Microsoft Celebrates Feynman 50-year Anniversary

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Microsoft Celebrates Feynman 50-year Anniversary

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday April 21, 2011 @04:31AM from the over-your-head dept.

Julie188 writes "A couple of years ago Microsoft acquired the rights to the famed filmed lecture series by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and posted them online for all to see via its Project Tuva site. As part of the 50-year anniversary of the lectures, the Project Tuva site now includes commentary from MIT physics professor Robert Jaffe. Project Tuva still requires Silverlight (alas, not HTML5), but does offer some nifty features for the aspiring physics student, such as search and the ability to take notes."

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Because it's Silverlight... by tian2992 · 2011-04-21 04:34 · Score: 3, Insightful

It's a shame no one will get to see it...
1. Re:Because it's Silverlight... by gstoddart · 2011-04-21 04:42 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  It's a shame no one will get to see it...
  I was bummed to discover that Microsoft owns the rights to the Feynman lectures. Available in Silverlight only just rubs salt in the wound.
  
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  Lost at C:>. Found at C.
2. Re:Because it's Silverlight... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-04-21 04:49 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  It's a shame no one will get to see it...
  I was bummed to discover that Microsoft owns the rights to the Feynman lectures. Available in Silverlight only just rubs salt in the wound.
  Exactly. Feynman loved to teach and he loved to educate. He would not appreciate people holding his teaching behinds artificial barriers. What a shame. I'd sad to see Feynman's legacy "owned" by people who are so inferior-minded and unimportant compared to him.
3. Re:Because it's Silverlight... by schnikies79 · 2011-04-21 04:50 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Yes it does, and it works just fine on my copy of firefox running on os x.
  
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  Gone!
4. Re:Because it's Silverlight... by SanityInAnarchy · 2011-04-21 05:06 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  What barrier, a free download barrier?
  For some value of "free".
  Free download, but only available for Windows and OS X. If you're on Linux, there's Mono, but that tends to lag behind -- I usually have to get some bleeding-edge version whenever I actually need some Silverlight content. And contrary to popular belief, neither Windows nor OS X is "free".
  What's insulting about this, especially to Feynman's legacy, is that there's a very simple right way to do this: HTML5. And that actually is behind a free download -- Chrome, Firefox, etc, assuming you don't already have a browser capable of playing it. Or, for that matter, multiple technologies at once, if you're afraid of the codec issue -- put it in, say, H.264, then you should be able to develop Flash and Silverlight shims for browsers which don't support H.264 in HTML5.
  
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5. Re:Because it's Silverlight... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-04-21 05:07 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Wow, not kowtowing to the latest in whiz-bang proprietary lock-in bullshit is being a luddite now? It amazes me that people have worked so hard to free the web from the clutches of the likes of MS (active-X) and Adobe (flash) through the efforts put into html5 and now we get the pleasure of being called a luddite. If anything, I'd say not embracing the <img> tag is being a luddite.
6. Re:Because it's Silverlight... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-04-21 05:17 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  You know what else was a free download? IE6.
  That's it then; the thread has been Godwindowed.
7. Re:Because it's Silverlight... by Covalent · 2011-04-21 05:29 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Silverlight != FOSS Therefore, this awesome piece of the legacy of Richard Feynman is currently != free. Furthermore, what is to prevent MS from making this no longer "free"? Nothing. The real tragedy, though, is that 50-year-old video of a man who is long dead is still covered by copyright.
  
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8. Re:Because it's Silverlight... by RDW · 2011-04-21 05:40 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Incidentally, there'll be a new multimedia version of the actual 'Feynman Lectures on Physics' out this year. They've integrated the (corrected) text with Feynman's original audio, blackboard photos, and related problems:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqRp9tyDLvw
  http://www.basicfeynman.com/enhanced.html
  Goddness knows what locked-down format this will be in, though.
9. Re:Because it's Silverlight... by oakgrove · 2011-04-21 05:45 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Wow, using a free browser addon that has versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux
  
  That's interesting. Because, you see, I just went here, was told my browser was not officially supported so I should go here and install moonlight. Okay, cool, so I do it and go back to here. Guess what. No lecture. That's some support.
  
  I don't think I'd enjoy your Internet very much.
  My html5 open standards based internet is fantastic, thank you very much. Works on my iPhone, my Xoom, my Ubuntu netbook, my Ubuntu desktop, and my Droid smartphone. Have fun playing with your silverflash.
  
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  The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
10. Re:Because it's Silverlight... by gstoddart · 2011-04-21 05:54 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Well, then your a short sighted moron.
  The fact that any corporation can own the "rights" to a lecture series by one of the most brilliant physicists (and teachers of physics) in the last century is appalling.
  These lectures were filmed by Caltech, and it's awful to have anybody "own" them. It's just the kind of thing that shouldn't be locked up in some corporations IP portfolio -- and I don't care if it's Microsoft, Sony, or Time Warner.
  Really, what next ... The Einstein/Pepsi Theory of Relativity? Planck's Constant, brought to you by Staples?
  My point is that no commercial entity should hold the "rights" to this. This is quite depressing.
  
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  Lost at C:>. Found at C.
11. Re:Because it's Silverlight... by zpiro · 2011-04-21 06:26 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  I can watch Netflix using Chrome, but the Project Tuva site says my browser isn't supported for Silverlight...
  So I went to the effort of setting up moonlight (4.0), getting it to work on chrome compiling necessary software.
  Even the silverlight port of Quake worked (quakelight), albeit actually playing didn't.
  However, that site denies me access because my browser isn't "officially" supported -- surprise surprise.
  
  Where I work, there are mostly physicists, most of them use Linux and quite a few use OSX, windows users being a (very) small minority.
  
  Physicists in practice being denied access to the lectures by one of the most inspiring physicists throughout history.
  
  Have to give it to M$, they are consistent when it comes to coercing / luring people into using their products.
  
  If at least it was the first of April, there would be a glimmer of hope for this cretinous hostage-taking of a truly great man. Whats wrong with the world when someone can own this, wasn't he essentially paid by the people?
  
  Now, where is my public-access to science and the educators of the public!
12. Re:Because it's Silverlight... by History's+Coming+To · 2011-04-21 08:01 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  MS buys rights to Feynman videos, puts them online for "everyone". That's very nice of them.
  
  MS then insists that you install their propriety video player to play it. Not an HTML5 tag, not *any* of the multitude of Flash based video players, NOT EVEN A SIMPLE LINK TO A VIDEO FILE!
  
  If you want to make something available to everybody for free you don't use a rarely used system that does nothing except replicate existing functionality whilst locking everybody else out. You don't insist they download (yet another) resource grabbing plugin. If you want everyone to see it you do what we did ten years ago, we called it "putting it on the internet" and it involved placing a video file on a server and then putting a link to the file on a web page. It's not that complicated, and I'm sure MS can cope with it. Unless, of course, you don't want "everybody" to see it. If you want only confirmed Silverlight users to see it then it makes perfect sense. I'm sure Feynman would have appreciated the gesture.
  
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Not on the Internet. by bobs666 · 2011-04-21 04:43 · Score: 4, Insightful

It's only in the Microsoft net. Due to the requirement to use Silverlight.
Re:Silverwhat? by TrancePhreak · 2011-04-21 05:01 · Score: 3, Informative

If you are seriously bothered about those things and Moonlight, you should also concern yourself with javascript, it's under the same license.

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-]Phreak Out[-
Re:Cry much? by SanityInAnarchy · 2011-04-21 05:21 · Score: 4, Informative

What does FOSS have for a web framework that is a viable alternative to Silverlight or Flash?
What about HTML5 isn't viable?
More than that, how about not making it streaming-only? While I'd prefer a free codec, I can play pretty much anything in mplayer or VLC, if you give me a download URL (or a torrent). And these are things I'd want to keep around.

...that only works for Flash, and you all hate Flash too.
Well, it's tricky. In theory, I like Silverlight better than Flash, because Moonlight seems to be much more stable and complete than Gnash. But in practice, there actually is a native Flash player for Linux, and the nspluginwrapper crap isn't really worse than Flash in a 32-bit browser, which is all you get on Windows anyway -- whereas both Moonlight and Gnash only work on a ridiculously small subset of the Silverlight and Flash content out there.
Add to this the fact that the DRM in Silverlight does not work on Moonlight, so while this particular site might work, Netflix, for example, will not. So even if Moonlight was flawless, you'd still have content that requires the official Silverlight.
And if that wasn't enough, with the few videos I've watched, Moonlight didn't do anti-aliasing. I think Silverlight did, but I'm not sure. Flash does, and you better believe mplayer does.

having competing (albeit commercial) frameworks to choose from is a Good Thing[TM] IMHO.
Nope. Having multiple competing implementations is a Good Thing. Having multiple competing standards is a problem, especially when several of them are proprietary. I have no problem that IE exists, so long as we can develop to web standards and, with minimal hackery, have our websites work on all major browsers, including IE. I did have a problem when IE was the defacto standard.

Where's the FOSS alternative, and which major site's require me to use it for the best experience?
Erm, since when did we judge standards based on which ones we're forced to use? WTF makes you think that's a good criterion?
By that logic, the fact that so many apps force you to use Windows means Windows should be the standard, and people should stop bashing it, and nobody should complain if these Feynman lectures -- or, for that matter, our tax forms -- are Windows-only. (Right now, they're Flash-only, which is an improvement, but still retarded.)

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Re:What, NOTHING about the CONTENT? by blair1q · 2011-04-21 05:45 · Score: 3, Insightful

In order to comment on the content, you have to see the content.
I'm guessing we're finding out how many /. users use /. on Windows boxes this time of day.
Re:What, NOTHING about the CONTENT? by TaoPhoenix · 2011-04-21 06:15 · Score: 4, Insightful

Marshall McLuhan (I think?) would be proud that the Medium is the Message. If you wanted to talk about Feynman's Awesomeness, you/someone would have posted a story like "It's the 50th anniversary of Feynman's Lectures. How has Feynman contributed to what you do today?"
This story is "Microsoft bought the rights to SomeCoolContent. However, they couldn't have picked any of three generic video formats, but once again made an excuse to follow their Proprietary Only strategy."
2002 called. They want their "Sites work only in IE" back.

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