http://veritas-vos-liberabit.com/tmp/2009/MoonVorbisTest/Bin/Debug/index.html
(requires Silverlight 3, beta just rleased)

Some more info here:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Mar-23-1.html
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Mar-24-1.html

Silverlight 3 has a raw AV pipeline so you can write any codec you want.

The only reason I’d have Moonlight installed is to view already-created content. Though even this doesn’t work half the time.

Whenever I read articles, I judge greatly based on who writes the article and the publication (editorial board). I’m fortunate to be able to differentiate based on tens of thousands of articles/posts I’ve read. I happen to take notes.

Let’s not pretend that we live in a society where all mean well and no corporate role comes into play. Messengers do mean a lot to the message.

I can’t help being reminded of how presidential candidates get ‘advertised’ based on their obedience (i.e. how receptive they would be to those who would fund them). This shows you how great a role money plays and also the rule of “self censorship” (meaning things that people dare not say because of peer reaction).

For those who don’t know the opinions of Ralph Nader or Ron Paul, here’s a video.

One reason to be anon is that you might fall on the “wrong” side of the fence (for that discussion), but you might feel you have legitimate reasons for being on that side and want to communicate these.

Sometimes, “good” people make mistakes, and sometimes “good” people become “bad” people in order to leverage their past “good” name. And what about “bad” people becoming “good” people but not being heard?

It also seems that some of the firestorms here might have been more constructive engagements if there had been less attacking of people. After a while, the bystander can’t figure out who is defending primarily and who is attacking primarily because everyone always claims to be defending something.

Trying to identify the roles various people have played or play makes up a significant chunk of the postings here. The idea is to make it easier to trust or distrust messengers in the future (no matter the message). It’s an effort to battle marketing and to manage complexity. I can live with that focus, do participate to some extent, and can appreciate it to some extent, but it’s better whenever we can focus on the message ahead of the messenger. Sometimes the message is complex or there are missing pieces and trust becomes part of the equation. In these cases, humans look towards the messenger for clues; however, this weakness is exploitable. It gives power to those that try to buy people, quote them out of context, or trap them so that they can later point to support. Maybe I’m helping the wrong side and not even intentionally? The “messenger” can also be faked. At the end of the day, we’ll go farther if we can avoid having to fall back to evaluating the messenger because we failed to deal properly with the message; always let’s try message first, messenger second.

[Note, I admitted guilt to having succumbed to judging the messenger. Basically, some messages are complex, and the messenger can give a clue to how to attempt to digest some of the messages.]

In private, it was actually suggested to me that Dan might be AstroTurfing, but I choose not to believe this although he seems to be close to Novell’s headquarters? (Massachusetts?)

Slated wrote a piece linked earlier which mentions gangsters ( http://www.answers.com/gangster ). Doing business with gangsters is risky to say the least. For Microsoft’s case, it may even be illegal doing business with them if, for example, you’d be colluding with them in violation of anti-trust laws [a very relevant issue for many].

Mono has been criticized here repeatedly, over and over, etc etc, for reasons that have nothing to do with technological aspects or the current licensing. That you wish to continue to ignore that without convincing rebuttals hints you may be biased at least as concerns those issues.

I generally stay away from the tech issues because I don’t know enough. I don’t want to be biased if possible.

I also like the GPL, but have pointed out numerous times how that is not an elixir by any means. In fact, contributing and helping GPL code from an abusive company is not good. One of the safeties of the GPL and other free software is the ability to fork when you have bad/abusive leadership/ownership of the source. Having said that, I also don’t like dotgnu because they aren’t forking in their own direction but are following the same path still lead by Microsoft. So what good is free software if you don’t leverage it to fork and leave bad leadership alone to play by themselves?

Microsoft knows what really matters, and that is why they want to move the argument over to technical and licensing issues, just as Dan advocates. Those two issues are secondary. In particular, dotnet’s technical positives were largely inherited from elsewhere, and the GPL (because of copyright law) is actually quite an advantages license to those that own the code, putting that much more importance for the community not to contribute when the leadership is rotten. [Is the leadership rotten? Well, Novell's leadership is in bed with Microsoft's leadership it appears, and Microsoft is definitely rotten.]

As for “poison”. It would be dishonest not to call poison by its name. mono is poison in a number of ways (which have also been covered here repeatedly).

“[The partnership with Microsoft is] going very well insofar as we originally agreed to co-operate on three distinct projects and now we’re working on nine projects and there’s a good list of 19 other projects that we plan to co-operate on.”

–Ron Hovsepian, Novell CEO

Why are people who work for Microsoft also working on Mono? Does that not trigger anyone’s alarm?

http://slated.org/why_dotgnu_is_wrong

Dan: “If they dislike it because it’s Microsoft, then yes.”

IOW Dan O’Brian thinks it’s “lunacy” to dislike criminals.

Well, at least we now all clearly understand his position, which is intractably biased towards Microsoft – convicted criminals, and anyone who dares to dissent against these criminals, their business practises, and their technology, must therefore be a “lunatic”.

Personally, I’d lay odds that he is actually a Microsoft employee. It would certainly explain his utter indifference to Microsoft’s criminal behaviour.

Too much focus, in my opinion, is spent on the messenger (in both directions).

In many cases, these folks are just trying to help with corrections, further the discussion with questions, or are "just another websurfer pushing a point of view", so to speak.

Whatever their motivation, we can either out-debate them, or we can’t. May whomever is correct, win.

But, of course, this is the internet, and at the end of the day, no one really knows who is whom and what their affiliations are – so, we’re back at square one and can only judge each other on the ‘content of our characters (and comments)’…

If I made all comments come up as ‘Anonymous’, I think it’d be interesting to see how they get ‘modded’ without everyone assuming their agenda first and using it as a reason to discount the argument…

As Shane has already stated, it is irrelevant who I or anyone else works for.

As long as you don’t work for Microsoft, Novell, one of their public relations agencies,or partners then I would agree that it’s not relevant where you work. The only reason I make that distinction is that, if you do work at one of the mentioned places, then you have a conflict of interest and your comments take on the flavour of an official representative. For myself, I can say that I have no conflict of interest (i.e. I do not even work for or with a Microsoft or Novell competitor) and it is not relevant where I work.

My stake is that I think they are cool technologies.

Having legitimate, defensible convictions does not make one incapable of commenting.

I make no money from them.