Slashdot Mirror

Really?

http://www.xda-developers.com/
http://my-symbian.com/main/index.php
http://www.myphonegames.co.uk/
http://www.handango.com/home.jsp?siteId=1
http://www.skype.com/intl/en-gb/download/skype/mob ile/
http://messenger.yahoo.com/mobile.php
http://www.agilemobile.com/download.html
http://www.pdamill.com/
http://www.adobe.com/mobile/

While I appreciate most of the applications you can get for a mobile phone are Java games, the market is heading towards smartphones using a version of symbian. The iPhone is really aimed at two parts of the mobile phone market, the first is the current PDA market (so blackberry's in the USA and Windows Mobile phones in the UK), the geek/hobbyist which would be the highend Nokia Symbian & Windows Mobile users, its price tag would young teen market (atleast in the UK) as most young teens (I am one and know many others) could afford one (sadly most have iPods) but own small cheap phones because they don't like taking expensive phones out and around with them. I don't understand that thinking myself but then again my last two phones have been free on contract.
I'm aware the American market does have carrier's which lock down phones but most of the rest of the world doesn't suffer this. About the most invasive I've seen is this annoying sidebar Orange stick on all their mobile phones, then again Orange is currently losing customers in droves (least in my home city) because of their new rigid pricing policy. By limiting themselves the way apple have to web 2.0 they've taken the java route on other lowend phones, sure Java can do all sorts of things but the only things that are prevelent for java phones are games. When you compare Doom and Snails (both of which are availiable for Symbian and Windows Mobile) the game selection for Java phones is not as good.
I have no idea how well this would do in American but if the pricing plan were to stay the same in the UK it would tank as its far too expensive for example, I believe the Samsung E900 or Sony Erricson W800i are the current trendy phone's for iPod owners both of which are £80-100 on pay as you go, for the more serious phone owner you have the Nokia N90, Blackberry and Windows Mobile selection all of which are free on 18 month plans, the iPhone is slated to be £200 on a 24 month plan (converting from american dollars.) Symbian and Windows Mobile 5 both have very good User Interfaces, I've yet to meet a person who could tolerate a non symbian phone once they had owned one and to this day every single person who has seen my Windows Mobile phone has been able to get to solitare in seconds (without assistance.)

Without a decent SDK I see the iPhone heading down the Java capable phone route, you'll get hundreds of cheap rubbish games oh and an expensive version of Pacman and Space Invaders.

If it's only photo for photos ajustments (Exposure for instance) I found Adobe Lightroom very useful and straightforward. I found myself doing these kind of thing in Photoshop more than once. I know, it's nothing like Photoshop, GIMP, PaintShop or anything like that, but still. Reassembles Picasa.

Not only has the front-end been rewritten several times, they've released the framework that they use as open source.

Macromedia xRes was the only serious competition Photoshop ever had, xRes had a Large File format that Adobe lacked in PS [briefly]. It was a really nice application.
It died an agonizing death, it became Fireworks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_xRes

http://www.adobe.com/support/xres/ts/documents/tn3 830.html

I thought I would toss this in as well....

Photoshop Elements ($85 from Adobe) is a pretty capable package if you want to work with general image editing. There's also a bundle that gives you basic video editing as well by including Premiere Elements ($128 from Adobe) available. I've worked on teams where the $650/seat licensing for Photoshop was a bit much to swallow and so Elements got us through.

The Elements line is geared towards the casual user base instead of the full blown Photoshop. You won't be designing award winning layouts, but it's great for croping and resizing photos etc for web and powerpoint docs. Take a look at their capabilities list to see if it's right for you: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin/overv iew2.html

I'm surprised you can still buy G5s... or was this a machine you already owned and just provisioned for this person?

Also... $9000? Is that in USD?

I'm having trouble coming up with materials that would add up to $9000.

The Apple 23" HD display is $899. Adobe CS3 Master Collection, the most expensive edition of CS3 (which hasn't yet shipped) is only $2,499.

So... the G5 plus misc software was another $5,500 or so?

OEMs started shipping Java around the time that Microsoft stopped:

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-1015723.html

So it does show up on a lot of PCs.

Mac OS X also has Java bundled into the OS, and the Opera download provided an option to include Java until recently. So Sun still has fairly good market penetration. Adobe has a nice chart showing both Flash and Java penetration here: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashp layer/

You're right. The Penguin.SWF blog says the flash JIT VM needs to be converted and that's why there's no 64 bit version.

The GP also forgot to mention the 3rd option (for the flash plugin):
3) nspluginwrapper. It's far from easy to get going on Ubuntu Feisty and needs a 32 development environment (in addition to a 64 bit environment) to be compiled but it _can_ be made work. A brief glance suggests it does it stuff by running the plugin in a 32 bit environment and communicating back to the 64 bit browser over sockets.

That still leaves the problem of how to accept incoming connections - Flash doesn't support server sockets. TCP has a rarely used feature called simultaneous open that allows two clients to establish a connection if their SYN packets cross on the wire. This can also be used for NAT and firewall traversal, and the NUTTS group at Cornell has achieved an 85% success rate by combining TCP simultaneous open with port prediction. So it looks like BitTorrent in Flash might be feasible after all, if a little hacky.

Yes. All you need is a flash player. See here.

If you're using Ubuntu, check out Automatix for lots of goodies, including flash.

Flash and Linux don't generally get along too well, so YMMV, but I've been enjoying tv-links.co.uk for quite a while now :).

PDF is an "open" format in that the full specification is published. I know - I've read it. You can download it here. Adobe owns the trademark, but anyone can implement PDF.

You can convert .pdf to html through the browser: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlin etools.html
There are others too with a simple Google-ing

As mentioned, the list is fairly rich in content and loses lots of the formatting and special characters through conversion.

Well said. One more serious contender and probably one that has a better chance of succeeding is Flashlite.

well, Adobe is making Flex open source as well (see here)
I suppose the more the merrier!

This is truly the first /. story I have bookmarked to come back to check it out again later.

BTW: I use Propellorheads Reason for most of my music stuff, though I don't expect anyone else to shell out the oodles of cash required for it. Anything left that Reason can't do I'll use Adobe Audition. Both are commercial products, but for anyone truly interested in music, you will never need anything more (software wise, at least for Windows computers!)

--beckerist

what? also flash last I checked is not available on for firefox running linux with the x86_64 architecture. http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.c fm?id=6b3af6c9 Straight from Adobe saying no 64 bit browser support

Spry is still in pre-release but up to version 1.5 and looks to be getting pretty good too. It's also fully open source under a BSD license.

We're currently looking at a few AJAX options at work too so I'd appreciate any feedback from anyone who's evaluated it particularly against jQuery and the others in TFA.

I know nothing I can say can remove the pain of bad past experiences, but let me clear up your misconceptions.

1. Navigating through a site and I hit back .. leaving the site. Oops, I've been trained from HTML pages to navigate that way. This angers me to no end.

This is really a problem with any single page site, which is what Ajax is - a single page that loads in the different components. The same methods to make the back button work with Ajax can be used for Flash. It's just that not everyone uses these methods with Flash or Ajax.

2. As a programmer, until recently, it was extremely time consuming to do anything that I could do in Ajax quickly. Huge learning curve trying to learn how to use flash.

As someone who has done a lot of Flash and Javascript, I would say that the learning curve is feature-for-feature worse for Javascript because you need to learn about the different browsers, but may be greater overall for Flash because it offers more features. That's a trade off I've been happy to make.

3. Complex Flash Applications generally use much more CPU and are extremely sluggish compared to Ajax apps (in your case the Ajax programmers didn't know how to code well, 30sec to load .. wow, pathetic)

Computation for computation, Flash has better performance than Javascript. At least, I think that's why Mozilla accepted Adobe's donation of the EMCAScript execution engine from Flash. After that's incorporated I would believe that Javascript alone would run faster, but right now that's not true. (Or if it is true, someone better stop Mozilla.)

4. You are more likely to be compatible with javascript/Ajax than flash, since most sites use javascript in the first place to detect if flash plugin is installed.

This is another issue of every site being different, but the fallback for not having Javascript enabled can easily be to show the Flash content. The only reason everyone uses Javascript to embed the files now is because of Microsoft's attempt to screw plug-ins.

5. Forget about getting any real Search Engine traffic from an 'all flash' site. (unless it's an internal corporate thing)

This isn't an issue for me since I usually use Flash for corporate apps that you wouldn't want indexed, but again this isn't something that's inherent to Flash. The issue is that Flash sites often pull in dynamic content. That's what the search engines can't index, and again it's something that's going to be a problem for any Ajax site that does the same. (Google has been indexing Flash for years and Adobe offers a free SDK for developers of search engines. Also, Flash-dependent sites like YouTube are definitely not starving for traffic.

As long as we're talking about pet peeves here are two essential things Javascript/Ajax needs to address that Flash already has.

1) Built in security against cross-domain scripting.
2) Accessibility for the disabled.

"[F]or management trying to impress someone, that's usually important I guess" -- if that someone you're trying to impress is either your boss or your client then there's no guessing about it.

I'm more intrested in finding out how the Adobe Spry framework compares. I just got a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 (academic pricing is so sweet!) where this framework is part of Dreamweaver. With CS3 being so new, doorstoppers ($50+ USD books) are not yet available to explain how to implement this framework.

'More important than the source code is an Open Format .. Flash is a proprietary, binary format and the Specification [adobe.com] forbids you from building an alternative player'

According to this Adobe is releasing Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) which states:

'The Initial Developer hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license .. to make, have made, use, practice, sell, and offer for sale, and/or otherwise dispose of the Original Code'

How is 'Open Format' defined in the current context and do you have a citation for the Silverlight license.

was Re:Xaml v/s Flex, Format is the key

Actually, there isn't a Flash plugin for 64-bit Windows, either. http://www.adobe.com/go/6b3af6c9

That's going to become more of an issue as people get more memory-hungry: XP 32-bit can only see 3.2 gigs of memory. My work PC has 4 gigs, but some of that's wasted because I decided to opt out of the 64-bit hassle. (I'm not sure if Vista 32-bit can see more than 3.2 gigs; I would expect that it can, seeing how Windows 2003 can. Perhaps that's what will eventually cause people to willingly migrate to Vista, unless XP SP2 includes PAE. For now, I've also opted out of the Vista hassle.)

Anyway, I suspect Adobe will sort it out eventually. A more interesting issue is mobile devices: these are becoming more and more popular, but it will be some time before they're powerful enough to be able to comfortably play Flash without killing the battery life... and even when they can, many displays will be way too small for what Flash developers are targeting. This keeps the age-old question alive: do you create a "dull", standards-based, accessible site; or a media-rich, heavy site which may exclude some people? Or do you do both?

....Give away development tools, Wait until it is a eb de-facto standard.....
Flash works, Flash movies work, Flash is ubiquitous, Linux/OSX support it, Everybody knows it. So why do we need anything else?

Apart from the obvious point that competition is good, Flash is yet another lock-in that is waiting to happen. From the Flash Specification:
"This license does not permit the usage of the specification to create software which supports SWF file playback."

Why would you want to protect a format/specification, if not for a lock-in? Even MS-Word formats are becoming more open.

Everything you said is more applicable to Adobe than to Microsoft. Microsoft is in no position to shove SilverLight down unsuspecting throats. They don't have the trust, the respect or the distribution of Flash to be able to do that.

More important than the source code is an Open Format, which IMO is a key advantage over Flex/Flash. Silverlight's Markup Language, XAML is pure XML and easier to decode. Flash is a proprietary, binary format and the Specification forbids you from building an alternative player.

The Flex Plan
1. Open Source Flex, and Flash Runtime
2. Drive a strong adoption wave, since its "Open Source"
3. Alternate Tools spring up, Flash becomes the "*.doc" of RIA
4. Flash format remains proprietary, all RIA belongs to Adobe
5. Profit!

I can't imagine any other reason why anyone would want to open source the tools, while protecting the format.

Anyway competition is good, and might actually result in Adobe opening the Flash Specification.

MTASC doesn't support actionscript 3.
Haxe does support actoinscript 3

The free Flex SDK includes an AS3 compiler and is being open-sourced. Did you even read the article?

MP3 is the only audio codec that's supported by flash, and the mpegla licensing terms make it illegal to distribute MP3 decoders in large numbers for free, without paying royalties.

You don't distribute the decoder - Adobe does. They pay the royalties. MP3 is the standard - deal with it.

The Version 2 Components are not freely available.

From the FAQ:

Adobe plans to release all of the components of the Flex SDK needed to create Flex applications, including the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger, and the ActionScript libraries that make up the core Flex framework

Again, did you read the article?

Summary: flash is a disaster if you want to write OSS using an OSS toolchain.

Summary: you're completely ignorant. We've been developing OSS Flash applications using a completely OSS toolchain for years now. The ONLY thing that isn't OSS is the player that our applications run in. And now, we can also include OSS Flex development. This is a good thing.

Flex Builder, the main development environment for the Flex SDK we're talking about here, is built on Eclipse. Not a timeline in sight. I highly recommend checking it out.

1. MTASC doesn't support actionscript 3.
2. Haxe does support actoinscript 3, but it's a different language, so it isn't source code compatible with Adobe's compilers.
3. MP3 is the only audio codec that's supported by flash, and the mpegla licensing terms make it illegal to distribute MP3 decoders in large numbers for free, without paying royalties. (I believe ubuntu, for example, pays royalties for the privilege of distributing it for free.)
4. The Version 2 Components are not freely available. That means that if you're writing a flash app, and want to do it without paying Adobe money, you have to use another gui component library, which won't be source-code compatible with the kind of flash everybody else is writing.
5. The license of the flash spec, http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/fileforma t/license/ , says "3)a. 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."

Viewable source is a compilation option in flex applications (example: http://examples.adobe.com/flex2/inproduct/sdk/flex store/flexstore.html right click to view source). The beauty of Flex / flash is that it's contained in it's own "cross platform" VM, making it totally independent of the browser. I would think that any tight integration into any browser would be a poor move for adobe/flex/flash.

The flex project at sourceforge has nothing to do with Adobe. It's just a coincidence of name.

Try http://www.adobe.com/go/opensourceflex

The FAQ is actually here.

Flash has always suffered from some inherit design flaws. For example, it's difficult to build a crawler that can index a flash-based site. Microsoft claims, however, that "content created with Silverlight would be more searchable and indexable than that created with Flash."

I, for one, actually look forward to seeing what Microsoft can deliver with Silverlight. As of now, Adobe has Flex, which has some features that are somewhat appealing. However, being Flash-based, it will suffer from some of the same limitations. Ignoring the Linux community, however, would leave an incredibly bad taste in my mouth.

Maybe they could tweak IIS so that it slows Flash down while optimizing the speed of their products?

Given that Flash runs on the browser rather than the server this would be pointless. It'd just make IIS look slow(er) compared to Apache.

MS could possibly do something in IE to slow Flash down but then they'd look bad against Firefox, Safari, Opera etc.

No. Looks like they'll just do what they've always done and bundle extra features into the OS as well as make the development tools cheaper. Expect to see an equivalent to Flash Media Server built in to various Windows server products. They've already started down this path with streaming media. Just ask Real.

1. Apollo FAQ (ActionScript3)
2. Apollo Introduction
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_(JIT)
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActionScript
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flex
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash

1. Apollo FAQ (ActionScript3)
2. Apollo Introduction
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_(JIT)
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActionScript
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flex
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash

As some of you may have noticed, Adobe has discontinued its SVG Viewer, and they suggest using Flash as its replacement for web authoring. The Adobe viewer is the only way to show SVG content in Internet Explorer (that I'm aware of). If IE can't show SVG content, then SVG is effectively dead as a useable format on the web. And that would be a sad state of affairs.

So what I'm hoping is that Microsoft will see fit to support SVG natively in IE. That would be a good thing, even if the reason they do it is just to compete with Adobe's Flash format.

JP

"The player is cross-platform, based on open standards - including RSS and SMIL - and brings viewers the highly desired ability to play the Web's most popular video format outside of their browser."

So much FUD going on here; where to begin...

For the record, I don't like where this is headed, because DRM in the Flash Player itself is only a matter of time IMO, but the article and the /. are very misleading about what's actually being released. Adobe announced the Adobe Media Player today - NOT a new version of the browser-based Flash plug-in/player. The software is a desktop application that is being built on top of Apollo, and it is the software itself which will support the DRM that will allow either pay-for-play content (like iTunes store purchases), as well as ads and branding that can't be separated from the video clip. Big media companies will be the ones tying ads to content - individuals can target the player and not have any ads or DRM at all, so your Aunt Sue's cooking show (or whatever) will be provided unlocked, free and clear. Basically, the software works as an RSS aggregator. It won't even be released for a while, and when the time comes, if you don't want it, don't download it and don't use it. Plain and simple. And geez - if you own a video site, you can already force ads on Flash Video viewers right now if you want to, and many places do. Flash streaming has been a pseudo-DRM format unto itself for a while now. Just because the technology will be there doesn't mean independent and individual producers have to use it - it's not the Zune we're talking about here.

Read Adobe's official release and decide for yourself. The lack of detail in the source article is ridiculous.

In addition to any technologies Adobe may be making for the web browser, you also must consider Adobe Apollo which is Adobe's attempt at incorporating web languages into desktop applications. You can look at it either way, this technology is promoting desktop apps, and web apps. On one hand, it is getting people with knowledge of html/css and mxml to create desktop technologies, and it is also getting people to learn web languages, so possibly in the future, that person will be making a web application.

Right now it is merely too early to tell, but my guess is that desktop applications will be around forever (have to remember games), but as internet speeds continue to speed up, you can surely expect more rich applications (also using that nifty bandwidth.)

What ever happens in the future, Google is taking over the world, one decimal place at a time.

I have never owned a handheld or even touched one, but would like to know whether a basic handled to be used to read PDF documents downloaded from the internet is reasonable.

Get a Windows Mobile PDA with WiFi and support for modern SD cards, and a VGA-resolution display, and you will have no problems. The QVGA (240x320) screen is pretty bad, although IIRC Adobe Reader for mobile devices has cleartype. It's one of the largest apps on my iPaq.

I am not a lawyer, but I have read the applicable law reasonably carefully, and I'm familiar with the cases mentioned here.

Redistributing the Flash player is less a patent problem than side effects of a restrictive licence. For example, openSUSE goes out of its way to install browsers compatible with its bundled Flash player; Novell apparently has a deal with Adobe to allow redistribution of acroread and flash-player. Debian seems to circumvent this problem by having the package installer download Flash straight from Adobe. Nice and legal either way (assuming Adobe isn't violating a patent somewhere or something like that, which I doubt).

libdvdcss2 is trickier. Using Finland as an example of an EU country (applicable law), the situation seems to be that you are allowed to circumvent CSS to watch a movie, but I'm not lawyer enough to tell whether CSS qualifies for legal protection (that depends on whether it's an effective copy protection mechanism, I think) and whether the law requiring the copyright holder/distributor to provide a circumvention device, if necessary, is applicable. You'd also be very hard pushed to argue substantial non-circumventing use, making redistribution quite risky. In conclusion, I think libdvdcss2 users in Finland are safe, but redistributors may have a harder time. Other EU countries should be similar, as most of this legislation originates with the EU.

The win32 binary codecs are, in part at least, straightforward copyright infringment (unlicensed derivative works), but haven't been subject to any legal action I've heard of. Some of the codecs developed from scratch (e.g. some MPEG variants) seem to need patent licences in some areas; this is the primary cause of problems with MP3 (openSUSE circumvents this by using Real's Helix engine for MP3 decoding, which is licensed).

In conclusion, the situation is a mess and if you want to be safe, stick to what the major corps tell you is OK. If it isn't, they take the heat.

Premiere? Well first off, it is available for the Mac, secondly Adobe stopped making it for the Mac for a while because Premeire has always been a low-end program for prosumers and multimedia professionals.

Only low end shops use Final Cut? So do you consider:

The BBC

CNN

David Fincher

The Washington Post

Pixar

Weta

ILM small shops? Cold Mountain and Lost in Translation were cut solely on Final Cut Pro, and for compositing tools don't forget Shake is what Weta used to make the Lord of the Rings movies and King Kong.

Plucker and adobe reader. If I could take the floorplan of my house in acrobat format, carry it in to the local hardware store, and zoom in to get the measurements of various areas, good enough for me.

We'll fix that right after we get cold fusion.

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2006/12/photoshop_and _multicore.html

Multi-core processors may not be as fantastic as you thought.

I'll take it a step further. Borland/Inprise/whatever is such a bad company that I'd never knowingly start a serious
project that depends upon them or their products in any way.

Never *ever* again.

When Borland (then Inprise, then Borland again, then Codegear(?) ) stopped making sober RADs and decided to take a chance
on expensive toys for code management, they lost in both fronts. The Turbo Series (Pascal, C and Assembler) and Delphi
(the odd versions, 1, 3, 5 and 7) seriously competed against Microsoft products (Microsoft C, Assembler, Visual
Series), even outselling them in a lot of places in the world (Brazil, for instance).

Two things made Borland wreck their scene: 1) losing their creative minds to Microsoft, specially Anders Hejlsberg
[wikipedia.org], creator of nothing less than Turbo Pascal, Delphi and main architect of C#. 2) losing their focus (from
useful RADs to expensive but totally good for nothing "Application Lifecycle Management" (whatever it is).

Had kept the focus and the creative minds, either .Net would not exist (and consequently, stole Borland's thunder) or the
Borland tools would be better even than the Microsoft ones on that fronts (Delphi 8 almost got there, initially).
Borland died a sad death, and what we see now is nothing but Post Morten flatulence.

ozgur uksal
http://www.adobe.com/

• Openoffice.org (use word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database, and similar applications)
• Picasa (view/edit photos)

Internet Tools

• FireFox (browse Web sites)
• Gaim (chat with users of AIM, YIM, MSN, IRC, etc.)
• Thunderbird (e-mail)
• Pegasus Mail (e-mail)
• Macromedia Flash Player (watch Flash animations within Web browser)
• Java Plugin (run Java applications inside Web browser)

Basic Tools

• 7Zip (compress/decompress files)
• EditPad Lite (edit text files)
• vim/gvim (edit text files--advanced)
• Adobe Acrobat Reader (view PDF files)
• PDF Creator (create PDF files)

Security Tools

• ZoneAlarm (firewall - detect unwanted Internet access)
• Avira Antivirus (detect/remove viruses)
• ADAware Personal SE (detect/remove spyware)
• SpyBot Search & Destroy (detect/remove spyware)
• HiJackThis (detect/remove spyware)
• Discombobulator (make Windows more secure)
• Shoot the Messenger (make Windows more secure)
• Unplug-n-pray (make Windows more secure)
• PGP (encrypt/decrypt files or e-mail for privacy) - see admin for more details

Advanced Tools

• Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP (mount ISO images as filesystems) from MSDN
• IMAPSize (manage/search/backup an IMAP mailbox)

• Openoffice.org (use word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database, and similar applications)
• Picasa (view/edit photos)

Internet Tools

• FireFox (browse Web sites)
• Gaim (chat with users of AIM, YIM, MSN, IRC, etc.)
• Thunderbird (e-mail)
• Pegasus Mail (e-mail)
• Macromedia Flash Player (watch Flash animations within Web browser)
• Java Plugin (run Java applications inside Web browser)

Basic Tools

• 7Zip (compress/decompress files)
• EditPad Lite (edit text files)
• vim/gvim (edit text files--advanced)
• Adobe Acrobat Reader (view PDF files)
• PDF Creator (create PDF files)

Security Tools

• ZoneAlarm (firewall - detect unwanted Internet access)
• Avira Antivirus (detect/remove viruses)
• ADAware Personal SE (detect/remove spyware)
• SpyBot Search & Destroy (detect/remove spyware)
• HiJackThis (detect/remove spyware)
• Discombobulator (make Windows more secure)
• Shoot the Messenger (make Windows more secure)
• Unplug-n-pray (make Windows more secure)
• PGP (encrypt/decrypt files or e-mail for privacy) - see admin for more details

Advanced Tools

• Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP (mount ISO images as filesystems) from MSDN
• IMAPSize (manage/search/backup an IMAP mailbox)

You're writing software for a low-speed or low-memory chip for an embedded system (e.g. one of the PIC chips). Such chips are used either because they are cheap or because they need very little power. You can often program these chips in some variant of C, but if you need that last drop of performance, you use assembly.

You're writing a compiler. In this case you may not have to write assembly directly, but you'll have to understand it intimately in order to convert source code to machine language. (Replace "assembly" with "bytecode" or "IL", if making a Java or .NET compiler)

You are reverse-engineering closed-source software (another case where you must comprehend assembly)

You're designing or testing a computer chip, in which case you may have all sorts of tests cases written in assembly language.

You're maintaining an old "legacy" system that uses assembly.

You're writing an emulator for another computer, and you need high performance. In this case you may need to understand the assembly language of both the real and emulated machines, as I learned when I wrote a Super Nintendo emulator.

Those bastards make you study it in one of your college courses.

Ozgur Uksal
http://www.adobe.com/

"But the big problem is they believed everyone would work together:

• would agree on web standards (hah!)
• would adopt a common vocabulary (you don't say)
• would reliably expose their APIs so anyone could use them (as if)"

One of the features of the W3C's model (based on RDF) is that it doesn't push the idea that everyone should adopt the same vocabulary (or ontology) for a topic or domain. Instead it offers a way to publish vocabularies with some semantics, including how terms in one vocabulary relate to terms in another. In addition, the framework makes it trivial to publish data in which you mix vocabularies, making statements about a person, for example, using terms drawn from FOAF, Dublin Core and others.

The RDF approach was designed with interoperability and extensibility in mind, unlike many other approaches. RDF is showing increasing adoption, showing up in products by Oracle, Adobe and Microsoft, for example.

If this approach doesn't continue to flourish and help realize the envisioned "web of data", and it might not after all, it will have left some key concepts, tested and explored, on the table for the next push. IMHO, the 'semantic web' vision -- a web of data for machines and their users -- is inevitable.

If you would have bothered to check their Website you would have found this on the FAQ page:

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo:develo perfaq#Does_Apollo_support_Linux
Does Apollo support Linux
Apollo 1.0 will not be available on Linux. We plan to release Linux support shortly after the 1.0. release.
While we had originally planned to support Linux in the 1.0 timeframe, we have had to wait on the core Flash Player's support for Linux to be finalized.

I might give it a try for my Computer Store Work Order Tracking program.