Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Linux For Supervillains

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the nothing-else-happening-today dept.

computernut writes "Supervillains seem to like Linux. Take a peek at a cool Shockwave Animation on why they use it." Cute little animation. I think we might have shown it here before, but hey it's Sunday, and August which means this is the closest thing to news we might have all day.

8 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. Are you kidding me? by falloutboy · · Score: 5, Informative

    This story is a great reason not to get a subscription to slashdot.

    Anyway, the video -- which is funny -- is several years old and comes from http://www.ubergeek.tv/

    1. Re:Are you kidding me? by jc42 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Heh. Nowadays, the problem is figuring out how to block flash.

      For instance, I've installed FlashBlock and PrefBar several times in mozilla and/or firefox. They both test out ok, and work for a week or two. Then one day I find a movin' pitcher running in a moz or FF window, check, and sure enough; it's flash. F'r instance, flash was blocked a few days ago in FF, but when I pasted this comic's URL into a FF window, it came up and ran instantly.

      Anyone got any other good clues about killing this cpu sinkhole? This comic was one of the rare cases where I'd actually want to watch a flash movie. 99% of the time, flash is only used for obnoxious, intrusive ads that take over the cpu.

      Is there a browser where you can actually block flash, and keep it blocked, while still being able to play an occasional flash movie or game?

      (I tend to collect browsers; I have 7 or 8 on both my linux box and my Powerbook. It's interesting to see how effective the advertisers are at bringing your cpu to its knees from any of them. Of course, when an ad does this, I add the company to my list of companies to never buy from if I can at all avoid it. ;-)

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
  2. slashdot by brokencomputer · · Score: 4, Informative

    Wow, this animation is soooooooooooo old. here is the actual site this came from.

    --
    The Television Wiki
  3. This thing is called Flash for 5 years already! by tereshchenko · · Score: 2, Informative

    This thing is called Flash for 5 years already! And previously it wasn't simply Shockwave, but Shockwave Flash. Shockwave is the name of Macromedia Director's internet format and entirely different technology.

    --
    Slashdot - free anti-Microsoft propaganda 24/7
  4. And actually by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Macromedia has renamed SWF to "Small Web Format" I'm serious. I sat through a presentation and that's what they called it.

  5. Re:Confused? by Novus · · Score: 2, Informative

    Huh? Works fine in Mozilla for me. RPM version data follows:

    > rpm --qf "%{NAME} - %{SUMMARY}: %{VERSION}\n%{VENDOR}\n" -q flash-player mozilla
    flash-player - Macromedia Flash plugin: 7.0.25.0
    SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nuernberg, Germany
    mozilla - The Open Source successor of the Netscape browser: 1.7.5
    SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nuernberg, Germany

    Hope this helps.

  6. Re:Linux versus Windows by KillerBob · · Score: 3, Informative

    But KDE and Gnome go down all the time.

    You do realise that there's other desktop environments and window managers than KDE/Gnome, right? I find that those two DEs go down fairly frequently as well. Since switching to XFCE, however, I have never had a crash. Ever. It's absolutely rock-solid, and as long as it's development is focused on speed and stability over, say, bells&whistles, it's going to continue to be rock-solid.

    And if you don't like XFCE, there's nothing to stop you from using *box, fvwm, or hell, even tab-window-manager. Maybe your problems with X have less to do with X or Linux themselves, and more to do with your choice of using Desktop Environments with known memory leaks (KDE) and stability problems when dealing with unexpected library versions (Gnome).

    And in the event of an X crash, I wouldn't lose my documents, either. At most, I'd lose 5 minutes' work, because that's the interval at which AbiWord is set to autosave my work. Hell, my music wouldn't even stop playing, thanks to me using MPD.

    --
    If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
  7. Re:Confused? by Mathonwy · · Score: 5, Informative

    True, the .swf file format does stand for shockwave flash. However, this is a flash animation; a shockwave animation is something quite different. This was an animation that was produced via macromedia flash, and runs in their flash player.

    A shockwave animation is one that is produced in Macromedia Director, and requires an entirely different plugin.

    They're separate products and separate file formats. The flash format (which is far more common) is vector based, and was designed to stream interesting animations to people while using up as little bandwidth as possible. Similarly, the flash player itself is (or at least originally was) designed to be as small as possible.

    In contrast, the shockwave player was designed from the start to handle lots of stuff (bitmaps, vectors, 3d) and so was always a much heavier player.

    So anyway, the parent post is right, I think. This is a FLASH animation, not a shockwave animation. Calling this a shockwave animation in the headline is misleading.