[time-nuts] OT - Feynman lecture series on Physics hosted by Microsoft

Mike Monett xde-l2g3 at myamail.com
Fri Jul 17 05:07:03 UTC 2009


time-nuts-request at febo.com wrote:
>
>Hi:
>
>I've been watching these in IE6 at the
>http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva
>web page.  When I added it to my Favorites an option comes up "Make available
>offline" with options for related web pages.  I didn't know IE6 had that
>feature.  But did not use it since the .avi versions are available.  But this
>is a handy thing to know about.
>
>Have Fun,
>
>Brooke Clarke
>http://www.prc68.com

Brooke, how do you get IE6 to show anything? I get a blank page with a few
Microsft links in the upper left corner. I tried the latest release of
Opera 9.64 and it shows the same thing. Do you have to install SilverLight?
If so, is this format also used to view offline?

Carnegie Mellon has a description of the 7 lectures in the series at

http://www.ece.cmu.edu/news/story/2005/03/the_feynman_lecture/

I've been trying to find Lecture 3: The Great Conservation Principles. This
seems fundamental to everything we are doing - flicker and the other noise
sources, drift, random walk, etc. But I have not found any source on the
web so far. I did find more lectures in YouTube that were not referenced
elsewhere. They are part of the Messenger series, but the quality is poor.
The lectures are broken into separate files, and some have long breaks with
no video or sound.

I really would like to get the whole set. Feynman often refers to previous
lectures in the series, but without seeing them it's hard to get a complete
picture. Too bad there is no converter for Silverlight. Which, btw, I found
an excellent free converter at

http://www.nchsoftware.com/prism/

It works great! They have about 60 other free programs ranging from
accounting and inventory software to camera monitoring software that looks
for scene changes.

Everything I've tried so far works very well. My Win98 machine went
unstable and I had to reboot a couple of times, but I'm not sure that
wasn't caused by a multimedia program that crashed every time I tried to
move the file cursor.

If you can, let me know if MS uses Silverlight to save the files. I suspect
that will be the case. If so, it might be worth creating a separate WinXP
installation in VirtualBox just to watch the files. A bare XP installation
is only a couple of GB. The entire Feynman series might be 4GB or so.
That's not much on a 500GB disk. And the quality would have to be better
than YouTube:)

Mike



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