Why bother when we have WebGL [wikipedia.org] (the 3D canvas API) that doesn't require any plugins at all?... the plugin mechanism has just resulted in one or two players achieving dominance and vendor lock-in.
I think you answered your own question. Vendors want to push proprietary plugins so they can achieve vendor lock-in.
Fine, for the 1% of websites that bother with the "extended validation", they'll continue to do that. For everyone else, it really doesn't matter.
Or what, you think that most CAs actually verify anything? You think that if you registered www.hsbcbankusa.org (it's not taken!) that you couldn't get a certificate authority to give you a valid cert? Of course you could.
In 99% of cases, the point of SSL certs is not to validate the identity of the person running the site. The point is to encrypt traffic. The reason we need certificate authorities is that we need a chain of trust prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. All you need is a way to pass public keys and verify that the keys belong to whoever controls the domain.
However, the same people that screw up their SSL / HTTPS config and convince everyone to just click thru the error messages, will be running/ruining their dnssec config
Well it's kind of funny that this is your complaint, since one of the reasons admins ask people to click through the error message is that they have self-signed certs because they don't want to pay ridiculous amounts of money to a CA. From what I understand, (which admittedly is limited) DNSSEC could possibly open the door to putting signed public keys into DNS records, which would mean you wouldn't really need SSL certificate authorities.
So instead of being the same problems as SSL all over again, this could help address the SSL problems. Maybe. I still suspect certificate authorities will find a way to keep anything like that from happening.
Yeah, I think this is part of why Jobs is voicing frustration with Flash. I'm sure there were years where a lot of people had a bad impression of Safari because it crashed so much, even though the root of the problem was Flash. Meanwhile Adobe has spent years refusing to move their apps to Cocoa, and they're only moving now because Apple started refusing to support 64-bit for applications using Carbon. Adobe Acrobat is a model of bloat. For most people most of the time, all they want to do is view static PDFs, but Adobe keeps cramming in more and more silly features.
What I'd really like to see is for the next version of Adobe's Creative Suite be what Snow Leopard was for OSX: not a lot of new features, but a cleaning out of old code, updating of all the pieces that need it, optimizing everything, etc. If Adobe made CS6 lean, mean, and efficient (and if they would just drop the damn activation scheme) then I'd probably be willing to buy the whole thing again.
Many hardware devices already have H.264 decoding built into the chip, ranging from set-top boxes to the iPhone. Moving away would mean losing ability to run on these target devices (or run at an unacceptable frame rate).
Well I think you're right and this is a big issue. If VP8 were to displace H264, it would have to be a long-term goal that Google would need to work for. First, they'd need to make sure that VP8 was compelling. Offering it all royalty-free definitely helps, but it's not clear that it's enough to get everyone on board. A lot has already been invested in H264, and it'd take some investment to move away from it. It'd definitely help if they could demonstrate some superior capabilities of the codec.
Second, Google would need to make sure there was hardware support. This would take some time to develop, but the real problem is that it'd take years to phase out existing H264 devices. It's easy enough to install a new codec in Windows and OSX, but installing a new hardware chip in my iPod/iPad/iPhone/AppleTV/Zune/Droid/whatever to support hardware decoding is harder. So in the meantime, while these old devices are being phased out, everyone would need to support both H264 and VP8.
Now don't get me wrong. I would love to see Google release a high-quality royalty free codec. If it came out, I'd love to see everyone use that codec in a completely open container format. Like if the default video format in Windows Media, Quicktime, and VLC were all the same high-quality codec in the same high-quality container format, that would be fantastic. It just doesn't seem to me to be something that can be achieved in the short term. It seems like a long-term (multi-year) goal.
I'd really love to see some of these things hashed out publicly. Do Apple and Microsoft have a reason for not supporting MKV containers? Do they have valid legal/technical objections, or have they just not bothered? If they have technical objections, can they offer those objections to a group who could then respond or offer possible changes to MKV to address those issues? I'd love to have some transparency in these things, since it affects all of us.
Notice at the very end of the Flash engineer's post, it mentions that part of the problem was that they had to move to Cocoa? This isn't just Adobe and Apple working together, it's also Adobe and Apple fighting it out.
Maybe you've just been lucky? I don't know what to tell you. For years and years Safari would periodically freeze up, give the the spinning beach-ball of death, and then crash. If you looked at the crash report, the culprit was Flash every single time. Often it was Flash ads, which is really annoying because my browser is being crashed by something I don't even want. But really it could be anything. Youtube and Hulu have crashed Safari for me plenty of times.
These days that doesn't seem to happen, but I think Apple made some change in Safari and they must be sandboxing Flash somehow. Flash will still crash, but Safari is fine. It just replaces the Flash app with a little icon and keeps working.
So no, I'm not parroting anything. I'm speaking from my personal experience on a number of different systems. Flash is *much* better on Windows and doesn't crash very often, but it's still an annoying resource hog.
Disclaimer: my own view is that the quicker IE6 and flash both die the better, but I also have to live/develop in the real world and so know the likelihood of this happening in the short term.
Well then you should at least have some small secret part of you that is happy with Apple's decision. They've providing the beginnings of a business case for dropping Flash, and thereby dropping support for older versions of IE. You'll be able to honestly argue, "To provide support to iPhones and iPads, we'll have to do this with HTML5 instead of Flash. Unfortunately IE6 doesn't support HTML5, so we should just drop legacy support."
Yeah, it's not the final word, but the more companies stop supporting Flash and instead support HTML5, the more realistic an argument it will be. Baby steps.
For instance: if you don't explicitly terminate a contract at the end of its period, it's automatically renewed for another 18 months. You need to give 2 months notice before the end of the term before canceling.
Yeah, watch out for this one for any vendor. I've seen it happen where someone requires a 1-month advanced notice to cancel your contract or it auto-renews for a year. Then, when you try to cancel 2 months in advance, they tell you that they can't enter it into the system until you're closer to the cancellation date. Effectively this company had a window of a couple days where they'd let you cancel your account-- call too soon, they tell you to call back later; call too late, and you're auto-renewed for a year. I don't know if it was legal, but I'd generally prefer to stay away from a company that behaves this way.
Hosting is particularly annoying to shop for. Google for reviews, and you'll find advertisements pretending to be reviews. Visit most hosting companys' websites and you'll find an ugly and annoying page filled with smiling people wearing headsets. It seems like nobody takes shared hosting seriously anyway. The assumption tends to be that if your site were important, you'd have a dedicated host. With lots of hosting packages going for under $5/month for "unlimited" everything, it's not hard to see why.
Apple bans Flash because they are tired of dealing with Adobe.
This seems more likely to me. The Apple/Adobe relationship has seemed a bit strained lately. Adobe often provides better and more support to Windows users, and they've been very slow to move to Cocoa. Meanwhile, Apple has been competing with Adobe in the audio/video realm.
Plus, Steve Jobs has been reported as saying that Flash sucks, is too slow and unstable, and takes up battery life. This is true. It's annoying on Windows, but on OSX, Flash is a disaster. It seems like this should be a case where Slashdotters could support Apple; they're essentially saying, "This stuff should be done according to more open standards like HTML. Let's work on HTML5 to get it to do the things we need and get rid of Flash."
I'm in no way a supporter of Flash, but how is this any different than anything else in the browser with a:hover state?
Well it depends on how you're using your "hover" state, but at least HTML has the option of doing things like detecting the browser and feeding alternate stylesheets. If the use of "hover" is using a stylesheet, then an alternate stylesheet can be used to present a version of the page that would be more appropriate to a touchscreen. As far as I know, Flash doesn't really work like that. I suppose Flash could work like that, but I don't think it currently does.
I don't really have a problem with using javascript for navigation per se as long as it degrades well.
For that matter, I wouldn't have a problem with someone making a Flash website so long as it degrades well. Can I disable Flash and still get a fully-functional version of your website? If the answer is "yes", then go ahead and do whatever you want with the "flash version", because I'll just disable Flash and get a fully-functioning site.
Of course, if you have your website functioning fully without Flash, then I don't see why you would want to create an alternate Flash version. It seems to me that Flash has 3 uses: games, embedding audio/video into the page, and allowing people who don't know what they're doing to create overly-animated websites. The third thing shouldn't happen anyway, the second will hopefully go away as people transition to html5.
But it makes me feel so awesome to see 6GB free. I'm all like, "Damn, I have a lot of RAM!" When the RAM is all fully, my system monitoring graphs don't look at cool. I also like seeing my CPU utilization showing 4 cores, each idling around 1%, and having a multiple terabytes of free space on my hard drives. All those graphs get ruined if you actually use your computer for stuff.
How about creating a semi FOSS license that remains closed source, and immediately becomes FOSS or Public Domain should the company ever fold, or the software itself becomes otherwise unavailable.
Of course, the problem with that is that you have to make the source available ahead of time. Part of the reason that FOSS licenses aren't revokable is that, once you've released a copy under the license, anyone with that copy retains the license under which it was released.
I kind of like the idea that, in order to get formal copyright protection, developers must register the source code with some government agency. Then the source would be released to the public domain if the copyright expires, and further that the copyright could be forced to expire for abandonware under certain circumstances.
I don't know if that's practical, but it seems fair to me.
It's kind of too bad, though. You have Thunderbird, Sunbird, and Fire... fox. Nobody even knows what I firefox is. For years, I kept hearing people refer to the browser as "Fox Fire".
I don't know, that toolbar looks a bit different. I'm saying if you look at the scheenshots they have for Photoshop 1 and then for Photoshop 11, the main toolbar hasn't really changed that much. By Photoshop 3, it looks like they've gotten most of the UI elements together and they don't change very drastically after that.
I'd say most 20 year old applications have probably changed their UI more than that since their first release.
Just to be clear: I have no problem with macros. I have no problem with scripts. If you want to write a macro in Word that will make your workflow easier and faster, I think that's great. I think it's great that Microsoft had the forethought to include support for scripting in MS Office.
What I object to is embedding macros in Word documents. I think this is dangerous design. If you want to write your own macro and store it on your computer, then you shouldn't need to embed it in the document itself. If you want to pass the macro to another user, you should be able store the macro in its own file and copy that file sending it along with the file you want to run it on.
However, if you want to pass around a single file where you fill out a bunch of fields and it actively does stuff with that information, then that's an application. It's not a document anymore. If Microsoft and Adobe want to enable their users to create their own mini-applications to do this sort of thing, then that seems like a great idea. Create a new file type with a different filename extension so that I can block them in email and otherwise treat them like applications.
Re:Sort of a weird feeling about it
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20 Years of Photoshop
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Anyway, it's nice of Adobe to keep improving Photoshop, but it's amazing how many millions of dollars have gone into this software, and it is still getting a bad rep for tons of crashes, expensive third-party plugins, weird bugs, etc.
It's also surprising how little the UI has changed over 20 years. If you look at the screenshots going all the way back, you don't see a whole lot of change. I guess you could argue either way: either the UI is stagnant, or it was so well designed in the first place that it didn't need to change.
As far as "tons of crashes", I'm not with you on that one. I haven't really upgraded to CS4 and I don't use any 3rd party plugins, but Photoshop is pretty solid to me. I don't see lots of weird bugs either. Expensive third-party plugins? I don't see how that's really Adobe's fault unless they're somehow setting the price through deals that I'm not aware of.
What I find a little more annoying is the feeling of being on the upgrade treadmill. Here's my petty little rant (don't read it if you don't want to read a petty little rant): I had a copy of CS2 for OSX, but felt a little railroaded into CS3 because I had to upgrade to get Intel support. Meh, that's understandable, but kind of annoying. Now Snow Leopard comes out, and they say they won't really support CS3 on Snow Leopard. Ok, that's annoying, but not a big deal-- CS3 still works. But I go to reinstall CS3 recently, and it's kind of annoying-- they dropped CS3 trialware completely off their website. You can upgrade directly from the trial to the full version using a credit card, I hadn't kept an electronic copy around. I finally get it installed, and Adobe's Updater won't work. The Updater needs to be updated first, and it won't work well enough to update itself. You can download the Updater from their website, but they try to push you to use the CS4 Updater. The CS4 Updater won't update CS3 software. So it basically takes me a day and a half of hunting around online before I find an update to the old CS3 Updater online. I install it, and it updates Adobe Acrobat from 8.1 and stops. I run the Updater again, and it upgrades to Acrobat 8.1.2 and stops. Run it again, 8.1.3. Then 8.1.4. It keeps going like this until I hit... I don't know... 8.2.1 or whatever the most recent version is. I'm sitting there thinking, "I paid something like $1,500 for this, and they can't make this all easier?" Then I realize, "No, they don't want to make it easier. They want me to get frustrated and just buy the upgrade to CS4."
What, you think that insurance companies pay out? The way insurance companies profit is to take your money and then find excuses to deny the coverage that we've promised. It's like casinos-- they don't make money by letting you win.
The telcos have offered dumbed-down, legacy speeds because they are trying to become more closely associated with the entertainment industry than with telecommunications. The entertainment and other content industries do not want the competition that comes when every subscriber can become an originator.
I find it pretty frustrating how consumer internet speeds are generally asymmetrical. I understand that most people don't really care about upload speeds, but I've long suspected that there are sinister motives at work. I think big ISPs have tried to portray themselves as an entertainment service for a variety of self-serving reasons:
They want to control content distribution. As far as some of these people are concerned, the Internet is a great business opportunity for large media companies, and it's unfortunate that the whole thing isn't isn't a broadcast network.
They want to nickel and dime you and the companies you interact with. (see: net neutrality)
They want to avoid regulation. If they admit to being telecommunications infrastructure, then it suddenly seems much more reasonable that the people (and therefore the government) would expect certain things from them. However, as long as the Internet is viewed as an "entertainment service", there isn't really a compelling public interest in requiring good service.
They want to charge a premium to businesses. A lot of ISPs will provide very slow upload speeds, block ports, and refuse to provide static IPs unless you pay for a much more expensive business account. Sometimes simply converting to a "business account" doubles the price of the service, and then you still have to pay additional fees for faster speeds and static IPs.
I could probably come up with more, but that's just off the top of my head.
What I find absolutely absurd is that I've heard people claim that it's ok that America doesn't do a lot of manufacturing anymore because we lead the world in technology and intellectual property. You know, real "ra ra America rules" type of stuff about how the fundamentals of our economy are strong and how America is the greatest country in the world. Two minutes later, they complain about how Obama is evil and communist because he's trying to interfere in the "free market" of ISPs.
The contradictions are staggering. Estimates vary, but I've read in the past few months that something like 1/3 of the people in the US don't have access to anything faster than dialup. I live in NYC and can't get DSL or FIOS. My only option is cable, where up until a few months ago, the fasted upload rate I could get for under $300/month was 768kbps. In the biggest city in the country. Meanwhile other countries are already working on 1Gbps connections.
Businesses don't invest in locations where the infrastructure is bad. Society doesn't thrive where infrastructure is bad. This is a big deal.
First, what market forces? If you're lucky, you have a choice between FIOS and Cable. A lot of people only have a choice between dialup and... dialup. "Free market forces" depend on customers having low barriers of entry into the market, which would help to provide customers with real choice. There aren't "market forces" when you have monopolies, duopolies, cartels, etc. controlling the market.
Second, why isn't "the Government's place" to mandate minimum standards for interstate infrastructure?
I also just fail to see how this is terribly interesting. Sorry, yeah, I like science and it's kind of an interesting little bit of trivia or something, but putting aside the technicalities, doesn't this just boil down to, "If you are going really really really fast and you hit something, it's going to cause damage. Space isn't completely empty, so you're going to hit stuff even in 'empty space'."?
...but don't confuse yourself into believing that some document formats are inherently safer than others. The vulnerability is fundamentally in the software, not the document.
I'm not the one confusing things. First, of course it's not the format itself, but what's interpreting the file. Text files are pretty harmless all by themselves, but I don't go sending arbitrary text files to be interpreted by bash. Likewise, it's not the inclusion of javascript in PDFs that's a problem, but rather the fact that PDF viewers interpret that javascript creates a great opportunity for malicious code.
And yes, theoretically, if a viewer has exploitable flaws, then you can exploit them. I'm sure you could write a text viewer that would run arbitrary code when a malicious text file was opened in it-- but you don't really see that very often, do you? Talking about these PDF exploits, what percentage of them do you think came from exploiting the javascript engine, and what percent came from an exploit in the graphics rendering?
Theoretically, yes, vulnerabilities can exist in any document viewer such that a malicious document can cause problems. However, that doesn't mean that all document formats are created equally, and it doesn't mean that the conventional split between applications and documents isn't helpful.
Most users/blockers will not allow EXEs, and can open "ZIP" files to determine if an EXE is enclosed.
And IMO this is exactly why everyone should be wary of putting scripting languages into documents. We have a well-established convention of distinguishing "documents" from "applications"; "documents" are passive collections of information, whereas "applications" do stuff.
We block applications and scripts because they do stuff and we can't easily know what it is that they do, but we don't block documents because, in theory, they can't do anything. Loading a document in its proper viewer application shouldn't do anything that the viewer wasn't explicitly designed to do. If you throw scripting applications and macros into the documents, then suddenly the "documents" do stuff too. This, in my opinion, is bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Why bother when we have WebGL [wikipedia.org] (the 3D canvas API) that doesn't require any plugins at all?... the plugin mechanism has just resulted in one or two players achieving dominance and vendor lock-in.
I think you answered your own question. Vendors want to push proprietary plugins so they can achieve vendor lock-in.
Fine, for the 1% of websites that bother with the "extended validation", they'll continue to do that. For everyone else, it really doesn't matter.
Or what, you think that most CAs actually verify anything? You think that if you registered www.hsbcbankusa.org (it's not taken!) that you couldn't get a certificate authority to give you a valid cert? Of course you could.
In 99% of cases, the point of SSL certs is not to validate the identity of the person running the site. The point is to encrypt traffic. The reason we need certificate authorities is that we need a chain of trust prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. All you need is a way to pass public keys and verify that the keys belong to whoever controls the domain.
However, the same people that screw up their SSL / HTTPS config and convince everyone to just click thru the error messages, will be running/ruining their dnssec config
Well it's kind of funny that this is your complaint, since one of the reasons admins ask people to click through the error message is that they have self-signed certs because they don't want to pay ridiculous amounts of money to a CA. From what I understand, (which admittedly is limited) DNSSEC could possibly open the door to putting signed public keys into DNS records, which would mean you wouldn't really need SSL certificate authorities.
So instead of being the same problems as SSL all over again, this could help address the SSL problems. Maybe. I still suspect certificate authorities will find a way to keep anything like that from happening.
Yeah, I think this is part of why Jobs is voicing frustration with Flash. I'm sure there were years where a lot of people had a bad impression of Safari because it crashed so much, even though the root of the problem was Flash. Meanwhile Adobe has spent years refusing to move their apps to Cocoa, and they're only moving now because Apple started refusing to support 64-bit for applications using Carbon. Adobe Acrobat is a model of bloat. For most people most of the time, all they want to do is view static PDFs, but Adobe keeps cramming in more and more silly features.
What I'd really like to see is for the next version of Adobe's Creative Suite be what Snow Leopard was for OSX: not a lot of new features, but a cleaning out of old code, updating of all the pieces that need it, optimizing everything, etc. If Adobe made CS6 lean, mean, and efficient (and if they would just drop the damn activation scheme) then I'd probably be willing to buy the whole thing again.
But whoops, now I'm really going off-topic.
Many hardware devices already have H.264 decoding built into the chip, ranging from set-top boxes to the iPhone. Moving away would mean losing ability to run on these target devices (or run at an unacceptable frame rate).
Well I think you're right and this is a big issue. If VP8 were to displace H264, it would have to be a long-term goal that Google would need to work for. First, they'd need to make sure that VP8 was compelling. Offering it all royalty-free definitely helps, but it's not clear that it's enough to get everyone on board. A lot has already been invested in H264, and it'd take some investment to move away from it. It'd definitely help if they could demonstrate some superior capabilities of the codec.
Second, Google would need to make sure there was hardware support. This would take some time to develop, but the real problem is that it'd take years to phase out existing H264 devices. It's easy enough to install a new codec in Windows and OSX, but installing a new hardware chip in my iPod/iPad/iPhone/AppleTV/Zune/Droid/whatever to support hardware decoding is harder. So in the meantime, while these old devices are being phased out, everyone would need to support both H264 and VP8.
Now don't get me wrong. I would love to see Google release a high-quality royalty free codec. If it came out, I'd love to see everyone use that codec in a completely open container format. Like if the default video format in Windows Media, Quicktime, and VLC were all the same high-quality codec in the same high-quality container format, that would be fantastic. It just doesn't seem to me to be something that can be achieved in the short term. It seems like a long-term (multi-year) goal.
I'd really love to see some of these things hashed out publicly. Do Apple and Microsoft have a reason for not supporting MKV containers? Do they have valid legal/technical objections, or have they just not bothered? If they have technical objections, can they offer those objections to a group who could then respond or offer possible changes to MKV to address those issues? I'd love to have some transparency in these things, since it affects all of us.
Notice at the very end of the Flash engineer's post, it mentions that part of the problem was that they had to move to Cocoa? This isn't just Adobe and Apple working together, it's also Adobe and Apple fighting it out.
Maybe you've just been lucky? I don't know what to tell you. For years and years Safari would periodically freeze up, give the the spinning beach-ball of death, and then crash. If you looked at the crash report, the culprit was Flash every single time. Often it was Flash ads, which is really annoying because my browser is being crashed by something I don't even want. But really it could be anything. Youtube and Hulu have crashed Safari for me plenty of times.
These days that doesn't seem to happen, but I think Apple made some change in Safari and they must be sandboxing Flash somehow. Flash will still crash, but Safari is fine. It just replaces the Flash app with a little icon and keeps working.
So no, I'm not parroting anything. I'm speaking from my personal experience on a number of different systems. Flash is *much* better on Windows and doesn't crash very often, but it's still an annoying resource hog.
Disclaimer: my own view is that the quicker IE6 and flash both die the better, but I also have to live/develop in the real world and so know the likelihood of this happening in the short term.
Well then you should at least have some small secret part of you that is happy with Apple's decision. They've providing the beginnings of a business case for dropping Flash, and thereby dropping support for older versions of IE. You'll be able to honestly argue, "To provide support to iPhones and iPads, we'll have to do this with HTML5 instead of Flash. Unfortunately IE6 doesn't support HTML5, so we should just drop legacy support."
Yeah, it's not the final word, but the more companies stop supporting Flash and instead support HTML5, the more realistic an argument it will be. Baby steps.
For instance: if you don't explicitly terminate a contract at the end of its period, it's automatically renewed for another 18 months. You need to give 2 months notice before the end of the term before canceling.
Yeah, watch out for this one for any vendor. I've seen it happen where someone requires a 1-month advanced notice to cancel your contract or it auto-renews for a year. Then, when you try to cancel 2 months in advance, they tell you that they can't enter it into the system until you're closer to the cancellation date. Effectively this company had a window of a couple days where they'd let you cancel your account-- call too soon, they tell you to call back later; call too late, and you're auto-renewed for a year. I don't know if it was legal, but I'd generally prefer to stay away from a company that behaves this way.
Hosting is particularly annoying to shop for. Google for reviews, and you'll find advertisements pretending to be reviews. Visit most hosting companys' websites and you'll find an ugly and annoying page filled with smiling people wearing headsets. It seems like nobody takes shared hosting seriously anyway. The assumption tends to be that if your site were important, you'd have a dedicated host. With lots of hosting packages going for under $5/month for "unlimited" everything, it's not hard to see why.
Apple bans Flash because they are tired of dealing with Adobe.
This seems more likely to me. The Apple/Adobe relationship has seemed a bit strained lately. Adobe often provides better and more support to Windows users, and they've been very slow to move to Cocoa. Meanwhile, Apple has been competing with Adobe in the audio/video realm.
Plus, Steve Jobs has been reported as saying that Flash sucks, is too slow and unstable, and takes up battery life. This is true. It's annoying on Windows, but on OSX, Flash is a disaster. It seems like this should be a case where Slashdotters could support Apple; they're essentially saying, "This stuff should be done according to more open standards like HTML. Let's work on HTML5 to get it to do the things we need and get rid of Flash."
I'm in no way a supporter of Flash, but how is this any different than anything else in the browser with a :hover state?
Well it depends on how you're using your "hover" state, but at least HTML has the option of doing things like detecting the browser and feeding alternate stylesheets. If the use of "hover" is using a stylesheet, then an alternate stylesheet can be used to present a version of the page that would be more appropriate to a touchscreen. As far as I know, Flash doesn't really work like that. I suppose Flash could work like that, but I don't think it currently does.
I don't really have a problem with using javascript for navigation per se as long as it degrades well.
For that matter, I wouldn't have a problem with someone making a Flash website so long as it degrades well. Can I disable Flash and still get a fully-functional version of your website? If the answer is "yes", then go ahead and do whatever you want with the "flash version", because I'll just disable Flash and get a fully-functioning site.
Of course, if you have your website functioning fully without Flash, then I don't see why you would want to create an alternate Flash version. It seems to me that Flash has 3 uses: games, embedding audio/video into the page, and allowing people who don't know what they're doing to create overly-animated websites. The third thing shouldn't happen anyway, the second will hopefully go away as people transition to html5.
But it makes me feel so awesome to see 6GB free. I'm all like, "Damn, I have a lot of RAM!" When the RAM is all fully, my system monitoring graphs don't look at cool. I also like seeing my CPU utilization showing 4 cores, each idling around 1%, and having a multiple terabytes of free space on my hard drives. All those graphs get ruined if you actually use your computer for stuff.
How about creating a semi FOSS license that remains closed source, and immediately becomes FOSS or Public Domain should the company ever fold, or the software itself becomes otherwise unavailable.
Of course, the problem with that is that you have to make the source available ahead of time. Part of the reason that FOSS licenses aren't revokable is that, once you've released a copy under the license, anyone with that copy retains the license under which it was released.
I kind of like the idea that, in order to get formal copyright protection, developers must register the source code with some government agency. Then the source would be released to the public domain if the copyright expires, and further that the copyright could be forced to expire for abandonware under certain circumstances.
I don't know if that's practical, but it seems fair to me.
It's kind of too bad, though. You have Thunderbird, Sunbird, and Fire... fox. Nobody even knows what I firefox is. For years, I kept hearing people refer to the browser as "Fox Fire".
I don't know, that toolbar looks a bit different. I'm saying if you look at the scheenshots they have for Photoshop 1 and then for Photoshop 11, the main toolbar hasn't really changed that much. By Photoshop 3, it looks like they've gotten most of the UI elements together and they don't change very drastically after that.
I'd say most 20 year old applications have probably changed their UI more than that since their first release.
Just to be clear: I have no problem with macros. I have no problem with scripts. If you want to write a macro in Word that will make your workflow easier and faster, I think that's great. I think it's great that Microsoft had the forethought to include support for scripting in MS Office.
What I object to is embedding macros in Word documents. I think this is dangerous design. If you want to write your own macro and store it on your computer, then you shouldn't need to embed it in the document itself. If you want to pass the macro to another user, you should be able store the macro in its own file and copy that file sending it along with the file you want to run it on.
However, if you want to pass around a single file where you fill out a bunch of fields and it actively does stuff with that information, then that's an application. It's not a document anymore. If Microsoft and Adobe want to enable their users to create their own mini-applications to do this sort of thing, then that seems like a great idea. Create a new file type with a different filename extension so that I can block them in email and otherwise treat them like applications.
Anyway, it's nice of Adobe to keep improving Photoshop, but it's amazing how many millions of dollars have gone into this software, and it is still getting a bad rep for tons of crashes, expensive third-party plugins, weird bugs, etc.
It's also surprising how little the UI has changed over 20 years. If you look at the screenshots going all the way back, you don't see a whole lot of change. I guess you could argue either way: either the UI is stagnant, or it was so well designed in the first place that it didn't need to change.
As far as "tons of crashes", I'm not with you on that one. I haven't really upgraded to CS4 and I don't use any 3rd party plugins, but Photoshop is pretty solid to me. I don't see lots of weird bugs either. Expensive third-party plugins? I don't see how that's really Adobe's fault unless they're somehow setting the price through deals that I'm not aware of.
What I find a little more annoying is the feeling of being on the upgrade treadmill. Here's my petty little rant (don't read it if you don't want to read a petty little rant): I had a copy of CS2 for OSX, but felt a little railroaded into CS3 because I had to upgrade to get Intel support. Meh, that's understandable, but kind of annoying. Now Snow Leopard comes out, and they say they won't really support CS3 on Snow Leopard. Ok, that's annoying, but not a big deal-- CS3 still works. But I go to reinstall CS3 recently, and it's kind of annoying-- they dropped CS3 trialware completely off their website. You can upgrade directly from the trial to the full version using a credit card, I hadn't kept an electronic copy around. I finally get it installed, and Adobe's Updater won't work. The Updater needs to be updated first, and it won't work well enough to update itself. You can download the Updater from their website, but they try to push you to use the CS4 Updater. The CS4 Updater won't update CS3 software. So it basically takes me a day and a half of hunting around online before I find an update to the old CS3 Updater online. I install it, and it updates Adobe Acrobat from 8.1 and stops. I run the Updater again, and it upgrades to Acrobat 8.1.2 and stops. Run it again, 8.1.3. Then 8.1.4. It keeps going like this until I hit... I don't know... 8.2.1 or whatever the most recent version is. I'm sitting there thinking, "I paid something like $1,500 for this, and they can't make this all easier?" Then I realize, "No, they don't want to make it easier. They want me to get frustrated and just buy the upgrade to CS4."
What, you think that insurance companies pay out? The way insurance companies profit is to take your money and then find excuses to deny the coverage that we've promised. It's like casinos-- they don't make money by letting you win.
The telcos have offered dumbed-down, legacy speeds because they are trying to become more closely associated with the entertainment industry than with telecommunications. The entertainment and other content industries do not want the competition that comes when every subscriber can become an originator.
I find it pretty frustrating how consumer internet speeds are generally asymmetrical. I understand that most people don't really care about upload speeds, but I've long suspected that there are sinister motives at work. I think big ISPs have tried to portray themselves as an entertainment service for a variety of self-serving reasons:
I could probably come up with more, but that's just off the top of my head.
What I find absolutely absurd is that I've heard people claim that it's ok that America doesn't do a lot of manufacturing anymore because we lead the world in technology and intellectual property. You know, real "ra ra America rules" type of stuff about how the fundamentals of our economy are strong and how America is the greatest country in the world. Two minutes later, they complain about how Obama is evil and communist because he's trying to interfere in the "free market" of ISPs.
The contradictions are staggering. Estimates vary, but I've read in the past few months that something like 1/3 of the people in the US don't have access to anything faster than dialup. I live in NYC and can't get DSL or FIOS. My only option is cable, where up until a few months ago, the fasted upload rate I could get for under $300/month was 768kbps. In the biggest city in the country. Meanwhile other countries are already working on 1Gbps connections.
Businesses don't invest in locations where the infrastructure is bad. Society doesn't thrive where infrastructure is bad. This is a big deal.
Let market forces deal with bandwidth.
First, what market forces? If you're lucky, you have a choice between FIOS and Cable. A lot of people only have a choice between dialup and... dialup. "Free market forces" depend on customers having low barriers of entry into the market, which would help to provide customers with real choice. There aren't "market forces" when you have monopolies, duopolies, cartels, etc. controlling the market.
Second, why isn't "the Government's place" to mandate minimum standards for interstate infrastructure?
I also just fail to see how this is terribly interesting. Sorry, yeah, I like science and it's kind of an interesting little bit of trivia or something, but putting aside the technicalities, doesn't this just boil down to, "If you are going really really really fast and you hit something, it's going to cause damage. Space isn't completely empty, so you're going to hit stuff even in 'empty space'."?
...but don't confuse yourself into believing that some document formats are inherently safer than others. The vulnerability is fundamentally in the software, not the document.
I'm not the one confusing things. First, of course it's not the format itself, but what's interpreting the file. Text files are pretty harmless all by themselves, but I don't go sending arbitrary text files to be interpreted by bash. Likewise, it's not the inclusion of javascript in PDFs that's a problem, but rather the fact that PDF viewers interpret that javascript creates a great opportunity for malicious code.
And yes, theoretically, if a viewer has exploitable flaws, then you can exploit them. I'm sure you could write a text viewer that would run arbitrary code when a malicious text file was opened in it-- but you don't really see that very often, do you? Talking about these PDF exploits, what percentage of them do you think came from exploiting the javascript engine, and what percent came from an exploit in the graphics rendering?
Theoretically, yes, vulnerabilities can exist in any document viewer such that a malicious document can cause problems. However, that doesn't mean that all document formats are created equally, and it doesn't mean that the conventional split between applications and documents isn't helpful.
Most users/blockers will not allow EXEs, and can open "ZIP" files to determine if an EXE is enclosed.
And IMO this is exactly why everyone should be wary of putting scripting languages into documents. We have a well-established convention of distinguishing "documents" from "applications"; "documents" are passive collections of information, whereas "applications" do stuff.
We block applications and scripts because they do stuff and we can't easily know what it is that they do, but we don't block documents because, in theory, they can't do anything. Loading a document in its proper viewer application shouldn't do anything that the viewer wasn't explicitly designed to do. If you throw scripting applications and macros into the documents, then suddenly the "documents" do stuff too. This, in my opinion, is bad.