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Free Software Foundation Shakes Up Its List of Priority Projects (networkworld.com)
alphadogg quotes Network World:
The Free Software Foundation Tuesday announced a major rethinking of the software projects that it supports, putting top priority on a free mobile operating system, accessibility, and driver development, among other areas. The foundation has maintained the High Priority Projects list since 2005, when it contained just four free software projects. [That rose to 12 projects by 2008, though the changelog shows at least seven projects have since been removed.] Today's version mostly identifies priority areas, along with a few specific projects in key areas.
The new list shows the FSF will continue financially supporting Replicant, their free version of Android, and they're also still supporting projects to create a free software replacement for Skype with real-time voice and video capabilities. But they're now also prioritizing various projects to replace Siri, Google Now, Alexa, and Cortana with a free-software personal assistant, which they view as "crucial to preserving users' control over their technology and data while still giving them the benefits such software has for many."
And other priorities now include internationalization, accessibility, decentralization and self-hosting, and encouraging governments to adopt free software.
The new list shows the FSF will continue financially supporting Replicant, their free version of Android, and they're also still supporting projects to create a free software replacement for Skype with real-time voice and video capabilities. But they're now also prioritizing various projects to replace Siri, Google Now, Alexa, and Cortana with a free-software personal assistant, which they view as "crucial to preserving users' control over their technology and data while still giving them the benefits such software has for many."
And other priorities now include internationalization, accessibility, decentralization and self-hosting, and encouraging governments to adopt free software.
"We can't build a kernel in a reasonable amount of time, so instead we'll take on projects that meld AI, natural language and voice recognition!!"
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Maybe FSF should try to learn from the mistakes Mozilla made when it pissed away several billion USD of payments from Google, trying to take on and beat top SV outfits at their own game. Outfits that have datacenters hosted around the world with rack servers running into the hundreds of thousands or millions, AND a well-tuned virtualization infrastructure on top of that, AND millions of people already using their product.
I looked at the projects from 2008, and AFAIK none of them have really made much progress or are already dead. Gnash, really? Luckily for everyone (except Adobe) Flash is in it's death knell in 2017. Coreboot is a great concept (I have used LinuxBIOS in a couple of projects) but ultimately doomed because firmware/BIOS is intimately tied to hardware - it will be great for hobby projects but by definition never be useful for mainstream PCs. And so it goes down the list...
And the 2017 list... Free smartphone OS basically seems to be "free Android" - I'm sure it will be about as successful at the 2008 goal with "gNewSense". FSF personal assistant? Could it be possible they don't understand how these work? It's trivial client software with billions of dollars in server hardware behind it. And seriously, "projects that replace Google, Facebook Apple, and so on"? Again, you don't replace those unless you have billions in backend investment and billions of users.
I commend them on finally trying to address the totally dysfunctional open source community in terms of female and minority inclusion, but they still need to prioritize actual useful *projects*, not just processes...
Lately we've seen GNU/Linux morph into GNU/systemd/Linux, and we've started to see that morph into just systemd/Linux.
As everyone is probably quite aware these days, systemd has proven itself to be very problematic for many GNU/Linux users, especially those who need stable and reliable systems.
After encountering numerous problems, most of them truly idiotic, with systemd, I've had to move away from Linux (no, I'm not going to use a niche distro like Devuan that might not exist next week, nor a truly archaic distro like Slackware, nor one like Gentoo where I have to wait a week for everything to compile).
While I prefer to use GPL'ed software for ideological reasons, I'm now using OpenBSD on my servers, and FreeBSD on my workstation. One thing to remember about the FreeBSD developers is that they don't tend to like the GPL, and prefer alternatives when available. Recent versions of FreeBSD use clang/LLVM instead of GCC, for example.
The part that should worry the FSF is that I'm beginning to like using this non-GPL'ed software a lot more than I ever liked using GPL'ed software, despite me preferring the GPL as a license. FreeBSD is really stable. It works when I need it to work, and it doesn't let me down. Clang/LLVM is fast, modern, has great error messages, and I think it may in some cases generate better code than GCC does.
Maybe the FSF doesn't realize this yet, but it's not Microsoft, or Google, or Apple, or SCO, or IBM driving many of us away from GNU/Linux. It's developments from within the open source GNU/systemd/Linux community that are forcing us to leave. We're now being exposed to non-GPL'ed open source software, and we're actually liking it a lot. As users of OSes like FreeBSD and OpenBSD, the FSF and its software has become pretty much irrelevant for us now, I'm sad to say.
This list has ~1/2 of it being right on point... OSS drivers and firmware, better internationalization, better security... etc.
Somewhere in the middle is this...OSS Android... but Android is already OSS... wait... they want 'stock Android' without any Google Play Services...\\
Then there is the last ~1/2... Replacement for gmail, siri, google search... etc... they want people to "not rely on servers they don't own"... but they are missing the key fact that 99% of people don't WANT TO nor CAN THEY own servers (and keep them secure, etc.)
This reeks of personal vendettas against "big brother" companies they the director level people don't like (Amazon, Google, Apple, etc.) instead of actually working on the fundamental issues (Security, firmware, getting a "cell phone bios" in place, better security UX, an OSS key-exchange system that "makes sense" (good luck)) etc...
These are just guidelines. And almost all of them are covered. Free phone OS is firefox OS, ubuntu phone. For flash there's html5. Decentralization is ownCloud. Personal assistant is a tough nut. You need reliable voice recognition, plus SDKs for mining contacts, messages, logs etc.
Inclusion and diversity is just a dream and mock.
I read TFA because I was curious to see what the FSF felt they'd accomplished in the last twelve years; but, alas, there's no mention of the list's former contents.
I have trouble believing a group which has been unable to get a working Hurd released sometime during the past three decades is capable of accomplishing any of their stated "high priority" goals.
I don't mean to discount their philosophical importance; but really I think that's pretty much the sum total of their impact.
#DeleteChrome
Firefox OS?! Have you ever actually tried it?! It's awful, in my opinion. Or should I say, it was awful, as I believe even Mozilla has pretty much given up on it. Firefox OS couldn't even compete with ancient versions of iOS and Android when I tried it.
Back before every computer/tablet etc users were using was behind NAT we had point to point video and audio. Skype is the hack to have someone in the middle to act as a proxy between to endpoints between NAT.
Now that IPv6 is finally starting to spread we just need something like those many point to point video and audio programs. It's no longer such a difficult problem and there are many open source projects already delivering in that space.
Linux is not a GNU project. That's why not.
Free phone OS is firefox OS, ubuntu phone
No, RTFA. They are creating a new one (Replicant) based on Android. Firefox OS is a joke.
For flash there's html5
That doesn't even make sense. Sure, apps are moving to HTML5, but that has nothing to do with FSF, it just means FSF priorities in 2008 were ultimately wrong.
Decentralization is ownCloud.
Wha? Really?? That's just a lame alternative to other cloud file storage service that no one actually uses. It doesn't remotely touch anything Facebook, Apple or Google really do.
Free software assistant... already exists
http://mycroft.ai
They've got an RPi image you can download, slap on a card, and be up and running with a USB mic and something to handle the audio out.
Seems to me like the FSF should pay more attention to what is already going on.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I respect the Free Software Foundation, but I prefer to write software with a BSD license. Is there an organization like the FSF, that wants free donations of software that have a BSD license?
I commend them on finally trying to address the totally dysfunctional open source community in terms of female and minority inclusion, but they still need to prioritize actual useful *projects*, not just processes...
The illogical and nonsensical concept of "inclusion and diversity" contributes to the open source community's dysfunctionalality.
And the 2017 list... Free smartphone OS basically seems to be "free Android" - I'm sure it will be about as successful at the 2008 goal with "gNewSense". FSF personal assistant? Could it be possible they don't understand how these work? It's trivial client software with billions of dollars in server hardware behind it. And seriously, "projects that replace Google, Facebook Apple, and so on"? Again, you don't replace those unless you have billions in backend investment and billions of users.
Originally "intelligent agents" were supposed to be software running on the users behalf which strived to understand contextually what the users needs were and act to support the user. What actually happened big data cyber stalking firms have entirely corrupted this vision.
It isn't that you start over and run parallel infrastructure. It is more about designing local agents able to effectively leverage the network as it is to fulfill needs of the user. There is no reason an IA can't run a google, wolfram alpha, bing search, check specialized databases of interest or rummage through your email or local files on your behalf. The only difference is the IA is acting in YOUR best interests NOT a third parties and it isn't sending all of your local personal shit to god knows who for god knows why.
Current systems are more than capable of doing NLP and voice recognition locally. Even if you go with generic ANN approach for recognition you don't need exotic hardware to use a trained network. Granted all of this requires specialized skills but far from unreasonable.
If done properly you can provide value with IA's the likes of siri, cortana, alexa...etc can't because it's not in their business model. If you got the basic interfaces, perhaps some specialized DSLs and focus on making it easy for people to build their own agent logic and share it with others.. there is a chance... perhaps a small one of creating something that snowballs where the value and the capabilities of the IA grows organically as more people contribute or improve upon logic that scratches their itches.
Do you just not know anything about this very publicly discussed topic, or are you one of the douchebags who actively discourages accepting commits from women or others outside of your social circle?
I use owncloud and I really love it. It's been awesome to be able to access my files from anywhere while still maintaining control of them down to the metal. I sync my calendar and contacts with my phone through caldav and carddav. I am very close to running cyanogenmod/lineages without google play services. It certainly isn't as convenient as Google, but freedom isn't free. I am glad that I can get a little bit of control back.
Current systems are more than capable of doing NLP and voice recognition locally. Even if you go with generic ANN approach for recognition you don't need exotic hardware to use a trained network. Granted all of this requires specialized skills but far from unreasonable.
Since you seem to know the basics of ANN-based AI but not the details, check this article out to get into the current decade, it's a good overview of how much resources it really takes to do ANN right: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/1...
Summary is: sure you can do really crappy NLP locally, but what Google has started doing is at another level entirely. And that's not even at the level that will be required to really get "intelligent agents" to be truly useful. The limiting factor to ANN right now is computing power (and/or much more special purpose hardware). That's the reason it was nearly abandoned 20 years ago and revived recently - it was impossible with the previous concepts of "supercomputers", etc and now only with massively distributed computing has it been possible to actually simulate the multilevel networks required.
You can run plenty of AI on mobile phones or PCs. It's not so farfetched to have a non-cloud personal assistant.
Do you just not know anything about this very publicly discussed topic, or are you one of the douchebags who actively discourages accepting commits from women or others outside of your social circle?
Why don't you provide a citation then? The last thing I saw about the FSF was around libreboot, and I wouldn't describe the drama that way, at all.
It's open source. On the Internet. Nobody even needs to know your gender. It's just that some people can't help playing identity politics instead of focusing on the code. It's all this "+" garbage the social justice idiots are injecting into every area they try to infect.
It ran smooth on a dual core with 512MB and had no crap running in the background.
There was something of an Osborne effect : I was waiting for the ZTE Open L that had 1GB RAM, 5" screen, quad core and FF OS 2.1 or 2.2 (don't know) out of the box to recommend it to everyone. The phone was made but not launched, deal fell through, whatever.
What are most smartphones right now? Quad core, 1GB RAM, 5" screen. 4.0" doesn't cut it.
Firefox OS couldn't even compete with ancient versions of iOS and Android when I tried it.
But, it the same way I can say linux distroes can't compete with ancient versions of Windows like 98 and XP.
I don't know what OS features were missing on Firefox OS, I don't care. Three-finger swipes or whatever they'd be, why should I give a shit?, scroll and click on shit were there. The only really bad thing would be that Uberized-job apps are for the duopoly (not even whatever Windows RT on phones is called). That's a big problem. Dunno if there were a "get your dick sucked" app in html5 either, likely not.
Replicant has existed for years, it's just useless because drivers.
On IBM-PC compatibles you can say reverse engineer a dozen NIC drivers and add them to the pool of reverse engineered or already free drivers. This makes networking work on 90% of all PCs (desktop/laptop/server). Then, the graphics driver situation allows 90% of PC with 3D-capable hardware to run say Google Earth. So, perhaps 81% of linux PCs or more are able to run Google Earth as it needs both simple 3D graphics and networking. (the numbers I've completely made up) (can possibly work with a software OpenGL renderer or crazy networking options like 10 Base 5, high speed serial cable or whatever)
On Android phones, you need to reverse engineer a hundred SoCs. So the task is immense, hardly possible and devs would need a pile of dozens crappy phones, tablets, SBC old and new, from $30 to $800, with cables etc. ; just flashing new images and testing crap would be multiple full time jobs.
Let's say 2% SoCs support 3D graphics on Replicant (it's likely 0% in reality) and 4% support 3G/4G networking, now at best 2% phones can run a 3D, networked application on the go, perhaps 0.08% can, perhaps none at all are able to do it as the sets of working-3D and working-3G/4G can be disjoint.
There is no reason an IA can't run a google, wolfram alpha, bing search, check specialized databases of interest or rummage through your email or local files on your behalf.
And there's no reason why I'm not in my flying car, living in my moon base right now, as futurists claimed would be the case when I was a teen.
Or maybe it's easy to state vague ideas, and hard to actually work out all the practical details...
Chromebooks use Coreboot, and they regularly top the lists of most popular laptops on Amazon. The firmware/binary blog thing isn't as much of an issue as you might think, since the basic idea of Coreboot is to do the minimum possible to boot the OS rather than replace all the random BIOS functions and crud built up over the years.
Replicant is likely a response to Cyanogen giving up, and an attempt to find some way around the binary blob hell that is smartphone chipsets. Well, these days Android runs on a lot more than just phones, and things like tablets tend to have more transparent hardware for their radios so it's far from an impossible goal.
Personal assistants could easily use your own personal server. The speech recognition might not be quite as good, but of course you can just type stuff. In any case, being able to look up results on your choice of search engine or Wikipedia, and being able to interpret simple commands like "set a reminder for next Tuesday at 7 PM" hardly requires billions of dollars of hardware. There are some useful Google Now features I don't use for privacy reasons, like traffic info cards, which could easily be replaced by free software even if I have to explicitly tell it my route home from work rather than it using machine learning to figure it out for me.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"For flash there's html5". Sure, if you want turn-of-the-century performance on modern hardware. Party like it's 1999, because html5 whatever. At least you could run flash standalone, without a stupid browser to add another layer of insecurity.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Well, you know it's just going to get worse as the SJWs take over everything. When BlackLivesMatter can get PRIDE parades to ban gays and lesbians, you know that both movements are now quickly accelerating to peak stupidity, bypassing any fake news you'd ever read ...
On balance, the internet is now causing more harm than good. Time to shut it down.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It ran smooth on a dual core with 512MB and had no crap running in the background.
It ran great on your hardware, but it didn't run anything useful. There were no real apps for it, not even a maps/navigation app. There wasn't even a terrible one.
Personally I disliked the OS, but the real problem was that it wasn't useful without those pieces that are hard to make on your own. Especially when you're a company based entirely around an already dying browser.
And we've got a bunch of women wearing "pussy hats" and marching on Washington. What timeline do I live in?
DC Comics Bizarro World from the 1960's.
The time to protest was BEFORE the nominations, not after the elections.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Well, at least the SJW's presidential candidate lost the election so not all hope is lost.
Again, you don't replace those unless you have billions in backend investment and billions of users.
There are some really interest projects going on that allow for decentralization of applications (eg ipfs, blockchain technology). With the continued increase in broadband speeds and distributed technologies it's not as far fetched as it once was.
Thanks for the civil answer.
Mine came with HERE maps, which looks slow and not very pretty but it's here. No navigation I guess, I don't know. Anyway I'm more of the kind to look up a map (Google Earth, openstreetmaps) on a desktop before going to somewhere.
I never put a SIM card into the phone, and I was waiting for Firefox OS 2.5 before flashing it (from 1.3). So I'm not the biggest enthusiast either lol. And, while I used to ridicule the 5" phones, I think that's what people want, even I, it would make maps or the keyboard easier to use.
I don't think the browser is dying, rather it's staying around a 100 million users mark while 1.5 billion new users came up online mostly ignoring it (I'm making up the figures)
Perhaps it comes down to money : not only Mozilla isn't big, but there's no income either from app sales, personal user data and such. Also, the 2.1, 2.2, 2.5 etc. version were on beta, alpha, or nightly forever.
Lastly, the people who liked it were people who had no smartphone (like me), or who upgraded / sidegraded from broken crap or Android crap full of nagware etc. . The kind of Luddite who would rather check mail by loading an application or site rather than receive notifications. In other word, smartphone for people who don't want a smartphone or who want one with training wheels. Might have worked in 2013 or 2014, less so in 2015 or 2016.
given the opportunities for snooping, they level of insecurity that is here and only going to get worse, a free mobile OS would be a great thing.
google's efforts at completely eliminating your privacy (i HAVE to sync my calendar to the google, WTF?!) is evil.
couple of problems:
how does this work with the carriers. are they free to keep your phone off the air once they start doing OS checks ?
pushing an OS onto a variety of hardware, just as on PCs is definitely painful, and I think it's going to be much worse for mobile phones. Lots of parts are proprietary and require NDAs to have access to datasheets. Not sure how you get around this problem.
Absolute statements are never true
Happily, lack of diversity and LGBT with foss projects allows for some quite good foss projects, unlike corporate monsters like ibm with their sixty percent female management .
Salamu alaikum, Thanks all for the FLOSS movement. I'm a normal user of Debian GNU/Linux and GNU/Linux Mint as my main Desktop computer and Laptop. Since, i'm creating CC0 educational 2d animation videos like those : https://youtu.be/4MB47oPBp9U (Created with Synfig Studio, Tupe, Libreoffice Impress, OpenShot, Audacity, LibAV, Inkscape and GIMP), And because of the world of on-line content are increasingly created by users. I think that it is time, for FLOSS people to consider a Animation Maker Software to be on their list of priority projects. It will boost the GNU/Linux Desktop Market Share for the next couple of years.
I looked at the projects from 2008, and AFAIK none of them have really made much progress or are already dead. Gnash, really? Luckily for everyone (except Adobe) Flash is in it's death knell in 2017. Coreboot is a great concept (I have used LinuxBIOS in a couple of projects) but ultimately doomed because firmware/BIOS is intimately tied to hardware - it will be great for hobby projects but by definition never be useful for mainstream PCs. And so it goes down the list...
And the 2017 list... Free smartphone OS basically seems to be "free Android" - I'm sure it will be about as successful at the 2008 goal with "gNewSense". FSF personal assistant? Could it be possible they don't understand how these work? It's trivial client software with billions of dollars in server hardware behind it. And seriously, "projects that replace Google, Facebook Apple, and so on"? Again, you don't replace those unless you have billions in backend investment and billions of users.
I commend them on finally trying to address the totally dysfunctional open source community in terms of female and minority inclusion, but they still need to prioritize actual useful *projects*, not just processes...
This is pretty much right, although I like some of the newer priorities they have, such as 'driver development, internationalization, accessibility.' At least, that would largely reduce the barriers that exist in their 'Libre-Linux' being accepted. About Replicant, I just don't see the point - why don't they look at partnering w/ LineageOS to produce something? They can fork it so that they have a GPL3 version while LineageOS has maybe a BSD one.
But the larger point you made is correct - they need to look at their budget, pick the ones that are not just essential for entry to adaption - such as drivers, but also projects that do not require heavy investment in backend infrastructure. Like lose things like GNU Network and GNU Social, and focus instead on things that would enable them to handle documents or sites created from 'non-Free' software. Sorta like LibreOffice or Epiphany, but in ways where adapting those does not mean that one loses one's ability to experience the entire web, or edit MS Office documents.
Not for modern ANNs unfortunately. The days of 2 or 3 sensibly sized layers are long gone. Deep networks can have thousands of layers with absurd numbers of elements doing non-trivial computations. On the plus side it makes them incredibly powerful, but the obvious downside is that they are the exact opposite of computational lightweights.
Since you seem to know the basics of ANN-based AI but not the details, check this article out to get into the current decade, it's a good overview of how much resources it really takes to do ANN right: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/1...
I seem to have no idea what you are asserting or relevance of this New York times article. It does not address the topic at hand, offers no useful technical details and does not address the premise of my point -- there exists a massive difference in computational requirements between training vs using trained networks.
For example when level 5 self driving cars hit the roads they will be executing against trained networks locally without "the cloud". ANN based systems generally have this property.
Summary is: sure you can do really crappy NLP locally, but what Google has started doing is at another level entirely. And that's not even at the level that will be required to really get "intelligent agents" to be truly useful. The limiting factor to ANN right now is computing power (and/or much more special purpose hardware). That's the reason it was nearly abandoned 20 years ago and revived recently - it was impossible with the previous concepts of "supercomputers", etc and now only with massively distributed computing has it been possible to actually simulate the multilevel networks required.
My own opinion why these things don't see daylight is primarily the value proposition was always so weak in the first place. People are happy with tools that only cover trivial aspects such as managing their schedule, contacts and some interactions with local and external datasets to find common shit like a someone's number or nearest MC Donald's. Speech recognition industry has seen a near total collapse of vendors and crickets in terms of research dollars over the last couple decades. Using Siri/Cortana/Alexa does not make the user more productive or assist them in getting their jobs done.. it is a wiz-bang cool gimmick that many people lose interest in over time. The utility of IA is it's role as "glue". It doesn't need to be anything approaching AGI to be useful to me.
And there's no reason why I'm not in my flying car, living in my moon base right now, as futurists claimed would be the case when I was a teen.
Or maybe it's easy to state vague ideas, and hard to actually work out all the practical details...
Back on earth a "smartphone" I had some dozen years
ago set appointments, called people I told it to call, played music from artists I wanted to hear and ran programs for me locally without any Internet access at all.
On this planet in the year 2017 most non-trivial requests to Siri/Cortana are in fact resolved by passing transcriptions to publically accessible search engines.
I've been carrying an extensive self-contained geographic database detailing the entire country and POI/business listings in my pocket here on the planet Earth three rocks away from SOL while Bush Jr was president.
I never indicated anything was easy. I only stated it was reasonable/tractable to achieve.
Firefox OS?! Have you ever actually tried it?!
No. I couldn't seem to find a device running Firefox OS in stores in my part of the United States. I was under the impression that it was marketed mostly in developing countries.
The time to protest was BEFORE the nominations, not after the elections.
They did protest before the primary elections, before the nomination, and before the general election. When else should they have protested?
Personal assistants could easily use your own personal server.
Would this "personal server" be a device carried in the user's pocket? Or would it be a server application running on the user's home PC, which home ISP terms of service tend to forbid on pain of disconnection? Or would it be a leased virtual private server?
how does this work with the carriers. are they free to keep your phone off the air once they start doing OS checks ?
That depends on the terms under which each carrier leases spectrum from each national radio communications regulator. Some require carriers to serve subscribers who carry any device that has been certified to follow the relevant protocol and has not been stolen, such as licenses resulting from U.S. auction 73.
I resent your lumping transexuals in with "others". The appropriate phrasing is "women, transexuals, the transgendered and others".
If you're waiting a week for Gentoo to build, either (1) you're doing it wrong or (2) you need more modern hardware. It doesn't even need to be bleeding-edge; the Core 2 Quad Q6600 I bought in 2008 and still use at work (!) could do a complete rebuild (including things like Chromium, LibreOffice, and KDE) in maybe 36-48 hours. You almost never need to rebuild everything at the same time, however, so the typical emerge whatever takes far less time than that.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Sure they did - not very effective, was it? But where were the tens of millions protesting the DNC/Clinton crooked nomination and the way the MSM slanted all their coverage in favour of Clinton? Wanna bet that it was Clinton supporters who are mostly protesting now? The same ones that actively supported a candidate who is known to be dishonest (public and private positions, "I don't remember", refusing to turn over a server that was subpoenaed and then deleting emails that were under subpoena?).
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Luckily for everyone (except Adobe) Flash is in [its] death [throes] in 2017
Not quite everyone. Flash is still very important for people who read and study the existing corpus of electronic literature, much of which was created using Flash. Whether that was a good idea (not really) is irrelevant; that's what the authors used, and we need an implementation to continue reading those texts.
Some of that Flash-based e-lit has a large audience, and some of it is culturally significant. This may be a niche application, depending on your point of view, but it's not an insignificant one.
That said, of course I'd like to see Flash replaced by an open-source player (or converter) that's well-designed and tested, with unnecessary features removed or at least disabled by default. I'd like to see far less Flash used on the web. The existing security disaster that is Adobe Flash certainly needn't continue in order to preserve access to Flash-based e-lit. But getting rid of Flash entirely is not a Good Thing either.
Do you even know what the initials SJW means? And if you do, what about fighting for social justice is an insult? Boggles the mind how people try to use equal rights advocacy as a slander. I'm sure you think MLK, WEB, SBA, etc are all "goddamn SJWs". But go for it, I guess, if you have to hate...
Sure they did - not very effective, was it?
Really, just going to quote your fearless leader, Trumpkin?
"For flash there's html5". Sure, if you want turn-of-the-century performance on modern hardware. Party like it's 1999, because html5 whatever. At least you could run flash standalone, without a stupid browser to add another layer of insecurity.
What the F are you talking about? That was the only thing I actually *agreed* with...
I guess either you totally misunderstood the meaning of the AC's comment (HTML5 can replace Flash) or you totally misunderstand how Flash works ("standalone" = AIR, which is probably worse than running Flash in a secure browser like Chrome as it provides even more access to OS features).
What you are thinking of is NOT "AI".
EXACTLY! Just what do people think the *deep* in "deep learning" means? I (and I'm sure many here) played around with 2-3 layer networks 20 years ago, and while fun, they just can't perform real world tasks. Every layer you add can exponentially increase the connections. Once you start trying to emulate "human intelligence" you are literally talking thousands of "layers" (though at that point we are beyond even what is currently comprehensible).
Standalone is NOT necessarily AIR. Not at all. AIR was a piece of bloated shitware. If you could write code, you didn't need AIR for ANY of your "flash objects", or for your "behaviours." HTML5 still requires a browser.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
From where I sit, there isn't much difference between the Clinton and Trump. I would never vote for either. Fortunately, neither one of them could ever be my president, because I'm part of the 95% that is looking at the US and thinking you should admit you all screwed up big time and just get over it and start working together to fix your latest, greatest, fuckup.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
If you could write code
I guarantee I have written more "code" to embed Flash and know more about Flash than you do. I have ported it to several set top boxes & TVs and was using it to develop rich Internet apps (email, photo browsers, news feeds, etc) back in 1998.
HTML5 still requires a browser.
HTM5 requires an HTML rendering engine and Javascript interpreter just like Flash requires the flash rendering engine and Actionscript interpreter.
You can embed HTML5 rendering engines into apps just like you can embed Flash rendering engines. There is nothing more inherently secure in either approach.
And yet none of those succeeded (set top boxes, email, etc) or are being done today (embedding an html 5 rendering engine into an app - which btw also violates Apple's terms of "no interpreters"). People will instead use the crappy rendering components in, for example Bloatroid, if full html5 support isn't required, or just embed it in a web page if it is - and even then it doesn't work, because even support for html4 and css results in stuff that's crap.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
And yet none of those succeeded (set top boxes, email, etc) or are being done today (embedding an html 5 rendering engine into an app - which btw also violates Apple's terms of "no interpreters").
Wow, there are so many incorrect statements in this sentence it's hard to know where to begin...
No Flash-based STBs/TVs succeeded? Many Vizio Smart TVs and BD Players, several cable STBs, as well as some other brands from circa 2009-2014 used embedded Flash for significant parts of their UI.
And no one is embedding an HTML5 rendering engine into an app? Are you fucking kidding me? First, Apple (iOS - since they have no control over Macs, obviously): what do you think a WebView is? And second, everyone else (since WTH does iOS really have to do with this discussion): there are literally hundreds of millions of TVs, STBs, and BD/DVD players that embed HTML5 engines. All Samsung TVs in the past 5 years and LG TVs in the last 3 years have done this. And there are thousands of apps on PCs/Macs that do the same.
Here's one popular framework used by a ton of PC apps: http://electron.atom.io/
It's pretty amusing how definitive you are about everything you state while obviously knowing nothing about the field...