The problem is that Flash is only ubiquitous in certain circles for certain tasks. Developers know HTML. They're not scared of HTML5. 90% of what they need flash for, they get for free with HTML5. Why pay for Flash? As you point out, the translation isn't difficult. Is it difficult enough to warrant the investment for a developer?
It would be a different story if designers drove the web, but they are the scarce resource, not programmers. And the bulk of the web is written and maintained by programmers, not designers. Most firms in my state will hire a second full-time developer before they'll even contract out to a designer to make a nice web design. When the boss comes down the stairs and says, hey you guys, we need to embed video, why should they reach for Flash if they have <video>?
You say it yourself: they'll need to release a version of Flash which fully supports HTML5 export. Odds of them doing that before developers jump ship? This is the web. Were you in PHP or Java land during the Rails gold rush? This industry moves fast. If your technology isn't cool, the next wave isn't learning it and they're not going to care how widely-used or stable it is.
The "sides" of this debate are talking past each other. One side is saying, Flash is already great and people are going to use it. The other side is saying HTML 5 is cool. Everyone agrees that Flash is more capable today, except for Scribd.
I think we should be able to agree that new and cool tends to get a lot more attention than stable and proven on the Web. It seems likely to me and most of the people in the HTML5 camp that great tools will show up eventually for it. But it doesn't matter if they do or not. 90% of Flash use on the web is to embed a video, to play audio or to have a fancy 2D interactive graphic. Obviously HTML5's <video> and <canvas> tags are aimed squarely at Adobe's jugular. This would be true with or without Apple.
A basic market fact: free beats for-pay. MySQL singlehandedly beat almost the entire database market. Raise your hand if you remember FileMaker Pro. You don't have to be better than the for-pay option if you're free, you just have to solve the average case. Look at Hypercard. Look at FrameMaker. Adobe is great at developing a chokehold on a market only to let it slip away with their arrogance.
Web fact. It takes a designer and a programmer to make a website. But if you can only afford one, you get a programmer. Programmers are the blue collar behind the web. If your designer really knows HTML and is cool and multipurpose like that, which tool are they going to reach for if they have both? A <video> tag or a Flash applet? The "Flash has better tools" argument is often put forth, but in practice there aren't a lot of websites out there that were put up singlehandedly by designers thanks to the power of Flash.
Adobe has to make better developer tools, or make Flash a technological contender again rather than the Cobol option, or they're likely to take their favorite market position: second-most easy-to-use for-pay tool in a market surrounded by free alternatives. HTML5 appeals to the workhorses of the internet: the programmers. Unless Adobe acts, they're going to lose their corner of the market. They're already in danger just because of the popularity of the iPhone and iPad. If they stagnate, they're fucked.
Agreed 100%. This article is basically saying Flash is too big to fail. I don't buy it. The barrier to entry for <canvas> is so much lower. It's just a matter of time before we have excellent—and free—developer tools. Plus, in this industry, new and cool has always won over old and reliable.
I think you're absolutely right. I've seen people playing WoW. It looks just like having a job. You go here and do task A, then you go here and do task B. I can't imagine being so bored with my life that I'd want to play it, but I can understand people who don't have fun, interesting careers or hobbies getting caught up in it. It's what the rest of us do every day, minus the swords and armor.
Depending on his skill level and interest, I would try Squeak. Scratch and Etoys work well with younger kids.
Someone else said you can't force someone to program. I agree with that, but people don't always know what they're going to like. Give him things to explore and maybe he will become interested. Try not to be offended if he doesn't.
Granted, this story is grandstanding. But still, this is what you have to do to copy from the article:
"Create source and destination URIs."
"Create new destination URI with the source object name as the destination object name." (clone_replace_name)
"Create a new destination key object."
"Retrieve the source key and create a source key object."
"Create a temporary file to hold our copy operation."
"Copy the file."
That seems like a lot of steps, and a couple of them seem very strange to me, namely the clone_replace_name.
I agree that complex tasks require complex APIs. I just don't see why this is such a complex task. We're not using SSL, namespaces or storing a gigantic file here, and I don't see any reason why those features should make the process that much harder. If you want to store large data in the cloud, why should it be so much harder than storing data on a regular filesystem? You don't have "namespaces" on the filesystem, just folders and they just work. SSL "just works." Large files are not intrinsically different from small files. There aren't any ACLs in this example. Where's the complexity? Shouldn't simple things be simple?
The answer is because the cloud is ultimately about marketing and selling expensive crap to enterprises that don't need it, so a burdensome API is just another way of making things that should be cheap more expensive. Expensive developers up on their marketing will get to charge 5x as much because it will take them 5x as much work to do simple things. "Everyone wins."
That's certainly an interesting take on it, but the government lately has been making it pretty clear that when they want something, they get it whether or not the firm is “cooperative.” Besides that, I don't think SSL is used to protect the kinds of communications the government would like to snoop. There's dozens of steganography programs out there you can use to hide malicious data out in the open with little chance of detection, and there are much stronger forms of encryption available that don't have a middle man taking money either. Even if this became a standard practice, it's hard to imagine how the government could either benefit from or defend a policy of watching people's credit card transactions go over the web. I'd worry more about mail but there are so many possible weak links in that chain and the amount of junk traffic is so high I doubt there's much to invest in that approach either.
Most people make most of their purchases based on a blend of emotion and awareness. Computers are ubiquitous, computer skills are not. Therefore, there's a thriving market for products whose advertising makes you afraid of something and then they sell you the solution. It's the same in every industry. Symantec has a big name and they have lots of ads and people are afraid of the things their products pretend to protect them from. So it's a business model. And it doesn't matter if it's a shitty product if 95% of people think they need it and buying it makes them feel better, they'll do it. That's just life.
This is called diversification. Anti-virus is their flagship product, but the "benefit of the benefit" as they say in marketing is the warm fuzzy feeling of being secure. Well, certificates make people feel secure the same way AV does, so it fits the brand, so they're going to sell them. It's a great investment for them, I'm sure they'll make money on this deal.
All the time here on Slashdot I see people trying to read a technological message in a business decision or action. If you're puzzled or outraged by whatever Apple or Symantec or whoever are up to, just follow the dollar signs. This makes business sense and there's nothing more outrageous about Symantec selling certs than anyone else. Really. It's just business. There's no meaning here.
+1! "Past performance is not a predictor of future success." Taleb is my hero. Everyone should read Fooled by Randomness, which I didn't find repetitive at all.
You mean PUT and DELETE, which came in HTTP 1.1, significantly after HTTP 1.0 had defined all the methods as GET, HEAD and POST. These deal with the HTTP's resource model, which only deals with the URL notion of thing, not page-level interactivity which is what I think the OP was talking about.
Still, I do like HTTP 1.1 and one thing I like about REST is that it builds on what appear to me to be fundamental assertions about the HTTP model. You're not fighting the model, you're working with it. Still, I do wonder about how we got where we are today. Things are much harder than they need to be. Many of the things that help initially wind up hurting in the long run, and staying current is a constant battle.
Money spent on e.g. breast cancer awareness goes towards raising awareness of breast cancer, not to finding a cure or even a treatment. It's the same with every other X cancer awareness non-profit charitable organization.
In practice I'm sure they'll approve apps that rely on cross-platform libraries, so long as the UI directly uses their interfaces and it's obvious that the interface was designed for Apple technology. The point is, they don't want your apps if they look just like apps on other devices. They want your apps to seem like they were written from scratch for Apple. So they just need to seem that way and I'm sure they'll get in. I bought a game for the iPhone last week that was written in Scheme. This is about appearance.
I think I'll take a solution that works, and try not to care so much about whether internally it queries in SQL or JSON. But since I'm entertaining this absurdity with a response, let's remember that the NoSQL databases are designed to be eventually consistent, which isn't necessarily a property I want my government's law enforcement relying on.
One downside is what happens if the registrars decided to force existing porn sites to give up their domain names under other TLDs and reregister under xxx? Whether or not they have the authority to do that, they would obviously be destroying a great deal of intellectual capital, and not necessarily freeing up many domains for more prudent users, since they do tend to indicate what they are about in their name already.
If they're not planning on doing that, it amounts to opening up a new TLD that nobody except the porn sites are going to want to use because it is so likely to be blanket blacklisted by everyone's office or school. I'd wager that a significant percentage of their traffic comes from these sources, so there's another forced loss of revenue, albeit not necessarily one they should feel too indignant about losing.
It also creates the illusion that you can just block that one TLD to block porn sites, which wouldn't be true even if they were forcibly evicting porn sites from the other TLDs. To do so would be just as bad as battling viruses, with the disadvantages that the "law" against it would be hard to enforce globally, and the businesses have a lot of capital to invest in the problem. Not to mention it would open up ICANN or the registrars to a lot of the same philosophical problems that NetNanny and the Australian firewall come up against: defining the boundary between art and porn is an intractable problem.
If they aren't evicted from the other TLDs, it could create more problems for ICANN; it would look like a massive giveaway to the biggest industry on the internet without a corresponding concession to the rest of the businesses. How many TLDs do we want to have for different business categories? How do we decide when something is important enough to get its own?.com is getting pretty loaded now, do we want to live in a world with a hundred or a thousand TLDs? I'm not saying this side effect is necessarily a bad thing, it's just something we haven't been seriously talking about that might need to be.
So, I'm against it because I think it'll be too expensive and not have enough benefit to make up for all of the side effects.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point.
The problem is that Flash is only ubiquitous in certain circles for certain tasks. Developers know HTML. They're not scared of HTML5. 90% of what they need flash for, they get for free with HTML5. Why pay for Flash? As you point out, the translation isn't difficult. Is it difficult enough to warrant the investment for a developer?
It would be a different story if designers drove the web, but they are the scarce resource, not programmers. And the bulk of the web is written and maintained by programmers, not designers. Most firms in my state will hire a second full-time developer before they'll even contract out to a designer to make a nice web design. When the boss comes down the stairs and says, hey you guys, we need to embed video, why should they reach for Flash if they have <video>?
You say it yourself: they'll need to release a version of Flash which fully supports HTML5 export. Odds of them doing that before developers jump ship? This is the web. Were you in PHP or Java land during the Rails gold rush? This industry moves fast. If your technology isn't cool, the next wave isn't learning it and they're not going to care how widely-used or stable it is.
Not that anyone actually reads these things later but I got into essentially the same argument on Reddit. To recap:
The "sides" of this debate are talking past each other. One side is saying, Flash is already great and people are going to use it. The other side is saying HTML 5 is cool. Everyone agrees that Flash is more capable today, except for Scribd.
I think we should be able to agree that new and cool tends to get a lot more attention than stable and proven on the Web. It seems likely to me and most of the people in the HTML5 camp that great tools will show up eventually for it. But it doesn't matter if they do or not. 90% of Flash use on the web is to embed a video, to play audio or to have a fancy 2D interactive graphic. Obviously HTML5's <video> and <canvas> tags are aimed squarely at Adobe's jugular. This would be true with or without Apple.
A basic market fact: free beats for-pay. MySQL singlehandedly beat almost the entire database market. Raise your hand if you remember FileMaker Pro. You don't have to be better than the for-pay option if you're free, you just have to solve the average case. Look at Hypercard. Look at FrameMaker. Adobe is great at developing a chokehold on a market only to let it slip away with their arrogance.
Web fact. It takes a designer and a programmer to make a website. But if you can only afford one, you get a programmer. Programmers are the blue collar behind the web. If your designer really knows HTML and is cool and multipurpose like that, which tool are they going to reach for if they have both? A <video> tag or a Flash applet? The "Flash has better tools" argument is often put forth, but in practice there aren't a lot of websites out there that were put up singlehandedly by designers thanks to the power of Flash.
Adobe has to make better developer tools, or make Flash a technological contender again rather than the Cobol option, or they're likely to take their favorite market position: second-most easy-to-use for-pay tool in a market surrounded by free alternatives. HTML5 appeals to the workhorses of the internet: the programmers. Unless Adobe acts, they're going to lose their corner of the market. They're already in danger just because of the popularity of the iPhone and iPad. If they stagnate, they're fucked.
If you want to develop a cross-platform app for the iPhone and iPad, you're fucked, so don't bother.
If you want to develop a cross-platform GUI app for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows, your best bet is probably to use Qt, which means C++.
Agreed 100%. This article is basically saying Flash is too big to fail. I don't buy it. The barrier to entry for <canvas> is so much lower. It's just a matter of time before we have excellent—and free—developer tools. Plus, in this industry, new and cool has always won over old and reliable.
I think you're absolutely right. I've seen people playing WoW. It looks just like having a job. You go here and do task A, then you go here and do task B. I can't imagine being so bored with my life that I'd want to play it, but I can understand people who don't have fun, interesting careers or hobbies getting caught up in it. It's what the rest of us do every day, minus the swords and armor.
Depending on his skill level and interest, I would try Squeak. Scratch and Etoys work well with younger kids.
Someone else said you can't force someone to program. I agree with that, but people don't always know what they're going to like. Give him things to explore and maybe he will become interested. Try not to be offended if he doesn't.
The more I learn about Smalltalk the harder I find it to swallow the notion that Java is closely related to it.
For one thing, I'm using Python in that example. If everybody had to do the same steps in Python as they did in C, nobody would be using Python.
It only takes one step to copy a file in DOS.
Granted, this story is grandstanding. But still, this is what you have to do to copy from the article:
That seems like a lot of steps, and a couple of them seem very strange to me, namely the clone_replace_name.
I agree that complex tasks require complex APIs. I just don't see why this is such a complex task. We're not using SSL, namespaces or storing a gigantic file here, and I don't see any reason why those features should make the process that much harder. If you want to store large data in the cloud, why should it be so much harder than storing data on a regular filesystem? You don't have "namespaces" on the filesystem, just folders and they just work. SSL "just works." Large files are not intrinsically different from small files. There aren't any ACLs in this example. Where's the complexity? Shouldn't simple things be simple?
The answer is because the cloud is ultimately about marketing and selling expensive crap to enterprises that don't need it, so a burdensome API is just another way of making things that should be cheap more expensive. Expensive developers up on their marketing will get to charge 5x as much because it will take them 5x as much work to do simple things. "Everyone wins."
That's certainly an interesting take on it, but the government lately has been making it pretty clear that when they want something, they get it whether or not the firm is “cooperative.” Besides that, I don't think SSL is used to protect the kinds of communications the government would like to snoop. There's dozens of steganography programs out there you can use to hide malicious data out in the open with little chance of detection, and there are much stronger forms of encryption available that don't have a middle man taking money either. Even if this became a standard practice, it's hard to imagine how the government could either benefit from or defend a policy of watching people's credit card transactions go over the web. I'd worry more about mail but there are so many possible weak links in that chain and the amount of junk traffic is so high I doubt there's much to invest in that approach either.
Most people make most of their purchases based on a blend of emotion and awareness. Computers are ubiquitous, computer skills are not. Therefore, there's a thriving market for products whose advertising makes you afraid of something and then they sell you the solution. It's the same in every industry. Symantec has a big name and they have lots of ads and people are afraid of the things their products pretend to protect them from. So it's a business model. And it doesn't matter if it's a shitty product if 95% of people think they need it and buying it makes them feel better, they'll do it. That's just life.
This is called diversification. Anti-virus is their flagship product, but the "benefit of the benefit" as they say in marketing is the warm fuzzy feeling of being secure. Well, certificates make people feel secure the same way AV does, so it fits the brand, so they're going to sell them. It's a great investment for them, I'm sure they'll make money on this deal.
All the time here on Slashdot I see people trying to read a technological message in a business decision or action. If you're puzzled or outraged by whatever Apple or Symantec or whoever are up to, just follow the dollar signs. This makes business sense and there's nothing more outrageous about Symantec selling certs than anyone else. Really. It's just business. There's no meaning here.
Hey, at least we can still speak our minds.
+1! "Past performance is not a predictor of future success." Taleb is my hero. Everyone should read Fooled by Randomness, which I didn't find repetitive at all.
You mean PUT and DELETE, which came in HTTP 1.1, significantly after HTTP 1.0 had defined all the methods as GET, HEAD and POST. These deal with the HTTP's resource model, which only deals with the URL notion of thing, not page-level interactivity which is what I think the OP was talking about.
Still, I do like HTTP 1.1 and one thing I like about REST is that it builds on what appear to me to be fundamental assertions about the HTTP model. You're not fighting the model, you're working with it. Still, I do wonder about how we got where we are today. Things are much harder than they need to be. Many of the things that help initially wind up hurting in the long run, and staying current is a constant battle.
Practical Extraction and Reporting Language.
Money spent on e.g. breast cancer awareness goes towards raising awareness of breast cancer, not to finding a cure or even a treatment. It's the same with every other X cancer awareness non-profit charitable organization.
The free market doesn't have to be perfect, just a lot better than the alternatives. Which it is.
How many businesses are there which have Google's needs? Ten? Twenty?
In practice I'm sure they'll approve apps that rely on cross-platform libraries, so long as the UI directly uses their interfaces and it's obvious that the interface was designed for Apple technology. The point is, they don't want your apps if they look just like apps on other devices. They want your apps to seem like they were written from scratch for Apple. So they just need to seem that way and I'm sure they'll get in. I bought a game for the iPhone last week that was written in Scheme. This is about appearance.
Relax, you're going to be fine.
I think I'll take a solution that works, and try not to care so much about whether internally it queries in SQL or JSON. But since I'm entertaining this absurdity with a response, let's remember that the NoSQL databases are designed to be eventually consistent, which isn't necessarily a property I want my government's law enforcement relying on.
One downside is what happens if the registrars decided to force existing porn sites to give up their domain names under other TLDs and reregister under xxx? Whether or not they have the authority to do that, they would obviously be destroying a great deal of intellectual capital, and not necessarily freeing up many domains for more prudent users, since they do tend to indicate what they are about in their name already.
If they're not planning on doing that, it amounts to opening up a new TLD that nobody except the porn sites are going to want to use because it is so likely to be blanket blacklisted by everyone's office or school. I'd wager that a significant percentage of their traffic comes from these sources, so there's another forced loss of revenue, albeit not necessarily one they should feel too indignant about losing.
It also creates the illusion that you can just block that one TLD to block porn sites, which wouldn't be true even if they were forcibly evicting porn sites from the other TLDs. To do so would be just as bad as battling viruses, with the disadvantages that the "law" against it would be hard to enforce globally, and the businesses have a lot of capital to invest in the problem. Not to mention it would open up ICANN or the registrars to a lot of the same philosophical problems that NetNanny and the Australian firewall come up against: defining the boundary between art and porn is an intractable problem.
If they aren't evicted from the other TLDs, it could create more problems for ICANN; it would look like a massive giveaway to the biggest industry on the internet without a corresponding concession to the rest of the businesses. How many TLDs do we want to have for different business categories? How do we decide when something is important enough to get its own? .com is getting pretty loaded now, do we want to live in a world with a hundred or a thousand TLDs? I'm not saying this side effect is necessarily a bad thing, it's just something we haven't been seriously talking about that might need to be.
So, I'm against it because I think it'll be too expensive and not have enough benefit to make up for all of the side effects.