Slashdot Mirror

Looking forward, Adobe believes that Flash is particularly suited for addressing the gaming and premium video markets, and will focus its development efforts in those areas. At the same time, Adobe will make architectural and language changes to the runtimes in order to ensure that the Flash runtimes are well placed to enable the richest experiences on the web and across mobile devices for another decade.

what does that mean? it means flash is being used as middleware in game development. other examples of game middleware include the havok physics engine, sundog, RAD, autodesk, the list goes on. i've seen the flash logo in my console games already, in fact more and more as of late.

oh look! here's something from autodesk so you can use flash to make console-quality games for the web - http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/10/autodesk-scaleform-flash-games/. i really wish html5 had rich, mature development tools like flash does. how come autodesk didn't choose html5 for this instead of flash? actually, i know the answer.

adobe killed flash player in android mobile browsers because android is too fragmented to ensure quality. that's from their blog statement. html5 has the same problem, except that it's fragmented by all browsers, and not just mobile ones. if you don't think so, explain why modernizr exists: http://modernizr.com/.

one last thing to rip your stupid viewpoint apart: you hate flash most for the invasive ads? and you think that's flash's fault? you think adobe makes those ads? with html5 being supported to replace flash in the browser, marketers are going to make the same fucking ads that they make now, except they will be built in html5 and you will have a much tougher time blocking those than flash. you're a dumbass.

if you think flash means flash player in the browser only, then you don't know what flash is. you don't know shit.

No, Adobe is focusing on what they always did: making tools for developers. Flash as a viewer is irrelevant.

Their HTML5 content authoring tools already supports mobile: http://edge.adobe.com/whatisedge.html

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

Adobe Flash player both release and debug versions (including the Android versions) are available from the archive: http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-player-versions.html#main_Archived_versions

Yes: http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-player-versions.html

Just to be clear: you'll be able to download them for the foreseeable future. Whether they'll work in future versions of Android remains to be seen.

Citation. Flash Player 11.2 will be the last version released for Linux, aside from the player built in to Google Chrome.

Obviously, Adobe discontinuing Linux development did not cause existing copies of Flash Player 11.2 to retroactively cease to exist, but you'll note that 11.3 has already been released for Windows and Mac OS.

By "very late" you mean "about one year before OSX" in Windows XP in 2001 with GDI+?

Informative? Maybe if you know nothing and can't be bothered to check.

GDI+ was a 100% software API. GDI, the Win95 graphics API, was already hardware accelerated. The acceleration wasn't very good but it did work, and it did make a significant difference in the early days of the 200MHz CPU.

GDI+ was introduced because GDI was pretty much designed specifically for direct hardware processing on a very specific class of video accelerators. In short, alpha transparency (translucency) was impossible in GDI. GDI+ was created to fix that problem but it is a 100% software API as D3D was too unstable to use as a core API in early WinXP days.

Is that why "how to turn off hardware graphics accelleration" was a common recommendation to try if you had graphic issues with Windows XP? (like this from Adobe). Why should you turn off graphics hardware accelleration if it was 100% software?

I'd like to see how popular Photoshop would be if you couldn't pirate it? Well it wouldn't...

Why not? It's only really home users that are going to pirate it (and that's only if they don't have a license from work that they can use at home), businesses pay and students & educational institutions get dramatically discounted licenses. What would people be using instead? GIMP?

That's a nice data point, but on balance I find Apple's service to be better than most other companies'. Again, that's just a data point.

Fortunately we have people like Forrester Research, who rank Apple at the top of all the tech companies.

Well Apple's Mountain Lion is $19 for starts. Even if you had to buy Lion at $29 at's still less than the traditional Windows upgrade.

Sure, those are nice upgrade prices but how much did the user pay for the hardware? And it's not like they can just throw Lion discs into any old machine and have them run. It must be supported Apple hardware.

Windows is supported for much longer compared to OSX releases as far as software support and backwards compatibility are concerned. The general rule for Apple support seems to be the current and last release and you're on your own. As a developer it's nice to have users running current versions of things, however, being on a quickened upgrade treadmill isn't always cheap. An example of OSX backwards compatibility is Adobe Creative Suite.

I think there will be FEW upgrades this round because Microsoft wants Windows 8 tied to the proper hardware. I think they are making the consumer push first to grab some hardware sales, companies aren't going to upgrade for 6-12 months anyway.

I think most people prefer fresh installations when upgrading anyway. It's not like you're unable to take your files with you as most people are familiar with backups and having multiple copies of their files. The Windows 7 release was pretty smooth since most of the driver issues which plagued Vista's launch had been settled by the vendors.

While I like some of the under the hood features of Windows 8 I'm not too keen on the UI among other things. As far as Windows is concerned I'll be sticking with 7 for the foreseeable future.

Adobe: "Oh yes.. Jobs was right. Flash is going away. We've really got to eat crow now. Boy are we embarrassed. Believe me...... Oh! Hey! we've just released Adobe AIR 2.7 for iOS and it's 4 times faster. You should go check it out. *grin*"

Maybe continue using Flash but use Adobe's toolkit to output to HTL5?

We announced last November that we are focusing our work with Flash on PC browsing and mobile apps packaged with Adobe AIR.

An Update on Flash Player and Android

Flash isn't going away.

It is Flash in the mobile browser that is going away.

Adobe is focused on the app store because the app store is the future of mobile, not the browser.

You can see the same thing happening in Metro and Windows 8.

The start page tiles are dynamic, they draw your attention away from the browser.

But the browser has been one of the few unqualified success stories for FOSS on the mass market platforms.. *

Supporting Flash was a small price to pay for that.

____

"Round up the usual suspects!"

Your list will be different from mine, but both should number about a dozen.

It can be a bit of a stretch:

"Filezilla: Solid podcasting client." Open Source Windows

html5 is no good for games? not surprised, it hasn't matured at all yet. and everyone who wasn't a flash developer was so quick to abandon it, right as it gained popularity for use as middleware in pc/console games.

http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2012/03/gameon.html

to my knowledge there are no games being made with html5 that even approach the scope of these pc/console games using flash. and html5 is more inconsistent across platforms than javascript, almost as much as css. i thought we valued write-once-deploy-everywhere? html5 is a nice attempt, it's a nice thing to get started. but everyone jumped the flash ship wayyyy too quickly. only those who never worked in flash are scratching their heads at these html5 inadequacies. steve jobs was full of shit about flash. every point he made was either a misdirection, a warped fact, or outright lie.

Not sure why you think this, other than ignorance or severe hatred. iOS can do these today. Any Windows tablet OS can't, today.

http://www.apple.com/ipad/from-the-app-store/apps-by-apple/iphoto.html
http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2012/01/creating-ipad-apps-using-rapid-elearning-authoring-tools.html
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/02/prweb5060934.htm

But iPads just consume media!

Wrong. SOOOOO wrong.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/story/2012-05-28/art-painting-apps/55205572/1
http://www.designer-daily.com/10-great-ipad-applications-for-creative-people-6234

I just got the latest Flash update, and the process to get to the license was so horrific that I have sent it off to the lawyers to go through it with a fine comb - I really don't trust any organisation that makes it so hard to find the terms you agree to.

When you receive the update and you want to see the license you have to:-

1 - click a link which leads you to an external page. The relevant license is not embedded in the package you download, so there is a risk of disconnect between product and license.
2 - find the product, because the page you land on is an Adobe page with EVERY PRODUCT LICENSE EVER WRITTEN. Sure, it has a hash link which may land you in the right spot, but that's not where the tortuous journey ends
3 - identify the right version for the software as every version comes with its own license
4 - find your own language in the PDF you get, because Adobe produces one massive file with the license translated in all languages of the planet. I'm not sure if the index is enabled in Adobe Reader (I don't use it), but the reader I used the index was off. Adobe has sorted the languages alphabetically, but spelled in English (so Deutsch - which comes before English alphabetically - would actually be found as "German"). This means, the first thing you see when you open the PDF is Arabic.

As far as I am aware there is actually a serious issue with making it so hard to find what you agree to - it may render their license invalid in a number of countries.

Whatever the legality, the first thing that you get when you have to do this sort of digging is a feeling they really, really do not want you to look at it - i.e. you become suspicious. I actually hope the lawyers find something objectionable..

From Adobe's news release:

[Emphasis added]

The restrictions we apply to this sandboxed process come from the Windows OS. Windows Vista and Windows 7 provide the tools necessary to properly sandbox a process. For the Adobe Reader and Acrobat sandbox implementation introduced in 2010, Adobe spent significant engineering effort trying to approximate those same controls on Windows XP. Today, with Windows 8 just around the corner and Windows XP usage rapidly decreasing, it did not make sense for the Flash Player team to make that same engineering investment for Windows XP. Therefore, we've focused on making Protected Mode for Firefox available on Windows Vista and later.

I was under the impression that it wouldn't even be available for Chromium Browser, which implements the same Pepper API as Google Chrome. According to Adobe's blog, not only will Flash Player "only be available via the 'Pepper' API", but the Pepper version will be distributed "as part of the Google Chrome browser distribution and will no longer be available as a direct download from Adobe". So even if you have another browser that implements Pepper, it still won't be able to run Flash Player for Pepper because Flash Player for Pepper is exclusive to Google Chrome.

At https://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ (which tells you what flash version you have and what are the latest), it says that the latest for linux is 11.3.300.257. However the "player download center" link on this page goes to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ and that the latest version is 11.2.202.236 (and that 11.2 will be the last for linux). I'm running 64 bit fedora 17, so that might be the wrinkle.

At https://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ (which tells you what flash version you have and what are the latest), it says that the latest for linux is 11.3.300.257. However the "player download center" link on this page goes to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ and that the latest version is 11.2.202.236 (and that 11.2 will be the last for linux). I'm running 64 bit fedora 17, so that might be the wrinkle.

http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/03/flash-to-html5-conversion-tool-on-adobe-labs.html

Despite everyone's hatred of Flash, it exists because there was no other way to get that type of functionality on the Web until relatively recently. I remember when FutureSplash came out in 1995 and it was very impressive compared to state of what you could do on the Web at the time. When Macromedia added the programming capability it was even more impressive. However, the time has come to move on to next great thing. Such is the way of technology.

Not exactly what you're looking for, but there is a subscription model for Photoshop - $50/mo. Not sure how well it handles a month here and a month there rather than a continuous subscription.

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopextended/buying-guide.html

IANASR, but for a start, just like with any other OS you don't need root password for many useful (from malware author viewpoint) things, like keylogging, uploading your personal data or spamming. Unless most linuxes started hardening acess restrictions usnig SELinux and whatnot, like forbidding network access for non user approved applications, it still works great. Root access is mostly needed for hiding the malware from detection, with added benefit of ability to spy on every user on multiuser system. Latter part is not really important for usual targets of malware, home users.

My guess is getting it to run wouldn't be really a problem for dedicated attacker, something like planting .xprofile along with your executable would do the trick.

So, given possibility of drive-by download, only things stopping dedicated Linux malware is unprofitability of targeting home Linux users. It would probably be noticed and stomped out faster as well, given higher average tech smarts of Linux users.

Oh, and "Adobe has stopped developing Flash for Linux" probably referred to this (tl;dr: new major Flash versions will be PPAPI only, bundled with Chrome, older versions are getting security updates for 5 years)

"didn't stop files named like c:\playerhost.dll from ending up in my home directory, on Linux. I guess you can say that I was saved by Linux's lack of popularity on the desktop, nothing else".

No, you couldn't say that, how playerhost.dll got onto your home directory was you saved it there. And even if it was a Linux executable you would still have to perform a numbr of steps to get it to run, as well as supply the root password.

"You can claim that many of those vulnerabilities are gone now that Adobe has stopped developing Flash for Linux"

That's news to me, ..

'Download Adobe Flash Player
Adobe Flash Player version 11.2.202.235
Your system: Linux 32-bit, Firefox` link

Valid Photoshop license holder speaking here.

Yes, it's great that Gimp exists and that it's free in both senses of the word.

The problem is that Gimp keeps getting compared to Photoshop, as though it's any kind of contest.

If this were a racing event, the only way you'd get Gimp up against Photoshop is to do away with the class system. They call it an outlaw race, in automotive racing.

If you want to compare Gimp to something in the commercial world, compare it to Photoshop Elements, or Pixelmator.

ColdFusion was about the only language (in my experience - sure there's others) that you needed to pay for the runtime for your code (in a production environment; development version was free; The "Express" version went away around 2001 or so). Then along come Railo and Open BlueDragon, and there were open source alternatives. The "language" itself is pretty basic (most developers get by using just 5 tags), but the power of it comes when you use the various feature tags that are more akin to APIs (cfchart, cfpdf, cfsearch, etc). Railo and OpenBD of course implement all these tags. Whereas Oracle doesn't "sell" Java, Adobe sells ColdFusion - if Oracle wins, Adobe has 100% motivation to eliminate their competition. (Should also point out that OpenBD's lineage comes from New Atlanta, which sells commercial version of Blue Dragon - MySpace was built on this.)

Most importantly, GIMP doesn't have this gem of a term that comes with a validly licensed copy of Photoshop:

13. Compliance with Licenses.

If Customer is a business, company, or organization, Customer agrees that, in addition to any license compliance checking performed by the Software, Adobe or its authorized representative have the right, no more than once every twelve (12) months, upon seven (7) business days' prior notice to Customer, to inspect Customer's records, systems, and facilities to verify that its use of any and all Adobe software or service is in conformity with its valid licenses from Adobe. For example, Adobe has the right to those of Customer's records useful to determine whether installations of the Software have been serialized, and Customer shall provide such records to Adobe promptly upon request by Adobe. Additionally, Customer shall provide Adobe with all records and information requested by Adobe in order to verify that its use of any and all Adobe software is in conformity with its valid licenses from Adobe within thirty (30) days of Adobe's request. Additional information on serialization is available at http://www.adobe.com/go/elicensing.

Obviously GIMP staff or the wider community will check or notice if you violated the GPLv3+ for your distributed version of GIMP, but I don't have to worry about getting my private property felt up to make sure the software I got is prim and proper.

For that alone GIMP is already massively better.

1300 is the price for the absolute cheapest version of Adobe CS6. The article says "UP TO" so we can assume that is for the most expensive version. The Adobe site says the Master Collection is $2600:
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite.html?kw=p&sdid=JRSIM&skwcid=TC|22178|adobe%20CS6||S|e|10550251960

Second, the article says it is "up to 1400 more", not 1600.

So 4000/2600 = 54% markup in Australia.

You mean Apple under Cook may consider allowing Flash on their devices? The most recent complaints I've heard about the iPads from coworkers is that their shiny new toy doesn't seem to be able to show all of the webpages they look at.

Where have you been? Adobe is abandoning Flash for Android and every other mobile platform.

http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html

Single Window GUI (SDI) is terrible in photoshop.

Have you ever heard about window managers? What manages windows (not Microsoft Windows) for you?

Have you ever heard that you can attach multiple displays to your computer and that your working speed improves with it?
I can not find the slashdot article about multi-screen efficiency but http://www.multiplemonitors.org/index.php/multiple-monitor-solution/multi-advantages says it is 20-50% overall improvement and that is what I remember from slashdot discussion of different study as well.

At that point, you want just to have MDI = every image as own window and tools in own window. Then you can use window manager to actually manage your windows so you quickly find what you need and you can see all of them at glance, get them in full screen and tools pop-up only when needed by pressing a TAB. You can organize images to second screen or make a duplicates of images and place them to side by side to compare when you want to have a new try of something fancy without undoing everything if it isn't successful.

Since GIMP 2.3 development branch the UI has been very powerful and logical. Much better than in Adobe Photoshop what is illogical but works for those who have born with knowledge to use it. That is one reason why Adobe went and made a Adobe Lightroom for photographers because Adobe Photoshop was designed to totally different work than for photographers. And even Adobe has said that Photoshop UI is terrible and needs tweaking as now it is "one for all" what does not fit at all for everyone, but they need "one for one, everyone gets own". And now they are coming there with customization possibilities per user needs.
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2007/11/photoshop_as_seen_through_johnny_cash.html http://slashdot.org/story/07/11/09/0226215/adobe-to-unclutter-photoshop-ui

So go and get yourself a good window manager (like KWin) so you can get functions like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktTNcj0fAM4 and virtual desktops and so on.

Also Flash 10 has still W2K support, and it seems to still get updated.

Given that Chrome runs on Android and Google has a source license to Flash, I wouldn't be surprised if they keep supporting it in Android too.

Adobe would be surprised it seems...

http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2012/02/flash-chrome-for-android-beta.html

And as a parting shot at Linux users, Adobe introduces a major regression (hardware accelerated video tints everything blue, e.g. YouTube), claims it can't be reproduced, and closes all bug reports about it, leaving users to implement a nasty hack individually.

Not a problem. With the same toolset (Flash CS Pro/Flex) I can export Flash projects to iOS as a native app with a wrapper and am actually targeting iPhones & iPads with Flash.

Adobe's new roadmap for flash is to position it as the "premier game console" of the web and main video engine. I'm now looking more on creating standalone Adobe AIR (unsandboxed Flash) apps for iOS & Android Market.

With reduced resources (they just laid off a number of employees last Nov) and the inherent compatibility difficulties of porting to so many flavors of Linux, I guess they just decided to consolidate and let Google (with whom they've had a long partnership) do the job for them.

It's at least been since Flash Player 9 in January 2007. 5 years is more than a token gesture.

Flash does work on firefox for mac and according to adobe it works on your browser as well. I do not know which planet you are on but mac system codecs are fine if all you browse is youtube. Because youtube does remote transcoding. The /. guys can't afford the cost to do this as well as the fact that it requires a system type server to client query to be done when someone goes to load up a vid. Seems that the ./ tv site just does a talkback javascript without doing a scripted system or browser type enquiry.

If safari is choking on the sfv and you have flash installed then something else is going on and you should report it to the guys coding the site ...but considering the fact that a ton of ./ people actually use macs ...me thinks you are most like against installing flash or firefox on your pure apple device.

And with that mentality, there never will be.

Here's what Adobe suggests.

Here's 10 alternatives to Flash Player.

Then there's the "Occupy Flash" movement, LOL!

None of this is a replacement for software content creation tools like Flash CS5. It's not a mentality, it's fact. I don't see any high end tools that replace it. Video support is such a small part of flash player, I'm talking about actual applications.

So, admit it. You're just plain lazy. You don't WANT to have to learn a new way.

For some reason you think I don't know HTML5/javascript technologies. I've written my own HTML5 applications, I've used web sockets, I've used the backing storage system - Despite knowing this, I haven't found any tools close to as intuitive to high end software like Flash CS5.

Nope, no released version of flash player supports WebM (Latest is version 11, released Nov 2011). Even if one was released today, how long would it be before that version was available on most platforms, and then how long before it was pervasive?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash
http://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/multi/release-notes-flash-player-11.html

For as much as this crowd wants to bash Adobe on occasion for 'proprietary' formats, closed source products, etc. PDF is ISO'd* along with information on how to create/modify/remove the annotation COS objects in the file. Annotations were added in the PDF specification in 1.2 (circa 1996) and into the Acrobat / Reader product lines in the 3.15 update which came out, roughly, 1999.

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=1&platform=Windows

* You can get the current PDF spec free of charge from Adobe's web site by downloading the Acrobat SDK.

I know that Annotations (along with forms objects) became first-class tools in the product with the release of 4.0 and were a major selling point (including annotation import/export). Adobe has since added and has continued to expand annotation capabilities and synching options in Acrobat 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Starting with regular file systems, through WebDav and other web based technologies (e.g. Acrobat.com) and onto Lotus Notes and Sharepoint.

I'm surprised that the USPTO even entertained this patent as, for them to even process the patent they would have had to use the exact same technology in the patent with Acrobat as apart of the regular USPTO workflow. It would be akin to Bell calling the USPTO, on the phone, to patent the phone that both of them were talking on.

Going to get a bucket of popcorn and watch the show on this one.

No, Adobe's implementation of PostScript is licensed. The specification itself is not--you can download a copy for free. There are numerous third party PostScript implementations. E.g., many Brother printers have "BR-Script". PhoenixPage is/used to be popular too.

No, Adobe's implementation of PostScript is licensed. The specification itself is not--you can download a copy for free. There are numerous third party PostScript implementations. E.g., many Brother printers have "BR-Script". PhoenixPage is/used to be popular too.

Jesus. The reason El Cheapo laser printer won't take PostScript directly is that the format is licensed by Adobe and the printer manufacturer doesn't want to pay a licensing fee. http://www.adobe.com/products/postscript/

You would think a Linux user, of all people, would appreciate the inadvisability of relying on a closed format like this and commend manufacturers who enable inexpensive products by routing around it. Instead you're shitting on people who don't want to buy the "superior" closed-tech printer for use with their open source OS. Ugh, the irony. Take a step back and get some perspective.

All the existing Flash animations and games on Weebl's Stuff, Homestar Runner, Kongregate, and Newgrounds are likely to keep SWF on life support for a very long time, be it through Adobe Flash Player or through Gnash.

Did you read my post? Adobe itself is migrating to HTML5. Adobe offers a tool (currently in beta) to convert Flash animations to HTML5: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wallaby/
I bet it'll be part of -- at the latest -- CS7.

Yep BUT just because you are waiting for 15-30 seconds doesn't mean the time is being sensibly used.

Check out this problem on the AS3 compiler for Flash. Disabling compiler warnings reduces compile time from 74 seconds to around 1 second.
http://forums.adobe.com/message/3923444

So next time you watch that splash screen crawl by, sit back and guess whether it is actually loading or just winding itself in circles...

or it could be a pdf with an embedded flash http://www.adobe.com/designcenter-archive/tutorials/flashpdf/

It would seem to me that "Chrome's habit of bundling Adobe Flash" would be a detriment. But that's just me.

They went on to recommend Adobe Reader X. I agree that pdf readers in a sandbox make a lot of sense, its just that I have no particular reason to trust Adobe, since it was their doing that made PDFs unsafe in the first place. With Chrome's built in PDF render engine, I find I seldom have to use the adobe plugin at all any more. (And when I do, I'm always suspicious).

If Google wanted to do us all a favor they would to with Flash content what they did with PDF documents, and add their own in-browser render engine.

That being said, I do like the sandboxing that Chrome supplies, and Google Chrome is my browser of choice.

Some people don't like keying search terms in the URL bar, and other minor objections that, when investigated, all amount to "its not firefox". I've seen some reports of incredibly slow page fetches, which are usually traceable to external things (chrome likes to use multiple concurrent connections, and swamps some anti-virus packages that operate as a proxy server).

For me, the speed can't be beat on any of the platforms I use (linux and windows - various flavors of each). I prefer Google's builds to those in the Chromium Open Source project but both work very well.

if there was a huge user base of simple users they might even make an easier "Lite" version out of it.

They do: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-elements.html

The Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshop) shows that the file format has been documented (http://www.adobe.com/devnet-apps/photoshop/fileformatashtml/) As to why it doesn't use some sort of XMLish format, this thing was created in the early 90's, before XML based file formats were in vogue and computers were much less powerful.

i use IE in virtualbox in linux to watch videos on youtube...

Sorry but, that is retarded.

FlashPlayer "Square" hasn't crashed on me in 3 years! Even when it was a Labs project in alpha, it was stable on x64. Granted, I use NoScript to block 3rd party scripts (I temp whitelist the current domain) so that blocks most Flash ads and other junk from loading.

Download the tarball: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/

Remove whatever flash came with your distro, throw libflashplayer.so in: /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ and restart FF. `ps aux | grep plugin-container` might use a lot of ram after a long browsing session, but it's super-stable and has been for a long time.

"Oracle issues rare out-of-band update for Apache DDoS vulnerability"

"This is only the fifth time Oracle has issued an alert outside its routine quarterly patch cycle since introducing its own version of Patch Tuesday at the start of 2005."

That would be Microsoft's "Patch Tuesday". Oracle doesn't call it "out-of-band".

"Adobe Releases Out-of-Band Patch"

Adobe called it a "Security bulletin", and judging from when Adobe releases updates for Flash Player, I'm not even seeing a regular schedule to classify it as "out-of-band" as Microsoft defines it.

"Installing out-of-band updates for IBM BladeCenter devices using Telnet fails"

They're actually talking about delivery of patches via FTP and TFTP. Another talks about SNMP as the method. That is out-of-band and not what Microsoft is doing.

If anything about Microsoft releasing a patch off-schedule is "out-of-band" it is that they call special attention to it via press release rather than otherwise silently informing people via Windows Update. And that's assuming that they don't issue press releases anyway that usually get ignored by the press when they're on the regular schedule. It's not delivering the patch out-of-band, it's informing the public out-of-band, i.e. via an alternate band of communication. But it isn't delivery of the patch; that still occurs through the normal channel: Windows Update. It's conflating security "update" as a deliverable fix with security "update" as bulletin about the availability of the fix via the usual channels.

And that's the closest to a concession you'll get out of me on this.