Flash comes with most browsers [not with Firefox, though I don't know why it always came with Netscape and I think it came with Mozilla before Firefox --- you might disagree, but I'm going to assume that if you're savy enough to install a new browser you can also install Flash].
Also, with Flash 8 (ok, new technology granted) there is a method to update the player without having to go to another website.
Yes, you're right, I did intend to say Google Maps.
I don't know why there's no search on Flash Earth, but the cool thing about it (besides overlaying both Google Maps and Virtual Earth), is the seemless transitions. Isn't one of the big bonuses to Ajax the end of the page-flicker? Yes, it's just scaling up the bitmaps and then replacing them with the other images when they load, but it seems less likely that you'll lose your place, as you can do with Google Maps.
Don't get me wrong, Ajax apps are cool, I just don't know when and why you'd want to use those techniques instead of Flash.
In Internet Explorer the XMLHttpRequest object comes from an Active X object, which is what Flash is in IE, an Active X object.
As far as an open source Flash Player the Free Software Foundation is now supporting GPLFlash, an open source Flash Player. ( http://gplflash.sourceforge.net/ ) A version of this project that plays older Flash files has been around since 2000.
Now I'm not saying that these are mutually exclusive technologies (Macromedia itself has put out some examples of them working together), but as someone who started out writing a lot of Javascript and moved over to Flash in part to escape browser incompatibilites, what is the technical advantage of Ajax as compared to Flash.
As far as I can tell, Flash is more accessible (they've built in hooks for this), and Flash uses less bandwidth. (It comiplies to a binary format.) There's an open source compiler (MotionTwin). Flash also seems to provide a better user experience. (Compare Google Earth to Flash Earth.)
I know everyone here doesn't like Flash because it's used for advertising, but people here talk a lot about how wrong it is to attack a technology because of how some people choose to use it.
So, seriously, I've been thinking about looking into Ajax some more, but right now I don't have a good reason to. Convince this Flash programmer that Ajax is a better solution.
Your characterization of college networks is innacurate. At the small private college I went to it was access via Vax in 1995, dorm room static IP's in 1996-97 and DHCP and the beginning of managed traffic by '98-'99. So, there were 1-2 glory years of free for all access, but as more and more students started owning computers that became impractical.
My friends at larger institutions got Web access slightly earlier than we did (well you could run Netscape over the Vax connection, but it was very slow), but I think they skipped the static-IP phase.
Surprising to the the purchaser, the parent. If you buy your kid a cops and robbers game and come home one day to see the game playing as a porno it would be a surprise.
This is potentially the death knell for the ESRB. They are quite explicit in their direction to companies submiting games - all content, regardless of how it is accessed must be submitted for rating. Indeed, I'm not even sure if the ESRB gets playable versions of the games, they ask for footage of the most extreme sex and violence in the game. (They have guidelines to let you know what's significant.)
The only enforcement power that the ESRB has is the promise that if you try to trick them they will refuse to rate your games. If they won't rate your game you can't use their trademarked logos on your games. If you don't have a ESRB logo on your game the major retailers will refuse to carry your game.
So, here's the problem. GTA 4 is going to come out sometime. When it does there will be huge demand for it. If these claims hold true, the ESRB has a choice - either refuse to rate the game, and risk undermining their authority if stores carry the game anyway (and stores have to choose if they want to sell the game themselves, or risk introducing their customers to the competition if they are forced to buy the game on the Internet), or rate the game anyway and lose the only enforcement tool they have. Either way you have a neutered ESRB.
Why do we care? Because just like the movie ratings, the game ratings aren't in existence to be a form of thought police - they're there to prevent the goverment from creating thought police. Right now creating and selling an unrated game means you don't have access to Wal-Mart; if the government was in control your unrated game would be banned outright. Goodbye indie game scene.
The ESRB itself is agnostic about what kids are playing at what age - they just want to make sure that no one goes home and is surprised by what they've purchased. If this report is true, that's one hell of a surprise.
I don't know if it's this way in all states, but I've been told that it is impossible to make a legal contract to commit an illegal act. So, you maintain personal responsibility for breaking the law and cannot hide behind loyalty to your company or contractual obligation because you cannot be compelled into action by any prior agreement.
The bad news for you is that 42 is most definitely in the movie, as it's in the trailer twice. (Time on the alarm clock is 7:42, and it can be seen in the stars near the end.) On the other hand, the books were already made into a TV and radio show, so it's not much of a secret, is it?
I posted this on a previous story, but now it's truly on-topic. I did a comic strip about this on Wednesday.
The thing that's galling about this is the amount of lip-service that EA has given in the past to supporting the video game ecosystem. They've maintained they don't want to be the only video game developer, they just want to be the best. However, as soon as they are faced with truly healthy competition, their response is to burn a lot of resources killing it off. EA was never in danger of losing the NFL license, and the ESPN brand carries less weight than the Madden brand in the football game market. They have mentioned some possible features with ESPN data-feeds, but to me this deal just feels like insult to injury.
I forgot to mention, I used to be the chief technical advisor to the head of a medium-sized video distribution and television production company. Momentum of adaption is far more important than technical merits.
I know it hurts eveyone who understands technology, but techical merits don't matter compared to the direction the market is already moving. To me, this looks like the symptom of a shift of market thinking. (Gizmodo does have a degree of influence, even if you haven't heard of it before.) Remember, management makes the final decisions, and they really like bandwagons.
Ok, I know this sounds naive, but get this: If we all decide right now that Blu-Ray is the winner, and we cling to that idea in spite of any future arguments then it will be the winner. The masses have spoken. We don't have to go through another period of format instability. It's a wonder of the Internet, a snap decision by millions.
The only people who won't like this are the people who are supporting the other standard, you know DVD-whats_its_name, you know- the losers.
As far as I can tell from reading those articles, all of those cases are of people being twice-registered or imaginary people being registered. That's the type of fraud that is easy to detect, and hard to exploit. It always seems to be a case of greed on the part of the individuals who are gathering registrations. (Though, this alone is enough to justify getting rid of paid registrators, if you ask me.)
No, what the case in Nevada is, is a case of tricking people into thinking they are registered, tricking them into thinking that if they show up to vote, they will be able to do so. When they show up to the polls on Nov. 2nd, however, they will be turned away and they will have no recourse - how can they prove what happened? The fact that it happened in Nevada, a battleground state that is only very marginally leaning toward Kerry means that this could be the difference in the election. This could get very ugly. I'm shocked that it isn't getting wider media coverage.
The basic theory of how Bush is ruining the economy is that the budget deficits & the growing international disdain for America (generated by the President) are deflating the economy by discouraging international investment in America. You might not think that international investment is very important to the American economy, but you just have to consider the trade deficit to know that it is. Afer all, by definition the trade deficit means that there is net a outflow of money in the form of direct commerce. If the trade deficit alone defined the financial landscape, America would spend itself into oblivion.
Fortunatly, that is not the case, foreign investment in the United States takes many forms (not just the purchase of American hard assets, but also of American securities, and currency), and often more than offsets the trade imbalance. One of the better theories on the 90's boom was that a weak international economy (compared to the US) + international respect for the only remaining Superpower + Clinton's fiscal responsibility all mixed together to create a bonanza of investment (so much, that we ended up with a crisis of bad investments, but that's another story).
That this flow of foreign money has been greatly reduced is, no doubt related to 9/11, but many would argue that the reduction is because of how we reacted, not because of the event itself. Our response was the beginning of an internatational disillusionment that continues to this day. The high rate of exchange between the Euro and the Dollar is a quick way to see the effect. The exchange is where it's at because of the balance of people who would rather hold their investments in the Euro vs people who want to hold their investments in dollars. There's even some evidence that Bush is actually directly pushing for this imbalance because he mistakenly believes that manufacturing is the core of the economy and is trying to boost that sector. To many, it would just be another example of how he's out of touch with reality. Anyway, I'm Am Not An Economist, but I am a Democrat, so take my analysis with the usual grain of salt.
>> Am I the only one who's wondering why it's only available via cell phone?
According to the site, this app is an extension of the fundrace.org website, which does let you input a zip code. The cellphone app just takes your current GPS coordinates and checks it against the same database. They aren't trying to sell the software, it seems that they thought it was a moderatly cool idea for a cellphone app and ran with it. Kudos to the devs.
Well, yeah, except I visited 3 other public museums Labor Day weekend, and none of their tickets had wording like that at all. It was also the only one of the 4 that didn't allow photography. (I can understand not allowing flash-photography, but not allowing any sort of recording device is somewhat unusual.)
Overall I enjoyed my visit, but their institutional attitude seems a little strange.
Strange, I just visted last weekend and was a little disappointed. The spherical video displays were cool, and some of the original cg work was passable (though, it seemed somewhat inappropriate since it looked lower-quality than the movies being represented). However clever some of the looping videos (including a big screen display of numerious famous ficitonal starships all passing within close proximity to each other)these aren't really good reasons to go to a museum-- all those things could have just as well been presented online.
The real reason to visit a museum for the artifacts, and on this level they sometimes impressed and sometimes were lacking. A number of items were not authentic props- there were replica lightsabers, a replica R2-D2, a reproduced Terminator - and these sometimes made the displays seem a little incomplete. On the other hand, they have lots of Star Trek originals: Patrick Stewart's Borg accessories, a couple dozen phazors, tricorders, Captain Kirk's chair. They had a lot of scripts and original manuscripts, as well as model spaceships... Actually, my disappointment might just be bitterness at the gift shop lingering - I just wanted something with a logo on it, and everything was wildly overpriced, I think the cheapest pen was $10... oh yeah, that and the wording on the back of the ticket rubbed me the wrong way, I believe it starts "This ticket is a revokable license..." - I shit you not.
Meh, I'd still go again, but if you're planning a trip, keep your expectations in check. I'm sure that as the years go on it will only improve.
As a more on-topic aside, the Sky Captain movie reminds me of my friend's comic that he's been working on for the past year or so. It's more of a traditional pulp thing, but what I've seen [that he hasn't posted yet] seems pretty cool (he just finally put up the first installment recently - I believe he'll be updating weekly): Captain Spectre and the Lightning Legion.
The fact that people who 1)grew up before video games went mainstream 2)are socially closed to games and 3)have never played games - don't like games shouldn't matter to people as much as this article proves it does.
Look at your culture, man! The fact that we're embracing interactive entertainment instead of passive narrative is something to be proud of. The people who tell you your feelings are not valid, the people who tell you that you are wasting your time, the people who don't view video games as a form of artistic expression DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT. Literally, honestly, they wouldn't know Grand Theft Auto from Super Mario Brothers. Stop worrying about it, and talk to your peers, not the establishment.
Much to the dismay of many of my designer friends, the last few development cycles for Flash have been focused on Flash as an application platform. Just take a look at their recent initiatives, Flex, Central - they're targeting the developer community.
Sad to say, lately their efforts haven't been going so well. Most of the people who are Flash programmers right now don't need new interfaces for creating Flash content because they're already acclimated to the old interface, and many programmers who aren't already in the Flash community aren't getting turned on by these changes to the tools because they already have strong opinions that they aren't open to changing. ("Flash is good for Strongbad, but why should I care?")
So, how do they attract more developers? By going where the developers want to go, to Linux. It might seem obvious here on Slashdot, but this is real leadership in the market in which they operate - let's hope it starts a cascade that turns into a flood.
I think you're right, they seem to be basing the fact that it's an "Ultra" completely off the fact that the Windows control panel says "NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra". The people on the message board post benchmarks, and they're all lower save for one - you can overclock the card slightly higher when it's running the Ultra's bios... w00t.
Hey, that's no joke. These voucher class action settlements are horrible for consumers. When I sent money to the effort to free the sources for Blender I used Western Union. A month or so ago I got a letter telling me that there was a class action suit against Western Union because when they were transfering money to other countries (Blender is based in the Netherlands) they were making a secret profit on the currency conversions. I was entitled to a settlement in the form of a voucher that could be used for future Western Union transactions. I'm sure this is a relevant settlement to somebody, but I have no plans to ever use Western Union again. The lawyers got rich, the company was forced to do unwanted promotional mailings (the vouchers are so small that they're more like coupons than a punishment) and the costs got passed on to consumers. Anymore, class action lawsuits seem more like oil speculation and less like civil justice.
Sad to say, but in the future, the only reliable port will be 80. All clients will have all ports except 80 blocked by default (right now this seems like wishful thinking!) and no one will open any other port (it will give them a scary security warning!), and even if they wanted to, they might be blocked from doing so by their ISP.
We're already seeing shades of this, but it hasn't reaced the majority of Internet users yet. Back in late 90's my company rolled out a product for schools that to be retooled when it was realized that many schools were firewalling everything except port 80. (They added a mini proxy server to the product that sent everything over 80.)
I have a friend that's a sysadmin for a medium sized insurance company - and they had all their internal applications break a couple weeks ago when a MS worm started bouncing around the Internet. However, the problem wasn't that they were using Windows machines (I think all their servers were AIX...)- the problem was that their ISP (the regional phone company) had blocked off the port that all their applications used because it was the same port that the worm used to get into systems. Last I heard, the phone company was refusing to ever re-open the port. (The phone compnay made the change without even informing anyone at the insurance company, everything just stopped working and from what I heard it took them a day to figure out why their data wasn't getting through. I believe they were resigned to changing all their programs to work on a different port.)
So, we've already come to the point where connections on other ports seem strongly subject to the winds of fate, and I see no reason the situation won't get worse. In most environments 80 is the only port that people would notice if it was blocked, and there are too many sysadmins out there who don't know any better. Right now, if I was developing an application that needed to communicate on the Internet, I would only trust that it could use port 80, and I wouldn't even bother looking at anything else. You can even see application enviornments starting to spring up now (Flash Central) where it's assumed that most applications will just share a port 80 connection.
It sure is a sub-optimal situation, but I don't know what can be done to stop the trend. Ironically, such a situation makes simple port-blocking firewalls useless because all applications will be running on port 80 anyway.
"At this time, the Target Request site only works with Internet Explorer (IE). It was developed and tested with IE 6 / Windows 98 SE and IE 5.2.3 / Mac OS X (10.2.6). It is impractical for us to make it work with every browser on every platform, due to the incompatibility of various browsers."
Standards compliant scripting or Flash, those should be the only 2 options for developing the client side for a web application. "IE scripting" shouldn't even be on the list.
Slashdot Mirror
Flash comes with most browsers [not with Firefox, though I don't know why it always came with Netscape and I think it came with Mozilla before Firefox --- you might disagree, but I'm going to assume that if you're savy enough to install a new browser you can also install Flash].
Also, with Flash 8 (ok, new technology granted) there is a method to update the player without having to go to another website.
Yes, you're right, I did intend to say Google Maps.
I don't know why there's no search on Flash Earth, but the cool thing about it (besides overlaying both Google Maps and Virtual Earth), is the seemless transitions. Isn't one of the big bonuses to Ajax the end of the page-flicker? Yes, it's just scaling up the bitmaps and then replacing them with the other images when they load, but it seems less likely that you'll lose your place, as you can do with Google Maps.
Don't get me wrong, Ajax apps are cool, I just don't know when and why you'd want to use those techniques instead of Flash.
In Internet Explorer the XMLHttpRequest object comes from an Active X object, which is what Flash is in IE, an Active X object.
As far as an open source Flash Player the Free Software Foundation is now supporting GPLFlash, an open source Flash Player. ( http://gplflash.sourceforge.net/ ) A version of this project that plays older Flash files has been around since 2000.
Now I'm not saying that these are mutually exclusive technologies (Macromedia itself has put out some examples of them working together), but as someone who started out writing a lot of Javascript and moved over to Flash in part to escape browser incompatibilites, what is the technical advantage of Ajax as compared to Flash.
As far as I can tell, Flash is more accessible (they've built in hooks for this), and Flash uses less bandwidth. (It comiplies to a binary format.) There's an open source compiler (MotionTwin). Flash also seems to provide a better user experience. (Compare Google Earth to Flash Earth.)
I know everyone here doesn't like Flash because it's used for advertising, but people here talk a lot about how wrong it is to attack a technology because of how some people choose to use it.
So, seriously, I've been thinking about looking into Ajax some more, but right now I don't have a good reason to. Convince this Flash programmer that Ajax is a better solution.
Your characterization of college networks is innacurate. At the small private college I went to it was access via Vax in 1995, dorm room static IP's in 1996-97 and DHCP and the beginning of managed traffic by '98-'99. So, there were 1-2 glory years of free for all access, but as more and more students started owning computers that became impractical.
My friends at larger institutions got Web access slightly earlier than we did (well you could run Netscape over the Vax connection, but it was very slow), but I think they skipped the static-IP phase.
Surprising to the the purchaser, the parent. If you buy your kid a cops and robbers game and come home one day to see the game playing as a porno it would be a surprise.
This is potentially the death knell for the ESRB. They are quite explicit in their direction to companies submiting games - all content, regardless of how it is accessed must be submitted for rating. Indeed, I'm not even sure if the ESRB gets playable versions of the games, they ask for footage of the most extreme sex and violence in the game. (They have guidelines to let you know what's significant.)
The only enforcement power that the ESRB has is the promise that if you try to trick them they will refuse to rate your games. If they won't rate your game you can't use their trademarked logos on your games. If you don't have a ESRB logo on your game the major retailers will refuse to carry your game.
So, here's the problem. GTA 4 is going to come out sometime. When it does there will be huge demand for it. If these claims hold true, the ESRB has a choice - either refuse to rate the game, and risk undermining their authority if stores carry the game anyway (and stores have to choose if they want to sell the game themselves, or risk introducing their customers to the competition if they are forced to buy the game on the Internet), or rate the game anyway and lose the only enforcement tool they have. Either way you have a neutered ESRB.
Why do we care? Because just like the movie ratings, the game ratings aren't in existence to be a form of thought police - they're there to prevent the goverment from creating thought police. Right now creating and selling an unrated game means you don't have access to Wal-Mart; if the government was in control your unrated game would be banned outright. Goodbye indie game scene.
The ESRB itself is agnostic about what kids are playing at what age - they just want to make sure that no one goes home and is surprised by what they've purchased. If this report is true, that's one hell of a surprise.
I don't know if it's this way in all states, but I've been told that it is impossible to make a legal contract to commit an illegal act. So, you maintain personal responsibility for breaking the law and cannot hide behind loyalty to your company or contractual obligation because you cannot be compelled into action by any prior agreement.
It's always been sort of a secret code...
The bad news for you is that 42 is most definitely in the movie, as it's in the trailer twice. (Time on the alarm clock is 7:42, and it can be seen in the stars near the end.) On the other hand, the books were already made into a TV and radio show, so it's not much of a secret, is it?
I posted this on a previous story, but now it's truly on-topic. I did a comic strip about this on Wednesday.
The thing that's galling about this is the amount of lip-service that EA has given in the past to supporting the video game ecosystem. They've maintained they don't want to be the only video game developer, they just want to be the best. However, as soon as they are faced with truly healthy competition, their response is to burn a lot of resources killing it off. EA was never in danger of losing the NFL license, and the ESPN brand carries less weight than the Madden brand in the football game market. They have mentioned some possible features with ESPN data-feeds, but to me this deal just feels like insult to injury.
Ok, this'll probably just get modded off-topic, but I just started a web comic, and did a strip about all the EA deals.
Warning: The site is 100% Flash, and initial feedback is that it isn't funny. Enjoy Slashdot!
What i'd need... ...is a book about how to get things started.
You mean like Guy Kawasaki's book, The Art Of The Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide For Anyone Starting Anything?
Now you have no excuses.
I forgot to mention, I used to be the chief technical advisor to the head of a medium-sized video distribution and television production company. Momentum of adaption is far more important than technical merits.
I know it hurts eveyone who understands technology, but techical merits don't matter compared to the direction the market is already moving. To me, this looks like the symptom of a shift of market thinking. (Gizmodo does have a degree of influence, even if you haven't heard of it before.) Remember, management makes the final decisions, and they really like bandwagons.
Ok, I know this sounds naive, but get this: If we all decide right now that Blu-Ray is the winner, and we cling to that idea in spite of any future arguments then it will be the winner. The masses have spoken. We don't have to go through another period of format instability. It's a wonder of the Internet, a snap decision by millions.
The only people who won't like this are the people who are supporting the other standard, you know DVD-whats_its_name, you know- the losers.
As far as I can tell from reading those articles, all of those cases are of people being twice-registered or imaginary people being registered. That's the type of fraud that is easy to detect, and hard to exploit. It always seems to be a case of greed on the part of the individuals who are gathering registrations. (Though, this alone is enough to justify getting rid of paid registrators, if you ask me.)
No, what the case in Nevada is, is a case of tricking people into thinking they are registered, tricking them into thinking that if they show up to vote, they will be able to do so. When they show up to the polls on Nov. 2nd, however, they will be turned away and they will have no recourse - how can they prove what happened? The fact that it happened in Nevada, a battleground state that is only very marginally leaning toward Kerry means that this could be the difference in the election. This could get very ugly. I'm shocked that it isn't getting wider media coverage.
The basic theory of how Bush is ruining the economy is that the budget deficits & the growing international disdain for America (generated by the President) are deflating the economy by discouraging international investment in America. You might not think that international investment is very important to the American economy, but you just have to consider the trade deficit to know that it is. Afer all, by definition the trade deficit means that there is net a outflow of money in the form of direct commerce. If the trade deficit alone defined the financial landscape, America would spend itself into oblivion.
Fortunatly, that is not the case, foreign investment in the United States takes many forms (not just the purchase of American hard assets, but also of American securities, and currency), and often more than offsets the trade imbalance. One of the better theories on the 90's boom was that a weak international economy (compared to the US) + international respect for the only remaining Superpower + Clinton's fiscal responsibility all mixed together to create a bonanza of investment (so much, that we ended up with a crisis of bad investments, but that's another story).
That this flow of foreign money has been greatly reduced is, no doubt related to 9/11, but many would argue that the reduction is because of how we reacted, not because of the event itself. Our response was the beginning of an internatational disillusionment that continues to this day. The high rate of exchange between the Euro and the Dollar is a quick way to see the effect. The exchange is where it's at because of the balance of people who would rather hold their investments in the Euro vs people who want to hold their investments in dollars. There's even some evidence that Bush is actually directly pushing for this imbalance because he mistakenly believes that manufacturing is the core of the economy and is trying to boost that sector. To many, it would just be another example of how he's out of touch with reality. Anyway, I'm Am Not An Economist, but I am a Democrat, so take my analysis with the usual grain of salt.
>> Am I the only one who's wondering why it's only available via cell phone?
According to the site, this app is an extension of the fundrace.org website, which does let you input a zip code. The cellphone app just takes your current GPS coordinates and checks it against the same database. They aren't trying to sell the software, it seems that they thought it was a moderatly cool idea for a cellphone app and ran with it. Kudos to the devs.
Well, yeah, except I visited 3 other public museums Labor Day weekend, and none of their tickets had wording like that at all. It was also the only one of the 4 that didn't allow photography. (I can understand not allowing flash-photography, but not allowing any sort of recording device is somewhat unusual.)
Overall I enjoyed my visit, but their institutional attitude seems a little strange.
Strange, I just visted last weekend and was a little disappointed. The spherical video displays were cool, and some of the original cg work was passable (though, it seemed somewhat inappropriate since it looked lower-quality than the movies being represented). However clever some of the looping videos (including a big screen display of numerious famous ficitonal starships all passing within close proximity to each other)these aren't really good reasons to go to a museum-- all those things could have just as well been presented online.
The real reason to visit a museum for the artifacts, and on this level they sometimes impressed and sometimes were lacking. A number of items were not authentic props- there were replica lightsabers, a replica R2-D2, a reproduced Terminator - and these sometimes made the displays seem a little incomplete. On the other hand, they have lots of Star Trek originals: Patrick Stewart's Borg accessories, a couple dozen phazors, tricorders, Captain Kirk's chair. They had a lot of scripts and original manuscripts, as well as model spaceships... Actually, my disappointment might just be bitterness at the gift shop lingering - I just wanted something with a logo on it, and everything was wildly overpriced, I think the cheapest pen was $10... oh yeah, that and the wording on the back of the ticket rubbed me the wrong way, I believe it starts "This ticket is a revokable license..." - I shit you not.
Meh, I'd still go again, but if you're planning a trip, keep your expectations in check. I'm sure that as the years go on it will only improve.
As a more on-topic aside, the Sky Captain movie reminds me of my friend's comic that he's been working on for the past year or so. It's more of a traditional pulp thing, but what I've seen [that he hasn't posted yet] seems pretty cool (he just finally put up the first installment recently - I believe he'll be updating weekly): Captain Spectre and the Lightning Legion.
The fact that people who 1)grew up before video games went mainstream 2)are socially closed to games and 3)have never played games - don't like games shouldn't matter to people as much as this article proves it does.
Look at your culture, man! The fact that we're embracing interactive entertainment instead of passive narrative is something to be proud of. The people who tell you your feelings are not valid, the people who tell you that you are wasting your time, the people who don't view video games as a form of artistic expression DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT. Literally, honestly, they wouldn't know Grand Theft Auto from Super Mario Brothers. Stop worrying about it, and talk to your peers, not the establishment.
Much to the dismay of many of my designer friends, the last few development cycles for Flash have been focused on Flash as an application platform. Just take a look at their recent initiatives, Flex, Central - they're targeting the developer community.
Sad to say, lately their efforts haven't been going so well. Most of the people who are Flash programmers right now don't need new interfaces for creating Flash content because they're already acclimated to the old interface, and many programmers who aren't already in the Flash community aren't getting turned on by these changes to the tools because they already have strong opinions that they aren't open to changing. ("Flash is good for Strongbad, but why should I care?")
So, how do they attract more developers? By going where the developers want to go, to Linux. It might seem obvious here on Slashdot, but this is real leadership in the market in which they operate - let's hope it starts a cascade that turns into a flood.
I think you're right, they seem to be basing the fact that it's an "Ultra" completely off the fact that the Windows control panel says "NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra". The people on the message board post benchmarks, and they're all lower save for one - you can overclock the card slightly higher when it's running the Ultra's bios... w00t.
Hey, that's no joke. These voucher class action settlements are horrible for consumers. When I sent money to the effort to free the sources for Blender I used Western Union. A month or so ago I got a letter telling me that there was a class action suit against Western Union because when they were transfering money to other countries (Blender is based in the Netherlands) they were making a secret profit on the currency conversions. I was entitled to a settlement in the form of a voucher that could be used for future Western Union transactions. I'm sure this is a relevant settlement to somebody, but I have no plans to ever use Western Union again. The lawyers got rich, the company was forced to do unwanted promotional mailings (the vouchers are so small that they're more like coupons than a punishment) and the costs got passed on to consumers. Anymore, class action lawsuits seem more like oil speculation and less like civil justice.
Sad to say, but in the future, the only reliable port will be 80. All clients will have all ports except 80 blocked by default (right now this seems like wishful thinking!) and no one will open any other port (it will give them a scary security warning!), and even if they wanted to, they might be blocked from doing so by their ISP.
We're already seeing shades of this, but it hasn't reaced the majority of Internet users yet. Back in late 90's my company rolled out a product for schools that to be retooled when it was realized that many schools were firewalling everything except port 80. (They added a mini proxy server to the product that sent everything over 80.)
I have a friend that's a sysadmin for a medium sized insurance company - and they had all their internal applications break a couple weeks ago when a MS worm started bouncing around the Internet. However, the problem wasn't that they were using Windows machines (I think all their servers were AIX...)- the problem was that their ISP (the regional phone company) had blocked off the port that all their applications used because it was the same port that the worm used to get into systems. Last I heard, the phone company was refusing to ever re-open the port. (The phone compnay made the change without even informing anyone at the insurance company, everything just stopped working and from what I heard it took them a day to figure out why their data wasn't getting through. I believe they were resigned to changing all their programs to work on a different port.)
So, we've already come to the point where connections on other ports seem strongly subject to the winds of fate, and I see no reason the situation won't get worse. In most environments 80 is the only port that people would notice if it was blocked, and there are too many sysadmins out there who don't know any better. Right now, if I was developing an application that needed to communicate on the Internet, I would only trust that it could use port 80, and I wouldn't even bother looking at anything else. You can even see application enviornments starting to spring up now (Flash Central) where it's assumed that most applications will just share a port 80 connection.
It sure is a sub-optimal situation, but I don't know what can be done to stop the trend. Ironically, such a situation makes simple port-blocking firewalls useless because all applications will be running on port 80 anyway.
"At this time, the Target Request site only works with Internet Explorer (IE). It was developed and tested with IE 6 / Windows 98 SE and IE 5.2.3 / Mac OS X (10.2.6). It is impractical for us to make it work with every browser on every platform, due to the incompatibility of various browsers."
Standards compliant scripting or Flash, those should be the only 2 options for developing the client side for a web application. "IE scripting" shouldn't even be on the list.