[nmglug] city of santa fe videos using silverlight (ugh)

[Arlo Barnes]

If people want to feel better about the city, yesterday I was at the
LaFarge public library and they were using Linux for their catalog
computers - a 'multi-seat' distro called Userful <http://userful.com> that
looks to be Ubuntu-based. It had Google Chrome, Adobe Reader, and some
for-pay software called Crossover that allowed them to run Microsoft Office
("cx-office") installed, although it was setup to be kiosk-like (running on
a thin client) with only Google Chrome running on startup to display their
catalog page, with no desktop or menu to start other applications, but
maybe if you inserted a jump drive with a Word file on it, it would bring
up some option to edit it?

Anyway, regarding the videos - yes, an alternate option just for
downloading would be nice. But why do you need Silverlight, or even Flash
for that matter, to do streaming video? I have not investigated any of
these technologies, but my understanding was that Flash was a closed
proprietary compiled ECMAscript-like language to create animated content,
and Silverlight is MS' ripoff of that. Why not just load the video into the
browser a little bit at a time ('streaming') and play it with Javascript? I
am sure I have seen more than one JS player out there...

-Arlo James Barnes
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