I used the adjectives naive, scared, lazy to indirectly refer to the hypothetical OP. Which raises an interesting question: Did you think the OP was a real person & situation?
Anyway, in any rational mind, all three adjective clearly applied to the OP, by dictionary definition.
This has been a really fascinating thread. My response had more than 2 dozen moderations, 60/40 split between -1 and +1. I now understand that a large portion of slashdot commenters are also Fox News viewers. Brainstem rules; cortex loses.
Did you assume I was being sarcastic when I said the sweatshops reduce child prostitution?
No.
But I did understand that you have never been to Cambodia, or to any country where child prostitution runs rampant, because it makes much more money than child factory labor.
Child prostitution in those countries is almost certainly limited by the size of the paedophile market, which is limited by ethics and law, not by less-lucrative work options.
I know their entire life stories as intimately as I know my own.
Ummm...radical exaggeration to support unfounded beliefs?
I would debate that mainframes are less complex than smart phones.
You would debate it? OK, please do. Don't just claim that you would. Anyone can talk trash.
Also did you count the people involved in the creation/maintenance of either technology? They need energy too.
Yes. The energy requirements were orders of magnitude higher in the past. It took dozens of people and (literally) tons of manufactured material to do the design & engineering that can now be accomplished by a single person on a single workstation drawing about 100 watts.
Computers are just one easy & relevant example. For another...I remember the design floors at a jet-engine manufacturer in the 1970s. Drafting tables as far as the eye could see, with hundreds of people working at full capacity to keep the blueprints up-to-date. Today, again, a handful of designers with CAD workstations do the same job faster, better, cheaper.
Also it is not completely and provably untrue, you can for instance go ahead and find some papers on the topic of measuring energy flows in biological systems.
Rewind. We were talking about human intelligence, not dumb biological systems.
Anyway...a plankton bloom or algae bloom consumes orders of magnitude more energy than a single human being...and it is orders of magnitude less complex.
Also I don't have to prove anything, I don't have any good news, and there is little we can do about it.
Well, I do have good news, and part of it is that we can do something about it.
My life experience, plus the much longer thread of human history that I have studied, shows that applied intelligence can solve pretty much any problem that faces the human race.
On an individual level, if you are lazy, and scared, and refuse to think for yourself (like the hypothetical OP of this thread)...then yes, you will be enslaved by the small faction of humanity who have no qualms about slavery. And you will be their "employee", "consumer", "follower", "borrower", etc for the rest of your lazy/fearful/unthinking life.
lol by solved are you referring perhaps to the rampant slavery and human trafficking which sustains the first world way of life?
No, absolutely not.
Food and energy are the largest expenses of the three, and neither food nor energy come from manufacturing sweatshops.
Clothing is a distant third. If you have trouble providing for your family, clothing is your last concern. You can get by with just a few basic pieces of clothing for years. And you can get that clothing for free from aid organizations.
I have spent a significant portion of my life living in the so-called "third world". Not as a first-world tourist or businessperson, but actually out there on the streets and in the villages, on the farms and in the factories, amongst some of the economically poorest (but often emotionally and spiritually richest) people in the world.
So I have a very low tolerance for bullshit from privileged first-world kids who have no experience in the third world, only a fashionable objection to global manufacturing (although they hypocritically continue to buy products from the companies that they whine about).
Have you ever been in a third-world manufacturing "sweatshop"? Or are you just parroting some hypocritical concern for the workers who make your junk?
Meta-meta-nitpick: Actually it was an "edit-o", i.e., when you edit/rewrite/move a sentence, but leave an inappropriate fragment of the older sentence in there. In this case, the number was correct until I edited that sentence.
IMO "typo" is a convenient shorthand for all manner of fat-fingering, editos, thinkos/brainfarts, phonetic replacements, and other isolated writing errors. But to each their own definitions.
The old 1.5TB are in "production" on some general use computers running linux. One of them mainly used for software development. I think I could made good use of data compression on my SVN repositories.
Raw source code could be compressible...but I'm quite certain that you don't have that much code.
Let's say for example that you personally maintain a source base with 10 million lines of code. This is equivalent to the entire Windows NT4 source base, which had hundreds of software developers, plus many IT drones managing the code repositories.
Let's also be generous and assume that your average line of code is 80 bytes. So, your entire source-code base, uncompressed, would be 800MB. Less than one gig.
Let's further assume that you change a whopping 1% of this source code (100,000 lines committed to SVN) every week.
Even with those silly-big numbers, it would take you more than 3600 years (a very optimistic 45 lifetimes) to fill your 1.5TB drive with source code.
Code is tiny. If that drive is full, it is mostly filled with compressed multimedia (video, audio, image) files. Not compressible code.
...you can never build a long lasting civilization based on a finite resource...
Please clarify: Which resource are you talking about?
Every physical resource is finite in the long run. The key is to jump from one to another before we run out. Energy for example: fossil to fission, fission to fusion, fusion to ???
These jumps are easier to achieve if we aren't wasting 99.99% of our stepping-stone resources on crap like cyclical consumerism. Hence my adive for intelligent procreation, of individuals who can hopefully rub two brain cells together and advance humanity, instead of dragging us all down as they drown.
I would never direct an idiot to not have kids, but I would like them to at least consider taking the higher road for the sake of humanity.
Complexity increase supposedly requires more energy input into systems
This is completely and provably untrue.
Here is a very simple contemporary example, relevant to slashdotters:
Compare a modern smartphone to a mainframe computer from 1980.
The smartphone is several orders of magnitude more complex than the old mainframe, and several orders of magnitude more energy-efficient. More complex. Less energy.
The rest of your rant falls apart at this point. But thanks for playing.:)
HTML4 will never go away. It is an open standard with BILLIONS of users. It is impossible for any corporation, or even government, to break backwards compatibility with that standard.
HTML5 is still just a vapor-buzzword, and is totally irrelevant unless Microsoft, Apple, and Google all agree to implement the same spec. But if they do, it is just an extension of HTML4.
The crossover between advanced Flash/Flex development and advanced web development is very very slim. My recommendation is to hire a Flash/Flex specialist to reverse-engineer and document your app, then hire a DHTML specialist to rebuild it using a suitable framework. SmartClient is my first choice, but Ext JS is another option if they can provide the features and support that you need.
Good luck. And again, sorry for the mistargeted first reply.
Uhhhhhh - 99% buy in pairs? You're limiting that statement to corporate and geek customers, right? If you include average consumers in your group of purchasers, I'd say that little more than 30% buy in pairs.
GP claimed that 99% of customers buy just 1 drive.
I disagreed, believing that many more than 1% customers buy their drives in pairs, or larger quantities.
Yes, but don't worry. Just go back and re-read the previous replies, and try to think about it, and I bet you can understand what just whooshed over your head.
Also, you might want to refrain from name-calling when you don't have anything useful to say. Name-calling is the refuge of the dimwitted.
I'm optimistic that you can do better in the future.
So what "professional tool developers" have published an SVG-animation or canvas-animation creation tool that approaches the capability of even Flash from a decade ago?
You missed a big one. On Internet Explorer, which still has almost twice the market share of any other browser, the vector graphics technology was VML.
Honestly, the tools that use SVG, Canvas, and VML, to provide decade-old Flash vector graphics, are very hard to find right now. As I mentioned in another post, SmartClient (http://www.smartclient.com) is at least one framework that does this. Afaik they smartclient guys do not provide the tools to the general public. But they do at least have some raw demos at e.g. http://www.smartclient.com/isomorphic/system/reference/inlineExamples/drawing/Drawing.html
I care. I've got a large old Flash program that I want to convert, because Flash is indeed "dead".
Sorry. My reply was inappropriate for your question...and yes, I was expressing some of my historical exasperation (call it hate if you prefer) with the unfortunate fate that Flash was used for anything except the keyframe animations for which it was originally designed.
To answer your question: No, there is no generic Flash-to-DHTML converter.
As someone who has used both Flash and DHTML from their very beginnings, I can state with 99.9% confidence that a general-purpose converter will never be created. To make such a converter, you would have to re-implement the entire ancient & gnarly Flash runtime engine in JavaScript. From a platform perspective, that is mostly possible, even in HTML4, but it would be an enormous task. Afaik, no one has a business case that would remotely cover the expense.
If your "large old Flash program" was implemented in Flex, you have a much better chance of sponsoring a converter project. The Flex framework is much higher-level, with XML descriptors of the UI, but it provides a subset of the functionality already implemented in DHTML frameworks like SmartClient (www.smartclient.com). So a converter is entirely possible, orders of magnitude easier than a generic Flash-spaghetti-code to JavaScript converter.
Its interactive features are HTML5 features which would be much more work in HTML4.
Not if you build on a high-level RIA framework that has been around for many years. See e.g. the smartclient link above to get a sense of what has been possible for many years now. You may be surprised.
This is why fuckwits such as yourself shouldn't be allowed to control who has children.
Wow. Who said anything about controlling who has children? Oh right. Just you.
I only offered advice to someone who presented themselves as a poor candidate for parenthood. The decision is still up to them. And if they have slow & fearful kids, we can always use those kids as customers or workers.;o)
Here's some advice for you: If you find yourself swearing at someone, you are almost certainly acting from your lizard brainstem instead of your human cortex. Human up. I'm optimistic that you can behave calmly and rationally if you try.:)
If you have trouble providing food, clothing, and energy to your family...you should not be wasting your limited time on slashdot. Those problems were solved loooong ago for most folks here. Welcome to the 21st century.
The probability of a child being a genius is more or less a constant.
No, it is not.
There have been plenty of studies of identical twins separated at birth, to address the nature vs nurture question.
Intelligence is very highly dependent on genetics. If the parents were not so smart, chances are, their kids are not so smart either.
When you also consider that the kids of dimwitted parents get a dimwitted education, they are even further behind the curve. Nature and nurture are both against them. It's extremely unlikely to get a "genius" from someone who is scared to do a simple google search, and clean their own gutters.
Unless...a "genius" is one of the dimwits who works behind the counter in an Apple store. Haha.;p
Did you notice that acceleration of progress of this civilization is related to the size of the population
You are confusing correlation with causation. We advanced over time, yes. The population grew over time, yes. These are unrelated observations.
The ratio of producers to consumers is also fixed.
OK, you just jumped into the deep end of crazy. Not gonna follow there. Good luck.:)
Macromedia/Adobe got/gets designers, and too many people don't realise that.
Actually...Macromedia/Adobe built their businesses by "getting" wannabe designers.
You know, folks who think they can just buy a copy of Director/Flash/Dreamweaver/Photoshop/Premiere/etc, take a couple of classes at the community college, and be a "designer".
fwiw...I was using Flash when it was FutureSplash Animator, back before MM acquired it in the mid-1990s. I really enjoyed Flash too, doing interactive animations with physics, flocking behaviors, etc. But I'm not sentimental about it.
Professional designers have either the breadth of skills to take on whatever tools will do the job, or the depth of skill that they can partner with professional tool developers. The specific tools are irrelevant to the professional designer. Deployment is what matters, and ubiquitous open standards (eg HTML & JavaScript) will always win on that front.
However, Macromedia/Adobe figured out that wannabe designers are a much larger market than professional designers.
I predict one of two things will happen: Flash will die, and this kind of creative content will die with it until a new challenger appears; or more likely, Flash will just refuse to dies, and the geek elite just won't understand why.
Flash will live as long as Adobe can sell copies of the dev tool to folks who take (or teach) community-college or art-school classes in how to use it.
From a professional and real-world deployment perspective, the only thing keeping Flash alive is the video codec. Microsoft has already tried to chip away at this with their Silverlight plug-in. But both are doomed as soon as enough people have web browsers with decent video codecs (eg WebM) built-in.
I am totally optimistic that we can solve the world's resource problems, class warfare, engineered famines, etc by breaking the cycle of mindless procreation by people who don't have their heads on straight.
In an ideal world, I'd prefer that the obviously-clueless OP reconsider having kids, to prevent their suffering.
But if he does, I am also optimistic that I could sell tons of useless crap to his kids, and also hire them as my wage slaves so they can afford to buy more of that stuff.
Either way, I'm optimistic. Just offering some advice.
Who cares? The only useful applications of Flash are:
1) To provide a wrapper and controller for video-on-demand, until everyone has a web browser that natively supports low-bandwidth video formats.
2) To populate classrooms with a multitude of poor shmoes who are really excited to make some of that fancy-shmancy keyframe animated stuff, though they don't really know what they will use it for.
Flash died years ago. Most Flash content was dead on arrival. Let it go, and program your new stuff in HTML. Doesn't have to be HTML5. HTML4 is perfectly capable for most stuff.
I look upon the inevitable Kindle conversion with a terrible dread. I'm typing it up in Google Docs, but because I use italics for emphasis, this means I have to either manually construct the book (and manually re-put in all my italics and formatting), or use a converter which will produce sucky output which will require a lot of manual cleanup
Crikey.
I had no idea the Kindle conversion was as lame as you say.
I thought we software-folk had solved all the issues of converting basic formatted text about 20 years ago. Equations, vector graphics, embedded images...OK, they might still be cross-format hurdles.
I think we agree, except perhaps my definition of "mirroring" is broader than yours.
My original point was that more than 1% of folks buy hard drives in pairs, so they can back them up. Hence a 1-drive limit on purchases is ridiculous.
fwiw, I have never lost data to an errant delete command, virus, or lightning strike. I have lost data, several times, to hard drive failures (head crashes). I suspect this is the main data-loss scenario for consumers. NOT fire, flood, theft, lightning, etc. Simple statistical failure of cheap drives.
... activate that old and faithful hard disk compressor. (Remember Stacker, SuperStor and DriveSpace?)
Your 2TB hard drive is probably filled with video, audio, or image data that is already compressed (both lossy & lossless, via mpeg, mp3, jpeg, etc). A disk-level compressor will do nothing except slow your system down.
Speaking seriously - is this really what we want? Focusing every bit of hardware on one single source? Shit happens everywhere, every time - are we going the right path on this extreme geographical source of goods dependency?
Here are your choices:
1) Pay $50/TB for storage, and plan ahead so you always have enough storage for the next few months.
2) Pay $50/TB for storage, usually, unless the factory has a disaster that bumps the price to $100/TB for a couple of months, and you have to buy storage right now because you did not plan ahead.
3) Pay $100/TB for storage, always, from a manufacturer who operates redundant factories with overcapacity.
Slashdot Mirror
Calling someone "Ass" is name-calling.
I used the adjectives naive, scared, lazy to indirectly refer to the hypothetical OP. Which raises an interesting question: Did you think the OP was a real person & situation?
Anyway, in any rational mind, all three adjective clearly applied to the OP, by dictionary definition.
This has been a really fascinating thread. My response had more than 2 dozen moderations, 60/40 split between -1 and +1. I now understand that a large portion of slashdot commenters are also Fox News viewers. Brainstem rules; cortex loses.
Anyway, good luck raising your kids.
Did you assume I was being sarcastic when I said the sweatshops reduce child prostitution?
No.
But I did understand that you have never been to Cambodia, or to any country where child prostitution runs rampant, because it makes much more money than child factory labor.
Child prostitution in those countries is almost certainly limited by the size of the paedophile market, which is limited by ethics and law, not by less-lucrative work options.
I know their entire life stories as intimately as I know my own.
Ummm...radical exaggeration to support unfounded beliefs?
I know children who have to work
FTFY.
I would debate that mainframes are less complex than smart phones.
You would debate it? OK, please do. Don't just claim that you would. Anyone can talk trash.
Also did you count the people involved in the creation/maintenance of either technology? They need energy too.
Yes. The energy requirements were orders of magnitude higher in the past. It took dozens of people and (literally) tons of manufactured material to do the design & engineering that can now be accomplished by a single person on a single workstation drawing about 100 watts.
Computers are just one easy & relevant example. For another...I remember the design floors at a jet-engine manufacturer in the 1970s. Drafting tables as far as the eye could see, with hundreds of people working at full capacity to keep the blueprints up-to-date. Today, again, a handful of designers with CAD workstations do the same job faster, better, cheaper.
Also it is not completely and provably untrue, you can for instance go ahead and find some papers on the topic of measuring energy flows in biological systems.
Rewind. We were talking about human intelligence, not dumb biological systems.
Anyway...a plankton bloom or algae bloom consumes orders of magnitude more energy than a single human being...and it is orders of magnitude less complex.
Also I don't have to prove anything, I don't have any good news, and there is little we can do about it.
Well, I do have good news, and part of it is that we can do something about it.
My life experience, plus the much longer thread of human history that I have studied, shows that applied intelligence can solve pretty much any problem that faces the human race.
On an individual level, if you are lazy, and scared, and refuse to think for yourself (like the hypothetical OP of this thread)...then yes, you will be enslaved by the small faction of humanity who have no qualms about slavery. And you will be their "employee", "consumer", "follower", "borrower", etc for the rest of your lazy/fearful/unthinking life.
Wake up!
lol by solved are you referring perhaps to the rampant slavery and human trafficking which sustains the first world way of life?
No, absolutely not.
Food and energy are the largest expenses of the three, and neither food nor energy come from manufacturing sweatshops.
Clothing is a distant third. If you have trouble providing for your family, clothing is your last concern. You can get by with just a few basic pieces of clothing for years. And you can get that clothing for free from aid organizations.
I have spent a significant portion of my life living in the so-called "third world". Not as a first-world tourist or businessperson, but actually out there on the streets and in the villages, on the farms and in the factories, amongst some of the economically poorest (but often emotionally and spiritually richest) people in the world.
So I have a very low tolerance for bullshit from privileged first-world kids who have no experience in the third world, only a fashionable objection to global manufacturing (although they hypocritically continue to buy products from the companies that they whine about).
Have you ever been in a third-world manufacturing "sweatshop"? Or are you just parroting some hypocritical concern for the workers who make your junk?
Meta-meta-nitpick: Actually it was an "edit-o", i.e., when you edit/rewrite/move a sentence, but leave an inappropriate fragment of the older sentence in there. In this case, the number was correct until I edited that sentence.
IMO "typo" is a convenient shorthand for all manner of fat-fingering, editos, thinkos/brainfarts, phonetic replacements, and other isolated writing errors. But to each their own definitions.
The old 1.5TB are in "production" on some general use computers running linux. One of them mainly used for software development. I think I could made good use of data compression on my SVN repositories.
Raw source code could be compressible...but I'm quite certain that you don't have that much code.
Let's say for example that you personally maintain a source base with 10 million lines of code. This is equivalent to the entire Windows NT4 source base, which had hundreds of software developers, plus many IT drones managing the code repositories.
Let's also be generous and assume that your average line of code is 80 bytes. So, your entire source-code base, uncompressed, would be 800MB. Less than one gig.
Let's further assume that you change a whopping 1% of this source code (100,000 lines committed to SVN) every week.
Even with those silly-big numbers, it would take you more than 3600 years (a very optimistic 45 lifetimes) to fill your 1.5TB drive with source code.
Code is tiny. If that drive is full, it is mostly filled with compressed multimedia (video, audio, image) files. Not compressible code.
...you can never build a long lasting civilization based on a finite resource...
Please clarify: Which resource are you talking about?
Every physical resource is finite in the long run. The key is to jump from one to another before we run out. Energy for example: fossil to fission, fission to fusion, fusion to ???
These jumps are easier to achieve if we aren't wasting 99.99% of our stepping-stone resources on crap like cyclical consumerism. Hence my adive for intelligent procreation, of individuals who can hopefully rub two brain cells together and advance humanity, instead of dragging us all down as they drown.
I would never direct an idiot to not have kids, but I would like them to at least consider taking the higher road for the sake of humanity.
Complexity increase supposedly requires more energy input into systems
This is completely and provably untrue.
Here is a very simple contemporary example, relevant to slashdotters:
Compare a modern smartphone to a mainframe computer from 1980.
The smartphone is several orders of magnitude more complex than the old mainframe, and several orders of magnitude more energy-efficient. More complex. Less energy.
The rest of your rant falls apart at this point. But thanks for playing. :)
HTML4 will never go away. It is an open standard with BILLIONS of users. It is impossible for any corporation, or even government, to break backwards compatibility with that standard.
HTML5 is still just a vapor-buzzword, and is totally irrelevant unless Microsoft, Apple, and Google all agree to implement the same spec. But if they do, it is just an extension of HTML4.
The crossover between advanced Flash/Flex development and advanced web development is very very slim. My recommendation is to hire a Flash/Flex specialist to reverse-engineer and document your app, then hire a DHTML specialist to rebuild it using a suitable framework. SmartClient is my first choice, but Ext JS is another option if they can provide the features and support that you need.
Good luck. And again, sorry for the mistargeted first reply.
Uhhhhhh - 99% buy in pairs? You're limiting that statement to corporate and geek customers, right? If you include average consumers in your group of purchasers, I'd say that little more than 30% buy in pairs.
GP claimed that 99% of customers buy just 1 drive.
I disagreed, believing that many more than 1% customers buy their drives in pairs, or larger quantities.
Your 30% estimate confirms my belief. Thanks.
Yes, but don't worry. Just go back and re-read the previous replies, and try to think about it, and I bet you can understand what just whooshed over your head.
Also, you might want to refrain from name-calling when you don't have anything useful to say. Name-calling is the refuge of the dimwitted.
I'm optimistic that you can do better in the future.
So what "professional tool developers" have published an SVG-animation or canvas-animation creation tool that approaches the capability of even Flash from a decade ago?
You missed a big one. On Internet Explorer, which still has almost twice the market share of any other browser, the vector graphics technology was VML.
Honestly, the tools that use SVG, Canvas, and VML, to provide decade-old Flash vector graphics, are very hard to find right now. As I mentioned in another post, SmartClient (http://www.smartclient.com) is at least one framework that does this. Afaik they smartclient guys do not provide the tools to the general public. But they do at least have some raw demos at e.g. http://www.smartclient.com/isomorphic/system/reference/inlineExamples/drawing/Drawing.html
I care. I've got a large old Flash program that I want to convert, because Flash is indeed "dead".
Sorry. My reply was inappropriate for your question...and yes, I was expressing some of my historical exasperation (call it hate if you prefer) with the unfortunate fate that Flash was used for anything except the keyframe animations for which it was originally designed.
To answer your question: No, there is no generic Flash-to-DHTML converter.
As someone who has used both Flash and DHTML from their very beginnings, I can state with 99.9% confidence that a general-purpose converter will never be created. To make such a converter, you would have to re-implement the entire ancient & gnarly Flash runtime engine in JavaScript. From a platform perspective, that is mostly possible, even in HTML4, but it would be an enormous task. Afaik, no one has a business case that would remotely cover the expense.
If your "large old Flash program" was implemented in Flex, you have a much better chance of sponsoring a converter project. The Flex framework is much higher-level, with XML descriptors of the UI, but it provides a subset of the functionality already implemented in DHTML frameworks like SmartClient (www.smartclient.com). So a converter is entirely possible, orders of magnitude easier than a generic Flash-spaghetti-code to JavaScript converter.
Its interactive features are HTML5 features which would be much more work in HTML4.
Not if you build on a high-level RIA framework that has been around for many years. See e.g. the smartclient link above to get a sense of what has been possible for many years now. You may be surprised.
This is why fuckwits such as yourself shouldn't be allowed to control who has children.
Wow. Who said anything about controlling who has children? Oh right. Just you.
I only offered advice to someone who presented themselves as a poor candidate for parenthood. The decision is still up to them. And if they have slow & fearful kids, we can always use those kids as customers or workers. ;o)
Here's some advice for you: If you find yourself swearing at someone, you are almost certainly acting from your lizard brainstem instead of your human cortex. Human up. I'm optimistic that you can behave calmly and rationally if you try. :)
If you have trouble providing food, clothing, and energy to your family...you should not be wasting your limited time on slashdot. Those problems were solved loooong ago for most folks here. Welcome to the 21st century.
The probability of a child being a genius is more or less a constant.
No, it is not.
There have been plenty of studies of identical twins separated at birth, to address the nature vs nurture question.
Intelligence is very highly dependent on genetics. If the parents were not so smart, chances are, their kids are not so smart either.
When you also consider that the kids of dimwitted parents get a dimwitted education, they are even further behind the curve. Nature and nurture are both against them. It's extremely unlikely to get a "genius" from someone who is scared to do a simple google search, and clean their own gutters.
Unless...a "genius" is one of the dimwits who works behind the counter in an Apple store. Haha. ;p
Did you notice that acceleration of progress of this civilization is related to the size of the population
You are confusing correlation with causation. We advanced over time, yes. The population grew over time, yes. These are unrelated observations.
The ratio of producers to consumers is also fixed.
OK, you just jumped into the deep end of crazy. Not gonna follow there. Good luck. :)
Macromedia/Adobe got/gets designers, and too many people don't realise that.
Actually...Macromedia/Adobe built their businesses by "getting" wannabe designers.
You know, folks who think they can just buy a copy of Director/Flash/Dreamweaver/Photoshop/Premiere/etc, take a couple of classes at the community college, and be a "designer".
fwiw...I was using Flash when it was FutureSplash Animator, back before MM acquired it in the mid-1990s. I really enjoyed Flash too, doing interactive animations with physics, flocking behaviors, etc. But I'm not sentimental about it.
Professional designers have either the breadth of skills to take on whatever tools will do the job, or the depth of skill that they can partner with professional tool developers. The specific tools are irrelevant to the professional designer. Deployment is what matters, and ubiquitous open standards (eg HTML & JavaScript) will always win on that front.
However, Macromedia/Adobe figured out that wannabe designers are a much larger market than professional designers.
I predict one of two things will happen: Flash will die, and this kind of creative content will die with it until a new challenger appears; or more likely, Flash will just refuse to dies, and the geek elite just won't understand why.
Flash will live as long as Adobe can sell copies of the dev tool to folks who take (or teach) community-college or art-school classes in how to use it.
From a professional and real-world deployment perspective, the only thing keeping Flash alive is the video codec. Microsoft has already tried to chip away at this with their Silverlight plug-in. But both are doomed as soon as enough people have web browsers with decent video codecs (eg WebM) built-in.
If the data matters, you store it on another machine with removable drives
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!
If you have 6TB of storage that matters, you need 6TB of separable storage for backup.
Hence, you buy drives in pairs. One for primary storage, one for backup.
End of story. :)
I see that your optimism is lost :P
You misunderstand.
I am totally optimistic that we can solve the world's resource problems, class warfare, engineered famines, etc by breaking the cycle of mindless procreation by people who don't have their heads on straight.
In an ideal world, I'd prefer that the obviously-clueless OP reconsider having kids, to prevent their suffering.
But if he does, I am also optimistic that I could sell tons of useless crap to his kids, and also hire them as my wage slaves so they can afford to buy more of that stuff.
Either way, I'm optimistic. Just offering some advice.
Who cares? The only useful applications of Flash are:
1) To provide a wrapper and controller for video-on-demand, until everyone has a web browser that natively supports low-bandwidth video formats.
2) To populate classrooms with a multitude of poor shmoes who are really excited to make some of that fancy-shmancy keyframe animated stuff, though they don't really know what they will use it for.
Flash died years ago. Most Flash content was dead on arrival. Let it go, and program your new stuff in HTML. Doesn't have to be HTML5. HTML4 is perfectly capable for most stuff.
I look upon the inevitable Kindle conversion with a terrible dread. I'm typing it up in Google Docs, but because I use italics for emphasis, this means I have to either manually construct the book (and manually re-put in all my italics and formatting), or use a converter which will produce sucky output which will require a lot of manual cleanup
Crikey.
I had no idea the Kindle conversion was as lame as you say.
I thought we software-folk had solved all the issues of converting basic formatted text about 20 years ago. Equations, vector graphics, embedded images...OK, they might still be cross-format hurdles.
But italics? Seriously? That's so 1980's
I got 3Tb on the main machine, another 2Tb on the other, and a 1Tb external
Whoosh! You thoroughly missed the point of my replies.
Let me put it this way:
You have 6TB of storage.
Let's assume that you actually use that storage.
So...where do you back up your 6TB of data?
(Hint: Even crusty old IT departments have moved their backups from tape, to disk, in the last few years.)
I think we agree, except perhaps my definition of "mirroring" is broader than yours.
My original point was that more than 1% of folks buy hard drives in pairs, so they can back them up. Hence a 1-drive limit on purchases is ridiculous.
fwiw, I have never lost data to an errant delete command, virus, or lightning strike. I have lost data, several times, to hard drive failures (head crashes). I suspect this is the main data-loss scenario for consumers. NOT fire, flood, theft, lightning, etc. Simple statistical failure of cheap drives.
Ass.
Precisely. People who procreate, when they can't even manage to live their own lives without help from others, are indeed asses.
Those poor ass-kids don't stand a chance. But they do make good consumers and employees. ;D
Moral of this story? Wait until the prices come down if you can.
Alternative moral: Always have enough spare storage to make it through a 3-month price hike.
... activate that old and faithful hard disk compressor. (Remember Stacker, SuperStor and DriveSpace?)
Your 2TB hard drive is probably filled with video, audio, or image data that is already compressed (both lossy & lossless, via mpeg, mp3, jpeg, etc). A disk-level compressor will do nothing except slow your system down.
Speaking seriously - is this really what we want? Focusing every bit of hardware on one single source? Shit happens everywhere, every time - are we going the right path on this extreme geographical source of goods dependency?
Here are your choices:
1) Pay $50/TB for storage, and plan ahead so you always have enough storage for the next few months.
2) Pay $50/TB for storage, usually, unless the factory has a disaster that bumps the price to $100/TB for a couple of months, and you have to buy storage right now because you did not plan ahead.
3) Pay $100/TB for storage, always, from a manufacturer who operates redundant factories with overcapacity.
Personally I would choose #1.