There are already at least four apps on the store today that were built like this. This isn't Flash on the iPhone in any way - the apps are compiled into native iPhone applications. Does Apple have a rule somewhere that says all iPhone apps must be compiled with XCode?
I've actually been going through the process of getting code reviews as a standard process on my own team. We've done them now and again in the past - often on other team's code that was being integrated into our platform - and it was typically a pain.
Enter A Good Tool(TM). We've been demoing some code review software lately and after settling on a particular tool that we find to work well with our workflow, the team has unanimously agreed that they find reviews beneficial. We don't have strict policies on how/when reviews are done, so it's encouraging when you see people are creating new reviews for their code of their own volition.
While we haven't found a lot of critical bugs, we have found lots of minor things, problems/shortcomings in unit tests, documentation problems (especially important because we provide libraries to other teams, we're not the sole users of the code), and even pre-existing bugs while doing maintenance. I think the biggest benefits, though, have been getting more eyes on the code to increase familiarity with it so it's easier for other people to do maintenance and bug fixes on when the original author is unable to as well as just generally opening up broader communication about various elements of style, consistency, improving code readability, etc.
The software says we've logged about 16 hours in the past month, across 7 developers. That's a pretty minimal investment. There was mention of good functional testing being all you really need, but if you're working on libraries and such it's easy to have bugs that don't show themselves in all usage scenarios. If well after a release another team manages to find a previously unnoticed bug in a library, the cost for them to track it down to our code, for us to fix it, put through QA, do a new release, pass off to the other team who then has to put their component through QA and deploy.... we've just burnt through a lot of time and money.
Will code reviews lead to perfect code? No. But I would undoubtedly say that there are plenty of benefits that make them well worth it if they're done in an effective fashion.
By the way, the software we settled on is Smart Bear's Code Collaborator, having also tried Crucible and Review Board as well as talking to other divisions about their experiences with code review software. It may not be the right tool for you, but we found it lets us bust through both initial reviews of the code as well as follow-up reviews to ensure any issues are being resolved appropriately. It's not the cheapest, but if it's the difference between a tool people will willingly use or a tool/process that people will bemoan, it's worth it.
I seem to remember seeing an interview with one of the big guys at Pixar years ago talking about how much they regretted doing Toy Story 2 and how they would never do another sequel like that again, etc., etc.
And so long as they were calling the shots, they didn't.
Being that Disney is calling the shots these days, this shouldn't be a big surprise and while I can't be 100% I'm inclined to believe that's where the responsibility lies. The upshot is that Lasseter is now directly involved in non-Pixar Disney films as well. Take Bolt, for instance. It was a new franchise that, while not up to Pixar standards, I felt was noticeably better than what we've (sadly) become accustomed to from Disney.
(full disclosure: Disney owns my soul)
Just to be clear, users are downloading malicious software that is posing as the Flash Player. "Malicious Flash", to me, means Flash content (a SWF) that uses a vulnerability in the Flash Player to compromise a user's system. While Flash hasn't had a spotless security record, I don't know of any instances where a vulnerability in the Flash Player has been exploited on a scale such as this. In the past few years, Adobe has really strived to make Flash Player much more secure. Were this to be an actual case of "malicious Flash", I think it would be a big PR problem for Adobe and make end users extra wary of Flash for some time to come.
The wording in the title seems to me like calling someone social engineering some passwords a "WIndows security vulnerability" - misleading and inaccurate, at best.
To be clear, this is only related to the SDK and NOT the runtime. More specifically, it's related to the debugger (ADT) and it's listed as a "known issue", which seems to imply that it's something they're looking to fix by the time it's released.
When his initial e-mails to the Microsoft blog asking it to remove links to his photo didn't immediately work, Kennedy replaced the image with one of a man engaging in an activity best described as "extreme mooning." Visitors to the Microsoft blog who clicked on the innocent-looking link were guided to the new photo. Hehehe, I can only assume that's a goatse.cx reference. Linked to from an MS blog. Reading that made me chuckle.
So let's be honest, this is a pretty common occurrence. Often times when people post code online in a forum, it's expected by the author that people will lift the code... in fact, that's why it's being posted to the forum! I understand that without an explicit license or authorization from the original author that this is not legal... good, fine, whatever - not trying to debate the legalities of it.
What bothers me here is that the original poster seems to be implying some act of malice on the part of his co-worker. Now, I don't know the full details of the situation, maybe there are valid reasons why he would feel that way. But he didn't even hint at that in his question to Slashdot but does mention his inclination to report him to managment. Really?? I mean... REALLY??? Could this not be an honest mistake stemming from a misunderstanding of the law? Perhaps the co-worker had private exchanges with the code author regarding using the code. Should portraying your co-worker as a criminal to management really even be considered as your first course of action?
I'll let others give their suggestions on how to deal with the situation, but the way the co-worker was portrayed here just rubbed me wrong. I've seen this same thing plenty of times, and it's never been anything but an innocent mistake... both on the part of the person copying and the person posting the code, because in my personal experiences the poster's intent was to make the code freely available but lacking knowledge of copyright law prevented them from expressly stating so in the forum. I'm guessing there's a good chance it can be resolved fairly easily without pissing anyone off or getting anyone fired.
Maybe it's because all of my passwords have numbers and symbols alongside the letters, but I've never, ever had my iPhone try to auto-correct a password. In fact, doing so would breach the security of the password field by possibly showing everything that had been typed up to that point (if it's suggesting an auto-complete word). I know that I've come across input fields that definitely do not try to auto-correct (I believe the Safari URL input is like that... it will try to auto-complete using your history, but not auto-correct) so it seems strange that password fields would try to.
Actually, Adobe released Flash Player 9 for Linux last October... I'm not sure what more you want. They now have Flash Player for Solaris, too. Obviously it exists for Windows and OSX, as well. Yes, Flash can be abused... but Flash can also be really useful for creating engaging user experiences and it's also an EXCELLENT platform for application development, particularly via Flex. Flex 2 is great, Actionscript 3 is a really nice language featuring the best of OO and dynamic languages, the AVM2 virtual machine is a really nice piece of work. I know more and more enterprise developers who do.NET or Java that have been exposed to Flex 2 in recent months and come to like it very quickly. The power that it affords is great, it "just works" (regardless of browser/OS), and it's infinitely better to develop apps of all kinds in than HTML/CSS/Javascript.
So I'm sorry that you have such issues with Flash. But as a development platform, it's appealing in many ways. And ever since the Adobe/Macromedia merger, Adobe has really become more open with their developers and has been releasing more and more tools to help them out (checkout labs.adobe.com for some examples).
I'm a bit confused... don't the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray specs both support the same video codecs (I believe the audio codecs between the two can differ)? But Blu-Ray supports a larger stream and larger available space. I believe they just had the specs for the two in the last Videographer and that's where I'm recalling this from, but someone please correct me if I'm wrong. In any case, if that is true, it makes no sense that Blu-Ray would be inherently worse quality... quite the opposite.
HOWEVER... that said, as someone else alluded to, if the ultimate output is worse, it's worse. It's the difference between theoretical and in practical. I would just keep in find that these are both first-gen players, which were probably somewhat rushed, to boot... and first-gen discs, so the art of compressing for next-gen discs certainly hasn't been mastered. In theory I would think Blu-Ray would have the edge, but we'll see how things pan out.
I didn't see this mentioned in the comments, and won't be able to read the article until tonight, but one feature I enjoy is Opera's auto "next" feature. I don't know the official name, but basically when you're on a page that has a next button, such as this article, or a Google search, you can navigate to the next page via a "forward" shortcut assuming you're at the most recent page in your browser's history (otherwise you'll just go forward in your history). It somehow automatically locates that "next" link (I'm not quite sure how, and it doesn't work on all pages with "next" links... but it often does). I prefer to activate this feature with button rocking. I don't know if button rocking is improved in Firefox 2, but in FF1.5 to rock two pages forward, for example, you have to press and hold the left button, then press the right button... then RELEASE both buttons, and repeat. In Opera, you can just hold the first button (so the left button if rocking forward) and repeatedly hit the second button. Much nicer, and can make navigating through search results or other pages much more convenient.
Another nice feature is if you're looking at a thumbnail gallery (of uh... game screenshots, you prevert) and the thumbnails link to images rather than another html page or javascript, you can click on a thumbnail and then use your forward shortcut to go to the next thumbnail. You can continue to do this through all of the images on the thumbnail page. Once you get through all of the images, it returns you back to the thumbnail page. Quite nice.
I'm 99.5% positive that Adobe Flex can help address using back/forward buttons in the browser and Google has code to do this with Ajax. If I'm not mistaken, Gmail no longer croaks if you try using back/forward now. I'm at work and don't want to take the time to look up the links, so (hopefully) free mod points to whoever feels like posting some links to this stuff!!
That being said, the article is garbage. People ARE integrating it into the browser controls... no point in using this crappy method. Fact is, most users will, through force of habit, use the back/forward buttons, or mouse gestures, or keyboard shortcuts.
Well, you didn't say free or open-source, so I'll throw out the suggestion of FogBugz. For a single user it would set you back $129. It has a whole interface for dealing with external users (ie: your clients) where they just send an email to an email address you setup and it goes into the system as a new issue. It then sends them an email back giving them a link where they can track the status of the issue. Within the issue, you have the ability to add notes that are either hidden or visible to the client, should you ever need to make note of anything regarding an issue that you don't want them to see.
All in all it's not bad. Definitely easy for both you and especially the client, since they won't have to learn the interface of an application, just send an email. Plus you get support, though to maintain the support contract past 45 days it would run, for a single user (clients don't count as users), $1.50/month. So not too shabby.
I don't have experience with other applications that would fit the bill, so I can't say this is the best option... but I think it's a pretty decent one.
SATA drives have definitely improved, and for file servers NCQ definitely helps out alot.... but for the absolute best performance in a (true) multi-user environment, 15k SCSI drives still offer gobs of performance over even the new 150gig 10k Raptor SATA drive. Ultimately it will come down to how important price vs. size is to you... but speaking purely on performance, 15k SCSIs are the way to go.
One way to curb some of the cost, I might add, would be to switch to something like RAID 5... you won't have as high throughput, but you'll still see performance gains and end up with more usable drive space. The throughput likely won't be your problem, anyways... typically it would be the drive's ability to handle multiple simultaneous requests, which heavily relies on low access times (which is why SCSI dominates in this type of environment).
Here's a quick reference of some IOMeter benchmarks using a file server test pattern. You'll see what I mean. Wealth of info on drives on that site.
Just my two cents... we use FogBugz where I work. I'm the one responsible for that purchasing decision after evaluating various products. It's a good product, the price is right (we wanted to have support, not to mention the open-source products I looked at at the time (this was quite some time ago) weren't up to par. Maybe some are now, feel free to reference them) and it's certainly far better than the issue-tracking methods we had previously.
I also like alot of the things Joel has to say. However, at no point in time would I term his product "remarkable". Given how much Joel talks about "great software", I'm a bit disappointed by FogBugz. Like I said, it's a good product, but hardly remarkable.
You could check out SilenX. While their PSUs can get pricey, a 300W model can be had for $59.95 and is rated at 14dba. That's under load... not under load the fan can run even quieter. That puts the SilenX's loudest at being nearly 3x quieter than the Zalman mentioned in another post when the Zalman is running at it's quitest. The Zalman can reach up to 30dba, which is something like 32x louder than 14dba.
I've only owned SilenX's fans, but I'm EXTREMELY pleased with them. A 92mm 14dba fan and 120mm 14dba fan (~17dba combined) quieted my system considerably while actually lowering temps. I haven't tried their PSUs, but I'm expecting one any day now and have read plenty of great reviews of them.
Probably the biggest problem I've seen in my many years of working with the web is the clients. They drive content, they drive design... depending on their involvement and their goals, having something that works well for most people is typically prefered (by them) than having something that doesn't look as good for most people, but is readable without horizontal scrolling at 320 width and fills the entire screen at 1600 width. And if your work is client driven, it's somewhat important to make them happy.
I'm all for liquid layouts, too... when they're appropriate and work. For some projects they just don't work.
For what it's worth to the poster, my company has a range of sites which cater to very "average" audiences. We're seeing about 50% at 1024x768 and ~30% at 800x600.
When using Flash in the way that AJAX is meant to be used (typically for applications), Flash is actually far more mature. Problems with printing, bookmarking, etc. are all problems that both Macromedia and the Flash community have worked on for some time to rectify. As far as indexing, not something you really need or even want for an application. So, put blunty your "FAR WORSE extent with fewer workarounds" is bullshit.
Now, on non-application sites that are 100% Flash, it's a more valid concern. But again I call bullshit because in my experience the problems only seem to present themselves more often because I see more Flash sites, not because a larger percentage of Flash exhibit these problems compared to AJAX sites. But moreover, problems with the back button, bookmarking, and printing, at least, CAN be dealt with. Most of it without using a "workaround" or hack of any sort, but by using the capabilities of Flash that Macromedia has provided specifically to address these issues.
Now, that's not to say that page authors implement these capabilities. But that's their fault, not Flash's. You can create a steaming pile of poo with any technology, but I think it's a matter of exposure that leads many people to think Flash sucks. People see more pieces of crap written in Flash, so they assume Flash itself is crap.
So to sum up, before talking about how capable a platform is of dealing with a problem, it might help to know anything about the platform. Flash is, at present, far more mature when it comes to addressing many of these issues.
Note: this is not meant to be a pro-Flash rant, so don't take it as such. I'm merely correcting some statements made by the o.p. that I feel aren't entirely accurate.
It gives you Vi-like editing inside of Eclipse while retaining any and all Eclipse features. The two downsides are a) It's not free. But it's about $18 US, so if you're a Vi-nut it's a small price to pay... b) It's not actually Vi running in Eclipse... the author is recreating Vi's functionality to run inside of Eclipse. Because of this, it's not (yet?) feature complete and has bugs of its own.
Personally, I think it's (overall) fantastic. I use Eclipse for a wide range of languages... some of the language plugins combined with the Vi plugin make it the hands down best IDE for many languages for me, personally.
I tried these in both Opera 8 and IE 6 and couldn't activate/de-activate any of the controls with the keyboard. Am I the only one having this problem??
Slashdot Mirror
There are already at least four apps on the store today that were built like this. This isn't Flash on the iPhone in any way - the apps are compiled into native iPhone applications. Does Apple have a rule somewhere that says all iPhone apps must be compiled with XCode?
I've actually been going through the process of getting code reviews as a standard process on my own team. We've done them now and again in the past - often on other team's code that was being integrated into our platform - and it was typically a pain.
Enter A Good Tool(TM). We've been demoing some code review software lately and after settling on a particular tool that we find to work well with our workflow, the team has unanimously agreed that they find reviews beneficial. We don't have strict policies on how/when reviews are done, so it's encouraging when you see people are creating new reviews for their code of their own volition.
While we haven't found a lot of critical bugs, we have found lots of minor things, problems/shortcomings in unit tests, documentation problems (especially important because we provide libraries to other teams, we're not the sole users of the code), and even pre-existing bugs while doing maintenance. I think the biggest benefits, though, have been getting more eyes on the code to increase familiarity with it so it's easier for other people to do maintenance and bug fixes on when the original author is unable to as well as just generally opening up broader communication about various elements of style, consistency, improving code readability, etc.
The software says we've logged about 16 hours in the past month, across 7 developers. That's a pretty minimal investment. There was mention of good functional testing being all you really need, but if you're working on libraries and such it's easy to have bugs that don't show themselves in all usage scenarios. If well after a release another team manages to find a previously unnoticed bug in a library, the cost for them to track it down to our code, for us to fix it, put through QA, do a new release, pass off to the other team who then has to put their component through QA and deploy.... we've just burnt through a lot of time and money.
Will code reviews lead to perfect code? No. But I would undoubtedly say that there are plenty of benefits that make them well worth it if they're done in an effective fashion.
By the way, the software we settled on is Smart Bear's Code Collaborator, having also tried Crucible and Review Board as well as talking to other divisions about their experiences with code review software. It may not be the right tool for you, but we found it lets us bust through both initial reviews of the code as well as follow-up reviews to ensure any issues are being resolved appropriately. It's not the cheapest, but if it's the difference between a tool people will willingly use or a tool/process that people will bemoan, it's worth it.
I seem to remember seeing an interview with one of the big guys at Pixar years ago talking about how much they regretted doing Toy Story 2 and how they would never do another sequel like that again, etc., etc. And so long as they were calling the shots, they didn't. Being that Disney is calling the shots these days, this shouldn't be a big surprise and while I can't be 100% I'm inclined to believe that's where the responsibility lies. The upshot is that Lasseter is now directly involved in non-Pixar Disney films as well. Take Bolt, for instance. It was a new franchise that, while not up to Pixar standards, I felt was noticeably better than what we've (sadly) become accustomed to from Disney. (full disclosure: Disney owns my soul)
I feel like there should've been sharks with lasers in there somewhere.
Just to be clear, users are downloading malicious software that is posing as the Flash Player. "Malicious Flash", to me, means Flash content (a SWF) that uses a vulnerability in the Flash Player to compromise a user's system. While Flash hasn't had a spotless security record, I don't know of any instances where a vulnerability in the Flash Player has been exploited on a scale such as this. In the past few years, Adobe has really strived to make Flash Player much more secure. Were this to be an actual case of "malicious Flash", I think it would be a big PR problem for Adobe and make end users extra wary of Flash for some time to come.
The wording in the title seems to me like calling someone social engineering some passwords a "WIndows security vulnerability" - misleading and inaccurate, at best.
To be clear, this is only related to the SDK and NOT the runtime. More specifically, it's related to the debugger (ADT) and it's listed as a "known issue", which seems to imply that it's something they're looking to fix by the time it's released.
So let's be honest, this is a pretty common occurrence. Often times when people post code online in a forum, it's expected by the author that people will lift the code... in fact, that's why it's being posted to the forum! I understand that without an explicit license or authorization from the original author that this is not legal... good, fine, whatever - not trying to debate the legalities of it.
What bothers me here is that the original poster seems to be implying some act of malice on the part of his co-worker. Now, I don't know the full details of the situation, maybe there are valid reasons why he would feel that way. But he didn't even hint at that in his question to Slashdot but does mention his inclination to report him to managment. Really?? I mean... REALLY??? Could this not be an honest mistake stemming from a misunderstanding of the law? Perhaps the co-worker had private exchanges with the code author regarding using the code. Should portraying your co-worker as a criminal to management really even be considered as your first course of action?
I'll let others give their suggestions on how to deal with the situation, but the way the co-worker was portrayed here just rubbed me wrong. I've seen this same thing plenty of times, and it's never been anything but an innocent mistake... both on the part of the person copying and the person posting the code, because in my personal experiences the poster's intent was to make the code freely available but lacking knowledge of copyright law prevented them from expressly stating so in the forum. I'm guessing there's a good chance it can be resolved fairly easily without pissing anyone off or getting anyone fired.
Maybe it's because all of my passwords have numbers and symbols alongside the letters, but I've never, ever had my iPhone try to auto-correct a password. In fact, doing so would breach the security of the password field by possibly showing everything that had been typed up to that point (if it's suggesting an auto-complete word). I know that I've come across input fields that definitely do not try to auto-correct (I believe the Safari URL input is like that... it will try to auto-complete using your history, but not auto-correct) so it seems strange that password fields would try to.
Actually, Adobe released Flash Player 9 for Linux last October... I'm not sure what more you want. They now have Flash Player for Solaris, too. Obviously it exists for Windows and OSX, as well. Yes, Flash can be abused... but Flash can also be really useful for creating engaging user experiences and it's also an EXCELLENT platform for application development, particularly via Flex. Flex 2 is great, Actionscript 3 is a really nice language featuring the best of OO and dynamic languages, the AVM2 virtual machine is a really nice piece of work. I know more and more enterprise developers who do .NET or Java that have been exposed to Flex 2 in recent months and come to like it very quickly. The power that it affords is great, it "just works" (regardless of browser/OS), and it's infinitely better to develop apps of all kinds in than HTML/CSS/Javascript.
So I'm sorry that you have such issues with Flash. But as a development platform, it's appealing in many ways. And ever since the Adobe/Macromedia merger, Adobe has really become more open with their developers and has been releasing more and more tools to help them out (checkout labs.adobe.com for some examples).
Actually, the iPhone does have wifi (B/G)
They actually announced they're using WebKit for Apollo.
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo:develI'm a bit confused... don't the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray specs both support the same video codecs (I believe the audio codecs between the two can differ)? But Blu-Ray supports a larger stream and larger available space. I believe they just had the specs for the two in the last Videographer and that's where I'm recalling this from, but someone please correct me if I'm wrong. In any case, if that is true, it makes no sense that Blu-Ray would be inherently worse quality... quite the opposite.
HOWEVER... that said, as someone else alluded to, if the ultimate output is worse, it's worse. It's the difference between theoretical and in practical. I would just keep in find that these are both first-gen players, which were probably somewhat rushed, to boot... and first-gen discs, so the art of compressing for next-gen discs certainly hasn't been mastered. In theory I would think Blu-Ray would have the edge, but we'll see how things pan out.
I didn't see this mentioned in the comments, and won't be able to read the article until tonight, but one feature I enjoy is Opera's auto "next" feature. I don't know the official name, but basically when you're on a page that has a next button, such as this article, or a Google search, you can navigate to the next page via a "forward" shortcut assuming you're at the most recent page in your browser's history (otherwise you'll just go forward in your history). It somehow automatically locates that "next" link (I'm not quite sure how, and it doesn't work on all pages with "next" links... but it often does). I prefer to activate this feature with button rocking. I don't know if button rocking is improved in Firefox 2, but in FF1.5 to rock two pages forward, for example, you have to press and hold the left button, then press the right button... then RELEASE both buttons, and repeat. In Opera, you can just hold the first button (so the left button if rocking forward) and repeatedly hit the second button. Much nicer, and can make navigating through search results or other pages much more convenient.
Another nice feature is if you're looking at a thumbnail gallery (of uh... game screenshots, you prevert) and the thumbnails link to images rather than another html page or javascript, you can click on a thumbnail and then use your forward shortcut to go to the next thumbnail. You can continue to do this through all of the images on the thumbnail page. Once you get through all of the images, it returns you back to the thumbnail page. Quite nice.
Someone already responded with Flex info, but here's the Google link:
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
Under "Browser History Management" - "No, AJAX applications don't need to break the browser's back button."
And I'm sure Google's GWT ain't the only library in town to do this...
I'm 99.5% positive that Adobe Flex can help address using back/forward buttons in the browser and Google has code to do this with Ajax. If I'm not mistaken, Gmail no longer croaks if you try using back/forward now. I'm at work and don't want to take the time to look up the links, so (hopefully) free mod points to whoever feels like posting some links to this stuff!!
That being said, the article is garbage. People ARE integrating it into the browser controls... no point in using this crappy method. Fact is, most users will, through force of habit, use the back/forward buttons, or mouse gestures, or keyboard shortcuts.
All in all it's not bad. Definitely easy for both you and especially the client, since they won't have to learn the interface of an application, just send an email. Plus you get support, though to maintain the support contract past 45 days it would run, for a single user (clients don't count as users), $1.50/month. So not too shabby.
I don't have experience with other applications that would fit the bill, so I can't say this is the best option... but I think it's a pretty decent one.
One way to curb some of the cost, I might add, would be to switch to something like RAID 5... you won't have as high throughput, but you'll still see performance gains and end up with more usable drive space. The throughput likely won't be your problem, anyways... typically it would be the drive's ability to handle multiple simultaneous requests, which heavily relies on low access times (which is why SCSI dominates in this type of environment).
Here's a quick reference of some IOMeter benchmarks using a file server test pattern. You'll see what I mean. Wealth of info on drives on that site.
I also like alot of the things Joel has to say. However, at no point in time would I term his product "remarkable". Given how much Joel talks about "great software", I'm a bit disappointed by FogBugz. Like I said, it's a good product, but hardly remarkable.
Again, just my two cents.
I've only owned SilenX's fans, but I'm EXTREMELY pleased with them. A 92mm 14dba fan and 120mm 14dba fan (~17dba combined) quieted my system considerably while actually lowering temps. I haven't tried their PSUs, but I'm expecting one any day now and have read plenty of great reviews of them.
Probably the biggest problem I've seen in my many years of working with the web is the clients. They drive content, they drive design... depending on their involvement and their goals, having something that works well for most people is typically prefered (by them) than having something that doesn't look as good for most people, but is readable without horizontal scrolling at 320 width and fills the entire screen at 1600 width. And if your work is client driven, it's somewhat important to make them happy.
I'm all for liquid layouts, too... when they're appropriate and work. For some projects they just don't work.
For what it's worth to the poster, my company has a range of sites which cater to very "average" audiences. We're seeing about 50% at 1024x768 and ~30% at 800x600.
Now, on non-application sites that are 100% Flash, it's a more valid concern. But again I call bullshit because in my experience the problems only seem to present themselves more often because I see more Flash sites, not because a larger percentage of Flash exhibit these problems compared to AJAX sites. But moreover, problems with the back button, bookmarking, and printing, at least, CAN be dealt with. Most of it without using a "workaround" or hack of any sort, but by using the capabilities of Flash that Macromedia has provided specifically to address these issues.
Now, that's not to say that page authors implement these capabilities. But that's their fault, not Flash's. You can create a steaming pile of poo with any technology, but I think it's a matter of exposure that leads many people to think Flash sucks. People see more pieces of crap written in Flash, so they assume Flash itself is crap.
So to sum up, before talking about how capable a platform is of dealing with a problem, it might help to know anything about the platform. Flash is, at present, far more mature when it comes to addressing many of these issues.
Note: this is not meant to be a pro-Flash rant, so don't take it as such. I'm merely correcting some statements made by the o.p. that I feel aren't entirely accurate.
Is this the same Brian Hook that previously worked at id software??
http://www.satokar.com/viplugin
It gives you Vi-like editing inside of Eclipse while retaining any and all Eclipse features. The two downsides are a) It's not free. But it's about $18 US, so if you're a Vi-nut it's a small price to pay... b) It's not actually Vi running in Eclipse... the author is recreating Vi's functionality to run inside of Eclipse. Because of this, it's not (yet?) feature complete and has bugs of its own.
Personally, I think it's (overall) fantastic. I use Eclipse for a wide range of languages... some of the language plugins combined with the Vi plugin make it the hands down best IDE for many languages for me, personally.
Accessibility my arse.