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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.
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
If you want suboptimal performance why not just go back to windows?
The performance difference between 64-bit and 32-bit is not nearly as big as between 32-bit and 16-bit. When making the transition to 32-bit, things were pretty much faster across the board. With 64-bit, the case isn't so cut and dried. On x86 machines, running in 64-bit mode, you get a couple of things. The biggest is a larger virtual address space, which lets you work with more than 4GB at once. You also get larger general purpose registers, and more registers to play with. Generally, larger registers aren't really needed. Things like MMX and SSE have already given us the ability to process data in 128-bit chunks if we need to, and I'd bet most things that really need large registers are already using SSE. More registers are nice, but they only help in compute-bound circumstances. Most of the time these days, you're I/O bound.
The downside is that in 64-bit mode, pointers are all twice as big, which means your program will need more memory and possibly memory bandwidth than the 32-bit version would. My experience is that 64-bit is usually slower, unless you have 4GB or more of RAM. Theoretically, 64-bit can be faster, but generally people don't switch because they need the faster CPU speed, they switch because they need the RAM.
OK, Just in case anyone was about to answer...the answer is *YES*. Finally flash is useable on all sites it was intended to be!
Honestly, I didn't know Real was still around. I wouldn't let that software near my windows machines, much less the Linux ones.
It's funny, actually, but the Linux version of RealPlayer is not loaded with garbage. It just looks like a vanilla video player. It is not at all like the Windows version.