Bill Gates offers the world a physics lesson

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10286732-56.html

by TriinT • 17 years ago

22 14 17 years ago

news.cnet.com

Dilpil• 17 years ago

And a brilliant lesson in marketing a platform to first adopters as well.

Not so sure about that. It was rather obvious that the discussions about "Silverlight only" would overshadow the release of the video at least in all the technical circles. Offering the videos in more than one format - so people with Silverlight could have gotten advanced features while others still could have watched it would have been a lot better marketing.

J_McQuade• 17 years ago

Marred only by the fact that half the people I know can't even get it to work.

zmonkeyz• 17 years ago

Damn I thought he was going to dive into a vault full of gold coins without getting hurt. :/

andreyf• 17 years ago

Um, but you need to install Silverlight to see them? Does this man do anything without at least some kind tiny piece of ulterior motive?

Unrelated, this is a great biography of Richard Feinman: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3164300309410618119

endtime• 17 years ago

>Does this man do anything without at least some kind tiny piece of ulterior motive?

Nope. The billions of dollars of donations to protection against malaria is simply to keep more people alive to buy Office, I'm sure.

freetard• 17 years ago

He has stocks in the companies he's donating to to find a cure for malaria.

smhinsey• 17 years ago

If it hadn't been Silverlight, someone would be saying "see, even Bill Gates doesn't think it's good!" Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I find this a really frustrating critique.

coffeeaddicted2• 17 years ago

Not "Silverlight" is the problem, but "Silverlight exclusive". How hard would it have been to put up an alternative webpage with other formats for people which don't want or can't install Silverlight? The answer is certainly - not hard at all. Not doing so makes them just looks bad when they could have looked good so easily.

edit: Hm, do you think that would be hard? We offer our videos in several formats and I know lots of other people doing that and I don't see the problem with that. Run it through a converter and add another link...

phugoid• 17 years ago

Can someone explain whether we might in theory watch the video using moonlight?

From Ubuntu I tried installing moonlight-plugin-mozilla (I assume this installs Microsoft Media Pack), and spoofing my Agent as IE 8; that got me a different version of the page where I can only click to "Install [Silverlight] and go to Project Tuva".

ryne• 17 years ago

If Microsoft doesn't use Silverlight, do you expect Adobe to? Or rather they'd use something as tentative is HTML5's video tags? Sure it's annoying but it's to be expected.

Bill Gates offers the world a physics lesson

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