This has caught my eye: "We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it."
Aliens could have a hive-like society, similar to ants or bees, where the individual is nothing. Surely you remember Ender's Game and its idea that the conflict was ultimately caused by the difference in society - the aliens could not comprehend an advanced society made of individuals alone. A hive-based society may discard empathy as inefficient. As a side-note, I think this is the direction of the reimagined "V" series - I think the aliens are "bug-like" rather that "lizard-like".
You inserted the word "flash" just for flames, but actually this is one of the really strong points of Flash: - Flash is VECTOR!
For 12 years now you've been able to specify a flash size in percents for true resolution independence.
The problem with websites are bitmaps and CSS incompatibilities across browsers. Even so, a nice constructed website will allow you to increase the text size.
This was at a time when Photoshop had few serious competitors. Today, Photoshop has mounting competition
Name one.
There is no serious competition for Photoshop. I wish it were. Corel stopped innovating years ago. Gimp is still a toy for professional work and I really don't know any other professional program that can do what Photoshop can.
I'm saying this as a former Corel user. It wasn't easy for me to fork money for PS, but I had to because I realized that no other tool comes close. Sure, there's Fireworks (also by Adobe) and Corel Painter but they are specialized tools.
Keep in mind that actual Flash apps written by CS5 beta testers have been approved in Apple's app store in the past as well as many games written with Unity3D, so it's not like performance is a problem.
Since every app is checked against objective (and subjective) criterias, it would have been OK to just reject poorly written applications.
Forcing me to use a specific programming language is insane. Imagine Microsoft demanding all windows apps to be written only in C# and compiled only with Visual Studio. It would be an outrage. But hey, it's Steve Jobs, the Big Brother himself, and he knows what's best for us, right?
Also, the timing was devious - on Friday, just before the Monday's official release of Adobe's CS5, effectively giving them no time to react. I was never a big fan of Adobe (especially before the Macromedia acquisition - their corporate culture started to change afterwards) but this is simply Steve Jobs being a big dick.
Finally, I know that many/.-ers are against Flash. Keep in mind however that this move goes well beyond Flash, affecting other tools and frameworks. If successful, this move will lead to more and more closed ecosystems (from other vendors as well). Today's Apple makes Microsoft look like saints.
I read you post three times but I could see no facts, examples, anecdotes, anything. Just words.
Flash supports multitouch and has access to accelerometer data, GPS info and so on, so what "new features" don't fit well with the medium? Semicomplex games not good? There are so many games in flash, some of them excellent, that isn't even funny. Quake has been ported to Flash, as well as Prince of Persia, just to name two classics, I could give many more examples.
Flash won that war largely because it didn't lag nearly as badly Flash doesn't lag at all. It's streaming. Loading is one thing, but the initialization is instant (even for very complex apps with tons of graphics and in excess of 50 KLOC).
I'll grant you on execution speed. When dealing with complex algorithms, a flash app profiled and optimized down to the opcode level will run about the same or slower as a plain java app. On the whole, Flash is bout 5 times slower than Java. Of course, when dealing with "normal" stuff, you hardly notice these issues.
Yes, but this time it's going to be different, you'll see. HTML5 will be adopted by all browsers within a year, IE6, 7 and 8 will die a horrible death in 6 months, the MPEG consortium will open-source H264 and everyone will be able to make awesome html5 games with 10 lines of code (or less). Flash will be become a relic of the past, like animated gifs.
Interactive, annoyingly loud animated html5 banner ads will become the new standard. They'll be based on open standards and we'll love them.
Talk to me when Windows 7 Service Pack 2 comes out. That's when I'll start installing it for business users.
You're so full of it. 7 is rock-solid out of the box. I've been testing it since beta and we were ready to upgrade as soon as it hit the stores. Windows 7 without any SP is faster and more secure than XP-SP3. But not even SP1 is good enough for you, you need SP2; why not SP4?
Tell me, make a list of issues that prevent your company from upgrading. I'll wait.
gotta move with my friends or end up falling out of touch [dotgnu.info], with everybody who already knows what everybody else is doing.
Falling out of touch? The friends I have are just a phone call away. I have an account on FB but if I really care about someone, I don't need it to stay in touch with them.
I wrote my first Basic program in 1983, when I was 7, on a ZX Spectrum. By 13 I was writing in assembler using Zeus, cracking games in order to copy them from cassette to floppy, writing utilities like a record/play sound, font editor and more.
At 15 I started learning Pascal. At 17 I wrote my first asm virus for x86 and started with C.
Later I used C#, PHP and javascript.
My favourite programming language right now? Actionscript. Epic fail, I know - I'll turn in my card in a minute. But I wrote a chess game in it and had tons of fun tweaking the performance.
I know I'm about to get lynched by a mob of angrey slashdotters for saying this, but have you tried Flex? As in that Eclipse-based IDE & (open source) SDK? It's basically flash, but it works.
I'm not even going to suggest the other piece of technology from Microsoft, that includes the words "silver" and "light"...
Even in Romania and even with the whole economy downturn, you can't find a skilled programmer at 8 EUR/h. You can get someone competent enough from 15 EUR/h... and for kernel-level knowledge, much higher that that.
Mod parent up. I wanted to express the same thing.
Flash is not video. Flash can play video in a consistent manner across platforms and browsers. Flash supports H264. Freeing VP8 has no direct impact on Flash (unless you think all browsers will embrace VP8 overnight and Flash won't be used for anything else).
It's days like these when I lose hope in humanity.
The very fact that we need laws to tell us "yes, you can help someone in need and in fact you should" is bad enough, but then we have the typical lazy-bastard response "why should I be forced to help" and even uber-rationalizations like "groups are programmed to no intervene, it's normal" or even "it's a slippery slope..."
My karma is on Excellent so mod me down if you will, but if you think like so many posters, I have this to tell you: have a good look at yourself in the mirror. YOU are a self-centered lazy bastard; no matter how clever you think you are, you're human failure and I hope you won't find out the hard way how is to be ignored by your fellows.
It's obvious that the current situation is fragile and the media is changing, but what's the solution?
To recap:
Demand for online is on the rise and for print is declining
People don't want to pay
People don't want to see ads
So how can the newspapers provide content and pay for the bills?
It's easy to dismiss the media as being obsolete and that you can find the information for free anyway, but let's consider something: almost all bloggers and "new media" hipsters get the info from the old media anyway. There's precious little actual content created by bloggers and enthusiasts and it's very difficult to do so.
Case in point, I researched for weeks on info about the software used in the making of Avatar and some technical details. I got the info by finding the companies involved via IMDB, talking to people involved and basically scrapping bits and pieces into a coherent article. Then Cinefex magazine came out with so much more information, all my work looks ridiculous.
You are correct but still, for the most part the Na'vi did look real and more importantly they looked alive.
I've looked at the movie and at high-res stills and I never thought "this looks so fake". In fact, one scene with a Samson helicopter and a bunch of mercenaries did look like CGI to me; then, reading Cinefex I saw a picture of the scene and it was real (1:1 model of the helicopter, the people and even some of the grass)
I am doing 3d work (not at that level) and I usually know where to look for imperfections... the only place I could spot things looking fake was in the night scenes with the Na'vi tribesmen by the fire... the light on their faces was wrong, way to orange. Again, in the Cinefex article this was alluded - they had to make a special shader for that, otherwise blue skin + orange light = zombie gray.
The "article" is stupid and ill-informed. The author compared a Monaco at 10pt with Helvetica at 12pt and concludes Helvetica is easier to read.
I could do a similar test with Helvetica at 7pt and Arial at 12pt and conclude that Arial is better!
In programming, readability is determined by different factors than for literature. Word-pictures are less important since you basically have to deal with a lot of made-up words (variable and function names) but what's really important is to eliminate any room for misinterpretation, e.g. I vs l or " vs '' or O vs 0
Hands down, my font of choice for programming is Consolas, followed by Inconsolata.
I know the story, it was called "The Plant". Actually, Stephen King was rather dissatisfied with the sales and that's why he discontinued it.
The idea was, you could download one chapter as PDF for free by promising you'll pay for it. My memory is fuzzy (that was when, in '98?) but few people actually kept their promise...
I am in a somewhat similar situation - not 50,000 files per year but around 50,000 in total. My solution: - DNG for archival - at around 12Mb much smaller than uncompressed TIFFs anyway and you get the benefit that advancements in demosaicing and optical corrections or noise reduction means that you can process the file again and get better quality out of it - JPG2000 for finals - even at 2-4 Mb they are undistinguishable from originals (I tested), suport 16bit channels, etc. (I admit I don't usually keep intermediary PSD files unless it's really complex work with lots of layers).
I keep the DNGs tagged and indexed on a hard drive rsync-ed to another one and I backup new files to DVDs once a month. Every year I test the DVDs and if one has the slightest issue, I create a new copy.
At first I thought the map updated dynamically via an xml, but it seems we have a flash movie that dynamically loads a big JPEG image and shows it - nothing more.
Improper use of a technology, nothing new.
Should I also count how many times I've seen a big js framework like jQuery being used for a trivial thing? I mean, load an entire 100Kb library to do something that could be done with 2-5 lines of javascript anyway...
Slashdot Mirror
This has caught my eye:
"We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it."
Well, according so some benchmarks, Flash actually performs better than HTML5 on Android.
Not necessarily.
Aliens could have a hive-like society, similar to ants or bees, where the individual is nothing. Surely you remember Ender's Game and its idea that the conflict was ultimately caused by the difference in society - the aliens could not comprehend an advanced society made of individuals alone. A hive-based society may discard empathy as inefficient. As a side-note, I think this is the direction of the reimagined "V" series - I think the aliens are "bug-like" rather that "lizard-like".
You inserted the word "flash" just for flames, but actually this is one of the really strong points of Flash:
- Flash is VECTOR!
For 12 years now you've been able to specify a flash size in percents for true resolution independence.
The problem with websites are bitmaps and CSS incompatibilities across browsers. Even so, a nice constructed website will allow you to increase the text size.
Name one.
There is no serious competition for Photoshop. I wish it were. Corel stopped innovating years ago. Gimp is still a toy for professional work and I really don't know any other professional program that can do what Photoshop can.
I'm saying this as a former Corel user. It wasn't easy for me to fork money for PS, but I had to because I realized that no other tool comes close. Sure, there's Fireworks (also by Adobe) and Corel Painter but they are specialized tools.
Keep in mind that actual Flash apps written by CS5 beta testers have been approved in Apple's app store in the past as well as many games written with Unity3D, so it's not like performance is a problem.
Since every app is checked against objective (and subjective) criterias, it would have been OK to just reject poorly written applications.
Forcing me to use a specific programming language is insane. Imagine Microsoft demanding all windows apps to be written only in C# and compiled only with Visual Studio. It would be an outrage. But hey, it's Steve Jobs, the Big Brother himself, and he knows what's best for us, right?
Also, the timing was devious - on Friday, just before the Monday's official release of Adobe's CS5, effectively giving them no time to react. I was never a big fan of Adobe (especially before the Macromedia acquisition - their corporate culture started to change afterwards) but this is simply Steve Jobs being a big dick.
Finally, I know that many /.-ers are against Flash. Keep in mind however that this move goes well beyond Flash, affecting other tools and frameworks. If successful, this move will lead to more and more closed ecosystems (from other vendors as well). Today's Apple makes Microsoft look like saints.
I read you post three times but I could see no facts, examples, anecdotes, anything. Just words.
Flash supports multitouch and has access to accelerometer data, GPS info and so on, so what "new features" don't fit well with the medium?
Semicomplex games not good? There are so many games in flash, some of them excellent, that isn't even funny. Quake has been ported to Flash, as well as Prince of Persia, just to name two classics, I could give many more examples.
HD Fullscreen video works great in Flash 10.1 RC
Ah, but that's the thing: Adobe was going to publicly show CS5 on monday!
The timing of Apple's move is so intentional.
Yes, but this time it's going to be different, you'll see. HTML5 will be adopted by all browsers within a year, IE6, 7 and 8 will die a horrible death in 6 months, the MPEG consortium will open-source H264 and everyone will be able to make awesome html5 games with 10 lines of code (or less). Flash will be become a relic of the past, like animated gifs.
Interactive, annoyingly loud animated html5 banner ads will become the new standard. They'll be based on open standards and we'll love them.
Pray tell, why not?
And if Flash CS6 will output HTML5 Canvas+Javascript in addition to SWF, it's a win-win.
You're trolling or you're just misinformed.
Flash supports multitouch. Google for it.
You're so full of it. 7 is rock-solid out of the box. I've been testing it since beta and we were ready to upgrade as soon as it hit the stores.
Windows 7 without any SP is faster and more secure than XP-SP3. But not even SP1 is good enough for you, you need SP2; why not SP4?
Tell me, make a list of issues that prevent your company from upgrading. I'll wait.
Falling out of touch? The friends I have are just a phone call away. I have an account on FB but if I really care about someone, I don't need it to stay in touch with them.
Same here - this is how I learned assembler - by rewriting loaders in order to copy games from tape to floppy for my ZX Spectrum...
Very similar to my childhood.
I wrote my first Basic program in 1983, when I was 7, on a ZX Spectrum. By 13 I was writing in assembler using Zeus, cracking games in order to copy them from cassette to floppy, writing utilities like a record/play sound, font editor and more.
At 15 I started learning Pascal. At 17 I wrote my first asm virus for x86 and started with C.
Later I used C#, PHP and javascript.
My favourite programming language right now? Actionscript. Epic fail, I know - I'll turn in my card in a minute. But I wrote a chess game in it and had tons of fun tweaking the performance.
I know I'm about to get lynched by a mob of angrey slashdotters for saying this, but have you tried Flex? As in that Eclipse-based IDE & (open source) SDK? It's basically flash, but it works.
I'm not even going to suggest the other piece of technology from Microsoft, that includes the words "silver" and "light"...
Even in Romania and even with the whole economy downturn, you can't find a skilled programmer at 8 EUR/h. You can get someone competent enough from 15 EUR/h... and for kernel-level knowledge, much higher that that.
Kernel development is not PHP stuff...
Mod parent up. I wanted to express the same thing.
Flash is not video. Flash can play video in a consistent manner across platforms and browsers. Flash supports H264. Freeing VP8 has no direct impact on Flash (unless you think all browsers will embrace VP8 overnight and Flash won't be used for anything else).
It's days like these when I lose hope in humanity.
The very fact that we need laws to tell us "yes, you can help someone in need and in fact you should" is bad enough, but then we have the typical lazy-bastard response "why should I be forced to help" and even uber-rationalizations like "groups are programmed to no intervene, it's normal" or even "it's a slippery slope..."
My karma is on Excellent so mod me down if you will, but if you think like so many posters, I have this to tell you: have a good look at yourself in the mirror. YOU are a self-centered lazy bastard; no matter how clever you think you are, you're human failure and I hope you won't find out the hard way how is to be ignored by your fellows.
It's obvious that the current situation is fragile and the media is changing, but what's the solution?
To recap:
So how can the newspapers provide content and pay for the bills?
It's easy to dismiss the media as being obsolete and that you can find the information for free anyway, but let's consider something: almost all bloggers and "new media" hipsters get the info from the old media anyway. There's precious little actual content created by bloggers and enthusiasts and it's very difficult to do so.
Case in point, I researched for weeks on info about the software used in the making of Avatar and some technical details. I got the info by finding the companies involved via IMDB, talking to people involved and basically scrapping bits and pieces into a coherent article. Then Cinefex magazine came out with so much more information, all my work looks ridiculous.
You are correct but still, for the most part the Na'vi did look real and more importantly they looked alive.
I've looked at the movie and at high-res stills and I never thought "this looks so fake". In fact, one scene with a Samson helicopter and a bunch of mercenaries did look like CGI to me; then, reading Cinefex I saw a picture of the scene and it was real (1:1 model of the helicopter, the people and even some of the grass)
I am doing 3d work (not at that level) and I usually know where to look for imperfections... the only place I could spot things looking fake was in the night scenes with the Na'vi tribesmen by the fire... the light on their faces was wrong, way to orange. Again, in the Cinefex article this was alluded - they had to make a special shader for that, otherwise blue skin + orange light = zombie gray.
The "article" is stupid and ill-informed.
The author compared a Monaco at 10pt with Helvetica at 12pt and concludes Helvetica is easier to read.
I could do a similar test with Helvetica at 7pt and Arial at 12pt and conclude that Arial is better!
In programming, readability is determined by different factors than for literature. Word-pictures are less important since you basically have to deal with a lot of made-up words (variable and function names) but what's really important is to eliminate any room for misinterpretation, e.g. I vs l or " vs '' or O vs 0
Hands down, my font of choice for programming is Consolas, followed by Inconsolata.
I know the story, it was called "The Plant". Actually, Stephen King was rather dissatisfied with the sales and that's why he discontinued it.
The idea was, you could download one chapter as PDF for free by promising you'll pay for it. My memory is fuzzy (that was when, in '98?) but few people actually kept their promise...
I am in a somewhat similar situation - not 50,000 files per year but around 50,000 in total.
My solution:
- DNG for archival - at around 12Mb much smaller than uncompressed TIFFs anyway and you get the benefit that advancements in demosaicing and optical corrections or noise reduction means that you can process the file again and get better quality out of it
- JPG2000 for finals - even at 2-4 Mb they are undistinguishable from originals (I tested), suport 16bit channels, etc.
(I admit I don't usually keep intermediary PSD files unless it's really complex work with lots of layers).
I keep the DNGs tagged and indexed on a hard drive rsync-ed to another one and I backup new files to DVDs once a month. Every year I test the DVDs and if one has the slightest issue, I create a new copy.
At first I thought the map updated dynamically via an xml, but it seems we have a flash movie that dynamically loads a big JPEG image and shows it - nothing more.
Improper use of a technology, nothing new.
Should I also count how many times I've seen a big js framework like jQuery being used for a trivial thing? I mean, load an entire 100Kb library to do something that could be done with 2-5 lines of javascript anyway...