The USB spec says it has to provide SOME power, my guess is that it needs the higher power level (500 mW?) to charge, which the PS3 won't provide when off.
I don't like using my consoles for other things. I used my PS2 as a DVD player for years, but it wasn't as nice as a real DVD player, interface wise. I've used my PS3 once or twice as a Blu-Ray player, but the interface isn't as nice as a stand alone device.
The big reason the PS3 having Blu-Ray was so great was because the console cost $500 or $600, and a Blu-Ray player cost $400 to $700. It was like buying the Blu-Ray player and getting a console for free. The PS3 also supposed updated profiles that older hardware wouldn't.
But at this point, there will be $100 players this Thanksgiving. It's not a bad feature, but I'm not sure it would really move any additional XBox 360s.
It would increases the fees to make the thing thanks to licensing though. And like additional RAM, games couldn't take advantage of it without writing off all of the millions of units already sold, so the storage wouldn't be useful for games.
A separate little box (like they did with the HD-DVD player) would work much better, in my opinion.
Right, that's why they come with wall chargers. Sony thinks you should buy those separately, or leave your console one when you're not using it but your controllers need to charge.
Considering the thing uses soft-power like everything else, they could have easily identified the controllers and allowed them to charge when the thing was off, but they didn't.
It's just a stupid little decision they made. One of those things that seems to serve no benefit, but is a little paper-cut on the experience.
Apple isn't saying you can only use their ad service. You can use ANY ad service. They're just saying that ad services belonging to direct competitors in the OS/Hardware game can't collect some device demographics information. AdMob would have been able to, under this rule, if Google hadn't bought them.
This is actually an improvement over what they announced earlier this year. When they unveiled iOS4, they said no one could collect that data. They've loosened that.
AdMob says not getting that data will hurt their ability to place relevant ads. I'm not sure of that, but it could be true. It doesn't really matter to me, I don't care.
Most of the stuff I get off the app store is either free and adless (because the developer was just making something fun), or paid for (like most games I play) and thus has no ads. I don't like ads.
There is only one app I use with these kinds of ads in it, and I hate the app. I haven't found a replacement for it yet.
Should Apple get in trouble for this? I can see it. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this is called anti-competitive.
Do I care? Not really. I avoid apps with ads, so this doesn't really effect me.
I remember them. They called me quite a bit last year. It got to the point I started trying to figure out who they were.
They would call and tell me my car warranty was about to expire. I thanked one of them and asked which of my two cars had the warranty problem... and the guy couldn't answer and hung up.
The answer, of course, is that I don't have any cars/warranties in my name. Whatever he said would have been wrong, but I knew that.
They've still got WiFi, which covers a LOT of places. It covers my house, my parents house, my friends houses, my work, and many restaurants, hotels, and other places of business. Most of the places I use my iPhone, usually when I'm sitting around waiting for something, WiFi is often available.
For the rest of the time, yes, theres 3G. Someone (Engadget or Gizmodo) did some calculations the other day and found that it would take ~11 hours of streaming TV shows on Netflix to use up the 2G monthly allocation the new data plans have. That's for a normal computer, not lower resolution designed for mobile viewing.
They could get people to watch quite a bit of content without killing their bandwidth caps, especially if you pre-load it when on WiFi for on the desktop and then sync it to the phone (basically, as video podcasts).
I will agree that the fact that cap is there would make me have to think about watching content when I had to get it over 3G/4G/HyperPonyDataRadio, when I wouldn't have thought about it before.
Microsoft has the same problem. If you read The Old New Thing, you'll get a lot of stories over time about things that people start doing in Windows/DOS that weren't documented, that were private APIs, etc. But they had to keep them working because otherwise some really important program would break. Microsoft generally seems to try to keep that stuff working.
Apple is exercising control that Microsoft didn't have over Windows. Since Apple controls distribution, they can prevent people from doing these things, and save themselves hassle later.
Just because someone discovers that a specific microwave can also open their garage door doesn't mean that all new versions of that microwave should have to do that forever.
Apple (and Microsoft) never said "If you do this, it will work." Usually they say "DON'T do stuff unless we say it's OK, 'cause it will break."
Right. There are people that I empathize with, and from time to time I hear a really sad story that makes me mad someone had to go through something horrible or terrible, and I feel for them.
But sob stories work so well that the media loves to try to get you to empathize with people, deservedly or not, and that tends to make me crass about the "look at poor Mary... when [blah blah blah]" stories. Half the time it seems like it was just drummed up for ratings.
By the same token I'll run into people in my personal life who will complain or look for empathy about how tough their life is... when they don't really deserve it. "I married someone with an insane and jealous ex, who fights over custody, and I work a 40 hour week and have to find a new daycare and have a ton of homework to do for night school, my life is so hard." But they chose to marry someone with a difficult ex, go to school while they were busy with other things, work when they could take care of the kid (many people do have a choice.)
"I want everything without sacrificing anything" isn't a position worthy of empathy. "My husband got really sick and I'm stressed out and having trouble doing my job" is.
If you put yourself into the situation, it's hard to empathize with you. If you recognize your mistake and are trying to dig out, then we can talk.
The military participation thing is not only historically "normal", but considered to be self-sacrifice (the marketing of particular wars IS a separate issue!).
I've often heard the lack of forced military or civil service (a draft or something similar) as having been a detriment on society and empathy. After going through a war trying to save other people, or having to defend the guy next to you even if you think he's a jerk. How many people do you think would go around pointing guns at people and playing thug if they had spent some time shooting and defending people, understanding just how powerful a tool the thing is.
But you can easily grow up in a suburban house, without any real violence. And you can go through school without really interacting with poorer people or having to be humanitarian. You know what your comfy life is, and your friends comfy life. And you can go straight to college, and learn about how America has dominated many people and the military can be evil. Your parents can give you a car at 16, and keep you from having to face a touch teacher by yelling at them and making sure you're treated "fairly".
It's really easy for people to be isolated from sorrier conditions and situations where they would have go out of themselves and show empathy.
Instead, you can sit in your room with your own personal 32" TV and My Super Sexy Sweet 16 on MTV, and become a better person.
Personally, I have a hard time showing many of those people empathy. When a girl I went to high school with recked her 3rd car and her parents wouldn't buy her a new one, why would I empathize with that. She didn't deserve the first. She certainly didn't deserve the 2nd. Why should she get a 4th?
And when I'm being told I should empathize with someone who lost their license for drunk driving the 4th time and can't go to their job, or can't pay their bills because they can't afford that 8th kid they had because they wanted it with no thought to what that meant for the kid, I'm not terribly inclined to empathize with them.
I wonder. How much of this is people who can't empathize, and how much of this is people scoring lower because people aren't empathizing with people who probably don't deserver it?
How much was it worth to Apple's competitors (such as RIM, Samsung, Nokia, etc.) to find out that Apple's next phone had a front facing camera? That it had a flash? Getting an extra 2 or 3 months head start on that information could be very important. It could be the difference between their next models coming out with the same features, or having to wait an extra product cycle to match Apple's new features.
And that difference, those phone sales, could easily run into the millions.
It's one thing with an analyst says "I think Apple will do X". It's quite different when someone finds an Apple device that does X just two to three months before it will be released (based on Apple's summer iPhone release pattern).
I'd agree. I was quite impressed with Full Spectrum Warrior. You run your little squad of 4 guys around in Iraq (yeah, it had a fake name). But you'd run them around with tactical commands and you had to be really careful. One stupid move and your whole group had been taken out by and RPG. Forget to use cover fire and a guy is shot down and you have to go get him and drag him for the rest of the mission or back to the med truck at the start. The game was really a RTS/squad hybrid of sorts.
The game was developed for the military as a training sim, and made less punishing and realistic for civilians. If you dared (I didn't), you could put the game in full military mode which was much much more difficult.
It had a story, and it was fun to play, but it gave you a real sense of just how dangerous and hard that kind of anti-insurgency close quarters combat could be in a way that traditional FPS games don't.
That's why the FCC made this decision the way it did. Actually, it seems like a really fair decision to me.
They did not say Hollywood could cut the analog (or unencrypted digital) signal any time they wanted. DVDs will be the same, and your Comcrud DVR can't disable it's non-HDMI output when HBO plays Spiderman 2 or some other previously released movie.
This is only for movies that aren't available otherwise in the home, and only for a limited time. As Ars Technica said, this was designed explicitly so that you don't lose functionality. If you can watch it today, you can watch it next month and next year.
When Aladin 4: Jafar Gets a Haircut comes out next year, Hollywood can choose to put it on PPV in a way you won't be able to watch, but after 3 months (or when they release it on DVD/Blueray, whatever is first), they have to stop doing that, and allow you to watch it.
It only effects new content. Compared to what Hollywood has been demanding, this is extremely fair and reasonable. It's unnecessary and anti-consumer, but it's not that bad. Just like I now have to wait an extra 30 days to get some stuff from Netflix, you'll have to wait a little longer for some content.
Right, I meant the "let's have the button fly in from the left and bounce around" animation. True vector animation doesn't have a replacement yet. The canvas tag could theoretically do it, but I've heard things about it's speed and it's real drawing, not moving vector objects around like Flash so it would be much much more difficult to do.
Animated SVG should be able to do some of it, but since static SVG often doesn't work well in browsers right now, the animated version would be a pipe dream to try to use.
Most animation I see on the web on people's websites is things sliding around, pointless eye candy that showing/hiding/moving images could do. Take this VW site. A quick look makes me think quite a bit could be done with HTML, but it would be really complicated. I understand using flash for that. A few months ago a friend showed me a car company's web site (someone smaller, not one of the biggest 4 or 5) that just had an amazing video of an exploding (as in exploded diagram) car that seamlessly transitioned to let you click around to different models and they swung in and out and... I have no idea how you could do it in HTML.
But compare that with Toyota and Honda's main pages. Both have pop-up lists of cars that you can hover over to get more links. Toyota did it all with HTML, Honda used Flash. Honda has a little more animation, but nothing too fancy. So many companies just use Flash to show a little slide show of clickable images, like Gamespot does.
For these simpler uses, Flash is no longer necessary. Flash has enough abilities that it (or something like it) will always have a place. But the "we need to use Flash here" bar is much higher than browsing many popular sites would have you believe.
I agree that's Steve's way of doing it: it should be on the app store. Maybe if Flash were available, most of the web games would make themselves work well with touch interfaces, but the early experiences when you suddenly get all these new free games and almost none play well wouldn't be a good experience for customers until many games got updated.
Perhaps Android getting Flash will fix the interface problems (since devs will make their games work with it), then the issue won't matter as much.
I think games are the real issue, so all this argument over whether Flash is good at video or how Apple wouldn't let Adobe accelerate video is just kind of... odd. It's a red herring. I don't care if the App store has more "push button to make sounds" apps, no matter what language they're written in. If you make a financial tracker, I'd like it to act like an iPhone app, but a developer who cared enough could probably do that in Flash.
The first is video. Flash is not needed for video. It became the standard because it could do things the object tag couldn't, but it's not needed. The video tag does what most users need, and people will figure out ways to do the rest. For most users (who just want to see Hulu/Vimeo/YouTube/whatever), the video tag will be all they need. Flash isn't necessary here for most users (especially mobile).
The second is animations. There are some very impressive things done in HTML5 and JS, and most of the stuff I see on the web done with flash could be done in HTML5 (or really just needs a redesign). Very few sites do more than make objects show and hide and move around. iPhone users don't need a special plugin to use terrible interfaces, they should be made in HTML5 or have a simplified version available. So Flash isn't necessary here for most users, especially mobile.
Games are the best argument for flash, it's the standard and works well (when the programers know what they're doing and don't code an idle loop to use 100% CPU). Steve Jobs is right that a great many of these wouldn't work on the iPhone because of the keyboard and mouse expectations that can't be translated. Native code would work better, and being able to get to farmville but having a horrible time trying to play it would make iPhone users mad.
Games is the best reason Adobe has, I'd like to be able to play 'em on my iPhone some times. Steve is right that it's better for most users that the games get made for the device instead of trying to rejigger the interface.
Apple's policy has always been (as far as I know), you can virtualize OS X all you want, but you have to have Apple hardware. I thought you had to have OS X Server as the host OS, but I guess that wasn't the case.
But he's not denying Flash apps in the app store because they're not open while being closed himself. That would be hypocritical.
The real reason is the last one he gives: stuff made through Flash is made to the lowest common denominator between mobile platforms. That's why people want to use Flash to write things: multiple platforms. They'll have to wait for Flash to support newNeatFeatureX before they can use it, and Steve doesn't want that.
The other points (like openness) are there to rebut Adobe's "We're open, everywhere, and necessary" argument. They're not open the way HTML/JS/CSS is. Remember you can make anything you want for the iPhone, no matter how pornographic, if you make it via the web. It's only applications that get restricted. The web is open to anything.
Flash is a standard. There are projects that try to implement it (like gnash, if I've got the name right). But the problem is that's just like Wine or ReactOS: you're always chasing the pack leader. When Flash 11 comes out with neatNewFeatureX, you have to scramble to try to implement it and make it work well while many people see broken content. And since it may have taken Adobe with all their engineers 3+ years to make that feature perform well, as someone making an alternate implementation, you're going to be quite behind.
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That's what I do, plug it into my laptop.
The USB spec says it has to provide SOME power, my guess is that it needs the higher power level (500 mW?) to charge, which the PS3 won't provide when off.
Does Blu-Ray matter at this point?
I don't like using my consoles for other things. I used my PS2 as a DVD player for years, but it wasn't as nice as a real DVD player, interface wise. I've used my PS3 once or twice as a Blu-Ray player, but the interface isn't as nice as a stand alone device.
The big reason the PS3 having Blu-Ray was so great was because the console cost $500 or $600, and a Blu-Ray player cost $400 to $700. It was like buying the Blu-Ray player and getting a console for free. The PS3 also supposed updated profiles that older hardware wouldn't.
But at this point, there will be $100 players this Thanksgiving. It's not a bad feature, but I'm not sure it would really move any additional XBox 360s.
It would increases the fees to make the thing thanks to licensing though. And like additional RAM, games couldn't take advantage of it without writing off all of the millions of units already sold, so the storage wouldn't be useful for games.
A separate little box (like they did with the HD-DVD player) would work much better, in my opinion.
Right, that's why they come with wall chargers. Sony thinks you should buy those separately, or leave your console one when you're not using it but your controllers need to charge.
Considering the thing uses soft-power like everything else, they could have easily identified the controllers and allowed them to charge when the thing was off, but they didn't.
It's just a stupid little decision they made. One of those things that seems to serve no benefit, but is a little paper-cut on the experience.
Yes, but due to a touch of brilliance, the controllers won't charge if the console isn't on.
Actually, 40% for the ads.
Apple isn't saying you can only use their ad service. You can use ANY ad service. They're just saying that ad services belonging to direct competitors in the OS/Hardware game can't collect some device demographics information. AdMob would have been able to, under this rule, if Google hadn't bought them.
This is actually an improvement over what they announced earlier this year. When they unveiled iOS4, they said no one could collect that data. They've loosened that.
AdMob says not getting that data will hurt their ability to place relevant ads. I'm not sure of that, but it could be true. It doesn't really matter to me, I don't care.
Most of the stuff I get off the app store is either free and adless (because the developer was just making something fun), or paid for (like most games I play) and thus has no ads. I don't like ads.
There is only one app I use with these kinds of ads in it, and I hate the app. I haven't found a replacement for it yet.
Should Apple get in trouble for this? I can see it. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this is called anti-competitive.
Do I care? Not really. I avoid apps with ads, so this doesn't really effect me.
I remember them. They called me quite a bit last year. It got to the point I started trying to figure out who they were.
They would call and tell me my car warranty was about to expire. I thanked one of them and asked which of my two cars had the warranty problem... and the guy couldn't answer and hung up.
The answer, of course, is that I don't have any cars/warranties in my name. Whatever he said would have been wrong, but I knew that.
I reported them a couple of times to the FCC.
They've still got WiFi, which covers a LOT of places. It covers my house, my parents house, my friends houses, my work, and many restaurants, hotels, and other places of business. Most of the places I use my iPhone, usually when I'm sitting around waiting for something, WiFi is often available.
For the rest of the time, yes, theres 3G. Someone (Engadget or Gizmodo) did some calculations the other day and found that it would take ~11 hours of streaming TV shows on Netflix to use up the 2G monthly allocation the new data plans have. That's for a normal computer, not lower resolution designed for mobile viewing.
They could get people to watch quite a bit of content without killing their bandwidth caps, especially if you pre-load it when on WiFi for on the desktop and then sync it to the phone (basically, as video podcasts).
I will agree that the fact that cap is there would make me have to think about watching content when I had to get it over 3G/4G/HyperPonyDataRadio, when I wouldn't have thought about it before.
Microsoft has the same problem. If you read The Old New Thing, you'll get a lot of stories over time about things that people start doing in Windows/DOS that weren't documented, that were private APIs, etc. But they had to keep them working because otherwise some really important program would break. Microsoft generally seems to try to keep that stuff working.
Apple is exercising control that Microsoft didn't have over Windows. Since Apple controls distribution, they can prevent people from doing these things, and save themselves hassle later.
Just because someone discovers that a specific microwave can also open their garage door doesn't mean that all new versions of that microwave should have to do that forever.
Apple (and Microsoft) never said "If you do this, it will work." Usually they say "DON'T do stuff unless we say it's OK, 'cause it will break."
Apple just has a chance to force the issue.
OMG. Don't you have any empathy for the poor beans?
Suggesting people eat them.... just.... wow.
Right. There are people that I empathize with, and from time to time I hear a really sad story that makes me mad someone had to go through something horrible or terrible, and I feel for them.
But sob stories work so well that the media loves to try to get you to empathize with people, deservedly or not, and that tends to make me crass about the "look at poor Mary... when [blah blah blah]" stories. Half the time it seems like it was just drummed up for ratings.
By the same token I'll run into people in my personal life who will complain or look for empathy about how tough their life is... when they don't really deserve it. "I married someone with an insane and jealous ex, who fights over custody, and I work a 40 hour week and have to find a new daycare and have a ton of homework to do for night school, my life is so hard." But they chose to marry someone with a difficult ex, go to school while they were busy with other things, work when they could take care of the kid (many people do have a choice.)
"I want everything without sacrificing anything" isn't a position worthy of empathy. "My husband got really sick and I'm stressed out and having trouble doing my job" is.
If you put yourself into the situation, it's hard to empathize with you. If you recognize your mistake and are trying to dig out, then we can talk.
I've often heard the lack of forced military or civil service (a draft or something similar) as having been a detriment on society and empathy. After going through a war trying to save other people, or having to defend the guy next to you even if you think he's a jerk. How many people do you think would go around pointing guns at people and playing thug if they had spent some time shooting and defending people, understanding just how powerful a tool the thing is.
But you can easily grow up in a suburban house, without any real violence. And you can go through school without really interacting with poorer people or having to be humanitarian. You know what your comfy life is, and your friends comfy life. And you can go straight to college, and learn about how America has dominated many people and the military can be evil. Your parents can give you a car at 16, and keep you from having to face a touch teacher by yelling at them and making sure you're treated "fairly".
It's really easy for people to be isolated from sorrier conditions and situations where they would have go out of themselves and show empathy.
Instead, you can sit in your room with your own personal 32" TV and My Super Sexy Sweet 16 on MTV, and become a better person.
Personally, I have a hard time showing many of those people empathy. When a girl I went to high school with recked her 3rd car and her parents wouldn't buy her a new one, why would I empathize with that. She didn't deserve the first. She certainly didn't deserve the 2nd. Why should she get a 4th?
And when I'm being told I should empathize with someone who lost their license for drunk driving the 4th time and can't go to their job, or can't pay their bills because they can't afford that 8th kid they had because they wanted it with no thought to what that meant for the kid, I'm not terribly inclined to empathize with them.
I wonder. How much of this is people who can't empathize, and how much of this is people scoring lower because people aren't empathizing with people who probably don't deserver it?
That doesn't mean the carriers have to expose that to us meager peons, or price services in a way that reflects that fact.
How much was it worth to Apple's competitors (such as RIM, Samsung, Nokia, etc.) to find out that Apple's next phone had a front facing camera? That it had a flash? Getting an extra 2 or 3 months head start on that information could be very important. It could be the difference between their next models coming out with the same features, or having to wait an extra product cycle to match Apple's new features.
And that difference, those phone sales, could easily run into the millions.
It's one thing with an analyst says "I think Apple will do X". It's quite different when someone finds an Apple device that does X just two to three months before it will be released (based on Apple's summer iPhone release pattern).
Too bad you didn't keep reading. Here's how he made a copy of the phone:
If he introduced it as a law, it wasn't illegal when he did it, right?
I'd agree. I was quite impressed with Full Spectrum Warrior. You run your little squad of 4 guys around in Iraq (yeah, it had a fake name). But you'd run them around with tactical commands and you had to be really careful. One stupid move and your whole group had been taken out by and RPG. Forget to use cover fire and a guy is shot down and you have to go get him and drag him for the rest of the mission or back to the med truck at the start. The game was really a RTS/squad hybrid of sorts.
The game was developed for the military as a training sim, and made less punishing and realistic for civilians. If you dared (I didn't), you could put the game in full military mode which was much much more difficult.
It had a story, and it was fun to play, but it gave you a real sense of just how dangerous and hard that kind of anti-insurgency close quarters combat could be in a way that traditional FPS games don't.
That's why the FCC made this decision the way it did. Actually, it seems like a really fair decision to me.
They did not say Hollywood could cut the analog (or unencrypted digital) signal any time they wanted. DVDs will be the same, and your Comcrud DVR can't disable it's non-HDMI output when HBO plays Spiderman 2 or some other previously released movie.
This is only for movies that aren't available otherwise in the home, and only for a limited time. As Ars Technica said, this was designed explicitly so that you don't lose functionality. If you can watch it today, you can watch it next month and next year.
When Aladin 4: Jafar Gets a Haircut comes out next year, Hollywood can choose to put it on PPV in a way you won't be able to watch, but after 3 months (or when they release it on DVD/Blueray, whatever is first), they have to stop doing that, and allow you to watch it.
It only effects new content. Compared to what Hollywood has been demanding, this is extremely fair and reasonable. It's unnecessary and anti-consumer, but it's not that bad. Just like I now have to wait an extra 30 days to get some stuff from Netflix, you'll have to wait a little longer for some content.
Right, I meant the "let's have the button fly in from the left and bounce around" animation. True vector animation doesn't have a replacement yet. The canvas tag could theoretically do it, but I've heard things about it's speed and it's real drawing, not moving vector objects around like Flash so it would be much much more difficult to do.
Animated SVG should be able to do some of it, but since static SVG often doesn't work well in browsers right now, the animated version would be a pipe dream to try to use.
Most animation I see on the web on people's websites is things sliding around, pointless eye candy that showing/hiding/moving images could do. Take this VW site. A quick look makes me think quite a bit could be done with HTML, but it would be really complicated. I understand using flash for that. A few months ago a friend showed me a car company's web site (someone smaller, not one of the biggest 4 or 5) that just had an amazing video of an exploding (as in exploded diagram) car that seamlessly transitioned to let you click around to different models and they swung in and out and... I have no idea how you could do it in HTML.
But compare that with Toyota and Honda's main pages. Both have pop-up lists of cars that you can hover over to get more links. Toyota did it all with HTML, Honda used Flash. Honda has a little more animation, but nothing too fancy. So many companies just use Flash to show a little slide show of clickable images, like Gamespot does.
For these simpler uses, Flash is no longer necessary. Flash has enough abilities that it (or something like it) will always have a place. But the "we need to use Flash here" bar is much higher than browsing many popular sites would have you believe.
I agree that's Steve's way of doing it: it should be on the app store. Maybe if Flash were available, most of the web games would make themselves work well with touch interfaces, but the early experiences when you suddenly get all these new free games and almost none play well wouldn't be a good experience for customers until many games got updated.
Perhaps Android getting Flash will fix the interface problems (since devs will make their games work with it), then the issue won't matter as much.
I think games are the real issue, so all this argument over whether Flash is good at video or how Apple wouldn't let Adobe accelerate video is just kind of... odd. It's a red herring. I don't care if the App store has more "push button to make sounds" apps, no matter what language they're written in. If you make a financial tracker, I'd like it to act like an iPhone app, but a developer who cared enough could probably do that in Flash.
But games have become big business.
Flash only has three big uses on the web.
The first is video. Flash is not needed for video. It became the standard because it could do things the object tag couldn't, but it's not needed. The video tag does what most users need, and people will figure out ways to do the rest. For most users (who just want to see Hulu/Vimeo/YouTube/whatever), the video tag will be all they need. Flash isn't necessary here for most users (especially mobile).
The second is animations. There are some very impressive things done in HTML5 and JS, and most of the stuff I see on the web done with flash could be done in HTML5 (or really just needs a redesign). Very few sites do more than make objects show and hide and move around. iPhone users don't need a special plugin to use terrible interfaces, they should be made in HTML5 or have a simplified version available. So Flash isn't necessary here for most users, especially mobile.
Games are the best argument for flash, it's the standard and works well (when the programers know what they're doing and don't code an idle loop to use 100% CPU). Steve Jobs is right that a great many of these wouldn't work on the iPhone because of the keyboard and mouse expectations that can't be translated. Native code would work better, and being able to get to farmville but having a horrible time trying to play it would make iPhone users mad.
Games is the best reason Adobe has, I'd like to be able to play 'em on my iPhone some times. Steve is right that it's better for most users that the games get made for the device instead of trying to rejigger the interface.
Apple's policy has always been (as far as I know), you can virtualize OS X all you want, but you have to have Apple hardware. I thought you had to have OS X Server as the host OS, but I guess that wasn't the case.
But he's not denying Flash apps in the app store because they're not open while being closed himself. That would be hypocritical.
The real reason is the last one he gives: stuff made through Flash is made to the lowest common denominator between mobile platforms. That's why people want to use Flash to write things: multiple platforms. They'll have to wait for Flash to support newNeatFeatureX before they can use it, and Steve doesn't want that.
The other points (like openness) are there to rebut Adobe's "We're open, everywhere, and necessary" argument. They're not open the way HTML/JS/CSS is. Remember you can make anything you want for the iPhone, no matter how pornographic, if you make it via the web. It's only applications that get restricted. The web is open to anything.
Flash is a standard. There are projects that try to implement it (like gnash, if I've got the name right). But the problem is that's just like Wine or ReactOS: you're always chasing the pack leader. When Flash 11 comes out with neatNewFeatureX, you have to scramble to try to implement it and make it work well while many people see broken content. And since it may have taken Adobe with all their engineers 3+ years to make that feature perform well, as someone making an alternate implementation, you're going to be quite behind.
THEY DIDN'T SEARCH HIS HOME, they said a collection of words from his doorstep when his door was (probably) open.
The police did search, with a warrant. Apple (according to you), only asked to. That's not wrong in any way.
Also, uncommonness is not a good way to measure things. Just because you're the lone voice in the wilderness doesn't make you wrong.
I just don't understand your position. What's so horrible about being asked something? That seems overly sensitive.