Occupy Flash?

mcgrew writes "CNN is reporting another Occupy movement — Occupy Flash. Their aim: get rid of Flash completely. They explain: 'Why does it matter when HTML5 has clearly won the fight for the future of our web browsing? Well, as we've seen with other outdated web technologies (most notably the much-lamented Internet Explorer 6), as long as software is installed on machines, there will be a contingent of decision makers who mandate its use, and there will be a requirement of continued support, the plugin will live on, and folks will continue to develop for it.' In response, a group of Flash developers have started Occupy HTML in Flash's defense. Popcorn, anyone?"

Comments

I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[elrous0]

Clearly the "Occupy" meme is being abused now. Every dipshit with any pet cause is slapping "Occupy" on it and co-opting solidarity with the OWS movement. "Occupy" is teetering on the edge of really jumping the shark here. If it goes much further, we run the risk of "Hey, remember that whole 'Occupy' fad? What was with THAT, huh?" becoming a segment on VH1's Hey, Remember The Teens? episode on 2011.

Therefore I propose we Occupy "Occupy" before it's too late. We must stand up to those who would steal our term. Because if we don't make a stand today, tomorrow we may be faced with Twilight fans wearing "Occupy Edward" and "Occupy Jacob" t-shirts, which can only lead to nostalgic Gen-Xer's wearing lame "Occupy Empire" and "Occupy Rebellion" Star Wars shirts.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see it now, this is the start of Occupygate.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[MightyMartian]

I'm Occupying my livingroom this weekend! If my wife tries to make me move, well, I won't be intimidated with threats from authority figures!

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Talderas]

That's it. It's time to Occupy Slashdot.

No longer will we idly stand by and stand for the continuation of all the Bitcoin slashvertisements!

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Oswald McWeany]

Bill Gates is clearly in the 1%.

Occupy Gate.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what happens when your movement has no, or very loosely defined, goals.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Oswald McWeany]

Yeah... it really went over the top when United Artists announced that the Bond film would be called:

Occupyssy.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[mx b]

"Occupy" is teetering on the edge of really jumping the shark here.

I believe the term is "nuking the fridge" now.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[arth1]

Isn't it just a common mislatinization? Clearly it should be occupodes!

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[cobrausn]

I've always thought the best way to govern is to favor incentive over punishment. I'm sure she could think of a way to get you moving...

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[UnknowingFool]

Did Bill Gates rape and murder a young startup in 1991? I'm not saying he did but I find it interesting that he's never denied it. I think he called it "buying out"

.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Surt]

As a die-hard Twilight fan, and member of team centenarian pedophile, I resent this.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

um - ITS THE PEOPLE (finally, i knew they were somewhere) not a corporation... people that don't hire other people to lie full-time on the TV for them, so maybe it is a little less presentable to the media at large.. I think i'm okay with that.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Andy Dodd]

I think the worst was when some moron came up with "Occupy Tibet"... Um, being occupied is PRECISELY the problem they have.

Unfortunately I can't rant on the guy's Facebook page without "liking" the stupidity...

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Overzeetop]

And, let's face it, punishment may be what he's after. Just as long as he remembers the safe word.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Eponymous Coward]

Therefore I propose we Occupy "Occupy" before it's too late. We must stand up to those who would steal our term.

Yes! Stand up to them! Freedom of expression is for us, not them!

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention, and I'm sure I'm gonna get hate from all the web developers that are drooling in their coffee over new tech (I swear you guys are as bad as gamers when it comes to new toys) but everyone seems to ignore the elephant in the room that is taking a big shit on the rug and stinking up the joint! What is that elephant?

HTML V5 IS A BIG PILE OF SUCK! that's what! It sucks MORE resources than flash, requires MORE CPU and RAM, I've found it pretty much won't run at all on anything less than a dual core, whereas flash will run fine without hardware acceleration on a 1.8GHz Celeron or Sempron as long as you stick to SD video and will even play HD1080p if you put a decent GPU to share the load, sucks up MORE bandwidth than flash...

Are you people sure this idea of "progress" wasn't cooked up by Dilbert's PHB? Now I can understand the iFanbois rushing to embrace it because anything the God Steve said was law to those nutters, but web developers are usually a LITTLE more sane than that, so what gives? Did you lose your collective minds?

And before someone pipes in with "It'll get better" well that may be true, but I could say that in the future that I could play HD video simply by farting the theme from "The Dukes Of Hazzard" but that don't help us none NOW does it partner? We are talking NOW and guys like the nutball occupy flash want to replace flash NOW with a system that simply doesn't work!

It is worse in EVERY SINGLE MEASURE than flash and we haven't even gotten to the DRM that MSFT and Apple is gonna put into it yet! Hell is there even a way for the FOSS guys to legally play H.264 on Linux, or is it still like Blu Ray? If it sucks THIS bad now, imagine when the MPAA gets done. Oh MSFT and Apple will be happy, they both sign NDAs and support kernel level DRM so the next netflix will play beautifully on Win 8 and the next iShiny, sucks for FOSS though.

So why? It makes no sense! It is worse in every way, will most likely be a *.A.A wet dream as both MSFT and Apple want to "fucking kill Google" and what better way than trying to lock up the next format between themselves, and most importantly HTML V5 is a damned pig, sucking CPU cycles and RAM like a drunk at a free minibar! So WTF developers, have you lost your damned minds? Or is that iPad just too damned shiny for you to see anything but iMoney?

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[maxwell demon]

I mean, Obama and Bernanke as part of the 99%?

Of course. everyone is part of the 99%. It's just a matter of choosing the remaining 1% accordingly.

Of course not everyone is part of the same 99%.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[mcgrew]

"Ron Paul, a current presidential candidate for the 2012 election, has lead an
incredibly successful life and has a Net Worth of $4.9 Million".

"Barack Obama is the former Senator from Illinois and the 44th President of the
United States with an estimated net worth of $10.5 million."

Obama is only twice as rich as Ron Paul. They're both 1%ers.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Anthony Mouse]

The problem is that there is no cause. There is no 99%. It's just a bunch of people who collectively agree that they don't like the way things are, but fundamentally disagree on how things should be instead.

It's shades of "change you can believe in." People want change, but what change? Borrowing so much that we can't pay the interest is change. Nuclear war is change. Is that the change we want? Certainly not.

You need to define a platform before you can have a cause. But that dissolves the coalition of the naive who each believe that everyone wants to do the thing they want to do rather than each having their own ideas and goals.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Karlt1]

And is there nobody here that can think for themselves anymore? Why has NOBODY here asked themselves "Who is pushing this? who will gain from it?" and the answer is....drumroll....Apple and MSFT! By pushing a heavily patented spec like H.264 as the video "standard" they will be able to further lock down the web.

As opposed to a closed source plug in? Where is the spec for the Flash run time?

And guess which codec Flash video usually uses?

What you will see is the MPAA come up with a truly horrible DRM for H.264 to protect their content, Apple and MSFT will embrace it, FOSS will be fucked.

So Flash is open sourced and doesn't have DRM?

Unfortunate

[timeOday]

I think the Occupy Wall Street movement is tackling an important issue, and co-opting the name for a trivial issue like this is unnecessary and unfortunate.

Re:Unfortunate

[MightyMartian]

That's an insult to disorganized messes. Even a disorganized mess makes more sense than the Occupy movement(s).

Re:Unfortunate

[timeOday]

I feel like I get the gist of the Occupy movement, just as people get the gist of the Tea Party. I agree that neither is definitive enough to be considered a political party, but pushing in a general direction and keeping some flavor of issues on the front burner can be constructive.

If the press really wanted to understand the Occupy movement, it wouldn't just stand back and complain that the movement is not producing a manifesto. Rather, they would take an empirical approach, by conducting surveys with the protesters, to see which attitudes best characterize them, statistically. (Quick, somebody write an app for that).

Re:Unfortunate

[kelemvor4]

It's really bad. I saw an interview with one of the occupiers who had been given the boot the other day and when they asked her what she thought of the coppers evicting her and the other protesters she said "maybe it was what we needed." I think she is right.

Re:Unfortunate

[ByOhTek]

Responsibility, and accountability for the wealthy few who direct the country. Focusing more on leading the country (and to an extent, even the world) and it's people to a more financially suitable situation for everyone, and not just the wealthiest few?

People may be focused on different aspects related to that, but I'd call that the overall goal. Changing the government, and allowing government control over more things isn't the way to go about it, changing the mindsets of those individuals with disproportionately more power, who make the decisions, is what is needed, and I think that's what most of the people in the occupy movement are trying for.

Re:Unfortunate

[TheRaven64]

Maybe I missed something, I was under the impression that they were protesting against the concentration of wealth into the hands of a small percentage of the population, most of whom did nothing to create that wealth. What they lack is a good solution to this problem - part of the point of the protests is to draw attention to the problem in the hope that someone will solve it.

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

Occupy is a result of what happens when enough people get sick of their bread and circuses - they might not be able to coherently word their grievances into a manifesto but they know they're generally unhappy with the way their society is heading. It usually degenerates quickly into governments struggling to keep control with police and then military violence against civilians, and then you either have a regime change or a bloodbath or both on your hands.

Re:Unfortunate

[Jeng]

You cannot come up with a solution until you know what the problem is.

If you tear down a government without a clear idea of how to rebuild it it is then likely that the rebuilt government will end up being worse than the original.

Re:Unfortunate

[amicusNYCL]

What issue is that? That a bunch of idiots are having a street party calling it a 'movement' when all they really need to do is actually fucking vote rather than being whiney little bitches?

Hey, great solution. They can vote for the Republican candidate who has been vetted and funded by Wall Street, or the Democrat candidate who has been vetted and funded by Wall Street. Yeah, that will show them!

Re:Unfortunate

[roc97007]

The Occupy Wall Street movement descended into self-parody shortly after it started. The participants themselves trivialized whatever issues they had by their own actions during the protest. Like a lot of people, I cared about the issues, but had to cringe at how silly and empty the protest became, and now wouldn't be associated with them for a big bag of gold.

The name had ceased to mean anything long before we started making fun of it.

Re:Unfortunate

[cathector]

it's weird that with so many years of perspective people still refer to Soviet Russia as a communist system.
the primary political aspect of soviet russia was totalitarianism, not communism.
Stalin murdered 20 million russians, not counting deaths during the war.
he used enforced wide-scale mass-starvation as a weapon, for example.
that kind of terror is not a feature of communism, that's a feature of totalitarianism.
ditto china, ditto nazi germany.

for further reading, check out "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million" by Martin Amis, or "The Origins of Totalitarianism" by Hannah Arendt.

Re:Unfortunate

[DriedClexler]

You can't both be for "responsibility" while also being for forgiveness of your debts incurred when getting an overpriced worthless degree.

It's unfortunate, too, because I agree with their criticism about all the wealthy who have gotten that way without producing any real value ... but most OWS solutions would simply make *themselves* those people, to the extent they want high salaries despite having worthless skills. Plus, their demand for more funding for higher education would just make the education system even more bloated and wasteful, with more university leaders getting big salaries for doing nothing of value.

Occupy elrous0

[Xest]

Consider your comment occupied. I'm not even sure why, but I thought I better get in on the fad before I start to look uncool.

It's a shit meme and anyway George Bush beat them all to it years ago with Occupy Afghanistan in 2001 and Occupy Iraq in 2003.

Occupy HTML, written in HTML

[RicardoGCE]

Game, set, match.

Re:Occupy HTML, written in HTML

[FumarMata]

You didn't understand a word. They are saying that for certain websites, it's better to use HTML and for other websites it's better to use Flash. To do all websites only in Flash or only in HTML is a mistake. One might think that it's a reasonable response... but well, some times you have to explain it twice for people to understand. Or people should read/listen before talking about something

pissing contests

[tverbeek]

HTML5 is not a superset of Flash.
Flash is not a superset of HTML5.

Get over the pissing contests and use the right tool for the job.

Re:pissing contests

[Jonner]

HTML5 is not a superset of Flash.
Flash is not a superset of HTML5.

Get over the pissing contests and use the right tool for the job.

Saying Flash is appropriate for a web site is like saying IPX/SPX are appropriate protocols for a LAN connecting to the Internet. Sure, it can be done, but it's a stupid way to do it and thankfully went away many years ago.

The right tools to create web sites are web standards. Even Adobe agrees with that; they've actually been promoting HTML5 for a while. They're still promoting AIR for desktop apps I think. I have no interest in that, but it is apparently the right too for some people.

Re:pissing contests

[supersloshy]

Somebody forgot about Flash games and animations (like Homestar Runner), quite possibly the most legitimate uses for Flash in existence that HTML5 couldn't replicate nearly as well, what with varying implementations and a constantly changing standard.

Glad I read this, I learned a few things

[kiwimate]

Though the 15-year old technology is still commonly used for advertisements, videos and games, many developers have been moving toward more modern and universal standards like HTML5

Well that's pretty impressive. It's been around for 15 years, and is still heavily used. That said, HTML5 is looking pretty sure to eclipse it, eventually.

"We feel this move effectively creates two Internets -- the one you can use on mobile/tablets and the one you can use on the desktop," one of the founders of the Occupy Flash movement said via e-mail. "This is not good for anyone except Adobe."

Now that I know it's been around for 15 years, I'm kind of impressed it's still working, and not terribly surprised that it hasn't morphed well into newer technologies that are being used in ways people were only beginning to think of at the turn of the millenium. I know 15 years is not that unusual for some technologies, like mainframes, but just think about the rapid pace of development in web standards, graphics cards and algorithms, etc.

Huh, I wonder what Adobe thinks.

HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community

Seems reasonable. As does this:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations

Fair enough. What about security fixes?

We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.

Spiffy.

Aren't there more important things these people could be spending their time on?

As much as I hate flash..

[Superken7]

As much as I hate flash, you gotta admit flash existed for a reason: it filled the gaps where HTML was more lacking. Unfortunately, that's still true today even with HTML5, although the trend towards HTML5 is very obvious and clear.

Many browsers still can't playback HTML5 properly and there isn't even a single video codec which will work consistently across browsers just like flash does, AFAIK. (I'm talking about h264 license issues, WebM's lack of hardware decoding, etc..).
Also, while rich media solutions are certainly possible with CSS3 and javascript, it still requires significantly more effort than its flash counterparts.

Of course, that doesn't excuse many many (many) uses where flash isn't really necessary but still being used. THAT must go. And flash video should be avoided where possible if the browser supports anything else. I think the main issue with that is that many web developers are still being lazy (hey, megavideo, I'm looking at you!).

But flash still accomplishes some things across browsers consistently in a way that HTML5 and CSS3 still can't - or at least not effortlessly for the web developer, which is what counts most of the times; let's hope Adobe helps with that with the HTML5 tools they are building.

So don't blame everything on flash, the standards are advancing too slowly IMHO even with backers such as Apple and Google.

Adobe Flash as a Content Classifier

[mmmbeer]

Flash must live on! If Flash dies out then that means highly annoying and CPU-hogging advertisements will be converted into HTML5 and get around my simple flashblock. I don't like Flash as much as the next guy but when you can currently carte blanche disable flash and easily remove the most heinous of web content, I fully support its continued use.

Re:"I hate flash" is the new "I hate Microsoft"

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever tried using the plugin in linux? It does not do what it is supposed to and it does not do it reasonably well.

Re:"I hate flash" is the new "I hate Microsoft"

[jcupitt65]

It's pretty awful on OS X as well. Flash 10 needed about 6x more CPU on OS X than Windows and crashed every 10 minutes or so. According to this elderly benchmark anyway.

http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2008/10/benchmarking-flash-player-10.ars

The grass is greener on the other side

[DrXym]

Of course as soon as Flash goes everyone will suddenly realise how frigging awful the equivalent code in JS hooked up to a canvas is. At least with Flash the plugin had the potential to be rendering content on a separate thread and largely independent of anything else going on in a page. It was even better on Windows since a Flash anim could invalidate its plugin window and repaint without bothering the browser.

Now if you hit a page with a few Flash-like HTML animations, they'll all be in contention on the same thread, running off timers and generally chugging. And hardware accelerated video? Screw that, you're stuck with WebM or whatever else can be called the lowest common denominator.

Ten times bigger.

[tepples]

I think they should open it, and it should not be plugin, but a protocol

Adobe's way ahead of you. It relicensed the Flash spec as part of the Open Screen Project.

And you do not need flash for playing video

But you do need Flash for playing vector animations like Weebl and Bob. Otherwise, you have to render each frame of the SWF to produce mp4 and webm files, and in my tests, those end up ten times bigger than the SWF.

A movement missing reality...

[n7ytd]

'Why does it matter when HTML5 has clearly won the fight for the future of our web browsing?'

A future technology still being defined does not solve today's problems.

While we're at it, let's boycott all manufacturers of prosthetic legs as using stem cells and legal pot to regenerate lost limbs is clearly the superior technology.

Think of Flash as the tool, not the plug-in

[Arkhan]

Flash may very well be on the way out as a browser plug-in (a distribution platform, if you like).

It will likely live on a long time as an artists' tool.

Flash as a platform, a plug-in, was a way to solve the problem of "I've made this cool animation in Flash, now how do I show it to people?"

Adobe has gotten with the times, and turned Flash into a vector animation tool with the level of features for professionals you'd expect (think Photoshop or Illustrator). Sure you can make a "Flash movie", but you can also import your artwork from better creation tools, easily animate it with tweens (etc) in Flash, then export to any number of video or animation formats, or more importantly to frames or sprite sheets. Those exported formats find their way into your game, program, etc. The old "Flash movie" has nothing to do with this workflow.

The plug-in is decreasingly useful every day. The tool is quite useful for the designer/artist and will live on. You just won't watch Flash-created content in a Flash platform plugin. You'll be watching Flash-animated content (likely created outside Flash) in some other platform and never know Flash was part of the picture.

You don't look at graphics in a Photoshop or GIMP plugin, or play iOS games inside XCode, but the tools still exist and are useful, separate from the obsolescence of the delivery platform.