There are a few problems with your theory. 1. All of the music Apple sells is DRM free and any DRM'ed songs that anyone still has which they could not upgrade can be burned to CD and re-ripped.,
Having to burn and rip possibly dozens or more songs at a degraded quality is a disincentive right there. Also don't forget about all those movies & shows which would be virtually impossible to take with you short of breaking the crypto or ripping with a screen capture device.
2. Even if iPhone apps were DRM-free, you would not be able to run then on non-apple device anyway.
Not even the web apps?
While it probably isn't feasible in the short term many native apps could be made to run on some other platform with the appropriate clean implementation of Cocoa, LLVM etc.
Apps whether they be free or paid are the main part of the stickiness of the iPhone OS platform. Even ignoring the replacement costs, some apps would be irreplaceable on other platforms like Android because of the unique properties of the iPhone OS (multi-touch) and because many third party developers have not bothered with Android because of how poorly Google treats commercial software devs.
Commercial software devs are treated exceedingly well. They get an SDK without signing any odious terms & conditions, an SDK that runs on Windows, Linux and OS X. They get to choose to put their apps on Google marketplace, or somewhere else. They get to do pretty much anything they like without going through some arbitrary approval process that denies them at the last hurdle.
The Android store is biased in favour of free apps.
So what? Release a trial version for free and then unlock the functionality with a registration code. Or take the user to the marketplace entry to buy the full version. Or do what the likes of Gameloft are doing and don't bother with Android marketplace at all and sell direct from your own site. Or cosy up with a network operator and sell through their store. There are plenty of options, many of which send 100% of the revenues to the developer, not 70% as with Apple.
a) There is no such thing as "100% perfect" in software, and b) Android phones are perfectly fine as it is. Doesn't mean there is no room for improvement but there is nothing wrong with the implementations out there already. My HTC Desire does an excellent job as a phone.
The problem is a political one, not technical: Most Phone manufacturers don't thrust microsoft.
That's not true. Lots of phone manufacturers have released Windows Mobile based phones. The problem for Microsoft is that Windows Mobile is basically a legacy platform - the OS can directly trace its roots back to Windows CE / Pocket PC and the APIs reflect that. It's a ten year old OS and it's just too crusty and old school to keep up with the likes of iPhone or Android.
Hence the reason that MS have basically bisected Windows Mobile - the old UI is getting ditched and the new UI will be reimplemented from scratch with Silverlight & XNA. This should make it easier to write attractive modern apps & games and provide a platform for others to do so too. Unfortunately it also means version 7 misses functionality which was there in 6.5, particularly business functionality. Eventually they'll catch up but I wonder if it will be too late.
A second issue from a mobile phone manufacturer's point of view is what's in it for them to carry on with Windows Mobile? MS would have to make a pretty bloody compelling case for a manufacturer to use their OS instead of Android for example. At the very least that probably means giving manufacturers a cut of any advertising / store fees.
Assuming the tablet were equipped with a decent resistive touch sensitive screen then I don't see it necessarily as a loss. The student can write on the pad instead. It would have to be resistive because capacitive touch screens would be utterly useless in that regard.
I reckon OLPC tied their legs together by not releasing a commercial variant. Something using the same hardware but in a configuration that appealed to private use. VTech or someone could have sold a branded version in toy shops. OLPC could even have sold a configuration to adults. They would have made money to fund the educational version and also brought down volume prices.
But they didn't and Asus et al ate their lunch.
Now they have another chance with this tablet. Who wouldn't be interested in a $150 tablet if it were running Android or soemthing? I wonder if OLPC will seize the opportunity or whether history will repeat itself.
It's a fairly nice desktop environment, but it's obvious that the focus (for the desktop user experience at least) has always been eye-candy first and stability later.
And usability never. KDE 4.x is a dog's dinner of a user interface. There is too much going on, too many esoteric buttons & settings all mixed with the common ones. The control panel is particularly atrocious with a pseudo-Mac like front end giving way to dialogs with tabs with more dialogs with tabs and even trees of dialogs of tabs with more dialogs.
GNOME has had its own pratfalls and missteps (and may have more when GNOME shell turns up) but it puts usability first and foremost and the payoff is its continued popularity and continued dominance over KDE.
Clearly the point I made sailed completely over your head. Capacitive screens do not work on pressure, but on conductance. Just resting your hand on the iPad while writing would cause multiple points of contact and confuse the hell out of the device. Watch this review of such a stylus in action and see if the clue sinks in - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QSi59bMfWY. You would have to write without touching the screen, wear gloves or put some non conductive surface under your hand to take notes. Utterly impractical and completely stupid. Even if the problem of writing could be overcome, capacitive screens aren't very precise which means you have to write in large letters with thick lines.
Any sort of tablet device that expects to be used for note taking must support a resistive touch screen or some kind of hybrid resistive / capacitive screen.
The iPad uses a capacitive screen meaning your stylus would have to be capacitive also and your hand (which is also capacitive) resting on the screen would have to be ignored by the iPad. So what are the chances of that working? Of course students could hold the stylus while wearing non conductive gloves which would be enormously practical I'm sure.
This use scenario seems much more apt for an iPad, due to it's much heavier flexibility. But, only if proper applications are written to fit the student's needs better.
I don't see the iPad being especially more useful since students can hardly take notes like a two year old finger painting. Even attempting to type on the thing is hardly practical either, and certainly worse than using a regular netbook.
Apple is on a yearly release cycle (For both the major SDK and hardware) - while Android has new devices released every month, hell even more than that - and a SDK that is constantly evolving (Good or bad)
To highlight the issue Apple faces, T-Mobile is selling an Android phone for £100. That's a pay as you go phone (i.e. no contract) and its just one Android handset of many on the market. It it might not be the greatest phone ever but its a smart phone for £100 ffs.
If someone's budget stretches further there are Android phones from different providers, from different manufacturers, sporting different form factors, and featuresets. What they all have in common is the same core OS and a high degree of compatibility. None of this would matter if Android wasn't an extremely capable OS but it is. Some manufactures do a better job of extending it than others, but at the end of the day you can find some excellent Android handsets and things are only going to get better.
Flash Lite 4 is in the HTC Desire already. It works perfectly fine and provides a substantial amount of what the full Flash 10.1 would supply.
Point being Flash doesn't suck and if it did, it would be beyond the realms of science to think of ways to implement it in a less CPU intensive fashion, e.g. browser doesn't launch flash apps until you click on them, or only launches same domain flash by default.
That more or less sums it up. Newell has been whining about the ps3 for years and it appears to boil down to the fact it has its own way of doing things which doesn't happen to exactly match assumptions hardcoded into Valve's Source engine. I doubt it was a surprise that the PS3 didn't embrace DirectX...
So they treat the platform some unwanted illegitimate child, tossing the port onto some paid by the hour EA team and then whine even more when the lacklustre port doesn't exactly set people's hearts aflutter.
Now it seems his whines are more oriented at PSN and delivery. I'd love to see a console that implements a single DRM infrastructure but enables multiple online stores to sell games. But that platform isn't the PS3, or the 360, or even Apple's App Store. Perhaps he should be embracing Android.
Better yet, perhaps he should be putting money where his mouth is and cleanly separating Steam the service from Steam the online store. The reality is that Steam is as proprietary as anything he is complaining about.
It harms anyone in life sciences or otherwise who ELF decide to intimidate, threaten, attack, or otherwise cause actual harm or property damage. ELF are terrorists by any reasonable interpretation of the term and PETA have given material aid to them.
I want to write a game which involves beating animals to death in inventive and needlessly painful and prolongued ways. What licence do I use?
Why would I want to write such a game? Just to piss off PETA and its retards who anthropomorphize animals as ickle wickle bunny wunnies. Particularly sexy animals who'd they'd love all night long.
There are dozens of more deserving animal welfare organisations. Organisations like the RSPCA, Compassion in World Farming, World Wildlife Fund etc. who are too busy actually working with government, industry & individuals on real world animal issues to be arsed to launch cretinous publicity campaigns such as animal friendly software licences.
It seems that anyone capable of tampering with a quantum link (i.e. they know where the equipment and the cable are), it seems they have a simpler solution. Just "accidentally" run a digging machine through the link, or otherwise damage the connection and then just wait for the sender & recipient to use a less secure method of communication.
If you want radical improvements, go mess with Groovy. Java is a mature language with a mature feature set and doesn't change rapidly for pretty obvious reasons. The invokedynamic thing is anticipated by dynamic languages, but it doesn't stop you from using them right now if you want.
Groovy, Scala, Clojure (which I'd never heard of), Jython, JRuby, Beanshell etc. all say bollocks to that. Java 7 also delivers dynamic invocation which is likely to mean even more new languages will appear that utilise the JVM.
Wikipedia has always spats, disputes and disagreements that can be inflated into news but considering the number of people involved is that surprising?
I suspect that Fox & others like to pour hate on it because it's easy and cheap to do so. There is always someone with a a bruised ego (e.g. perennial cry babies like Larry Sanger) and with so many disputed articles, it's not hard to sensationalize some angle. In the case of Fox I think they are also motivated to pour hate on the site because (despite its flaws) does strive for impartiality, citation and a neutral point of view. It's also free.
First, how do you teach system-level concepts with those languages. I would grant you that you can learn the basics of programing, Python and Ruby would be fine (not Java since you can't express things procedurally if a problem requires so.)
And pascal & Delphi are hardly better. Most operating systems in recent memory have C interfaces so if your intent is teach system level concepts, why not do so through C or C++? Even as far as pascal is concerned, there are so many damned variants of it that just saying "pascal" is meaningless.
Second, what's wrong with Delphi, as a teaching programming language. It has many (if not all) the strengths of Pascal-like languages (Turbo-Pascal in particular) while at the same time introduces new programming concepts that did not exist when Pascal and Pascal-dialects were conceived (properties come to mind.)
I thought that would be obvious. It's proprietary, expensive, runs on a single platform and is effectively an evolutionary dead end. Python would be a far more suitable language if the aim is to teach on, or.NET provided that Mono was an option, or Java, or Ruby.
Delphi has been an industrial language (however, niche it might be), and Anders Hejlsberg, the chief architect of Delphi, is also the lead architect of C#. C# (the 3rd-4th most widely used programming language in industry) has a lot more immediate roots in Delphi than on any other C-syntax-like languages.
I'm aware of that, but in that case, why is this list recommending a legacy, dead-end language and not C#?
A teacher, on the other hand, is routinely expected to stay late in the school doing out-of-hours INSETs, and to take work home with them for marking and assessment, planning future lessons and producing any additional resources that may be needed. I would imagine that a fair number of them simply don't have the time to keep up-to-date learning new languages, and as a result a lobby group somewhere has insisted that older languages - whose runtime is still supported even on Windows 7 - be allowed. This is possibly also the rationale behind Pascal / Delphi being on the list.
I don't see why computer science teachers of all people should expect to use some 40 year old language in perpetuity when more modern languages are far more suitable and practical for teaching programming. I say "modern" although the likes of Java, Python, and even.NET have been knocking around for a very long time now.
I also think that schools of all institutions would appreciate the advantages of using a cross platform and free language as opposed to a commercial one. Software licences alone must be an administrative and budgetary headache.
Memory management is still important in languages like Java, C#. Concepts such as soft / weak references exist in these languages precisely because its quite possible to allocate more memory than is physically available. So teaching in a high level garbage collected language doesn't mean such concepts do not need to be taught.
I fully understand why C might be considered undesirable as a teaching language but their rationale for what languages to recommend makes little sense. Pascal/Delphi are recommended because they were "stable and was designed to teach programming and problem solving". Pascal may have been designed to teach programming but it's also been hacked six ways from sunday because it's 40 years old. There are dozens of variants of the language some with object oriented extensions (object pascal), some without. Which one are they referring to? How is pascal (in one of its guises) better for teaching than Python for example?
As for Delphi, it is a niche commercial product, one which has grown increasingly irrelevant with each passing year. What Delphi are they even talking about? The version that compiles native code or Delphi.NET? If the latter, how is it more "stable" than any other.NET platform? Why would they recommend a commercial programming language which runs on one operating system and costs a lot of money?
Other odd things. What is VB6 doing there? I can't think of any reason that VB "classic" should be used to teach anything. Not now, not 10 years ago. I'll give VB.NET a pass since it's basically a dialect of.NET so not especially better or worse than any other standard.NET language and you could write.NET with Mono. But why ditch C# and not VB.NET (or Delphi.NET)?
It just seems so horribly inconsistent. People setting the syllabus should be recommending, a modern, clean, free, cross-platform language. That means something like Python, Ruby, or Java.
I think this is just another case of a government reaching a conclusion and then ignoring results that don't concur with it. Maybe gamers are an "interest group" but only in the sense they are people most affected by a draconian and silly rating systems. They still represent the opinion of a large percentage and cross section of the general public across all lines of race, gender, sexuality, age and religion.
I believe the government is fudging and it's hard to see why exactly. Grown ups should be allowed to play grown up games if they so wish.
If the plugin draws a normal window, it should be able to run as fast as any other app, no? Why can mplayer display 1080p video without any problems and Flash stutters with QVGA resolution videos?
MPlayer can take advantage of some extensions that Flash can not. For example MPlayer can dump out video via X Video because most video content is in the YUV colour space. Flash works in RGB so it can't use X Video. Even if Flash is playing YUV video it has to be converted to RGB to be mixed with other graphical elements which in turn are sitting inside a plugin which may or may not be windowed. Flash does benefit from OpenGL hardware acceleration but as I mentioned, Linux hardware acceleration sucks. Even with hardware acceleration are caveats that it doesn't work compositing extensions like compiz.
This is a good article on the issue of video playback and flash.
BTW I sound like a Flash apologist - I'm not and I hate Flash ads as much as the next person. But I think it's fair to counter the "Flash sucks" arguments when there are plenty of technical issues imposed by various platform that deserve their fair share of the blame. It's more prevalent when discussing OS X, but as I hope the article makes clear, Linux is not absolved either. I think Flash works a lot better on Windows simply because the platform is a better host for it.
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Having to burn and rip possibly dozens or more songs at a degraded quality is a disincentive right there. Also don't forget about all those movies & shows which would be virtually impossible to take with you short of breaking the crypto or ripping with a screen capture device.
2. Even if iPhone apps were DRM-free, you would not be able to run then on non-apple device anyway.
Not even the web apps?
While it probably isn't feasible in the short term many native apps could be made to run on some other platform with the appropriate clean implementation of Cocoa, LLVM etc.
Apps whether they be free or paid are the main part of the stickiness of the iPhone OS platform. Even ignoring the replacement costs, some apps would be irreplaceable on other platforms like Android because of the unique properties of the iPhone OS (multi-touch) and because many third party developers have not bothered with Android because of how poorly Google treats commercial software devs.
Commercial software devs are treated exceedingly well. They get an SDK without signing any odious terms & conditions, an SDK that runs on Windows, Linux and OS X. They get to choose to put their apps on Google marketplace, or somewhere else. They get to do pretty much anything they like without going through some arbitrary approval process that denies them at the last hurdle.
The Android store is biased in favour of free apps.
So what? Release a trial version for free and then unlock the functionality with a registration code. Or take the user to the marketplace entry to buy the full version. Or do what the likes of Gameloft are doing and don't bother with Android marketplace at all and sell direct from your own site. Or cosy up with a network operator and sell through their store. There are plenty of options, many of which send 100% of the revenues to the developer, not 70% as with Apple.
a) There is no such thing as "100% perfect" in software, and b) Android phones are perfectly fine as it is. Doesn't mean there is no room for improvement but there is nothing wrong with the implementations out there already. My HTC Desire does an excellent job as a phone.
That's not true. Lots of phone manufacturers have released Windows Mobile based phones. The problem for Microsoft is that Windows Mobile is basically a legacy platform - the OS can directly trace its roots back to Windows CE / Pocket PC and the APIs reflect that. It's a ten year old OS and it's just too crusty and old school to keep up with the likes of iPhone or Android.
Hence the reason that MS have basically bisected Windows Mobile - the old UI is getting ditched and the new UI will be reimplemented from scratch with Silverlight & XNA. This should make it easier to write attractive modern apps & games and provide a platform for others to do so too. Unfortunately it also means version 7 misses functionality which was there in 6.5, particularly business functionality. Eventually they'll catch up but I wonder if it will be too late.
A second issue from a mobile phone manufacturer's point of view is what's in it for them to carry on with Windows Mobile? MS would have to make a pretty bloody compelling case for a manufacturer to use their OS instead of Android for example. At the very least that probably means giving manufacturers a cut of any advertising / store fees.
The amount of remakes of games should answer that question - no. Some people just like recreating old games.
Assuming the tablet were equipped with a decent resistive touch sensitive screen then I don't see it necessarily as a loss. The student can write on the pad instead. It would have to be resistive because capacitive touch screens would be utterly useless in that regard.
But they didn't and Asus et al ate their lunch.
Now they have another chance with this tablet. Who wouldn't be interested in a $150 tablet if it were running Android or soemthing? I wonder if OLPC will seize the opportunity or whether history will repeat itself.
And usability never. KDE 4.x is a dog's dinner of a user interface. There is too much going on, too many esoteric buttons & settings all mixed with the common ones. The control panel is particularly atrocious with a pseudo-Mac like front end giving way to dialogs with tabs with more dialogs with tabs and even trees of dialogs of tabs with more dialogs.
GNOME has had its own pratfalls and missteps (and may have more when GNOME shell turns up) but it puts usability first and foremost and the payoff is its continued popularity and continued dominance over KDE.
Clearly the point I made sailed completely over your head. Capacitive screens do not work on pressure, but on conductance. Just resting your hand on the iPad while writing would cause multiple points of contact and confuse the hell out of the device. Watch this review of such a stylus in action and see if the clue sinks in - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QSi59bMfWY. You would have to write without touching the screen, wear gloves or put some non conductive surface under your hand to take notes. Utterly impractical and completely stupid. Even if the problem of writing could be overcome, capacitive screens aren't very precise which means you have to write in large letters with thick lines.
Any sort of tablet device that expects to be used for note taking must support a resistive touch screen or some kind of hybrid resistive / capacitive screen.
The iPad uses a capacitive screen meaning your stylus would have to be capacitive also and your hand (which is also capacitive) resting on the screen would have to be ignored by the iPad. So what are the chances of that working? Of course students could hold the stylus while wearing non conductive gloves which would be enormously practical I'm sure.
I don't see the iPad being especially more useful since students can hardly take notes like a two year old finger painting. Even attempting to type on the thing is hardly practical either, and certainly worse than using a regular netbook.
To highlight the issue Apple faces, T-Mobile is selling an Android phone for £100. That's a pay as you go phone (i.e. no contract) and its just one Android handset of many on the market. It it might not be the greatest phone ever but its a smart phone for £100 ffs.
If someone's budget stretches further there are Android phones from different providers, from different manufacturers, sporting different form factors, and featuresets. What they all have in common is the same core OS and a high degree of compatibility. None of this would matter if Android wasn't an extremely capable OS but it is. Some manufactures do a better job of extending it than others, but at the end of the day you can find some excellent Android handsets and things are only going to get better.
Point being Flash doesn't suck and if it did, it would be beyond the realms of science to think of ways to implement it in a less CPU intensive fashion, e.g. browser doesn't launch flash apps until you click on them, or only launches same domain flash by default.
So they treat the platform some unwanted illegitimate child, tossing the port onto some paid by the hour EA team and then whine even more when the lacklustre port doesn't exactly set people's hearts aflutter.
Now it seems his whines are more oriented at PSN and delivery. I'd love to see a console that implements a single DRM infrastructure but enables multiple online stores to sell games. But that platform isn't the PS3, or the 360, or even Apple's App Store. Perhaps he should be embracing Android.
Better yet, perhaps he should be putting money where his mouth is and cleanly separating Steam the service from Steam the online store. The reality is that Steam is as proprietary as anything he is complaining about.
It harms anyone in life sciences or otherwise who ELF decide to intimidate, threaten, attack, or otherwise cause actual harm or property damage. ELF are terrorists by any reasonable interpretation of the term and PETA have given material aid to them.
Why would I want to write such a game? Just to piss off PETA and its retards who anthropomorphize animals as ickle wickle bunny wunnies. Particularly sexy animals who'd they'd love all night long.
There are dozens of more deserving animal welfare organisations. Organisations like the RSPCA, Compassion in World Farming, World Wildlife Fund etc. who are too busy actually working with government, industry & individuals on real world animal issues to be arsed to launch cretinous publicity campaigns such as animal friendly software licences.
It seems that anyone capable of tampering with a quantum link (i.e. they know where the equipment and the cable are), it seems they have a simpler solution. Just "accidentally" run a digging machine through the link, or otherwise damage the connection and then just wait for the sender & recipient to use a less secure method of communication.
If you want radical improvements, go mess with Groovy. Java is a mature language with a mature feature set and doesn't change rapidly for pretty obvious reasons. The invokedynamic thing is anticipated by dynamic languages, but it doesn't stop you from using them right now if you want.
Groovy, Scala, Clojure (which I'd never heard of), Jython, JRuby, Beanshell etc. all say bollocks to that. Java 7 also delivers dynamic invocation which is likely to mean even more new languages will appear that utilise the JVM.
I suspect that Fox & others like to pour hate on it because it's easy and cheap to do so. There is always someone with a a bruised ego (e.g. perennial cry babies like Larry Sanger) and with so many disputed articles, it's not hard to sensationalize some angle. In the case of Fox I think they are also motivated to pour hate on the site because (despite its flaws) does strive for impartiality, citation and a neutral point of view. It's also free.
And pascal & Delphi are hardly better. Most operating systems in recent memory have C interfaces so if your intent is teach system level concepts, why not do so through C or C++? Even as far as pascal is concerned, there are so many damned variants of it that just saying "pascal" is meaningless.
Second, what's wrong with Delphi, as a teaching programming language. It has many (if not all) the strengths of Pascal-like languages (Turbo-Pascal in particular) while at the same time introduces new programming concepts that did not exist when Pascal and Pascal-dialects were conceived (properties come to mind.)
I thought that would be obvious. It's proprietary, expensive, runs on a single platform and is effectively an evolutionary dead end. Python would be a far more suitable language if the aim is to teach on, or .NET provided that Mono was an option, or Java, or Ruby.
Delphi has been an industrial language (however, niche it might be), and Anders Hejlsberg, the chief architect of Delphi, is also the lead architect of C#. C# (the 3rd-4th most widely used programming language in industry) has a lot more immediate roots in Delphi than on any other C-syntax-like languages.
I'm aware of that, but in that case, why is this list recommending a legacy, dead-end language and not C#?
I don't see why computer science teachers of all people should expect to use some 40 year old language in perpetuity when more modern languages are far more suitable and practical for teaching programming. I say "modern" although the likes of Java, Python, and even .NET have been knocking around for a very long time now.
I also think that schools of all institutions would appreciate the advantages of using a cross platform and free language as opposed to a commercial one. Software licences alone must be an administrative and budgetary headache.
Memory management is still important in languages like Java, C#. Concepts such as soft / weak references exist in these languages precisely because its quite possible to allocate more memory than is physically available. So teaching in a high level garbage collected language doesn't mean such concepts do not need to be taught.
I fully understand why C might be considered undesirable as a teaching language but their rationale for what languages to recommend makes little sense. Pascal/Delphi are recommended because they were "stable and was designed to teach programming and problem solving". Pascal may have been designed to teach programming but it's also been hacked six ways from sunday because it's 40 years old. There are dozens of variants of the language some with object oriented extensions (object pascal), some without. Which one are they referring to? How is pascal (in one of its guises) better for teaching than Python for example?
As for Delphi, it is a niche commercial product, one which has grown increasingly irrelevant with each passing year. What Delphi are they even talking about? The version that compiles native code or Delphi.NET? If the latter, how is it more "stable" than any other .NET platform? Why would they recommend a commercial programming language which runs on one operating system and costs a lot of money?
Other odd things. What is VB6 doing there? I can't think of any reason that VB "classic" should be used to teach anything. Not now, not 10 years ago. I'll give VB.NET a pass since it's basically a dialect of .NET so not especially better or worse than any other standard .NET language and you could write .NET with Mono. But why ditch C# and not VB.NET (or Delphi.NET)?
It just seems so horribly inconsistent. People setting the syllabus should be recommending, a modern, clean, free, cross-platform language. That means something like Python, Ruby, or Java.
I believe the government is fudging and it's hard to see why exactly. Grown ups should be allowed to play grown up games if they so wish.
MPlayer can take advantage of some extensions that Flash can not. For example MPlayer can dump out video via X Video because most video content is in the YUV colour space. Flash works in RGB so it can't use X Video. Even if Flash is playing YUV video it has to be converted to RGB to be mixed with other graphical elements which in turn are sitting inside a plugin which may or may not be windowed. Flash does benefit from OpenGL hardware acceleration but as I mentioned, Linux hardware acceleration sucks. Even with hardware acceleration are caveats that it doesn't work compositing extensions like compiz.
This is a good article on the issue of video playback and flash.
BTW I sound like a Flash apologist - I'm not and I hate Flash ads as much as the next person. But I think it's fair to counter the "Flash sucks" arguments when there are plenty of technical issues imposed by various platform that deserve their fair share of the blame. It's more prevalent when discussing OS X, but as I hope the article makes clear, Linux is not absolved either. I think Flash works a lot better on Windows simply because the platform is a better host for it.