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Linux Now an Equal Flash Player
nerdyH writes "As recently as 2007, Linux users waited six months for Flash 9 to arrive. Now, with Microsoft pushing its Silverlight alternative, Adobe is touting the universality of its Flash format, which has penetrated '98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops,' it claims. And, it today released Flash 10 for Linux concurrently with other platforms. Welcome to the future." Handily enough, Real Networks released this summer RealPlayer 11 for Linux, the first release for which they've included a .deb package, and offers nightly builds of their Helix player, for which Linux is one of the supported platforms.
Now make them do the same with Photoshop.
What's that?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
And this is a good example! Why change, update, or innovate if you have no competition? Throw a little in there and all of a sudden the things people actually wanted, are given!
Non-ascii text input has been broken forever.
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-40
We need a proper Open Source flash as a BSD user I am still jaded by flashes lack of support
There's still no 64-bit version yet!
Follow me
But still not open-source. So if you need it on PPC Linux, or FreeBSD, you are still SOL. Give us the source guys, and we'll maintain it for you. Or if you absolutely cant do that, publish a spec that somebody can use to write compatible player.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
Did you fix the cookies yet?
Free Martian Whores!
Now, I can watch my CPU's max out, and my systems become unresponsive on EVERY platform!
Some of us have been waiting a lot longer for flash9 and still don't have it for wii, iphone, and I believe even the Opera web browser.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
Is this good news or bad news?
The big question I have is: Have they finally released a 64-bit plugin for 64-bit firefox in Linux?
The stability of wrappers just isn't there yet (neither is the performance). One would think by now they could do a recompile...
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
Adobe would just encourage more webmasters to write actual code instead of relying on flash for their entire websites.
But of course there wouldn't be much profit incentive for Adobe to do such a thing...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Nice to know that in addition to cats, I'm a trendsetter in not having Flash installed.
So this is what the linux crowd feels like on a daily basis.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
So they fixed the transparency problems in Linux?
Complaints about lack of Photoshop and a 64-bit version aside (it's interesting how much Slashdot resembles a sewing circle of old ladies in the complaints department), this is actually pretty significant news. Especially if this is the beginning of a new Way Things are Done for the Flash developers. With most major video sites using Flash-based players and the other wealth of Flash content on other websites, Flash support is pretty essential for desktop users. This is a major stepping stone. Hopefully Adobe will see enough rewards from doing this that will encourage them to embrace the Linux platform even more.
My theory is that Adobe's Flash player is a horrible hack that is so utterly fragile and bug-ridden that Adobe can't actually make a 64-bit version without doing a full rewrite.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Do they have a Flash Player for the iPhone yet? Just curious.
where open source is used as a bargaining chip in a commercial pissing contest. i guess linux developers alone werent enough to spur adobe to invest, so how if at all is this a win for linux?
Good people go to bed earlier.
If I recall correctly, it was six months after the release of Flash 9 for Windows when Linux got it, but there wasn't even a Flash 8 for Linux. Linux users had actually been waiting for a new release since the release of Flash 7.
Competition is good and all, but this is just annoying. It only exists to muddy the waters.
I'm just waiting for MS to announce that they will no longer speak english, but will communicate only in Anglush-Sharp. A language in which every noun is copyrighted by Microsoft and only MS approved verbs will generate an intelligible response.
My thoughts exactly. I'd really like to turn my Wii into a Hulu box, but the one browser I actually paid for doesn't have flash compatibility. What gives?
I love to watch Firefox grey out or my whole system freeze for 10 seconds for some flash thing.
I still won't switch back to winders.
I just wish there were an alternative that worked really well.
First of all, as some have already pointed out, where's the *BSD binaries and 64-bit binaries?
Why doesn't Adobe go (L)GPLv3 with their flash plugin, keep all the products that produce flashes commercial and watch how other people (while being angry at their original plugin's performance) fix their bad code?
In all seriousness, what bad could releasing flash renderer as a GPLv3 or LGPLv3 mean for adobe? They have the market for 90s style websites (one big graphic) and 100% of Internet's video sites already, their actual closed source not so well performing plugin is the first reason why people don't think flash is great for anything other than attracting teenager users.
If the do not open source it, one day it will a better alternative will grow out of the open source community or flash simply ceases to exist as it's replaced by more open standard X or better renderer Y.
Flash 10 is supported for Opera on Windows. Not for other Operating Systems, though (apparently).
Well done Adobe! Now we're talking. Help us help YOU keep Silverlight still-born.
Either that or it apparently won't run unless the host browser is GTK2 based.
Oh well. I'm out.
Looks like they changed it during they beta to require glibc 2.4-based Linux distributions (RHEL 4, CentOS 4, Debian 4 are out) for stack-smashing protection.
Link.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Most of the 64-bit work is still in the opensource Tamarin Project. You can still contribute, if you've got the chops.
http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2006/10/whats_so_difficult_64bit_editi.html
http://www.kaourantin.net/2006/11/spidermonkeys-relative-tamarin-joins.html
The "we'll maintain it for you" line has not particularly been borne out by experience.... ;-)
jd/adobe
With security flaws like this! http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9954408-7.html
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
The SWF file format specifications have been published for a decade. Just like HTML.
The sourcecode to the canonical implementation has not, just like most of the HTML browsers out there.
Adobe licenses high-quality video decoders from third-parties, so it's difficult to have an ideologically-pure Player.
jd/adobe
They can't even make a 32 bit version without bugs and security vulnerabilities. Honestly, who would install a new version of Flash on its zero-day?
That would be a more plausible explanation if they didn't have a version for Solaris on Sparc. I'm more inclined to believe that the root problem is unwillingness to devote the resources.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Now that I've just upgraded it seems that those "performance upgrades" don't show up at least on (K)Ubuntu 8.10 beta.
Running without desktop effects, under firefox or konqueror it still needs the whole core to do simple low quality video decoding. mplayer (w/ ffdshow) does videos with same resolution with less than 10% of total cpu usage.
Wished at least some kind of performance boost ..
Theory? No. Fact? Yes.
Tagged "dubioushonor"
You're right. The software assumes 4==sizeof(char *) all over the place. So much for portability.
Yes, Linux folk did have an unusually lengthy gap back then. Worse, it coincided with the rise in YouTube popularity, so the gap was felt particularly acutely.
Video was added in Player 6. Player 8 was a massive re-architecture of the graphics engine. This was also due to include a re-architecture of the logics engine, but the latter was re-scheduled out into Player 9 timeframe. Rather than make a graphics-oriented Linux Player which would need to be rev'd in six months, the Linux Player went straight from v7 to v9. It was pain, but it's over now.
Flash/Linux has been an emphasis from the start:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000815054538/www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/alternates/
jd/adobe
Anyone know when Flashplayer 9 for the wii is coming out? Or how to use Flashplayer 9 with wii homebrew?
I hate to disrupt a good theory with references, but What's So Difficult? 64-bit Edition claims the main issue is that rewriting the JIT compiler to emit 64-bit code is non-trivial.
I agree that a version for the Solaris Sparc platform is a slight negative, but I bet that version is a 32-bit version as well.
There are liberties you can take when you can assume that some particular integer type and a pointer type are interchangeable, or that pointers have some particular internal structure. Most 64-bit platforms break all those assumptions.
In particular, on x86_64 the pointer is specifically structured so you can't steal either the high or low bits to represent some other sort of data. And the 'int' type in most compilers is still 32 bits, you have to use 'long' or even 'long long' to get a 64 bit integer type.
So, I think sloppy and bad programming practices are still the likely culprit.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
If Linux is now "an Equal Flash Player" then why do Flash elements STILL get rendered above other elements when this problem doesn't exist in Flash 9 for Mac/Windows? Install Flash 10 for Linux, go to the Flash homepage http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/ and hover the mouse over the Home Solutions Products etc menus. See how they are not fully usable because the Flash movie is rendered on top.
I've got my laptop setup to dual-boot Windows and Linux. I've noticed that, generally speaking, the Windows version of Flash can play higher resolution videos at full screen with better framerates, than the Linux version of Flash. For example, I pretty frequently go to hulu.com to watch episodes of TV shows that I've missed. Many of the videos have a 480 resolution option (which, really, is just standard definition, but 'normal' resolution on hulu is like 360 or something like that). Under Windows, the 480 resolution videos will *generally* speaking flame back pretty smoothly with very few dropped frames, but under Linux, the Flash player is like watching a slide show.
Also, outside of video playback, I've noticed that other functionality of Flash is often just much slower under Linux, like full-screen animations (as an example, Marvel.com has a digital 'comic book' viewer implemented in Flash. When you turn a page, it does an animation which looks like the page physically turning, sort of. Under Windows, it takes like a second, but under Linux it takes like 2-3 seconds.
I suspect that the Windows version of Flash takes advantage of various video acceleration features of the nVidia drivers (probably via DirectX), but that the Linux version does not use such acceleration features. I am using a recent, accelerated video driver from nVidia, so I believe that the acceleration features are *available* in Linux, but simply that the Flash for Linux does not use them.
They're competing with Silverlight. I don't see how they can give us the source or a useful spec that won't give Microsoft a highly undersired advantage.
Sony released today a new firmware for the PS3 updating the browser to Flash 9, now Flash 10 is released and i am sure all sites will start to use version 10 features, leaving us PS3 owners on the same previous state + 1
He's wondering why it's so cold down there.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
So did they fix the *really* annoying problem where on linux firefox configurations that flash objects appear ontop of *everything* else in the page? This annoyance has made many pages very much un-usable (especially ones with drop down menus where the menu gets hidden behind the flash object :( ...adobe's own site fits into this catagory).
Come on, you use Solaris on the desktop too, right?
There are a number of issues that make flash 10 on linux inferior to it's better-supported cousin.
The most notable is dealing with the audio server - if you get flash audio running on linux, theres any given streaming video will crash the flash sandbox and bring firefox down with it.
Releasing flash 10 simultaneously makes sense, i guess, as far as features added are concerned but the problem major problems with flash on linux are persisted even through this new release.
It's a shame, too, because one of the biggest barrier for adaption of desktop linux, i argue, is a stable flash player.
Now do the same for Shockwave Player so it can be on linux as well.
Time line for flash on iphone?
...But please, lets be realistic.
In your minds, if company Z doesn't support Linux, they lose. If they do support linux, they lose even worse. They get screamed at for not releasing specs, not GPL'ing the source, not supporting a specific distribution, not supporting 64-bit... the list goes on.
Now if you're going to take the time to respond to this, please answer me this: Why should company X spend the most time supporting a platform that has the least marketshare?
Linux folk see the problem being that software vendors don't support linux. The fact of the matter is Linux doesn't support ISV's. There are a million different distro's with no standardization. You already have your market share working against you, and you realize that. What you don't seem to realize is that your platform is the hardest to develop for and support.
You really should do something about this before you scream with a sense of entitlement that some company should spend time and money supporting your platform when it is not likely to be financially viable.
Similes are like metaphors
Wait, I thought we hated RealPlayer? So now we can hate it on Linux, too?
And a major company can finish porting a program to a new, reasonably similar, platform in less than 6 years. Sorry, lame excuses about porting to 64 bit being hard were great in 2005 or so, but at this point it's completely clear that there's no 64 bit flash player simply because Macromedia / Adobe has chosen not to devote the resources to it. It's not like they're the ones who will get shit when web browsers hit the 2GB barrier.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Come on, let's have the year of Linux on the desktop before we tackle the year of Solaris on the desktop.
Anybody want my mod points?
... and I believe even the Opera web browser.
Flash10 works for me in Opera. Just copy the libflashplayer.so into a plugins directory it knows about. Look in Preferences -> click Content then click 'Plugin Options' button to see a list of your plugin directories it knows about (or mkdir your own and add it there).
I'm in the same boat. I paid $5 for the browser. It'd be nice if Nintendo, Opera and Adobe could hammer something out.
Regardless, there may be a solution around the corner if you're willing to pay $30 bucks and run a windows machine. Media Mall claims their PlayOn! software will be Wii compatible by the end of 2008:
http://www.themediamall.com/playon
Really, how much of a fuckup does something need to be to make 32->64 bitness a problem?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
See:
http://objection.mozdev.org/index.html
The development release: /home/USERNAME/.macromedia/Flash_Player
http://downloads.mozdev.org/objection/objection-0_4_0b1-fx-sm.xpi works great for me but there is one bug that requires you to define the directory by hand:
Just what I've always wanted, RealPlayer on a computer that I own! Can we have QuickTime too?
A fair amount of closed source software I have looked at recently, that has had Linux support, has supported just Ubuntu and maybe Gentoo, having a package for each. I'm guessing enterprise software would support RedHat. It seems like a good way to narrow the number of distros while reaching a large portion of users.
And, it today released Flash 10 for Linux concurrently with other platforms.
It's okay. I just read the tags too.
Linux folk see the problem being that software vendors don't support linux. The fact of the matter is Linux doesn't support ISV's. There are a million different distro's with no standardization. You already have your market share working against you, and you realize that. What you don't seem to realize is that your platform is the hardest to develop for and support.
There are things that the OSS community can change and those it can't change. No amount of Linux standardization will ever make x86 code run directly in a browser with x86_64, PPC, ARM or other architecture. In other cases you might have at a point, but in this case the flash plugin is one file to drop in the plugin directory and you're done. Flash works equally well (poorly?) across all the million distributions. Anyway, the SWF/FLV specs are out there so there's really no excuse for the OSS community.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
And the benefits (even on Flash 9 sites, without the new features in 10) are significant:
Better performance and smoother graphics
The fullscreen video mode is no longer choppy
Unfortunately, there's a significant drawback as well:
Often crashes my browser as soon as I visit a page with Flash.
(or at least crashes the plugin process, when using a browser smart enough to isolate plugins from the main system)
Obviously I got to enjoy Flash 10 for a while before it started dying on me. Wiping my .macromedia directory doesn't seem to restore the stable behavior. Neither does reinstalling flash. Did Hulu change their video format in some subtle way that breaks just my system? I don't know, but he official Flash 10 breaks too, not just the betas. Unless anyone here has any good ideas, back to 9 it is.
Anyone know of a Homebrew method for using Flashplayer 9+ on the wii. I too am looking to watch Hulu through the wii.
This isn't just about linux, don't get me wrong, im pretty happy about 10, it's a big improvement for me....
but only because I'm lucky enough to use it on firefox, in linux 32-bit. There are still lots of other platforms and browsers who are left out of the full internet experience because so much of it is tied up in this proprietary technology. The internet is supposed to be about open access, and is one of our last free communication mediums, but adobe is getting the choice on who can truly experience it to it's fullest, as more and more sites use it.
I eagerly await the day that the open source decoders are of a high enough quality to replace the adobe player
Maybe a post from 2006 (summarizing an explanation from 2005) is not the best thing. At the end of the day, the excuses seem lame. Java had 64-bit support out pretty quickly (are you telling me the JIT in Flash is more complicated than the Java JVM, of which the JIT is a minor portion?)
The reason is that Adobe doesn't feel there's a big enough market for 64-bit platforms, thus it doesn't throw many resources at getting a 64-bit version, end of story.
Why couldn't you just quote it like this:
--penguin.swf (Penguin.SWF tracks development status and issues regarding the Linux version of Adobe's Flash Player)
Question everything
I just browsed the Tamarin mailing list, status reports, and commit logs. Adobe employees seem to do at least half of the work, but that's less than all of the work you'd do if you hadn't donated the code.
how to invest, a novice's guide
That was also written, oh, two fucking years ago! They haven't figured out how to make their JIT compiler work in two years? What kind of incompetents are they? I'm sure it's a hard problem. Lots of problems are hard. But somehow Firefox and Opera and even IE managed to get their Javascript code working on 64bit platforms in the meantime. Why is Flash somehow special?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
The kind who would think the Flash player was a good idea in the first place.
Specific distribution: Supporting all distributions isn't hard, you know.
No. Supporting Linux is not hard at all. It's not like you have to release 10 different packages for each distribution you support... and stuff.
Flip it around and ask yourself why shouldn't company X spend a little time making something cross-platform (it's not as hard as you think) and get that many more sales?
You say "It's not as hard as you think." I say, "It's easier said than done."
This just screams troll right here. I find it a pain to develop for Windows myself given that libraries and headers can be all over the place, or are you thinking of RAD C# stuff that is useless for many applications (note I'm saying it's useless for things like, say, Flash; it certainly has a use for smaller programs and other apps that don't need speed, etc).
Yeah, I'm a troll. Instead of developing a modern tool chain, linux folk scream, "Emacs/VIM, the GNU toolchain and a command line debugger is all you will ever need!" Which, wherein lies the most fundamental problem of the Linux crowd, they feel entitled to tell people what they should want and need, rather than listen to what people want and need. And then you call them a troll.
Similes are like metaphors
Now if you're going to take the time to respond to this, please answer me this: Why should company X spend the most time supporting a platform that has the least marketshare?
At one point back in 1995, the Microsoft Windows market was only 20% of the PC market. The other 75% of the market was OS/2, QNX, DrDos, Novell and a few others. Windows was an emerging market so we coded for it.
Linux is now an emerging (or growth) market. Ignore it if you want. Your competitors are not.
There is a reason that google has released Picasa and GoogleEarth binaries for linux and its not because of a bunch of hippies yelling at them demanding the code. There is a reason that Dell is still continuing its Linux line of products. Asus, Adobe, Quicken, Oracle, Real, etc, do not make their product support decisions based on a bunch of screaming smelly basement dwellers.
What you don't seem to realize is that your platform is the hardest to develop for and support.
Linux is the hardest platform to develop for if all you know how to code in is Microsoft based technologies.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
http://www.oiloja.com.br/ - Brazilian cellphone carrier I use. They had a transparent Flash that covered everything - now it WORKS!
http://www.formula1.com/ seems to be OK too.
Anyone has other sites with that problem so we can test more?
Flash 7 has been the only SDK available for the longest time. I think Flash 9/10's have just come out.
... now if they could just get flash running on Windows Mobile....
Evolution: love it or leave it
Your post reminded me that coincidentally enough, the PS3 firmware that was released today is the first to have Flash 9.
A 64-bit Linux and BSD version of the official Flash Player was shown at a conference recently (Flashforward 2008):
http://thebackbutton.com/blog/73/64-bit-linux-freebsd-flash-player-exists/
Must not feed trolls but
...But please, lets be realistic.
In your minds, if company Z doesn't support Linux, they lose. If they do support linux, they lose even worse. They get screamed at for not releasing specs, not GPL'ing the source, not supporting a specific distribution, not supporting 64-bit... the list goes on.
Yeah we hate mathmatica, matlab and ID too? No we got burned by adobes proprietory nature and methods, just a year ago too so were not too kean on them right now. Additionally their implementation sucks
Now if you're going to take the time to respond to this, please answer me this: Why should company X spend the most time supporting a platform that has the least marketshare?
Linux folk see the problem being that software vendors don't support linux. The fact of the matter is Linux doesn't support ISV's.
If you want us to like you, your going to have to support our system, i doubt many mac users love game developers who ignore them either. As for spending the most time supporting us, well with a well implemented program thats not really true, ID games were all ported in a developers spare time IIRC, programs with lots of OS integration (chrome may take longer, but a well maintained code base can be ported fairly easily (google desklet, dashboard desklets, ID games, HL (without the rendering as that requires directX), etc)
There are a million different distro's with no standardization. You already have your market share working against you, and you realize that. What you don't seem to realize is that your platform is the hardest to develop for and support.
A common point against linux, but linux standard base says differently providing
standard libraries, a number of commands and utilities that extend the POSIX standard, the layout of the file system hierarchy, run levels, the printing system, including spoolers such as CUPS and tools like Foomatic and several extensions to the X Window System.
LSB is supported by novell(suse,opensuse,etc), redhat(RH,centos,fedora), Mandrakesoft and Debian(ubuntu,xandros) and id bet that slackware/gnetoo can handle RPMs too.
Additionally the software API* for linux is more or less stable (atleast as stable as windows has been recently) that's why you can install binaries for software and if it was designed for it 2.6 kernel it will normally work most of the time. If you want to make use of our libraries this is not necessarily true but your still free to implement your own libraries or compile your binary with snapshots of free libraries (dependent on how the library is used).
You really should do something about this before you scream with a sense of entitlement that some company should spend time and money supporting your platform when it is not likely to be financially viable.
Entitlement? i dont feal entitled but I do want my voice to be heard as nobody is going to port to linux just for fun.
*Binaries dealing with the kernel directly have it more difficult, but if the source is avalible we will try our best to get it working (Even if its not strictly allowed, see cisco vpnc)
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Aww that breaks my heart =(
:P
As a long time FBSD user, i've complained about this for a while now. A long time ago we had it, but they took it away over a legal difference.
But am still waiting for the day it comes back. But with those saying nothing is worth viewing in flash, take a look at my home page. Sure, most of it has nothing to do with flash but there is one thing that is flash. I used to have another link to the users section but that's been down for a while now
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
The "we'll maintain it for you" line has not particularly been borne out by experience.... ;-)
Well said from a closed source company. Heck, we might even be able to resolve all the serious flaws in your code. *cough* cookie *cough*
Just downloaded it... I hoped it would fix the poor fullscreen video performance of flash 9 under Linux (YouTube videos being played back at a rate of 5 fps). However, fullscreen mode does not work at all any more - Firefox completely freezes and has to be killed manually as soon as a video attempts to go fullscreen.
Gnash 0.8.4 was released yesterday, but I guess that doesn't merit a slashvertisement:
http://gnashdev.org/
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Linux is now an emerging (or growth) market. Ignore it if you want. Your competitors are not.
Huh? Silverlight isn't ignoring us?
Looks like they've re-introduced the RGB bug that makes flash content look funny on a Sun Ray. Rather than querying the X server for the RGB masks, the plugin just assumes red=0xff0000, green=0xff00, blue=0xff, when in fact on a Sun Ray the red and blue are swapped around.
They had this fixed in the last of the 9 series, but with 10 the bug has re-emerged.
Hell, it deserves an article just for it! We've been putting up with that shit for what, 10 years?
WOO HOO!
On dialup, most any realplayer vid works a lot better than the youtube flash vids I have tried (and mostly given up on) to watch. Real I can set my download speed/connection rate, and my buffer size, flash I can mash the little right hand pointing "play" arrow and that's it, no other options. In other words, of the two, I'd take real, flash is almost completely unusable. Real is tolerable at least on dialup. And that is because most of these vids don't give you a straight "download the whole thing, then decide what you want to play it on and when" option anymore, unless you go the peg leg route, arrrr
They get screamed at for not releasing specs
The specs are already released, so that one is null now.
not GPL'ing the source
Is there any reason not to?
not supporting a specific distribution
GPLing would help with this. If you don't feel like doing that, you could code for the LSB, like RiotingPacifist said
not supporting 64-bit...
It would probably be in your best interest to do this, regardless of what we say. Any decade now, MS will stop making 32-bit OSs.
Now if you're going to take the time to respond to this, please answer me this: Why should company X spend the most time supporting a platform that has the least marketshare?
Again, GPLing or coding for the LSB would help you a great deal in this regard. Also, if Linux is a growing player in the OS market, you would want to be on board early.
Some of us have been waiting a lot longer for flash9 and still don't have it for wii, iphone, and I believe even the Opera web browser.
Web 'designers' care more about their technobeat animations than you using the site. Sorry. Maybe we should give them all iPhones.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Ahh, that's an excellent reference, thank you. :-) So, yes, I will agree with you that it seems like a willingness to devote resources problem and not a code quality problem.
Though, IMHO, I don't think the re-write of the JIT should take more than a few months to a year. It's not like the instruction sets are that radically different. And they have a Sparc port as someone else pointed out, and that _is_ a radically different instruction set.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Huh? Silverlight isn't ignoring us?
Actually, SilverLight ignores every platform but Windows. Novell/Mono provides "moonlight" which may or may not be compatible with Microsoft SilverLight.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
It's not like it works anyway.
:(){
Someone wake me when there's a version of Flash (or even Swish) for Linux. Until then any talk of equality is way premature.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
your eagerness to prove your devotion to the sect of the "Opener than Thou"
Not sure how you came to that conclusion but it would be kind of me to merely discard it as short-sighted.
There are plenty of things not to like about flash, beyond the fact that it is closed source.
And those are just problems with flash that occur to me in the first few minutes. Something that was supposed to be an improvement for users has instead become a monster that has impaired communication for many users.
You position contrasts nicely
Your grammar contrasts even more.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
In particular, on x86_64 the pointer is specifically structured so you can't steal either the high or low bits to represent some other sort of data.
Why did they make it that way? I really liked being able to use the lower 2 bits or so of pointers as a type tag.
Wow, how typical. You point out the shortcomings of Linux and someone takes personal offense. Just one more thing wrong with linux: It's community.
Yes, we are a community, which is why we usually try to help each other with our problems. If there exists a problem, then we can ask others for help, and they help us fix it. Otherwise we have to wait on a telephone for 3 hours before Mircosoft tells us that they can't help us unless we ship our computer to them. (Real experience)
No. Supporting Linux is not hard at all [opera.com]. It's not like you have to release 10 different packages for each distribution you support... and stuff.
so go after one distro at a time. The modifications for each aren't that complex once you have a base. Would just take some tweaking.
You say "It's not as hard as you think." I say, "It's easier said than done."
For a linux developer, this would not be difficult. For a Windows only developer, it could take 10+ years.
Yeah, I'm a troll. Instead of developing a modern tool chain, linux folk scream, "Emacs/VIM, the GNU toolchain and a command line debugger is all you will ever need!" Which, wherein lies the most fundamental problem of the Linux crowd, they feel entitled to tell people what they should want and need, rather than listen to what people want and need. And then you call them a troll.
No one was telling you what to want. He just said that he didn't like C#... Use what you want. We honestly don't care.
--gmxgeek
"They get screamed at for not releasing specs [...] Why should company X spend the most time supporting a platform that has the least marketshare?"
Depends on what the target market for the app is. If it's meant to work on a single PC, or even on a homogenous LAN, it doesn't really matter.
But, if you want your app to be a major part of The Internet, you need to realise that:
1) The Internet is not, and has pretty much never been, a network of homogenous devices.
2) The range of devices connected to the internet is not shinking; it is diversifying more and more as time progresses.
3) The Internet's greatest strength is the fact that it is an open platform, built on open standards, reimplementable by anyone. This is so that when diverse groups of people build new devices that are not like the others, the people who build the device can make it work. Distributing the development this way, instead of relying on a single company to port, e.g. a TCP/IP stack, to every device ever made, means that more devices can be built and tested in the real world than would be possible in the single-company approach.
4) The openness of the platform and the interconnectivity of the internet means that even if the manufacturer of a device doesn't have the resources to implement a particular bit of software (e.g. a mail reader) then development can be distributed further and any end user, or collection of end users, can write a mail reader for that device, making the device more valuable, and making email more valuable due to network effects.
I don't give a fuck if Photoshop is ported to Linux or not. Or, if it is, whether Adobe only ports it to LSB-3.2/x86-32. I don't give a fuck because I can use any application to manipulate photos and other images, because the formats are open, and the protocols you use to copy images around are also open.
But if you want your new file format to be widely used on The Internet, you should take the time to learn a fucking thing or two about why The Internet is as powerful, useful and ubiquitous as it is. Especially if you want your file format to succeed on The Internet because of how great The Internet is. Creating formats and applications to take advantage of The Internet, while at the same time not only ignoring, but actively working against, the principles and methods which caused The Internet to be the thing that you want to take advantage of, is going to make people who have thought about this shit frustrated, and scream at you for being so fucking short-sighted.
I wouldn't give a fuck about Adobe's Flash player being released/supported on Linux or not, if it the Flash format was open, documented and reimplementable - just like every other major technology out there. Then I could choose to use Adobe's Flash player, if I wanted to, based on whatever criteria I may happen to have. Be that price, freedom, stability, the device I'm using and the CPU it happens to have, etc...
If the Flash format were open, it wouldn't matter if supporting Linux were financially viable for Adobe. They wouldn't have to support it. The community would do that work for them. They'd support their own code.
And, by making the Flash format available for more platorms, and more devices, these diverse communities would make the Flash file format more valuable, again due to network effects. The wider the format is supported, the more useful it is as a technology.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
No 64 bit support.
Someone on Slashdot who finally gets it.
I go a step further, and say that 'Linux' is not a platform at all if you're an end-user or starting out in app development.
Don't get me wrong... I'm LPI certified and use various distros on a daily basis for all sorts of things. But I am far from an average user or even power user.
... so it fits in the 32-bit memory model. Just turn off Cookies, Java, JavaScript, and Flash. Oh wait.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
... Linux version, or a 64-bit version, or whatever. So why don't the browser writers make their browsers just do videos as an integrated feature using a tag as simple as images (but with some extra properties appropriate for videos), with pluggable codecs compatible with the ones that come in mplayer (just install mplayer's codecs in the usual location and the browser finds them), and include Theora already integrated and ready to play.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I like how you have no direct knowledge or experience, yet you can rant and get modded "Interesting".
Since it's so trivial you should volunteer to fix it. I bet Adobe has been looking for a guy just like you.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
My primary use is obviously youtube, and I'm happy to report that with this official version 10 release, all of the above problems seem to have been resolved on my ubuntu 8.04 install.
Censorship is the opposite of education. If neo-darwinism were defensible, people would not need to try and censor ID.
That one use to make many educational titles.
"but that is the fault of the fool who designed the page."
That wouldn't be so bad if it was ONE fool with ONE web page, but now it is HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of fools with an even larger number of pages that are so heavy and flash specific that they are completely unusable at all without running that resource hogging buggy piece of who knows what for spywarez crap. We need two internets, one for flash happy "ohh shiny" short attention span theater people, then the other internet, where adults who don't need ritalin and acne medicine can go back to normal. I'm not saying we need just black and white and ascii text, but flash is an internet abomination. All web 2.0 is, is web 1.0 with one million more ways to shove ads at you and make it more difficult to escape to some site that at least has content worth reading or looking at.
So now we get to find out 6 months earlier how buggy the Linux version is.
No. Supporting Linux is not hard at all [opera.com]
If both ATi and nVidia can support all of those distros with just one download per CPU type (and that's with their respective GUI control panel apps), why does Opera fail on such a huge scale?
Flash 10 makes my browser (Firefox 3.0.3) hang when I browse a youtube video and I make it go full screen.
This is on Linux (Slackware 12.1.0)
It's not trivial. I just said that it's doable, and they have had two years since that statement, and something like 5 years since it was quite apparent that 64bit was the way of the future.
Java has had a 64bit version for a long time (though not the plugin) but since Flash is just a plugin it's a fair comparison. It's doable. The problem either has to be that they don't have competent employees, or they have a completely fucked up codebase that needs a complete rewrite, and I get the feeling that they just don't want to admit the truth.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Because video card drivers have far fewer dependencies, most of which are standard across distros (the kernel itself and x.org), therefore a lot fewer variants to worry about.
Similes are like metaphors
We have a heated discussion on 64-bit Flash player but recall that Adobe's target audience is probably comprised of 95% or better 32-bit platforms. Let's get out of fairly land here and realize that until Microsoft standardizes on a 64-bit version of Windows, 32-bit acceptance will continue to be ubiquitous. When the 64-bit hammer is about to be laid down, then resources (money/programmers/etc.) will come quickly.
Ayup
This is the inherent difficulty in adopting something that is designed to be masked under closed source. Mono's Moonlight (ooo, the variant of the evil Silverlight) is open source, allows you to program/script it in a variety of languages and is quickly approaching the same level of compliance with Silverlight 2.0. So, yes, Adobe realizes that they have a viable competitor. And, Adobe will soon realize that the open source movement can produce a product (take The Gimp for example) that can compete virtually toe-to-toe for the average desktop user.
Ayup
OK. I'm going to feverishly hunt for the link now, though it should have been easier to find on the site initially:
http://www.myscienceisbetter.info/2008/05/install-adobe-flash-player-10-on-ubuntu-using-nspluginwrapper.html
is all I found. Fuck that. I don't have all day just to get YouTube working natively, since I have it running well in Virtualbox already. Seriously Adobe, wtf?!? Why not just release an x64 version? What year is this? 1993?
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
*raises hand* I down ported GPL flash 3 that was written for Linux to 16 bit Dos in a month. Going the other direction with actual documentation should be doable in two years. They just basically don't want to do it. Why? I don't know.
Waiting for Adobe to release bugfixes and versions for other platforms like ARM isn't working out so well for us either.
Text isn't a very good medium for conveying sarcasm.
I don't even know what that means, "64bit is the way of the future". I'd say that 256bit is the way of the future, because who wants to be the guy who said "2^64 should be enough for everybody!"
I would suggest that, perhaps, the reason that Adobe hasn't ported Flash to 64bit is because there's no pressing reason to do so. Not because they're "incompetent" as you suggest. You may return to Slashdot and make such pompous declarations once you are running a billion dollar software firm.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
PowerPC could be the issue. Adobe offers flash SDK to companies like Nintendo if they want Adobe to release flash for the Wii. So yeah probably could blame Nintendo for not making it happen.
I call BS, by that reasoning no one outside of Adobe would be allowed to criticize Flash.
And no, it's not trivial. But 2+ years is a long time to be working on something like that without as much as a mention of a alpha build behind closed doors. And considering several other projects managed to port their JIT compilers to many architectures, not just 2, it is valid to bring up competancy, be it in the talent of the current programmers or the quality of the code.
Hey, look! It's Bono's brother.
They can claim all they want, the fact they haven't done it does nothing to invalidate the OP's comments.
MLB Gameday under Fedora 9 is still broken. I switched recently to the above release (which has Firefox 3.0.2) and it typically breaks after not very long. If this is "equal", give me back Flash 9.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Electric car people, I want your vehicle to succeed... but please, let's be realistic.
In your minds, if GM doesn't make electric cars, they lose. If they do make an electric car like the EV-1, they lose even worse. The get screamed at for leasing them not selling them, taking them back and crushing them... the list goes on.
Now if you're going to take the time to respond to this, please answer me this: why should GM spend any time developing an electric car when electric cars have no marketshare?
Electric car folk see the problem that automakers don't make electric cars. The fact is electric car lovers don't support automakers. There are a million different homebrew electric cars out there. You already have market share working against you, and you realize that. What you don't realize is we think electric cars are hard to make anyway.
You really should do soemthing about this before you scream with a sense of entitlement that some company should spend time and money supporting electric cars when it is not likely to be financially viable.
Drill here, drill now!
Anybody want a peanut?
Compared to most other piece of software, Flash had very few security issues. I can remember 3 or 4 issues, all of them proof-of-concept. I think just one vulnerability has been used 'in the wild' and even there its success is debatable.
Flash 10 works fine with Opera on my Intel Mac. When I went to the download site, there was also a PPC version, so I guess there shouldn't be any problems either.
Signature has left the building.
No. Supporting Linux is not hard at all. It's not like you have to release 10 different packages for each distribution you support... and stuff.
Take a closer look at the packages they link to, most of them are actually using the same package.
All in all there is a total of 3 versions of the binaries each with 3 different installers. a total of 9 packages to cover pretty much every single distribution out there.
One statically linked one for extremely old or unknown distributions, one gcc3 one for semi old ones, and finally a gcc4 one for modern distributions, each of these is then available as .deb, .rpm and .tar.gz.
Its really not a big deal, the only reason for having such a big list of distributions to select from is to make it easy for a end user to get the optimal package for his platform without having to know anything about his system except the name and version of his OS.
The Nokia N95 - and othe N-Series devices - has a built in PDF reader. Works very well.
Most modern BlackBerrys can also read PDFs.
As an aside, the N95 can play MP4, DivX (with a plugin), 3GP etc video files.
It also has (limited) support for flash and flash lite. You can watch YouTube videos straight from the browser.
If a square is really a rhombus, why aren't all triangles purple?
Yeah, I'm a troll. Instead of developing a modern tool chain, linux folk scream, "Emacs/VIM, the GNU toolchain and a command line debugger is all you will ever need!" Which, wherein lies the most fundamental problem of the Linux crowd, they feel entitled to tell people what they should want and need, rather than listen to what people want and need. And then you call them a troll.
Erm...
Do you even develop for linux?
Last time I checked, people didn't have that many problems with the GNU toolchain and wealth of associated tools.
Command-line debugger? I suspect you live on planet 1995...
Seriously, Linux developers enjoy a wide range of options when it comes to software development tools. If you can't find them, you probably don't know how to use Google and SourceForge...
Perhaps, but they DO officially support Linux on PPC, unlike Adobe, so you can take your PS3 with a YDL6 install and have Opera 9.60.
As far as I'm concerned, Flash 9 never arrived on Linux as there was no 64-bits support.
SVG and its family, many examples via http://svg.startpagina.nl
It's great Adobe is taking Linux seriously, especially when Microsoft is trying their next lock-in strategy called SilVerliGht .
Ages ago, Adobe released their ActionScript VM as open source, under the name "Tamarin". Basically, that consisted of the VM itself, some runtime components, and a code generator.
That's not too useful by itself - it's missing a compiler, and it was designed to run typed JavaScript instead of untyped JavaScript. So rather than switch to it entirely, Mozilla have been working on integrating bits of it into SpiderMonkey.
The code generator ("NanoJIT") is used in Firefox 3.1 as the code-generating back-end for TraceMonkey.
That same code generator was only released by Adobe for x86 processors. This is the part they claim is too difficult to port to 64-bit processors.
TraceMonkey supports x86, x86-64, and ARM, with PowerPC support on the way. That means that there's already an x86-64 back-end for the JIT used by Flash. It's just that Mozilla wrote it, rather than Adobe.
> The SWF file format specifications have been published for a decade.
For a very old version. With huge chunks of functionality remaining completely undocumented. Under a license that prohibits anyone from writing a compatible player.
In other words, those specs are useless to anyone wanting to implement their own Flash player. In fact, I don't think you legally could write a Flash player if you'd seen those specs.
There's also this: http://thebackbutton.com/blog/73/64-bit-linux-freebsd-flash-player-exists/ Although it seems to be just a rumour and I haven't heard anything else anywhere else...
http://macromedia.mplug.org/
Tips and workarounds for using Flash (especially on Fedora) and avoiding crashes are updated frequently on this site. I follow all the latest patches of nspluginwrapper and firefox upstream to give people the latest advice. (Note: You need the new nspluginwrapper-1.1.2 in order to avoid the most common crashers of Flash 10.)
You still can't enter non-ASCII characters in Linux FP. Absolutely astounding.
It means that we've hit the wall with 32-bit, and it won't be long before 3.25 Gigs just won't cut it anymore. Delaying the inevitable by ignoring the existence of 64-bit and just making people use 32-bit browsers will will only work for so long.
No one ever said 2^64 should be enough for everyone, but rather that it will outlive 32-bit.
Hey, look! It's Bono's brother.
Recent versions of Opera support 32 bits plugins in 64 bits mode.
Not "just like HTML", unless the SWF spec comes with no strings attached (NDAs, non-competes, etc), and a patent policy equivalent to the W3C one (which pretty much means no enforceable patents).
Judging by some replies up the thread, it's a far cry from that.
This _is_ the same Flash I recently disabled on my Windows PC because it's so fraught with weaknesses and vulnerabilities that it's downright dangerous?
That Flash?
And who's guaranteeing that it'll be any safer on a non-Windows system? Adobe?
Riiii-ight.
Mmkay. Get back to me what Linux is 20% of the PC market. Or care to extrapolate the present growth trends to see how many more years it will take to get there?
Also, the difference is that today, the other "75%" of the market is not a host of other OSes. It's just one, and you know which one it is. When it comes to ROI, the choices become obvious. Of course, the server is a different story - which is why most server products have Linux versions. But desktop? Forget about it. Those "Year of Linux on the Desktop" proclamations every year are getting tiresome.
Not really. See, OS X is very different from Windows (ObjC and all that, and some quite radically different UI guidelines, too). But there's only one OS X, and there is a well-defined way of doing things there. With Linux distros, you've got a myriad of various packet managers (plus all those extra "zero install" thingys), an inconsistent and not-well-defined set of system components that can be relied upon, two major desktops and associated UI toolkits (and then you also have to decide to go pure Gtk/Qt, or to get into Gnome/KDE integration) and a dozen minor ones, etc.
Because ATI and nVidia only support the latest releases, while Opera guys cover various glibc combos, various Qt versions, static vs shared Qt, etc, so that you can actually run it on any distro released in the last 4 years.
I think this kind of post title, "Linux is now an equal Flash player" is irresponsible. Please tell me where to download the PPC flash plugin for Firefox. I'm running Linux PPC, OpenSUSE for cripes sake. Not some home made distro, SUSE! We've never had flash.
Linux isn't only x86 y'know, all it would take is a source code tar ball and I could compile it. Thanks.
Sadly, in the Linux land, in 2008, it is still a hotly contested topic whether C or C++ is the preferred language to code UI in. And that is really all that has to be said about it. Double irony for the fact that, in terms of tooling (IDE integration, code completion, debugging), Microsoft's VS is still way ahead of any other C++ IDE on any platform out there.
It would be nice if they realized that 64 bit OS's are no longer bleeding edge. Why still have no flash plugin via browser on 64 bit systems...
sorry for my english...
I have fedora 9 (64bits) with the latest kernel... when I installed the new flash-plugin (yum install...) firefox keeps closing, so i discovered that a library has to be installed: libcurl.i386
This is indeed really good news, multimedia is getting better and better on Linux platform as the months go by.
There is a growing community of people who *do not want to support any 32-bit libraries on their systems anymore*. And when windows also drops 32-bit support, do you think Intel and AMD will bother to keep the very-hard-to-maintain 32-bit microcode in their CPUs either? They'll just tell you to run an emulator if you want 32-bit.
Where is the native x86_64 version they have promised for so long?
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
The 64bit ISA started with the Athlon 64's, and soon after Intel licensed it. That was 2003. That means that the chips were the next step in the progression from 16->32->64 bit. The way of the future. 256bit may be, but there's no ISA to program to, so there's no reason to think about it. But hey, if you wanna be stupid, go for it.
The point is, they have had LOTS of time to get a 64bit version going. Even if not many of their customers need it now, they will need it eventually. They've had the demand there, they've had the resources, all new computers are 64bit capable, and a number of them, especially media professionals (you know, they people they claim to target as a business) NEED to use 64bit operating systems any more.
I stand by my assertion that Adobe either has an untenable codebase, or they're incompetent. And I'll add another assertion... you have no clue what you're talking about.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
They did it because when applications start using pointer bits for stuff it restricts the range of the pointers and limits what the hardware people can do with them later. The designers of 64-bit platforms wanted to make sure that they would have free reign to extend pointers out to the full 64 bits over time without losing application compatibility.
At least, that's my guess. :-) There might well be other reasons for that design decision.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
yeah i've seen a good tutorial on how to install flash player in ubuntu ..just checkout
http://nextdoornerd.blogspot.com/
Unless you're running Gentoo or another source-based distribution, you never have to compile software anymore.
Such an old tired argument. Get over it.
Linux distributions like Ubuntu are easy to use, easy to update, and easy to install new software with.
Photoshop will show up on Linux eventually.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
It astonishes me how much FUD appears here
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
You must have missed the disclaimer on the W3C site that says you can't write an HTML renderer if you've ever used one (for example, to read their specifications).
how to invest, a novice's guide
"When was the last time that you needed to upgrade, configure or recompile something to watch a show on a consumer television set?"
I don't remember. I installed Mythbuntu on a new machine, plugged the aerial and started using my new shiny PVR.
Saying lies about Linux will not makes them true.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If you download a Linux package (rpm, deb ) you can double click on it if so you wish, this will install it in pretty much the same fashion as in any other OSes full of eye candy.
Of course you can launch the respective *graphical* package manager and search amongst the myriad of applications available to you for one that suits your needs, selected and request installation, with your mouse, since obviously user's brains have shrinked since the times there was no graphical interface at all. If creationists ever need proof of negative evolution they should talk to the wackos claiming Linux is not getting better, they seem like a marriage made in heaven.
But of course it is much more fun to pretend Linux is static in the prehistory of Desktop development.
I will end here and ignore how you can't script installations in Windows or OSX, which is vital for corporate environments, and why Linux is growing relentlessly in this market.
Oh yeah, and now we have around 5 or 6 Linux laptops being sold on regular shops.
But Linux is not progressing, and in spite of shops actually vending Linux machines, it surely is not ready for the desktop....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Much of what you've just pointed out is untrue
Feel free to point out how you feel it is untrue, rather than just claiming it to be that way.
your making a habit of it
You're making a habit of bad grammar.
And what were you saying about grammar?
I was saying your grammar is terrible. And if you are the same AC, then it hasn't improved.
on previous versions (not sure about 10) the same version for different systems had different capabilities
If there is a grammatical error there, why don't you show it specifically rather than just posting an entire line you disagree with?
a nice touch of hypocrisy to your essentially flawed argument.
Your argument seems to revolve around repeating your claim of mine being lacking, while not ever showing how you reached that conclusion. Your argument doesn't exactly come across as flawless when you can't actually build it on anything other than repetition of your own fact-free opinion.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Oh my god, you don't understand what I'm talking about, did you even read my post? I'm definitely not ignorant, I've been using Linux for many years. You cannot just download a "DEB or RPM" and install it, only specific versions of DEBs can be installed on specific distros with their DEB package managers, and only RPM files can be installed on machines with RPM package managers and no doubt the distro version situation applies there as well, further fragmenting everything for users. I don't care if it's through a GUI or command line, it doesn't matter at all which you use, I only mentioned easy clicking because that's what normal users will use.
Yes, of *course* you want scripting to be possible, that has nothing to do with anything. I know that Linux is great because you don't *have* to run a GUI, I've seen it myself how Windows admins have to actually fight the windows that pop up to get them to shut the hell up so they can remotely install programs for users.
I'll state my point again here for you, all I'm saying is that all package managers should be compatible with ONE standard package format. Do you like ODF? That's called a standard. It gives you more freedom because it allows you to use many different office productivity suites including even Office, and to be able to read and write files in the format. It gives you freedom and choice by providing a common ground, and standard. Linux cannot and should not always have these repositories made by companies that just want to attract you over to their "Linux version" by compiling their special versions. They will never ever ever be able to compile everything you'd ever want or need. Linux users should not be trapped into depending on them for their program needs. I should be able to link my manager easily directly to the developers of a particular program, i.e. a "third party repository", that is also cross-distro. There are 5 thousand Linux distros out there. Companies and developers, both closed and open source, cannot and should not have to support them all, there's no reason to or need to try as it's unfair.
I've been to many sites that had programs I wanted, made for Linux, that I was unable to get because of all the dependencies with broken links and crap, and Linux adoption will not become widespread until this is fixed. All that has to be done to fix the problem and have true software accessibility for ALL Linux users, is the creation of at least one single packaging standard, later on hopefully more, so developers can use the one they like the most while still reaching all Linux users, just like ODF, OpenGL, HTML, or any other standard that exists today.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
"...if it the Flash format was open, documented and reimplementable..."
It is. But the third-party codecs Adobe licenses for redistribution aren't, so it's still hard to see how to get a functional clone.
The SWF format has been published for a decade, just like HTML. A few years ago reading rights were traded for the promise to not fracture Flash's distributed predictability, but by now that has loosened too. Here's a starting point:
http://www.openscreenproject.org/
jd/adobe
That doesn't make sense to me. If you use the lower two bits of a pointer as a type tag in some programming language runtime, it does restrict you somewhat -- you have to allocate all your objects along 4-byte boundaries. But that's a small compromise, and one that people happily make. It doesn't restrict you from using the full 64-bit range.
So, what you're saying is, is that it's not reimplementable.
Oh, and you forgot to point out that it's only reimplementable by people who've not installed the Adobe Flash player, ever. Which means that even if someone *does* reimplement it, it's kind of hard for them to check that they've done it right, as they can't install and run Adobe's player side by side with their own, to check their player does the same thing.
Uh huh.
Did you not get the central point of my argument or something?
I mean, I'm sorry that I asked for the format to be open when it apparently already is, but I intended that as a means to an end, which is that a Flash player needs to be implementable by anyone for it to be a useful, viable Internet technology.
In the meantime, I'm still waiting for Adobe's Flash player to be available on my Linux/x86-64 and Linux/PPC boxes. After all, Adobe supports Flash on Linux, and they run Linux.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
Ah, it's good that we have Adobe to tell us when Linux is a first-class desktop operating system citizen. Thanks guys!
You can actually still do that then if you like. The low bits aren't any more important than they were in a 32 bit pointer. It's mostly the high bits they were trying to keep people from abusing.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Still waiting for a x86_64 version. nspluginwrapper is most unsexy.
Just a warning, as great as having the same Flash as Windows, etc., Flash 10 breaks compatibility with a number of websites apps. Specifically I've found a problem with CitiBank's Virtual credit card app (it mis-detects Flash 10 as 1.0). BankAmerica's Shopsafe (same concept, temp credit card numbers) works, but also throws errors in different sections saying I need flash 6.4 or greater and that 1.x doesn't cut it.
This occurs with Windows as well as Linux (I tried to get it to work under a Windows VM, but when I installed Flash 10, it had the same problems).
There will always be 32 bit code around for those things that really don't get any advantage from a 64 bit rewrite. If you want to run a pure 64 bit system, it likely won't be a desktop system any time very soon.
Its demand that creates things, not *not wanting to run any 32 bit code* for reasons unknown since you get no discernable advantage in some applications by rewriting it to be 64 bit (esp if you made the pointer/int interchangability mistake in your code).
DEAL WITH IT.
My Babylon
Should we make an open-source browser plug-in for viewing FLV videos without Adobe Flash(TM)?
There are open FLV players, but not embedded in browsers. I can't watch Youtube in a totally open-source environment, and it bothers me.
MS may stop doing 32-bit OSs, but 32 bit APIs will stay available for much longer.