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MS Silverlight To Stream Obama Inauguration Events
Ilgaz writes in to let us know that we will have to install MS Silverlight 2 to watch the US President's inauguration online. Everyone running Mac PPC, Linux, and FreeBSD has been left out, as there are no working Silverlight 2-capable alternatives on these systems. Here is Microsoft's press release announcing the selection of Silverlight yesterday. Streaming of various events around the inauguration begins today at the Presidential Inaugural Committee site, which touts its "inclusive and accessible" coverage.
That certainly didn't take long to have the rhetoric fail and the reality take charge.
You can watch it using flash video here
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The actual copy from the references story is...
Microsoft's Silverlight technology has been chosen to stream U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's swearing-in ceremony live on the Presidential Inaugural Committee's Web site...
Nowhere does it say that all the networks will be using Silverlight exclusively.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The story *DOES NOT* say that Silver light will be used exclusivly accross all channels. It says:
Microsoft's Silverlight technology has been chosen to stream U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's swearing-in ceremony live on the Presidential Inaugural Committee's Web site
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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Oddly enough Jan 20th is the official release date for Moonlight 1.0 The Linux implementation of silverlight. But only of the silverlight 1.0 spec. I wonder if 2.0 is really required.
moonlight roadmap
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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.
Developers: We can use your help.
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.
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.
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.
Those running Windows 9x are out in the cold too.
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?
Since I watch Joost shows sometimes on the Mac without having silverlight installed, I assume that it is not a requirement there either.
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.
Don't you think that the very point is that this is the *official* site we are talking about?
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.
Or we can start doing it the way it was done in WW2 and shoot them as spies. Tim S
http://citizensbriefingbook.change.gov/ideas/viewIdea.apexp?id=087800000005BUn
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.
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.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
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.
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."
Palm trees and 8
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.
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!
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?
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