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In part I agree with you - if Apple make a mistake they should be held responsible and they should fix it.

Interestingly, Adobe have already released an update:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=13&platform=Macintosh

Now, why would Adobe release a fix if Apple screwed up? It could be that either Adobe screwed up and their code relied on some undocumented API behaviour or that Apple changed the APIs and Adobe updated their app to support the new APIs.

Regardless of which it is, it doesn't look like a testing issue or a simple screw-up by Apple.

Interestingly, Adobe already have a fix out:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=13&platform=Macintosh

This corrects the issue, if their release notes are accurate. Why is this interesting? Because Adobe released the fix, not Apple.

So what is the evidence that conclusively shows that this has something to do with DRM?

Note, BTW, that one Adobe person says that "We're working with Apple to resolve the problem".

Looks like most of the issues are fixed by this released today. http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/aftereffects/Adobe_After_Effects_CS3_8_0_2_Read_Me.pdf

It's nice that Dtrace works again. But I'm betting a lot more people use After Effects or Premiere. The QT 7.4 update which enables movie rentals from iTunes breaks any render that takes longer than 10 minutes. Thank god DRM is here to protect me from the work I need to do. Wasn't apple supposed to me the machine for media professionals?

http://blogs.adobe.com/keyframes/2008/01/dont_update_to_quicktime_74.html

We are talking UI, not communications protocol.

In that case, let's talk about UI. Remember back when you said:

I don't understand how the internet is even useful, since anything you define on the web you could have simply included as an option on the disc AND it will be les suser configurable.

Ok, now I see the problem. You said "web", when what we both meant was REST.

You see, HDi is a script that runs off disc or persistent storage. It's Javascript and XML. It has an API which allows it to fetch things over HTTP, but it does NOT have a web browser. Thus, the only relevance of "web" here is as REST -- it's really just a form of restricted Internet access that has nothing directly to do with the Web.

("Restricted" because it does not allow protocols other than HTTP, or ports other than 80 (or 443 for SSL), etc etc)

So, anything BDJ can do, HDi can do. And right now, HDi can do it better.

not for example show active movies in the UI the same way you could with BD-J.

Not only can I show active movies in the UI, I can download or stream them, too. Could watch the original movie, while streaming in a live director's commentary talking head...

There's a reason people would prefer real apps on the iPhone over web apps.

Yes, there is, but it has nothing to do with XML or JavaScript.

Because for your single example the user could more easily choose the exact series of test patterns desired based on a more refined GUI not hampered by DHTML limitations or the availability of network which as I said only 20% of people would have hooked up anyway.

Except HD-DVD markup is not HTML, though it resembles it. And HDi does not require availability of the network, so I could still fall back to your way if it was not available.

Correct. But it's not a good idea in even your example that is unlike any other disc sold on the market.

Let's talk about that after you understand how my example works.

All flash video to date is streamed over the network.

Also not true. (Alright, technically it's Director, but it's the same tech.) And that's not counting downloading the flv file directly and watching from mplayer or VLC.

You mean the same iPod which lets people download and "own" songs and store them locally?

Or copy them from their friends, or download them from the Internet.

I wouldn't even rate it as possible. J2ME programming is a lot easier

Than what?

Grandma will not have a 1st gen player though, she's not a bleeding edge buyer

No, she's a hand-me-down have-to-buy-it-for-her.

Considering that this is that third thing you forgot to mention, called trademarks, it really isn't too unreasonable. In order to keep their trademarks, they have to defend them rigorously. If they stood back and did nothing, they are putting themselves at risk. This is the same reason Adobe's official stance is don't say "I photoshopped that image", but "I enhanced that image using Adobe Photoshop." I am sure they love that their product is a verb, but they can't officially advocate it.

The part that is unreasonable is how they shut down making the car calander. They could have, perhaps, sent a letter telling them about the legal situation and granting them permission, right there in the letter, to go ahead.

I couldn't find a link for this, but I remember reading about an incident with Get A First Life getting a letter from Linden Labs. Linden Labs told them about a trademark issue with the Get A First Life website, and in the same letter granted them permission to go ahead and use it. The letter was their rigorous defense of their trademark, but the defense didn't require shutting anyone down. Yeah, Linden Labs is pretty cool, I guess (even though I hate Second Life).

IANAL, btw.

Let's face facts, there is tons of software that is not on Linux that people want. How much longer is the Linux community going to ignore this fact?

WTF?

Maybe you've heard of VMWare?

Or, perhaps, Wine?

Or maybe you've noticed that software like Open Office and FireFox is cross platform, running on Win/Mac/Linux ? Toolkits such as GTK Java, Flash and QT allow for easy, straightforward cross-platform development?

Or, perhaps, that there's a whole operating system being put together utilizing all these parts?

Get your head out from under that rock! (or is it... Mom's basement?)

Look, you gave IRIX and Solaris as evidence that a Linux port of Photoshop made sense. But IRIX and Solaris versions of Photoshop flopped,

Is IRIX still in production? Last I heard SGI stopped building PCs and now concentrates on supercomputers. And what is Solaris' market share? Especially in graphics. But Adobe still makes a version of FrameMaker for Solaris, they even make an educational version. I don't know if all the open source graphics programs available for Linux can also be used on either IRIX or Solaris. However their existence as well as people paying extra for CrossOver Linux to run Photoshop indicates there is a market for Photoshop on Linux. People even jump through hoops to get PS running in WINE. Here's a Ubuntu forum on running PS CS3 in WINE.

you wouldn't (no matter what Adobe thinks) build an enterprise application with Flash.

you wouldn't (no matter what Adobe thinks) build an enterprise application with Flash.

So "Free" is too expensive?

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/

Flash at least works. It remains to be seen how compatible Moonlight is with Silverlight. Our options here are between proprietary solutions, one of which is mature and has been around for years, as well as having platform ubiquity. The other is new, immature, harder to use, only offers a promise of ubiquity which has not been fulfilled yet, and comes from a company with a proven track record of putting only enough effort into developing technology to shut out the competition, then dropping it all together for many years (see IE).

Also the Flex development tools are free unlike Visual Studio 2008. Go download them for yourself. It's just an Eclipse plugin.

Flex Builder is free. And from my experience, Flex is far easier to work in, a lot more mature, and not just a knee-jerk response from its parent company to a market condition which caught them by surprise like Silverlight is.

Umm....3.5 billion? Yeah, it might have been downloaded that many times but I find it unlikely.

World Population est. = 6.6 billion.
Internet Population est. = 1.25 billion.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Installs per internet user = 2.8

I know for a fact that not all of those 1.25 billion people have Flash installed, and fewer still having flash 9. Especially since some of the internet population will be people who share computers such as internet cafes.

Now according to Adobe's own information they have a total flash penetration of flash 6 and higher of 838 million. Out of an estimated 858 million computers on the internet.

http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/PC.html

Now if they are able to move 60 million people to their Silverlight install base, they still have a long ways to go, but it is a good start.

Before I read the comments, I didn't even know what Silverlight is. and like the article suggests, that ignorance may reflect as poorly on MS as it does on me. I am living with someone who is well up the learning curve for Flash 3 Action scripts. These prices will force the little people to look at the MS "alternative" but her employer is gung ho for a rich client-side and the money is insignificant. Besides...

is SL really a Flash alternative?
The video presentation is not even the interesting part to companies that have data [YOUR DATA] that you want formatted and readable in some custom way, or graphed just the way you like it. Can you easily make animated and interactive graphs with SL? Does it have object and event interfaces to let you create UI that can react to nearly any item the user might click on? Does it natively support [ie, know how to render] tabular and XML structured data as it is fetched from the server?

Flex SDK is free, incidentally. You are overrated.

http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/sdk/

This site doesn't force me to use Flash.

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402251 mac & win

Bonjour connects to no other servers than your machine's pre-configured DNS server.

Why am I not surprised that Adobe's using Flash as its spyw^H^H^H^Hphone-home tool?

The only surprising thing about this story is that Adobe's managed to brib^H^H^H^Hconvince the vendors of "security" software to not declare Flash as a malware vector.

When was the last time you saw something as capable of interacting with both the web browser and the rest of the system as Flash... not have at least one security hole that could be exploited through the downloading of malicious content?

I've sniffed the data sent to that address. It includes the serial number of the software:

GET /b/ss/mxcentral/1/F.3-fb/[sn-here]?[AQB]&purl=mm&pccr=true&c2=dw&c3=9.0&c4=win&c5=en&c6=full&c7=&c8=&c9=dw_9.0_win_en_full__[AQE] HTTP/1.1
Referer: http://www.adobe.com/startpage/dw_content/dw_90_full_default.swf?prod=dw&ver=9.0&plat=win&lang=en&stat=full&tday=&spfx=&productName=dreamweaver
x-flash-version: 9,0,45,0
User-Agent: Shockwave Flash
Host: 192.168.112.2O7.net

and returns a 2x2 pixel blank GIF.

In an updated post:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2007/12/whats_with_adob.html
the Adobe guy says:
the objections seem to center not so much on whether Adobe apps are contacting a server, but rather that the server is named "192.168.112.2O7.net,"

Note the letter O instead of a zero. 2o7.net is registered to Omniture.

WTF? If Little Snitch told me that some app was trying to connect to 192.168.112.2O7.net I would assume it was compromised, and would be debating a complete clean system reinstall of OSX.

192.168.112.2O7.net? Masquerading as an IP from my home DHCP server? Are they serious? From Nigeria? Romania?

Again, WTF?

P.S. for those of you who have not set up a LAN, 192.168.xxx.xxx is typically an IP address for an internal LAN, not something out on the Web.

Quote:
1. Lack of flash plugin. Yes, they totally side-stepped the legal problems, but how about a script to do the job on startup??

What legal problems would that be? Adobe allows you to distribute the flash plugin with your software or service, so preinstalling flash would be legal. (See http://www.adobe.com/licensing/)

Including a link to youtube, without including flash is stupid.

Thanks for all the advice (everyone). I have a license for Photoshop versions 1-4, but I don't think they allow upgrades to the latest one for one cheap upgrade price. But yeah, that's always a good strategy.

You may be able to find PS 6 or 7 that is an upgrade, then use it to upgrade to CS3. You may find something you can upgrade at a computer show, you can check out Super Computer Sale for any sale events near you. I learned from another /.er months ago that you can also find old versions, full as well as upgrades, of PS on eBay.

My college has Macromedia Studio 8 (or whatever it's called) for $75. I could buy that and upgrade to CS3 I bet, for substantially less than full retail.

You've got to be careful and check the versions, both as I say about above at computer shows or on eBay as well as what the college sells. If you plan to upgrade, and I bet most will upgrade eventually, you need to make sure the version you buy is upgradeable. Educational versions are not typically upgradeable. For instance I got Macromedia Studio with Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Freehand through college however it specifically states on the license and packaging that it's not upgradeable. If you look at what eBay has you want to make sure if you buy from eBay what you buy specifically states it is a full or upgradeable version. There are some unopened boxes listed but if it is opened then it's a good idea to make sure the seller has a License Transfer Agreement filled out from Adobe. Otherwise you may not be able to upgrade.

Read this.

This is Erick Lee from the Adobe Secure Software Engineering Team. We can be reached at secure@adobe.com.

From the day Adobe was notified about the issue we have been working with the researcher to develop appropriate solutions.

These potential vulnerabilities are in improperly coded SWFs, and Adobe is developing a solution in an update to Flash Player that will prevent these attacks on existing vulnerable SWFs.

Flash Player bulletin released on 12/18 (http://www.adobe.com/support/
security/bulletins/apsb07-20.html)
includes a solution to a portion of these vulnerabilities and the next update in early 2008 will mitigate the remaining issues.

In the meantime, developers can mitigate cross site scripting attacks in their SWFs by coding them following guidelines for secure Flash development as described in the whitepaper at http://www.adobe.com/ devnet/flashplayer/articles/secure_swf_apps.html, and by using data validation libraries available at http://code.google.com/p/flash- validators/.

Adobe is also applying these guidelines to SWF templates that are commonly deployed, which will be available as updates in early January, and we are working with other software vendors to update their templates.

Together, these strategies provide a complete solution to the potential vulnerabilities.

Erick Lee
Manager, Secure Software Engineering
Adobe Systems

Realistically, if you want to learn to develop flash using an OSS toolchain, you have a long, hard road ahead of you

Step 1: go to http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/sdk/
Step 2: Download the open-source Flex Compiler.
Step 3: Profit.

Yep, that was long and hard...

Acutally, you may want to take a look at Flex. Adobe open-sourced their compiler, and the SDK to create SWF files. Flex (starting with version 3), is open source, /and/ fully supported by Adobe on Linux, Mac and Windows.
Thanks for the info -- that's very interesting. However, there's some pretty objectionable stuff in the EULA, including "2.6.1 No Modifications, No Reverse Engineering." That really doesn't fit my definition of OSS.

The EULA for the SWF spec also states that "You may not use the Specification in any way to create or develop a runtime, client, player, executable or other program that reads or renders SWF files." That would be my definition of proprietary.

Acutally, you may want to take a look at Flex. Adobe open-sourced their compiler, and the SDK to create SWF files. Flex (starting with version 3), is open source, /and/ fully supported by Adobe on Linux, Mac and Windows.
Thanks for the info -- that's very interesting. However, there's some pretty objectionable stuff in the EULA, including "2.6.1 No Modifications, No Reverse Engineering." That really doesn't fit my definition of OSS.

The EULA for the SWF spec also states that "You may not use the Specification in any way to create or develop a runtime, client, player, executable or other program that reads or renders SWF files." That would be my definition of proprietary.

Flash's SWF file format is documented well enough that several other products and open source projects can produce it and some are capable of playing it back. The FLA unpublished save format is basically a memory dump of how the Flash program works with the project, so it's considerably harder to develop outside software to save or load that format.

I know ActionScript, but I prefer to write what little Flash stuff I do in HaXe, for example. There are also Rebol Flash dialect (RSWF), an ActionScript virtual machine assembler called flasm, swfmill, Laszlo, and more.

There are also other graphical programs for Flash publishing. Everything from the Zmag web app to SWF Quicker by SoThink and their SWF Easy.

For players, there's at least Gnash, Swfdec, SWF.max, Eltima's SWF and FLV Player, and IrfanView (which is what I use to play Flash games without opening a big memory-hogging browser).

Hell, Adobe's own Flex authoring suite for Flash is supposed to be MPL within a few months. How much more open do you people want?

It's in the current v9 Flash player which was released a couple of weeks ago.
The beta was available for months with loads of samples.

As for links... http://www.adobe.com/

Adobe has implemented WebKit in its Flex 3 HTML component. See http://labs.adobe.com/ for more info.

Yes you can run it on some Linux systems, but under the terms of the EULA many are illegal.

[Flash EULA...] you may not use a Web Player on any (a) mobile devices, set top boxes (STB), handhelds, phones, web pads, tablets and Tablet PCs that are not running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, game consoles, TVs, DVD players, media centers (excluding Windows XP Media Center Edition and its successors) - EULA

Actually, they are open-sourcing the messaging portion of LiveCycle Data Services, except for the RTMP protocol. They are instead releasing a new protocol, which emulates what RTMP does, except over HTTP(s). http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/blazeds/

am I the only developer thats sick of this html / css / javascript mess??

Next, we note that Adobe has not released its RTMP protocol

Adobe recently announced to make it's messaging server open source. This includes the RTMP, of course.

I find it interesting Adobe AIR wasn't mentioned.

The announcement of the opening of the AMF protocol (which is a compressed, binary stream of data, used to transfer data from a back-end server to a flash application, no different than AJAX), is actually a subset of Adobe's announcement to open-source the BazeDS project. BazeDS is a Java server that sits as middleware between your Flash/Flex app and your back-end server (Java, PHP, ColdFusion, etc). AMF is a major part of that product. To all the critics of the Flash player... Take a look at its track record. It is under a meg download, available for most platforms (Win,Mac,Linux,Symbion,etc), and has an excellent security track record (as compared browsers/plugins in the industry). It does not just take a "binary stream" and execute it -- it has a very strict sandbox enviroment that protects both the browser, and the operating system. Heck, you can't even load a Web Service without the called-domain allowing it. And while not opening up the full SWF format, Adobe has open-sourced the Flex Framework, which is used to create SWF files. Take a look at Adobe Labs : http://labs.adobe.com/ for more info on some of Adobe's open-source projects.

I see few recurring themes in the questions asked, so I'll try to cover them briefly:

Q1: How do you deploy an AJAX application offline?
A1: You can use integrated HTML/CSS/JS/Flash/PDF runtime, like Adobe AIR.

Q2: How do I deliver bulky complex AJAX applications over the net, if it's a lot of code?
A2: You don't. It's not a suitable deployment model, at least until we have a simple delivery vehicle for bundling multiple app elements into a single file, such as a browser downloading and directly reading a ZIP file with collection of resources/JS files (as with Java's JAR). Until then, and for complex UI-s in general, look into established compiled solutions like Flash.

Q3: Do we need JS2.0?
A3: No, we don't (right now), since JS2 delivers benefits for larger projects only (refer to Q2 why large online JS projects are not viable). If this is resolved, then JS2 will be highly desirable.

Q4: Hand-made AJAX or AJAX framework?
Q4: Framework. Cuts development time, provides consistent code, avoid wheel reinvention (Exception: very large projects may need custom code. Are you Google? Yahoo? If not, use a framework).

Q5: Is AJAX wide-spread / easy / hard / common?
Q5: It's easy, wide-spread, and accepted. Fallback is usually present, unless the AJAX is a component of a complex online app that can't have no-JS fallback (example: rich text editor).

Q6: Do I pick AJAX or Web 1.0 / iPhone SDK ?
A6: Apply common sense. In general, when a new technology comes around, people abuse it and try to shoehorn it into replacing everything before it. Then comes the backlash ("AJAX sucks"). Only then, people settle to use said tech in moderation, co-existing versus replacing, evolution versus revolution, and solving unique problems not solved before.

For anyone curious:

Spec: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html

Implementations include: Adobe Reader, xpdf, Preview.app and some others here: http://www.hsinlin.com/software/pdf.html
It should be noted that ghostscript can convert to PDF, MacOS X can create PDFs straight from the print dialog and there are even tools to generate PDF man pages.

Considering the weight of non-Adobe implementations I can agree that they deserved to become an ISO standard. My metric for deciding whether something is worth of ISO standardisation is whether a third-party has been able to implement the specification, without sponsorship of the company who defined the standard - the reason I take this approach is that it is clear sign that there aren't any hidden issues. BTW I am not part of the ISO process.

I know you comment was of comedic intent, and I don't really see why we need to make everything XML, but XML PDF has been done. Check out the Mars project from adobe labs.

a) 'sudo apt-get' is a command line. Casual PC users aren't going to touch the command line. Not to mention you need to know what you're 'apt-get'ing in the first place
b) http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&P2_Platform=Linux - not quite as easy as Windows, eh? When you can do stuff like that in Linux, then you can claim it's easy to use for novices.

The closest thing to it is the new Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). Its not an OS but the concept is similar to JAVA, write once and run anywhere (Adobe calls it cross-operating system runtime). You create an application that works in AIR, and AIR can run on different Operating Systems. Look at the demo video at: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/videos/apollo_demo07/index.html

Even though Windows 2000 will continue to get security updates and paid support until July 2010, I think the installed base is getting too small to be worth supporting (for many developers). That's a shame (for me) because I enjoy using my Windows 2000/Kubuntu desktop more than my Windows XP notebook.

Screw 'em. I like Opera better than Internet Explorer 7. Foobar2000 over Media Player/iTunes. COMODO Firewall Pro over Windows Firewall. TrueCrypt over BitLocker. AVG/Spybot over Norton/McAfee/Symantec. 7-Zip, IrfanView, Picassa, VLC, Media Player Classic, Quicktime Alternative, QuickPar, ImgBurn, VirtualDubMod, BitComet, Skype, Google Desktop Search, ... and that's just some free (beer) stuff available for Windows 2000.

Even though Windows 2000 will continue to get security updates and paid support until July 2010, I think the installed base is getting too small to be worth supporting (for many developers). That's a shame (for me) because I enjoy using my Windows 2000/Kubuntu desktop more than my Windows XP notebook.

Screw 'em. I like Opera better than Internet Explorer 7. Foobar2000 over Media Player/iTunes. COMODO Firewall Pro over Windows Firewall. TrueCrypt over BitLocker. AVG/Spybot over Norton/McAfee/Symantec. 7-Zip, IrfanView, Picassa, VLC, Media Player Classic, Quicktime Alternative, QuickPar, ImgBurn, VirtualDubMod, BitComet, Skype, Google Desktop Search, ... and that's just some free (beer) stuff available for Windows 2000.

The article (which is actually a PDF, thanks for the warning) uses proprietary fonts (LucidaBright). While it was typeset with TeX (open), only the PDF (closed and uneditable) is provided.

I think this may be a lot more appealing if it takes advantage of the h.264 support in the upcoming version of Flash Player