Well, Amazon is purely releasing these to have something to sell on their streaming store... so it's all about revenue for them.
So, while it might give some new content to people, there's no guarantee it will be any good.
If a company starts making films because of a dearth of things which can be streamed, and to cut down on the turnaround time between theatrical and streaming release... well, that's pretty much just cynical marketing.
If they produce garbage, other than padding their own pockets, then this "competition" is just pointless.
What people want is the movies and content they want to see. They don't actually care about competition. And they certainly don't care about some "me too" dreck which was produced just to be sold to a streaming audience.
All of these new services which want to be like NetFlix? Unless they add actual value, they're just another "it's like NetFlix, but with less content" service.
Does Amazon have any history of producing good content? Or is this just out of the blue?
I'm afraid I don't see how the decision to make films means they have any skills in the area.
I think you're missing the part where the GUI and the OS are two different things.
No, I'm missing how a bloated hog of an OS trying to be all things to all people isn't going to be a bloated hog of an OS.
If you're using the same OS on my phone as you are on my server... it's going to probably do a shitty job on one of them.
It tells me that MS either can't, or won't, embrace the notion that you have different builds for different things. They've always had this "common OS for everything" mentality -- which to me says they don't understand how those platforms differ. Or they don't care.
Wasn't Microsoft making noises about releasing a single OS which would be the same for a mobile device and a desktop?
In which case I expect a "one size fits some" approach, which will lead to a bloated mess on smaller devices.
Mobile devices aren't the same as desktops, don't have as much resources, and need to be a little more slimmed down -- like apps which weigh in at 10s of megs instead of gigs.
I'm just not sure Microsoft is going to hit the mark and not end up with something which is useless on at least one platform.
I don't want my tablet or my phone running the same OS as my desktop -- because that makes no sense unless you're just going to force the mobile devices to get even bigger.
Sometimes, I just think Microsoft has no real understanding of the markets they're chasing.
Of course, the problem with rocketry is the ability to launch people/satellites into space is pretty much the same as required to lob missiles onto someone else.
And, let's face it, Iran is largely under the sway of people who are a little on the crazy side. Ahmadinejad is pretty much batshit crazy and deluded.
If you wish to keep believing large corporations do this shit by accident, you are free to.
Me, I'm long since past being able to accept this is anything but calculated malfeasance.
Corporations absolve these people from legal responsibility. Which means it somehow seems to resolve them from any moral responsibility.
I think your average CEO is a sociopath and a narcissist, who surrounds themselves with similar people, and then hires lawyers to explain all of the angles to them.
Oddly, I find the same thing true of most elected officials and most other people who seek power.
And, as a long term vegetarian.. this is why I view PETA and most vegans with some contempt. The rhetoric and crazy gets dialed up to 11 straight out of the gate.
Slightly more on topic, I'm glad someone is demonstrating what "just the metadata" really translates into. People have been hoodwinked into thinking this isn't as severe as it really is.
But I'm not one of those people who assume guilt until proven innocent.
When it comes to corporations, I'm firmly in the "assholes until proven otherwise, and even then only temporarily on this one issue".
From TFA:
The company found support for its claims from the American Hotel & Lodging Association lobby group, which accused the FCC of trying to tie Marriott's hands at a time of a growing number of cybersecurity threats.
So, after they had this pointed out to them, they and a lobby group proceeded to keep claiming it was necessary or legal.
Which means they knew damned well it was illegal, and why it was illegal. But, as corporations and lobby groups are want to do... they tried to re-frame the question.
Earlier in the story, it said:
An investigation by the regulator subsequently confirmed that the hotel was using a wi-fi monitoring system that de-authenticated guest-created hotspots.
This meant that if a guest connected their laptop, smartphone or tablet to either a mi-fi add-on or a hotspot created by a device already linked in to the hotel's internet system, then it would disconnect after a short time.
The FCC described the action as "unacceptable", noting that Marriott was charging conference attendees between $250 and $1,000 per device for internet access.
So, no, fuck Marriott. They don't get to paint themselves as anything but greedy bastards in this.
This is greed and entitlement, pure and simple. They knew damned well they were interfering with communications, and couldn't plausibly think that was legal.
You jest, but in its current incarnation, that pretty much describes the international stock market.
Unrealistic expectations and assumptions, divorced from reality, subject to the whims of speculation and manipulation, and operated in such a way as to allow the big players to skim off the top.
The crash of 2008? That was what happened when the guys running the Ponzi scheme managed to get everyone else to cover their losses.
The modern financial system is little better than any other pyramid scheme. It's just as vacuous and unfounded -- it's like everyone saying they believe in Tinkerbell.
So, overpriced speculative currency found to be overpriced?
When BitCoin was worth over $1000, why was it worth over $1000? Because people said it must be, not because it's backed by anything which objectively made it worth that much.
I've always looked at BitCoin and wondered what the value was in it -- sure, people said "Yarg, no regulations, no governments". But did you really think that would last? Or that without those people would be honest?
Basically BitCoin created a bubble, inside of a reality distortion field, and people assumed it would go up forever and always stay that way. And it's been all hype since then. But it seems like we've been discovering that the players are either shady or incompetent, and that it doesn't look like all of the voodoo magic ascribed to it.
BitCoin seems like it's always been an idea, but somewhat divorced from reality. Essentially, it placed value on... what... large prime numbers?
As someone who has always been skeptical of BitCoin, I don't find myself seeing any reason to think it was ever anything but something people wanted to believe in, but which was never going to pan out as claimed.
This is like the people who were still buying tech stocks at the end of the.com bubble. It's musical chairs, but with money. Only now people are starting to realize there's not a lot of seats left.
So, imagine you're a multi-billion dollar corporation with business interests in many countries. Failure to investigate the legality of this is a risk to shareholders.
If the board of a company with a market cap of over $20 billion dollars is too stupid to find out if this plan is legal... they're idiots.
Because those people don't do much without checking with the lawyers to make sure their asses are covered.
So, no, I'm not willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to them. I believe someone knew this to be illegal, and decided to do it anyway -- possibly with the hope that someone would side with them.
I'm not prepared to cut them any slack. It's their damned job to understand this stuff if they're going to implement it as policy.
If ignorance of the law is no defense for me, then I sure as fuck expect a multi-national company to be held to the same, if not higher, standard.
I love how we use this phrase as if to imply that the government has somehow changed the rules on it's own without the consent or will of the people.
Until such time as they change the Constitution, it is still the highest law of the land. Deciding the 4th amendment (or any other part of it) is optional is not consistent with that.
Ergo, it is, by definition, illegal.
Yes, a lot of scared people have accepted this. That doesn't make it legal. It's expedient, sure. But legal? I don't buy that.
And, since they've given themselves permission to do this in the rest of the world, without the consent of the people they do it to... I conclude that America has made themselves the enemy of the liberty of everyone on the planet.
In which case what your passive citizenry accept is irrelevant. Because the rest of the world isn't subject to US law, no matter how much you guys believe in manifest destiny.
So, fight or don't fight your your rights, I don't care. But keep your fucking hands off mine. The rest of us haven't consented to this horseshit by the NSA.
Before Hubble, the only way was huge optics and high elevations.
Somewhere in the middle, the software compensating for the atmosphere got much better, and suddenly ground-based stuff was as good as Hubble.
They also do the neat tricks of the very-long-baseline where several smaller telescopes can get combined into what is effectively a huge telescope, but is much more cheaper to build than a single massive one.
I kind of get the impression the astronomers have been busy over the last few decades... CCDs used to be expensive and exotic. Now everybody carries on in their pocket -- so both the hardware and the software have given them huge strides over the last bunch of years.
Almost to the point that by the time someone has built the next big thing, someone has come close to beating it for a fraction of the cost.
Many years ago when I was in university and hung out with astronomy nerds... the notion of discovering an exoplanet was still speculative science, and it was largely thought there wouldn't be many planets.
Flash forward, and exoplanets are real, documented, and numerous.
It's awesome to see how much our understanding has changed in the last 25 years or so. And the more we discover about the universe, the bigger and cooler it actually is.
And, just think, only a few hundred years ago you'd be burned at the stake (or whatever) for saying the Earth goes around the sun.
They thought they owned the airwaves inside their hotel and wanted to charge guests for using them
How uneducated do you have to be on the topic to believe this? Me? I'm betting some corporate lawyer said they could probably get away with it.
If they sincerely believed they owned those airwaves and could do this, they utterly failed to ask anybody who knew anything about it. That level of ignorance is either epic, or willful.
I think this is more likely a case of them knowing damned well they weren't supposed to, hoping they'd get away with it, and now pretending like it was all an honest mistake. At some point, someone said "ummm, guys, we can't legally do that" and was told to STFU.
I'm glad this got smacked down. And I wonder if movie theaters and other venues won't get caught doing the same thing.
It's about time corporations got reminded they aren't the ones defining what's legal and what isn't.
1.
seeking or intended to subvert an established system or institution.
"subversive literature"
synonyms: disruptive, troublemaking, inflammatory, insurrectionary; More
seditious, revolutionary, rebellious, rebel, renegade, dissident
"subversive activities"
noun noun: subversive; plural noun: subversives
1.
a subversive person.
synonyms: troublemaker, dissident, agitator, revolutionary, renegade, rebel
"a dangerous subversive"
Getting around a surveillance state which has declared itself to be legal and legitimate... well, guess what, demanding your rights now is subversive.
When you have to hide from your own government because they have decided you have no actual right to privacy, your government is unjust.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized
That is now interpreted as "unless we say otherwise, and if you disagree you must side with the terrorists".
The supposedly "free" governments around the world now pretty much require that we be subversive, because they no longer recognize or give a damn about our rights. So it's pretty much the only thing left.
A lot of people don't realize librarians have always been on the forefront of protecting out rights.
From fighting for censorship, to advocating for free speech, to stuff like this... librarians tend to be people with a real understanding of our liberties, and why it's important to have them.
So, if you enjoy the right to read a book which someone found offensive, of the ability to access stuff without having to pay the publisher, or free and anonymous access to the interwebs... hug your local librarian.
They or someone like them has probably done as much to maintain your freedoms as anybody else in the last few decades.
Showing the public how to undermine the surveillance crap... well, that deserves applause in my book.
But why do we think it is a good idea for arbitrary websites to be able to run arbitrary code? That's completely idiotic.
Flash and Java are one of those things that expect you to run your browser in the least secure possible configuration (let anybody run anything) on the offbeat chance you might need it somewhere.
Which means you let all of the rest of the websites you visit run anything they want to for no good reason.
Since Flash is mostly a security hole used by advertising, and the few sites I've seen which require Flash for navigation are complete crap, why are people willing to put up with this?
Hey, I know, how about we stop pretending that we need the stuff Flash brings to the table because it just makes a more overall insecure browsing experience, so when you do get exploited it was kind of just a matter of time.
Flash (and to a certain extent, Java) has always been a security hole. It's time to stop pretending that it's otherwise useful.
At the very least, it needs to be sandboxed up the wazoo... there is no way in hell Flash should have access to anything outside of itself, because you can't trust it. Not now, not ever.
Because at a point a few years back it was the only viable solution available to do some of the things flash does
Define 'viable' -- do you mean it was the only sufficiently insecure platform which allowed arbitrary execution of code on the host machine?
The ever cookies? The ability to spy on your microphone and camera? How about providing endless security holes, hacks, exploits, privilege escalations, and who knows what else?
I'm afraid we differ on the meaning of the word 'viable'.
If you consider giving any website on the planet effectively root access to your machine in order to implement stuff that doesn't need to run locally as 'viable', then sure. Go with that.
But in terms of a platform where you can have any trust in it, and expectations it isn't a conduit to getting screwed -- I would say Flash is a resounding pile of crap.
I selectively enable it for a few things at work every year. But in general, I do not find that not having Flash even installed is a limitation.
In fact, I find it to be a blessing -- because starting with those stupid "Punch the Monkey" ads, and pretty much everything it's done in its lifetime, I don't find Flash provides much of value. At least not to me.
Flash was created by Macromedia. Which means it was designed by a company who was more or less hostile to consumers from the beginning, and was only doing things which benefited themselves.
I'm firmly of the opinion Flash should have died a violent death years ago.
I would honestly say given the track record of Flash... why the hell are people still running it?
Flash has been a gaping security hole as long as it has existed.
How anybody can pretend that it hasn't been leaving a series of security issues in its wake for over 15 years is mind boggling. Many of us have actively blocked/disabled it for at least 10. I don't even install it on personal machines, and I disable it on work machines except for the 2-3 things per year which I am required to do which won't work without Flash.
Why do people have any trust in this platform? It's pretty much been crap for its entire history.
Could it be your bullshit alarm is really sensitive? If you take the user-friendly UI and familiarity of Facebook, Twitter, etc and apply it to internal web applications like a document library, would you not get an easier adoption, and through network effect have more benefits for everyone?
You know, oddly enough, I have some experience in content management (at least enough to be dangerous)... and quite frankly, I'm not sure any of what the Facebook interface does really adds much in the way of business value.
Facebook is possibly a little useful (though exceedingly annoying IMO) to organize office parties -- I don't see it has much value for any 'real' business tasks.
In fact, a good portion of the 'social networking' paradigm, to me, doesn't seem like it adds much value to business. Which is a pity, because I've see several companies implement something, and it became an albatross after the novelty wore off. It's like nobody is ever clear on how this helps... just "because, social".
Your document library isn't about how many badges and likes you get, it's about finding stuff which is pertinent to your job and the task at hand. The content is what is valuable. At one point, large organizations employed actual librarians to organize their content. I don't see the Facebook model beating that.
As a library/content platform, social media technology just does the wrong thing.
"Enterprise social media" can work, let's not dismiss it just because it looks like something hipsters would approve.
In all honesty, I've not seen any of the technologies or platforms you describe... so maybe they're different. And in this case, the 'hipsters' are the marketing wankers who are all over the buzz-word du jour.
But, the limited stuff I have seen looks more like someone slapped "and social" on essentially a blogging system -- and they absolutely suck for tracking and organizing content, and over time people stop using them.
It's hard to see social media outside of what I've seen of it. And, quite frankly, in the enterprise, I've personally yet to see one which added value -- doesn't mean it's not out there.
So far I've found them to be more cumbersome than helpful, and mostly focused around vague, unquantifiable things which never actually seem to make it any easier to do anything useful.
And then we end up doing things in email anyway.:-P
Slashdot Mirror
So ... sales lies to you once the product exists, and marketing starts lying to you before the product is done?
Thanks for clearing that up. :-P
Cool, never heard of it ... but I'm happy that they're apparently actually making good programming.
Lots of people can make programming, but so few of them know how to make anything which isn't complete crap.
Well, Amazon is purely releasing these to have something to sell on their streaming store ... so it's all about revenue for them.
So, while it might give some new content to people, there's no guarantee it will be any good.
If a company starts making films because of a dearth of things which can be streamed, and to cut down on the turnaround time between theatrical and streaming release ... well, that's pretty much just cynical marketing.
If they produce garbage, other than padding their own pockets, then this "competition" is just pointless.
What people want is the movies and content they want to see. They don't actually care about competition. And they certainly don't care about some "me too" dreck which was produced just to be sold to a streaming audience.
All of these new services which want to be like NetFlix? Unless they add actual value, they're just another "it's like NetFlix, but with less content" service.
Does Amazon have any history of producing good content? Or is this just out of the blue?
I'm afraid I don't see how the decision to make films means they have any skills in the area.
No, I'm missing how a bloated hog of an OS trying to be all things to all people isn't going to be a bloated hog of an OS.
If you're using the same OS on my phone as you are on my server ... it's going to probably do a shitty job on one of them.
It tells me that MS either can't, or won't, embrace the notion that you have different builds for different things. They've always had this "common OS for everything" mentality -- which to me says they don't understand how those platforms differ. Or they don't care.
Wasn't Microsoft making noises about releasing a single OS which would be the same for a mobile device and a desktop?
In which case I expect a "one size fits some" approach, which will lead to a bloated mess on smaller devices.
Mobile devices aren't the same as desktops, don't have as much resources, and need to be a little more slimmed down -- like apps which weigh in at 10s of megs instead of gigs.
I'm just not sure Microsoft is going to hit the mark and not end up with something which is useless on at least one platform.
I don't want my tablet or my phone running the same OS as my desktop -- because that makes no sense unless you're just going to force the mobile devices to get even bigger.
Sometimes, I just think Microsoft has no real understanding of the markets they're chasing.
Of course, the problem with rocketry is the ability to launch people/satellites into space is pretty much the same as required to lob missiles onto someone else.
And, let's face it, Iran is largely under the sway of people who are a little on the crazy side. Ahmadinejad is pretty much batshit crazy and deluded.
Shadenfreude?
If you wish to keep believing large corporations do this shit by accident, you are free to.
Me, I'm long since past being able to accept this is anything but calculated malfeasance.
Corporations absolve these people from legal responsibility. Which means it somehow seems to resolve them from any moral responsibility.
I think your average CEO is a sociopath and a narcissist, who surrounds themselves with similar people, and then hires lawyers to explain all of the angles to them.
Oddly, I find the same thing true of most elected officials and most other people who seek power.
And, as a long term vegetarian .. this is why I view PETA and most vegans with some contempt. The rhetoric and crazy gets dialed up to 11 straight out of the gate.
Slightly more on topic, I'm glad someone is demonstrating what "just the metadata" really translates into. People have been hoodwinked into thinking this isn't as severe as it really is.
When it comes to corporations, I'm firmly in the "assholes until proven otherwise, and even then only temporarily on this one issue".
From TFA:
So, after they had this pointed out to them, they and a lobby group proceeded to keep claiming it was necessary or legal.
Which means they knew damned well it was illegal, and why it was illegal. But, as corporations and lobby groups are want to do ... they tried to re-frame the question.
Earlier in the story, it said:
So, no, fuck Marriott. They don't get to paint themselves as anything but greedy bastards in this.
This is greed and entitlement, pure and simple. They knew damned well they were interfering with communications, and couldn't plausibly think that was legal.
Does Radio Shack still sell those capacitors and connectors?
I'd sort of gotten the impression that for the most part Radio Shack had been reduced to "cheap electronics R us" for some time now.
Radio Shack has been in fairly steady decline for a few decades now.
How many times is this now?
This has been going on for years it seems.
I actually assumed they'd gone under by now, but apparently they've dragged out the death throes for a long time.
You jest, but in its current incarnation, that pretty much describes the international stock market.
Unrealistic expectations and assumptions, divorced from reality, subject to the whims of speculation and manipulation, and operated in such a way as to allow the big players to skim off the top.
The crash of 2008? That was what happened when the guys running the Ponzi scheme managed to get everyone else to cover their losses.
The modern financial system is little better than any other pyramid scheme. It's just as vacuous and unfounded -- it's like everyone saying they believe in Tinkerbell.
So, overpriced speculative currency found to be overpriced?
When BitCoin was worth over $1000, why was it worth over $1000? Because people said it must be, not because it's backed by anything which objectively made it worth that much.
I've always looked at BitCoin and wondered what the value was in it -- sure, people said "Yarg, no regulations, no governments". But did you really think that would last? Or that without those people would be honest?
Basically BitCoin created a bubble, inside of a reality distortion field, and people assumed it would go up forever and always stay that way. And it's been all hype since then. But it seems like we've been discovering that the players are either shady or incompetent, and that it doesn't look like all of the voodoo magic ascribed to it.
BitCoin seems like it's always been an idea, but somewhat divorced from reality. Essentially, it placed value on ... what ... large prime numbers?
As someone who has always been skeptical of BitCoin, I don't find myself seeing any reason to think it was ever anything but something people wanted to believe in, but which was never going to pan out as claimed.
This is like the people who were still buying tech stocks at the end of the .com bubble. It's musical chairs, but with money. Only now people are starting to realize there's not a lot of seats left.
So, imagine you're a multi-billion dollar corporation with business interests in many countries. Failure to investigate the legality of this is a risk to shareholders.
If the board of a company with a market cap of over $20 billion dollars is too stupid to find out if this plan is legal ... they're idiots.
Because those people don't do much without checking with the lawyers to make sure their asses are covered.
So, no, I'm not willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to them. I believe someone knew this to be illegal, and decided to do it anyway -- possibly with the hope that someone would side with them.
I'm not prepared to cut them any slack. It's their damned job to understand this stuff if they're going to implement it as policy.
If ignorance of the law is no defense for me, then I sure as fuck expect a multi-national company to be held to the same, if not higher, standard.
Until such time as they change the Constitution, it is still the highest law of the land. Deciding the 4th amendment (or any other part of it) is optional is not consistent with that.
Ergo, it is, by definition, illegal.
Yes, a lot of scared people have accepted this. That doesn't make it legal. It's expedient, sure. But legal? I don't buy that.
And, since they've given themselves permission to do this in the rest of the world, without the consent of the people they do it to ... I conclude that America has made themselves the enemy of the liberty of everyone on the planet.
In which case what your passive citizenry accept is irrelevant. Because the rest of the world isn't subject to US law, no matter how much you guys believe in manifest destiny.
So, fight or don't fight your your rights, I don't care. But keep your fucking hands off mine. The rest of us haven't consented to this horseshit by the NSA.
I think software went a long way.
Before Hubble, the only way was huge optics and high elevations.
Somewhere in the middle, the software compensating for the atmosphere got much better, and suddenly ground-based stuff was as good as Hubble.
They also do the neat tricks of the very-long-baseline where several smaller telescopes can get combined into what is effectively a huge telescope, but is much more cheaper to build than a single massive one.
I kind of get the impression the astronomers have been busy over the last few decades ... CCDs used to be expensive and exotic. Now everybody carries on in their pocket -- so both the hardware and the software have given them huge strides over the last bunch of years.
Almost to the point that by the time someone has built the next big thing, someone has come close to beating it for a fraction of the cost.
Many years ago when I was in university and hung out with astronomy nerds ... the notion of discovering an exoplanet was still speculative science, and it was largely thought there wouldn't be many planets.
Flash forward, and exoplanets are real, documented, and numerous.
It's awesome to see how much our understanding has changed in the last 25 years or so. And the more we discover about the universe, the bigger and cooler it actually is.
And, just think, only a few hundred years ago you'd be burned at the stake (or whatever) for saying the Earth goes around the sun.
How uneducated do you have to be on the topic to believe this? Me? I'm betting some corporate lawyer said they could probably get away with it.
If they sincerely believed they owned those airwaves and could do this, they utterly failed to ask anybody who knew anything about it. That level of ignorance is either epic, or willful.
I think this is more likely a case of them knowing damned well they weren't supposed to, hoping they'd get away with it, and now pretending like it was all an honest mistake. At some point, someone said "ummm, guys, we can't legally do that" and was told to STFU.
I'm glad this got smacked down. And I wonder if movie theaters and other venues won't get caught doing the same thing.
It's about time corporations got reminded they aren't the ones defining what's legal and what isn't.
It's depressing that it's necessary, but ...
Getting around a surveillance state which has declared itself to be legal and legitimate ... well, guess what, demanding your rights now is subversive.
When you have to hide from your own government because they have decided you have no actual right to privacy, your government is unjust.
That is now interpreted as "unless we say otherwise, and if you disagree you must side with the terrorists".
The supposedly "free" governments around the world now pretty much require that we be subversive, because they no longer recognize or give a damn about our rights. So it's pretty much the only thing left.
A lot of people don't realize librarians have always been on the forefront of protecting out rights.
From fighting for censorship, to advocating for free speech, to stuff like this ... librarians tend to be people with a real understanding of our liberties, and why it's important to have them.
So, if you enjoy the right to read a book which someone found offensive, of the ability to access stuff without having to pay the publisher, or free and anonymous access to the interwebs ... hug your local librarian.
They or someone like them has probably done as much to maintain your freedoms as anybody else in the last few decades.
Showing the public how to undermine the surveillance crap ... well, that deserves applause in my book.
But why do we think it is a good idea for arbitrary websites to be able to run arbitrary code? That's completely idiotic.
Flash and Java are one of those things that expect you to run your browser in the least secure possible configuration (let anybody run anything) on the offbeat chance you might need it somewhere.
Which means you let all of the rest of the websites you visit run anything they want to for no good reason.
Since Flash is mostly a security hole used by advertising, and the few sites I've seen which require Flash for navigation are complete crap, why are people willing to put up with this?
Hey, I know, how about we stop pretending that we need the stuff Flash brings to the table because it just makes a more overall insecure browsing experience, so when you do get exploited it was kind of just a matter of time.
Flash (and to a certain extent, Java) has always been a security hole. It's time to stop pretending that it's otherwise useful.
At the very least, it needs to be sandboxed up the wazoo ... there is no way in hell Flash should have access to anything outside of itself, because you can't trust it. Not now, not ever.
Define 'viable' -- do you mean it was the only sufficiently insecure platform which allowed arbitrary execution of code on the host machine?
The ever cookies? The ability to spy on your microphone and camera? How about providing endless security holes, hacks, exploits, privilege escalations, and who knows what else?
I'm afraid we differ on the meaning of the word 'viable'.
If you consider giving any website on the planet effectively root access to your machine in order to implement stuff that doesn't need to run locally as 'viable', then sure. Go with that.
But in terms of a platform where you can have any trust in it, and expectations it isn't a conduit to getting screwed -- I would say Flash is a resounding pile of crap.
I selectively enable it for a few things at work every year. But in general, I do not find that not having Flash even installed is a limitation.
In fact, I find it to be a blessing -- because starting with those stupid "Punch the Monkey" ads, and pretty much everything it's done in its lifetime, I don't find Flash provides much of value. At least not to me.
Flash was created by Macromedia. Which means it was designed by a company who was more or less hostile to consumers from the beginning, and was only doing things which benefited themselves.
I'm firmly of the opinion Flash should have died a violent death years ago.
I would honestly say given the track record of Flash ... why the hell are people still running it?
Flash has been a gaping security hole as long as it has existed.
How anybody can pretend that it hasn't been leaving a series of security issues in its wake for over 15 years is mind boggling. Many of us have actively blocked/disabled it for at least 10. I don't even install it on personal machines, and I disable it on work machines except for the 2-3 things per year which I am required to do which won't work without Flash.
Why do people have any trust in this platform? It's pretty much been crap for its entire history.
You know, oddly enough, I have some experience in content management (at least enough to be dangerous) ... and quite frankly, I'm not sure any of what the Facebook interface does really adds much in the way of business value.
Facebook is possibly a little useful (though exceedingly annoying IMO) to organize office parties -- I don't see it has much value for any 'real' business tasks.
In fact, a good portion of the 'social networking' paradigm, to me, doesn't seem like it adds much value to business. Which is a pity, because I've see several companies implement something, and it became an albatross after the novelty wore off. It's like nobody is ever clear on how this helps ... just "because, social".
Your document library isn't about how many badges and likes you get, it's about finding stuff which is pertinent to your job and the task at hand. The content is what is valuable. At one point, large organizations employed actual librarians to organize their content. I don't see the Facebook model beating that.
As a library/content platform, social media technology just does the wrong thing.
In all honesty, I've not seen any of the technologies or platforms you describe ... so maybe they're different. And in this case, the 'hipsters' are the marketing wankers who are all over the buzz-word du jour.
But, the limited stuff I have seen looks more like someone slapped "and social" on essentially a blogging system -- and they absolutely suck for tracking and organizing content, and over time people stop using them.
It's hard to see social media outside of what I've seen of it. And, quite frankly, in the enterprise, I've personally yet to see one which added value -- doesn't mean it's not out there.
So far I've found them to be more cumbersome than helpful, and mostly focused around vague, unquantifiable things which never actually seem to make it any easier to do anything useful.
And then we end up doing things in email anyway. :-P