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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.
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!
It's [loading...] a [loading...] multimedia [loading...] player/viewer [loading...].
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
It's a slideshow viewer.
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
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.
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
What's that?
It's just a story we tell to scare the kids.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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!
...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
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.
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.
*cough*Opera*cough*
But seriously, Opera now has a native 64 bit build but it runs 32 bit plugins without any special voodoo. "OMG it isn't open source" you say... well neither is flash.
The kind who would think the Flash player was a good idea in the first place.
In Linux, you can view *.rm files with rm command.
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.