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Linux For Supervillains
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.
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/
Wow, this animation is soooooooooooo old. here is the actual site this came from.
The Television Wiki
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
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.