the majority of target browsers breaks that "monopoly" the W3C holds on developers. We now have a choice to develop complex, in-the-browser interfaces using something other then their standards.
For too long the W3C has held a monopoly over web developers. Hopefully Silverlight will light a fire in their ass because if it doesn't, the web will be stuck in the stone-age for quite some time to come.
May I respectfully suggest you butt out if it doesn't affect you?
I am an American. I live in Belgium. It will not be on TV. Even if it were, like a growing segment of the population I own a computer and not a TV. As an IT professional, this computer runs linux to make it easier to work from home.
I have as much right to watch the inauguration as you do, and there is absolutely no technical reason why I should not be able to.
As someone incisively said:
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
wOOt so now I have yet another reason to not watch it =D
Or this
Silverlight works on my Mac. Check your basic facts before you post bullshit. Who the hell modded that insightful?
Msft pulled the same stunt for the Democratic National Convention:
http://ixnotes.wordpress.com/2008/08/26/democratic-national-convention-against-gnulinux-or-bought-by-microsoft/
And for the Olympics.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080623-nbc-olympics-on-the-go-download-service-is-vista-only.html
Must be nice to able to buy so much influence.
YouTube. The BBC. Hulu. You're welcome.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
They've excluded me from the most open inauguration in history as well. As a lynx user, they haven't trascoded into a codec I can use, like streaming ASCII art.
Sarah Palin would have fixed that. I bet all her moose hunting videos are available as streaming ASCII art. Plus she can see ASCII-Russia (or RSCII-Russia, really) from her house. Ron Paul would have been better too, he'd have just given us all free Gold Bullion.
Flash shouldn't have been used either because Flash doesn't run on every OS as well. In effect, it too limits OS competition. Java has the same problem, so we can't use that either.
So if we can't use Flash, can't use Java, nor can we use Silverlight, what else could they have used to produce the same in-browser video player? Should we not offer a user-friendly embedded video player? If so, is would offering something less user-friendly be as open?
Are you willing to pay higher taxes to offer streaming in several formats? If yes, please go lobby the administration. If no, then would you rather they not offer any kind of user-friendly way to stream video? I would say "make it like youtube" is a critical requirement for the website.
Can you suggest a non-proprietary way to stream video ala-youtube on a web page? If no, then are you willing to spend your spare time to create a non-proprietary (defined however you wish) way to stream video content in a way that works on at least as many targets as Flash or Silverlight?
Silverlight runs on Intel Mac's (PPC's are legacy... if you have a problem with that go talk to Apple, not Microsoft. Apple is notorious for pulling stuff like that).
It doesn't run on Linux or FreeBSD (does Flash run on FreeBSD? Never tried, actually).
The solution, provided you are willing to bear the cost (i.e. taxes) would be to offer the stream in a secondary format. Keep in mind though, you dont know what backend they are using, so it could either be easy to have two video streams, or it could be a major pain in the ass. Personally, I'd say they should do it. I can't stream Silverlight or Flash to my SageTV if it is embedded.
Since the [canvas] tag is a ways off, and so is anything else, maybe somebody should invent a new [link] tag like [link rel='streaming' codec='h.264' src='http://place'] so things like SageTV, MythTV and whatever can suck down the media without trying to embed a flash player or silverlight player. As long as the codec is widely supported, it would be really nice. The only trick is to figure out ways to splice in the 15-second ads into such things like you can do with the Flash/Silverlight players. I bet the backend can do that though.
Take that Linus, and SHOVE IT! YOU LOST!
This pisses me off. Why can't we have FOSS technology to do it. With silverlight only some people can watch it. With FOSS technology everyone can.
I have no idea what the hell this article is talking about. This will be the most covered event in history, because, well, it is history. There will be many, many, many live video streams covering it and just because one provider has decided to use Silverlight doesn't mean the whole Internet has to use just one feed.
CNN.com for example will be covering this using their same live flash player they've been using for a while. So let's not kid ourselves and pretend that MS has a monopoly on the Internet.
kthnx.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
Funny because it's true. At no greater time in history has communications ability been so great that even people in Kenya will be able to watch a historical event.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
I liked this inauguration on Silverlight very much and use it all the time. I would buy this candidate again. Please make five more inaugurations like this one.
The magic of Google.
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/3707/mac-os-x-install-silverlight-2-on-non-intel-systems-ie-powerpc-or-osx86-installs/
It's Saturday night on Slashdot. Anyone reading this will be the type of person who owns a television AND would watch an inauguration, but who has difficulty imagining a person.
You are wrong. Windows Media Server is licensed per server, not per client. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/server/version.aspx
Assuming you would be paid $40/hr (thus about $75 including overhead), that is about 133 hours of work. Even a conservative 150 hours, that is about a month to create, test and integrate a system that works as easy as youtube without using Silverlight or Flash. Keep in mind if the backend doesn't support your solution (like the website is centered on ASP.NET), you might wind up building the whole thing from scratch too.
Remember the requirement is to make it embed and if you are forced to use Flash or Silverlight, offer a secondary stream.
You keep saying this, but I've yet to see any proof. You do realize that if you are using the FEC as proof, any donor has to disclose their employeer, right? The FEC then lumps all the employees who donated from an employer into a single number. Given how many people work for Microsoft, and how many of them live here in "ultra-liberal" Washington State, I wouldn't be surprised to see a spike in donations from Microsoft employees. I'd expect the same from Google too.
YouTube's terms of service prohibit that sort of activity. For some people, the terms of service actually matter -- for example, an activist who wants to obtain a digital copy of the proceedings to be published later. The last thing that activist needs is a cease and desist order cropping up in the middle of their political movement. Yes, they can use the TV broadcast for the time being, but that may not be the case in future -- more likely than not, within a decade, TV recordings will only be made possible with paid "DVR services," which will be locked down to prevent a user from retaining a personal copy (and publishing such a copy). If nobody bothers with unencumbered streams anymore, it will eventually become difficult to retain a copy of these proceedings, which is more of a backwards step.
Palm trees and 8
And what technology is available for Ogg Theora (not Vorbis) that can encode and stream a live event to hundreds of millions of people?
Or do you expect the White House to code that up in a couple of weeks?
I'll bet you that they outsource the streaming stuff. Only a fool would run their own media distribution system, open or closed, on their own. Traffic patterns like this are exactly what EC2 was meant for.
Even if they in-sourced it, licensing costs are typically spit in the bucket compared to other costs. When a server costs at least $6000, a $1000 server license isn't much (and you might be able to use the Web Server edition for $500). And of course, that is even chump change compared to employee time.
It is the fact that you can embed a video into a webpage and have it play almost instantly. Prior to that, video on the internet sucked. You'd have to download Real because some jerk offered only a feed in Real Video. Other jerks would only offer it in Windows Media. Some would offer both and do so in like 3 different bitrates. Then came Youtube and suddenly you just clicked "Play" and things work.
That this uses Flash is only secondary. If Ogg or any other format can embed itself into your webpage and work as easy as a youtube video, it will catch on. No way should we revert to the days of "Click here for Real, Click here for WMV, Click here for OGG, Click here for MOV".
If you ask any prominent republican, they'll tell you one of the big mistakes their party made this election was to only complain and never offer solutions. They admit that nobody likes it when a party does nothing but point out flaws in the other guy' solution, but never comes up with a plan of their own to fix it.
Dont make the same mistake as the republicans! If you are going to poke a million holes in the other guy and not come up with your own fix, you offer nothing to the conversation.
How do you embed video on a webpage without Silverlight or Flash so it works like Youtube?
Here's to four years of hoping for change...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Microsoft's definition of cross-platform: Vista and Windows XP. Anything that threatens the hegemony of Windows must be destroyed. Standards are for losers.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Seriously, Barack Obama did not sit down and say, "Man, I really dig this Silverlight stuff. Maybe we should stream the whole inauguration in it."
The bottom line is that the person who made the decision to use Silverlight was probably the same person who made that decision for the Democratic National Convention. Most likely, the guy/gal was hired because he/she had Microsoft Certs and experience. I know a lot of very smart people who could very well have been tabbed for the same thing that are Microsoft people, and they probably would have made the same decision because they don't think beyond "this is a cool technology and it makes it easier for me to do what I want".
If you think it's a money thing, you don't know crap. Microsoft gives to both the Democratic AND Republican party. I know a lot of very hardcore Republicans who work for them. Yes, I know, I know a lot of people that I'm painting in a really bad light here. Apple, however, gave a lot as well. So did Google. And they tend to support Democratic and Independent causes more often than Republican.
Look, one thing you have to know is if Barack Obama had a whole lot less on his plate...after all, the economy is going down the tubes, followed by the environment, we've got wars that we're fighting and we don't really know why we're still fighting them...costly occupations...our schools are going to pot and good jobs are getting really, really scarce. If that stuff wasn't all on his plate, and he knew that Apple and Linux people wouldn't be able to stream the inauguration, he'd be upset and ask to talk to whoever made that call. As it is, it was probably some guy that was hired that was probably held over from the DNC stuff. Maybe it was one of his paid staffers.
Write a letter. Get your feelings out there and make it known. Don't just whine silently to yourself. If they get word, then some staffer might get a talking to. Really now...if you wanted this to be streamed using more open/cross platform technology, you should have started complaining about it when their tech team would have had some time to offer an alternative.
Linux users aren't out of the running completely. Silverlight runs on Wine. No idea if it runs on IE6 or if you have to use IEs4Linux to get IE7 on there.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
There is no "have to" about this. Nowhere does the original article say Silverlight will be used *exclusively*, but the post on Slashdot says as much. Yellow journalism, anyone?
Hulu has been advertising that they're showing the inauguration for several days now, with a countdown to the start time and everything. And Hulu works just fine on my Ubuntu machines, the fast ones at least..
The Linux community seems to be very invested in being perpetually misunderstood and discriminated against. Get over yourself, guys, and get the facts before whining about something that's not even true.
that's what you get for using non standard crappy OS's HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
Look, you choose to use an operating system built by essentially hobbyists in their spare time. Not everything is gonna work--that is a feature not a bug. And while I hate to say it, if you dont like that, perhaps you could dedicate some of your time to Moonlight so that you *can* use Silverlight stuff. Don't expect people to use their non-free time to develop software for a free operating system.
And yes, I do contribute to the free operating system I use in production environments--FreeBSD. I've contributed many ports to build and install CPAN modules. If something isn't in the ports tree and I need it, I don't just expect somebody else to put it there nor do I bitch, moan or cry--I take the time out of my day and write the damn port myself. That is how open source works--you give back to it and everybody benefits. If I didn't give back, I'd be a leech. That is also one of the biggest flaws in open source, you have to have the skills *to* give back, and not everybody does.
Silverlight exists, it is an amazing platform, and soon enough it will become widely adopted. Accept it as fact, and either either get used to being left out or get started working on Moonlight or something like it. Calling me a "Microsoft fanboy douche" will not result in the open source faeries giving you Silverlight support. You have to make it work!
Getting shit to work is what Linux is all about (or at least was all about). Back in the day, your only reward was the pride you got by getting $IMPOSSIBLE_DEVICE to work on Linux! Now I guess Linux is all about the politics of getting something for nothing. Sad. ...Now get the hell off my lawn!
looks like campaign money has spoken out loud here. why on earth would barack obama, the first politician on earth to mobilize his campaign on the internet choose silverlight - which probably has a 5% reach compared to a 95% reach of flash ?
why has MS been allowed to get away with stunts like this, or like the subversion of ISO in broad day light ?
apparently, calling for sites to be standards compliant = troll.
slashdot moderators to the rescue!
Nice you guys seem to leave that part out.
Wouldn't have watched regardless of who won the election or the format used.
1311393600 - Back to Black
But will we still need a translation of the political jargon?
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Liberals typically pander to the "underdog." I wish all you *nix pansies would stop crying. Boohoo... noone like my operating system. That's because it doesn't make sense to commit resources to such a small close minded market share. I think it's time to stop crying and realize that noone cares about *nix home users. Why would I use open source when I can develop 95% of what I need to do with .Net faster than on OSS. It makes perfect business sense to use .Net... bottom line people. Silly open source, at least you have someone to blame when shit doesn't work.... youself.
The Presidential Inaugural Committee site, while also touting its "inclusive and accessible" coverage, provides no easily identifiable way to contact them to register a comment about the Silverlight decision. You can make a donation, request and invitation (good luck)or purchase stuff you won't find [yet] on eBay, but provide feedback or make a comment? Nope.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
In the big scheme of things, this won't matter too much. Why? This is only *one* website people - the "Presidential Inaugural Committee" website. There will be other, independent sources of streams. There will be what, dozens or hundreds of news organizations running cameras at the Inauguration? NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, CBC, BBC, Hulu.com, Youtube. You've got your pick of probably dozens of sources online to watch streams from the inauguration.
Download a free XP vmware image from the ususal places and run it on Vbox http://www.virtualbox.org/ under Linux - should work...
Aren't they (M$oft) asking for it?
I have already contacted the DNC about this and filed a complaint under their Civil Rights heading. http://www.democrats.org/contact.html
I asked them what they were thinking when the chose to support a convicted criminal organization (MS) over the freedom loving people of the US.
Email them *now*
Stonewolf
If you cant run it, you probably didn't vote for him anyway.
He doesn't care about you, and i bet you don't care for him either.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Well, those who object to it on moral grounds are still free to upload files one by one as RMS wants them to. I left the form in place for people who don't have Silverlight.
Where is this TOS you have to agree to before viewing YouTube content? I personally have never been presented with any sort of TOS before watching any video I've found on there. I've certainly never signed or even clicked on anything on the YouTube site saying I wouldn't copy or download anything off there. Did you?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Everyone running Mac PPC, Linux, and FreeBSD has been left out
All right! Microsoft Silverlight can run on IRIX! Woo!
Well this kinda pisses me off. :)
Yeah, sure, Microsoft's doing good with Windows 7 so far, but you can't fking go this far with your monopoly. >:|
Also, I'd love to count how many people who use other OS's and decide to pirate some version of Windows exclusively for the inauguration, then delete the partition/virtual disk afterwards.
Screw your monopoly, Microsoft. Don't force our whole world to be involved around you -- how about just computers? That's even bad enough, in my opinion. >.>
...what antics will ensue when all the Windows users with older systems (sans Silverlight 2) get the message to download and install it as the inauguration begins?
How many prerequisite patches and service packs must be downloaded and reboots must be performed? And how much of the ceremony will be left to see once the install is done?
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm no expert on this, but can't Linux users with Firefox run the Moonlight plug-in? I understand it to be a opensource version of Silverlight, which even has official backing by Microsoft and is funded by Novell.
It looks like Moonlight is in beta release with its support of Silverlight 2.
-David
Whoever the tech folks who work for Obama understand the need for having a FOSS option. Change.gov is licensed under creative commons, so somebody got the memo that user freedom, the web as a commons and all that is a good thing. The Silverlight thing is probably being viewed by the Obama team as "just another option," but they have made a good faith effort to cater to the (for lack of a better catchall term) FOSS community--at least better than any previous USA presidential administration.
Inauguration Anthem
--------------------
Barry Obama, voters at your feet,
Wonder how you'll manage to make ends meet.
Who'll finance imports, who will pay the debt?
Just eleven trillion and we'll be set.
Petro-bucks are borrowed in profusion.
Middle kingdom creep in like a nun.
Dodgy automakers' cash infusion.
See how they run.
Barry Obama, bailouts for the banks.
Wonder how you'll manage when all else tanks.
See how they run.
Barry Obama, soon in Lincoln's bed,
Listen to the lobbyists in your head.
Monday afternoon is never ending.
Tuesday morning coronation fun.
Wednesday night your promises absconding.
See how they run.
Barry Obama, voters at your feet,
Wonder how you'll manage to make ends meet.
...a Slingbox. If you're using a PPC Mac or certain mobile devices. I'm also 99% sure that somebody, somewhere, will stream it live on line.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
Are computers 3 years old outdated? Even back in 1998, sites could provide 3 alternatives (Qt, Real, Wmedia) on same page. What happened to that
Real and MS started making exclusivity deal, forcing to install Real, which then took over all media types on your computer, even those it couldn't handle.
And then there was sadness.
But some day flash came along, at first it was just a huge waste of electrons, serving only to make pointless "intro animations" which were annoyances that had to be suffered only long enough to find and click on the "skip" button... until youTube made popular a way of embedding video in a page using flash that made it usable.
And the peasants rejoiced.
But MS saw that there was profit being made, and thought to itself "I want that profit for myself!", and so from the raped corpse of a unicorn, it carved the unholy horror know as silverlight.
And the peasants felt the tinge of sadness come back to their browser video experience.
You can't take the sky from me...
Anyone ever heard of a TV?
I'm sorry, but you guys are making way too big of a deal out of this.
As for me, I'm currently writing this in the nightly build of Ubuntu 9.04 released last night; I have Debian, Gentoo, FreeBSD, OpenSUSE, and LFS installed on on other partitions. But seriously, do you expect the U.S. Government to cater to our open-source and open-standards desires?
The goal of the government should be maximum accessibility, not minimal appeasement. Frankly, /. is making a mountain out of a molehill.
I'll be watching this inauguration on good ol' analog television.
Wow...that didn't take long did it? Here's the "conquering hero" entering Washington on his knees, pledging his Change program to Bill Gates instead of the American People. What a phony barackolony.
We're on Silverlight 2.0 already....?
What was wrong with Silverlight 1? It worked at Beijing, why can't it do the job here? Oh, it's not about functionality, is it?
No sig today...
'Donors with ties to Microsoft are among the biggest backers of President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration'
davecb5620@gmail.com
"Look, you choose to use an operating system built by essentially hobbyists in their spare time. .. And yes, I do contribute to the free operating system I use in production environments--FreeBSD. I've contributed many ports to build and install CPAN modules"
Is this a sample of the hobbyist system?
Do you mind providing a link to these ports?
davecb5620@gmail.com
It will also be live on Hulu in Flash.
How dare you utter such blasphemy against the Messiah Lord Barry Soetoro the Merciful! You must be one of those bitter, gun-clingy types the Chosen One warned us of...
It's about time to tune my GNURadio!
To stream the closed-source Silverlight into an openly-viewable format :)
Ohhh we should ignore things with small market share? Haha. How well does that argument fly with your LinSUX OS? Getting enough loving from the FOSS cock yet? $ilverlight uses a superior codec and because you have the entire .NET mini-runtime at your disposal its insanely easy to create websites using silverlight.
Also, The VC1 codec is used in HD-DVD _AND_ Blu-ray and it was created by MS. Gosh ! Sony using MS codecs.. I guess they used what was the best one :) . Just like the 90% of the world using MS software.
MS makes good software. Live with it.
One website decides to use silverlight. How about the other sites like cnn, msnbc etc that will use something else. Just go there. FYI - silverlight runs on osX and moonlight (see mono) runs on linux.
Ahoy..lets pirate windows
This isn't a screw up. They just placed higher priority on streaming quality than on accessibility -- especially given there are many more channels to see the inauguration live (TV, Flash, etc.) than this one.
Did you SEE how high quality the DNC streaming coverage was? It was phenomenally good, a leap ahead of the typical Youtube quality.
-Stu
Issues of accessibility aside, there is a clear technical reason for this choice: the video quality is astounding for a streaming medium.
The DNC website streamed the 2008 convention with Sliverlight technology from Move Networks in high definition, and, from what I can tell, that's the same technology they will be using for the Inauguration.
This is near-HD quality streaming, with adaptive correction (i.e. no pauses to "buffer"). Startup is nearly instantaneous.
Given that 99% of users are using Windows or Intel Macs, and that they need to stream *live*, I'm not sure what open technology you would have them use that has been proven in practice and has comparable quality. You would be basically insisting that the government fall back to the technological equivalent of AM Radio because they haven't published the specifications of how to build your own FM Radio, even though they're giving out new radios at no charge....
So, I don't view this as a mistake, or a screw-up. I view it as a challenge to FLOSS supporters to build a better (or at least, *competitive*) video streaming solution. The freedom to use crap is not freedom.
-Stu
There are lots of other places it will be streamed; here are a few more lists:
Here and here.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Silverlight is actually much easier to develop for then flash in many regards. Any .net developer can jump right into it. I would get used to Silverlight's existence and make it work for you rather then bemoan any industry successes it may have.
If you don't like being unable to use Silverlight on Linux, stop whining about it and contribute some time to the moonlight project. Show them how well the OSS development model works.
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
I don't know about all of you folks, but to me viewing a stream defeats the purpose of having it on ones computer. I will personally be looking for downloadable recordings in divx or somesuch which I can burn to optical disk and save for later. Inauguration, the speech from today, and all of his other speeches too. Any tips on where to look would be appreciated.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
Joost quickly abandoned Silverlight when they figured where it was heading and currently they brag (rightly) that their app is now PowerPC compatible.
Unlike some MS bought out organisations, every "media site" tries to reach highest possible population. While I still insist it was never designed to do what it does, h264 embedded in FLV container is currently the most popular and most compatible down to smart phones.
If I was American, I would be really concerned about how easy to direct a committee to serve as a poster child for a never popular wannabe plugin and I would actually mail and protest them.
My hope is by using Silverlight (or Flash), I can send a message to the W3C and friends to get their damn act together and make my life easier. It seems the W3C guys think we developers want yet another pile of semantic tags (like anybody uses the existing ones...). They'd be better severed by generously ripping off XAML and adding useful things like stylesheets. HTML should be more layout oriented, not "semantic" oriented.
Semantic languages work fine for a describing the contents of a book (or creating a PDF file), but are horrible for the web. With books or PDF files you can semanticly describe your content and since you know exactly what device you are targeting, you can make a stylesheet that looks good for that device. With the web, you have no clue what your output device is, so you need a very robust language for layout to make sure things arrange themselves properly.
Bottom line is Silverlight and Flash both make it easy to control the layout and functionality of your application. HTML + Javascript + CSS can do the same thing, yeah, but only in a very brittle non-robust way (though jQuery helps a lot).
bottom line is you can't index and search closed-source "blobs" which can also be used to mask the origin of media being loaded on (and possibly exploiting) your system.
You also can't publish on a web built around silverlight or flash without paying the gatekeepers a hefty brib.. i mean license fee.
It sounds to me like you're just too lazy, or like you still service IE and it's becoming clear they're the only ones who dont conform to standards.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Note the e-mail contact and comment forms which litter most obama related web material are conspicuously missing, not even a webmaster contact link.
The only contact is snail mail.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Microsoft is good now. Non-microsoft users are provably racist.
detaining people that may pose a terrorist threat or have information about a possible terrorist threat
Is a fiction.
Instead of believing that Saddam was linked to 9-11, that he had WMDs ready for deployment, that breathing cement&asbestos dust is safe, that no one foresaw the failure of the levees, and that Guantanamo is keeping you safe, you should look for the truth, because what the Bush administration has been feeding you is a long list of lies.
Do you also believe that the Inquisition protected you from people who may have posed a witchcraft risk or had information about possible witching covens? Because that wasn't true either, even though both groups used water boarding to obtain information from suspects.
In short: When people have been systematically lying to you, why would you believe anything they say without external, independent confirmation?
You can't take the sky from me...
The technology choice was probably outsourced because the "right people" are probably busy as hell. Beyond that, how many people are ACTUALLY going to watch it there, rather than a Flash-supporting streaming site ... say, CNN? Over 1.1M people have signed up on Facebook to watch the stream live via CNN. I don't think anyone gives two shits about the "official" site and what technology it is or isn't using. There's plenty of alternatives. Just about every major news network is streaming the Inauguration online.
Omega Vortex Corporation
The PIC was not very smart with their choice of using Silverlight over Flash (or some other more open media streaming technology). The biggest problem with Silverlight is that it only supports 1 1/2 platforms: Windows and sometimes Mac (Intel-only). Flash would have been a much better choice and being a US taxpayer, I would certainly hope that this is not a taxation without representation moment driven by some short sighted techies up in Washington getting bribed under the table from Microsoft to force using a technology that almost no one has installed on their computer to watch the Presidential inauguration.
In short, this was a ridiculous choice for the PIC, who potentially shutout millions of possible viewers of this historic event.
Good news everyone. After burning some midnight oil, we (Microsoft) and Novell have pulled together a Silverlight 1.0 compatible verison of the inauguration player that's compatible with both Moonlight Beta 1 and Silvelight 1.0 on PowerPC Macs.
Miguel's Blog: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Jan-20.html
My Blog: http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/The-Obama-Inauguration-coming-to-Linux-and-PowerPC-Macs-Plus-compression-details/
The updated player should be up around 6 am EST if you want to validate your installs.
http://pic2009.org/
My video compression blog
That's pretty cool, Ben, you old (well, aging, rather than former... -:) ) Mac hacker you. Too bad your announcement is buried way down here...