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.

Comments

So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[retech]

That certainly didn't take long to have the rhetoric fail and the reality take charge.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[ScrewMaster]

That certainly didn't take long to have the rhetoric fail and the reality take charge.

Oh, they're plenty tech savvy ... they're just not tech willing. Microsoft now owes the Obama Administration a favor.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Rasta_the_far_Ian]

Need to make noise about this in every public forum / newsgroup / polital meeting now.

From these events, it is obvious that the new administration either does not know about or does not care about the passion this community has for free ideals.

I shudder to think of any Microsoft friendly legislation coming before the new President - this is a clear signal that he will support MS over non-MS objectives.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Joe Jay Bee]

From these events, it is obvious that the new administration either does not know about or does not care about the passion this community has for free ideals.

A very tiny community, compared to the overwhelming majority who a) don't give a toss about "free ideals" and b) have seen this story for the bullshit it is, in that only one website requires Silverlight to watch the inauguration, whereas YouTube and many others will be showing it in Flash video.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Tubal-Cain]

Any chance of WikiMedia or someone else hosting an OGG for Firefox 3.1 and Opera users to enjoy the tag?

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[xlotlu]

[...] in that only one website requires Silverlight to watch the inauguration, whereas [...]

Yeah, it just so happens that the "one website" is the official presidential inaugural committee site, which pompously dares to call it the most open inauguration in history.

Welcome to the change.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[atraintocry]

I'm sure that they meant open as in open access. Assuming that they meant open software is a bit of a stretch.

Oh! the injustice. Having to load a browser plug-in! You think Adobe would handle a monopoly in any market differently than Microsoft? You must not use their products, then.

If you are from the US and voted for Obama because you thought his platform was somehow anti-Microsoft, then, frankly, you're an idiot. This is it though...*this* is what lifted the veil and caused you to see the world for what it is. Silverlight. When there are lots of other options available, no less (maybe that's what they meant by "most open"?) Your trolling needs work.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[thtrgremlin]

"most" is subjective. If he baby steps it, every thing he does could be "more" and "more" open. He wouldn't want to loose his tag line.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Thinboy00]

I'm sure that they meant open as in open access. Assuming that they meant open software is a bit of a stretch.

It isn't open access. I'm running Linux and I can't use it. Therefore it is excluding me based on OS usage. I'd gladly use Adobe Flash (they make it for Linux)

Oh! the injustice. Having to load a browser plug-in! You think Adobe would handle a monopoly in any market differently than Microsoft? You must not use their products, then.

Adobe isn't Microsoft. M$ does this because Windows is competing with other OSs and M$ doesn't want Silverlight to work there. If Silverlight didn't exist Flash would still work on Linux. It's just that then we wouldn't have any compatibility issues since everyone would be using Flash. Finally, I'd gladly install the closed-source Silverlight plugin, but M$ won't let me.

If you are from the US and voted for Obama because you thought his platform was somehow anti-Microsoft, then, frankly, you're an idiot. This is it though...*this* is what lifted the veil and caused you to see the world for what it is. Silverlight. When there are lots of other options available, no less (maybe that's what they meant by "most open"?) Your trolling needs work.

If I had been old enough to vote and I had voted for him, it would have been because I expected him to take a sterner line against blatantly anticompetitive measures such as Silverlight. And about the "other options": What if e.g. Congress decided its website would only work on Windows? Certainly people using Linux/Mac/whatever can get the information via news sources etc. right? The problem is that it becomes impossible to get the information straight from the horse's mouth (Why should I have to rely on The New York Times when their photojournalism is blatantly biases?).

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

You can check how much this favor was worth (not much).

We can look forward to the future. After all the RIAA paid over 150 times the amount microsoft bought this with.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Oh! the injustice. Having to load a browser plug-in! You think Adobe would handle a monopoly in any market differently than Microsoft? You must not use their products, then.

Unless, of course, you haven't paid the microsoft tax.

Then you're simply excluded from "the most open inauguration in history".

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[gparent]

From these events, it is obvious that the new administration either does not know about or does not care about the passion this community has for free ideals.

The majority doesn't give a shit. The other 3 people who care won't be able to do a thing about it. That's the way it is.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Dolphinzilla]

I am sure you have this backwards - Micro$oft probably made campaign contributions to Obama and Obama owed M$ the favor....

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[narcberry]

"The old washington is a thing of the past."

I guess he meant the old George Washington. I do wish he had clarified that.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[techno-vampire]

I shudder to think of any Microsoft friendly legislation coming before the new President - this is a clear signal that he will support MS over non-MS objectives.

My first thought was that now we knew who BO's corporate masters are. Then, I had a different idea: he may be doing this to pay back Microsoft for services rendered by doing something that doesn't commit him to anything else. Then, when they come to him to get favorable laws passed (or unfavorable ones killed) they have less leverage because they have one less chit to call in. After all, just because he owes them a favor that doesn't always mean that they get to decide when or how he pays them back. I'm no BO supporter, and never have been, but I wish him well and I'm not going to condemn him without more evidence than we now have.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Dolphinzilla]

sorry - I have typed it so many times since 1997 its automatic !

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Anonymous Coward]

People who spell that company's name "Micro$oft" give me flashbacks to 1997. Firstly because they need to grow up, and secondly because they haven't moved on since then.

On the other hand ... neither has Microsoft.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[RichardJenkins]

I guess it's meant as a compliment. He probably meant 'A description Microsoft's glory, magnificence and riches beyond imagination transcends letters and can only be truly represented using non-alphanumeric characters.'

Or something.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[ScrewMaster]

I am sure you have this backwards - Micro$oft probably made campaign contributions to Obama and Obama owed M$ the favor....

Wouldn't surprise me. Washington is a complicated, twisted place.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[techprophet]

Yeah, it just so happens that the "one website" is the official presidential inaugural committee site, which pompously dares to call it the most open inauguration in history [pic2009.org].

omfg! I'd better accelerate my plans to rebuild Atlantis. *sends out emails frantically*[/sarcasm] I can't believe they actually said that. Remember people: promises made by politicians (of any party, standing, or otherwise) probably won't be kept. Don't trust them.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[betterunixthanunix]

"whereas YouTube and many others will be showing it in Flash video."

Which is still not truly available to everyone. Where is that Flash plugin for my PPC system? Where is the non-patent-risk FLV codec for my PPC system? What do people who do not have an up to date computer do (yes, there are still a lot of them, and their computers can play an .ogv or .mpg just fine but fail on flash)? Why is there no talk of making an ogv available, even as a streaming video? Why the focus on browser plugins?

You ridicule us for being a tiny community, but keep in mind that this tiny community of people who care about "free ideals" represents a substantial proportion of people who care about politics, substantially more than the proportion of people who use computers. Beyond that, there are a lot of people who want to maintain their own copy of these proceedings, who should not be legally barred from doing so by the use of streaming video websites whose TOS forbids non-streaming downloads. This is a historic proceeding, if a bit hyped, and there should be no copyright or patent issues when it comes to videos of the event.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[drewness]

Where is that Flash plugin for my PPC system?

Um, here?

Debian package search tells me that the Gnash Flash plugin for Mozilla is available for alpha, amd64, arm, armel, hppa, i386, ia64, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, and sparc, at least for Debian users. So it at least compiles and does something on all those platforms.

It's not the official Adobe plugin, but they claim it supports at least Flash 7 and can handle YouTube.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Lennie]

You could try swfdec(with the browser plugin: swfdec-mozilla) or gnash. Youtube and many other sites work with it.

Not that I like people using flash, I would much rather have seen that browsers have support for the video-tag.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[betterunixthanunix]

I actually am a swfdec user, but swfdec on my PS3 fails really hard. I have tried watching YouTube videos using Fedora 10 on my PS3, which is more or less bleeding edge, and the video is not redrawn on the screen (but forcing a window redraw works). Also, FLV decoders are in a patent minefield, and YouTube videos require such decoders.

Gnash is an epic fail, mostly because of lack of developer interest -- last I checked, most gnash developers switched to the swfdec team, and gnash still was not working for Youtube (this was 18 months ago; have things changed?).

Personally, I do not understand the obsession with Flash for streaming video. Desktop operating systems have had built in support for streaming video since...1995? If you count Linux, I guess that should be since 1998~. Why is nobody planning to offer streaming ogg or, encumbered as it may be, streaming mpg?

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

omfg! I'd better accelerate my plans to rebuild Atlantis. *sends out emails frantically*[/sarcasm] I can't believe they actually said that. Remember people: promises made by politicians (of any party, standing, or otherwise) probably won't be kept. Don't trust them.

Then allow me to give you some detail on this issue : even Bush kept his main campaign promise.

Obama already announced he wouldn't keep his (neither the withdrawal from Iraq promise, nor even the closure of guantanamo bay). And he's going to lower taxes AND spend over 3 times bush has ever spent. (I'm not sure what to think about the CRA starting this crisis, but if it did, Obama's deserves a hefty helping of blame and responsability for the mess. AND both Bush and McCain tried to stop it multiple times BEFORE the crash, only to have democrats just shout "racist" at them).

The problem is simple : people ate up Obama campaign promises and elected him. Expecting him to keep his promises is NOT "delusional". I give money to the baker, I expect a bread. I gave a vote to Bush, and I actually got dollars back. I gave a vote to Obama to close guantanamo, and it seems he puts up a big smile and throws a sickening extremely-rich-only-please in a time when half america is losing their jobs.

He will get what's coming to him. And hopefully reid and pelosi too.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

You can download youtube movies and watch them on your PPC system just fine.

But of course, there are better options.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

That's why we brought in "hope and change".

I would say "disappointment and reruns" is more like it, but he probably patented it.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

You know, when you make conspiracy theories ... at LEAST have the govt be the bad guy.

I mean nobody's claiming "the US army saved earth from alien invasion by cutting open all martian babies and killing their family with bombs launched at Roswell" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Clearly Obama does. And he's about to become the most powerfull man on the planet.

So why does Obama still believe microsoft ? He's stupid ? He's gotten bought by m$ dollars ? You tell us.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Q-Hack!]

I did find this. The senate claims that you only need Flash to view the ceremony.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Sark666]

To me 'contributions' should be made illegal. Explain to me how these are nothing more than an above-table bribe.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Dolphinzilla]

you know if Bill Gates had a penny for every bug in a Microsoft product he'd be a Billionaire...

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Baseclass]

I boycott any sites that are MSFT specific, and if possible I'll let them know this.

Sure, there are ways around most of it (VM, User Agents, Wine, etc.) but I shouldn't have to jump through hoops to see their product. There's plenty of other content on the internet.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

Silverlight in and of itself cannot be anti-competetive. It is a content delivery platform, by this very nature it must compete in its space against the incumbent flash, as well as other content delivery systems. Whenever someone pushes out a video in flash, you don't hear the BSD crowd moaning. Whenever someone pushes out a video in Ogg (all 5 of them) you don't hear the rest of the world moaning.
Silverlight is being used. Deal with it. Whoever planned this decided that Silverlight was their best option despite the fact it isn't the dominant delivery platform.
Chill, stop being inflamatory, or if you really are that angry, go poke the mono guys, their work is blessed by MS afterall.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[fm6]

Right, let's judge the entire tech policy of the Obama administration by the fuckups of their party planners.

For that matter, can you name any organization that streams lots of video in a reliable, non-kludgy, platform independent manner that doesn't force you to update your client software twice a week? The only media client that doesn't drive me crazy is Flash — and we all have heard from folks who hate Flash with true bitterness.

I blame a messed up, IP-obsessed, monopolistic media industry for problems like this. Plus the sorry state of our telecom infrastructure. I'll judge BO by what be does about these things, not by the fact that his inauguration committee can't cope with a technical problem that has everybody tearing their hair out.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[The Master Control P]

Thank the robber-baron era Supreme Court ruling that money is speech.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[noctrl]

"And now, ladies and gentlemen here are the president of the USA, sponsored by Microsoft"

Ok, too bad.
At least we know what weare dealing with for the next years.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[the_bard17]

I'm sure that they meant open as in open access. Assuming that they meant open software is a bit of a stretch.

I suppose you missed the little bit on the parent's clicky... that part where it says (and I quote) "As long as you have an Internet connection, you'll be able to watch the ceremony as if you were there."

Note it didn't say "As long as you have an Internet connection and Windows". Like it's already assumed that you're running Windows...

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[techprophet]

Hey, I didn't vote for him. And Bush didn't keep all his promises (lowered spending being one of them). I wasn't happy with Bush, but would prefer him to Obama. [/end id="potential_flamewar"]

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[hduff]

A very tiny community, compared to the overwhelming majority who a) [SNIP]

"very tiny community" = minority

"inclusive" does not imply exclusion of any minority

"accessable" does not mean "Microsoft Windows only"

You appear to fail to appreciate the irony of the story, Joe, which is why it was posted to Slashdot instead of CNN.

Which raises a big WTF flag over your comment, buddy. I'm guessing the answer is "clueless".

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[cayenne8]

Big deal. I mean, are there really THAT many people that will be watching this thing? Won't most of us be at work on Tues? Do they let you stream audio/video at work?

I mean, sure, the ceremony is important, we once again have a peaceful change in power, and I wish the new president well. He's going to need all the luck he can get.

But, really...I'd think catching a few hightlights on the evening news would be enough if your really interested in watching this at all.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[DavoMan]

People who spell that company's name "Micro$oft" give me flashbacks to 1997. Firstly because they need to grow up, and secondly because they haven't moved on since then.

Microsoft haven't changed since 1997.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Thinboy00]

I'm not talking about the plugin market, I'm talking about the OS market. (To mods: if you must mark this comment as redundant, please do the same to the parent).

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[linzeal]

At both my jobs and school it is pretty much given that 50% of the people are not even going to show up that day. At least that is the feeling I get from people talking about it, and I am treating it is a 4 day weekend myself. I don't want to be on the road with half the country wasted from celebration.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Thinboy00]

If Linux doesn't count, that gives Apple and M$ an oligopoly. Technically, it is to their legal interest to ensure that I can do everything with Linux that I could with Windows, since otherwise the "only" OSs out there are Windows and Mac, creating, as I said before, an oligopoly (please don't preach to me about BSD etc., the principle just extends to multiple non-(Apple|M$) systems). M$ has been examined for this type of thing once in the U.S. and multiple times (as of ~a few months from now IIRC) in the E.U.. They (Apple & M$) don't want to get dissolved/broken up. IANAL, this is not legal advice, don't sue me if you lose a lawsuit.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[binarylarry]

Yeah, only a few people cared about freedom from England back in the day... they're called the founding fathers now.

Things have to start somewhere.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[atraintocry]

It runs on Mac, so you could pay the Apple tax instead :)

It's not that I don't understand Microsoft's history...I was in fact upset about the Library of Congress site going that route. It's just that I'm sure the address will be on TV and radio, and it's been pointed out that other sites will be carrying it in different formats. Complaining about this is a small bit like the FSF trying to tie up the Apple stores. Just wrong place, wrong time.

I know that talking about perspective is a cop out argument, and I am on a tech site. Still, this seems like something that once put in perspective is not a big deal, and the good outweighs the bad. Sometimes it's better to just get something done than worry about the implementation. I feel that it is open because they've made it available to millions (I'm guessing here unfortunately) of people who have a computer with Windows but not a TV.

And again, Microsoft is by far the minority plugin, with Flash dominating the space. These things aren't black and white. It'd be easy for me to toss everything Microsoft does under a single blanket, but I'm trying to be fair.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[atraintocry]

That's unfortunate language and it'd be better for everyone if they changed that.

I'm hopeful that they'll see the tech sites complaining about this and post a link to YouTube or another site with a flash stream.

Could be worse, senate.gov uses realplayer :)

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[flyingsquid]

I am sure you have this backwards - Micro$oft probably made campaign contributions to Obama and Obama owed M$ the favor....

I think some people may need to get their priorities straight. The United States is facing some incredible challenges right now. The economy is failing. We are fighting two major wars in the Middle East. The federal debt is 10 trillion dollars (about $40,000 per person). We've got a prison full of detainees in Guantanamo to figure out what to do with. And our entire economy is based around petroleum, which we seem to be running out of. I want Obama and his team to dedicate 100% of his time to figuring out those problems, and until they're under control I couldn't possibly care less what kind of technology is being used to stream his events.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[sumdumass]

I don't really think how large or tiny the community is should play an important role in this. The basic premise at fault here is that in order to participate in something the government is paying for out of the public trust, you will have to pay a specific company for software that isn't technically required for the action the government is making.

Now I understand that the vast majority of people have MS on their computers. But imagine if the government said that you have to get a permit from company X costing $100 in order to file a lawsuit or make a complaint to the police. Imagine if the government said you can come and watch our meetings only if you wear a Tshirt made by a specific company that we approved of. Or what if the IRA required you to purchase Turbo Tax to do your taxes each year? This really isn't much different in that you have to have purchased an MS operating system recently (because silver light doesn't run on older OS's even if they can still run and do what you need them to do) either directly from them or some reseller even though other operating systems are availible and the event the government is doing can be done without the consumer having to pay anything to anyone or using special software that isn't already free and open to anyone without paying some third party company.

In other words, is it really in the public's interest for the government to be propping up a private company and blocking out citizens who haven't patronized that company?

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[sumdumass]

It isn't open access. I'm running Linux and I can't use it. Therefore it is excluding me based on OS usage. I'd gladly use Adobe Flash (they make it for Linux)

This should read more like

"It isn't open access. I'm running Linux and I can't use it. Therefore it is excluding me based on my failure to pay some third party company that doesn't meet my need for OS usage. I'd gladly use Adobe Flash (they make it for Linux)"

See how that turned it from a Linux zealot rant to a why should I have to pay some company rant? I don't know, I just think it makes more sense the second way. I don't think it's in the public's interest for the government of any type to require payment to a third party for some service that could be done without the third party payment or devotion. It isn't like MS is the only way to stream something across the interweb and it isn't like this is something brand new. Even users of older MS OSes will be locked out because they didn't give MS any money recently.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[aliquis]

Just hosting it as fucking video would make even more sense, open format would be even better I'd assume though for most people it would make it more inconvenient and less accessible because they suck.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[KingMotley]

Using Adobe Flash isn't open access. I'm running OS/X on my iPhone, and I can't use it. Therefore it is excluding me based on my failure to {something}.

Get over it. Linux on the desktop accounts for less than the number of iPhones sold. There isn't a single standard that includes streaming to every imaginable stream-capable device out there. Silverlight accounts for the large majority of PC's, and even millions of non-PC devices. Adobe Flash does as well, but it doesn't scale as well, nor is it as flexible. If flash was truly open souce yada yada, it'd be on the iPhone, but it isn't. It proprietary, even more proprietary than silverlight is.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[h4rm0ny]

Approximately US$800,000 was how much Microsoft funded Obama's election campaign, outbidding Google by a mere US$10,000.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Bert64]

For how long?
MS have a history of porting technology to mac (and other platforms) just long enough for that technology to dominate it's field, and then pull it away to try and force mac users onto windows...

IE used to run on mac, solaris and hpux... it doesn't anymore, and they stopped making it around the time it's market share peaked, leaving some people out in the cold being unable to access ie-only websites.

I doubt silverlight will be any different, if it achieves sufficient market share then all support for non windows platforms will be cut.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Bert64]

You can also use one of the many tools for ripping videos from youtube, and then play then with mplayer, which does run on ppc.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[pur1ty]

yep. that's why I like MICROS~1 spelling better.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[SerpentMage]

Ah, but your sound of reason will fall on flat ears with the Slashdot crowd. After all what is more important than having technology [fill in blank] being accessible?

I was reading in OSNews an article that talked about accessibility and one poster said the following (paraphrasing)

Is it really that bad that only certain operating systems are followed? For if you try to be completely open you will annoy somebody. After all what is to say that somebody using Haiku or some other esoteric operating system?

The point is that you are going to annoy somebody... At least the Obama camp knows that there is an Internet! And that it is not made of tubes....

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[DaVince21]

But having to read MicroDollaroft every time is confusing!

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[XxtraLarGe]

"The old washington is a thing of the past."

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[DaVince21]

Anyone could do that. Plenty of ways to rip an flv from YouTube with Firefox...

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[cayenne8]

"At both my jobs and school it is pretty much given that 50% of the people are not even going to show up that day. At least that is the feeling I get from people talking about it, and I am treating it is a 4 day weekend myself. I don't want to be on the road with half the country wasted from celebration."

Really? Why? What is the big deal about this inauguration?

I've seen a few of them before, and they're pretty boring. The swearing in part takes a few minutes, and the speech....those are good, but, you needn't take off a whole day for that!!

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[DaVince21]

The "obsession" is the fact that Flash takes over all the codec issues by having a video play in it in a standard format, I guess. Which is good for people who are too lazy to actually convert their videos to standard formats by themselves.

For example, YouTube automates the process of re-encoding the video for anyone to see. No need for the video creator to change the format, most likely.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[DaVince21]

True, but even if you piss that 1% off, there is still 99% of other potential customers. It's not like that 1% is going to change back to Windows anyway.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[sumdumass]

The parrent said he would be happy with flash, not me. I'm not sure I or anyone in their right mind would be wanting to watch the inauguration on an Iphone though. Then again, an Iphone isn't a computer even though it performs some functions a computer does- it's an appliance. The Iphone doesn't run OS/X either, it's some hybrid OS based around it and it's limited in it's abilities which is why Adobe is making a light version of Flash instead of using what they already have.

Anyways, I would be happy just streaming it into a media player of some sort so then I could even use it on older versions of windows that MS no longer supports. About all operating systems have media players and the ability to stream media through it. Phone and appliance providers can stream the video to their sites and then reprocess it into something your Iphone or a NetTV box can use. A simple link to the raw feed and instructions to enter it in the open dialog of their media player would likely be enough but then again, they would have to use a format and a codec that has been around long enough for there to be popular support.

The problem isn't really just the stream format. It the promise of change and inclusion, it's the idea that you have to pay Microsoft a fee in order to meet the ideal espoused by the people and the site attempting to claim "will organize an inclusive and accessible inauguration that reflects the new Administration's commitment to leadership" yet in order to be included, you will pay to pay some third part money that isn't otherwise necessary. The entire claim seems to be a ruse and I don't care if your happy to participate in the fallacy being created. You can spice up a shit sandwich but don't expect me to call it anything other then shit. This is more of the you have to buy Office to do business with the government. You wouldn't expect to have to pay the corner gas station to walk into the town hall and get a permit to build a porch or replace your siding. I seriously don't understand why people think it is perfectly fine to expect a payment to MS for something tax payers are paying for which is being billed as all inclusive. Just because a lot of people who are well off already paid the fee shouldn't make a damn bit of difference.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[PastaLover]

This is the same problem as when Obama mentioned pumping your tires might make a real difference in fuel efficiency during the elections, then got ridiculed for it. The truth is, if you don't care about the little things, you're not gonna make much progress solving the big things. Big things are usually composed of lots of little things.

I'm relieved that we can stop being excited about the US president and start bashing him again though. All this positive talk was making me uneasy.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[sqldr]

People who spell that company's name "Micro$oft" give me flashbacks to 1997. Firstly because they need to grow up, and secondly because they haven't moved on since then.

He has a point. Nowadays, it's "Appl€".

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[ATMD]

... Micro$oft ... M$ ...

Oh come on, that's just juvenile. Of course Microsoft wants to make money; it's a business for Pete's sake. No need to point that out through deliberate misspellings. If you don't like the way they do things, don't use their software. I can assure you they care a lot more about their installed base than a couple of switched characters on some internet messageboard.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[NineNine]

Do they let you stream audio/video at work?

You work somewhere pretty crappy if you're serious about not being allowed to watch the inauguration. I own a business, and I'll have it running on all computers for my employees to see.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[will_die]

That certainly didn't take long to have the rhetoric fail and the reality take charge.
Finally we know the change we can count on.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Darundal]

Ogg probably shouldn't be included because a codec to play .OGG is available for pretty much any operating system someone will be likely to try to watch the inauguration from.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[jmccay]

You could just turn on the TV for the important parts. Maybe it's to 20th century for you? Every station and more is going to have some presence there. I am more shocked at the $150 Billion being used to put on this party. In a down turn economy, that could put a lot of money in our pockets. If they really want to get the economy going, send every American family, or single person, a tax free check for $50,000 to $100,000. It would probably have been cheaper than all the rounds of billions of dollar of hand outs to company that mismanaged the money. The even mismanaged the money gave them. Now even the porn industry wants a hand out!

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[tobiasly]

I want Obama and his team to dedicate 100% of his time to figuring out those problems, and until they're under control I couldn't possibly care less what kind of technology is being used to stream his events.

That's a ridiculous position, and you have obviously never been in a leadership position (much less an executive one) if you think like that. The concept that the President should only concentrate on a small handful of difficult issues at a time is unrealistic. The world isn't going to stop and wait while Obama figures out these things for the first time. To his credit, he has picked a lot of really smart people to help him out but he also has to figure out how to use them effectively.

Do you really think that he will better be able to solve the problems you mention if his entire team "dedicates 100% of their time" to them as you suggest? What exactly is Julius Genachowski (his much-ballyhooed, pro-net-neutrality pick for FCC chief) going to contribute to getting us off of foreign oil?

There are always going to be very tough, high-priority issues. Right now there are more of them than at many other times. It doesn't mean that he can simply ignore all of the other issues, many of which are very important to a lot of people. Obama was so over-hyped by the media that now everyone has unrealistic expectations of his ability and he's going to find out very quickly that his honeymoon period will be very short-lived.

But that doesn't mean that those of us who care about neutrality, openness, and software freedom, and who happen to believe that the solutions to those problems will have an extremely profound impact on our future lives and society as a whole, should sit around while he shuts out a large percentage of the public and give him a pass simply because there are other bigger problems to solve as well.

Solving the big problems gets all of the press, but solving the thousands of little problems are what makes a truly successful President (or any executive for that matter). It doesn't mean that Obama himself has to take time out of his day to decide which technology will be used to stream the inauguration. It means he needs to appoint really smart people to make those decisions for him, and other really smart people to let him know if people are complaining because that job wasn't done correctly.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[tobiasly]

The point is that you are going to annoy somebody... At least the Obama camp knows that there is an Internet! And that it is not made of tubes....

Stop making excuses for him. His team picked the wrong choice this time, plain and simple, and it's the job of those who know better to point it out. They could have streamed in multiple formats or done any number of things to make it more accessible, but they screwed up and went the MS-only route.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Kijori]

Ah, but your sound of reason will fall on flat ears with the Slashdot crowd

Damn those Slashdotters with their ugly ears!

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[commodore64_love]

It's part of the whole "religious-like experience" surrounding Obama.

That's not the only way things have changed. Back in 2000 the television couldn't stop talking about Clinton and his leaving office. It was almost as if Bush didn't exist. The TV media is firmly Democrat and they give priority to the Democrat whether it's the guy coming (Obama) or the guy leaving (Clinton).

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[Kijori]

Unless, of course, you haven't paid the microsoft tax.

Then you're simply excluded from "the most open inauguration in history".

I really think it's a stretch to say you're excluded. If you want to watch the inauguration, you can:
-Go there and watch it in person
-Watch it on TV. It'll be on a fair few channels.
-If you don't have a TV, watch it on someone else's; many small businesses, churches etc are showing it for free.
-Watch it on the internet at the official site using Streamlight
-Watch it on the internet at one of the other sites using a different plugin.

You aren't "excluded" from this event based on the fact that your computer is incapable of understanding one of the formats being broadcast. Firstly, because it's available in so many ways, if you want to you can still see it. Secondly, you choose to use an operating system built by hobbyists with little mainstream commercial support. The fact that you choose not to have the system they're broadcasting to doesn't make it unfair. I don't have a TV, but I'm not upset because I can't watch it on etch-a-sketch.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[GnuAge]

you know if Bill Gates had a penny for every original idea he ever had he'd be flat broke.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

I'm just frustrated ... I feel played by Obama. He promised all sorts of things, many he didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of delivering.

And tons of people weren't happy with Bush. I'm starting to think that there were very good reasons why he did what he did. Perhaps not even ideological.

Something's profoundly changing worldwide, and Bush had to interfere with some developments, no matter the cost. This change could end very well (defeat of the muslims entire ideology basically) or it could en very, very badly (e.g. another euro country with a muslim civil war like kosovo and a subsequent collapse).

The stakes are just too high to have a delusional demagogue at the helm. I should have realized that 3 months ago.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[PyroMosh]

Obligatory:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/7/22/

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[VanessaE]

Except you're more likely to be eaten by a politician than a grue.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[ScrewMaster]

yep. that's why I like MICROS~1 spelling better.

Better yet, MICRO$-1.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[ScrewMaster]

Except you're more likely to be eaten by a politician than a grue.

True ... but upon further reflection, I think I'd prefer the grue.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[joocemann]

I agree. There are a bagillion simple and free formats that pretty much all people are able to view with. From what I understand, most the porn sites use these because I've been able to view porn from a PC, Mac, and my Ubuntu laptop. Wtf happened to the obama/youtube connection?

This exclusion of viewership was done deliberately, to drive silverlight popularity/use. The product has been generally failing since inception and needs a big boost. I use the internet usually at least a few hours a day and I've never used silverlight nor been to a website that uses it. Yet if I want to view the inauguration online, this highly unpopular method will be *required*? This is blatant.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[ScrewMaster]

Oh come on, that's just juvenile.

Oh, come on ... this is SLASHDOT! 99% of what you read here is juvenile to one degree or another. The other 1% is what keeps you coming back.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[internewt]

Corporations have no vote, why do corporations can contribute?

Whatever it's for, it doesn't look like it goes towards the education system.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[CheshireDragon]

Just remember this though; even when the employee fscks up, it is still the manager's fault.

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[RingDev]

in that only one website requires Silverlight to watch the inauguration, whereas YouTube and many others will be showing it in Flash video.

Have you seen the resolution MS is pushing through SilverLight? If you want a video feed that looks grainy at 320x200, sure, Flash is great. If you want a picture that looks closer to 720i, then Silver Light is the way to go. Check out the media libraries from the Dem's convention. That site was entirely silver light driving and the video quality is amazing.

When Flash/YouTube are willing to shell out for some decent video Codecs, maybe they'll be a viable competitor. But for now, if you're going high res in a web environment, SL is pretty awesome.

-Rick

Re:So much for a tech savvy Whitehouse.

[fm6]

Thank you for the cliche. I'm tempted to reply by quoting Murphy's Law, which is just as (ir)relevant.

Or alternatively

[jonbryce]

You can watch it using flash video here

Re:Or alternatively

[Anonymous Coward]

There's another list available here:
http://newteevee.com/2009/01/14/where-to-watch-obamas-inauguration-online/

Re:Or alternatively

[tacocat]

Interesting that the UK has this and US doesn't.

It's day one, so maybe there should be a little slack granted. But he needs to be careful. I think a LOT of people who did vote for Obama did so on the ideas he presented with a we'll see how he does. Otherwise the Republicans will lay waste to the Democrats in four years.

I would welcome a third party.

Re:Or alternatively

[Waffle Iron]

There's another alternative, too. It turns out that streaming coverage will also be available using a wireless, thin client protocol.

I've set up my wireless client gear, and it's pretty sweet. For only a few hundred bucks, I got a 34-inch diagonal screen, WXGA resolution, and stereo sound. It streams video over a new protocol called "ATSC" in the ~500MHz band. And it all works for free without needing a subscription!

This event in particular will be delivered by multiple, simultaneous video streams that they call "channels". I encourage anyone who's not familiar with this technology to check it out.

Re:Or alternatively

[oracleguy01]

Hulu will also be airing the actual inauguration and they use flash: http://www.hulu.com/spotlight/obamapresidency

Re:Or alternatively

[XcepticZP]

The US isn't really a democracy. It's a bi-party democracy. It's either or. There aren't any third options. Perhaps once the novelty of having a black president wears off and the administration needs another distraction for the masses they'll find a way to introduce a third party. Or maybe they'll try get a black female president.

Re:Or alternatively

[Narpak]

I would welcome a third party.

I was under the impression there were already several parties (beyond the Democratic Party and the Republican Party) in the US. Just that people don't support them because they
1) Don't Agree with them.
2) Don't know they exist.
3) Don't believe any other parties can rule the country.
4) Some of them are filled with nutters (or believed to be filled with nutters).
5)They have almost no money so the other parties run them off the court.

Basically what I am saying; there is little that stops you from doing some research; finding what other parties exist; read their documentation/information/propaganda (underline appropriate) and make an informed decision about which one is right for you; then actively supporting that party. A two party system exists only as long as people believe those two are their only choices.

Re:Or alternatively

[bh_doc]

Upstream bandwidth is a bit of a dog, though...

Re:Or alternatively

[ogl_codemonkey]

... +5 just isn't enough.

Re:Or alternatively

[Boronx]

I'll be satisfied if Obama turns out not to be a torturing war criminal who makes trillions of dollars disappear. This is true even if he swaps Silverlight out for a streaming software written by clones of Hitler, or puts Hillary Clinton in the Cabinet.

I agree with you, though, that a president deserves only so much slack. If Obama hasn't proved himself to me by Wednesday or Thursday morning at the latest, I'm breaking up with him.

Re:Or alternatively

[Bert64]

So basically a monopolistic cartel...
Neither party needs to bother, because worst case the other party will get to sit in power for a couple of terms before it flips back.

You make people *think* they have some power and they are far less likely to rise up than in a situation where they realise that they have none.

Re:Or alternatively

[Bert64]

The existing 2 parties control the media, without which a third party has no hope of being noticed...
There is really only 1 party, they just make it look like you have 2 because making the people think they have some say is a very effective way to keep them in check. People think they have a way out, when in reality they don't, but the fake way out is a lot easier than banding together to overthrow the government.

Re:Or alternatively

[amorsen]

6) The voting system makes sure that small parties have no chance of representation.

Re:Or alternatively

[RealGrouchy]

C-SPAN also streams its three TV feeds and radio feed in both WMV and RealMedia:
http://www.c-span.com/Watch/C-SPAN_wm.aspx

I know it's an MS alternative to MS Silverlight, but it's an alternative nonetheless. Also, it's not restricted to US IP addresses.

- RG>

Re:Or alternatively

[Mark_in_Brazil]

Good tip for folks in the US, but I'm an expat and Hulu won't let me see videos, but will be happy to let me know by e-mail if and when they make a deal to allow US TV shows to be shown in my region.

Humm...

[LWATCDR]

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.

Re:Humm...

[Shakrai]

says it will take a while to figure out how best to close Gitmo

Most reasonable people would acknowledge that it's going to take awhile to close down Gitmo. Many of the people held there are simply too dangerous to let go. Many of the others who aren't have no where to go -- their home countries won't accept them. It should be obvious that you can't just close the facility down and give everybody there a bus ticket home. Obama has committed himself to ending torture and finding a safe way to closing down Gitmo. What more do you want?

Wants to renew Bush's tax cuts

And? Do you really think raising taxes in the middle of the ongoing economic meltdown is wise?

Re:Humm...

[truthsearch]

Many of the people held there are simply too dangerous to let go. Many of the others who aren't have no where to go

The US Department of Defense operates many military prisons. They can all easily be transfered to a military prison within the US. They were only held offshore to avoid jurisdiction, and that point's been rendered moot.

Re:Humm...

[nbarriga]

If they are transfered to a prison within the US, then they have to press charges. As far as I know in the US(I'm not from the US) you cannot detain somebody indefinitely without charges, except at Guantanamo that is. Please somebody clarify this.

Re:Humm...

[Bertie]

Most reasonable people would acknowledge that it's going to take awhile to close down Gitmo. Many of the people held there are simply too dangerous to let go. Many of the others who aren't have no where to go -- their home countries won't accept them. It should be obvious that you can't just close the facility down and give everybody there a bus ticket home. Obama has committed himself to ending torture and finding a safe way to closing down Gitmo. What more do you want?

Call me a woolly-minded old liberal, but they could always, y'know, try them, and either bang them up legitimately or let them go as appropriate.

Re:Humm...

[SwedishPenguin]

Isn't that sort of the point of closing gitmo? To try them in a court of law, as opposed to hold them illegally and indefinitely without trial?

Re:Humm...

[FishWithAHammer]

That's the plan Obama has. They have to be moved into the States, at which point they must legally be tried.

Re:Humm...

[TimSSG]

Or we can start doing it the way it was done in WW2 and shoot them as spies. Tim S

Re:Humm...

[thtrgremlin]

Troll? Do you work for Bush directly? I honestly think a very valid point is being made here if you were following the context. Last I checked, there are a lot of people quite upset over this whole jurisdiction "constitution doesn't apply if we take them to Cuba" thing. I am pretty sure the statements were rhetorical, such that if you said 'no' to either of those questions, then you were supporting Shakrai's point.

parent +Insightful

Re:Humm...

[thtrgremlin]

As far as I understand, they are detaining people for the purposes of national security. They have sota made this grey area, not really an enemy combatant or a prisoner of war or under the jurisdiction of the US cause is is off the soil, so there is no law that applies... at least that is the excuse.

Re:Humm...

[gtbritishskull]

It is actually NOT ok to hold them without charges on American soil. Hence why they have gitmo. I just read a story on slashdot about tax havens. Well, gitmo is the US government's habeus corpus haven.

Re:Humm...

[WindBourne]

Do you really think raising taxes in the middle of the ongoing economic meltdown is wise

There are places for this. In particular, I think that we should raise fuel tax time incrementally until gas/diesel hits about 6/gal in say 6-8 years. Then skip this kyoto shit, which will NEVER do the right job. Also put a Carbon/Pollution tax on goods. ALL GOODS. Look at the region where it is from and put the tax on according to the amount of pollution that is produced there. Again this MUST be time incremental. I would much rather see that and give up the kyoto and all that other silliness.

Re:Humm...

[ScentCone]

Isn't that sort of the point of closing gitmo?

No. The point of closing Gitmo is to throw at least one bone to the MoveOn.org and Barbara Streisand types. He made a big stink in the campaign about closing the facility, while being slippery and never mentioning what he planned on doing with the actual bad guys. His supporters in the media never pressed him on it, and it became one of the very, very few specific, concrete things he actually said he'd do. So, he's going to do it. Eventually. And it will be meaningless.

Just like quickly acting to "ban" waterboarding - which already stopped being used in 2003. Just like his bold new plan to get behind a "surge" type action in Afghanistan - which is already under way. It's OK, though - his fans don't care about reality, and most of the media will ignore it too.

Re:Humm...

[Narpak]

Call me a woolly-minded old liberal, but they could always, y'know, try them, and either bang them up legitimately or let them go as appropriate.

Since you try to approach this subject with reason you are obviously one of them hippy-pinko-commie-muslim fundamentalist-atheist-white supremacist-baby killing-liberals the media keeps warning us about. As an enemy of the people I have reported you to Stasi and expect you to be promptly taken to HohenschÃnhausen for indefinite detention and some random acts of torture.

Re:Humm...

[fm6]

Wants to renew Bush's tax cuts

No, he doesn't. He still wants to let them expire in two years. He did back down to the extent of not asking for their immediate repeal. Can you guess why?

says it will take a while to figure out how best to close Gitmo

Ok, smart guy, you tell me how to shut a major prison facility overnight. Give everybody a plane ticket and an apology?

Re:Humm...

[Erikderzweite]

Many of the people held there are simply too dangerous to let go.

What court did state that they are dangerous? What institution has proved it beyond reasonable doubt? The military says so? Come on, they have to find WMD's first before I even consider trusting them.

Many of the others who aren't have no where to go -- their home countries won't accept them.

I see it now -- Gitmo is all about charity, you simply give shelter to some poor homeless people. You have opened my eyes!

Re:Humm...

[HiThere]

That's how it's supposed to work. I'm not sure that's how it does work. Habeas Corpus was "sort of" repealed, and I haven't yet heard that it was re-instituted.

Re:Humm...

[mab]

Wouldn't rich folk buy the expensive stuff overseas and so not pay tax

Re:Humm...

[Scrameustache]

As far as I understand, they are detaining people for the purposes of national security.

And I bet that as far as you understand it, Saddam caused 9-11 and had an arsenal of WMDs which you were saved from at the last moment by the invasion.
But your understanding apparently doesn't go far enough.

Re:Humm...

[amorsen]

The carbon trading stuff from Kyoto was put in because of US negotiations. What most of the rest of the world wanted was much more akin to what you propose.

The rest of the world ended up with a crappy system to please the US, and then the US decided to not play along anyway.

Yes, I'm bitter.

Re:Humm...

[gtall]

I see, so how many Gitmo detainees will you be accepting to live with you for awhile until they get back on their feet?

Gerry

Re:Humm...

[Falconhell]

"Many of the people held there are simply too dangerous to let go."

And your evidence for this statement is?

From someone other than the people who told us Iraq had WMD hopefully.

I would not believe the word of kidnappers and torturesrs, why do you?

Re:Humm...

[Falconhell]

Or the point of closing gitmo might just be a belated attempt to appear to be a country that believes in freedom and rule of law. Have you seen any real evidence that the detainees are as dangerous as you have been told?

Remember the same people who *claim* these guys are dangerous, told us Iraq had WMD, and are proven liars.

Gitmo has destroyed any moral authority the US may have once had in the world. If a US soldier is captured and tortured in future, the US has no cause for complaint, as they have done the same themselves, much to the disappointment of those of us who believe in the rule of law. remember when truth and justice was the American way?

So show some real evidence these are what you so naively refer to as "Bad guys".

Its cute you believe waterboarding stopped in 2003 too, want to buy a large bridge?

Re:Humm...

[ScentCone]

...closing gitmo might just be a belated attempt to...

Gitmo is a place. The place has nothing to do with why the people detained there were taken out the environments in which they were attacking people, or supporting and financing those that were. You'll notice that even the incoming administration's spin-masters are making a big point of how problematic the actual bad guys are, just like they were for the Bush administration. None of the European countries who have complained about the place called Gitmo have offered to hold those prisoners instead. Some countries to which these guys would be released will torture and kill them, right away. Others have sworn that the minute they're released, they will resume attempting to kill coalition troops and supporting civilians anywhere they can get to them.

Over 50 of the released detainees have returned to the same militant jihadism they were practicing when they were captured. Many of their still-detained buddies are determined to do the same. They promise that that's what they'll do.

If a US soldier is captured and tortured in future...

This has nothing to do with soldiers, as you know. These aren't uniformed soldiers, fighting for and reporting to a uniformed hierarchy that acts on behalf a signatory to the Geneva Convention. These are un-uniformed, privately funded, non-military attackers and terrorists who do not answer to a military chain of command or a government body. Of course you already know all of that, and you're just trolling.

Re:Humm...

[thtrgremlin]

Please, you almost have the start of a counter argument.... oh wait, you stopped writing.

Are you saying that detaining people that may pose a terrorist threat or have information about a possible terrorist threat isn't in the best interest of national security? Also, I don't think I even implied that this behavior is excusable, just that Guantanamo wouldn't still be open if it wasn't for SOME justification by SOMEBODY... so I ask again... what the fuck are you talking about?

Re:Humm...

[Falconhell]

Trolling, since when was seeing the truth trolling?

You make a lot of staements which you seem to regard as fact but offer no proof at all, surely you have learnt not to trust the media and govt by now?

Germany has offered to take some of the detainees, so your "None of the European countries who have complained" is simply false.

As much as you may like to draw arbitary lines between official govt killers (soldiers) and "Terrorists", I see no difference in what they do.

Well maybe one-the official govt killers are better armed. (see Gaza, where 100x more have been killed in a couple of week than their enemy killed in 10 years )

Most of the detainess were bought by "intelligence" from afghan warlords, well known to be honest folk who would never lie about anything.

Are you really so gullible?

If there was any real evidence to support your claims that these people "were attacking people, or supporting and financing those that were", they could be tried and convicted of crimes. Hopefully crimes that existed at the time in the law books, not new ones made to fit.

Thank goodness the Bush adminstration, is out as of today.

"Over 50 of the released detainees have returned to the same militant jihadism"

Evidence please-what you dont have any-other than the word of proven liars?

You really drink your govt kool-aid dont you?

Re:Humm...

[Max Littlemore]

Sorry, I gotta bite. I don't understand how someone can support that evil little political game and still pretend to believe in freedom and democracy.

The place has nothing to do with why the people detained there were taken out the environments in which they were attacking people, or supporting and financing those that were.

You just condemned them without a trial. But why would anyone expect someone who bought the bullshit war on terror to believe in a fair trial or the rule of law? Anecdotally, from people who were held and then released without charge, we do know that a lot of people were captured by corrupt tribesmen in Afghanistan and sold to the US with trumped up charges. These people released without charge were entirely released due to pressure from home governments that respect freedom and the rule of law, not due to trial, assessment of evidence or any reasonable action of the United States of America.

The US was paying handsome rewards. How better to get rid of a rival then sell him to the super power to be subjected to torture and abuse until he loses his mind? A lot of the countries these people come from are either sucking up to the US or are enemies, so there is no one to defend their liberty or freedom. There is no one defending justice for these people.

Over 50 of the released detainees have returned to the same militant jihadism they were practicing when they were captured. Many of their still-detained buddies are determined to do the same. They promise that that's what they'll do.

[citation needed - from someone other than the US propaganda machine]

You can of course expect that anyone who is locked up and subjected to torture might go a little off tap and consider joining in the bombing. If some evil bastards subjected me to torture, sexual abuse, sleep deprivation and more, I would probably want to kill the fuckers and everyone who supports them. Especially if the same evil bastards were killing thousands of innocent civilians and ignoring international conventions on war crimes. When you look at it from that perspective, Bush's US was not that much better than Hitler's Germany.

None of the European countries who have complained about the place called Gitmo have offered to hold those prisoners instead.

And Australia has refused too. This is because under international law, it would be illegal. These people were kidnapped and have been tortured and held without charge for a long time. In countries that respect the rule of law, it is a serious criminal offence to break international law. Americans don't understand this because the US gave up on justice a while ago. It's now mob rule and the politics of fear.

This, by the way is not a big anti-US rave, I understand that there are a lot of good people there who still hold the ideals on which the country was founded, but there are also a lot of neo-fascist idiots who have had just a little more power then their inferior intellects should rightfully be allowed to wield. Hopefully this is changing and the US can become a beacon again. Hopefully you haven't gone so far down the wrong path that no one believes you when you change your tune.

Re:Humm...

[ScentCone]

There is no one defending justice for these people

You mean, other than the lawyers that have been assigned to them, the judicial panels that have freed many of them, and the Red Cross observers who have a permanent presence at the facility.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Huh? What?

[Frosty Piss]

Boy, talk about cherry picking a slanted conclusion...

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.

Re:Huh? What?

[sjames]

To enlarge upon your point, that would be a committee that Obama is NOT heading up. He probably won't be personally supervising the mowing of the White House lawn either. I suppose people will be blaming Obama if the D.C. dept of Sanitation doesn't provide enough waste baskets as well.

Re:Huh? What?

[gtbritishskull]

But, when you become president, everything you do is a political statement. Everything done by your administration is your responsibility. He chooses the people below him, who choose the people below them. It is his job to choose people who are politically savvy and take things like this into account. Comes with the territory. So he is to blame.

Re:Huh? What?

[CarpetShark]

Nowhere does it say that all the networks will be using Silverlight exclusively.

Nowhere on earth would anyone read that into the headline. Except you, seemingly.

Re:Huh? What?

[Frosty Piss]

Nowhere on earth would anyone read that into the headline.

Did you read the summary as well?

Ilgaz writes in to let us know that we will have to install MS Silverlight 2 to watch the US President's inauguration online.

Yet as several people point out, is not so. Not only that, it is not at all what the actual article says. You did read the article, right?

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

...on the Presidential Inaugural Committee's Web site. It does not enlighten us on other venues.

Love or hate Microsoft, the headline and summary are misleading.

Re:Huh? What?

[sjames]

If the worst mistake he makes is choosing someone who chooses someone who chooses someone who makes a poor technology choice for a single website (where the very same thing is available from dozens of other sources), he'll be the most flawless president ever.

Considering how much he has to get up to speed on right now and how important those things are, I'd be upset if he DID spend a bunch of time sweating details of a website.

Re:Huh? What?

[Scrameustache]

if the D.C. dept of Sanitation doesn't provide enough waste baskets as well.

I remember a 20th century report on the coming tide of terror in America that mentioned that public waste baskets were a security threat, apparently terrorist can't resist putting bombs in there. ...just sayin'

Re:Huh? What?

[RightSaidFred99]

That's the thing. Nobody but you fucking dweebs gives a shit what technology they use to stream. To you it's all high drama, to everyone else it's "guh?". So you can certainly give him all he blame, and make it all dramatic like - as if his second in command ordered some civilians shot. The rest of the world, however, still thinks you're a dweeb and doesn't give a shit.

Re:Huh? What?

[CarpetShark]

I don't think they are misleading at all. When the leader (or future leader) of a country publishes something through an official channel, it should be equally accessible to all citizens. Of course there will be some way for people to bypass that official version and get the information elsewhere -- that will be true as long as people talk in bars. It doesn't change the fact that the leader chose to discriminate against portions of his own citizenry. Moreover, no other channel can be trusted to be the full and complete version, as the official channel can (or should) be able to be trusted.

Re:Huh? What?

[mgblst]

Fuck off, who could possibly micro-manage at this level. What a joke. I hope you never get into a position of power.

I hate Silverlight as much as the next reasonable person, but this is a joke.

Re:Huh? What?

[shutdown -p now]

But, when you become president, everything you do is a political statement.

I don't think that using a pen of a specific manufacturer to sign documents would be considered a political statement for a President to do. For most people outside /. the technology used to stream video amounts to roughly the same thing.

Doesn't mean much to me ...

[ScrewMaster]

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?

Re:Doesn't mean much to me ...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Letting the white house's computers run for another four years.

Standards?

[Midnight Thunder]

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.

Re:Standards?

[FishWithAHammer]

You do know that Obama has next to nothing to do with the PIC, right? Hell, I don't like the guy (voted "none of the above" because both candidates sucked), but making a mountain out of a molehill is stupid as shit.

I don't see why Flash would be better. Both the Flash and Silverlight formats are open standards.

Re:Standards?

[XcepticZP]

Flash would supposedly be better because it doesn't have the "Evil Microsoft" tag. I know, quite silly...

For the rest of us there is Hulu

[rev_deaconballs]

http://www.hulu.com/spotlight/obamapresidency

Re:For the rest of us there is Hulu

[Plug]

For the rest of you in the US, that is, who can already watch it live on television...

Re:For the rest of us there is Hulu

[Mashiki]

Hulu: HAHA sorry sucker. You live outside the US. Go !@#* yourself. I mean, we can't stream it anywhere but inside the US.

Re:For the rest of us there is Hulu

[Paradigm_Complex]

And for the rest of you out of the US, there's youtube.com

Re:For the rest of us there is Hulu

[Scrameustache]

For those whom Hulu deems fit to allow to watch their WORLD wide web content (limited to one country).

Hulu is a monstrosity that should be burned and buried.

Re:For the rest of us there is Hulu

[guyminuslife]

Shush! He's our president! You don't get to have him!

WRONG!

[Frosty Piss]

Typical garbage from KDawson.

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

...on the Presidential Inaugural Committee's Web site...

Re:WRONG!

[Anonymous Coward]

So you are forced to use Silverlight on that website, which is just wrong and is what the guy is complaining about.

Re:WRONG!

[Ethanol-fueled]

Especially since Silverlight is a brand new technology with small market share(flash is around 94% last I checked). This is much different than complaining about having to use popular, longer-lasting MS software such as Word or Visual Studio.

Re:WRONG!

[jejones]

...on the Presidential Inaugural Committee's Web site, which states at the top of the page, "The Presidential Inaugural Committee, at the direction of President-elect Obama and Vice President-elect Biden, will organize an inclusive and accessible inauguration..."

There, fixed that for you.

Re:WRONG!

[DiegoBravo]

I don't know what's the importance of that "Presidential Inaugural Committee's Web site", and apparently there is no story here since we can see the Obama-event from other sites.

The reason I ended reading this, was the main title: "MS Silverlight To Stream Obama Inauguration Events" (that shows the rss feed) sounds really bold and relevant, and I expect "stuff that matters" from /. Apparently /. doesn't care anymore.

But more disappointing are people that defends the editor/submiter because after carefully reading the last sentence of the resume, you discover that they are not announcing something relevant for most people, so technically, they are not lying at all, and we have to be happy with this stupid way of news/traffic promoting.

Re:WRONG!

[FishWithAHammer]

It's still free to access, and Moonlight will work on Linux and OS X. Macs with PPC won't do it, no, but there's kind of a point where you ignore outdated computers anyway.

Re:WRONG!

[Ilgaz]

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 magnificent technology? Is such a historical event suited for another DRM framework install advertisement? I am not for flash too. It is giving user (citizen) the choice. It is possible, even basic pages on shared hosts can do it. Apple, Real, VLC and Adobe guys will happily install their servers too.

Linux Moonlight PRE ALPHA is not Silverlight 2. I was always wondering if anyone would fall into that trick and there we go. Microsoft doesn't support YOU, your OS. It supports Developers to make a clone of the real Silverlight. Just like Windows Media Codecs for Quicktime, even while excellently coded, can't replace a full feature Windows Media Player. E.g. it can't do DRM streams/music store. You know why they exist? So they can claim unofficial support when a media companies IT guy asks about "What about multi platform support? Mobile support?"

Re:WRONG!

[FishWithAHammer]

It actually does support my OS. Specifically, Windows. :) I use Linux on my servers, but my desktop is a Windows box.

And...well, yes, a computer that's three years old is outdated, once a processor arch switch has been made. Sucks, but still.

And AFAIK, QT/Real/WMedia didn't allow streaming at the time. Personally, I have no problem with what you suggest, but I also have no problem with the way they're going with it now. I mean absolutely no disrespect, but you know what you're getting into when you choose not to use Windows on your desktop. In my KDE 3.5 stage when I didn't have a Windows box, I didn't complain that people didn't cater to my nonstandard choice. I got around it or did without. Sucks, but you know what you're getting into.

Re:WRONG!

[lord_sarpedon]

Uhuh. Linux users are essentially the paraplegics of the OS world. Nice try, troll!

A Linux user might need a wheelchair, but it's probably because he sawed his legs off due to patent concerns over the relevant genes.

Re:WRONG!

[iNaya]

You totally missed my point, which had nothing to do with paraplegics nor comparing them to Linux users, although you make a quaint point about yourself. As could easily be picked up from what I said, but I'll say it in non metaphoric language just for you, is that one method of access only works on windows. There are other methods of access that are a few keystrokes away.

You want to watch the inauguration? You don't need to use Windows or Silverlight to do so. There will be plenty of other live feeds available.

And this whole thing is pointless. Obama has bigger and better things to worry about, rather than whether some dipshit can't find a method to watch the inauguration that doesn't involve Windows and the official site; like running a country for instance. Personally, I will watch it on a TV. You know, those things that came out before computers.

Re:WRONG!

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

That's certainly one take on it. Alternatively, he could have just meant that we have less than 2% of the market ;)

Re:WRONG!

[rs232]

"The story *DOES NOT* say that Silver light will be used exclusivly accross all channels"

Where does it say it is going to be streamed for non-Windows players?

'Donors with ties to Microsoft are among the biggest backers of President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration'

Re:WRONG!

[Ilgaz]

Real networks invented the streaming standards of today, RTSP to begin with. Apple was also quick to adopt them based on their needs. MS was the LAST company to have a working "live streaming" solution.

Real Networks, Adobe, Apple and various open source apps (all current versions) support my CPU and I wouldn't care less if a joke in multimedia scene didn't. Ever wonder why they are considered a joke? This is the reason. Not being able to ship a product for a different CPU rather than x86. If people actually goes with their solution trusting to their usual "soon" arguments, good luck with the RISC empire named "mobile/3G/console/set top box market".

Re:WRONG!

[FishWithAHammer]

You...do realize that Silverlight 1.0 (which is the audio/video system) was released for the PowerPC Mac, right...?

And Microsoft products, both operating systems and the .NET CLR, already run on RISC architectures. Microsoft's RISC-architecture stuff goes back as far as NT on the Alpha. Windows XP Embedded also runs on a number of RISC architectures (ATMs, etcetera). In addition, a version of the .NET CLR exists for Windows Mobile, which is predominantly based on ARM. And their own XBox 360 is based on PowerPC, with plenty of Microsoft software for it (including a version of the .NET CLR, in the form of the XNA Framework). So I'll go out on a limb and say that they're quite capable of working with the mobile/console architectures out there and that your calling them a "joke" reveals more about your lack of knowledge when it comes to Microsoft's capabilities and product line than anything else.

The reason Silverlight 2.0 wasn't released for PPC Macs is much simpler than "lol M$ sux", though it might be a little bruising to your PowerPC Persecution Complex. Silverlight 2.0 wasn't released for PowerPC Macintosh boxes because, like it or not, PowerPC is more or less deprecated. It's old, it's done, Microsoft earns nothing by supporting it--I'd imagine that testing would cost more than they'd receive in return from a marketshare boost--and you know as well as I do that Apple won't support it for much longer either. Sucks for you.

Re:WRONG!

[Ilgaz]

Adobe, Real Networks, Apple (Quicktime) and even Java from Sun. Here is 98% of web media for you, all working fine under PowerPC and it takes considerable time for vendor companies to maintain them. Do you know what they earn by doing so? Respect and scalability.

MS drops PPC support because they aren't really serious in media player business. They saw whole web even including Real Networks going for standard codecs derived from mpeg 4 base. Real even abandoned their own ATRAC fantasies (which they paid huge money to Sony) and went with AAC and AAC+.

As a person doing business in Video, I know couple of things down to first 56K Video streaming experiments. MS is the last company to trust your media if you really want to make a setup which will extend to EVERYTHING.

I have never said "lol M$ sux" type of thing.

Re:WRONG!

[FishWithAHammer]

I note that you neatly try to spin away from your contention that Microsoft can't and doesn't release products on non-x86 hardware. Good on you.

AND, it begins...

[Gothmolly]

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?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:change we can believe in my b****

[couchslug]

"All hail Pres Bush the 3rd"

That would have been McCain. Obama is Clinton the Second, to judge by his cabinet.

Exclusively Silverlight?

[pieterh]

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.

Re:Exclusively Silverlight?

[Skreems]

The marketing won't work. Silverlight will die, and pretty rapidly. I predict MSFT will stop pushing it early 2010.

Good luck with that, since it's going to happen the second people stop using Netflix (their Silverlight-only "Watch Instantly" software is in Beta, and will at some point replace the old version entirely).

Re:Exclusively Silverlight?

[FishWithAHammer]

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.

Wrong, wrong, fucking wrong.

If Microsoft wanted to "kill JavaScript", then why exactly is it heavily used by ASP.NET? Why is jQuery being packaged with new releases of ASP.NET?

If Microsoft was trying to "conquer the free and open Internet" (it's never been free and only rarely and in brief periods been open), then why would the Silverlight spec be openly available?

Get a clue.

Re:Exclusively Silverlight?

[Draek]

this proprietary format, which is mainly designed to kill JavaScript and launch Microsoft's conquest of the free and open Internet.

No, it is mainly designed to kill the attrocity inflicted upon mankind popularly known as Flash, and launch Microsoft's conquest of the portion of the free and open Internet which caters to the "oohhhh, shiny" crowd. Big difference.

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.

No, it's not exclusive, yes it'll be available in other formats from other sources (most notably the aforementioned attrocity known as Flash), so I agree, there is no problem here other than this flamebait of a story meant to attract the "OMG, M$ must die!!!" crowd, and succeeding at it.

Moonlight...?

[gcnaddict]

Whatever happened to Moonlight? I thought they covered Silverlight 2.0 just fine:

http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html

Re:Moonlight...?

[Skreems]

Their implementation is only Silverlight 1. Silverlight 2 is in Alpha, but does not work with anything real, as I understand it.

Re:Moonlight...?

[FishWithAHammer]

Silverlight 1.0 handles video streaming fine; unless the PIC's website is idiotically coded, it should work fine on Moonlight.

Worst case, go get it from SVN and it'll work fine. (I'm well aware how stupid that advice is, but hey--that's how the open-source world likes to roll, and I don't personally have the time or the interest to package the current working SVN trunk just for something like this.)

Re:Moonlight...?

[Skreems]

True, but a quick glance at the feature set for 2.0 reveals that there's a lot of new stuff around "controls" and "skin-able interfaces". Not that these things are strictly necessary for streaming video, but odds are the widget used to play this broadcast will be written using those features.

Re:Moonlight...?

[FishWithAHammer]

Moonlight 2.0 supports XAML, I believe. (I don't like nor use WPF, so I have no experience with XAML and Moonlight.)

Stupid submitter

[Ren.Tamek]

I just installed silverlight 2 on my mac, so obviously someone didn't do their homework before submitting.

Re:Stupid submitter

[Ilgaz]

I did very well. Mac PPC means Macintosh PowerPC. You know, not everyone switched to Intel and MS left out PPC users on release of Silverlight 2.0 without any kind of explanation. Mono Silverlight 2.0 support is in pre-alpha stages and there is no guarantee it will do a trick like that (live streaming).

There should be another way of doing it and if I was Mr. Obama, I would really check that committee's ties with that convicted monopolist as this is not the first time they do this trick. It doesn't really give a good image. Even MS themselves offer Flash or at least WMedia alternatives on their own site.

Re:Stupid submitter

[Drencrom]

The post only mentions PPC macs. Maybe you have an intel mac.

Re:Stupid submitter

[Yvan256]

The slashdot summary clearly states "Mac PPC". Apple switched to intel CPUs only a few years ago.

Re:Stupid submitter

[93 Escort Wagon]

I just installed silverlight 2 on my mac, so obviously someone didn't do their homework before submitting.

They mentioned PPC Macs - that's PowerPC-based Macs. In other words, if your Mac is several years old you are starting to be left behind with regards to newer tech - at least if you were hoping to watch the inauguration from one specific website.

While the lack of support for PPC Macs bothers me somewhat in principle, from a practical standpoint I don't think it's all that significant. Unfortunately there is a lot of new software that doesn't support PPC at all; so this is just one more example of that.

Re:Stupid submitter

[FlyingBishop]

Mac PPC.

You use Mac x86.

Do your homework before posting.

And whoever modded this informative should also do some homework.

Re:Stupid submitter

[Macrat]

They mentioned PPC Macs - that's PowerPC-based Macs. In other words, if your Mac is several years old you are starting to be left behind with regards to newer tech

My PPC laptop is only 3 years old. Intel Macs are still rather new to the user base.

Re:Stupid submitter

[heffrey]

Those running Windows 9x are out in the cold too.

Re:Stupid submitter

[Richard_at_work]

I did very well. Mac PPC means Macintosh PowerPC. You know, not everyone switched to Intel and MS left out PPC users on release of Silverlight 2.0 without any kind of explanation.

PPC on the desktop is a small market getting smaller by the day. Sorry, but thats the way it is.

Re:Stupid submitter

[Ilgaz]

It is not sub 5% levels yet as you know, PPC macs didn't explode in horror right after Intel switch announced at WWDC. What I know is, Adobe ships Flash 10 for PPC, even enhancing it to use multiple CPU/cores.

Gaming is a very different matter and some people will of course switch to Mac Intel immediately but if we speak about population, it is not at stage of abandoning. It is like "Lets cut 4:3 compatible TV airing, everyone is on 16:9 now". The "everyone" is the trendy people who keeps up with latest.

It is extremely easy fro White House to figure PPC users as Mac browsers will tell which arch they run on browser headers. That committee site too. Hell, even Apple can provide stats, guy is the President.

Re:Stupid submitter

[msuarezalvarez]

That's one of the things FOSS excels at. Once the makers of software become uninterested in the software, those that are interested can pick up. Proprietary software and formats only lead to forced obsolescence and pain.

Re:Stupid submitter

[Ilgaz]

Even the usual suspect (Apple) ships all their software for PPC Macs, including consumer level (non pro) things like iLife 09. Snow Leopard doesn't (?) ship because running "pure 64bit" on PPC64 is pure 133t fantasy. It will even run slower, ask Linux guys or people installed 64bit linuxes. There is no extra bonus like x86-64 extra commands or no such thing as 3.2 GB limit exists on PPC Macs.

Re:Stupid submitter

[Max Romantschuk]

Mono Silverlight 2.0 support is in pre-alpha stages and there is no guarantee it will do a trick like that (live streaming).

Live streaming is easy. (You just read bytes from a port, after all...) Codecs are usually the stumbling block.

Re:Stupid submitter

[Ilgaz]

"Lot of new software" is lots of new games, directly ported from Windows using a technology named "Cider", a very high end, customized WINE as framework.

Other software includes software having lots and lots of x86 asm code like that Adobe Sound thing (which nobody takes serious), Premiere etc. They shipped as Intel only because they are ONLY possible on x86.

Once iLife, Graphic Converter, AVID, FCP class of software doesn't ship their major version upgrades, you will be correct. It is not a time to abandon PPC users on a mass market plugin yet. It is either the codecs were coded on x86 (huge mistake btw), the framework basically doesn't compile on PPC (another mistake) or basically incompetent and rushing developers. The issue is, PPC means "another processor" in this case, it is not like Apple will return to PPC. These days, people do crazy things like expecting similar, same functionality as their PC from their smart phones (which runs RISC). Once you have a multi (b)million product that can't be easily shipped to every platform easily, you have really started very wrong. For example, Adobe keeps their Linux, Symbian (as Flash lite) , Windows, OS X plugins in same generation since they want to keep multi platform, open to any OS or CPU. That is what MS would do if they were really interested in competing with them.

Re:Stupid submitter

[ChunderDownunder]

Even the usual suspect (Apple) ships all their software for PPC Macs

No, it doesn't. Apple have already made PPC and first generation Core (32 bit) x86 machines obsolete by releasing Java 6 for x86_64 only.

Now that Steve "Nobody uses Java anymore" Jobs isn't running the company anymore, we might see Apple actually supporting their customers instead of playing petty 'use Cocoa' games with users and developers.

Re:Stupid submitter

[betterunixthanunix]

Which is a point I keep bringing up: some people do not have up-to-date computers. They are a minority, but there are still a lot of them, and they are mostly in the older generation. The funny thing is that Windows 98 has built in streaming video support -- just not through browser plugins. Why is nobody posting a streaming MPEG, OGG, or even WMV?

Re:Stupid submitter

[aaron.axvig]

Those running MS-DOS are left out in the cold too. Where would you like to draw the line?

Re:Stupid submitter

[heffrey]

I'll bet there are more windows desktop machines that can't run silverlight than linux ones. That's my point.

Re:Stupid submitter

[gooneybird]

For anyone still running Windows 9x, they have a lot more to worry about than just not being able to use Silverlight. I'm just sayin...

And to the moron complaining about M$:
M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$

If I want to use M$, then dammit, I will use M$ For the greediest company on the known earth

Re:Stupid submitter

[heffrey]

But why should they deserve to be left out in the cold more than someone running Linux?

Re:Stupid submitter

[tepples]

Those running Windows 9x are out in the cold too.

True, but not a germane comparison. Windows XP has been around for four more years than Macs with Intel CPUs.

Re:Stupid submitter

[heffrey]

True, but there will likely still be more people running Windows 9x than Mac PPC.

Oops, bad link

[gcnaddict]

http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

meant that. I somehow got to the parent mono download link instead. Feel free to mod parent down.

Same bullshit as the convention

[WiiVault]

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.

Re:Same bullshit as the convention

[FishWithAHammer]

Silverlight's arguably much better tech than Flash. Calling it "shoddy" reveals a lack of understanding.

(Don't get me wrong, both Silverlight and Flash suck. But Silverlight really does suck less.)

Re:Same bullshit as the convention

[WiiVault]

I certainly can't speak for all of its implementations, but I found it to be very crash prone on my Mac. Flash is slow as a dog on Mac, but it is stable. In my experience Silverlight is neither. Though again, I admit I don't have it installed on my Windows/Linux box.

Re:Same bullshit as the convention

[FishWithAHammer]

I've never tried the Mac version, but the Windows one is fine. Moonlight 1.0 and SVN trunk of 2.0 both work fine for me.

Forcible adoption?

[kolbe]

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.

Re:Forcible adoption?

[FishWithAHammer]

"More robust standard"? Defend that, please. Keep in mind that both are openly available specs and neither have openly available video codec specs.

Even on Linux, Moonlight (the Silverlight implementation by the Mono guys) is probably better; it can hook ffmpeg directly for codecs it can't grok.

Re:Forcible adoption?

[msuarezalvarez]

In the name of all that's holy, please do not use the stats at w3schools.com to argue about browser usage. It makes no sense, at the very same page you linked to says.

I'm getting too old for this :/

Moonlight ?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

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

Re:change we can believe in my b****

[unix_geek_512]

He's Bush the 3rd with Clinton's cabinet, talking like Clinton, acting like Bush

The AC is right, we're screwed either way

The story is crap, but

[melted]

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.

Re:The story is crap, but

[WiiVault]

I refuse to support Silverlight for the same reason I won't support the Xbox. I simply do not want MS to dominate any more markets. We all should know by now that when that happens, things get bad.

Re:The story is crap, but

[eaa428e6f46aa9f93f47]

It may be the most perfect software ever written, but it is not open, its not free, and its not inclusive. So its exclusive, proprietay, and elitist. On top of that it doesn't do anything significantly better than the competition they are trying to use their market share to squelch. Its just a f'n shame that our leaders who espouse freedom, don't get it.

Re:The story is crap, but

[Trogre]

Its just a f'n shame that our leaders who espouse freedom, don't get it.

You mean like RMS? Who has yet to produce a suitable Flash or Silverlight replacement.

(removes tongue from cheek)

Re:The story is crap, but

[A beautiful mind]

I wouldn't care even if it would be the best coded thing ever. Reasonable people shun non multiplatform, non-open formats and that's that.

Re:The story is crap, but

[modmans2ndcoming]

it runs .Net code better than Flash....

Ohhhhhh.... a solution for their .net developers to get their desktop applications to the web quickly and easily and using a UI that is screen reader accessible! wow... you are right, flash is way better for that market.

Re:The story is crap, but

[Dotren]

But why is it any better to have Adobe (and Macromedia before that) dominate the market?

I'm personally hoping Silverlight matures on as many browsers and operating systems as possible AND that it and Flash and/or Flex continue to exist in competition. With luck, the competition will continue to drive each development team to improve their respective product.

Re:The story is crap, but

[chriscrowley]

Give SWFUpload a try. It uses JavaScript and a Flash Upload Library. It is open source. I tried it on a site and it worked really well. I became aware of it when I noticed Flickr using it. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any code samples in Perl, only PHP and ASP.NET.

Re:The story is crap, but

[NevDull]

Reasonable people deal with the consequences of picking an "alternative" platform.

Re:The story is crap, but

[coryking]

thanks for that. A lot of the upload controls do tricks with the backend server to get a working progress bar (hence they are tied to a language or platform). The one you linked to just does a traditional file upload so the backend is non the wiser.

Re:The story is crap, but

[Draek]

But you'd rather have Adobe dominate the market instead?

Say what you will about Microsoft, but to me they're clearly the superior choice both from a technological as well as ethical standpoint in this thing.

Re:The story is crap, but

[Liquidrage]

Things get bad? MS is part of the reason we all have computers at home and at work. Sure they screwed over IBM in doing so, but IBM was the same as Apple back then. MONEY MONEY MONEY CONTROL CONTROL CONTROL.

MS makes a lot of good software, and a lot of bad software. But it's typical /. moronism that creates posts such as yours. You're either too young to remember the 80's and 90's or too stupid to realize what happened. If you're going to knock MS knock them for shit like FrontPage, not something generic where they actually helped things, not hurt them.

Re:The story is crap, but

[Liquidrage]

And you wrote that from an open source non-patented hardware, right? As if silicon is worth more then someone's thoughts. I'm all for the virtues of open source in that peer review finds bugs. But if the software is "that" good, then it is "that" good. There's nothing moral about OSS, it's that such a philosophy should lead to better software. You seem very confused and I doubt you could actually defend your statement.

Re:The story is crap, but

[WiiVault]

I would say the destruction of Netscape and the "knifing of the baby" with Quicktime certainly show how MS feels about their competition, and thus their customers. MS Office is an abusive monopoly, as is Windows, and now MS wants to dominate the web and you are cool with that? You suggest that I am stupid or short sighted, do you not remember all the shit that happend when MS owned the web via IE? I could write a book about how MS has abused their various monopolies to the detriment of computer users, customers and others. Are you really such a fanboy that you can't see why a company that dominates tons of industries, and has a proven record of abuse is a bad thing?

Re:The story is crap, but

[WiiVault]

Well, yes I would, because Adobe doesn't have a vested interest in putting one OS above another, or a proven record of monopolistic abuse. Sure their stuff is overpriced, and yes Flash sucks balls. But going to MS to "cure" us from Adobe is beyond reason.

Re:The story is crap, but

[Scrameustache]

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.

Do you, by any chance, also really like astroturf?
It sounds like you do.

Re:The story is crap, but

[Bert64]

People had computers at home long before MS...
Commodore were big, Atari, Sinclair, and countless others... Commodore's Amiga line was actually massively superior to the offerings from IBM and Apple in those days, and a big part of that was the software.

Re:The story is crap, but

[Bert64]

Silicon costs money to produce, you can't give it away for free without some other source of revenue to carry it, or you will eventually run out of money to buy the source materials.
Software can be given away for free.

Re:The story is crap, but

[Draek]

So you think that pushing one OS above the others is worse than putting an innocent man on jail for interfering with their business model?

Microsoft has done a *lot* of despicable things throughout their relatively young age (IE's 'purchase' comes to mind), but they still have a long way to go 'til they reach the level of scum of Adobe.

Re:The story is crap, but

[Max Littlemore]

Actually, I would support Xbox 360, if it weren't for all the problems. I have a 1.5 Xbox and it's still used. But that's the market I'm happy for MS to play in - toys. They have strong competition, and let's face it, games is what they do best. For a lot of people, the only remaining thing tying them to MS is the games. Let them have it, I say, just don't buy anything else.

Re:change we can believe in my b****

[mazarin5]

Whoops

Hulu? Youtube?

[E3nder]

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.

Re:Hulu? Youtube?

[msuarezalvarez]

Don't you think that the very point is that this is the *official* site we are talking about?

Re:Hulu? Youtube?

[E3nder]

I mean, I get what you are saying...but they had to choose some platform. So they chose microsoft *shrug* if they had chosen adobe would we still be having this conversation?

All I'm trying to say is that I really think the article blurb is incredibly misleading and this really isn't a "slap in the face" or anything that people should really feel wronged about.

Choose your fights I guess is the moral. I remember being pretty pissed when Deval Patrick axed Massachusetts plans to get away from Microsoft for state documents...and in the end an issue like that is really where the open source community should be focusing its efforts on.

Re:Hulu? Youtube?

[tedu_again]

There's a big difference between saying "can't watch it online" and "can't watch it online *at the official website*". The latter is disappointing, the former is a lie.

Re:Hulu? Youtube?

[msuarezalvarez]

And you can probably use butterflies too, bypassing the whole issue... But the point is, this thread is about the official site.

Re:Hulu? Youtube?

[techno-vampire]

So they chose microsoft *shrug* if they had chosen adobe would we still be having this conversation?

No. That would have been a non-story because there are plugins for Flash for all modern browsers running under (probably) any modern OS that you care to use. That would make it easy for anybody who wanted to watch the inauguration through the official website, instead of excluding everybody who isn't using Windows.

Re:Hulu? Youtube?

[im_thatoneguy]

No.

I think it's because it's an easy place to slam Microsoft.

Silverlight handled the Olympics which is an amazing feat. People who make decisions like to have previous successes to look at when choosing between similar options.

"You have two options
1) You can use a proprietary Adobe Flash based system which will work on 99% of all computers and used used by companies like Youtube.
or
2) you can use a proprietary Microsoft Silverlight based solution which will work on 98% of all computers. It was used in the US to stream all of the Olympics coverage live. Also it's been successfully used by Netflix to stream high quality footage to both Macs and PCs.

"Thanks...both look like good options but netflix is higher quality video than Youtube right?"
"Yes."
"Go with the netflix/olympics one then!"

Re:Hulu? Youtube?

[plasmacutter]

ilverlight handled the Olympics which is an amazing feat.

yep, bribing a couple chinese officials is a really amazing feat!

i mean.. those guys need millions, not just the hundreds of thousands us politicians demand.

Joost is advertising that they will stream it live

[Tran]

Since I watch Joost shows sometimes on the Mac without having silverlight installed, I assume that it is not a requirement there either.

Re:False, false false...

[Ilgaz]

It is Intel only. Lots of people , especially G5 home/business users excluding big time gamers didn't upgrade to Intel yet. Apple knows this fact very well as they still ship iLife/iWork 09 as Universal binary. Adobe Flash 10 for example is both universal binary and recently SMP enabled for PPC dual G4s etc.

Like the dotcom boom days, MS can air a "exclusive Madonna concert" via silverlight, to make it popular and make people install it but this event isn't a Madonna concert or a Hollywood trailer. They couldn't convince their own OS users yet.

Re:False, false false...

[Pop69]

Because it's correct, there's only a version 1 runtime for Mac PPC.

version Silverlight 1 GDR 2 (1.0.30109.0) according to Firefox 3.0.5 on my G4 iBook

Re:False, false false...

[SwedishPenguin]

Note the PPC, PowerPC.

Re:change we can believe in my b****

[V!NCENT]

http://digg.com/

Buying market share

[IGnatius T Foobar]

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.

Obvious, but...

[Smitty825]

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!

Re:Obvious, but...

[TeXMaster]

Open, Free Codecs that work everywhere are surprisingly non-existent. I'd like to see that change!

Last time I checked, Ogg Vorbis was open, free and cross-platform. It was also proposed as the standard for HTML5 precisely for these qualities.

Silverlight 2

[coryking]

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).

Re:Silverlight 2

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Meh. Flash is bad enough, why would I want to hand Microsoft monopoly control of the development tools AND content distribution on the intertubes? What will be the result for HTML5 and web standards?

Count me out, but it sounds like you're already a lap-dog.

Re:Silverlight 2

[Dotren]

I could be wrong, but I believe one of the main differences between Silverlight 1 and 2 was back-end languages.

Silverlight 1 used a Javascript back-end while Silverlight 2 uses a .Net language back-end (C# or VB.Net). Silverlight in general uses a subset of the WPF system which is why its also named WPF/E which stands for Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (which indicates its use as a web platform instead of for desktops).

MOD PARENT UP

[JonJ]

Why in the world is this moderated troll?

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[narcberry]

Yeah, should be redundant.

You can watch in silverlight, or you can head over to youtube, or turn on your television. There are dozens of places to watch this thing. Article is misleading, parent is mislead.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[betterunixthanunix]

You are misleading as well. The Obama team has been heavily focused on using the Internet, and their choice Internet deliver methods is very important. The choice to use Silverlight 2, and offer no alternative for users who cannot use that platform (PowerPC users, people with out of date computers, etc.), and to offer no non-streaming alternative (for people without reliable Internet connections, or who want a copy on their hard drive without worrying about copyright issues), indicates something about their "tech savvy campaign." The outsourced their content deliver to some company that sounds like the 2009 equivalent of a dot-com, and gave no consideration to any tech issues beyond what the latest buzzword is (hint: web enabled streaming media).

Yes, the TV option is still available, but this team has not given it much attention. This team is setting a precedent in streaming the proceedings, and future presidents will follow this example. My biggest concern is that, over the next decade, the ability to record a TV program will only be available to those who pay for "DVR service," likely locked down to prevent users from keeping copies without paying, and that if that happens, and these proceedings are streamed by websites like YouTube, people will lose their ability to keep personal copies of government proceedings. Most people will just shrug, but for some activists, the ability to record the government is important and should not be lost because of misguided efforts to be "tech savvy."

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[narcberry]

Mod me flamebait.

The Messiah didn't endorse my favorite media encoding!!!

With the vapor he sold during his campaign, and the fickleness of his once-upon-a-time supporters, I'm surprised people aren't calling for his impeachment already.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[betterunixthanunix]

Who said anything about encoding? I was talking about content delivery, and all I said was that SOME downloadable or non-web based alternative should have been provided, as well as listing scenarios in which such an alternative would be necessary.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[YourExperiment]

if that happens, and these proceedings are streamed by websites like YouTube, people will lose their ability to keep personal copies of government proceedings

It's easy to download YouTube videos. Admittedly there isn't a big button on the site to do so, to make it easy for the less technically minded users, but they're hardly the ones who are likely to be concerned about YouTube's effect on their democratic rights.

Re:Lying or Insane or just SlashDot?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're confused. Unicasting is one stream per client. Multicasting is one shared stream. Multicasting is generally only available in local area networks, though, and not over the internet.

Re:False, false false...

[FishWithAHammer]

Silverlight 1 is the video streaming stuff. That actually should work fine...

Re:False, false false...

[FishWithAHammer]

I think it's less "convincing" users, it's more that developers aren't aboard the bandwagon. I didn't install Silverlight until a website I visited used it, and I'm a .NET developer. This will probably drive a good chunk of it.

May I respectfully suggest the damn TV?

[slightly99]

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.

Re:May I respectfully suggest the damn TV?

[joshbosh]

I agree.

Personally, I haven't owned a television since 2003, but I'm also the type of person who would never watch an inauguration. I'm having difficulty imagining a person who would watch an inauguration but not own a television. Are there any of you out there?

Re:May I respectfully suggest the damn TV?

[trawg]

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.

You should probably avoid reading sites that are intended for nerds, cuz they'll probably delve into the technical aspects when the Common People start talking about ze innernetz!

Re:May I respectfully suggest the damn TV?

[drspliff]

I don't have a TV...

Actually, why do I even want to watch the fucking inauguration?

Re:May I respectfully suggest the damn TV?

[greenreaper]

Some of us don't *have* TV, you insensitive clod!

Re:May I respectfully suggest the damn TV?

[Phroggy]

I agree.

Personally, I haven't owned a television since 2003, but I'm also the type of person who would never watch an inauguration. I'm having difficulty imagining a person who would watch an inauguration but not own a television. Are there any of you out there?

Hi!

Re:May I respectfully suggest the damn TV?

[rantingkitten]

That's a great idea except that the inauguration takes place at noon, Eastern time, when most Americans are at work. I don't have a television at my office. I don't think there's been a television at *any* place I've worked unless you count my table-waiting days.

If I could watch online, that'd be ideal, and my boss wouldn't even care -- but where am I supposed to find a TV?

Re:May I respectfully suggest the damn TV?

[mgblst]

Yeah, it will on every channel all over the fucking world...oh yeah, thats right, we don't all live in your little country!

Moonlight

[dontgetshocked]

Can we not use Moonlight instead of MS to view the broadcast?

Okay

[coryking]

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.

free ideals

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.

Re:Okay

[rtb61]

Actually the most likely reality is someone really cheap (as in how much he was paid by the political party versus how much he was paid by 'er' someone else) came in to do that part of web site and made some choices that where motivated less by their loyalty to the future administration and more by their loyatly to silverfish. A political web site is a political web site, everything about it is part of the message not just the content.

So the Obama camp is already starting to learn some lessons of how it can be manipulated to promote greed based corporate ideals. Of how it's message can be hijacked to promote some deceitful corporations agenda.

It is a major flub, a demonstration of being exploited by corporate intrests right at the very beginning of their term, a painful lesson to be learned but one they need to remember. Not all of their staff, will in reality be their staff and many of them will be their to serve other peoples interests and not the interests of the government they claim to be serving.

Re:Okay

[coryking]

I'm curious what they should be using beside Silverlight? Flash is just as "non-free" as Silverlight, isn't it? Keep in mind a requirement has to be "embeds in the web-page, runs on a good chunk of browsers, and works like youtube".

Having some kind of text-link that you click on to open up a non-embeded browser doesn't cut it (which is what CSPAN does). Most people get confused by that stuff. Whatever your alternative is, bottom line is it has to work like youtube.

A wise person would note that I'm asking for a trade off here. Being "open" means more then just the FSF definition. "Open" means anybody can not just get to your content, but can do so in a way that is easy. Thus, "Open" and "Easy to use" go pretty much hand in hand. You can't be open to all people if your website is shitty and hard to use. And you can have a easy to use website that doesn't have any useful content (thus not being open).

Since the website has to be easy to use to be "open", you need to make sure your video can stream in a way most users are familiar with. And that means "make it work like youtube". You will find that it is just all but impossible to make a "youtube" without Flash or Silverlight.

Life is full of tradeoffs. You may now commence moderating me into the floor for being a "M$" shill or whatever...

Re:Okay

[jlarocco]

Please get a clue. If the government creates software and releases the code, the code is public domain. Ditto with documents. The government doesn't really have a choice in the matter.

Re:Okay

[Ultra64]

I'm curious what they should be using beside Silverlight? Flash is just as "non-free" as Silverlight, isn't it?

Sigh. The entire point of this article is that Silverlight only runs on Windows. If they had chosen Flash then people on Mac/Linux/FreeBSD/whatever could watch it.

You should pay attention to the conversations you're in.

Re:Okay

[icebraining]

Where is the ease of use in running Silverlight on Linux? Or should I have to install Windows just to watch that video?

At least Flash as more than one OS version and even free (as in freedom) players, like Gnash.

Re:Okay

[XcepticZP]

"silverfish"? That doesn't sound like a typo.

That is just seriously immature on your part. I frankly didn't read the rest of your post when I read that one word. It's like having a debate with someone and instead of replying with something meaningful, or at the very least witty, you reply with an ad hominem. Want someone to take your opinion seriously? Then ditch the insults and ditch the immature behaviour.

Yes, I do realize I'm being somewhat of a hypocrite by not replying to any of your points and instead only focusing on one word you wrote.

Re:Okay

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

You don't get it ... the actual images are free ... the software REQUIRED to watch them isn't.

It's like you're saying "the program that landed the apollo on the moon is public domain, so anybody can land on the moon !".

I suppose one might even conceed that it's technically not entirely wrong ...

Bullshit = what obama offered for votes. Freedom of you&me = what obama offered to the highest bidder (to MS, RIAA, MPAA, etc so we'll hear a lot more from him soon enough).

Re:Okay

[jlarocco]

WTF are you talking about? The guy I replied to said he'd like the government to release software and documents under BSD license and Creative Commons. I was simply pointing out that they're already required to release stuff under a less restrictive license. We weren't talking about Silverlight.

As for Obama's campaign promises being bullshit... Anybody with half a brain should have realized both Obama and McCain were full of shit and begging for votes. Or maybe you're just not "hoping" hard enough.

Re:Okay

[Poltras]

Bullshit = what obama offered for votes. Freedom of you&me = what obama offered to the highest bidder (to MS, RIAA, MPAA, etc so we'll hear a lot more from him soon enough).

Oh yeah, the old "that guy offered you bullshit for votes" argument, hiding the opinion that you should have voted for that other guy. "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos..."

Re:Okay

[rtb61]

You really don't get it. This is the introduction to their term of office, it should be seen to be unbiased, putting a link on that page to a commercial web site immediately implies a preference by the administration for the product they are now directly advertising and promoting. It has very little to do with M$ and everything to do with demonstrating political maturity and independence, especially right at the very beginning of their term of office.

'Seen to be clean' should be a priority especially after the shameless and very public corporate biases of the previous administration. So quite simply as many formats for viewing as will clearly demonstrate no biases and this could quite simply be done by making the content available the most popular methods, rather than locking it down to one not very popular method that specifically excludes the use of competing products.

Re:Okay

[rtb61]

I prefer silverfish, mainly because of M$ being such a marketing driven company it is bound to niggle at them and I find the thought, well, to be blunt quite humorous. Also I feel that my very mild poke at the M$ marketing team is still far less than the years of M$ abuse at the FOSS movement ie. a cancer, terrorists use it, hackers prefer it et al, and, those where not from some random poster's on a forum (that has funny mods) but from the senior executives of the company and spread in every commercial mass media outlet they could spread their message of well, hate, with absolutely no humour or even satire intended, just a message of greed.

So forgive me my sense of humour and I will definitely 'not ever' take your criticism to heart ;).

Re:Okay

[Bert64]

Flash has an open spec available: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/, silverlight does not.
Flash is available for linux, silverlight is not
Flash is available for PPC macs, silverlight is not
Flash is already installed on most systems, silverlight is not (i have an intel mac and never even thought about installing it)
Flash is a tried and tested, mature technology with years of usage and any large websites using it, silverlight is not and does not.
Flash is available for some embedded devices such as nokia internet tablets and the nintendo wii, silverlight is not

So Flash is clearly a better option than silverlight on so many levels, even if it isn't an ideal option. If you have to make tradeoffs, why make unnecessary ones?

Re:Okay

[Rich0]

So the Obama camp is already starting to learn some lessons of how it can be manipulated to promote greed based corporate ideals. Of how it's message can be hijacked to promote some deceitful corporations agenda.

Ok, look - I prefer Obama to Bush no doubt. However, the guy doesn't walk on water.

When the Bush administration awards contracts to Haliburton we don't hear about how special interests are manipulating the administration to serve their own ideals - we hear about how Bush is corrupt. Either a president is responsible for his administration, or he isn't. If the president can appoint political cronys, and then not be held responsible for their action, then what exactly has Bush done that's all that bad? Half of his horrible policies were originally thought up and promoted by somebody who worked for him. I hold him accountable, because ultimately he signed on the line, and he chose the people working for him.

News flash - Obama isn't perfect either. His administration is going to grant favors/etc to their own special interests. I didn't see Obama voting against the copyright czar or anything.

Now, compared to gitmo I think I can deal with silverlight. However, I see this as just business as usual in Washington, and I'm expecting to see another 4-80 more years of that based on what I've seen to date. I think a lot of under-25-year-old bubbles are going to get burst...

Re:Okay

[WNight]

moderating me into the floor for being a "M$" shill

Well, you do see the requirements not in terms of what the users truly want, but what Silverlight does, (which is copy flash) so it's not surprising you that what you think is needed is some lame flash-happy thing like Youtube.

I *just* showed a group of people around Youtube (they sent me a joke video in email, I showed them how to find it on Youtube instead of having to email it around). Their whole complaint about the site was how it was this crappy little player embedded in the page. Nothing worked right, and this was on a new laptop running vista. When we tried to maximize the video it stopped and reloaded, starting the download and playback from scratch. When we tried to thumb through the movie it jerked, jumped back some random amount, buffered sections it had already downloaded, etc. The UI wouldn't expand usefully, so we all had to cluster around the laptop.

Pretty much nothing about it was intuitive or useful.

What they asked for, SPECIFICALLY, was the video to pop up in their REGULAR MEDIA PLAYER (one with controls that works, that streams reliably, etc) and for youtube to present the new videos as a list with thumbnail instead of this popping up over the video you just watched (got accidentally clicked more than once, which then again, probably is the point...)

So, you seem big on pushing how Obama really needs to use some crappy new MS clone of a Adobe brain-fart, so that the people who could otherwise just click on a streaming video link on a webpage now have to navigate some flash-crap that crawled out of the sewer, obeying no rules of god or UI, and all of this you advocate in the name of true freedom! Freedom from the tyranny of RMS!

Well, yes, you do seem like just a bit of a loon.

Thanks, but I'll have MY freedom served as an HTTP-compliant web-page and a selection of download links.

Re:Okay

[shutdown -p now]

Flash has an open spec available: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/, silverlight does not.

Except that it does. C# and CLI are both ISO standards. The general XAML spec, and the Silverlight vocabulary, are both available from Microsoft under the "Open Specification Promise".

But...

[slapout]

I didn't vote for Obama you insensitive clod!

Re:But...

[Boronx]

That was you?

Submitted to change.gov

[andrewpmk]

http://citizensbriefingbook.change.gov/ideas/viewIdea.apexp?id=087800000005BUn

Since you are so cool

[coryking]

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.

Re:Since you are so cool

[Bert64]

You can do that in Flash and Java too, and far more people will be able to use it.... You will find that there are even pre written ones widely available already.

They could have..

[Dotren]

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?

Re:They could have..

[Ilgaz]

It is a issue because the vendor has horrible record with multiplatform support, dropping the support without giving any explanation (in case of OSX/PPC) and trick people via unofficial open source implementations of frameworks which always lacks an important part.

Right after Apple announced Intel switch, instead of partying there as the Endian issue is gone, it will be easy as cake to port to x86 which they have very deep knowledge, they dropped Windows Media Player for OS X. It wouldn't matter to you but it really matters to companies who spent almost a million to their pay for view over net and did the mistake of choosing wmedia drm solutions. Now they are watching 30% of site visitors come and go without a chance of buying anything from them.

After years in a job which really requires to know the "media players" scene, I can easily tell that Microsoft is the last alternative to consider especially in this massively multiplatform scene which people started to expect their TV set top box or phone to show Youtube.

Re:They could have..

[Dotren]

I'm aware of the history but call me optimistic... I'm hoping the shift in the Microsoft leadership in the last years may be for the better. I'm thinking the future of the Mac and Linux implementions of Silverlight could be a good indication on whether anything has really changed or not. I'm hoping that Microsoft learns from the success of Adobe and realizes targetting one specific platform doesn't necessarily increase that platform's market share... I think this is especially true for web applications, although this may change in the future as more companies attempt to move their applications onto the web platform.

As I mentioned in another post, I really hope Silverlight's adoption rate rises and that they follow through on the cross-platform promises. I want there to be some competition for Flash/Flex just as I want competition for Silverlight. I'm hoping some really good features will spring out of both products because of this.

Granted, its not likely to happen, but what if Adobe pulled out of any sort of future Flash/Flex development? Sure, another competitor would pop up at some point but really there doesn't seem to be a lot out there right now (that I've found anyway) with the feature set of either Flash or Silverlight.

Re:You cannot read

[tedu_again]

First line of the summary: "Ilgaz writes in to let us know that we will have to install MS Silverlight 2 to watch the US President's inauguration online." Nowhere is the possibility of other websites mentioned.

It's what you get.

[iamghetto]

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.

Hopefully the W3C will compete

[coryking]

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).

Re:Hopefully the W3C will compete

[lord_sarpedon]

Apparently the semantic meaning of eleventeen levels of nested div tags is lost on you.

Re:Lying or Insane or just SlashDot?

[Vexorian]

Next time try reading the comments already posted so you don't have to post an insanely long post full of stuff already debunked by the comments above, Thanks.

Whether Silverlight is better or not than flash is completely irrelevant here.

What is more...

[Eirenarch]

People who don't own a computer cannot watch the stream. Outrageous!

Anti-competitive my rear.

[coryking]

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.

Re:Anti-competitive my rear.

[zero-point-infinity]

Two fields of competition. The GP's post wasn't referring to competition between Silverlight and Flash. He was referring to Silverlight's effect on OS competition. That is, if Silverlight's relevance to the internet increases without the plugin getting ported, then it's bad for the ability of other OS's to be/become competitive choices.

Re:Anti-competitive my rear.

[gtbritishskull]

It is anti-competitive to use a proprietary software to broadcast an event such as this when a significant percentage of computers (running incompatible OS's) can't use it. If they streamed it in both media, then it would be competitive.

Re:Anti-competitive my rear.

[KasperMeerts]

It's anticompetitive because it doesn't run on Mac PPC, Linux and FreeBSD? RFTS.
And I doubt it'll force Adobe to improve. And those W3C idiots will never do something worthwhile. They had something great going with Canvas but I don't think a lot will come of that. Too bad.

Re:Anti-competitive my rear.

[icebraining]

Hopefully Silverlight will die soon so users from other OSs than Microsoft's can enjoy the videos, with open or closed source software.

Re:Anti-competitive my rear.

[Macthorpe]

It's anticompetitive because it doesn't run on Mac PPC, Linux and FreeBSD? RFTS.

Firstly, Apple don't support Mac PPC anymore, why the fuck should anybody else?

Secondly, Linux and FreeBSD account for less than a single percentage point of the desktop market. Even so, you have people working on it.

Thirdly and finally, you don't have to watch at the official site. There's probably a hundred places online you could watch it. If you don't want to use Silverlight - don't.

Re:Anti-competitive my rear.

[Wovel]

80% of /. never heard of the presidential inaguaration comittee web site.
90% of the remaining 20% will not watch any of it over the Internet (Perhaps TV!!).
90% of the remaining 10% of 20% will watch a stream from a major media outlet (CNN, CSPAN, MSNBC, FOX, ABC, CBS...)
99.9% of the remaining 10% of 10% of 20% will be using Windows or OSX (Intel-Mac)
The President elect would like to extend his heart felt apologies to Chuck in Ohio.

Re:Anti-competitive my rear.

[KingMotley]

No it isn't. Silver light runs on Windows (http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/), Windows CE (http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/), Mac OS/X (http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/), and if you want to run it on linux or use, go use moonlight (http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight).

Re:Anti-competitive my rear.

[DavoMan]

Separation of applications and physical hardware via abstraction layers (an API) is something you've never heard of before it seems.

Re:Anti-competitive my rear.

[Bert64]

Silverlight has a very tiny installbase right now.... The fact that many *could* install it if they wanted to isn't terribly important.

The same argument is used against making sites that use modern css features and sending out files in opendocument formats and such, only in this case an even larger percentage of users *could* install supported apps if they wanted.

Linux and BSD may have a small percentage of the desktop market, but what about the sub desktop, ie mobile phones, small tablets (like nokia's), set top boxes etc... By using silverlight you are excluding all these users... Flash may not be perfect, but it has much wider support on such devices.

Re:Anti-competitive my rear.

[Bert64]

Joe public is more likely to be watching the TV...
Technically oriented people are more likely to be using the Internet to stream, and the use of Linux (and linux devices like nokia tablets etc) is much higher among technically literate people.

Re:Anti-competitive my rear.

[Macthorpe]

No users are being excluded except from one site, and that's a decision that should be made by the site administrators. As they're using government money, I would argue that whichever solution they could use that was the cheapest for them to implement (and I include training/hiring in that) should be used. Of course, that's not something we're really privy to.

What I'm trying to say is - people who would use those devices in the way you're positing are a vanishingly small percentage of computer users. Is it really worth the extra cost when other sites are willing to bear the brunt of that support for you?

Re:Anti-competitive my rear.

[DaVince21]

Actually, W3C is already getting off their asses with interactive SVG specifications. Or last time I looked, at least.

Re:Anti-competitive my rear.

[remmelt]

How does the W3C fit into this? If Flash didn't "light a fire in their ass," neither will Silverlight. The W3C is a godsend for web developers, even if they move slowly. It has nothing to do with Flash or Silverlight, and the W3C does not hold any kind of monopoly over developers. If you do not recognize the benefits of having clear and open standards, especially for the web, I don't know if you should be developing for it. It's your choice to develop against MS' or your own standards, but don't complain when your complex, in-the-browser interface doesn't work on 20% of your users' computers.

Flash/Silverlight is no silver bullet. It breaks loads of usability rules, it doesn't act like webpages are supposed to for most of the time. You have to re-learn an interface for each site you visit. Scrollbars don't work with the scroll wheel. Deep bookmarks are off. Can't save pictures unless you screenshot. This is just off the top of my head. But yeah, go right ahead with the complex interfaces. In the meantime, Google makes an easy interface, see Gmail or Maps, and wins all your users.

I'm sorry to say this, but you are missing several points here and it's showing.

Re:Anti-competitive my rear.

[debatem1]

I realize I'm jumping into this tempest in a teacup a little late, but the percentage of users without silverlight installed is huge. According to riastats.com its something like 83%. I'm no expert, but simply from a marketing standpoint, I have to question why they would go with a technology that has less than twenty percent market penetration if they were as concerned about being accessible to all as they claim.
The obvious counterargument, and the one that you've advanced, is that just because somebody doesn't have silverlight doesn't mean they can't have silverlight. Being honest, that doesn't pass the whose-bull-is-gored test- if this were a scenario in which only Linux users could access information about an event of national importance, I doubt you would be arguing that 99% of those interested should go fsck themselves.

Re:Anti-competitive my rear.

[Macthorpe]

The OS supporting it in hardware is one thing, actual software support is quite another.

Apple do not support people coding for PPC. 10.5 removed support for older PPC processors as well. You're a lucky G4 user to be able to use Leopard.

Re:Anti-competitive my rear.

[ThrowAwaySociety]

Firstly, Apple don't support Mac PPC anymore

Yes, it does. All of Apple's current software, including the stuff they released this month, runs natively on PPC.

Same as the old boss...

[mkcmkc]

As someone incisively said:

There's only one political party in the United States, and you're not in it.

Windows only?

[billiam247]

Silverlight works on my Mac. Check your basic facts before you post bullshit. Who the hell modded that insightful?

MS has pulled this stunt before

[walterbyrd]

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.

May I respectfully suggest you do your homework?

[Palshife]

YouTube. The BBC. Hulu. You're welcome.

I feel you brotha

[coryking]

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.

Re:I feel you brotha

[novakyu]

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.

BTW, Sarah Palin's speeches at the Republican national convention *was* available as embedded YouTube video. From that, you should be able to use free software tools to extract the video and convert it to whichever format you prefer.

Obama is just doing what the Democrats have been doing since, oh, at least the Democratic national convention, where video was streamed with Silverlight, which means there was no way you could watch it using free software only. I guess this just proves that Obama is just another Democrat in bed with Microsoft.

By that definition

[coryking]

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?

Re:By that definition

[coryking]

Sorry to inform you, but your definition of "open" isn't in line with the RMS/FSF party line. Pretty much MPEG* has all kinds of patents that would exclude it from use. Theora and Vorbis are the only video/audio codecs that would most likely pass the RMS/FSF smell test.

You still need a way to either offer a second stream or embed the Vorbis/Theora stream into a browser. And you would have to require Windows and most likely Mac users to install both codecs.

Re:By that definition

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Silverlight also requires an install on just about any system.

And I don't care about any patents that I can safely use. So let's keep the mpeg standard in there. The only problems are for hardware manufacturers and there's no open hardware at all yet.

Re:By that definition

[Thinboy00]

According to TFA the parent linked to (the FAQ), the patent agreement appears to comply rather nicely with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (which are identical to the requirements OSI published) since according to the FAQ, "You are free to download VP3, use it free of charge, implement it in a for-sale product, implement it in a free product, make changes to the source and distribute those changes, or print the source code out and wallpaper your spare room with it. "

Re:By that definition

[oddityfds]

No, there's a Java-based player for Vorbis+Theora. Here's an example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ubuntu_install_and_remove.ogg

Re:By that definition

[binarylarry]

Java tends have better performance than .NET, which is what Sliverlight uses. .NET is a clone of Java, FYI.

Re:By that definition

[Bert64]

Flash and Java run on more devices, so while not perfect they are a better choice.
The Flash specification has been available for years, and recently the terms were relaxed to permit using the spec to produce a player...
Java is now open source and free for anyone to port to a new platform if they wish.

The makers of Flash and Java want their systems to be ported to new platforms... They want it to spread far and wide.
The makers of silverlight want it to be tied to their platform, so it can be used as another weapon to prevent people going to competing platforms.

In order for a new platform to support java or flash, developers would need to read the existing documentation or possibly port some existing code...
In order to support silverlight they would need to reverse engineer the existing implementation, and risk being sued for violating patents.

Re:By that definition

[SerpentMage]

Ever heard of MONO...

Re:By that definition

[Bert64]

Yes, perpetually behind, not fully compatible etc...
And what are the chances of MS continuing to assist the mono project once they have achieved their goals of eliminating the competition?

Re:By that definition

[Elektroschock]

* A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.
        * The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organization, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties.
        * The standard has been published and the standard specification document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy, distribute, and use it freely.
        * The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.
        * There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.

The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of products based on the standard.

Would you be willing to pay increased tax

[coryking]

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?

Re:Would you be willing to pay increased tax

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

HIGHER taxes ? Have you priced the DRM server licence fees lately ? You need those even if you don't have any limitations.

+ the streaming servers
+ "backup" installations

All those need at least windows 2003 server licences, in addition to all other costs. Given that you need servers with 5000 CALs, that's over 100.000 of your tax dollars right there. And that's just the operating software.

I'd do it for 10.000. Easily.

Streaming open formats would be cheaper, not more expensive. It's just that he ... got money from microsoft.

And don't worry, the RIAA paid him lots more than microsoft ever did. So we'll be hearing more Obama related "details" soon enough.

But of course we'll always have obamatons. Like those elvis people.

Re:Would you be willing to pay increased tax

[Alex Belits]

Are you willing to pay higher taxes to offer streaming in several formats?

Yes.

If yes, please go lobby the administration.

Lobbying is literally millions times more expensive than total increase in taxes to implement this. Hell, a plane ticket from most of US to Washington is more expensive than total cost of configuring the whole thing.

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.

You are ignorant and likely also stupid.

They can stream it in Ogg Theora (that would be completely open format, completely open codec and completely open software) or any incarnation of MPEG (they all have free software implementations and therefore supported). The only reason for Flash being used as a player is the fact that Microsoft Media Player never was distributed with a decent set of codecs. The use of plugins and external players for video predates Flash by many years, however every time anyone implemented it, there were millions of users who discovered that their Windows Media Player, the only players they had, supported the set of codecs that no one wanted to use for streaming. It was easier to force users to install Flash plugin, a completely unrelated application that happens to include a better video player than to distribute a codec in any other way.

Now Microsoft, instead of fixing its mistake and including codecs with Media Player, pushes an even more retarded application trying to out-Adobe the Adobe -- except, of course, without support for any OS other than Windows.

Re:Would you be willing to pay increased tax

[marhar]

Are you willing to pay higher taxes to offer streaming in several formats?

Dude, how much does that cost? They're paying $150 million for the thing!

Re:Would you be willing to pay increased tax

[sumdumass]

It doesn't need to be in several formats, it doesn't even need to be a non-proprietary format. Just one format that has been around and is availible to anyone on any operating system. Streaming video isn't something new, it isn't something that only MS can do, and even MS has the ability to stream it using formats that other operating systems can readily use.

The biggest objection is the shortsighted definition of open. It's as if open and inclusive now mean only if you have recently paid the companies we support. If they are willing to narrow the definition on something as meaningless as this, what are they going to do when it starts really mattering? I and a lot of other people are starting to notice that this openness and inclusive yes we can bit is nothing more then political speak designed to trick people into voting for them. The only change will be who's pockets are going to get lined, outside that's its back to the same old.

Re:Would you be willing to pay increased tax

[Bert64]

Youtube uses flash, making it like youtube would be far preferable as flash is far more accessible and widely supported than silverlight.
Flash also has an open specification available for anyone to implement at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/

So i would consider using flash, just like youtube, to be a perfectly valid way to stream the video, which would support far more users than silverlight.

I do

[coryking]

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.

Re:I do

[mi]

The solution, provided you are willing to bear the cost (i.e. taxes) would be to offer the stream in a secondary format.

I had no problems watching the presidential debates on FreeBSD/amd64 computer. The cost of offering an mpg- or mp4-stream (the latter immediately viewable by iPhone-users, BTW) is negligible, even if, indeed, used as a secondary format. But why not offer it is the only format?

Re:I do

[coryking]

Because if you made it the only format, it might not be one that can embed in the webpage ala youtube. A secondary stream would let not only your FreeBSD box get in on the party, it would let my windows-based SageTV get in the party as well.

Your solution would still piss off the die-hard open source people. You 100% sure mp4 is open as in RMS/FSF open? I bet it has some patents on it that would still warrant at least a couple troll-stories on the front page of Slashdot.

Re:I do

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Unless they'd DROP silverlight, which only runs on expensive licenced windows server. And they need a LOT of servers to be at least somewhat sure of having a decent chance to withstand a DDOS.

Getting 5 sufficiently licenced silverlight streaming servers costs more than the contents of Al Gore's garage. And it's a VERY nice garage (although perhaps a bit high on that utterly dangerous polluting "inconvenient truth" gas there).

Bullshit = what obama offered for votes. Kicking people in the teeth ala RIAA = what obama offered for money.

Re:I do

[mi]

Because if you made it the only format, it might not be one that can embed in the webpage ala youtube.

I have not used Windows in over 10 years, but I'm pretty certain, MP4 can be embedded in a web-page.

And if, somehow, receiving such content is still too difficult for some people (YouTube requires flash, which too requires some futzing around once), well, those people will be watching inauguration on TV.

Were is FOSS

[zappa86]

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.

Re:Were is FOSS

[Stu Charlton]

SImply put, the FOSS technology sucks. If it was better (video quality / usability, for starters), then people would be inclined to use it.

Or alternatively-histerically.

[Ostracus]

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.

Re:Lying or Insane or just SlashDot?

[OrangeTide]

multicast works fine over the internet if you host from an multicast IP. Clients tell local routers they are interested in multicast IP, and whenever the server sends datagrams to that IP all the clients in the world who are tied to it will get the datagram.

It is technical to setup a multicast server, any old website can't just do it by starting up a daemon. But clients can access multicast easily.

Silverlight 2 on PowerPC

[StrahdVZ]

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/

Wrong crowd

[Jay L]

I'm having difficulty imagining a person who would watch an inauguration but not own a television.

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

[coryking]

Given that you need servers with 5000 CALs

You are wrong. Windows Media Server is licensed per server, not per client. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/server/version.aspx

I'd do it for 10.000. Easily.

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.

It's just that he ... got money from microsoft.

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.

Re:You are wrong

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

So Obama's been using proprietary software straight from the beginning, and now they would have high costs due to the lock in generated ?

Now there's something that he could not possibly have foreseen, after all, that never happened before.

And the lock-in affecting his "users" is also becoming obvious. There's just one problem. He's going to be the president and we're ALL users of the organization he's going to lead (and lock into microsoft).

It's also called LOCK in for a reason. And, on top of that, obama took heaps of money from both the RIAA and the MPAA. So it won't be restricted to some stupid website.

Some people still pay attention to legal matters

[betterunixthanunix]

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.

And delivery?

[jpmorgan]

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?

Re:And delivery?

[TeXMaster]

And what technology is available for Ogg Theora (not Vorbis) that can encode and stream a live event to hundreds of millions of people?

VideoLAN Client (VLC for short), for example, is free, open source, does Ogg Vorbis (for audio) and Theora (for video), and it can be used both as the streaming server AND as the client, on Linux, Windows and Apple computers.

I'll bet you

[coryking]

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 isn't flash

[coryking]

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".

Re:It isn't flash

[Lennie]

Click here for VLC wouldn't be all that bad. ;-)

So then you have no answer

[coryking]

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?

Re:So then you have no answer

[DavoMan]

You can. Use either an embedded player with a streaming codec, or use Ogg Vorbis which should be natively supported by the new HTML sexyness.

Re:So then you have no answer

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

So democrats never do any name calling ? Yeah I remember that. It's just that when pointing out the many (expensive) flaws of obama, you need to keep remembering :

Dissent is the highest form of patriottism (warranted or not, though of course with lets-spend-3-billion-this-week obama it's not that hard to have warrranted criticism)

"Bush was the highest increase ever for the public debt" ... until the first day in office of obama, of course. obama spends in one day what suffices bush for nearly a year.
And the problem I have with him spending ? He's going to print the money, in other words, he's de-facto lowering the value of the dollars in anyone's pocket, but mostly the ones in your paycheck. Every dollar he spends is de-facto another tax on all of us.

Re:So then you have no answer

[WNight]

Who, other than an Adobe or MS Exec wants it to embedded and obfuscated like that? YouTube is popular because of the content, the free hosting, and (pray for their souls) the forums, not their stunning UI.

Silverlight - The YouTube creation kit

Not perhaps the catchiest motto...

Re:So then you have no answer

[Elektroschock]

You can provide multiple streams, this is no technological problem.

Hope

[Brandybuck]

Here's to four years of hoping for change...

Cross-Platform

[Detritus]

Microsoft's definition of cross-platform: Vista and Windows XP. Anything that threatens the hegemony of Windows must be destroyed. Standards are for losers.

Re:Cross-Platform

[shutdown -p now]

Yes, I mean they couldn't even release Silverlight for OS X... oh wait... except they did.

Re:Cross-Platform

[Detritus]

The important question is, will it still be actively supported in five years? Microsoft has a bad habit of releasing products in response to short-term needs, only to let them die when the threat has passed.

Re:Cross-Platform

[shutdown -p now]

After all the anti-trust suits? You bet it will. It doesn't hurt the baseline much - no-one, including Apple, expects OS X to grow outside its present "trendy" 10% of the desktop niche. MSOffice is released for Macs for the same reason - it looks good to counter the monopoly argument, and it doesn't really matter in the big scheme of things.

If you don't like it, write a letter.

[zullnero]

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.

Silverlight runs on Wine

[dov_0]

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.

Simple BS.

[fieldstone]

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.

Kids these days...

[coryking]

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!

Re:Kids these days...

[binarylarry]

Linux is no longer an OS where you have to fiddle with things endlessly to have them work. It has been adopted and is maintained by huge, huge companies, some bigger than Microsoft.

Why are you preaching about Open Source when you're clearly a Microsoft shill? To any one with half a brain, Silverlight's mission is simple: Get all the media running on Sliverlight and then drop support everywhere but Windows. It's a classic Microsoft strategy. It's what they do, it's probably in the corporate bylaws.

No one asked for, nor needs, Silverlight. Open Source doesn't mean "reverse engineered version of a propprietary app."

I call you a Microsoft fanboy douche because that's what you are.

Re:Kids these days...

[binarylarry]

WTF is this about: http://silverlight.net/user/Profile.aspx?UserID=34139

Microsoft is probably paying you to spam Slashdot with your bullshit.

I hope you burn in hell.

Re:Kids these days...

[coryking]

So I have an open source project for silverlight and post on the silverlight forums. Paranoid just a bit? Get a life dude. What have you done for open source?

Re:Kids these days...

[slapys]

It has been adopted and is maintained by huge, huge companies, some bigger than Microsoft.

Name one. Microsoft is the #1 biggest software company in the world.

Re:Kids these days...

[binarylarry]

IBM.

Re:Kids these days...

[Elektroschock]

cool

Re:Kids these days...

[spectecjr]

Wow. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Fanboi much?

You might wanna step back a bit. If you're this wound up, then you're obviously taking this Intertubes thing a little too seriously. Just a suggestion.

Re:Kids these days...

[spectecjr]

WTF is this about: http://silverlight.net/user/Profile.aspx?UserID=34139

Microsoft is probably paying you to spam Slashdot with your bullshit.

I hope you burn in hell.

I take it back. You're not a fanboi. You're just a delusional douchebag with anger management issues.

Re:Kids these days...

[binarylarry]

uh, looking at your comment history you and "coryking" the spamming douche bag have very similar posts and responses.

Interesting I'd say.

Re:Kids these days...

[spectecjr]

uh, looking at your comment history you and "coryking" the spamming douche bag have very similar posts and responses

Now that's funny. Have you stopped having your apopleptic fit yet?

Re:Lying or Insane or just SlashDot?

[TheNetAvenger]

Well not so much confused, just typing without proofing, and you are right, it is multi-cast.

However, Multi-cast tends to work better on the Internet today than even a year or two ago.

It is not perfect or 'simple', but a solid host designed to handle the publishing points offsets a huge chunk of bandwidth compared to trying to solely unicast the streams.

The closer we get to IPv6 or basic ClassD becoming standard replacements it will get to the millions per stream before too long, right now a few 10s of 1000s is not out of expectation levels though, and 100s of 1000s with some providers that are fully equipped on newer networks.

Or Intel Mac

[coryking]

Nice you guys seem to leave that part out.

Re:Or Intel Mac

[binarylarry]

How much is Microsoft paying you to spam Slashdot with this propoganda bullshit? Seeing as how you live in the Redmond area and have a love for Microsoft only matched by Steve Ballmer himself?

You've made like 50 posts on Slashdot on this topic. Everyone knows why Microsoft is pushing Silverlight, so they can make using Mac and Linux more difficult in the future.

Yet you seem have a totally confused notion of what Open Source is, how its created, who uses it, etc. It's almost as if you have never been involved in any type of Open Source project at all. Like for example, when you call Linux a hobbyist OS. Do you think Google sees Linux as a hobbyist OS?

Wouldn't watch if I could or other format

[rec9140]

Wouldn't have watched regardless of who won the election or the format used.

We in the Colonies Are Grateful

[hduff]

But will we still need a translation of the political jargon?

Makes perfect sense to me.

[SpoonStomper]

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.

Re:Makes perfect sense to me.

[PrescriptionWarning]

I could try to dig up facts about how many linux based servers and clusters there are, or even the millions of people that actually use Mac or Linux as a desktop OS but oh hey you don't care about 5% of the population anyway. Thats 1 in 20 people just so ya know.

Interesting to note

[hduff]

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.

Contact the DNC right now!

[stonewolf]

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

Re:Contact the DNC right now!

[Macthorpe]

"Oh my god, they're making me download a plugin, or watch the inauguration somewhere else! MY PRECIOUS CIVIL RIGHTS"

Can you honestly read over what you just wrote and not burst out laughing at how ridiculous it is?

Re:Contact the DNC right now!

[stonewolf]

They have been convicted of crimes against the public, I.E, abuse of monopoly power, on pretty much ever continent except Antarctica. If that isn't a criminal organization, what is?

Non issue

[nurb432]

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.

Well, those who object to it on moral grounds...

[melted]

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.

Re:Some people still pay attention to legal matter

[cayenne8]

"YouTube's terms of service prohibit that sort of activity. For some people, the terms of service actually matter -"

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?

I wonder ...

[PPH]

...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?

Re:I wonder ...

[aaron.axvig]

Silverlight takes less than 30 seconds to install (less than 10 seconds on a moderately fast computer that is not bogged down with mailware) and only requires a browser reboot.

Re:I wonder ...

[PPH]

What's the minimum supported version of IE? We'll have to bring that up to date before we can even begin to worry about Silverlight.

Re:I wonder ...

[aaron.axvig]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight#Compatibility

So IE7, which has been out for 2.25 years. Also, I actually had to install Silverlight on a new Windows 7 machine today and it took less than 10 seconds and did not even require a page refresh. YMMV.

Re:I wonder ...

[PPH]

So IE7, which has been out for 2.25.

So, we've got to install IE7 first???

We're doomed!

Moonlight?

[DavidD_CA]

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.

Obama Creative Commons

[rhinokitty]

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

[Keith McClary]

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.

Re:Inauguration Anthem

[Carbon016]

I supported the guy here there and everywhere during the elections, but whether or not he gives us our money, I've got a feeling we'll be carrying that weight for a long time.

Re:That is your choice

[WiiVault]

While I appreciate the tone of your message I would remind you that Silverlight penetration is low, so while I'm sure you have skills in it it is hardly worth basing a site around. Very few people will download a plug-in just to view one site, they will instead type in the URL of your closest competitor.

Or you could use...

[Jerry Rivers]

...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.

and that's what happened to that

[Scrameustache]

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.

Re:Lying or Insane or just SlashDot?

[gzipped_tar]

The summary said nothing about OSX. It's about the old MacOS for the PPC architecture before Macs went for x86/OSX.

Re:This doesn't matter much - only 1 website

[fieldstone]

This does make me wonder - what sort of lobbying (if any?) does the FOSS community engage in, to try to convince the federal government to ditch its long-standing Microsoft-only-by-default position? Surely if we could convince the government that using an OS developed by the people is the patriotic thing to do, an Obama White House might at least consider it...

Silverlight 2

[Joce640k]

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?

Microsoft donations ®

[rs232]

'Donors with ties to Microsoft are among the biggest backers of President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration'

I've contributed many ports to FreeBSD ..

[rs232]

"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?

Re:Joost is advertising that they will stream it l

[hakey]

It will also be live on Hulu in Flash.

GNURadio!

[sam0737]

It's about time to tune my GNURadio!

This isn't news

[bdbolton]

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.

Re:False, false false...

[pastorious]

Silverlight 2.0 works on Intel and PowerPC Mac G4 or greater processors.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/silverlight.html

Stop continuing the bullshit...

[Stu Charlton]

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.

Re:Stop continuing the bullshit...

[Ilgaz]

Several times transcoded by amateurs video is not a benchmark for any video codec or container.

There are 4 high end codecs now which have very similar results. H264, VC1, Sorenson Spark family and On2 family. If you have uncompressed,raw video in hand, even most junk codec can create miracles. If you have consumer level, several times transcoded stuff (like youtube) and if you even lower the quality on purpose (Audio), you won't make it look good whatever codec or technology you use.

Codec companies generally showcase their products on their sites. Youtube is the last place to check a codecs/plugins quality level. I would look to BBC who is wise not to affiliate with a single product for real life benchmarks.

Re:Stop continuing the bullshit...

[kelnos]

You do realise that YouTube now has high-def video support, right? Approx 2Mbps or so (I believe; rough estimate), and it looks great. Clearly you can get good results using Flash. While Flash isn't open either, it's at least a bit more accessible than Silverlight.

For that matter, why not just provide a 2-4Mbps video stream over http?

Re:Stop continuing the bullshit...

[Stu Charlton]

It's not about Flash vs. Silverlight so much as this particular streaming technology. They sold the Obama-folks on it early on, and it *happened* to built on Silverlight (MS was an investor in the startup). This technology in my experience has better adaptive compression than the typical Flash streaming (even HD), though I'm not about to claim it will be the only technology that can do this.

In any case, the point is somewhat moot in that a Moonlight-based streaming version seems to be available for LInux and MacPPC users.

The quality is astounding

[Stu Charlton]

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.

Other places to watch

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

There are lots of other places it will be streamed; here are a few more lists:
Here and here.

fact is

[McBeer]

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.

Re:Bunk, This is flat out bunk.

[Gallomimia]

So let's not kid ourselves and pretend that MS has a monopoly on the Internet.

kthnx.

YOU MEAN THEY DON'T?! OMG!!!

Where might recordings be available?

[Gallomimia]

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.

Re:False, false false...

[Ilgaz]

Sadly MS lies on that spec page they submitted to Apple. The Download link will eventually land you to 1.0 Download which is not anything like 2.0 which everyone uses.

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx?v=1.0 (notice the 1.0 mentioned).

In fact, they actually let PPC macs download the Intel only binary once and left everyone with a non working, initialising plugin on their Internet Plugins folder. Such pages are planted on purpose so they will have a FALSE answer when a real pro media IT manager asks about multi platform support. Same trick they do with Windows Media Player. Instead of warning Intel users NOT to install it, they let them download (also submit to Apple downloads) and they end up with a non compatible crap breaking every single browser on their OS.

That is the company we deal with here. A company who doesn't hesitate pulling such kid like tricks.

Re:Joost is advertising that they will stream it l

[Ilgaz]

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.

Bottom line is you can't index and search closed..

[plasmacutter]

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.

NOTE CONSPICUOUSLY MISSING EMAIL/COMMENT FORMS!

[plasmacutter]

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.

fool you 17 times, shame on who?

[Scrameustache]

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?

Re:fool you 17 times, shame on who?

[thtrgremlin]

detaining people that may pose a terrorist threat or have information about a possible terrorist threat

Is a fiction.

Ok, sorry, still not getting what you are saying in context. Are you saying that the above statement is a lie by Bush, or the liberal media? Is it a lie that they are "detaining people" or a lie that "they pose a threat or have information"? Is it a lie that in the applicable cases that this is "done in the name of national security" or that they are "using the excuse of national security"? Or is it simply a lie that there is even a war going on or that Guantanamo bay exists?

I can see you obviously have a very strong opinion about something, I just can't tell what it is, though I am willing to believe that it was because I was unclear about something. So just to clarify, right now I believe Bush is lying about intelligence information / possible terrorist threats, habeas corpus should be a protected right to all except prisoners of war / enemy combatants in which case follow the Geneva convention, change it, or formally state that it will not be recognized.

And as far as the issues you brought up, I don't know anybody that even thought Saddam even might be related to 9-11, though I believe they might exist. Asbestos mining is dangerous, but that is it; It is always dangerous to mine, but unless you are being extremely stupid or intentionally creating a hazardous situation, PROCESSED asbestos and demolition of asbestos buildings is reasonably safe, and leaving asbestos in your walls is COMPLETELY HARMLESS!!! Anyone claiming otherwise is a lawyer or a moron. I have no idea how safe Guantanamo Bay is keeping us because that information is classified, so anything said about it is speculation, however, I do think that it is CAUSING harm since we are abandoning what we believe in out of fear. The inquisition was political and who cares what they told the public. Jesus == Worst Pokemon Ever; I put theists in the same category as people that take comic books WAY too seriously.

You can't take the sky from me...

Obviously not, but can you please explain some of your statements? Again, it really sounds like you were almost onto something. Please share.

Re:fool you 17 times, shame on who?

[Scrameustache]

detaining people that may pose a terrorist threat or have information about a possible terrorist threat

Is a fiction.

Ok, sorry, still not getting what you are saying [...] I have no idea how safe Guantanamo Bay is keeping us because that information is classified, so anything said about it is speculation

So why do you give any credit to the speculation that the people detained therein pose a threat or have information about threats?
Because you trust the people who made that speculation.
But those same people have lied to you countless times, I gave you plenty of examples of their lies, I gave you historical references of this pattern of behavior so that you might have the possibility of emotional detachment from the subject... to no avail.

After the terrorist attack on the twin towers, building debris and dust contained asbestos, lead, glass fibers, and concrete dust. However, the White House Council on Environmental Quality urged the EPA to âoeadd reassuring statements and delete cautionary onesâ in its press release.

As a matter of fact, many first responders suffered almost immediate health problems, developing what officials and doctors dubbed "The World Trade Center Cough". One study showed that more than 85% of those who initially responded to the tragedy were suffering from some sort of respiratory ailment within just months (or even weeks) of the collapse.

Deborah Reeve was the first 9/11 emergency responder to die of mesothelioma. She worked as a paramedic for the Fire Department of New York. Reeve began having symptoms of severe lung disease in early 2003 and was diagnosed with the asbestos-caused cancer in 2004. She succumbed to the disease in March 2006. Doctors agree that her exposure to asbestos was a result of her days spent working at the recovery site.

But the interesting part to me here is not that you were ignorant of that.
It's that you told me that asbestos in walls in safe, when I was clearly talking about the dust resulting from the spectacular disintegration of a series of buildings.

P.S. In August 2002, a Gallup poll found 53% saying they believed "Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11 attacks";

Re:fool you 17 times, shame on who?

[thtrgremlin]

But 9/11 is an example of an extreme situation. Now, buildings do blow up, but of all the risks that people could spend a lot of money on preventing, I think the asbestos thing has been blown out of proportion, as least as so far as contractors have been preying on peoples fears that having asbestos in their walls is going to give them cancer. Asbestos should never be used in any new building because of various harms, but that does not necessarily justify spending tons of money to demo all old buildings with asbestos immediately. I also wouldn't call 9/11 a normal asbestos situation, however it does explain why you brought it up. That seemed so out there when I read it, thank you for the clarification.

So why do you give any credit to the speculation that the people detained therein pose a threat or have information about threats?

To be honest I don't have any greater evidence that Guantanamo prison even exists let alone whether the actions of anyone operating it could be justified. Both pieces of information come from the same source. I would totally agree the government needs more oversight, but the reality is that people don't care, and the most that people do care are sitting here on slashdot talking about it, or protesting where it doesn't even matter. Hippies protesting in Santa Cruz is the biggest joke, sorry. Why spend all day "protesting" in a place where everyone is going to agree with you. Now that you really got me thinking, I think the reality is that there are too many other injustices going on in this country that I care a whole lot more about than Guantanamo Bay prison. I have friends joining the war because the economy sucks so bad for them it is the only job they can get. That I can care about. There are too many things to list that I care about more than how many innocent people end up in Guantanamo Bay, as sad as the whole thing is. As far as the country, more people are much worried about whether or not gays get to marry than how many children on either side die in Iraq. That is a pathetic truth. California prop 8 is another injustice I'd rather see resolved first. People are beaten and raped in my greater neighborhood area every month. Why do people care so much about people so far away and not right in their neighborhood? Just saying.

As far as the Gallop poll... that is really sad. But it explains our wonderful democratically elected leaders. Why should they be expected to be so much better than the people that elected them.

Re:False, false false...

[po134]

haven't you heard of http://www.mono-project.com/MoonlightRoadmap ? The final version is due tomorow.
For those still complaining, the Presidential Inaugural Commitee also choosed YouTube, Twitter & Flickr as official broadcaster. Microsoft silverlight is only one way to watch it.

Re:False, false false...

[Ilgaz]

Does their roadmap include PPC/OS X. a plugin running under Cocoa browser plugin subsystem?

They exist for such apologies on behalf of Microsoft anyway. We will see the results soon if not already.

Who cares?

[Atrophius]

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.

Inauguration WILL have Linux and PPC Mac support

[benwaggoner]

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/

Re:False, false false...

[po134]

Of course you can, it's all on their blog http://www.go-mono.com/monologue/

I just wanted to confirm that you can watch today's Barack Obama Official Inauguration video stream using Moonlight on Linux/x86 and Linux/x86-64 systems.
(...)
Microsoft worked late last night to get us access to the code that will be used during the inauguration so we could test it with Moonlight.
(...)
Aaron's code will also be powering MacOS/PPC streaming.