Flash has definitely outlived its usefulness. It was cool back in 2000, remember all the amazing flash animations that made sites like Albinoblacksheep and Newgrounds popular ? Good stuff, but "Napster Bad" was released 11 years ago ffs. That's like a century in internet years. Since then Flash has been abused for everything from atrocious "mystery meat navigation" type websites to obnoxious ads. We can do better now, it has outlived its usefulness and we should let it die already.
Selling music doesn't help Google's bottom line, which is 96% advertising revenue, though. If curtailing Apple's dominance is all they're after an alliance with the Amazon MP3 store would make more sense. Then it'd be Android + Amazon vs iOS + iTunes. The way Apple has been trying to move into ebooks Amazon might welcome it.
Why would it be a bad thing for them to (sorry) take a bite out of Apple? Apple has done nothing but bad lately.
Not in the music biz they haven't. Apple's been able to force the traditional music companies into making concessions and IMHO has been a pretty positive force for modernization from a consumer perspective.
Which industry? Music or computing? How does one qualify a low-blow?
The music biz, and a low blow would be something like locking Apple out of catalogues through pricing or by just not allowing them on iTunes. Apple's the one who for the large part made buying music on the net legit, popular and reasonably priced through the iTunes store. If Google moved in to the music business and they started to feud, carrying the fight from the computing industry over into the music business, it would strengthen the position of the traditional music companies that Apple has succeeded to cow into making concessions. That wouldn't be good for consumers I think.
I don't know of the CDBaby story. I googled it and it just came up with a one-sided story by the CDBaby founder, 7 years after the fact. I'm not saying it didn't happen that way, there's a ton of stories like that and Jobs can certainly be a ruthless bastard, but anyway it worked out OK for them in the end it seems.
They could buy one major and lead by example. It'd probably be all that's needed to drag them all into the 21th century. I'm not sure I'd trust Google not to use the opportunity to take a low blow at Apple though and that's one thing the industry doesn't need.
Which is also not the default, Skype set them this way on purpose. According to a comment in TFA, they use some native libraries to access those DBs that run under a different user than the app does because they are trying to obsfucate the Skype protocol. I'm not sure how true all that it but it seems logical/feasible enough.
Sounds like the sort of behavior that would cause Apple to exclude it from their AppStore. Of course, that would be evil, right ?
Or indeed the incomparable mr Paxman, as seen here in his interview with (then) PM Tony Blair. I would pay good money to see him grill some US politicians. Could you imagine the US press talking like this to a sitting US president ?
"Late in 1985, Commodore released to the European market a new version of the C128 with a redesigned chassis. Called the Commodore 128D, this new European model featured a plastic chassis with a carrying handle on the side, incorporated a 1571 disk drive into the main chassis, replaced the built-in keyboard with a detachable one, and added a cooling fan. The keyboard featured two folding legs for changing the typing angle."
I'm european so that explains why I didn't see the integrated keyboard c128. If you wait long enough you become nostalgic about everything, even the bad stuff:-)
Why should I settle for LESS when I leave the "desktop"?
This is all about Apple Fanboys trying to make lame excuses that they would laugh at themselves if they came from Linux users.
Why settle for less CPU power or less RAM ? It's the limitations of the platform. Flash is infamous for bringing desktops to its knees, why would you expect it to fare better on much more limited resources ? Hey I hope Adobe can somehow squeeze it down to size and maybe in the process vastly improve their desktop version. Based on past experience I'm not betting on it though. Maybe years of using Flash on OSX has made me bitter;-)
Not really. You may notice no one's actually advocating the creation of more Flash content, and that's because we have HTML5 here, which even after Apple crippled it with its tantrums to the W3C it remains a much superior choice for interactive web content.
What tantrums are you referring to ? I know apple was part of the workgroup that originally created and pushed for HTML5, the WHATWG:
"The WHATWG was founded by individuals of Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software in 2004, after a W3C workshop. Apple, Mozilla and Opera were becoming increasingly concerned about the W3C’s direction with XHTML, lack of interest in HTML and apparent disregard for the needs of real-world authors. So, in response, these organisations set out with a mission to address these concerns and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group was born."
So it seems likely they take an active role in guiding the process.
The thing with Flash however is just that, well, support for even outdated and inefficient formats like Flash is one of the advantages of an open ecosystem such as Android's over Steve Jobs' walled prison, and is an example popular and simple enough that it won't go over the layman's head (as would, for instance, the ability to develop in any language you choose).
Not just inefficient, broken. TFA states that he could hardly get a balloon-pop game, right out of a Flash beginners guide, to work right. I'll grant you that if they get it to work right and they can make it efficient enough to sip battery power instead of guzzling it, it would be a boon. If that were the case, however, would Apple keep it out ? The conspiracy theory says yes, I don't buy it though.
Well, that and the fact that what Apple's proposing in its stead (HTML5/h.264) is in many ways worse from a freedom standpoint than Flash itself so really, freedom advocates are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place in this Adobe vs Apple fight.
I don't buy that argument either but lets not go into the whole h.264 thing except to say that that race has been run and h.264 came out on top much like mp3 did. The difference with Flash is that where Flash is wholly closed at least in the combo with HTML5 you've got the choice of easily swapping out h.264 with WebM if you support it on the client.
When every browser supports flash except the browser on iOS devices, who's desperate to differentiate? Android users just want what's always been available to them in every other environment they use.
iOS devices don't support it because it doesn't work properly, as TFA explains, and there's a better way (AND because frankly Adobe screwed Apple over with the terrible Flash on OSX for years.) For some reasons Android users prefer to use a technology that's broken for their platform rather than to seize on it as an opportunity to move on to better things. Maybe Adobe will get a decent version of Flash on mobile devices in a couple of months or a year but where's the famous push of open source enthusiasts for open standards in the face of proprietary technologies ? It's been jettisoned in the race to beat the new Great Enemy, Apple, the end justifying the means.
If Linux users copped this kind of attitude for Flash, they would be portrayed as RMS worshiping hippies with little grip on reality by the same exact Apple fanboys that get their hate-on for Flash.
It's like Linux users advocating that Microsoft port IE6 to Linux to be able to view websites that need it rather than to demand that webmasters code to standards. Android users are so desperate for something to differentiate themselves from iOS they are fighting on the wrong side here.
They are pushing a bad solution to a technical problem and that's why Adobe will eventually lose even if they make it "good enough."
Bad solutions win more often than not, especially if there's a few billion in advertising dollars behind them.
Sure, but usually not when there is a popular platform that offers a better solution. That better solution is HTML5 on the desktop and mobile for video and native apps on mobile for games. The platform is iOS, it doesn't even need to retain dominance because the fatal blow has already been dealt: who would start a project these days with Flash as their primary technology ? The fact they are making their play for relevance with Adobe Air shows that Adobe know the way the wind is blowing.
I've been using Flash on my Nexus one for a while now and yeah it had bugs and issues and crashes a lot but there are certain situations that it was either A. Use a buggy flash implementation B. Don't view the content at all
I know that I'd choose the buggy Flash 99% of the time. Also, I have flash setup to only display on demand which means that I don't see the flash content unless I want to.
What content did you need that you couldn't get without Flash ?
Flash is occasionally useful - some sites won't even show you any content without it, or like Strongbad have their content primarily in flash.
Homestar Runner used to be my primary reason to install Flash. This was back in the days Linux users were bitching about Flash because it was so poorly supported, now it seems they are its biggest cheerleaders. Honestly, I haven't been to that site in a couple of years and anyone starting out now would be insane to do it with a Flash based website.
SOME flash is useful. SOME flash is malicious. SOME flash is merely advertising. The only thing that makes sense is to run that flash which is useful.
The "problem" with flash these days is that there is a better solution for the problems it solves, especially on mobile devices. They are pushing a bad solution to a technical problem and that's why Adobe will eventually lose even if they make it "good enough."
If you follow that reasoning it would be unethical to not click on every advertisement a website serves up because they are most likely pay-per-click. In fact you are advocating killing the DVR, which also allows you to skip ads. This isn't new of course ABC tried the same thing a while back.
"9. As all persons are held innocent until they shall have been declared guilty, if arrest shall be deemed indispensable, all harshness not essential to the securing of the prisoner's person shall be severely repressed by law."
And wikipedia tells us : "According to the preamble of the Constitution of the French Fifth Republic (adopted on 4 October 1958, and the current constitution), the principles set forth in the Declaration have constitutional value. Many laws and regulations have been canceled because they did not comply with those principles as interpreted by the Conseil Constitutionnel ("Constitutional Council of France") or by the Conseil d'État ("Council of State")."
See also "French Law Presumes Accused Innocent", letter to the editor of the New York Times by Michael H. Davies Prof. of Law, Cleveland State U. Cleveland
Certain websites offer you free content, don't try anything nasty, and the least you can do is try to let them scrape some money which you're not paying for.
Yes I agree that when you end up with giant half-page "POP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SCREEN" flash ads its kinda overdoing it...
Web bugs are again hard to find to remove. Blacklisting doesn't really work for long.
It's not unethical. They can't force you to look at ads or pay attention to them and they can't force you to load them at all. Do you consider going to the bathroom during a commercial break to be unethical ?
Your right, why should Google implement such a feature in Chrome when they know they are just going to ignore it ? If only there were some way they could convince themselves.
iOS 4.3 was released as the iPad 2 came out so they were probably working towards a fixed release date with stuff that wasn't ready simply being delayed to the next release. I don't think stymieing webapps is in Apple's best interest as their best excuse for retaining full control over the content of native apps is that people can simply create a webapp with no such restrictions.
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Flash has definitely outlived its usefulness. It was cool back in 2000, remember all the amazing flash animations that made sites like Albinoblacksheep and Newgrounds popular ? Good stuff, but "Napster Bad" was released 11 years ago ffs. That's like a century in internet years. Since then Flash has been abused for everything from atrocious "mystery meat navigation" type websites to obnoxious ads. We can do better now, it has outlived its usefulness and we should let it die already.
Selling music doesn't help Google's bottom line, which is 96% advertising revenue, though. If curtailing Apple's dominance is all they're after an alliance with the Amazon MP3 store would make more sense. Then it'd be Android + Amazon vs iOS + iTunes. The way Apple has been trying to move into ebooks Amazon might welcome it.
Why would it be a bad thing for them to (sorry) take a bite out of Apple? Apple has done nothing but bad lately.
Not in the music biz they haven't. Apple's been able to force the traditional music companies into making concessions and IMHO has been a pretty positive force for modernization from a consumer perspective.
Which industry? Music or computing? How does one qualify a low-blow?
The music biz, and a low blow would be something like locking Apple out of catalogues through pricing or by just not allowing them on iTunes. Apple's the one who for the large part made buying music on the net legit, popular and reasonably priced through the iTunes store. If Google moved in to the music business and they started to feud, carrying the fight from the computing industry over into the music business, it would strengthen the position of the traditional music companies that Apple has succeeded to cow into making concessions. That wouldn't be good for consumers I think.
I don't know of the CDBaby story. I googled it and it just came up with a one-sided story by the CDBaby founder, 7 years after the fact. I'm not saying it didn't happen that way, there's a ton of stories like that and Jobs can certainly be a ruthless bastard, but anyway it worked out OK for them in the end it seems.
They could buy one major and lead by example. It'd probably be all that's needed to drag them all into the 21th century. I'm not sure I'd trust Google not to use the opportunity to take a low blow at Apple though and that's one thing the industry doesn't need.
You can't actually expect the Slashdot users to actually know enough not to respond to a goatse troll, right ?
Which is also not the default, Skype set them this way on purpose. According to a comment in TFA, they use some native libraries to access those DBs that run under a different user than the app does because they are trying to obsfucate the Skype protocol. I'm not sure how true all that it but it seems logical/feasible enough.
Sounds like the sort of behavior that would cause Apple to exclude it from their AppStore. Of course, that would be evil, right ?
Or indeed the incomparable mr Paxman, as seen here in his interview with (then) PM Tony Blair. I would pay good money to see him grill some US politicians. Could you imagine the US press talking like this to a sitting US president ?
Huh, looked it up on wikipedia :
"Late in 1985, Commodore released to the European market a new version of the C128 with a redesigned chassis. Called the Commodore 128D, this new European model featured a plastic chassis with a carrying handle on the side, incorporated a 1571 disk drive into the main chassis, replaced the built-in keyboard with a detachable one, and added a cooling fan. The keyboard featured two folding legs for changing the typing angle."
I'm european so that explains why I didn't see the integrated keyboard c128. If you wait long enough you become nostalgic about everything, even the bad stuff :-)
Why should I settle for LESS when I leave the "desktop"?
This is all about Apple Fanboys trying to make lame excuses that they would laugh at themselves if they came from Linux users.
Why settle for less CPU power or less RAM ? It's the limitations of the platform. Flash is infamous for bringing desktops to its knees, why would you expect it to fare better on much more limited resources ? Hey I hope Adobe can somehow squeeze it down to size and maybe in the process vastly improve their desktop version. Based on past experience I'm not betting on it though. Maybe years of using Flash on OSX has made me bitter ;-)
Not really. You may notice no one's actually advocating the creation of more Flash content, and that's because we have HTML5 here, which even after Apple crippled it with its tantrums to the W3C it remains a much superior choice for interactive web content.
What tantrums are you referring to ? I know apple was part of the workgroup that originally created and pushed for HTML5, the WHATWG:
"The WHATWG was founded by individuals of Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software in 2004, after a W3C workshop. Apple, Mozilla and Opera were becoming increasingly concerned about the W3C’s direction with XHTML, lack of interest in HTML and apparent disregard for the needs of real-world authors. So, in response, these organisations set out with a mission to address these concerns and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group was born."
So it seems likely they take an active role in guiding the process.
The thing with Flash however is just that, well, support for even outdated and inefficient formats like Flash is one of the advantages of an open ecosystem such as Android's over Steve Jobs' walled prison, and is an example popular and simple enough that it won't go over the layman's head (as would, for instance, the ability to develop in any language you choose).
Not just inefficient, broken. TFA states that he could hardly get a balloon-pop game, right out of a Flash beginners guide, to work right. I'll grant you that if they get it to work right and they can make it efficient enough to sip battery power instead of guzzling it, it would be a boon. If that were the case, however, would Apple keep it out ? The conspiracy theory says yes, I don't buy it though.
Well, that and the fact that what Apple's proposing in its stead (HTML5/h.264) is in many ways worse from a freedom standpoint than Flash itself so really, freedom advocates are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place in this Adobe vs Apple fight.
I don't buy that argument either but lets not go into the whole h.264 thing except to say that that race has been run and h.264 came out on top much like mp3 did. The difference with Flash is that where Flash is wholly closed at least in the combo with HTML5 you've got the choice of easily swapping out h.264 with WebM if you support it on the client.
When every browser supports flash except the browser on iOS devices, who's desperate to differentiate? Android users just want what's always been available to them in every other environment they use.
iOS devices don't support it because it doesn't work properly, as TFA explains, and there's a better way (AND because frankly Adobe screwed Apple over with the terrible Flash on OSX for years.) For some reasons Android users prefer to use a technology that's broken for their platform rather than to seize on it as an opportunity to move on to better things. Maybe Adobe will get a decent version of Flash on mobile devices in a couple of months or a year but where's the famous push of open source enthusiasts for open standards in the face of proprietary technologies ? It's been jettisoned in the race to beat the new Great Enemy, Apple, the end justifying the means.
No-one has made a pron site with a HTML5 player yet ? Sounds like an opportunity for some enterprising young entrepreneur.
If Linux users copped this kind of attitude for Flash, they would be portrayed as RMS worshiping hippies with little grip on reality by the same exact Apple fanboys that get their hate-on for Flash.
It's like Linux users advocating that Microsoft port IE6 to Linux to be able to view websites that need it rather than to demand that webmasters code to standards.
Android users are so desperate for something to differentiate themselves from iOS they are fighting on the wrong side here.
They are pushing a bad solution to a technical problem and that's why Adobe will eventually lose even if they make it "good enough."
Bad solutions win more often than not, especially if there's a few billion in advertising dollars behind them.
Sure, but usually not when there is a popular platform that offers a better solution. That better solution is HTML5 on the desktop and mobile for video and native apps on mobile for games. The platform is iOS, it doesn't even need to retain dominance because the fatal blow has already been dealt: who would start a project these days with Flash as their primary technology ? The fact they are making their play for relevance with Adobe Air shows that Adobe know the way the wind is blowing.
I've been using Flash on my Nexus one for a while now and yeah it had bugs and issues and crashes a lot but there are certain situations that it was either
A. Use a buggy flash implementation
B. Don't view the content at all
I know that I'd choose the buggy Flash 99% of the time. Also, I have flash setup to only display on demand which means that I don't see the flash content unless I want to.
What content did you need that you couldn't get without Flash ?
Flash is occasionally useful - some sites won't even show you any content without it, or like Strongbad have their content primarily in flash.
Homestar Runner used to be my primary reason to install Flash. This was back in the days Linux users were bitching about Flash because it was so poorly supported, now it seems they are its biggest cheerleaders. Honestly, I haven't been to that site in a couple of years and anyone starting out now would be insane to do it with a Flash based website.
SOME flash is useful. SOME flash is malicious. SOME flash is merely advertising. The only thing that makes sense is to run that flash which is useful.
The "problem" with flash these days is that there is a better solution for the problems it solves, especially on mobile devices. They are pushing a bad solution to a technical problem and that's why Adobe will eventually lose even if they make it "good enough."
If you follow that reasoning it would be unethical to not click on every advertisement a website serves up because they are most likely pay-per-click. In fact you are advocating killing the DVR, which also allows you to skip ads. This isn't new of course ABC tried the same thing a while back.
In France you are not innocent until being proven guilty. If you are suspect, you are arrested, jailed, and investigated, in that order.
From the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" :
"9. As all persons are held innocent until they shall have been declared guilty, if arrest shall be deemed indispensable, all harshness not essential to the securing of the prisoner's person shall be severely repressed by law."
And wikipedia tells us : "According to the preamble of the Constitution of the French Fifth Republic (adopted on 4 October 1958, and the current constitution), the principles set forth in the Declaration have constitutional value. Many laws and regulations have been canceled because they did not comply with those principles as interpreted by the Conseil Constitutionnel ("Constitutional Council of France") or by the Conseil d'État ("Council of State")."
See also "French Law Presumes Accused Innocent", letter to the editor of the New York Times by Michael H. Davies Prof. of Law, Cleveland State U. Cleveland
It's the same in dutch. An April Fools prank is sometimes called an "aprilvis" or "april fish"
If you can still post to Facebook then you aren't drunk enough.
Blocking all advertisments is kinda unethical.
Certain websites offer you free content, don't try anything nasty, and the least you can do is try to let them scrape some money which you're not paying for.
Yes I agree that when you end up with giant half-page "POP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SCREEN" flash ads its kinda overdoing it...
Web bugs are again hard to find to remove. Blacklisting doesn't really work for long.
It's not unethical. They can't force you to look at ads or pay attention to them and they can't force you to load them at all. Do you consider going to the bathroom during a commercial break to be unethical ?
Your right, why should Google implement such a feature in Chrome when they know they are just going to ignore it ? If only there were some way they could convince themselves.
I imagine auction houses keep a record of prices of these kind of rarities to be able to offer an estimate should another one come to market.
iOS 4.3 was released as the iPad 2 came out so they were probably working towards a fixed release date with stuff that wasn't ready simply being delayed to the next release. I don't think stymieing webapps is in Apple's best interest as their best excuse for retaining full control over the content of native apps is that people can simply create a webapp with no such restrictions.