Both chat and voice are relatively easy on CPU and servers generally.
Wave uses a fascinating Operational Transform algorithm which verges on aspects of AI to keep all clients in sync. It's a really fascinating approach but I can see that it is far more intensive for servers than otherwise.
Having said that, I think if Wave had even the tiniest hope of being successful Google would have kept it going. The cost of servers is nothing to Google compared to that of having dozens of their phd's and probably hundreds of other staff occupied with it while they could be working on, for eg: Google Me.
There have been a bunch of vulnerabilities that were rendered completely ineffective by IE's protected mode which, I think, is still unmatched by other browsers. I think IE has evened the game up a lot now, and there's a reasonable argument that since IE is pretty much forced to be on the computer anyway you are best limiting the surface area of attack by not installing any more browsers or other software that you don't need.
Now, as it happens, IE is so much more unpleasant to use (mainly speed, but other features too) that I'm more than happy to go with the risk of a slightly increased security threat to get a much nicer browser (in my case, Chrome). But that is more based on features and speed than security these days.
What's your point then? Because you have a sucky phone nobody with a good phone should be able to use Flash? Or perhaps that installing Flash should be an option that people with phones that can handle it can install and others can leave out (shock, horror, it is!) It sounds like you are advocating for exactly what Android has done.
I don't particularly like Flash either - it is the last "single vendor" piece of the web experience and "single vendor" is antithetical to the whole concept of the web.
However I wouldn't count it as doomed. As far as I understand Flash is going to be shipped on WP7, Meego, Android, Blackberry... in fact, just about every single mobile platform except iDevices. That means developers can build one app and target nearly every single device on the market except for iOS in one go. Even if they have to build an iOS port separately that is a significant win. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this eventuates that we will see Air as the first platform people develop for with iOS trailing afterwards - which will be a real threat to the supremacy of iOS. Of course, this is speculative - Adobe has a long way to go to pull this off - they have to get Air working on all these platforms and working well in a multitouch environment. It is no small feat and there is a lot of doubt about Adobe's technical proficiency - however all the stars are aligned for it to happen and they have all the vendors onside. So it is there for them to win if they can pull it off.
Yeah, it's shocking that my old laptop stuttered when I tried to play Crysis on it. Clearly they should never have supported DirectX on that laptop at all. If even one game might not perform well clearly the entire technology should be banned from the platform.
Different devices have different capabilities. Nobody is pretending that is not the case. I bet all these sites he went to tried to send high quality video down in encodings that are not well supported on Android. Given my experience (about 75% of fash sites work very well, the rest vary from poor to not at all) I strongly suspect the author spent some time "researching" to find particular sites that happen to work badly.
I can tell you I have watched many, many flash videos on my Nexus that performed wonderfully - as good or even better than the desktop experience. For example, I watch many programs on the local TV station's web site here and they all work smoothly and perfectly.
Stick a USB tuner card in there and use Windows Media Center and you have a fantastic all round entertainment system for your living room - and nearly silent and very low power so you won't feel bad about having it on all the time. I don't understand why you would buy a box that can only do streaming when you can have a full computer that can do anything.
Yep. Android supports the argument that the only way you can ever put Linux in front of an end user is if you have completely hidden and sealed absolutely any trace of it from the user. Linux is just not making it as a consumer OS. Whatever chance it had was eaten up by OSX years ago. Its kind of sad really.
On the other hand - at least Android for the first time can actually claim to be "Linux" without being badgered to be called "GNU/Linux"!
A few months after getting one on launch day, I'm really not so concerned about the iPad any more. It has proven itself to be exactly what I expected - a beautiful, useful, niche device that performs a very few jobs extremely well and does nothing else at all well.
It is a great game platform for young kids (who don't have the dexterity for mice). It is a great photo frame. It is a nice book reader, although it has major flaws). For everything else (including web browsing) it sucks.
Even though I own an iPad, I still yearn for a netbook and probably will buy one, because the iPad doesn't even come close to replacing a netbook. I'm holding out for some nice touch screen / convertible Win7 netbooks to appear.
The only reason Jobs supports HTML is exactly because it is inferior to native apps and will never compete with his proprietary, locked down channel where he is the tollgate on everything that lands on the device. If you think HTML is just as good as native, can you explain then why there are 200,000 app in the app store? When it is far less convenient, costs you money, involves extensive review process and writing in a (for most people) strange and unusual programming language / environment?
The minute HTML starts to compete with the app store just watch Jobs throttle back his support for it.
Exactly. We tried Wave in our company where everyone was able to get invites (the first hurdle). But it simply wasn't as good as Google Docs. It had almost no advantages and just added several layers of confusion. At least Google Docs has built in interaction with email (crude as it is). Bottom line is - Google couldn't beat their own tool.
Almost none of the things you mention as problems with the flash runtime are necessary for something like a full screen game. As long as it can respond to touch events and understand some multitouch gestures you can make a very wide range of games where it doesn't matter in the slightest what the features of the surrounding phone are.
A few times I've had only my phone and needed to view a Flash-only video on a web site (one time on the way to a meeting where we were going to discuss some relevant things). Ok - hardly life and death, but extremely convenient when it was the only way to do it.
Apple doesn't control either the mobile, or the media market. They aren't #1 in any particular market except for possibly iPod's, which aren't really a market for flash anyway
I'm pretty sure this is the way Jobs wants it too. As soon as he sees anything approaching majority market share it tells him something - he's not charging enough. He needs to make more expensive, or more restricted products with less features and take a greater margin. Apple is all about the elite experience. They have no interest in making sucky products and anything that masses of people buy almost definition cannot be a superior experience.
Your whole rant is based on a false premise. Just because something doesn't work optimally doesn't mean it can't be useful to have it work when you need it. Android lets you switch Flash off by default and activate any given Flash object on a web page by touching it. 99 times out of 100 I'm ecstatic not to have Flash, but the one time I do need it I *really* need it, so having it there is invaluable. I really couldn't care less if it sucks battery for the 5 minutes that I turn it on in a month. So does the GPS which I turn on every few days.
Flash is shaping up to be in the slightly scary position of being the only cross platform runtime that will run across a wide swathe of mobile platforms (basically everything except iOS). It could well be that we end up with nearly every mobile app being developed first as a Flash app (Air is coming to Android shortly) and then as an iPhone app second. If that happens it will certainly start to hurt that iOS is crippled in this way.
> Well, once you let an app talk to the developer's servers they can do whatever they want with the data from there.
Absolutely, it is still open to abuse but it provides me many more tools to evaluate how much I trust the developers - (where is it hosted, who owns the domain, how long as it been registered, etc). Which most normal users will not look at but it only takes a few to follow up and post comments to alert people to a dangerous or sketchy app. It might even make sense to have an 'https' option only so that it requires a valid / reputable cert.
It still needs to be finer, in my opinion. One thing I would really value is a sandboxed internet access that includes restrictions on the domains it can access and the amount of data it can send. I'm quite happy for an app to talk to it's own server for a cloud based service. I see no reason that the same permission should let it blindly send unlimited amounts of my phone SD card data (possibly at great expense) to a mysterious web site in China. Unfortunately the same permission covers both.
The culture of minimizing permissions hasn't really taken hold yet
I think this is the real answer... how to foster a culture of scepticism and caution among users that will make apps declaring unnecessary permissions get shunned in the market place. I would start, if I was Google, by putting an incentive into the market itself: "safer" apps should receive a special marking. Perhaps even appear first in search results. It should be possible to lock the phone to only access "safe" apps (sort of parental control type feature). Not big things, but enough to persuade developers that it's worth spending 10 minutes to hone down the permissions they are using and not throw in gratuitous features that require large expansion in permissions. Right now there's not much incentive and in fact it's easier to ask for lots of permissions just in case rather than receive bug reports for cases where your app tries to do something and gets knocked back in an unexpected situation.
As a web site developer, I largely lost interest in bandwidth once we hit 1Mbps for most broadband users. Apart from video almost nothing in a web site makes much use of that bandwidth - and yet, even the best web applications can still feel "laggy" and experience slow load times because of network latency. Half the job of optimising a web site these days is figuring out all the points where latency occurs and either eliminating them or parallelizing them so they don't hold other things up. Cut latency in half and you'll make a much bigger difference to the web than doubling bandwidth.
Agree - I just went through the process of researching and installing an alarm, and the bottom line is that while the technology seems cool at first it is actually finicky and you are dealing with a serious pain-in-the-ass when things don't work right (your neighbors won't be friends for long when stray cats are setting off alarms next door at 3am).
Therefore I went with an Elk M1 system that is pricey but infinitely expandable into a complete home automation system and comes with an ethernet module that lets you do whatever you want in software - and that is where I will have my geek fun with it.
We already know from this conference that "Jackeeey Wallpaper" collects and publishes phone numbers and browser history from the phone
Actually what we know is that no such thing happened and that nearly the whole story was made up. I suppose it is still fun to spread the FUD around though!
It's not surprising at all. To get an app onto the Android store you need to provide a credit card tied to your real name and agree to the Google developer agreement. Breaking the agreement at very least gets you kicked out of the store (all of your apps, not just your malicious one) but since it is tied to a real identity it can land you in court owing damages to Google. That is not a fun place to be. As a developer I actually had a long pause for thought before I agreed to that agreement because it is slightly scary.
Slashdot Mirror
Both chat and voice are relatively easy on CPU and servers generally.
Wave uses a fascinating Operational Transform algorithm which verges on aspects of AI to keep all clients in sync. It's a really fascinating approach but I can see that it is far more intensive for servers than otherwise.
Having said that, I think if Wave had even the tiniest hope of being successful Google would have kept it going. The cost of servers is nothing to Google compared to that of having dozens of their phd's and probably hundreds of other staff occupied with it while they could be working on, for eg: Google Me.
There have been a bunch of vulnerabilities that were rendered completely ineffective by IE's protected mode which, I think, is still unmatched by other browsers. I think IE has evened the game up a lot now, and there's a reasonable argument that since IE is pretty much forced to be on the computer anyway you are best limiting the surface area of attack by not installing any more browsers or other software that you don't need.
Now, as it happens, IE is so much more unpleasant to use (mainly speed, but other features too) that I'm more than happy to go with the risk of a slightly increased security threat to get a much nicer browser (in my case, Chrome). But that is more based on features and speed than security these days.
What's your point then? Because you have a sucky phone nobody with a good phone should be able to use Flash? Or perhaps that installing Flash should be an option that people with phones that can handle it can install and others can leave out (shock, horror, it is!) It sounds like you are advocating for exactly what Android has done.
I don't particularly like Flash either - it is the last "single vendor" piece of the web experience and "single vendor" is antithetical to the whole concept of the web.
However I wouldn't count it as doomed. As far as I understand Flash is going to be shipped on WP7, Meego, Android, Blackberry ... in fact, just about every single mobile platform except iDevices. That means developers can build one app and target nearly every single device on the market except for iOS in one go. Even if they have to build an iOS port separately that is a significant win. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this eventuates that we will see Air as the first platform people develop for with iOS trailing afterwards - which will be a real threat to the supremacy of iOS. Of course, this is speculative - Adobe has a long way to go to pull this off - they have to get Air working on all these platforms and working well in a multitouch environment. It is no small feat and there is a lot of doubt about Adobe's technical proficiency - however all the stars are aligned for it to happen and they have all the vendors onside. So it is there for them to win if they can pull it off.
It works great on my N1.
It's also a classic example of a web site where the use of Flash is entirely redundant.
Here's a report for you: I watch plenty of Flash videos and the vast majority work just fine.
Yeah, it's shocking that my old laptop stuttered when I tried to play Crysis on it. Clearly they should never have supported DirectX on that laptop at all. If even one game might not perform well clearly the entire technology should be banned from the platform.
Different devices have different capabilities. Nobody is pretending that is not the case. I bet all these sites he went to tried to send high quality video down in encodings that are not well supported on Android. Given my experience (about 75% of fash sites work very well, the rest vary from poor to not at all) I strongly suspect the author spent some time "researching" to find particular sites that happen to work badly.
I can tell you I have watched many, many flash videos on my Nexus that performed wonderfully - as good or even better than the desktop experience. For example, I watch many programs on the local TV station's web site here and they all work smoothly and perfectly.
Viewsonic makes an awesome little nettop box (basically it's a high end netbook without a screen) that is absolutely perfect for this.
http://www.viewsonic.com/products/vot132.htm
Stick a USB tuner card in there and use Windows Media Center and you have a fantastic all round entertainment system for your living room - and nearly silent and very low power so you won't feel bad about having it on all the time. I don't understand why you would buy a box that can only do streaming when you can have a full computer that can do anything.
Yep. Android supports the argument that the only way you can ever put Linux in front of an end user is if you have completely hidden and sealed absolutely any trace of it from the user. Linux is just not making it as a consumer OS. Whatever chance it had was eaten up by OSX years ago. Its kind of sad really.
On the other hand - at least Android for the first time can actually claim to be "Linux" without being badgered to be called "GNU/Linux"!
A few months after getting one on launch day, I'm really not so concerned about the iPad any more. It has proven itself to be exactly what I expected - a beautiful, useful, niche device that performs a very few jobs extremely well and does nothing else at all well.
It is a great game platform for young kids (who don't have the dexterity for mice). It is a great photo frame. It is a nice book reader, although it has major flaws). For everything else (including web browsing) it sucks.
Even though I own an iPad, I still yearn for a netbook and probably will buy one, because the iPad doesn't even come close to replacing a netbook. I'm holding out for some nice touch screen / convertible Win7 netbooks to appear.
The only reason Jobs supports HTML is exactly because it is inferior to native apps and will never compete with his proprietary, locked down channel where he is the tollgate on everything that lands on the device. If you think HTML is just as good as native, can you explain then why there are 200,000 app in the app store? When it is far less convenient, costs you money, involves extensive review process and writing in a (for most people) strange and unusual programming language / environment?
The minute HTML starts to compete with the app store just watch Jobs throttle back his support for it.
Exactly. We tried Wave in our company where everyone was able to get invites (the first hurdle). But it simply wasn't as good as Google Docs. It had almost no advantages and just added several layers of confusion. At least Google Docs has built in interaction with email (crude as it is). Bottom line is - Google couldn't beat their own tool.
Almost none of the things you mention as problems with the flash runtime are necessary for something like a full screen game. As long as it can respond to touch events and understand some multitouch gestures you can make a very wide range of games where it doesn't matter in the slightest what the features of the surrounding phone are.
A few times I've had only my phone and needed to view a Flash-only video on a web site (one time on the way to a meeting where we were going to discuss some relevant things). Ok - hardly life and death, but extremely convenient when it was the only way to do it.
Apple doesn't control either the mobile, or the media market. They aren't #1 in any particular market except for possibly iPod's, which aren't really a market for flash anyway
I'm pretty sure this is the way Jobs wants it too. As soon as he sees anything approaching majority market share it tells him something - he's not charging enough. He needs to make more expensive, or more restricted products with less features and take a greater margin. Apple is all about the elite experience. They have no interest in making sucky products and anything that masses of people buy almost definition cannot be a superior experience.
Your whole rant is based on a false premise. Just because something doesn't work optimally doesn't mean it can't be useful to have it work when you need it. Android lets you switch Flash off by default and activate any given Flash object on a web page by touching it. 99 times out of 100 I'm ecstatic not to have Flash, but the one time I do need it I *really* need it, so having it there is invaluable. I really couldn't care less if it sucks battery for the 5 minutes that I turn it on in a month. So does the GPS which I turn on every few days.
Flash is shaping up to be in the slightly scary position of being the only cross platform runtime that will run across a wide swathe of mobile platforms (basically everything except iOS). It could well be that we end up with nearly every mobile app being developed first as a Flash app (Air is coming to Android shortly) and then as an iPhone app second. If that happens it will certainly start to hurt that iOS is crippled in this way.
> Well, once you let an app talk to the developer's servers they can do whatever they want with the data from there.
Absolutely, it is still open to abuse but it provides me many more tools to evaluate how much I trust the developers - (where is it hosted, who owns the domain, how long as it been registered, etc). Which most normal users will not look at but it only takes a few to follow up and post comments to alert people to a dangerous or sketchy app. It might even make sense to have an 'https' option only so that it requires a valid / reputable cert.
It still needs to be finer, in my opinion. One thing I would really value is a sandboxed internet access that includes restrictions on the domains it can access and the amount of data it can send. I'm quite happy for an app to talk to it's own server for a cloud based service. I see no reason that the same permission should let it blindly send unlimited amounts of my phone SD card data (possibly at great expense) to a mysterious web site in China. Unfortunately the same permission covers both.
The culture of minimizing permissions hasn't really taken hold yet
I think this is the real answer ... how to foster a culture of scepticism and caution among users that will make apps declaring unnecessary permissions get shunned in the market place. I would start, if I was Google, by putting an incentive into the market itself: "safer" apps should receive a special marking. Perhaps even appear first in search results. It should be possible to lock the phone to only access "safe" apps (sort of parental control type feature). Not big things, but enough to persuade developers that it's worth spending 10 minutes to hone down the permissions they are using and not throw in gratuitous features that require large expansion in permissions. Right now there's not much incentive and in fact it's easier to ask for lots of permissions just in case rather than receive bug reports for cases where your app tries to do something and gets knocked back in an unexpected situation.
Mod parent up!
As a web site developer, I largely lost interest in bandwidth once we hit 1Mbps for most broadband users. Apart from video almost nothing in a web site makes much use of that bandwidth - and yet, even the best web applications can still feel "laggy" and experience slow load times because of network latency. Half the job of optimising a web site these days is figuring out all the points where latency occurs and either eliminating them or parallelizing them so they don't hold other things up. Cut latency in half and you'll make a much bigger difference to the web than doubling bandwidth.
Agree - I just went through the process of researching and installing an alarm, and the bottom line is that while the technology seems cool at first it is actually finicky and you are dealing with a serious pain-in-the-ass when things don't work right (your neighbors won't be friends for long when stray cats are setting off alarms next door at 3am).
Therefore I went with an Elk M1 system that is pricey but infinitely expandable into a complete home automation system and comes with an ethernet module that lets you do whatever you want in software - and that is where I will have my geek fun with it.
I looked at the web page for my local newspaper today and it featured two headlines right above one another:
1. iPhone4 Jailbreak Offers Apps to Millions
2. Microsoft Windows Flaw Leaves Millions Vulnerable to Hackers and Malware
I guess we always knew that mass media lives well inside the reality distortion field, but still ...
We already know from this conference that "Jackeeey Wallpaper" collects and publishes phone numbers and browser history from the phone
Actually what we know is that no such thing happened and that nearly the whole story was made up. I suppose it is still fun to spread the FUD around though!
Not an Open Platform?
If Richard Stallman recommends it then I think it's open enough to satisfy me.
It's not surprising at all. To get an app onto the Android store you need to provide a credit card tied to your real name and agree to the Google developer agreement. Breaking the agreement at very least gets you kicked out of the store (all of your apps, not just your malicious one) but since it is tied to a real identity it can land you in court owing damages to Google. That is not a fun place to be. As a developer I actually had a long pause for thought before I agreed to that agreement because it is slightly scary.