Things are getting better with the latest release of Flash 9, which has a rewritten VM which includes JIT compiling. Unfortunately, code has to be ported to the new language (AS3) in order to take advantage of the speed. But they cleaned up a lot of annoying things in the language at the same time, and made everything much more standardized and consistent. It really feels like a first-class programming language now, that can compete with C# or Java.
They are not saying Adobe will call home, they are saying the people writing apps ontop of the framework can update stuff from the web, yet still run when not connected. The example I saw was an ebay app, that lets you manage the items you are selling. You don't need to be online all the time (like you do with the web version of ebay), but when you are, it updates the item's stats (price, # of bids, etc).
Imagine being able to read your gmail & compose messages without an internet connection, and when you connect it sends them all off? (Of course you can do this with a POP3 client, but perhaps some people prefer the gmail interface).
The flash player doesn't require a license. Neither does the free flex 2 sdk (compiler for flash 9 apps), nor the apollo sdk (compiler for apollo apps).
So if you are using only the free software, then you have nothing to worry about.
Of course if you want to use the fancy programmer IDE (Flex 2 Builder), or the Flash Authoring IDE, then of course you need to buy a license for each PC you install it on.
The Apollo runtime is created by the team formerly known as Macromedia. These guys focus really hard on reducing bloat as much as possible. For years they had a strict policy that the flash player download size must stay under 1MB. I just checked, and the current size of the firefox/windows plugin is 1,324KB. So they've gone over a bit, but you'll have to agree that it's still quite small for what it does.
As for the EULA, I wouldn't worry too much about it. It's almost boilerplate, in fact it looks like it's copy&pasted from the Flash Player EULA. And that hasn't stopped the flash player from getting on something like 98% of internet connected desktop pc's.
If Apollo can do all it promises, and do it well (which I have high hopes, as it's being made by the creators of Flash itself), it will blow all the competition out of the water. The two main competing products right now are mProjector and Zinc, but they all have limitations which come from not having as deep integration with the flash & web runtimes. They also have shakey crossplatform support, with some features only supported on some platforms, and even silly things like having to call different functions for the same feature when on different platforms. Zinc also has a bad reputation for introducing more bugs than they fix in every update.
One really cool thing is the bridge between the flash and web runtimes. You can do things like pass function pointers between them, and be able to call them, and still have it work. Or flash can subscribe to DOM events, and vice versa (javascript can subscribe to events broadcast from within the flash player).
The notion that you shouldn't learn something because it's not used at your current job seems somewhat foolish to me. I guess if you plan to work there until you die, and you are 100% sure that they will never ever consider using some other technology besides the outdated vb.net. Maybe you work at some dinosaur company that refuses to ever change, but at least where I work, there have been several instances where my "on-the-side" learning has eventually had a direct positive impact on my job.
My gf works in a corporate office at Wells Fargo. They have the hardest time transfering files around, email is capped at 10MB, outside programs banned. The only 'approved' way of transfering files (for example large 500 page financial statement 30MB pdf) is through a "SwiftSend" program. The only problem, is that this custom/enterprise app is so buggy, she is afraid to even open it, because she knows there is a 90% chance it will crash hard, locking up the PC, and needing a visit from IT in order to get the PC working again.
If they just were to lift the email cap, then they would be happy. Or perhaps installing a ZIP program, most PDFs can compress pretty well. But no, too much bureaucracy.
I like my job better (small, 10-person company), where I have free reign to install what the fuck ever I want. If I screw up my machine, it's my own damn fault, I'm better able to fix it that most people there anyway.
Happened to me once...when it was rebuilding the array with the new drive, the extra disk access caused a second drive to fail, and everything exploded (metaphorically).
There's a difference between something that sits in your systray and stores your username & password, and something that sits on a third-party server, which you have no control over, and stores your username & password (in a non-hashed format, which means other people potentially have access to it)
What if I want to open/save really RAW image files? For example, no header, 32bits per pixel, and I will have to manually input the width & height? These are unrelated to digicam outputs, and can be used in things like GBA homebrew games.
1) definately sounds more like mplayer-plugin's fault than firefox's fault. I always cut & paste the url into a terminal anyway, that way I can also save a copy of the video if I want to. (Yes it's more work, but I don't mind so much. Others may be annoyed by having to do it this way)
What about flv8? What about Flash 9, with it's completely rewritten from scratch virtual machine, and 10x performance increase? I have a feeling it will be a looong time before either of these see support in FOSS. But that's ok, most people who are hardline free software, are used to being a couple of years behind the latest technology, right?
I haven't tried flv in xine, but at least in mplayer+ffmpeg, it seems to have problems sometimes. About 40% of the FLV videos I play, sound and video get horribly out of sync. (This doesn't happen with any other video format for me). It's possible it's my fault, but I'm using precompiled packages, and a fairly standard config, so I dunno.
Be careful with JoelOnSoftware...he seems to talk out of his ass a lot. Especially the part where he claims that most programmers don't care about money. I mean, WTF? This is along with his suggestion to blow $800 on office chairs for your employees.
He's half right: The DS firmware chip is PARTIALLY protected. The first part of it cannot be written to without shorting the SL1 pad. The later part can be written to without shorting. However, because the firmware has a checksum which is verified by the BIOS, if you want to update the firmware (without bricking the DS), you MUST short the SL1 pad (so the entire firmware can be updated).
The reason for leaving part of it unprotected, is because it stores a few users settings at the very end of the firmware.
Also, different models of DS use different firmware chip models, while they work exactly the same, they may have different amounts protected (some have like only 25% protected, others have almost all of it protected except the last few kb which store user settings)
You should take a look at colinux. It takes a little bit to get it set up, but it's not too bad. And once you do, you can stay in windows, but have a fast linux server run in the background -- it's not virtualized at all, but it runs directly as a separate process under windows. For me, it is actually much much faster to run colinux than even cygwin! And they have a debian image, so you have the advantage of apt-get there. You can 'bridge' it to your network, so from your perspective, it just appears as a separate PC on the network, with it's own IP address, etc etc.
Like I said though, this makes the protocol much less efficient. Instead of being able to download from almost anyone, you can only download from people who have a higher percentage complete than you do (since anyone with less percent complete, will have only bits that you already have).
With bittorrent, the pieces come down in random order. Thus you cannot stream it, as you need the pieces to come down in order (unless you like watching things with the video shuffled around). If someone were to mod it, such that the pieces come down in sequential order, the protocol would be much less efficient overall.
I hope this means they will get back to work on the Linux client they've been promising for the past 3 years. Well...maybe I hope it doesn't. I've got enough addictions as it is.
Is TwIPS just something you made up? I'd like more information on it as well, it sounds interesting for various reasons (teaching others, learning more myself, maybe I'll write an interpreter if none exists, etc)
That thing looks sooooo shady. At one point, a while back when I first heard of them, their terms & conditions were word for word identical to skype's, except with 'Skype' search & replaced with 'VoipBuster'. I would be very wary of giving them money.
I tried their 'free' call (which is limited to a couple of minutes if you don't pay them - yes you have to pay in order to make free calls), and the quality was poor, with a several second delay, which makes it hard to hold a conversation.
Slashdot Mirror
Things are getting better with the latest release of Flash 9, which has a rewritten VM which includes JIT compiling. Unfortunately, code has to be ported to the new language (AS3) in order to take advantage of the speed. But they cleaned up a lot of annoying things in the language at the same time, and made everything much more standardized and consistent. It really feels like a first-class programming language now, that can compete with C# or Java.
They are not saying Adobe will call home, they are saying the people writing apps ontop of the framework can update stuff from the web, yet still run when not connected. The example I saw was an ebay app, that lets you manage the items you are selling. You don't need to be online all the time (like you do with the web version of ebay), but when you are, it updates the item's stats (price, # of bids, etc).
Imagine being able to read your gmail & compose messages without an internet connection, and when you connect it sends them all off? (Of course you can do this with a POP3 client, but perhaps some people prefer the gmail interface).
The flash player doesn't require a license.
Neither does the free flex 2 sdk (compiler for flash 9 apps), nor the apollo sdk (compiler for apollo apps).
So if you are using only the free software, then you have nothing to worry about.
Of course if you want to use the fancy programmer IDE (Flex 2 Builder), or the Flash Authoring IDE, then of course you need to buy a license for each PC you install it on.
The Apollo runtime is created by the team formerly known as Macromedia. These guys focus really hard on reducing bloat as much as possible. For years they had a strict policy that the flash player download size must stay under 1MB. I just checked, and the current size of the firefox/windows plugin is 1,324KB. So they've gone over a bit, but you'll have to agree that it's still quite small for what it does.
As for the EULA, I wouldn't worry too much about it. It's almost boilerplate, in fact it looks like it's copy&pasted from the Flash Player EULA. And that hasn't stopped the flash player from getting on something like 98% of internet connected desktop pc's.
If Apollo can do all it promises, and do it well (which I have high hopes, as it's being made by the creators of Flash itself), it will blow all the competition out of the water. The two main competing products right now are mProjector and Zinc, but they all have limitations which come from not having as deep integration with the flash & web runtimes. They also have shakey crossplatform support, with some features only supported on some platforms, and even silly things like having to call different functions for the same feature when on different platforms. Zinc also has a bad reputation for introducing more bugs than they fix in every update.
One really cool thing is the bridge between the flash and web runtimes. You can do things like pass function pointers between them, and be able to call them, and still have it work. Or flash can subscribe to DOM events, and vice versa (javascript can subscribe to events broadcast from within the flash player).
Maybe you can find some useful info here, this topic came up about a year ago:2 51224
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/26/2
The notion that you shouldn't learn something because it's not used at your current job seems somewhat foolish to me. I guess if you plan to work there until you die, and you are 100% sure that they will never ever consider using some other technology besides the outdated vb.net. Maybe you work at some dinosaur company that refuses to ever change, but at least where I work, there have been several instances where my "on-the-side" learning has eventually had a direct positive impact on my job.
My gf works in a corporate office at Wells Fargo. They have the hardest time transfering files around, email is capped at 10MB, outside programs banned. The only 'approved' way of transfering files (for example large 500 page financial statement 30MB pdf) is through a "SwiftSend" program. The only problem, is that this custom/enterprise app is so buggy, she is afraid to even open it, because she knows there is a 90% chance it will crash hard, locking up the PC, and needing a visit from IT in order to get the PC working again.
If they just were to lift the email cap, then they would be happy. Or perhaps installing a ZIP program, most PDFs can compress pretty well. But no, too much bureaucracy.
I like my job better (small, 10-person company), where I have free reign to install what the fuck ever I want. If I screw up my machine, it's my own damn fault, I'm better able to fix it that most people there anyway.
Happened to me once...when it was rebuilding the array with the new drive, the extra disk access caused a second drive to fail, and everything exploded (metaphorically).
There's a difference between something that sits in your systray and stores your username & password, and something that sits on a third-party server, which you have no control over, and stores your username & password (in a non-hashed format, which means other people potentially have access to it)
Good job sneaking a referral link past the moderators to +5
What if I want to open/save really RAW image files? For example, no header, 32bits per pixel, and I will have to manually input the width & height? These are unrelated to digicam outputs, and can be used in things like GBA homebrew games.
1) definately sounds more like mplayer-plugin's fault than firefox's fault. I always cut & paste the url into a terminal anyway, that way I can also save a copy of the video if I want to. (Yes it's more work, but I don't mind so much. Others may be annoyed by having to do it this way)
What about flv8? What about Flash 9, with it's completely rewritten from scratch virtual machine, and 10x performance increase? I have a feeling it will be a looong time before either of these see support in FOSS. But that's ok, most people who are hardline free software, are used to being a couple of years behind the latest technology, right?
I haven't tried flv in xine, but at least in mplayer+ffmpeg, it seems to have problems sometimes. About 40% of the FLV videos I play, sound and video get horribly out of sync. (This doesn't happen with any other video format for me). It's possible it's my fault, but I'm using precompiled packages, and a fairly standard config, so I dunno.
You can! it's neat...
http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/taor?c=1
Being willing to comprimise on pay in order to get other benefits, is different than not caring about money at all. (Joel seems to claim the latter)
Be careful with JoelOnSoftware...he seems to talk out of his ass a lot. Especially the part where he claims that most programmers don't care about money. I mean, WTF? This is along with his suggestion to blow $800 on office chairs for your employees.
Check this article for a point by point breakdown:
http://blog.sc.tri-bit.com/archives/171
Merry Christmas, from Chiron Beta Prime,
where we're working in a mine
for our robot overlords. Did I say overlords? I meant protectors.
He's half right: The DS firmware chip is PARTIALLY protected. The first part of it cannot be written to without shorting the SL1 pad. The later part can be written to without shorting. However, because the firmware has a checksum which is verified by the BIOS, if you want to update the firmware (without bricking the DS), you MUST short the SL1 pad (so the entire firmware can be updated).
The reason for leaving part of it unprotected, is because it stores a few users settings at the very end of the firmware.
Also, different models of DS use different firmware chip models, while they work exactly the same, they may have different amounts protected (some have like only 25% protected, others have almost all of it protected except the last few kb which store user settings)
You should take a look at colinux. It takes a little bit to get it set up, but it's not too bad. And once you do, you can stay in windows, but have a fast linux server run in the background -- it's not virtualized at all, but it runs directly as a separate process under windows. For me, it is actually much much faster to run colinux than even cygwin! And they have a debian image, so you have the advantage of apt-get there. You can 'bridge' it to your network, so from your perspective, it just appears as a separate PC on the network, with it's own IP address, etc etc.
Check it out: http://colinux.org/
Like I said though, this makes the protocol much less efficient. Instead of being able to download from almost anyone, you can only download from people who have a higher percentage complete than you do (since anyone with less percent complete, will have only bits that you already have).
With bittorrent, the pieces come down in random order. Thus you cannot stream it, as you need the pieces to come down in order (unless you like watching things with the video shuffled around). If someone were to mod it, such that the pieces come down in sequential order, the protocol would be much less efficient overall.
Damn, that's a small linux distro!
I hope this means they will get back to work on the Linux client they've been promising for the past 3 years. Well...maybe I hope it doesn't. I've got enough addictions as it is.
Is TwIPS just something you made up? I'd like more information on it as well, it sounds interesting for various reasons (teaching others, learning more myself, maybe I'll write an interpreter if none exists, etc)
Thanks
That thing looks sooooo shady. At one point, a while back when I first heard of them, their terms & conditions were word for word identical to skype's, except with 'Skype' search & replaced with 'VoipBuster'. I would be very wary of giving them money.
I tried their 'free' call (which is limited to a couple of minutes if you don't pay them - yes you have to pay in order to make free calls), and the quality was poor, with a several second delay, which makes it hard to hold a conversation.