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Saving Journalism With Flash and Java
An anonymous reader writes "New York magazine has a story about some of the flashy new ideas that are coming out of the labs of the New York Times. The piece prompted Peter Wayner to dig up some of the old Java applets he wrote to explore whether more promiscuity really stops AIDS and whether baseball can do anything to speed up the games. He notes that these took a great deal of work to produce and it's not possible to do them on a daily basis. Furthermore, they're cranky and fragile, perhaps thanks to Java. Are cool, interactive features the future of journalism on the web? Or will simple ASCII text continue to be the most efficient way for us to mingle our thoughts, especially when ASCII text won't generate a classloading error?"
Yes.
No.
Isn't this a rather obvious question?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
and must die!
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I welcome our new ASCII overlords, wait, it's New York Magazaine, I welcome our new AXCII overlords.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
So far the media's use of flash and java has been a major reason for the development and wide-spread use of browser plug-ins to disable those technologies. I reject your reality and substitute my own.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
We have different strengths in understanding idea. Reading is only one way of doing this. However for many people reading doesn't create a picture in the minds eye (myself included). Pictures do help set the minds eye about the information to help get the settings in correctly. But interactive methods of displaying ideas could really help portrait information. Playing a game to show a theory or method for a few minutes, can help get a better understanding of abstract concepts then trying to read them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"they're cranky and fragile, perhaps thanks to Java"
Of course... blame Java once again. It's Java fault if developers do cranky and fragile apps...
The question should be: Does a move away from traditional ways of serving news, mean the end of journalism? This is more hand wringing by print media about their waning fortunes. In fact TV, newspapers and news magazines didn't realize we were in a recession, because their revenue stream (advertising) was enhanced by the high spending presidential election. More and more stories are broken outside traditional media. The real story is how do journalists continue to do their job without the structure of a newspaper or wire service.
Display Applications are for web sites.
Research applications are for research.
Content is for journalism.
Journalism receives data from research.
Journalism provides raw materials to the web.
The web presents them to us.
IT and developers create that web and hence its doodads.
Journalists (and other creators) then populate that web and doodad with content. ...
The point being: No, java / flash / doodads won't save journalism. And journalism isn't dying. It still exists but has a WEALTH of new contributors, which leaves demand for the few highly trained contributors low enough that many are leaving the field. Yet we still get our news.
I don't like doodads. When I want news I want content. Not buttons. Not animations (unless they are truly pertinent).
Journalists that create doodads are trying to salvage their career by doing something that is not PART of their career. Just like Developers who try to create content.
So ... long answer given the short answer is: No, doodads won't save journalism. But journalism is evolving, not dying.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
The only thing that could possibly save journalism would be for them to report the news in an unbiased and objective form
Eh, if that's what you wanna see then get your news from sources that actually manage to do that. PBS and NPR do a better job than most at this, IMHO -- as evidenced by the fact that you'll find people on both the left and the right attacking them ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Technology can help illustrate a good story, of course.
However, the story is the key. What we need much more of, what the real savior of newspapers will be, it hard-hitting, in-depth investigations, and scoops. This worked for Hearst, among others. And the World really needs critical, trained, intelligent people examining what our corporations, our governments and their agents are up to, now more than ever in history.
Any blogger can paraphrase an AP feed, it doesn't take brains. This is what newspapers have been concentrating on in the past few years, while ignoring actual journalism.
Also, there's plenty examples of how technology is misused in TV media. Bugs, hyperbole-laced graphics, and skewed graphs. Let's not replicate that either. Let's not see powerpoint presentation news. By all means illustrate the facts, but make sure you have the facts too.
Really, they should partner with Amazon to get their papers delivered to the Kindle automatically for a subscription fee.
Also, Amazon should release an ebook reader designed for netbooks.
Both would go a long way toward getting revenue for their publications.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
...but I really prefer my news to be reported in text and pictures. The occasional Flash apps that BBC sometimes uses to explore stories feel slow and clunky. Information osmosis time is limited to the speed and pace of the program, whereas reading a text article is limited only by the user's ability to scan through it, which can be done at their leisure.
I feel like I am in the majority when I say that most of my news-reading comes during work during the few minutes I get every hour or so when waiting on something (like a compile). I don't really have the time to tinker around with a simulation exploring the possibilities. And even if I did, my patience will likely wear thin unless the simulation is either really exciting (not the case in the article) or something I'm really interested in (also not the case in the article).
Yes, it's kinda cool. But changing the face of modern journalism? I think not.
Dear Java Hating Slashdot Editors,
Java is not responsible for "generating class loader errors", any more than Perl is responsible for all the HTML errors on the Slashdot front page.
Here's the link to the W3C HTML Validator, go get yourself a clue.
Spectra Visual Newsreader
So if I stick my peen in MORE girls it LESSENS my chances of finding one with AIDS?
No. Obviously not. The idea is based on a fictional, purely heterosexual world. The point was if there were MORE promiscuous women, your chances of getting AIDS from any one of them is much lower than if there were fewer promiscous women. But the converse is not true. Not matter how many promiscuous women there are, no matter what percentage of promiscuous women have AIDS, your chances of finding one with AIDS will always increase with the number you 'stick your peen into,' young padawhan.
That's the whole point of Java-based visual model -- it helps to eliminate erroneous perceptions such as yours.
My blog
The linked articles are exactly what's wrong with newspaper sites.
I go to the newspaper for two things: become informed about current events, and laugh at the horoscopes. I have no use for silly little games and whatnot.
If newspapers want to become relevant, they need to expand their NEWS horizons and print news that matters to ME. A fire across town is NOT news; it's gossip about people I don't know. If said fire concens you, you're going to know about it before the newspaper does.
The Governor getting impeached is news, as is the reasons for his iompeachment. The Libertarians' and Greens' Presidential candidates' stances on the issues was news, and it wasn't even covered.
They have become marginalized because what they print is largely worthless.
Now, computer simulations in the other link are a different story altogether. IF it's not just done for show. Unfortunately most of them are just for show.
Free Martian Whores!
If you think plain ASCII text can't cause a system failure on loading, you need to spend some time grading undergraduate essays. Or reading corporate memos. Or, for that mater, some of the more egregious /. article summaries.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. If you think plane ASC 2 text can't on loading cause failure off your system, need too spend sometime grading undergraduate written by essays. Ore reading corporate-memos. Ore, four that matter, sum of teh more eggreigious article sumaries on this cite.
I'd add John Stewart to that list.
Seriously.
That's from someone who subscribes to multiple newspapers, and whose idea of a fun afternoon is re-reading articles in The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine. Assuming there's nothing on CSPAN, of course.
Is not about 'cool', its about 'facts'.
If there is not content, you cant make it up by tossing bandwidth ( and PC resources ) eating noise.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The New York Times has Labs? Amazing. However, such an entity is somewhat orthogonal to the New York Times loss in readership. Most of your readers will, in five years, be mostly Asians and Europeans; the U.S.ians having migrated to Russia or Canada or South America to escape the collapse of the Gulag.
Yours In Communism,
Kilgore Trout
Bluntly? If your news page is filled with flash and java, I'll close the browser never to return. If you have no content and have to mask it with flashy graphics, I don't want to hear your story.
It's the same with news networks. Ever watched the news recently? It's flashy "breaking news" jingles and enough FX to make the average hollywood movie drop its jaw in awe (which, btw, also rely more and more on flashy explosions and FX to hide that the script is thin enough to fit in a standard envelope), but where's the beef?
JibJab summed it up quite nicely.
Gimme news! Gimme information! And keep your flashy crap!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'd add John Stewart to that list.
I enjoyed him more when he spent more time lambasting the traditional (particularly cable) news media for their stupidity and less time pontificating his own political views. Still, he's pretty amusing to watch. Glad they put up full episodes online for those of us who don't have cable.
I actually got to go see a taping of TDS back in January. We learned that John Edwards had dropped out when Jon Stewart asked the audience what they thought about it. Still waiting to get a chance to see a Colbert taping....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I'd add John Stewart to that list.
The Green Lantern? Seriously?
Seriously.
Wow.
That's from someone who subscribes to multiple newspapers, and whose idea of a fun afternoon is re-reading articles in The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine.
But apparently not reading the titles of TV shows nor their credits.
Assuming there's nothing on CSPAN, of course.
Or Boomerang.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
There has always been an inverse relationship between substance and style in print journalism. The more pictures a newspaper has almost always means the less substance a newspaper has. I've seen the same with Web sites. The less educated will not have the knowledge to realize that flash and scripting blockers are available.
I've seen very helpful Flash visualizations on news websites that helped understand the story better.
For example, this interactive map of drug war related deaths in Mexico is very well done. It doesn't just clarify the conflict, but encourages the reader to analyze and research the topic independently in addition to linearly reading the text of an article.
Just reading an article, listening to the radio or watching a news program often gives the illusion of learning and understanding new information, whereas in reality very little is retained.
Innovative and interactive ways of presenting information solve this problem.
The most important thing I learned in journalism was that you have to figure out how to give your readers information that's useful to them.
For example, if somebody has cancer, he's very interested in a story about a new treatment for cancer. The more reliable, the better.
Nothing else counts. If flash and blinking lights will help do that, fine. If not, kill the lights.
If you don't give them useful information, it doesn't matter how much lipstick you put on it, they won't read it.
The article focused on a hypothetical heterosexual world in which all the men but only a few of the women were promiscuous. In this situation, the promiscuous women quickly caught the virus and became a sort of viral clearinghouse, spreading HIV to every man with whom they had contact. The men, in turn, brought it home to their wives. If the number of promiscuous women increased, the Landsburg-Kremer model posited, each man would be less likely to find an infected woman in his nightly wanderings, and the spread of HIV would slow.
Not sure of the link to flash (only skimmed TFA), but flash has apperantly cured AIDS AND made women more willing to sleep with me. Either one really would have made up for all the annoyances, both together? Can we declare Flash a saint?
As a journalist, I always want to know: What kind of information do my readers want to know?
What do you want from your newspaper?
When's the last time you saw a good story that was worth reading? That would have even been worth paying for?
What would you like to know about that you're not getting?
Trolls are OK. I'm willing to sort out the bad jokes from the useful answers. I do that all day anyway.
For most web applications, a developer should think of three layers:
1. Semantic information (Mostly HTML/XHTML, although other semantic content such as movies or games work as well)
2. Basic layout (CSS, non-semantic images)
3. Interactive/Dynamic features(JavaScript, Flash, Applets, and anything else strictly used to dynamically enhance the user experience)
This ensures graceful degradation and flexibility. In general, the larger the percentage of web applications using this model, the better.
If you're able to use Flash/Java without breaking the model, fine by me. Just don't expect me to actually utilize those features.
Important stuff
Perhaps journalism is suffering because unsubstantiated lies are repeated so often people think they're true.
No, I don't think Flash would harm journalism, because the usage of Flash has nothing to do with journalism by definition. Perhaps you phrased the question wrong. I'm going to vote the opposite of what this community is always ranting on about and say no Flash will not ruin the web any more than a concert on DVD or comics made into movies. Its only delivery and sometimes the artist is trying to tell the story as well. Now journalists doing Flash is another story. You don't ask a shoe salesmen to write an inventory software at a shoe store.
Why is it that any bozo coder who himself codes mistakes into his apps, is then hot and ready to blame the language? Dude, Java does not write itself. If you wrote it in a fragile way, then it is your fault--not the language. All that said, I'm delighted to see the NYTimes trying new things.
Unless the kind of man who sticks his peen into multiple women, tends to find different partners than those who don't...
What's most noteworthy is that there are two settings for male behavior in the simulator. Each of them is totally unrealistic, and they give completely different results. ... So, what am I supposed to learn here?
Not to mention that there's nothing too new about the results, and somehow people in the 60s understood them without a java applet. Basically what happens is that promiscuous women implicitly quarantine the men who find them. It just so happens, if I understand correctly, that there is a portion of the phase-space, where increasing the rate of promiscuity in women serves to reduce the overall rate of disease by concentrating the disease among the promiscuous while keeping men from sleeping with the unpromiscuous women.
Now, if that sounds like a realistic description of the world to you...
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I read 20+ news stories every morning on my commute from NJ to NYC. I do this on my iPhone.. I have no need for a newspaper that only becomes waste and costs me $1. I have Google News set up as a bookmark, and I read my news that way. No annoying folding/bothering people with a giant paper, no waste.
...tools can be used really well, or really poorly. Applet uploaded to the newspaper's website at 11.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
4022 journalists saved.
No survivors.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
That was all /sarc obviously... it makes no sense.
Say what you want about the NYT as an old media organization, but I can't think of any other media group (ALL media, not just journalistic) that has been so open to creating APIs for their collections of data (campaign money, movie reviews, etc), and I think they are putting out a few open-source projects too. Their blog about "open source technology" (their words): http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/
Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough, but I'd like is a fast site that worked /more/ like a hard-copy paper. It seems like every news site I've ever looked makes it as hard as possible to browse their news. I /want/ an editor whose biases are clear selecting stories, and I /want/ to be able to read the first paragraph or two of a given story without having to wait for a page load. Print newspapers fit two to four stories with multiparagraph lead-ins on the top half of their front page; CNN, for example, manages 1 lead-in, three headlines with summaries, and a dozen hard-to-read headlines in a column to the right. The other two-thirds of the width of the screen is totally wasted; scrolling down reveals a dozen exceedingly arbitrary categories with two headlines each. The BBC's new design is even worse.
Now, I was just thinking of using multiple columns and not having ads on the front page -- I mean, if I all want is headlines, I can get them a dozen other places and ways without going to your site -- but you could also do fun stuff like javascript articles in and out of the way. Now, I've never seen column-to-column wrapping done in a way that doesn't end up looking really silly. That being said, clicking on something [near what] I'm not going to read to pull the next article of that section into the same column is an interesting idea. I'll probably middle-click on an article I /do/ want to read, but you could do same thing on the single-article page, too. In terms of an emphasis on speed, I don't want shorter articles, I want to make looking for articles I'm interested in faster. (Yes, searching; but I need to know what to look for. That's part of the editor's job.)
At any rate, I feel like I spend more time navigating the site than reading at most news websites, specialized-interested ones excepted. (Ars Technica, for example, does a pretty good job of layout, although I'd like it to use more of the page horizontally and/to give a bit longer of a lead-in. But it can get away with a single chronologically-ordered column because of its narrow scope.) As I said earlier, I do /want/ something from the editors: the daily paper's website should decide what from the last day is important enough (given its well-known and undisguised biases) that I should know about it; I can get headlines from anywhere.
Reality Maintenance Group, Silver City Construction Co., Ltd.
Here's a pretty well-funded, all-Flash newsmagazine published by real journalists: http://www.flypmedia.com/
and that's reporting subjects with some real research and analysis, without fear or favour, not beholden to corporate or government interests and without being biased by the prevailing memes.
In my opinion, people are moving away from "traditional" journalism not so much because of the format or media but because they are sick of recycled, verbatimly quoted press-releases and propaganda pieces being constantly repeated with almost no variation by every media outlet.
The attractiveness of "alternative" media seems to be the increased variety of opinion available.
You're really willing to rake someone over the coals that hard over a single extra "h"? It's not as if you successfully negated his point, or even made one of your own.
You're really willing to rake someone over the coals that hard over a single extra "h"?
You'd have to be pretty thin-skinned to take that cultural reference joke as a severe reprimand. At most I may have knocked a little wind out of his sails from his boast about being well-read, but as the moderator recognized, it was in jest.
What kind of weak-ass coals do you use in your barbecue?
Now if you'll excuse me, I have some back episodes of Bill May-her to catch up on. I'm a bit behind on Real Time.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
But what about Lynx, Links or even graphical Arachne users ?
Isnt that waste of ennergy, i believe that text also will be displayed and scrolled using flash.
"Saying that Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders."
From the original article - "In this situation, the promiscuous women quickly caught the virus and became a sort of viral clearinghouse, spreading HIV to every man with whom they had contact."
I really am amazing at the commonly portrayed concept that AIDS is 100% communicable. Have there been any studies done to show the actual percentage chance of transmission of the HIV virus from one infected individual to one who isn't? Also, are there different probabilities for different types of sexual activity?
The media makes a lot of issues look like bad science with their hype, whether it be global warming or SARS.
Does anyone know where to get the solid scientific data regarding this issue?
To be fair, it was really funny. I don't think he meant it personally.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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HTML version:
We need open standards that don't suck as much first.
Java is fairly cross-platform in that it doesn't seem to work well on any OS or browser.
Journalism can be revitalised (perhaps not "saved") by thinking outside the box. Web-based reporting in general still looks and feels very much like a printed newspaper, for no apparent reason. OK there are a few fancy customization features coming in, but why does everything have to be presented in such a text-driven format ? What about graphically presented news time lines ? These don't require much incremental effort once set up. What about a visualthesaurus-style interface for navigating topics, rather than categorized lists (which appear in print newspapers too!) ? Think visual! Also, why are the different branches of journalism so segregated ? Today's story on the latest in the Gaza Crisis (with no long term context) should be followed by a link to a longer review article on the entire crisis (even if it's a few days old), followed by a link to magazine-style articles on Middle Eastern politics over the past few years (followed maybe by links to books on the topic by sponsor Amazon!). Moment-to-moment news updates are usually almost completely without longer term context. It seems to me there is a lot of scope for new ideas.
*laugh* Good catch. I block copied the text and then mangled it in no particular order as opportunities occurred to me. Looks like I bungled the mangling.
--MarkusQ
Yet another reason not to visit "news" sites: they won't work with my operating system and browser. I'm not going to boot into Linux (or gag, Windows) just to read your stupid news. Heck, I'm not even going to switch browsers. If you can get Adobe to open source flash, so I'm not stuck trying to run a proprietary plugin meant for another OS inside a browser not approved by the cloudlords of Macromedia, then I'll consider your site. Until then, screw you and the content you rode in on.
Big cluestick: Flash is not a web standard, it's a series of incompatible proprietary plugins used chiefly to signal the presence of bad websites.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I just gagged on a little vomit.
Can anyone explain to me how the HIV model the article describes works? I have spent the last 15 minutes trying to make sense of it.
If more HIV infected women are out and about having sex, wouldn't that mean more men are getting infected, thereby spreading it to even more women? I simply fail to see how women being more promiscuous would slow the spread of HIV.
Getting too pedantic about what is and isn't journalism leads the discussion away from focusing on the great tools that are being developed to help the average citizen understand the powers that be (government, corporations, etc..).
The Sunlight Foundation has funded a lot of really great web tools, widgets and applets that show how congress works, track money donated to candidates, expose corporate corruption, and many other areas of coverage that the film noir investigative journalist types might still consider their turf.
Anyone can do good journalism, anyone can do bad journalism. I think talking about who is helping to expose and disseminate new information that is in the public interest (news) is more important that talking about the news industry as such.
JVMs don't have intelligence to rearrange objects in the heap in a layout that favors cache locality. This happens in a limited extent:
1) GC continually compacts the heap, avoiding free space fragmentation. This results in denser cache lines, which means better cache usage.
2) Because a garbage-collected heap allows linear allocation - i.e., Java's "new " is basically as simple as "return (freePos += requestedSize)" - objects that are allocated together are typically grouped in one contiguous chunk of memory, while in C/C++ they could be scattered all over the heap.
The second factor can produce significant gains for Java, but only for very large and complex apps, with large heaps containing tons of objects (not the case of microbenchmarks that allocate everything at startup and on a clean heap). And even in this situation, modern C/C++ runtimes have significantly better heap managers than the naive, 50-line freelist malloc() algorithm used in the 70's. And when this fails, optimized C/C++ apps will resort to custom allocators.
The #1 reason that many microbenchmarks show Java beating C is that the top JIT compilers are extremely aggressive with three complimentary tactics:
1) Profile-driven compilation. This is trivial to implement in a dynamic compiler, but for static compilers it's cumbersome enough (requires extensive, up-to-date coverage tests for all performance-sensitive code), that 99% of all native programs don't use that feature even if the compiler supports it.
2) Deoptimization. The JIT can make heavy bets, e.g. "in this virtual call for a method of the Number type, the actual receiver is always a Double", and generate faster code. If this bet eventually goes bad (e.g. after a gazillion calls of the optimized code with Double arguments, it's called with a Integer), the JVM is able to efficiently trap this, fix the compiled code ("deoptimize" the now-invalid code), and go ahead.
3) Machine-specific optimization. A JVM will fine-tune all generated code for your specific system configuration, down to CPU stepping and precise cache hierarchy. Static-compiled code must typically be compatible with some reasonable configuration, e.g. "any Pentium or better". Even a fanatic Gentoo user that compiles everything for each machine is behind a JVM because the C/C++ compilers simply don't have sufficient -arch options to match JVMs.
The last item is another situation that may deliver cache-related benefits, but this is because JVMs are known to generate extremely cache-friendly code (reordering, prefetching instructions for arrays, etc.).
If you would look into the statistics of a news site, you would notice the enormous number of pageviews on the front page, how few people end up at the level of an article and how fewer people ever visit a back ground story.
The challenge for journalist is thus to engage readers, but also not to waste their time.
For that, journalists must carefully choose the media for telling the story.
Infographics can actually help in time management. Also assisting in block reading would be useful.
Examples:
Harder to do then just plain text? Definitely! More compelling and giving more insight? Absolutely!
If it's simple use a gif animation, if it's interactive for god's sake use java, it is available in so many more places than flash. Also, if your audience includes only Firefox users :) then you can use svg+javascript with a high level of confidence. Perhaps someday that will be a more feasible scenario.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The real question is how does a society fund the journalism process it values. For the last umpteen years the answer has been "Sell advertising to the highest bidders" with the presumed question "how do I make money off of reporting the news?" As with so many other things, the Internet is changing the rules of the game. The Internet allows the consumer to get what they want, and not see or spend time on what they don't.
The fundamental problem with the Internet mindset of "show me only what I want" is that most people don't want to see most advertisements. I subscribed to two magazines for the last two years that I will not be subscribing to in the future and the reasons I won't resubscribe include irritating advertisements. I rely on the Internet to give me the information I need when I want it and I usually get it without being subjected to advertising I don't want. Without the Internet I would be more at the mercy of content providers and subjected to what they wanted to show me rather than what I want to see. For me as an example, the Internet is taking away the power of the content provider to control my experience. In the long run, I believe that is a good thing.
For a while, the providers will still struggle to try to control the experience of the consumers. Flash and Java give them some control at the moment since they can make the content difficult or nearly impossible to access without also being subjected to undesired advertising. As the medium and associated technology mature however, there will be an irrepressible shift to the empowerment of the consumer. Eventually it will be nearly impossible for a content provider to subject the consumer to undesired advertising and with it, a growing lack of ability to leverage that control into a profit. In twenty years I predict that advertising will only be profitable where it is desired by the consumer.
There is a solution. This bears repeating. There is a solution. The replacement of intrusive and irritating unwanted advertising will be the rise of desired advertising. As difficult as it is to consider the idea of desired advertising, it is an already existing phenomena. Many people already tune into the Super Bowl every year solely to view the advertisements. For those of us who don't really care to sit through the game, the next day, sometimes the next hour, the advertisements are available on youtube or other venues for viewing. I really enjoy watching ads when they are well designed and especially when they are humorous, to the extent that I put forth the effort to seek them out. I regularly watch Mac vs PC ads and seek out "Worlds funniest commercials" for entertainment. When advertisement companies are good enough at their jobs that they can sell ads that people want to see, then the market will rebound. When I am able to go to CNN or Slashdot and know that the ads there will be ones that add to the experience in my estimation, then the advertiser, the content provider and the consumer will all coexist in a happy symbiotic relationship.
Until then, I'll keep my Adblock turned on and unsubscribe to anything that tries to force me to spend my time viewing advertisements I don't want to see.
Sidenote, "umpteen" is recognized as a word by Firefox, but "Sidenote" is not.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Flash has issues, but there's no superior product it beat out. Java is CONCEPTUALLY superior, but it didn't pan out - partially Sun's and partially MSFT's fault. ActiveX is more powerful, but is even conceptually a total lack of security and has no crossplatform support.
Since I haven't used it, hypothetically Silverlight could possibly be better, but I personally, based on their long track record, just don't trust MSFT to be even reasonably secure or to play nicely with others.
Flash video does tend to take 100% of your CPU... no matter how fast your CPU is. But youtube plays on pretty modest CPUs, so it doesn't require an especially fast CPU... it just uses what CPU it can find to make your experience better. And it's better in each version of FP. I agree, that's an issue if you're playing video on the web in the background. For some reason. Although, there are plenty of players for FLV and MP4 that aren't Flash Player... like Quicktime.
As for overlays, there's no reason to do that. That is, while you might not believe it, Flash Player isn't a video plugin like Quicktime - it's a full fledged OO programming environment. So you can put whatever you want over your video whenever you want, with a little programming. If you want to create a standardized overlay spec in XML so it's shared by a lot of players, you could do that. So the only thing you're missing is the ability to create overlays IN your video editing software, instead of in Flash... which would have to be a much more limited functionality than the complete programming language that ActionScript is.
I'll take being able to program truly interactive video over supporting overlays, any day.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot