[jawngee]

Well to start, rethink the EC2 web serving, you're spending more money than you need to. Consider linode or slicehost as bandwidth is way cheaper than amazon.

Second, why silverlight? The whole idea of online collaboration is allowing as many disparate people come together regardless of device. So you've thrown up roadblocks to two platforms that can no longer be considered marginal (OS X and Linux) for what is an arbitrary technology choice. At least with Flex you'll hit 98% of it and you can't sell me that silverlight has any advantage over Flex that is worth that.

I'd love to give you more feedback because I'm very interested in online collaboration, but I can't because I'm on Linux and won't install SilverLight on my mac.

[dan_sim]

This is a strong point for a bootstrapped company. We used EC2 for 2 months and then switched to Slicehost (and we'll try linode one day). That reduced our expenses a lot and we have the same quality of service. Think about it!

[stormideas]

Thanks, Will check it out.

[pclark]

I think silverlight could be an issue, but plenty of companys get by on windows only tools.

Why can't you install Silverlight on OS X? I had to quit my browsers then run the installer. It failed if they were open.

[mjr578]

I was able to install silverlight on OS X and FF. When I clicked to watch the demo it asked me to install and I clicked the link which downloaded 2.0. I didn't even have to restart my browser when it was done.

[jawngee]

Why should I go through the hassle to evaluate something I won't potentially use? Even the intro video is in silverlight. Perhaps if it were in flash I could make some determination if it's worth the hassle.

And what's the point of the hassle in the first place? Someone has yet to explain why SilverLight is better for me as the consumer than Flex/Flash.

[jmatt]

Since when has HN stuck with the defacto technology...

Ok, this may age me some. But people said exactly the same thing when Java and Flash first came out... if you go back far enough they were also intrusive annoying frustrating bug ridden technologies.

I'm not directly supporting SilverLight. I'm just supporting as many competitive web platforms as possible. They all add something, even the evil Microsoft ones. That being said Microsoft is losing the battle with that horrible SilverLight install. It needs to be as easy to install as Flash. It should be as close to transparent as possible.

[axod]

>> (Java+Flash) "if you go back far enough they were also intrusive annoying frustrating bug ridden technologies."

To a fair number of people, they still are.

[jmatt]

True enough!

[pclark]

I think having a flash tutorial (as well as a silverlight one) is a great idea.

[axod]

or, just a flash one, since it's what is commonly used for videos.

[stormideas]

That's sounding good to me. Going to add detect for Silverlight and switch in a flash version of the intro video if Silverlight isn't present.

Thanks!

[smysore]

I installed it so I could watch Netflix content instantly