Surely not joking, Mr. Feynman

July 15, 2009 1:21 PM

"I can see the audience tonight, so I can see also from the size of it that there must many of you here who are not thoroughly familiar with physics, and also a number that are not too versed in mathematics- and I don't doubt that there are some who know neither physics nor mathematics very well. That puts a considerable challenge on a speaker who is going to speak on the relation of physics and mathematics- a challenge which I, however, will not accept: I published the title of the talk in clear and precise language, and didn't make it sound like it was something it wasn't- it's the relation of physics and mathematics - and if you find that in some spots it assumes some minor knowledge of physics or mathematics, I cannot help it. It was named." The Feynman Messenger series at Cornell has been made available online for the first time thanks to Bill Gates.
posted by hindmost (125 comments total)

No thanks, I removed Silver light some time ago and have no wish to reinstall at this time. Thanks so much for the offer though.
posted by Cranberry at 1:25 PM on July 15 [1 favorite]

This page requires a more recent version of Silverlight.
posted by Mister_A at 1:25 PM on July 15

takeaway: Feynman was kind of a dick.
posted by boo_radley at 1:28 PM on July 15

Youtube link via slashdot ("This video has been removed due to terms of use violation" - still works for me.)
posted by acro at 1:28 PM on July 15

Would love to watch this but... "your browser is incompatible" (Firefox). Haven't seen that message in a while!
posted by crazy_yeti at 1:28 PM on July 15 [1 favorite]

boo_radley: His name was RIchard, but everyone called Feynman "Dick" :-)
posted by crazy_yeti at 1:29 PM on July 15

Ah. Silverlight no workee on my older Mac, unfortunately.
(At least I think it's unfortunate.)
posted by Thorzdad at 1:31 PM on July 15

On one hand, Silverlight.

On the other, Feynman.

This is going to require some vector calculus.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:33 PM on July 15 [24 favorites]

Well, it works for me (with Firefox). Seems interesting.
posted by alexei at 1:33 PM on July 15

As one who has had silverlight installed, I offer you this screenshot:
There's a lot of blank space.
posted by boo_radley at 1:33 PM on July 15

Gates giveth and Silverlight taketh away.
posted by tommasz at 1:34 PM on July 15 [2 favorites]

I'd love to watch, but it requires Silverlight.

I already have one bloated multimedia plugin (everyone's favorite Adobe software!) installed on my Mac. Not about to add another one.
posted by spitefulcrow at 1:34 PM on July 15

Silverlight?

Surely you're joking, hindmost.
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:37 PM on July 15 [1 favorite]

Sooooo who's this Feynman guy and why is this such a big deal? Is this something I'd have to be a science nerd to care about?
posted by exhilaration at 1:40 PM on July 15

"Sorry, your browser is not compatible. Your browser is not compatible with this web application."
posted by blucevalo at 1:40 PM on July 15 [1 favorite]

Fool me once (.Net), shame on you
Fool me twice (Silverlight), shame on me

Yes, I am aware they are two radically different products. I do not care. I am finished with Microsoft's bloated, bullshit attempts to co-opt the web into a product that fits their fucking pathetic, paleolithic mental model of what the software industry "ought to be" (with, of course, Microsoft as its God-King).

Pity, though, I'd love to watch the Feynman clips.
posted by Ryvar at 1:40 PM on July 15 [1 favorite]

I never expected to be this tempted to install silverlight. I still won't, but damn, it's Feynman!
posted by DreamerFi at 1:41 PM on July 15

I think the biggest thing missing from Feynman's equations is that the universe is only 6000 years old.
posted by Avenger at 1:44 PM on July 15

google video search brings up lots (and lots) of Feynman videos. The internet doesn't appear to suffer from a dearth of non-silverlight based videos of the guy.
posted by delmoi at 1:45 PM on July 15 [1 favorite]

Oh, for Ghod's sake. What makes Silverlight any worse than Flash?

I'm watching the first lecture. I love this guy.
posted by ixohoxi at 1:45 PM on July 15

So what this means is that Bill Gates bought the rights to the Feynman lectures in order to sell his (terrible) technology.
posted by sonic meat machine at 1:46 PM on July 15 [2 favorites]

Oh, and I don't mean to disparage Feynman above -- only that there's a lot of context lost in such a transcript.
posted by boo_radley at 1:46 PM on July 15

Hrmmm. Well, I would like to watch me some Feynman... but I've no desire to install Moonlight. Heck... I'm not a big fan of Mono... and I'm glad that it will be pulled out of Fedora starting with F12.

To many... Imperial entanglements.
posted by PROD_TPSL at 1:47 PM on July 15 [1 favorite]

Also available: Richard Feynman - The Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures, available as flash videos here (via a comment on slashdot).

Much more on Richard Feynman at Wikipedia.

Oh, for Ghod's sake. What makes Silverlight any worse than Flash?

One commenter on slashdot noted that it's another "attack vector" - another plug-in with it's own set of vulnerabilities.
posted by filthy light thief at 1:48 PM on July 15 [1 favorite]

ixohoxi, for one thing it's a "standard" by Microsoft, meaning that they will obfuscate it and make every attempt to prevent it from ever running on anything besides IE on Windows. Maybe the IE Mac port. Hell, the fact that it interacts heavily with the browser's Javascript engine is a clue--each Javascript implementation has subtle quirks and flaws, and grafting a new pile of crap onto the top of the old pile of crap just gives you, in the end, a bigger pile of crap.
posted by sonic meat machine at 1:50 PM on July 15 [2 favorites]

Well, I went and installed Silverlight to watch the series, and the strangest thing happened.

The world ended.

As you all are no doubt aware, the earth has been totally destroyed, and for this i'm sorry. No amount of previously unavailable film of Feynman could possibly have been worth this terrible consequence, and I hope you can forgive my incredible foolishness.

Fortunately, the end of the world still seems to have the video series available to it.

Here is a screenshot of it running, if you'd like to see what the end of the world looks like.

As you can see, there is some white space there, though I can tell you that the amount of white space varies depending on how tall and wide you choose to make your browser window. That, there, is as little white space as I could manage to produce. this looks to be the result of the video controls, seen at bottom, not being shrinkable past that width. On the plus side, MS have made nice use of the available tools to provide realtime subtitles below the video frame, which is a nice touch.

So there you go.
posted by shmegegge at 1:51 PM on July 15 [10 favorites]

On one hand, Silverlight.

On the other, Feynman.

This is going to require some vector calculus.

You do the math.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:55 PM on July 15 [2 favorites]

Bill Gates the actor?
posted by Smedleyman at 1:55 PM on July 15

I already have one bloated multimedia plugin (everyone's favorite Adobe software!)

your definition of bloated is somewhat unconventional.
posted by klanawa at 1:58 PM on July 15

Awesome! Love Feynman. Thanks for posting this series!
posted by zarq at 2:00 PM on July 15

Well, I went and installed Silverlight to watch the series, and the strangest thing happened.

The world ended.

You can't say you weren't warned.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:02 PM on July 15

takeaway: Feynman was kind of a dick.

He was idiosyncratic, and a lot of his charm was in his delivery. FWIW, whenever I've heard people who actually knew him say anything about him, it was usually that he was actually a pretty cool guy. Also, by this time, he'd started to get a bit of a popular following and he may have felt it was getting in the way of actually doing his job.
posted by lodurr at 2:04 PM on July 15 [2 favorites]

ixohoxi: "Oh, for Ghod's sake. What makes Silverlight any worse than Flash?"

Not sure about Silverlight in this case, but the fact that the page explicitly claims it is not compatible with my browser, which is Firefox 3.5 running on Ubuntu, with the user agent string explicitly changed to fix Ubuntu's braindead "Shiretoko" policy regarding 3.5 (which broke other sites until I changed it back).

In other words: FAIL.

Regarding the generosity of Bill Gates, he can take that right to hell with him. He wouldn't have the money and stuff to sprinkle generously upon us around the world if he ruthlessly engineer and maintain a monopoly strangehold on the world's computers for over twenty years, a stranglehold we're only now overcoming, slowly, with Firefox and Ubuntu.

It would have been so nice not to have turned this comment into an anti-Microsoft rant, but the combination of the FPP mention about Gates' generosity combined with the Silverlight/user string shenanigant set me right off. Sorry. If folk can complain that a software link has no Mac version, it seems like I should be able to complain about not being able to watch the damn video. Between that and Ubuntu's "Shiretoko" thing, I'm feeling conspired against by the world right now.
posted by JHarris at 2:16 PM on July 15 [1 favorite]

So the Feynman videos are only free as in beer? They're not being donated to the public domain?
posted by mullingitover at 2:17 PM on July 15

ixohoxi, for one thing it's a "standard" by Microsoft, meaning that they will obfuscate it and make every attempt to prevent it from ever running on anything besides IE on Windows. Maybe the IE Mac port.

And maybe Firefox and Safari and Chrome.
posted by kmz at 2:19 PM on July 15

The problem with silverlight is that flash (as well as java) is already installed on my machine. Why should I install another run time when I've got two perfectly good ones?
posted by delmoi at 2:23 PM on July 15

Works for me on Firefox 3.0.11 on Windows Vista perfectly. I don't even get a lot of whitespace. But then, the player automatically adjusts its size depending upon if you use the notes (kinda neat, but not necessary for me) or how you sized your window.
posted by Green With You at 2:29 PM on July 15

I am no great fan of Bill Gates, nor a fan of Silverlight. I didn't have a problem running on Firefox and in fact it fills the entire window with almost no white space, and has captioning, a transcript, chapter markers and the ability to add notations, so I let my enthusiasm for the subject matter overtake my distaste for the delivery format. My humble apologies to those that I have offended.

And while Feynman was indeed a dick, his quote that I used was delivered tongue in cheek as his popularity meant that his audience had grown to far greater numbers than just the "science nerds" and he was giving due warning that the lecture was going to involve some physics and mathematics.
posted by hindmost at 2:37 PM on July 15 [2 favorites]

Feynman and naked women are two of my favorite things. Neither has gotten me to install Silverlight.
posted by aerotive at 2:37 PM on July 15 [6 favorites]

FWIW, there is no IE Mac port. Microsoft stopped updating IE for Mac at version 5.2, years ago, and the installer's no longer available from their website. That old browser isn't even compatible with the latest version of Flash, and I'd be quite surprised if it were compatible with Silverlight.

We have to use IE 5.2 at my office to access an online database service. The only supported browser is IE.
posted by zarq at 2:39 PM on July 15

* please read my clarification above, thank you
posted by boo_radley at 2:39 PM on July 15

And maybe Firefox and Safari and Chrome.

For now. But some of us remember when Windows NT was available for other (hardware) platforms and then taken away. At the end of the day, Silverlight is just more "embrace, extend and extinguish".
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:41 PM on July 15 [1 favorite]

So what this means is that Bill Gates bought the rights to the Feynman lectures in order to sell his (terrible) technology.
posted by sonic meat machine at 4:46 PM on July 15

No, it means you'd deny yourself an opportunity to learn from a genius out of some misguided irrational allegiance to a technology platform.
posted by Pastabagel at 2:44 PM on July 15 [10 favorites]

exhilaration: "Sooooo who's this Feynman guy and why is this such a big deal? Is this something I'd have to be a science nerd to care about?"

Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, participant in the Manhattan Project, amateur safecracker, renowned lecturer, painter, IT visionary, and writer, among other things.

About the only serious criticism I've ever heard of Feynman was that he had some fairly unenlightened views on women and gender relations, but in the net a very cool guy, and one I'm sorry I never met in person. (Although a professor who was my mentor and thesis advisor when I was an undergrad was a former student of his, so I've always felt like I got within one degree of Feynman; not bad on the whole.)
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:44 PM on July 15 [1 favorite]

As you all are no doubt aware, the earth has been totally destroyed, and for this i'm sorry.

Well, I'm sure a kick in the nads isn't the end of the world either, but you won't see me looking to get one.
posted by splice at 2:48 PM on July 15

Your loss.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:50 PM on July 15

ah, you anticipated my next comparison. I was just about to say that, though comparing it to the End Of The World was a little bit too extreme, a far more accurate comparison is to say that Silverlight is like getting kicked in the nuts.
posted by shmegegge at 2:51 PM on July 15

No, it means you'd deny yourself an opportunity to learn from a genius out of some misguided irrational allegiance to a technology platform.

I've already read Feynman, and listened to interviews, etc.

I am not pledging allegiance to a technology platform--no good technology requires that you do so--but rather am declining to buy into Microsoft's latest foray into making the Web a worse place to be.

Look, if MS was on the up-and-up, and this penny-ante acquisition of content in order to get their terrible tech a foot in the door wasn't Yet Another E³ Adventure, why didn't they devote themselves to making a really good implementation of the W3C standards which already exist? Hell, they've been doing the same damn thing with SVG all these years—because they have a competing technology, they never put real SVG support in IE, so the web remains safely free of a truly viable scalable vector graphics format. They've held up CSS development for years, seem devoted to a bizarre model in which their browsers are bimodal and feature a "quirks mode" which still embraces their own broken implementation of features from a decade ago, and so on.

IE6 alone has cost me countless hours of work because Microsoft never saw fit to push out a mandatory update. Hell, it doesn't even properly support PNGs!

You may think I am hopelessly geeky. I am! However, understanding an issue and being dismayed by what appears to be a continuance of that issue is not just random anger for the sake of anger. It just pisses me off that Microsoft is using worthy content (ie, the Feynman lectures) in order to promote their crap, while simultaneously denying access via alternate means (YouTube).
posted by sonic meat machine at 3:05 PM on July 15 [4 favorites]

"unenlightened views on women and gender relations" < This may well be, but I am here to tell you that as a young man I read his chapter titled "You Mean You Just Ask Them?" and I'll be damned if it doesn't work a treat, as the Kiwi's would say. Most enlightening bit of Feynman I've ever read.
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 3:17 PM on July 15 [2 favorites]

This was a pretty neat video, and I was looking forward to some insightful commentary.

This discussion however, sucks.

I use macs. I like macs. But the thing I dislike most about macs is that mac users the whiniest crybabies to ever fondle a keyboard.

Seriously. Fully 3/4 of the comments are people crying about how Silverlight will discolor their teeth or ruin thier hipster rep, instead of, you know, the actual content or quality of the post.

This kind of threadshitting wouldn't be tolerated by any other special interest group - but the mac users limitless sense of infatile entitlement is somehow kosher ?

Yes, you're computer is vastly superior to mine because it limits you in very creative ways and this somehow makes you a superior human being. Shut up already.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 3:33 PM on July 15 [3 favorites]

Thanks for the post. I can't gets me enough Feynmann.

TSilverlight whiners can fuck off and die, or at least go act like crybabies in Metatalk instead of shitting up an interesting post, thanks. I don't fucking care about your views on Microsoft, and I doubt anyone outside your circlejerk Jihad does, either.
posted by rodgerd at 3:34 PM on July 15 [2 favorites]

This kind of threadshitting wouldn't be tolerated by any other special interest group - but the mac users limitless sense of infatile entitlement is somehow kosher ?

I think you may want to direct your ire elsewhere. The (mostly correct) observations about Silverlight and about how Feynman's talk is being used to entice installation of this software have nothing to do with Macs or Mac users.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:38 PM on July 15 [2 favorites]

This is the guy who came up with the technique of saying to women "if I buy you a drink, will you have sex with me?", isn't it? What's sad is apparently it worked for him.

Always struck me as really lame, turning women into whores for the price of a drink.
posted by marble at 3:41 PM on July 15

This thread is rapidly turning into some kind of weird Slashdot and That-metatalk-about-the-American-Apparel-guy mashup.
posted by blenderfish at 3:45 PM on July 15

How do you people possibly stream movies from Netflix without Silverlight?

Really. I want to know.
posted by twoleftfeet at 3:46 PM on July 15

This is an excellent FPP and is truly the best of the web.

And, yeah, the Silverlight whines are ridiculous. It works flawlessly well on my MacBook with FF and has never caused me one ounce of problem.
posted by bz at 3:51 PM on July 15

It may just look like threadshitting, but to some, it's art.
posted by orme at 3:56 PM on July 15

I almost hate to admit it, but the setup with Silverlight is very nice. I would have loved to have lectures presented to me in this format. A note book on the right that links the note to when you entered it, extra material on the left (though fairly boring for this particular lecture).
posted by substrate at 4:06 PM on July 15

What Keeps a Train on the Tracks? by Feynman

(via Starman on this thread about trains and tornados via Kottke beforehand)
posted by Cantdosleepy at 4:25 PM on July 15 [1 favorite]

CircleJerk Jihad! MILLIONS OF SPERM WILL DIE!

My favorite "Feynman can be kind of a jerk at times" stories was his bit about spinning up a Very Very Strong gyroscope, putting it in his suitcase, then carefully giving it to a bellhop. The bellhop takes it, goes down the hall, and when he attempts to turn the corner, gets thrown.
posted by adipocere at 4:41 PM on July 15 [12 favorites]

I only just heard of Feynman in that "train vs tornado" thread, so I appreciate the post!
posted by orme at 5:25 PM on July 15

No way am I unblocking microsoft.com on NoScript, even temporarily.
posted by Eideteker at 6:10 PM on July 15

No way am I unblocking microsoft.com on NoScript, even temporarily.

You and your ilk, I can't imagine using the internet on a daily basis the way you must. I mean, Christ, lighten up.

Oh no! Not Silverlight!

Yeah, ok, we get it. You're a real free thinker. Well, you don't get to see the God damn video, and it would make me very happy if you didn't feel the need to come in here and tell the world about it.
posted by kbanas at 6:26 PM on July 15

Ah, Blazecock, again you are completely full of crap.

The (mostly correct) observations about Silverlight and about how Feynman's talk is being used to entice installation of this software have nothing to do with Macs or Mac users.

The observations about Silverlight have been a) it seems to work reasonably well (true!) and b) OMG I WON'T INSTALL THAT, which isn't so much an observation as it is a statement of purpose, so I don't know what the hell you're on about.

I take it you don't like Silverlight. Hooray for you.
posted by kbanas at 6:27 PM on July 15

Anyway, thanks for the lecture. That was quite excellent.
posted by kbanas at 6:28 PM on July 15

"What makes Silverlight any worse than Flash?"

It's a horrible memory pig.
posted by Mitheral at 7:08 PM on July 15

Feynman = :D
posted by kldickson at 7:09 PM on July 15

It's a horrible memory pig.

And Flash, of course, is only a horrible CPU pig.*

(I've managed to avoid having to know anything about Silverlight so far, and I'm not looking forward to learning, but blowing up a Feynman thread into a running MS v. Everyone battle is a little weird even for MeFi.)

--
*Based on my experience, if this isn't a true statement at the time you read it, just wait for the next version or roll back to the previous.
posted by lodurr at 7:14 PM on July 15

You fucking anti-anti-Microsoft cabalists with your knees and your jerking and your jacking and your threads and your woeful plaints DISGUST ME. There's nothing good about you or what you do.

Fight ire with ire, I always say.

But like I was saying, Feynman was on to something when it came to the ladies. He was afraid to talk to women, so he practiced until he got over it. But asking for sex right away. . .dismays my sense of romance n adventure.

Also. Microsoft is eminently hatable, for reasons already outlined. For they loveth money and careth not for good technology--Gates is a kind of geek traitor. I shan't help their attempt to wedge yet another new standard into my internet, with which to leverage it all to a buggy hell.
posted by flotson at 7:35 PM on July 15

"You and your ilk, I can't imagine using the internet on a daily basis the way you must. I mean, Christ, lighten up."

You must've missed the "NoScript is evil and fucking around with AdBlock!!1!" thing a few months back.
posted by Eideteker at 7:55 PM on July 15

I am amazed at the ire and profanity displayed by the people who apparently are offended that people commenting on this gracious gift of Microsoft point out the flaw in it.

Do you realize that this content was already available months ago on Youtube? Now it's not.

Why is that? Could it be that a corporation is using good, meaningful content to further their own goals?

I am not one of "those mac people," I'm just a person who knows and understands tech issues. If you don't, don't assume that you can comment intelligently about them. Just because you can type a post on MeFi doesn't mean you have perfect understanding of the issue at hand.
posted by sonic meat machine at 8:30 PM on July 15 [3 favorites]

The observations about Silverlight have been a) it seems to work reasonably well (true!) and b) OMG I WON'T INSTALL THAT, which isn't so much an observation as it is a statement of purpose, so I don't know what the hell you're on about.

Several people have stated why Silverlight is problematic (myself included). It's not my job to re-read the thread for you, but I recommend that you do so you can figure it out for yourself. You don't have to agree with other people's observations, but that doesn't mean its fair to castigate Mac users who have nothing to do with legitimate criticisms about Silverlight and about what Microsoft is doing here. Keep that shit on Slashdot, please.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:24 PM on July 15

In any case, the Feynman Messenger series on YouTube.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:15 PM on July 15

flotson, I'm probably gonna look like a hick for admitting this, but that whole first paragraph feels really familiar and it's killing me that I'm not getting the reference. If there is one.
posted by lodurr at 6:21 AM on July 16

I think you may want to direct your ire elsewhere. The (mostly correct) observations about Silverlight and about how Feynman's talk is being used to entice installation of this software have nothing to do with Macs or Mac users.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 6:38 PM on July 15

This isn't being used to entice anyone to do anything. If you think Gates bought these lectures to promote Silverlight, not only do you know know anything about Gates, you also didn't read the article. Gates originally bought limited rights so he could pass the lectures around to his friends on VHS decades ago.

People think Gates is some arrogant monopolist. You couldn't be more wrong. He bought one of da Vinci's notebooks from Armand Hammer's estate, a guy who was arrogant enough to rename the notebook Codex Hammer after himself. When Gates bought it, he renamed it after it's owner in the 18th century. He bought that for $31 million. It's likely he paid somewhere in that ballpark for this.

Gates buys these things because he is interested in their content. He is intellectually curious, and wants to share that with the world. That's why he put these lectures on line in the manner that he did. That's why pages from that notebook are sent to museums all over the world.

The $60 million to buy these two things is within striking distance of many professional athletes, entertainers, CEOs, Wall Street execs, and museums. Steve Jobs could have bought them - he didn't. Warren Buffet didn't buy them. The oil monarchs of the Middle East didn't buy them. The founders of Google and Yahoo could have bought them and put them on their websites. Michael Jackson was given a Viking hero's funeral on this site, and he chose to spend his considerable fortune on things like the bones of the Elephant Man.
Steve Jobs just had a liver transplant, but he's eager to get back to work. Why? To do what? His life's work of selling a phone with lots of blinking lights? Gates is in fine health, and resigned as CEO nine years ago to work on his charity, which has the selfish goal of eradicating polio and malaria from the face of the earth. Direct me to Steve Jobs philanthropic foundation, and tell me again which one of those two men is "greedy".

The people you idolize and worship didn't buy these things because, simply put, they didn't think they were worth $60 million. Because they are the people preoccupied with making money, not Gates. Gates doesn't care about money. He has money. He's giving it away. That's why he spent his money to buy those lectures and that notebook. To make sure they would be shared with the world in a manner befitting their significance.

Maybe using Silverlight was a smart move. It establishes a threshold for intellectual curiosity. Kind of like charging $5 to post on this site. If you are really interested in the content of the lectures, you'll use the software to access them and the accompanying information. If you choose not to view them because of an objection to downloading a piece of free software, then maybe you shouldn't be watching them in the first place?

Furthermore, I'll suggest that things like these lectures - that require careful and thoughtful attention and not a little hard work - don't really belong on YouTube. Youtube is the medium for music videos and idiots prattling on about their meaningless lives. They only require partial passing attention. Look at the comments on Youtube, and consider what comments those lectures would get. But clearly that kind of content is important enough to you that you have the Adobe Flash Player. God forbid you miss a single episode of LonelyGirl or the latest Transformers trailer.

If you want this on YouTube, then you should be asking Sergei Brin why he didn't buy them up and put them there. Brin is a mathematician after all, so I'm sure he appreciates the significance of these lectures.

But unlike Gates, Brin does not appreciate the importance of sharing them with you.
posted by Pastabagel at 7:05 AM on July 16 [7 favorites]

By the way, I'd also like to add what a shame it is that while Feynman was an American and Cornell is an American University, it was the BBC that filmed them. Not PBS, not the Major US networks. There is something about mass communications that prevents it from seeking important content that would only be appreciated by a small minority. Mass media is media for the masses, for all the good and evil that entails.
posted by Pastabagel at 7:12 AM on July 16

I agree that Gates is a much more interesting guy than most folks give him credit for being.

I'm very glad the Gates Foundation exists and does what it does. Would I rather that hadn't been enabled by the existence of Microsoft? Sure. But things are what they are, and the Gates Foundation giving back is far, far better than Bill playing Scrooge McDuck with the whole wad. Bill Gates III was raised in an old-money petit riche milieu that valorized the social responsibility of the wealthy. We see him as a ruthless capitalist because of what his company has done, but he personally is much more like Warren Buffet than T. Boone Pickens in that he knows he grew up in an environment (at familial, community and national levels) that afforded him chances to prosper, and he seems to have a genuine commitment to the basic fairness in making sure that opportunities to prosper are available to others. I give him credit for that. Does it excuse his and Microsoft's decisions over the years? Of course not. Why should it -- and more importantly, why should it matter if it does or doesn't?

What seems to me to be true about Gates is that he is, yes, intensely competitive. But also that it's an abstract, cool competitiveness. It's not personal, even when the language seems to make it that way. (By contrast, say, with Ballmer, or Larry Ellison, or [I would say] Steve Jobs.) That's neither a good thing nor a bad thing -- there are some uncomfortable things that kind of attitude enables, just like there are some uncomfortable things that the "personal" style enables.

What I hear Pastabagel trying to say, and what I want to echo, is that it's just silly (and I would add wasteful) to demonize people or entities over this stuff. I would rather things had been different: I would rather we didn't have the magnificent bloatware to deal with that we have, now, and I think MS is partly (largely, even) to blame for that. But they had a lot of help from Apple and the various Linux crews, all of whom are now fronting incredible bloatware. Nobody's hands are clean on that one. Well, nobody whose software is successful.
posted by lodurr at 7:27 AM on July 16

Furthermore, I'll suggest that things like these lectures - that require careful and thoughtful attention and not a little hard work - don't really belong on YouTube. Youtube is the medium for music videos and idiots prattling on about their meaningless lives. They only require partial passing attention. Look at the comments on Youtube, and consider what comments those lectures would get.

That's why we have Google Video, pastabagel.

FWIW, having followed Gates for years, I think he probably believes that Silverlight was the best solution. He thinks like an engineer in many ways. He has his own rationales for what's optimal and what's not, and there's probably some picky reason that he or the person he picked to make decisions about this could give us that, in their mind, totally justifies using Silverlight instead of Flash Video.

Which is not to say that there was ever a chance in hell that a Microsoft-associated effort would ever use Flash Video, regardless of the engineering basis of the decision, but still....
posted by lodurr at 7:31 AM on July 16

Pastabagel, you have truly earned my respect.
posted by bz at 7:32 AM on July 16

Which is not to say that there was ever a chance in hell that a Microsoft-associated effort would ever use Flash Video

They seem happy enough to use flash for these videos
posted by onya at 7:52 AM on July 16

This are hilarious thread. Someone compared a series of lectures by Richard Motherfucking Feynman served on a suboptimal media platform to a kick in the nuts.

I...wow. If anyone needs me I will be in the Total Perspective Vortex getting absolutely obliterated with some inexpensive Priorat and Piano Cat.
posted by everichon at 8:30 AM on July 16 [2 favorites]

"Maybe using Silverlight was a smart move. It establishes a threshold for intellectual curiosity. Kind of like charging $5 to post on this site. If you are really interested in the content of the lectures, you'll use the software to access them and the accompanying information. If you choose not to view them because of an objection to downloading a piece of free software, then maybe you shouldn't be watching them in the first place? "

First off downloading and installing Silverlight is free only to the extent that you don't pay for it. Doing so still helps Microsoft extend and strengthen a monopoly that allowed Bill to purchase this stuff in the first place. A monopoly that was quite willing to let the world suck on the piece of crap that is IE6 until their hand was forced by FireFox.

Second can you explain how this establishes a worthwhile "threshold for intellectual curiosity" anymore than if Microsoft required each viewer to kick a kitten before viewing? I could see establishing a threshold for intellectual curiosity if the requirement was that each viewer had read one of Fenyman's books first but this is just a speed bump that, by chance I'm sure, tempts people to install an extension that helps out Microsoft.

Considering Microsoft is actually hosting the content there must be a dozen good ways of doing this that didn't involve Silverlight, half of which wouldn't involve installing anything at all but of course being Microsoft they couldn't resist ignoring all the previous solutions, including in house solutions like WMA, and went with the one that would extend their business.
posted by Mitheral at 8:39 AM on July 16 [1 favorite]

... anymore than if Microsoft required each viewer to kick a kitten before viewing?

If you can suggest a method for requiring website visitors to kick a kitten before viewing multimedia content, I think you could possibly have a viable patent filing, there.

I'm puzzled about why anyone would expect Microsoft to publish content in a format that didn't serve their vision of their strategic goals.

Note: their vision. There's no reason they and we should share the same vision, and lots of reasons to suppose they wouldn't. In fact, long experience should have taught us long ago that they wouldn't.

So any moral outrage feels misplaced, to me.
posted by lodurr at 9:06 AM on July 16

I am not one of "those mac people," I'm just a person who knows and understands tech issues. If you don't, don't assume that you can comment intelligently about them. Just because you can type a post on MeFi doesn't mean you have perfect understanding of the issue at hand.

Great. Looking forward to a post about Silverlight. This isn't it.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 9:49 AM on July 16 [1 favorite]

Several people have stated why Silverlight is problematic (myself included).

Yeah I get that. Your computer is broken, and this upsets you. It's understandable that you would want to warn people against falling into the same trap you did in purchasing a suboptimal system that is incapable of viewing the entirety of the internet in all of it's glory. I appreciate the effort.

That said, this is not the place do advocate so strongly about the weaknesses in the Mac platform. There are better places to do that, and maybe resolve your issues.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 10:11 AM on July 16

(Yeah, like that would really persuade Blazecock [or anyone] to go quietly. You go, Pogo.)
posted by lodurr at 10:18 AM on July 16

It's understandable that you would want to warn people against falling into the same trap you did in purchasing a suboptimal system that is incapable of viewing the entirety of the internet in all of it's glory.

Silverlight runs on a Mac. That's not a problem. Macs and Mac users have nothing to do with why Silverlight sucks and why Microsoft sucks in setting up this site. I don't know why some of you keep dragging your platform issues into this where they don't belong.

It's almost like some of you grasping at some reason, any reason, any rationalization, to defend what Microsoft is doing, at any cost, simply because the free hit they're handing out today is so good. Even when it's also available on YouTube. Total Perspective Vortex, indeed.

Furthermore, I'll suggest that things like these lectures - that require careful and thoughtful attention and not a little hard work - don't really belong on YouTube. Youtube is the medium for music videos and idiots prattling on about their meaningless lives..

Pretty damning stuff. But let's go back to Pastabagel's previous comment:

No, it means you'd deny yourself an opportunity to learn from a genius out of some misguided irrational allegiance to a technology platform.

So you'd deny yourself an opportunity to learn from a genius because there are music videos elsewhere on YouTube. Brilliant.

Your elitist attitude is misguided, irrational and exceedingly foolish. I'll leave it at that.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:12 AM on July 16

...you'd deny yourself an opportunity to learn from a genius because there are music videos elsewhere on YouTube.

Who is this 'you' of which you speak? I'm only wondering because no one on this thread has said anything that is remotely equivalent to this.
posted by lodurr at 11:25 AM on July 16

Who is this 'you' of which you speak?

Read the quotes, please.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:27 AM on July 16

I did. That's why I'm asking. Because those quotes do not even remotely support your rhetorical question.

If they do, you should be able to spell it out.
posted by lodurr at 11:30 AM on July 16

It's very clear from the quotes what I am saying. Please don't be deliberately obtuse.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:35 AM on July 16

I am not one of "those mac people," I'm just a person who knows and understands tech issues. If you don't, don't assume that you can comment intelligently about them. Just because you can type a post on MeFi doesn't mean you have perfect understanding of the issue at hand.

Great. Looking forward to a post about Silverlight. This isn't it.

But it is. That's why Microsoft bought video rights to content that was already available on Youtube, ToS'd the video portions of those YouTube versions, and then presented the same videos in their own, proprietary format. You like Feynman? So do I! He was a brilliant man. What I don't like is that this "project" represents a blatant extension of Microsoft's strategy aimed at monopolizing various niches of internet technology.

Your computer is broken, and this upsets you. It's understandable that you would want to warn people against falling into the same trap you did in purchasing a suboptimal system that is incapable of viewing the entirety of the internet in all of it's glory. I appreciate the effort.

That said, this is not the place do advocate so strongly about the weaknesses in the Mac platform. There are better places to do that, and maybe resolve your issues.

I don't use a Mac. I have never owned a Mac, nor do I ever intend to own a Mac. I do, however, create web pages, and as someone who is concerned with internet technologies—as my job, you know, I spend a few thousand hours a year dealing with them—I recognize this for what it is and will call it such. Even though this post is pointing out valuable content, it's also a link to what is, in essence, a project aimed at getting Silverlight onto nominally intelligent peoples' computers. That's all it is.

If it were really, truly some sort of laudable humanitarian effort to make a great man's thoughts free for the world, Mr. Gates would post them in MPEG format with no DRM. That's an open standard, so any company or individual can create a system for viewing it. When they make the decision not to do that, they take it out of the realm of humanitarian efforts and it becomes marketing.

For those of you who are looking at your monitor gibbering about how I'm a "Mac fanboy" at this point, I have nothing else for you. Go ahead and post about how much of an idiot I am.

Everyone else, please allow me to say a few (hundred) words about SVG. SVG stands for "Scalable Vector Graphics." If you're not familiar with graphics terminology, "vector graphics" means images that are built from procedural elements—curves and lines, mostly—that can be resized to any resolution without loss of visual fidelity. In terms of design, this is a profoundly important technology. SVG would allow for web sites that have more attractive, flexible, and accessible designs at any resolution. A designer could create a site with images that scale from a cell phone browser all the way up to a monstrous 1080p-sized monitor with very little extra effort.

Why isn't SVG a standard?

Well, the way SVG came about is as a compromise standard. The W3C—the people who rightfully control web standards, who define HTML, XML, XHTML, CSS, and essentially everything that makes the web more than a series of bland corporate sites keyed to proprietary browser systems—had many standards for vector graphics submitted to them in the mid-90s, including Microsoft's VML and Adobe's PGML. The W3C then created SVG as a standard to implement the various features of these graphics systems. Browser makers then smiled, said finally, and began working on implementing the industry standard SVG.

Haha, just kidding.

Opera, all Gecko browsers (Firefox et al.), and all Webkit browsers (Safari, Chrome, etc.) currently support SVG natively. Their support is incomplete, as some features of the standard are still missing, but it's been progressing steadily since the creation of the standard.

How about IE?

Well, it's like this. Microsoft has been pouting in the corner for the last ten goddamn years because their standard, VML, didn't get adopted. Microsoft loves controlling standards, see. That means that since everyone who uses Windows already has IE installed, and many people aren't computer-savvy enough to install a better browser, SVG (and all of the design advancements that would come with it) is not supported in the browser without third party plug-ins.

Meaning you still get user interface elements defined in raster images. Meaning the practical use of SVG is completely out of the question for the foreseeable future. Meaning companies that do use SVG in standards-compliant browsers, like Google, have to fight with Javascript in order to get a kludge together to serve something renderable to IE.

If you think this is trivial, you have no understanding of how much time and effort goes into creating the web pages you enjoy, nor do you understand just how limited our options are for layout and typography, nor do you understand that proprietary standards are a major contributing factor to both of these situations.

The standards that define communication should be just that—standards. Corporations that do not respect them are being malevolent. Just because the countless hours people like me put into making sites manages to create a cohesive, attractive illusion does not mean that the web is perfect or that it isn't possible to poison the environment of web design further through E³ style efforts... especially if the corporate malevolence comes from the most powerful corporation in the software market.

tl;dr: There is more at stake here than you know about. It isn't just a problem for neckbeards, and if you want to say something about "Mac fanboys" you can fuck right off.
posted by sonic meat machine at 11:41 AM on July 16 [1 favorite]

See, I think it's you that's being deliberately obtuse.

I thought Pastabagel's meaning was pretty darn clear: YouTube is an unsuitable medium for lectures and serious pieces because it has length constraints that damage the ability to communicate the message. The second quote you extracted was -- I thought pretty clearly -- intended to give examples of that un-seriousness: 'this is the kind of thing short run-lengths are good for, and get used for.'

You instead used that to insinuate that the argument was that YouTube was unsuitable for because of those uses people put it to.

It looks like really dishonest rhetoric to me.

Now, I happen to disagree with pastabagel on that one (and what's more, I think he's doing a bit of exclude-middling, since Google Video and some other sources don't have length constraints). I think that many lectures and documentaries and even some long-form films work fine in ten-minute chunks. But I'm not pretending his argument was something it's not.
posted by lodurr at 11:47 AM on July 16 [1 favorite]

The problem is that MS says Silverlight will run on my machine and yet it doesn't. My machine is not broken. I am not broken. Silverlight is broken if makes me install it over and over w/o recognizing that it's already installed. This reminds of '94 install nightmares. I can always count on MS to give that 'wayback' machine experience.
posted by xjudson at 11:50 AM on July 16

sonic meat machine just posted an excellent example of how to make a strongly-started point, incorporating sarcasm and humor, without using dishonest rhetoric.
posted by lodurr at 11:51 AM on July 16

It looks like really dishonest rhetoric to me.

Call it whatever you like, but Pastabagel's comments were ironic in that they were very plainly contradictory.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:56 AM on July 16

sonic meat machine just posted an excellent example of how to make a strongly-started point, incorporating sarcasm and humor, without using dishonest rhetoric.

The above is a good example of passive aggressiveness on the part of lodurr. It is wrong and it is an unpleasant tactic on his part, and I refuse to respond to any further.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:58 AM on July 16

I don't think you understand what "contradictory" means.
posted by lodurr at 11:59 AM on July 16

Good.
posted by lodurr at 12:01 PM on July 16

I've already said what needed to be said to you. Thanks for your time.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:02 PM on July 16

Blazecock, as far as I could see, what you said made no sense. Based on what you said and what I read, I have to conclude that you either didn't understand the arguments you were answering, or that you were answering them in a dishonest fashion.

You could have made sense. You could have made an argument; everything you needed to do it was there. But instead you chose to joust a straw man. That's what's pissing me off.
posted by lodurr at 12:05 PM on July 16

I made myself very clear. You are choosing to be obstinate about reinterpreting what I quoted, as well as attacking me personally. I just don't see the point in saying anything more to you on the subject. Thanks.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:17 PM on July 16

And now, to break the tension, I will fart.

*pfffft!*
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 12:19 PM on July 16 [2 favorites]

Blazecock's favorite tactic, which he uses over and over and over, is to say whatever he damn well pleases, and then when you can't make sense of it (because it makes no sense), he comes back right away and says, "It's obvious, and it's not my job to explain it to you."

He has done this so many times, in so many ways, in so many threads that it makes me head come very close to actually imploding in on itself.

He's also kind of a condescending prick about it.

Thanks for your time. Really?
posted by kbanas at 12:22 PM on July 16 [1 favorite]

Holy God, how many times can you expect me to fart?!

**pfffft!**
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 12:24 PM on July 16

AKA - Surely this isn't MetaTalk, Mr. Feynman?
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 12:25 PM on July 16

Can someone tie in farting to physics and math?
posted by lodurr at 12:48 PM on July 16

There are seven different types of quarks, known as flavors: up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom, and bean. Up and down quarks have the lowest masses of all quarks. The heavier quarks rapidly change into up and down quarks through a process of particle decay: the transformation from a higher mass state to a lower mass state. Bean quarks, as the heaviest flavor, transform violently into down quarks. For this reason, up and down quarks are generally stable and the most common in the universe, whereas charm, strange, top and bottom quarks can only be produced in high energy collisions (such as those involving cosmic rays and in particle accelerators). Bean quarks are produced with burritos.

Quarks have various intrinsic properties, including electric charge, color charge, spin, mass, and odor. For every quark flavor there is a corresponding type of antiparticle, known as antiquark, that differs from the quark only in that some of its properties have equal magnitude but opposite sign. The antiquark of a bean quark, for example, is bean0.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 12:56 PM on July 16 [1 favorite]

It's like Feynman is right. here.
posted by lodurr at 1:03 PM on July 16

Silverlight video is probably just an mp4 stream in some weird container format, somebody must have written a script to rip out the actual media url already (or you can capture the stream origin in etheral).

And Pastabagel, I think "allegiance" is the wrong word when you're avoiding what is obviously a ham-fisted effort at promoting a less-than-open "standard" from a company known best for ham-fisted efforts at promoting less-than-open "standards".

(don't get me wrong, Silverlight as a piece of technology is actually not that bad, but it comes with certain connotations)
posted by parkan at 1:13 PM on July 16

Oi, that serves me right to leave a page loaded overnight and not refresh before making a comment...
posted by parkan at 1:15 PM on July 16

He's also kind of a condescending prick about it.

Pot, meet kettle.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:24 PM on July 16

Your elitist attitude is misguided, irrational and exceedingly foolish. I'll leave it at that.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:12 PM on July 16

I find your use of the term "elitist" as a perjorative to be ironic, considering that we are talking about a series of lectures on physics delivered by a Nobel Laureate. Secondly, read Feynman's own words in the post again:

I published the title of the talk in clear and precise language, and didn't make it sound like it was something it wasn't- it's the relation of physics and mathematics - and if you find that in some spots it assumes some minor knowledge of physics or mathematics, I cannot help it. It was named.

This is not subject matter for everyone. Is Feynman an elitist because he is assuming his audience possess "some minor knowledge of physics or mathematics?"

Am I an elitist because I suggest that a venue like Youtube is inappropriate for this content NOT because of any technical constraints but because the presentation of that site is built entirely around the concept of distraction - look at other video from this user here, look at other videos on this topic here, read and post comments, etc? YouTube is a the Perpetual Perceptual Noise Short-Attention Span channel. This kind of content, I repeat, that requires careful and thoughtful attention, is not appopriate for youtube or even google video in the same way that a Frontline documentary does not belong on the Cartoon Network or Comedy Central.

Now, if you actually looked at the site and had any clue what you were talking about, you can see that the site is not generically useful for all videos, but rather is specifically tailored for this one series of videos. There are captions that are timecoded with the video, so you can watch without sound. There's an equation window that displays whatever equations are relevant to whatever Feynman is talking about at the time. There is a notes window so you can take notes. There is a commentary audio track you can switch to from a physics professor. Even if Gates avoided the noise of YouTube and threw this up on Google Video, that stuff wouldn't be available.

Gates wanted a presentation that would maximize the experience, not detract from it.

Here's a question for everyone. We know these lectures have been put up on youtube by now, right? So, did you actually go and watch them on YouTube?

Next. Microsoft didn't buy the rights to these films. Gates himself did. It's on a Microsoft Research website because who else is he going to get to put up this kind of a site? Why would he use a rival's site to do something generic when he can ask people at the company he owns to realize his particular vision.

The arguments in this thread are totally psychotic. They amount to accusations that Microsoft is using these lectures to promote their proprietary platform.

Think about that for a second. Microsoft wants to use 40 year-old black-and-white lectures of a Nobel physicist with accompanying equations and transcripts to promote their platform? What does that tell you about Microsoft. They aren't trying to use a game or some stupid lolcat viral video to promote their software (according to you). They are using physics lectures. And it is bad that they are using something elitist. They should be dumbing down the internet like everyone else!

Here's another shameless attempt to promote Microsoft software to the youtube masses: Worldwide Telescope. But you shouldn't click on that link. I'm telling you now, you won't think it's worth the Silverlight download.
posted by Pastabagel at 3:15 PM on July 16 [1 favorite]

hey, has anybody else noticed that if he were still alive, Art Carney would be the best choice to play Dr. Feynman in a biopic?
posted by shmegegge at 3:16 PM on July 16

Pastabagel, each and every feature that you cite is already provided by various open standards. Hell, a notes window? That's what text editors are for.

If Gates did this for no reason besides humanitarianism, why didn't he simply provide an alternative version? The fact that he didn't means that, in fact, the presentation is important to his purpose.

I do wish you'd leave out the random insults in the middle of your posts, by the way. It's really off-putting.
posted by sonic meat machine at 3:49 PM on July 16

That's why Microsoft bought video rights to content that was already available on Youtube, ToS'd the video portions of those YouTube versions, and then presented the same videos in their own, proprietary format.

Enough are still online that I won't blame Microsoft (just yet) for YouTube's (inconsistent) enforcement of copyright. Two are also available at CERN where you can download them (via reddit).

Where's the outrage at the BBC or Cornell or whoever had the rights for sitting on these until someone gave them money? Why should Bill have to make them public domain right after he paid for them? If they did that in the first place (and much sooner) then we could discuss the actual content instead of browser plug-ins.
posted by Gary at 3:54 PM on July 16

Carney? Really?

Really?

I'm having a hard time visualizing that one.

Maybe I need to go watch some Carney. As long as it's not on a Silverlight player. (Because I don't feel like screwing around enough to get Silverlight working on Kubuntu.)

Pastabagel, I hear you, but I don't think you're approaching the discussion from the same angle as the people you're talking to. (Maybe "these arguments are psychotic" is a way of describing that.) It's basically a moral/aesthetic issue for the people who are posting contra-Silverlight. The anti-corporate aesthetic outweighs other aesthetic considerations. For you, it seems like you're saying the information design or the information quality is primary. Add to that the fact that you just don't seem to share the animosity that a lot of people feel toward anything associated with MS, and I think we're just looking at a gulf.

I'm surprised it blew up this badly, here, on this particular thread, but I'm not surprised that a Silverlight-requiring site would blow up a thread.

I guess what I'm saying is that this discussion was mostly over before any of us started it. And yet it has managed to drag on and on and on....
posted by lodurr at 3:59 PM on July 16

I find your use of the term "elitist" as a perjorative to be ironic, considering that we are talking about a series of lectures on physics delivered by a Nobel Laureate.

You're changing the subject.

Now, if you actually looked at the site and had any clue what you were talking about, you can see that the site is not generically useful for all videos, but rather is specifically tailored for this one series of videos

Again, you're changing the subject.

Okay, here's what you quoted me saying (and what you based your diatribe against YouTube on):

I think you may want to direct your ire elsewhere. The (mostly correct) observations about Silverlight and about how Feynman's talk is being used to entice installation of this software have nothing to do with Macs or Mac users.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 6:38 PM on July 15

This isn't being used to entice anyone to do anything. If you think Gates bought these lectures to promote Silverlight, not only do you know know anything about Gates, you also didn't read the article...

I was responding to comments about the Mac community being slagged by people who don't know a damn thing about what they are talking about.

But, getting back to your original response, you then proceeded to judge the entirety of YouTube by the quality of its commenters, by what is really a minor fraction of its content (despite your highfalutin protestations otherwise), and — most ironically — your supposition about the personal qualities of Sergey Brin.

You are promoting the installation of Silverlight on the basis that people should ignore all the antics of the particular company which made this plug-in and the person who runs that company, only because of the content.

Nonetheless, on your say-so, we peons should choose Bill Gates' product, because Brin doesn't personally post Feynman's lecture materials on YouTube.

Never mind that, more importantly, Brin's company facilitates sharing of all manner of scientific and other educational videos to anyone with just about any modern desktop computer — including these very same specific lectures by Feynman! — to a much greater degree than Microsoft and Bill Gates can or ever will in both our lifetimes.

That's not to say I'm in love with YouTube and think everyone should go there, etc. I don't think anyone should choose this, that or the other option on the basis of my personal opinion of Gates or Brin or Jobs, anyway.

That's such a silly criteria, because neither of us knows any of these people on a personal basis. You know what their PR people want you to know, and that's all you get.

But people can and should be allowed to make their own choices as to how they want to see this kind of material. People should be informed about Microsoft's full history with regards to the web. And people should be allowed to make up their own minds about what software they are surreptitiously being asked to install.

In the face of choices, all of that information is relevant, and we should not tolerate any attempts to silence this part of the discussion.

And, finally, to get back to the original point, neither Apple nor users of Apple products have anything to do with Microsoft's promotion of Silverlight, nor Microsoft's long and infamous history in trying to control web publishing and personal computing, in general.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:55 PM on July 16

Anyway, for people who want to learn more about Microsoft's strategy of embrace-extend-extinguish, and why Silverlight may be problematic, I highly recommend reading David Bank's Breaking Windows, which interviews Microsoft engineers and managers about the history of Internet Explorer's rise and the methods they used for handling Netscape. David Bank is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and his book is well-researched.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:05 PM on July 16

And, finally, to get back to the original point, neither Apple nor users of Apple products have anything to do with Microsoft's promotion of Silverlight, nor Microsoft's long and infamous history in trying to control web publishing and personal computing, in general.

None of which has anything to do with Feynman's lecture - the actual subject of this post. But it's these said same mac users who still felt the need to make the discussion some sort of referendum on their inherent moral superiority.

Which, you know, good for them, but WTFGAS. This aint the place for it.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 6:46 PM on July 16

Pogo, whatever it's really about, it's not really about "mac users." Macs and their users are totally tangential to the issue, and a number of the people objecting most strongly explicitly identified themselves as non-Mac-users.

So could you please drop that part of the argument? It's not necessary, and it just inflames people.
posted by lodurr at 6:55 PM on July 16

Don't bother, lodurr, he's not actually reading anything.
posted by sonic meat machine at 7:16 PM on July 16 [1 favorite]

"Yeah I get that. Your computer is broken, and this upsets you. It's understandable that you would want to warn people against falling into the same trap you did in purchasing a suboptimal system that is incapable of viewing the entirety of the internet in all of it's glory. I appreciate the effort."

My computer works just fine and can handle Silverlight. I've probably spent the better part of three days messing with it because I've got to support it which is how I know it's a memory pig. And I can appreciate how sexy it can be; however, it is wild overkill for this content.
posted by Mitheral at 7:47 PM on July 16

Here's a meta-question that I don't really expect an answer to, and which probably shouldn't really be answered here -- more of a cry to the heavens, I suppose:

What can we do about things like this?

"Boycott MS" is neither a useful answer nor a tactic that's liable to have an impact on the problem. I mean, it's not just Silverlight -- Flash can be really awful, too, depending on the version. [It's entirely possible I lack perspective on just how bad Silverlight is.]

And Firefox itself in the latest versions is just hideous: After running for just a few hours, I routinely find that it's using 20% of my CPU while idle. (That's on a Mac, though; from my days when I was using both Windows and Mac side by side regularly, I recall that FF seemed to be a little more efficient and less buggy on Windows.) Safari seems to have gotten a little better, but it will still randomly go into Eternal Beachball Mode (EBM) after it's been running for a day or so. Leopard itself has done some really weird and disappointing things with its memory usage (processes that got a few hundred K of memory allocated to them under Tiger get 2GB or more under Leopard, and fans run all the time).

"Use Linux" isn't a good answer, either. I'd say I've used Linux as my main personal OS for about 8 months in the last 10 years, and in those 8 months I had more system crashes than I did in all my Mac and Windows use over that time. (And when I first started using Panther, I swear it crashed at least twice a month.)

If I had to make a point at the end of this, it would be again, that no one's hands are clean on this one. We are not where we should be after all this time.
posted by lodurr at 5:20 AM on July 17 [1 favorite]

Flash is not my favorite thing either, lodurr, but I will note that despite Adobe having creative control over their format they have never made real efforts to lock people out of alternative implementations. There is a Linux version of Flash; there are Mac and Windows versions of basically all of their important software; and there are competing open source implementations of many of their standards which Adobe does not kill. Do I like Adobe? Not really, and I'd never use Flash for anything structural or navigational due to its many problems (including accessibility), but they don't have quite the history of slash and burn culture that Microsoft has shown.
posted by sonic meat machine at 11:41 AM on July 17