Refuel yes but why put wings on what will basically be an empty tank when you are done? What might be an even better solution for a photoint sat would be to separate the sensors from the propulsion module. You could just launch a relatively cheap new propulsion unit on a smaller booster and swap it in for the old one in orbit. The old propulsion unit would separate and the new one would then doc with the sensor module. Put a robotic arm on the propulsion bus so it could grapple the sensor bus. The old module would then undock and move away to latter deorbit, The new bus would then doc using the robotic arm and then disengage the grapple to wait for it to be replaced at a latter date. Of course this is just off the top of my head.
"Debian, a whole OS without any paid devs?" 1. Debian is not an OS. It is a distro. 2. No Linux Distro I know of is free of code from paid devs! RedHat, IBM, Novell/SUSE, Intel, and many more pay people to develop code and then contribute that code to Linux. So any Distro that includes say.. The FOSS Intel video driver is using the code of paid devs.
Even RMS states the F in FOSS does not mean unpaid or free as in beer.
And I disagree about a crisis of sustainability. FOSS has not been wildly profitable as a whole. It has not inspired a huge numbers of vibrant projects. For every FireFox there are tens of thousands of projects that never get past a page on source forge. Even some really good FOSS software just sort of lingers on the fringe. One great project IMHO is DeVeDe which is a super simple and easy to use DVD creation tool. "I am not the dev but I use it" Without a clear source of revenue projects will fade. BTW the problem is getting worse for closed source software. Most people have found software that frankly is good enough so they are not buying new software as much. Also people have found free software on the internet both in the form of FOSS and in the form of piracy. That is why you see so much interest in mobile apps. It is still possible to make money and maybe even grow large in that space. On the PC it is just too crowded.
1. a. No need for a refueling ship to have to return, repair?
b. Maybe but it would have to be cheaper to launch this, bring back the satellite, repair it, and relaunch than to just replace with a new and probably better model. Plus will it be faster? Can you live with that bird out of service that long?
c. Monitoring? Maybe but why a return capability? 3. We already have Sigint and Commint satellites so an EW version is not to far fetched but why a return capability?
I think number two is the right answer. Put some Rods from God in the cargo bay and park it in orbit for a few months at a time. If you don't need them you bring them home to re launch. You want the bring home because frankly you wouldn't want them to just fall out of the sky... Maybe over a friendly city?
I have heard that Flex is better and I have not messed with Flash in years it was terrible when I used it down right painful.
From what I heard the Adobe tool generated binaries not just Objective c code. Adobe would have to change the tool to out put c or java for android but that is just code generation.
If you want to use flash for games and even apps on the Internet that is tolerable. What we need is a law where public flogging is the punishment for using Flash as a navigation element on a website. Not really but it is evil.
That is why I hate this. It reminds me of those Popular Science stores. Or even better the one that sticks in my mind. The THOR drive from Radio Shack. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor-CD
I was so hyped by this in 1988 it sound so cool and it was only a few years away... It never came. On the bright side we did eventually get CD-Rs and even CD-RWs but not for a good long time after the THOR drive was announced.
Well too be honest this makes sense to me. You seem to have a lot of in house Windows knowledge and little to no OSS knowledge. You already had OSS in place and then you decide to throw FreeBSD into the mix? What idiot came up with that idea. Nothing wrong with FreeBSD but you where already using some Linux and it sounds like a lot of Windows. So you add a third OS to the mix? In any good sized company you really want to cut down on complexity. You talked about how the people that the tasks where delegated too had no Unix experience. How many people had Windows experience and how many people have Unix experience? If most of the folks have windows experience only.... Really if you are going to use OSS in a company you need to do it in a smart way. Don't use multiple overlapping solutions for the problems. If you are going to use a OSS OS I suggest you pick one and standardize it. If you are going to pick Linux for a server solution then I suggest that you pick one distro for all your servers. I feel you where wise to pick CentOS and I would suggest that Ubuntu Server is also a good choice. They are very popular and are server distros. Red Hat if you want to pay or need pay support is good and of course Debian. Also pick a sever distro. Fedora is not a good production sever distro. Server distros like Ubuntu Server, CentOS, and Red Hat tend to recive updates for years. The last thing you want to do with a sever is frankly any more than you have too. The ideal sever is one that is secure and working. You often don't want the latest or greatest on it but the most reliable.
Frankly it looks like you company saw only problems with OSS. Failed projects and complexity are all issues that a lot of companies just don't want to deal with. They want it to just work or Have someone to blame when it doesn't.
Let my make this perfectly clear. IE is a nightmare but... Part of the problem really needs to be laid at the feet of the W3C. They moved so slowly when it came to creating standards that it was just painful. Netscape and Microsoft where at one time stuck with a standards group that moved at the speed of molasses in Antarctica in June and people wanting new functionality. Of course that was a long time ago band Microsoft spend a long time ignoring the standards that where set so we can blame them for that. But frankly the beginning of the problem had a lot to do with the W3C.
This sounds really cool but the artical that it links too is really short on details. Things like speed? Storage life? How many read write cycles before it wears out? Addressing? is it byte level or page level? I mean is this only a replacement for flash for is it a replacement for ram? Cool but it just ticks me off. It is just a tease. Yes they may not have those answers but I would be nice to know what they don't have answers for yet!
A. I am not Catholic. B. I agree with you but see A. so that doesn't matter all that much.
I asked a priest about that once. His response was. "Your parish is your family. If you had a family of your own would have to suffer. Your personal family or your parish family." I can see that point of view. I think it is not correct but I can at least understand where they are coming from.
"change the fact the Android is going to have the smart phone market nearly to itself eventually." I suggest that you learn just what a fact is. I really hope that Android never gets the entire mobile phone market. Simple reason that it would be bad for the users. Right now Android does not have as good of a UI as the iPhone or the WebOS. I have an Android phone, my wife has a Palm Pre, and I have an Ipod Touch. The media player capabilities of Android are not as good as well. Without competition you have stagnation.
So you have a bad habit of making wild statements of fact without any evidence backing them up. Let me teach the correct words to use. "I think Android will be come the dominate mobile OS" and "Open Source can produce software that is as good or better than commercial offerings."
You see I do agree that the flash cross compiler should be allowed. I think that Flash is a terrible programming environment and language. Franky I think of it as the modern equivalent to basic in many way. A terrible language that a few good programs managed to be written in. But I don't think it should be banned as a language.
Now the flash plug-in is another matter. I do have it installed but I look forward to the day when that is no longer the case. Flash on the web is a festering blight.
So yes I agree with you that I don't like Apples developer restrictions on development tools. One has to wonder if a library written in C will be put in the same class? If so that will really put a hurting on game developers.
The concept of not being able to use "toolkits" gets very weird very quickly. I have a few libraries I have created to manage some tasks. They work well and are written in C++. Can I not use them on the iPhone.
What gets me is this Adobe as the hurt party crap. They are every bit about lock in as Apple is no better and no worse. There is not one crusading for freedom here. Just two vendors each pushing their agenda.
But Adobe gets my goat because they have yet to deliver Mobile Flash. As far as I am concerned until they ship Flash for a Mobile platform it is them and not Apple keeping it out of the mobile space. Deliver it for WebOS, RIM, and Android if Apple doesn't want it. Let's see how much it adds to mobile devices. But until that happens Adobe is raising a fuss over Apple not allowing Adobe vaporware on to their devices. So I still as far as Flash on mobile devices goes Adobe still needs to Put up or shut up! BTW I am sure that Google wouldn't ban apps made with the Flash cross compiler so Adobe show us just how good this is.
You I do agree that I don't like the limitations that Apple put on developers. I don't have to like them to be honest. What I get wound up over is Adobe saying that Flash is an Open Standard when it really is not. They are a money gubbing corp that has failed to deliver in the mobile space for years. Flash-Lite is a disaster. This iPhone needs flash is total propaganda. The best example was on the Cnet podcast Buzz Out Loud. The day before yesterday they where ranting on about how the iPhone should have Flash. But when asked none of them knew if there Android phones had it or not? And they really didn't seem to care that it is supposed to be coming soon. When they pointed this out they all sort of finally admitted that the lack of Flash is probably not a terrible thing.
You may dislike Apples restrictions but Adobe is playing a propaganda war and people are buying it. If Flash is great on mobile devices lets see it. I don't have it for my Android Phone and My wife doesn't have it on her Pre yet. It isn't available on Blackberry. Lets see it in the wild and see if it is of any value. It is Apples Platform. What people don't get is nobody is preventing you from using any tool you want to program on the iPhone. You just can not sell the app through the store. You can write any app you want for your self. Hey Apple is be a pain. Adobe is play the the role of the hurt innocent. I am just not going to get fired up over Apple shutting out Adobe's closed proprietary ecosystem out of Apples closed proprietary ecosystem. And I am sure not going to work as a free PR department to help spread the crap that is Flash. Hey Air apps on the desktop are fine. But get Flash off of the Web. As I said 90% of all Flash code on the web is useless crap and I am being kind since I could probably add a 9 or two on that number and still be accurate.
"ARM also needs a 64-bit ISA, but I'm sure that they're working on it, or have even completed it." A I think they have and B I am not so sure. You only need 64 bit if you are going to use very large integers or if each task needs more than a 32 bit address space. It is entirely possible for a 32 bit cpu to have more than four gigabytes of memory. You only really run into issues if any one task need a very large address space. While some server tasks do fit those requirements a lot of them will do just fine with 32 bits. At least for a while.
But you are missing the point. At my office we have a Linux NAS running a P3 that supports 50 people with no problem. We have a PostgreSQL server that runs our call management system that supports 50 or so users and that is running on a 600 Mhz P3 with no problems. We have firewalls, mail servers, and web servers. We could probably virtualize them all on a quad core x86 but that would give us a massive single point of failure. Also we like to keep our firewalls on separate boxes anyway. Probably an ARM would be more than powerful enough for many of these tasks. It would probably be cheaper, and more power efficient as well. If we had a smaller office I would be willing to bet that a single ARM based box with the right storage system could be our NAS, Database server, intranet webserver, and maybe mail server.
The iPhone is NOT the only Smartphone on the market. The iPhone isn't even the best selling smartphone on the market. Frankly that is what is so good about the mobile space right now. Nobody had a 90% marketshare like Windows on the Desktop. So yes if you don't like develop on another platform and or buy another platform. So no Microsoft saying you can only use the win32 API is not the same as Apple saying that you can only use Objective C. As I said I don't like it. I feel that other languages should be allowed. However I will not cheer on Adobe as some white knight. The open spec is a moving target. Also Flash 10.1 does use hardware acceleration on the Mac. Probably through open CL. But not having hardware acceleration has ZERO to do with stability. Performance yes stability no. Apple is a company that's number one interest is in protecting it's profits by controlling their product. Adobe is a company that's number on interest is in protecting it's profits by pushing it's product and maintaining it's marketshare.
I own an Android phone and my wife owns a Palm Pre. The only Apple product I own is an iPod Touch that I use to watch video and play a few games on. I am so not an Apple fan boy but I will be honest. When Flash is only used for things like games I will be a happy man.
NOTHING ticks me off more than going to some website and having to wait while some silly Flash screen loads! Or to use some terrible Flash based UI setup by some hipster that thinks he is too cool for school. Most have TERRIBLE usability and almost all of them do not support access for sight impaired people well at all! About 90% of Flash is a best useless eyecandy and at worst a travesty of UI design. So the fact that Apple has actually made sites move to HTML 5 is I feel a great improvement. Those site render well not just on iPhones but my wife's Pre and my Android.
As I said I don't trust Adobe as far as I can throw them. If Adobe really wants me to worry about the closed Flash Player being locked out of the Closed iPhone then they can just release the source of the Mac, Windows, Android, and Linux Players to the community. Until then I will be grateful that they have stopped treating Linux as a second class citizen but little else. As far as I am concerned it is their fight for their money. I really don't care one way or the next.
Fine SolidWorks AutoCad PhotoShop "Gimp is good but NOT better". FSX BioShock Assassins Creed Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2... I am not a big gamer but please don't tell my how good nethack is.
Just go on and dream but you made a Damming statment about WebOS. WebOS is in many ways the MOST open of the mobile platform and is Linux based just like Android.
But you can just keep on dreaming. You see I was writing FOSS before the first GPL was written. Back when I first heard about the GNU project long before gcc or Linux was around I was releasing software with the source. As much as I really like FOSS it does not always provide the best solution to the problem. Frankly even though I use OpenOffice I know that Office is a better system. I just refuse to pay for it but good greif does OpenOffice Calc suck. It is PAINFULLY SLOW!
Not allowing Flash to compile to a native iPhone app I do find mildly annoying. I don't like from a purely philosophical point of view. From a practical point of view Flash is not well suited to touch applications. That is true. Try out a Juju tablet and you see just how messy it really is. Think of it. Flash often depends on mouse overs and games often use the keyboard. Just how would they work on an iPhone? Not very well to be honest. Yes it is a bothersome rule but I have had a program that depended on a closed source library suffer because I couldn't get a bug fixed or move from Dos to extended DOS with out it breaking. I can see how Jobs would no want people using a development system that didn't allow the developer to use all the features of the device. Remeber when some software companies produced Linux products by using WineLib? Remember how badly they fit in with everything else? Or think about it in the console world. The best games are not the ones that are ports.
Does Apple want a lot of exclusive well written software for the iPhone with a native look and feel? YOU BET THEY DO. As always if you don't like develop for WebOS or Android. And back to that. So is Adobe going to port their Flash compiler to work on Android and WebOS? I doubt it. Adobe just like Apple is in it for the money. And they want to keep developers locked into their ecosystem! So Adobe wants to do the EXACT same thing that Apple does. And remember how Adobe would let Mac and Linux lag a version or two behind Windows? And where is the Linux version of Shockwave?
Adobe is no innocent victim here. Flash is a closed source lock in. Worse the H.264.
It has no place on the Internet except for applets that can not be written in any other way and for those I would rather see people use Java which is how FOSS.
"Flash 10.1 for mobile devices, which is in BETA " Which means that it hasn't shipped that is the definition of beta. Yes I knew that it was in beta but it is a closed beta still and about a year late. So yea I am still saying put up or shut up. Instead of trying to force Apple to put flash on the iPhone by crying about how sad it is that they are blocking it deliver Flash on other devices that doesn't suck. Actually a lot of what Jobs said does make sense. 1. Flash isn't set up well for touch apps. That is the truth. Will that change? Maybe but currently flash isn't well suited to touch. 2. Adobe has not delivered a good mobile Flash yet. You said they have a beta and yes they do but it is a closed beta. Maybe you have an inside track with Adobe but just how good it will be is right now a big unknown. 3. Flash is a performance hog. Yep current flash viewers are slow and eat CPU cycles like they are going out of style. Which means 4. It will eat battery life. Is also true. Again when the mobile version comes out we will all know for sure but it still isn't out yet. 5. HTML5 is the open standard for video and Flash is a closed propriety technology. That is true. I hope that people do move to HTML 5 for video. 6. Flash and Adobe products as a whole have a bad history when it comes to security. That is true. Flash and Acrobat both have had a lot of security issues. How big of a deal that is on a mobile phone? Maybe not much. Adobe really is to blame. They blew it with Flash-lite and now really need to prove themselves. What will happen if Flash 10.1 doesn't suck is simply this. People will buy more WebOS and Android phones because Flash works on them and works well. Steve will get up on stage and say this, "We never said that the iPhone would never have Flash. We said we would put Flash on the iPhone until it was done right! Now I want you all to see Flash done right!" the crowd will go wild as Steve demos Flash on the iPhone and or Pad, Steve will introduce the Adobe's CEO. Adobe's CEO will kiss Steve's ring and tell everyone how grateful he is that Apple made them do Flash mobile the right way! Bird will sing the sun will shine and all will be right with the world.
So yea I stand by my statment, Adobe needs to put up or shut up and a closed beta isn't putting up in my book.
Well we will see. It is still not available for Android and the Palm yet Maybe it will not suck but with Adobe's track record "Flash is slow on an Atom" I really want to see it ship before I damn Apple.
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Refuel yes but why put wings on what will basically be an empty tank when you are done?
What might be an even better solution for a photoint sat would be to separate the sensors from the propulsion module.
You could just launch a relatively cheap new propulsion unit on a smaller booster and swap it in for the old one in orbit. The old propulsion unit would separate and the new one would then doc with the sensor module.
Put a robotic arm on the propulsion bus so it could grapple the sensor bus. The old module would then undock and move away to latter deorbit,
The new bus would then doc using the robotic arm and then disengage the grapple to wait for it to be replaced at a latter date.
Of course this is just off the top of my head.
"Debian, a whole OS without any paid devs?"
1. Debian is not an OS. It is a distro.
2. No Linux Distro I know of is free of code from paid devs! RedHat, IBM, Novell/SUSE, Intel, and many more pay people to develop code and then contribute that code to Linux. So any Distro that includes say.. The FOSS Intel video driver is using the code of paid devs.
Even RMS states the F in FOSS does not mean unpaid or free as in beer.
And I disagree about a crisis of sustainability. FOSS has not been wildly profitable as a whole. It has not inspired a huge numbers of vibrant projects. For every FireFox there are tens of thousands of projects that never get past a page on source forge.
Even some really good FOSS software just sort of lingers on the fringe. One great project IMHO is DeVeDe which is a super simple and easy to use DVD creation tool.
"I am not the dev but I use it"
Without a clear source of revenue projects will fade.
BTW the problem is getting worse for closed source software.
Most people have found software that frankly is good enough so they are not buying new software as much.
Also people have found free software on the internet both in the form of FOSS and in the form of piracy.
That is why you see so much interest in mobile apps. It is still possible to make money and maybe even grow large in that space. On the PC it is just too crowded.
1. a. No need for a refueling ship to have to return, repair?
b. Maybe but it would have to be cheaper to launch this, bring back the satellite, repair it, and relaunch than to just replace with a new and probably better model. Plus will it be faster? Can you live with that bird out of service that long?
c. Monitoring? Maybe but why a return capability?
3. We already have Sigint and Commint satellites so an EW version is not to far fetched but why a return capability?
I think number two is the right answer.
Put some Rods from God in the cargo bay and park it in orbit for a few months at a time. If you don't need them you bring them home to re launch.
You want the bring home because frankly you wouldn't want them to just fall out of the sky... Maybe over a friendly city?
Yes and no.
It will probably use Time Division multiplexing.
I have heard that Flex is better and I have not messed with Flash in years it was terrible when I used it down right painful.
From what I heard the Adobe tool generated binaries not just Objective c code. Adobe would have to change the tool to out put c or java for android but that is just code generation.
If you want to use flash for games and even apps on the Internet that is tolerable.
What we need is a law where public flogging is the punishment for using Flash as a navigation element on a website.
Not really but it is evil.
Now we just need to launch it.
I put the odds at less than 50% that it will launch but I am in a pessimistic mood.
The 1860s?
Oh yea I remember that as well.
Good times.
Yes.
H.264 after we ban software patents.
That is why I hate this.
It reminds me of those Popular Science stores.
Or even better the one that sticks in my mind. The THOR drive from Radio Shack.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor-CD
I was so hyped by this in 1988 it sound so cool and it was only a few years away...
It never came.
On the bright side we did eventually get CD-Rs and even CD-RWs but not for a good long time after the THOR drive was announced.
Well too be honest this makes sense to me.
You seem to have a lot of in house Windows knowledge and little to no OSS knowledge.
You already had OSS in place and then you decide to throw FreeBSD into the mix? What idiot came up with that idea.
Nothing wrong with FreeBSD but you where already using some Linux and it sounds like a lot of Windows.
So you add a third OS to the mix?
In any good sized company you really want to cut down on complexity.
You talked about how the people that the tasks where delegated too had no Unix experience. How many people had Windows experience and how many people have Unix experience? If most of the folks have windows experience only....
Really if you are going to use OSS in a company you need to do it in a smart way.
Don't use multiple overlapping solutions for the problems.
If you are going to use a OSS OS I suggest you pick one and standardize it.
If you are going to pick Linux for a server solution then I suggest that you pick one distro for all your servers.
I feel you where wise to pick CentOS and I would suggest that Ubuntu Server is also a good choice. They are very popular and are server distros. Red Hat if you want to pay or need pay support is good and of course Debian.
Also pick a sever distro. Fedora is not a good production sever distro. Server distros like Ubuntu Server, CentOS, and Red Hat tend to recive updates for years. The last thing you want to do with a sever is frankly any more than you have too. The ideal sever is one that is secure and working. You often don't want the latest or greatest on it but the most reliable.
Frankly it looks like you company saw only problems with OSS. Failed projects and complexity are all issues that a lot of companies just don't want to deal with.
They want it to just work
or
Have someone to blame when it doesn't.
Let my make this perfectly clear.
IE is a nightmare but...
Part of the problem really needs to be laid at the feet of the W3C. They moved so slowly when it came to creating standards that it was just painful.
Netscape and Microsoft where at one time stuck with a standards group that moved at the speed of molasses in Antarctica in June and people wanting new functionality. Of course that was a long time ago band Microsoft spend a long time ignoring the standards that where set so we can blame them for that.
But frankly the beginning of the problem had a lot to do with the W3C.
This sounds really cool but the artical that it links too is really short on details.
Things like speed? Storage life? How many read write cycles before it wears out? Addressing? is it byte level or page level?
I mean is this only a replacement for flash for is it a replacement for ram?
Cool but it just ticks me off. It is just a tease.
Yes they may not have those answers but I would be nice to know what they don't have answers for yet!
A. I am not Catholic.
B. I agree with you but see A. so that doesn't matter all that much.
I asked a priest about that once. His response was.
"Your parish is your family. If you had a family of your own would have to suffer. Your personal family or your parish family."
I can see that point of view. I think it is not correct but I can at least understand where they are coming from.
"change the fact the Android is going to have the smart phone market nearly to itself eventually."
I suggest that you learn just what a fact is.
I really hope that Android never gets the entire mobile phone market.
Simple reason that it would be bad for the users.
Right now Android does not have as good of a UI as the iPhone or the WebOS. I have an Android phone, my wife has a Palm Pre, and I have an Ipod Touch.
The media player capabilities of Android are not as good as well. Without competition you have stagnation.
So you have a bad habit of making wild statements of fact without any evidence backing them up.
Let me teach the correct words to use.
"I think Android will be come the dominate mobile OS" and "Open Source can produce software that is as good or better than commercial offerings."
You see I do agree that the flash cross compiler should be allowed.
I think that Flash is a terrible programming environment and language. Franky I think of it as the modern equivalent to basic in many way. A terrible language that a few good programs managed to be written in.
But I don't think it should be banned as a language.
Now the flash plug-in is another matter. I do have it installed but I look forward to the day when that is no longer the case. Flash on the web is a festering blight.
So yes I agree with you that I don't like Apples developer restrictions on development tools.
One has to wonder if a library written in C will be put in the same class? If so that will really put a hurting on game developers.
The concept of not being able to use "toolkits" gets very weird very quickly. I have a few libraries I have created to manage some tasks. They work well and are written in C++. Can I not use them on the iPhone.
What gets me is this Adobe as the hurt party crap.
They are every bit about lock in as Apple is no better and no worse.
There is not one crusading for freedom here. Just two vendors each pushing their agenda.
But Adobe gets my goat because they have yet to deliver Mobile Flash. As far as I am concerned until they ship Flash for a Mobile platform it is them and not Apple keeping it out of the mobile space.
Deliver it for WebOS, RIM, and Android if Apple doesn't want it. Let's see how much it adds to mobile devices.
But until that happens Adobe is raising a fuss over Apple not allowing Adobe vaporware on to their devices.
So I still as far as Flash on mobile devices goes Adobe still needs to Put up or shut up!
BTW I am sure that Google wouldn't ban apps made with the Flash cross compiler so Adobe show us just how good this is.
You I do agree that I don't like the limitations that Apple put on developers. I don't have to like them to be honest.
What I get wound up over is Adobe saying that Flash is an Open Standard when it really is not.
They are a money gubbing corp that has failed to deliver in the mobile space for years.
Flash-Lite is a disaster.
This iPhone needs flash is total propaganda. The best example was on the Cnet podcast Buzz Out Loud. The day before yesterday they where ranting on about how the iPhone should have Flash. But when asked none of them knew if there Android phones had it or not? And they really didn't seem to care that it is supposed to be coming soon. When they pointed this out they all sort of finally admitted that the lack of Flash is probably not a terrible thing.
You may dislike Apples restrictions but Adobe is playing a propaganda war and people are buying it.
If Flash is great on mobile devices lets see it. I don't have it for my Android Phone and My wife doesn't have it on her Pre yet.
It isn't available on Blackberry.
Lets see it in the wild and see if it is of any value.
It is Apples Platform. What people don't get is nobody is preventing you from using any tool you want to program on the iPhone. You just can not sell the app through the store.
You can write any app you want for your self.
Hey Apple is be a pain. Adobe is play the the role of the hurt innocent.
I am just not going to get fired up over Apple shutting out Adobe's closed proprietary ecosystem out of Apples closed proprietary ecosystem.
And I am sure not going to work as a free PR department to help spread the crap that is Flash.
Hey Air apps on the desktop are fine. But get Flash off of the Web. As I said 90% of all Flash code on the web is useless crap and I am being kind since I could probably add a 9 or two on that number and still be accurate.
"ARM also needs a 64-bit ISA, but I'm sure that they're working on it, or have even completed it."
A I think they have
and
B I am not so sure. You only need 64 bit if you are going to use very large integers or if each task needs more than a 32 bit address space.
It is entirely possible for a 32 bit cpu to have more than four gigabytes of memory. You only really run into issues if any one task need a very large address space.
While some server tasks do fit those requirements a lot of them will do just fine with 32 bits. At least for a while.
But you are missing the point.
At my office we have a Linux NAS running a P3 that supports 50 people with no problem.
We have a PostgreSQL server that runs our call management system that supports 50 or so users and that is running on a 600 Mhz P3 with no problems.
We have firewalls, mail servers, and web servers.
We could probably virtualize them all on a quad core x86 but that would give us a massive single point of failure. Also we like to keep our firewalls on separate boxes anyway.
Probably an ARM would be more than powerful enough for many of these tasks. It would probably be cheaper, and more power efficient as well.
If we had a smaller office I would be willing to bet that a single ARM based box with the right storage system could be our NAS, Database server, intranet webserver, and maybe mail server.
The iPhone is NOT the only Smartphone on the market. The iPhone isn't even the best selling smartphone on the market.
Frankly that is what is so good about the mobile space right now. Nobody had a 90% marketshare like Windows on the Desktop.
So yes if you don't like develop on another platform and or buy another platform.
So no Microsoft saying you can only use the win32 API is not the same as Apple saying that you can only use Objective C. As I said I don't like it. I feel that other languages should be allowed.
However I will not cheer on Adobe as some white knight.
The open spec is a moving target. Also Flash 10.1 does use hardware acceleration on the Mac. Probably through open CL. But not having hardware acceleration has ZERO to do with stability. Performance yes stability no.
Apple is a company that's number one interest is in protecting it's profits by controlling their product.
Adobe is a company that's number on interest is in protecting it's profits by pushing it's product and maintaining it's marketshare.
I own an Android phone and my wife owns a Palm Pre. The only Apple product I own is an iPod Touch that I use to watch video and play a few games on.
I am so not an Apple fan boy but I will be honest. When Flash is only used for things like games I will be a happy man.
NOTHING ticks me off more than going to some website and having to wait while some silly Flash screen loads! Or to use some terrible Flash based UI setup by some hipster that thinks he is too cool for school. Most have TERRIBLE usability and almost all of them do not support access for sight impaired people well at all! About 90% of Flash is a best useless eyecandy and at worst a travesty of UI design.
So the fact that Apple has actually made sites move to HTML 5 is I feel a great improvement. Those site render well not just on iPhones but my wife's Pre and my Android.
As I said I don't trust Adobe as far as I can throw them.
If Adobe really wants me to worry about the closed Flash Player being locked out of the Closed iPhone then they can just release the source of the Mac, Windows, Android, and Linux Players to the community. Until then I will be grateful that they have stopped treating Linux as a second class citizen but little else.
As far as I am concerned it is their fight for their money. I really don't care one way or the next.
Really so you picked the programs and one OS?
Fine
SolidWorks
AutoCad
PhotoShop "Gimp is good but NOT better".
FSX
BioShock
Assassins Creed
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2... I am not a big gamer but please don't tell my how good nethack is.
Just go on and dream but you made a Damming statment about WebOS. WebOS is in many ways the MOST open of the mobile platform and is Linux based just like Android.
But you can just keep on dreaming. You see I was writing FOSS before the first GPL was written. Back when I first heard about the GNU project long before gcc or Linux was around I was releasing software with the source. As much as I really like FOSS it does not always provide the best solution to the problem.
Frankly even though I use OpenOffice I know that Office is a better system.
I just refuse to pay for it but good greif does OpenOffice Calc suck.
It is PAINFULLY SLOW!
I was speaking just about the Flash viewer.
Not allowing Flash to compile to a native iPhone app I do find mildly annoying. I don't like from a purely philosophical point of view. From a practical point of view Flash is not well suited to touch applications. That is true. Try out a Juju tablet and you see just how messy it really is.
Think of it. Flash often depends on mouse overs and games often use the keyboard.
Just how would they work on an iPhone?
Not very well to be honest.
Yes it is a bothersome rule but I have had a program that depended on a closed source library suffer because I couldn't get a bug fixed or move from Dos to extended DOS with out it breaking. I can see how Jobs would no want people using a development system that didn't allow the developer to use all the features of the device.
Remeber when some software companies produced Linux products by using WineLib? Remember how badly they fit in with everything else?
Or think about it in the console world. The best games are not the ones that are ports.
Does Apple want a lot of exclusive well written software for the iPhone with a native look and feel? YOU BET THEY DO.
As always if you don't like develop for WebOS or Android.
And back to that. So is Adobe going to port their Flash compiler to work on Android and WebOS?
I doubt it.
Adobe just like Apple is in it for the money. And they want to keep developers locked into their ecosystem! So Adobe wants to do the EXACT same thing that Apple does.
And remember how Adobe would let Mac and Linux lag a version or two behind Windows?
And where is the Linux version of Shockwave?
Adobe is no innocent victim here. Flash is a closed source lock in. Worse the H.264.
It has no place on the Internet except for applets that can not be written in any other way and for those I would rather see people use Java which is how FOSS.
I have to say that I find Calc on OO to be painfully slow.
"Flash 10.1 for mobile devices, which is in BETA "
Which means that it hasn't shipped that is the definition of beta. Yes I knew that it was in beta but it is a closed beta still and about a year late.
So yea I am still saying put up or shut up.
Instead of trying to force Apple to put flash on the iPhone by crying about how sad it is that they are blocking it deliver Flash on other devices that doesn't suck.
Actually a lot of what Jobs said does make sense.
1. Flash isn't set up well for touch apps. That is the truth. Will that change? Maybe but currently flash isn't well suited to touch.
2. Adobe has not delivered a good mobile Flash yet. You said they have a beta and yes they do but it is a closed beta. Maybe you have an inside track with Adobe but just how good it will be is right now a big unknown.
3. Flash is a performance hog. Yep current flash viewers are slow and eat CPU cycles like they are going out of style. Which means
4. It will eat battery life. Is also true. Again when the mobile version comes out we will all know for sure but it still isn't out yet.
5. HTML5 is the open standard for video and Flash is a closed propriety technology. That is true. I hope that people do move to HTML 5 for video.
6. Flash and Adobe products as a whole have a bad history when it comes to security. That is true. Flash and Acrobat both have had a lot of security issues. How big of a deal that is on a mobile phone? Maybe not much.
Adobe really is to blame. They blew it with Flash-lite and now really need to prove themselves.
What will happen if Flash 10.1 doesn't suck is simply this.
People will buy more WebOS and Android phones because Flash works on them and works well.
Steve will get up on stage and say this, "We never said that the iPhone would never have Flash. We said we would put Flash on the iPhone until it was done right! Now I want you all to see Flash done right!" the crowd will go wild as Steve demos Flash on the iPhone and or Pad, Steve will introduce the Adobe's CEO. Adobe's CEO will kiss Steve's ring and tell everyone how grateful he is that Apple made them do Flash mobile the right way!
Bird will sing the sun will shine and all will be right with the world.
So yea I stand by my statment, Adobe needs to put up or shut up and a closed beta isn't putting up in my book.
Well we will see. It is still not available for Android and the Palm yet Maybe it will not suck but with Adobe's track record "Flash is slow on an Atom" I really want to see it ship before I damn Apple.