As a longtime caver, parent is correct: cave diving IS insane. (I'm glad some insane folk exist, as the knowledge they glean from this is valuable. Nevertheless, the risk is huge, and makes BASE jumping look safe by comparison...)
It's true (at least in the USA)... for whatever reason, avid cavers call themselves "cavers", and use "spelunkers" to refer to people who enter caves without the proper equipment or training. Thus, at caving conventions you see bumper stickers that read "Cavers Rescue Spelunkers"...
As soon as Adobe thinks they can make a buck at it, they will. What's the critical mass of (say) Desktop Linux that would buy a copy of Photoshop? What would tech support costs be for selling them? How many Linux variants could be reasonably supported?
SWF10, actually. While Gordon is a nice demo, the Flash apps it runs are barely above the Hello, World level... getting it to run SWF6 or later is going to be a nontrivial effort.
Nope. The bytecode isn't included. There's no Interpreter or JIT present in the final app. The Packager actually compiles the SWF directly into native code. (Assets from the SWF are brought along in data form, of course, but all the code bits are cross-compiled.)
> I have problem believing Google will spend time and money hardware accelerating VP8 on, lets say PowerPC.
I have a problem believing they should bother. PowerPC has no desktop presence aside from aging Macs, which are underpowered compared to modern phones (!). The PPC-G4 was da bomb back before Y2K, but that was then, this is now.
Apple bans Flash because they are tired of dealing with Adobe. Only now is performance suddenly important to them, over half a decade after buying Macromedia.
And the response from the minority party, presented by Tinic Uro of Adobe:
Currently, most of the web (Flash excluded) is free to generate.
Err, SWF *is* completely free to generate, aside from the patent-encumbered video codec parts (H.264 and Sorenson) and maybe the MP3/AAC audio codecs. Here's the spec, go to it:
(And about the "yeah-but-audio-video-patents" exceptions -- hey, don't blame Adobe for that. They don't even hold those patents, they have to pay big bucks for 'em too!)
H.264 is a free and open standard, just not in the US.
Actually, in most of the industrialized world that actually respects intellectual property rights. Attempting to ignore patent law would get Mozilla banned in pretty much all of Europe as well as the USA and Canada. I think that would be a deal-breaker for them.
Wow, that's a great idea. Maybe they could even get some other large company to write a plugin for H.264 for them! And get it installed on 97% of computers worldwide! Maybe they could call it "Flash"... </sarcasm>
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As a longtime caver, parent is correct: cave diving IS insane. (I'm glad some insane folk exist, as the knowledge they glean from this is valuable. Nevertheless, the risk is huge, and makes BASE jumping look safe by comparison...)
It's true (at least in the USA)... for whatever reason, avid cavers call themselves "cavers", and use "spelunkers" to refer to people who enter caves without the proper equipment or training. Thus, at caving conventions you see bumper stickers that read "Cavers Rescue Spelunkers"...
Yeah, cutting out that 1% or so of potential users will really crush their userbase....
(http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10)
...just imagine how much worse it would have been if those iPads had Flash installed...
Probably not, since those sites won't work with Smokescreen in the first place...
It's a nice piece of work.
It would be even more impressive if it didn't use ~4x the CPU time that Flash itself does to render the same content....
[citation needed]
Yeah, there's nothing like inching across the Bay Bridge in stop-and-go to make you realize the "fun" of driving a stick....
I grab my iPhone, only to discover that the battery is dead, thanks to Apple not designing it with a user-replaceable battery.
FTFY
As soon as Adobe thinks they can make a buck at it, they will. What's the critical mass of (say) Desktop Linux that would buy a copy of Photoshop? What would tech support costs be for selling them? How many Linux variants could be reasonably supported?
SWF10, actually. While Gordon is a nice demo, the Flash apps it runs are barely above the Hello, World level... getting it to run SWF6 or later is going to be a nontrivial effort.
> the SDK agreement explicitly says that the code must be originally written in one of the approved languages (C, C++, Objective-C).
Does this mean that (say) most of Donald Knuth's work can't be used in iPhone apps? IIRC, none of those used any of those languages....
I work on the Flash Player team at Adobe, so I know what I'm saying when I say: you're completely mistaken.
Flash Player 10.1 supports *all* legacy content on *all* platforms -- content created all the way back to version 1.0 will continue to work.
It also continues to support H.264 better than it did for, due to additional support for hardware acceleration.
H.264 delivers video quality superior to Flash and with less bandwidth.
Your statement makes no sense: Flash has included H.264 in its suite of codecs since 2007 (along with VP6 and H.263).
no 64 bit for macs, only windows
Nope.
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2010/04/photoshop_cs5_64-bit_benchmarks.html
Nope. The bytecode isn't included. There's no Interpreter or JIT present in the final app. The Packager actually compiles the SWF directly into native code. (Assets from the SWF are brought along in data form, of course, but all the code bits are cross-compiled.)
there's no gatekeeper yet
Fixed that for you. (Apple has already moved the goalposts once...)
As opposed to those sorts of caverns that are above-ground?
> I have problem believing Google will spend time and money hardware accelerating VP8 on, lets say PowerPC.
I have a problem believing they should bother. PowerPC has no desktop presence aside from aging Macs, which are underpowered compared to modern phones (!). The PPC-G4 was da bomb back before Y2K, but that was then, this is now.
A more accurate statement would be "Why Touchscreens Are Fundamentally Flawed For Existing Web Content".
Apple bans Flash because they are tired of dealing with Adobe. Only now is performance suddenly important to them, over half a decade after buying Macromedia.
And the response from the minority party, presented by Tinic Uro of Adobe:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2010/02/core-animation.html
Currently, most of the web (Flash excluded) is free to generate.
Err, SWF *is* completely free to generate, aside from the patent-encumbered video codec parts (H.264 and Sorenson) and maybe the MP3/AAC audio codecs. Here's the spec, go to it:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/pdf/swf_file_format_spec_v10.pdf
Here's a website full of open-source tools for it:
http://osflash.org/
(And about the "yeah-but-audio-video-patents" exceptions -- hey, don't blame Adobe for that. They don't even hold those patents, they have to pay big bucks for 'em too!)
H.264 is a free and open standard, just not in the US.
Actually, in most of the industrialized world that actually respects intellectual property rights. Attempting to ignore patent law would get Mozilla banned in pretty much all of Europe as well as the USA and Canada. I think that would be a deal-breaker for them.
You don't have to. Just use Flash -- Adobe has already paid the H.264 bucks for you. (You *do* know that Flash supports H.264 directly, right?)
Wow, that's a great idea. Maybe they could even get some other large company to write a plugin for H.264 for them! And get it installed on 97% of computers worldwide! Maybe they could call it "Flash"... </sarcasm>