"Flash sucks bleep on Linux, because Adobe apparently hates Linux or something. "
No, your assumption is mistaken... in fact, Linux is becoming more important to Flash over the next year, as smartphones and televisions introduce new configurations.
For performance which is slower than other machines, first try checking for background processes or browser chokepoints... that's easier than checking for hardware which creates the difference.
Then look into the Player betas, feedback process. If we can make your slowdown happen in the shop too, then we'd want to try to ameliorate that situation within the common Player, thanks.
No, sorry, it was a little different... when Adobe Flash Player 10 was released last October it was Mac, Win and Linux, all 32-bit. Linux was the first to reap work on 64-bit addressing in a preview release at labs.adobe.com, but a few weeks later. More info at blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf .
re: "As you can imagine, Apple, MS and Adobe are not really happy about this, as they obviously would like their patented technology to be used in HTML 5"
From what I've seen, folk at Adobe are pretty neutral about Ogg Theora. If it serves peoples needs, and if it enables more communication, that's all for the better. Anyone can already publish their own H.264 video though... most of the benefit seems to be for new video tools which could avoid license fees for high-performance codecs. Future licensing changes for H.264 are murky to me, hard to predict. Biggest risk seems to be Theora-only websites, but most everyone seems to be double-encoding.
Still, the more choice, the better... no problem with Ogg Theora here!
I'm confused by that argument, in this situation... Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and more are all frequently used in web development. Can you clarify...?
re: "This year they decided to switched back to a Flash-based player ON OPENING DAY. Unfortunately, the new player doesn't work either, and in many ways was worse than the silverlight player, requiring additional installation plugins for HD capabilities"
The new video backend and distribution system (as well as the new client) were used throughout Spring Training. The biggest problem this spring was the installation of the separate NexDef stream manager, which was also a difficulty during previous seasons... overall the forums were much, much happier this year: http://www.mlbsupport.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=3
Thanks for the link to the Huffington Post piece. It describes the Gameday Audio system, which is not the Flash video client or interactive display.
(For what it's worth, I had been impressed with the support staff at the MLB.com forums.)
Taxpayers have repeatedly asked the candidate to establish his eligibility -- just the normal birth certificate, passport history, citizenship history. The campaign has repeatedly gone to court to have these requests dismissed on lack of standing. Seeing such normal citizenship documents hidden is unprecedented, particularly for a politician, but going to court to keep them hidden is the point which first caught my attention.
The citizenship questions are numerous and reasonable:
-- Obama's half-sister Maya also has a Hawaii Certificate of Live Birth, like the Kos/Factcheck document. She was admittedly born in Indonesia. (Hawaii COLBs are registrations, rather than actual hospital documents, and foreign births qualify.)
-- No record has been found of the hospital in Hawaii where he was born... no doctor, no nurses have stepped forward and said they were there. The birth announcement in a local newspaper listed an address, and neighbors say they don't remember such a family at that address. His sister Maya has claimed two different birth hospitals in Hawaii. The lack of witnesses is not conclusive, just strange. Releasing the normal documents would help clear it up.
-- The campaign's fightthesmears.com website still says that at one time he held British citizenship, which seems to conflict with the office's requirement for "natural-born citizenship": http://fightthesmears.com/articles/5/birthcertificate
-- June 2008 an Associated Press reporter photographed Obama's school record in Indonesia. It listed him as a citizen of Indonesia. People say Indonesian schools did not accept non-citizens at the time. This is the only formal record still public of his citizenship. http://www.daylife.com/photo/01u33pL9Ns06D
-- He mentioned a visit to Pakistan during college. Some say this was off-limits to Americans at that time, but accessible to citizens of Indonesia. The first US passport we know of him holding was as a US senator much later. Opening up his passport record and travel history could help this issue go away.
-- School records are all withheld. Other politicians regularly release their grades. Some question whether he received foreign-student aid. Opening up school records, as other candidates do, could clear up this issue.
-- Media coverage of the questions has severely distorted the issues. This sometimes happens spontaneously, but....
Just opening up the normal citizenship records, to the normal degree, would have cleared away all these questions long ago. Yet there is unprecedented opacity. An open forum on "open government" would naturally draw these as prime questions.
"Why is it taboo?" Because questioners are personally attacked. Ad hominem, not ad rem. Scary.
(And yes, it is staggering that opposition candidates, media, and even "right wing bloggers" would attack or distort such questions. But the questions themselves are simple, reasonable, and answerable. The implications are significant.)
To read a page you wouldn't need JavaScript, true. But PDF is also a predictable way to work with editable forms, and these include input validation and business logic.
"... i thought that they would atleast fix the major flaws in flashplayer by version 9 and im still with version 10 able to use the same exploits i used in flash 7."
Hi, if you think you know of an old flaw that no one has noticed, could you drop a note to the security team, please?
http://www.adobe.com/support/security/alertus.html
January 2009: "Cumulative shipments of Flash-Lite enabled cellphones hit an estimated 961 million units at the of December 2008, up 489 million units over the previous year. With a current run-rate of over 40 million new shipments per month, Strategy Analytics estimates that the 1 billion figure will have been reached by the end of January 2009." http://www.strategyanalytics.com/default.aspx?mod=ReportAbstractViewer&a0=4483&src=rss
The iPhone seems to have dramatically helped shipments of Flash Lite, by spurring other manufacturers to realize that "Experience Matters".
re: "If Gnash is too limited, stick to the minimum version of Flash that supports the feature you need...unless you're extremely advanced, that version should be available on all major platforms."
If you're going live in December, clientside support on "major platforms" should be up above 95% by then.
Last month's Player 10, with its pixel-manipulation and P2P and all, is already used on some early-adopter sites, but will be mainstream by next summer.
The interesting thing is mobile. Adobe Flash Player is now moving to a single coding profile across devices of all form-factors... there will still be profiles of device capability, but not of runtime codebase. The goal is predictable capability across all display screens. It will take time and work to get there, but it's a good goal.
"...if it the Flash format was open, documented and reimplementable..."
It is. But the third-party codecs Adobe licenses for redistribution aren't, so it's still hard to see how to get a functional clone.
The SWF format has been published for a decade, just like HTML. A few years ago reading rights were traded for the promise to not fracture Flash's distributed predictability, but by now that has loosened too. Here's a starting point: http://www.openscreenproject.org/
Actually, last I checked, Dreamweaver still makes more money for the company than Flash authoring tools do.
Adobe benefits from over-eager and unimplementable HTML specs with clashing proprietary runtimes from different browser makers. But folks I work with also think there's an advantage to providing a predictable, universal runtime, which anyone can rely upon without cost.
Yes, Linux folk did have an unusually lengthy gap back then. Worse, it coincided with the rise in YouTube popularity, so the gap was felt particularly acutely.
Video was added in Player 6. Player 8 was a massive re-architecture of the graphics engine. This was also due to include a re-architecture of the logics engine, but the latter was re-scheduled out into Player 9 timeframe. Rather than make a graphics-oriented Linux Player which would need to be rev'd in six months, the Linux Player went straight from v7 to v9. It was pain, but it's over now.
"If things can be accomplished with COMPLETELY open and free (as in freedom) frameworks and languages, why choose Flash?"
The key word in that sentence may be the first....;-)
(The original story seemed strange to me... many screenfuls of text, with the elevator pitch seeming to be "One particular JavaScript Framework will Rule The World -- *if* it's from Apple!" The weblogs didn't show much skepticism today, so I'm glad to see some realistic questioning here at Slashdot.)
jd/adobe
Slashdot Mirror
Troubleshooting tips here: http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2010/02/troubleshooting_player_stabili.html jd/adobe PS: Thanks, Stan!
"Flash sucks bleep on Linux, because Adobe apparently hates Linux or something. "
No, your assumption is mistaken... in fact, Linux is becoming more important to Flash over the next year, as smartphones and televisions introduce new configurations.
For performance which is slower than other machines, first try checking for background processes or browser chokepoints... that's easier than checking for hardware which creates the difference.
Then look into the Player betas, feedback process. If we can make your slowdown happen in the shop too, then we'd want to try to ameliorate that situation within the common Player, thanks.
jd/adobe
No, sorry, it was a little different... when Adobe Flash Player 10 was released last October it was Mac, Win and Linux, all 32-bit. Linux was the first to reap work on 64-bit addressing in a preview release at labs.adobe.com, but a few weeks later. More info at blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf .
jd/adobe
re: "As you can imagine, Apple, MS and Adobe are not really happy about this, as they obviously would like their patented technology to be used in HTML 5"
From what I've seen, folk at Adobe are pretty neutral about Ogg Theora. If it serves peoples needs, and if it enables more communication, that's all for the better. Anyone can already publish their own H.264 video though... most of the benefit seems to be for new video tools which could avoid license fees for high-performance codecs. Future licensing changes for H.264 are murky to me, hard to predict. Biggest risk seems to be Theora-only websites, but most everyone seems to be double-encoding.
Still, the more choice, the better... no problem with Ogg Theora here!
jd/adobe
I'm confused by that argument, in this situation... Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and more are all frequently used in web development. Can you clarify...?
tx, jd/adobe
"Granted the likelihood of that happening is slim to none..."
Thanks, for that.... ;-)
jd/adobe
re: "This year they decided to switched back to a Flash-based player ON OPENING DAY. Unfortunately, the new player doesn't work either, and in many ways was worse than the silverlight player, requiring additional installation plugins for HD capabilities"
The new video backend and distribution system (as well as the new client) were used throughout Spring Training. The biggest problem this spring was the installation of the separate NexDef stream manager, which was also a difficulty during previous seasons... overall the forums were much, much happier this year:
http://www.mlbsupport.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=3
Thanks for the link to the Huffington Post piece. It describes the Gameday Audio system, which is not the Flash video client or interactive display.
(For what it's worth, I had been impressed with the support staff at the MLB.com forums.)
jd/adobe
Taxpayers have repeatedly asked the candidate to establish his eligibility -- just the normal birth certificate, passport history, citizenship history. The campaign has repeatedly gone to court to have these requests dismissed on lack of standing. Seeing such normal citizenship documents hidden is unprecedented, particularly for a politician, but going to court to keep them hidden is the point which first caught my attention.
The citizenship questions are numerous and reasonable:
-- Obama's half-sister Maya also has a Hawaii Certificate of Live Birth, like the Kos/Factcheck document. She was admittedly born in Indonesia. (Hawaii COLBs are registrations, rather than actual hospital documents, and foreign births qualify.)
-- No record has been found of the hospital in Hawaii where he was born... no doctor, no nurses have stepped forward and said they were there. The birth announcement in a local newspaper listed an address, and neighbors say they don't remember such a family at that address. His sister Maya has claimed two different birth hospitals in Hawaii. The lack of witnesses is not conclusive, just strange. Releasing the normal documents would help clear it up.
-- The campaign's fightthesmears.com website still says that at one time he held British citizenship, which seems to conflict with the office's requirement for "natural-born citizenship":
http://fightthesmears.com/articles/5/birthcertificate
-- June 2008 an Associated Press reporter photographed Obama's school record in Indonesia. It listed him as a citizen of Indonesia. People say Indonesian schools did not accept non-citizens at the time. This is the only formal record still public of his citizenship.
http://www.daylife.com/photo/01u33pL9Ns06D
-- He mentioned a visit to Pakistan during college. Some say this was off-limits to Americans at that time, but accessible to citizens of Indonesia. The first US passport we know of him holding was as a US senator much later. Opening up his passport record and travel history could help this issue go away.
-- School records are all withheld. Other politicians regularly release their grades. Some question whether he received foreign-student aid. Opening up school records, as other candidates do, could clear up this issue.
-- Media coverage of the questions has severely distorted the issues. This sometimes happens spontaneously, but....
Just opening up the normal citizenship records, to the normal degree, would have cleared away all these questions long ago. Yet there is unprecedented opacity. An open forum on "open government" would naturally draw these as prime questions.
"Why is it taboo?" Because questioners are personally attacked. Ad hominem, not ad rem. Scary.
(And yes, it is staggering that opposition candidates, media, and even "right wing bloggers" would attack or distort such questions. But the questions themselves are simple, reasonable, and answerable. The implications are significant.)
To read a page you wouldn't need JavaScript, true. But PDF is also a predictable way to work with editable forms, and these include input validation and business logic.
jd/adobe
"... i thought that they would atleast fix the major flaws in flashplayer by version 9 and im still with version 10 able to use the same exploits i used in flash 7."
Hi, if you think you know of an old flaw that no one has noticed, could you drop a note to the security team, please?
http://www.adobe.com/support/security/alertus.html
tx, jd/adobe
Oh, is that a fact? ;-)
Actually, a forecast from even one year ago turned out to be less optimistic than facts would later warrant:
March 2008: "Adobe Flash Lite has shipped on over half a billion devices and with 150% growth over last year we expect to reach 1 billion devices by 2010."
http://www.flashdevices.net/2008/03/flash-lite-has-shipped-on-over-half.html
[Bill works at Nokia now, but worked at Adobe then.]
January 2009: "Cumulative shipments of Flash-Lite enabled cellphones hit an estimated 961 million units at the of December 2008, up 489 million units over the previous year. With a current run-rate of over 40 million new shipments per month, Strategy Analytics estimates that the 1 billion figure will have been reached by the end of January 2009."
http://www.strategyanalytics.com/default.aspx?mod=ReportAbstractViewer&a0=4483&src=rss
The iPhone seems to have dramatically helped shipments of Flash Lite, by spurring other manufacturers to realize that "Experience Matters".
jd/adobe
re: "If Gnash is too limited, stick to the minimum version of Flash that supports the feature you need...unless you're extremely advanced, that version should be available on all major platforms."
Actually, it's most practical to go with the H.264 version of Player 9, which 90% of consumers successfully installed into their browsers within its first nine months:
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html
If you're going live in December, clientside support on "major platforms" should be up above 95% by then.
Last month's Player 10, with its pixel-manipulation and P2P and all, is already used on some early-adopter sites, but will be mainstream by next summer.
The interesting thing is mobile. Adobe Flash Player is now moving to a single coding profile across devices of all form-factors... there will still be profiles of device capability, but not of runtime codebase. The goal is predictable capability across all display screens. It will take time and work to get there, but it's a good goal.
jd/adobe
"...if it the Flash format was open, documented and reimplementable..."
It is. But the third-party codecs Adobe licenses for redistribution aren't, so it's still hard to see how to get a functional clone.
The SWF format has been published for a decade, just like HTML. A few years ago reading rights were traded for the promise to not fracture Flash's distributed predictability, but by now that has loosened too. Here's a starting point:
http://www.openscreenproject.org/
jd/adobe
It's a browser dependency. The search term you're seeking is "WMODE". Some browsers allow compositing. Others don't. Others are quirky.
Mike Melanson has some info, current as of a few months ago, here:
http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2008/07/turkish_localization_also_wmod_1.html
Release Notes from today seem to say that FF3/Linux is supporting it well, although I'm not certain if that's for all Linux or just most:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.html#features_ocre
jd/adobe
Actually, last I checked, Dreamweaver still makes more money for the company than Flash authoring tools do.
Adobe benefits from over-eager and unimplementable HTML specs with clashing proprietary runtimes from different browser makers. But folks I work with also think there's an advantage to providing a predictable, universal runtime, which anyone can rely upon without cost.
jd/adobe
Yes, Linux folk did have an unusually lengthy gap back then. Worse, it coincided with the rise in YouTube popularity, so the gap was felt particularly acutely.
Video was added in Player 6. Player 8 was a massive re-architecture of the graphics engine. This was also due to include a re-architecture of the logics engine, but the latter was re-scheduled out into Player 9 timeframe. Rather than make a graphics-oriented Linux Player which would need to be rev'd in six months, the Linux Player went straight from v7 to v9. It was pain, but it's over now.
Flash/Linux has been an emphasis from the start:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000815054538/www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/alternates/
jd/adobe
The SWF file format specifications have been published for a decade. Just like HTML.
The sourcecode to the canonical implementation has not, just like most of the HTML browsers out there.
Adobe licenses high-quality video decoders from third-parties, so it's difficult to have an ideologically-pure Player.
jd/adobe
Most of the 64-bit work is still in the opensource Tamarin Project. You can still contribute, if you've got the chops.
http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2006/10/whats_so_difficult_64bit_editi.html
http://www.kaourantin.net/2006/11/spidermonkeys-relative-tamarin-joins.html
The "we'll maintain it for you" line has not particularly been borne out by experience.... ;-)
jd/adobe
"If things can be accomplished with COMPLETELY open and free (as in freedom) frameworks and languages, why choose Flash?" The key word in that sentence may be the first.... ;-)
(The original story seemed strange to me... many screenfuls of text, with the elevator pitch seeming to be "One particular JavaScript Framework will Rule The World -- *if* it's from Apple!" The weblogs didn't show much skepticism today, so I'm glad to see some realistic questioning here at Slashdot.)
jd/adobe
Hi, I see you feel strongly about this. But I'm not sure whether you're aware of running 32-bit browser plugins in 64-bit browsers via nspluginwrapper, and contributing to the Tamarin Project to move the just-in-time compilation and garbage collection to a 64-bit memory space. http://gwenole.beauchesne.info/projects/nspluginwrapper/ http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2006/10/whats_so_difficult_64bit_editi.html http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/ You can get what you want now, and contribute to getting what you want in the future. Useful...? jd/adobe