As for Ruby and Python - I'm particularly surprised they didn't make the list but ColdFusion did. I know of many CF apps in legacy support and development, but for new work?
Had the same exact experience actually. We had 3/4 8GB SSD's fail that were installed in two pfsense routers within three weeks of turning them on. We've since learned that too much activity can in fact kill SSDs. Luckily these were being burned in prior to production deploy - but pfsense specifically writes a large amount of consistent activity to disk for traffic logging and building it's analysis reports in near real time. This apparently wears out the cells quickly.
It's sad to me we're seeing this kind of curriculum foisted upon the classroom by dying industry when most public schools are pulling back Civics programs, and overall education about the law and democratic process. It's a sorry state indeed.
Here's to the work of Sanda Day O'Connor though - who's at least trying to do something about it.
(If you don't know who that is, you might need some remedial schooling yourself)
I'm going to have to say - you may be missing the central point of advertising, web advertising and why in fact it's absolutely true that without it a lot of sites couldn't operate, particularly newspaper and magazine websites also operating online.
You talk about 'not clicking the ad' as being akin to blocking it - but most advertising doesn't even offer a 'click though' kind of response. In fact Internet Advertising, which is still in it's adolescence comparatively is one of the few advertising methods that actually allows a direct and immediate interaction. Banner campaigns are also for the most part still a lot cheaper than television campaigns.
Banner ad's are also sold by 'impressions' which means the number of people who see them, or the number of times they are displayed - at least in the realm of 'respectable' advertisers and publishers, not (for the most part) the number of times they are clicked on.
I would also point out that in pretty much any 'national grade' website there are very strict rules about the use of sound, file size, testing for processor speed, and handling of invasive or otherwise destructive ad creative, and you really shouldn't be so quick to lump the 'click the monkey' ads in with an industry that is working very hard to continue to keep news and entertainment content free, and deliver engaging promotional content where possible.
At the end of the day without an ad supported model, most content publishers would have to seek alternative means of remuneration which would be much more difficult to deal with than an animated banner, or simply close their very expensive websites. (How much do you want to make in salary a year exactly...?)
This industry is an important part of the internet ecosystem, and without it I know a lot of folks all over who would need to be seeking other work. I think for the most part it's time to start talking about 'standards' for the industry, which in my opinion should include universal technological incompatibly.
Any website blocking firefox because a small percentage of firefox users are blocking ads has got to be out of it's mind. The FF community might be small, but we are loud... Also, it just straight up isn't good PR for any site participating.
The more poingiant question is what's Microsoft now without Bill Gates? A man who definately engineered their skyrocket market strategy and take over the world attitude? Many would argue that today's microsoft is starting to fail, can't ship software - and is hedged in on all sides with a marketplace that they can't necissarily keep up with (as in dominate as they have in the past). I think that's more the question...
Good thing they have J Allard.
This isn't really about homebrew webcams- this is about companies and organizations like the one I run, who have been out there for five years collecting people with Video, audio production and web skills, and developing media on an 'open-platform' basis, experimenting with non television (23min, etc) formats for content and working with streaming video and both traditional and non-traditional mechanisims to distribute.
This is about the lowering of cost on broadcast and near broadcast quality production means, (DV, HDV, Final Cut Pro, Avid Xpress DV) to the level at which you can have a low cost to get these tools into the hands of a whole team, and work out non-traditional workflows to produce and distribute - this is about the future of the change in workflow and now, the change in distrobution. Many people are working on this model, because they know we are out there (many of us) people that specialize in looking at the whole medium, not just it's individual parts and are working to produce creative in these directions. We've been here taking website and new media contracts, as well as working towards new content mechanisims (partiualrly in next gen music production and promotion) because we know that some day, the distro is coming.
Watch out- content needs creative and there are many groups like ours waiting for the opportunity to innovate creative for a new medium, that is not monopoly controlled but still advertiser viable. This one might be the hit, and it might not- but it is coming.
I think the article writer here is definatey trying to start some serious commotion about linux on the desktop and as a client system, or as a system for a bold MCSE lineage admin- I think the real thing here is to try to turn up case studies on the uninitiated...
I always sort of wonder about the guy who walks into BestBuy with minimal linux knowledge or a few references from friends, looks at the sub $100 pricetag on RH or SuSE and the inclusion of the whole office suite and decides to give it a whirl, discovering on the other side KDE and OpenOffice, and sticks with that as a platform- slowly treading into the linux community (there must be a few). This dude slowly treading into the linux community and seeing what's up... I wonder how one get's statistics on him... I've had a bunch of friends who I talk about linux to who are sort of windows gamer/techies, who kind of look at what I do as wizardry. They always say, hey I tried linux back in 2001 or 2002 and nothing worked, and the desktop didn't do what I needed and it was hard (these are guys who have 10 things to do at the command prompt and are always both proud and nervous about their knowledge, but would be willing to learn if there was an easy path for them to follow). I often tell them that if they took a fresh look at what companies like RH or SuSE are shipping today out of the box for the desktop, they would see a big change. It's important to remember that OO is barely out of V1...
I'm a mixed linux/windows/OS X admin, and have found linux to be a remarkably stable and solid server of for our production and dev servers, when we got into linux, replacing a mixed W2k and AppleShare environment, things were still a bit shaky on the distros. We've recently been upgrading everything to SuSE 9 and I've been amazed by how strong the GUI/Yast tools are out of the box on the enterprise servers- I can imagine a Win2003 admin having an easier (point and click) time with this OS and maybe having the thought, "$300 for a licence and it does everything that a top of the line Win2003 box can do" (I'm talking about a LAN/office/file sharing installation here).
I sort of feel that these cases are the key... those of us that have taken time to dig deeper into the Linux OS to make it work for us and have discovered the posibilities it opens are not really of the right mindset to evaluate the future of the 'platform', to do that you have to kind of come in from scratch as a point and clicker and see what you can do. Most importantly I think is seeing what linux can do for one of these types on the desktop or on the server, and how they can grow with it as a new platform is the real key to the client growth we're talking about here. With real world experience of the fairly new, functional out of the box 'packages' we still have yet to see wheather it's truly viable.
The author is correct in the fact that apple has kind of beat out the linux distro's a little but in putting a killer front end on Darwin both on the Client and on the Server- it's a very attractive offering. OS X server has been very attractive to us, but hardware versatility has kept us on the Linux platform... we do have OS X machines everywhere in Video, Audio and Design and must say they fit into our Linux based, windows emulated network like a dream.
None of this of course takes into account emerging markets where if someone really figured out how to package a low cost powerful application platform that was easy to understand out of the box on linux, then 5 or 10 years from now, we could really be in a different ballgame worldwide.
I guess I'm saying that since we're really talking about switching here, it's really all in how people get started. First impressions are the killer.
Perhaps I misunderstood 'Obfuscation' - the iPod definately hides the files that you transfer to it in an unseen directory on the device, iTMS or not... these can only be accessed from the iPod or through non apple supported means- additionally one cannot plug an iPod into a computer and download tracks from it back to any computer through apple's software, so it definately puts some limitations on your own tracks... (although all of this is circumventable)
Don't forget in the head to head, that apple also 'Obfuscates' - I mean it's an easily broken obfuscation, and the iTunes platform has become so prolific that hacks to every aspect of it have been everywhere for years now and several parties have duplicated their DAAP protocol - easly the best LAN netradio scheme out there, and others have built clients to undermine it for p2p purposes...
Well... I am a gamer, and though am pretty die hard about my Macs for a personal/work machine (also a sysadmin) for most work tasks I deal with.
I er, do um... have a PC hooked up in my living room for games- as games are pretty hopless on the Mac.
In my opinion it is however the most rockin platform in the world if you have to administrate systems in a mixed Mac, PC and Linux environment- and do a lot of work with video audio and graphics and the web (as I do).
As much as I appreciate the decision by apple to finally do this (as I said at the start of this thread), I'm most appreciative of not having boxes of useless one button mice and now happy, friendly two button mice that will play better in emergencies.
(Everyone here, Mac or PC generally opts for a preferred input device from a 3rd party by their second day of work).
I think this is the standard for most people in our sector.
PC or no apple has long supported two button mice which is fine for me (as that's all one would ever want to use...) in fact my mac also has 5 buttons, two of which are hooked into the expose features and one I use in a more traditional (X) oriented fashion...
The issue is really with powerbooks which only support one button on the case trackpad- a major pain - will apple release a two button config with the new PB's as well? I hope so.
As as side note, I use (as do many others) a program called sidetrack, ( http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/sidetrack/ ) which allows you to place regions on the track pad to support up to an additional 4 buttons, and v/h scrolling on the edges of the pad. It works well- but takes a lot of getting used to (to avoid accidentally hitting the buttons) IMHO but it's better than nothing- however howabout a mod for the PB itself to have it on the HW, along with the two button mouse.
I wonder how Job's will keynote this. Not a guy who likes to say 'I was wrong'
I don't think that the way people use today it is so much at issue in the long term, the creating of more 'advanced' stable systems for true web applictions, beyond just informational uses is.
but to speak to your point I feel that 'Flash Intros' are on the downtick, because they precisely serve no useful purpose but advertising is on the rise...
However us, macromedia, any developer needs to think about the future - broadband users are the majority now, and most dial-upers know they are less and less on the radar (at least in the US). The fact that one can (and do) use these capibilites to maximum effect in terms of ease of use, and versitility can only increase the use of flash as a standard. What we're talking about in macromedia's decision to add the toolbar is their long term market potential, something that will be hurt by this decision, and will in turn hurt the developers committed to realizing it as a next generation front-end platform.
Alt tags are a must though, and I feel that one thing that's important is to develop systems that allow the content to be available in dynamic ways even if it's primary display technique is in flash, (RSS, Meta, Html alt)
If there weren't annoying flash ads there would be something else- people can write terrible and annoying HTML (should we ban javascript from our machines because of how marketers take advantage of it?)
I work in a company where we concieve the flash platform to have the utmost potential for developing interactivity for several reasons- it's cross broswer and cross platform (MM: linux soon pls?) in a way that allows for very high speed downloading of rich media applications (in a way that java is not with it's load time to run time, and lack in my opinion of true cross browser/platform standardization in the way that people generally develop for it)
Flash offers the ability to conceptualize and develop on the Authoring environment in a creative way to impliment complex graphic interfaces over the web in a fashion is simply not accessable to people focusing on raw code - and it's fast to develop in via this method for designers and animators, and to develop a process to work with the more application oriented people.
At the same time the people I work with who are more 'raw code' oriented can program in server side action script and raw AS to their hearts content to overcome tricky engineering problems- as a developer it provides a great synthesis between limitless interface design possibilities and ways to plug in to essentially any type of backend via XML, remoting, etc...
The possibility is fairly endless, and the elegance of it for rich media activities is it's main selling point. As an observer of social networking sites and the implications for the larger global social base in areas such as the arts, the potential is enormous to combine expressiveness with function- simple tools such as XML based mp3 players documented in such a way that an average musician knows how to plug them into their sites. The ability to create these type of tools quickly and easily is a boon for the emerging web community at large. For learning solutions, playerless web video streams, and the ability to leverage interactivity between users on a fully customizable platform has it's merits- it is next generation thinking on the web.
Though I wish there was a fully OSS platform to take advantage of these directions, macromedia is really doing a great job of expanding the creative potential of both actionscript and the swf format, which is essentially open while providing for a very strong and sophisticated authoring and design tool- what I've seen of the future of the flash player makes me buzz.
With that being said- this toolbar thing scares the bejezzus out of me. The one thing that's required for our work to continue is that I need to be able to tell clients (and know for my own projects) that the flashplayer is everywhere, and I've been trusting the flash player not to disincentivize users from actually downloading it. In my experience most of my clients have flash, understand what it is and are comfortable with the aquissition of it. Accept checkbox or not, we all know what users actually to when installing something (click-click-click) and I know at least 5 corporate IT directors who will block out macromedia at the first hint of anything that deviates from their up-till-now philosophy of ease of aquisition.
For me this brings up deep seeded fears of macromedia transforming from a developer for developers and a custodian of the future of the web, into a company looking to leverage it's assets to gain profit - nothing wrong with that, as long as it's not at the expense of marketshare and sustainability for their core customers and fans- their development userbase, with our big investments in their server side products, authoring platforms etc.
That may be so, but people very much value their TV, and at least if you asked the average american about it (and explained it to them)- what they can do with it.
Sadly, more than their drinking water, air soil- what have you.
How many of you out there have your XBOXs 'chipped' - I personally don't because I have prefered to live in the land of legal XBOX IP's - but many friends who don't take such advantage of the Live service (which has been on the whole weak until Halo 2) do.
The amazing thing is that their chipped XBOX's with the modded hd's and their ports of MPLAYER and ffmpegx make for perfect medis center boxes- servers for mp3's, dvd rippers, btclients, and everything else you could want (complete librarys of classic MAME games for parties and the like) all in their little $200 console.
Microsoft really missed out, in that they are spending time and effort building bloated aggrivating Windows Media Center PC's all for the sake of DRM and an OS no one wants anywhere near their playback devices-
Microsoft could have DRMed the XBOX (boo hoo) and killed the console market if they had seen their device as a sucessor to the DVD player, CD player and computer like some adventuresome hackers did. If they droped the WinMediaPC and went this route with the Xbox2 they would definately see a plus to their marketshare.
If of course the consumers didn't get so upset by the DRM licencing strategies that they threw them out the 'window' and wend OSS.
Since we're talking about hot text editors I also thought I might slip in a plug for SubEthaEdit http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/ which I use a lot , which is a great text editor supporting a wide variety of syntax, multiuser editing and most importantly has a binary from the command line that allows piping to and from the gui on the CL
I can't help but point out that if you were going to google last night for any information about the electoral vote count in any given state, this site was first on the hit parade.
Sure are a lot of americans with broadband these days...
Slashdot Mirror
As for Ruby and Python - I'm particularly surprised they didn't make the list but ColdFusion did. I know of many CF apps in legacy support and development, but for new work?
Had the same exact experience actually. We had 3/4 8GB SSD's fail that were installed in two pfsense routers within three weeks of turning them on. We've since learned that too much activity can in fact kill SSDs. Luckily these were being burned in prior to production deploy - but pfsense specifically writes a large amount of consistent activity to disk for traffic logging and building it's analysis reports in near real time. This apparently wears out the cells quickly.
It's sad to me we're seeing this kind of curriculum foisted upon the classroom by dying industry when most public schools are pulling back Civics programs, and overall education about the law and democratic process. It's a sorry state indeed. Here's to the work of Sanda Day O'Connor though - who's at least trying to do something about it. (If you don't know who that is, you might need some remedial schooling yourself)
I'm going to have to say - you may be missing the central point of advertising, web advertising and why in fact it's absolutely true that without it a lot of sites couldn't operate, particularly newspaper and magazine websites also operating online.
You talk about 'not clicking the ad' as being akin to blocking it - but most advertising doesn't even offer a 'click though' kind of response. In fact Internet Advertising, which is still in it's adolescence comparatively is one of the few advertising methods that actually allows a direct and immediate interaction. Banner campaigns are also for the most part still a lot cheaper than television campaigns.
Banner ad's are also sold by 'impressions' which means the number of people who see them, or the number of times they are displayed - at least in the realm of 'respectable' advertisers and publishers, not (for the most part) the number of times they are clicked on.
I would also point out that in pretty much any 'national grade' website there are very strict rules about the use of sound, file size, testing for processor speed, and handling of invasive or otherwise destructive ad creative, and you really shouldn't be so quick to lump the 'click the monkey' ads in with an industry that is working very hard to continue to keep news and entertainment content free, and deliver engaging promotional content where possible.
At the end of the day without an ad supported model, most content publishers would have to seek alternative means of remuneration which would be much more difficult to deal with than an animated banner, or simply close their very expensive websites. (How much do you want to make in salary a year exactly...?)
This industry is an important part of the internet ecosystem, and without it I know a lot of folks all over who would need to be seeking other work. I think for the most part it's time to start talking about 'standards' for the industry, which in my opinion should include universal technological incompatibly.
Any website blocking firefox because a small percentage of firefox users are blocking ads has got to be out of it's mind. The FF community might be small, but we are loud... Also, it just straight up isn't good PR for any site participating.
And it's suprisingly pretty good. http://www.myspace.com/musicforendtimes
The more poingiant question is what's Microsoft now without Bill Gates? A man who definately engineered their skyrocket market strategy and take over the world attitude? Many would argue that today's microsoft is starting to fail, can't ship software - and is hedged in on all sides with a marketplace that they can't necissarily keep up with (as in dominate as they have in the past). I think that's more the question... Good thing they have J Allard.
This isn't really about homebrew webcams- this is about companies and organizations like the one I run, who have been out there for five years collecting people with Video, audio production and web skills, and developing media on an 'open-platform' basis, experimenting with non television (23min, etc) formats for content and working with streaming video and both traditional and non-traditional mechanisims to distribute.
This is about the lowering of cost on broadcast and near broadcast quality production means, (DV, HDV, Final Cut Pro, Avid Xpress DV) to the level at which you can have a low cost to get these tools into the hands of a whole team, and work out non-traditional workflows to produce and distribute - this is about the future of the change in workflow and now, the change in distrobution. Many people are working on this model, because they know we are out there (many of us) people that specialize in looking at the whole medium, not just it's individual parts and are working to produce creative in these directions. We've been here taking website and new media contracts, as well as working towards new content mechanisims (partiualrly in next gen music production and promotion) because we know that some day, the distro is coming.
Watch out- content needs creative and there are many groups like ours waiting for the opportunity to innovate creative for a new medium, that is not monopoly controlled but still advertiser viable. This one might be the hit, and it might not- but it is coming.
Now if they would only widen the pipes.
I think the article writer here is definatey trying to start some serious commotion about linux on the desktop and as a client system, or as a system for a bold MCSE lineage admin- I think the real thing here is to try to turn up case studies on the uninitiated...
I always sort of wonder about the guy who walks into BestBuy with minimal linux knowledge or a few references from friends, looks at the sub $100 pricetag on RH or SuSE and the inclusion of the whole office suite and decides to give it a whirl, discovering on the other side KDE and OpenOffice, and sticks with that as a platform- slowly treading into the linux community (there must be a few). This dude slowly treading into the linux community and seeing what's up... I wonder how one get's statistics on him... I've had a bunch of friends who I talk about linux to who are sort of windows gamer/techies, who kind of look at what I do as wizardry. They always say, hey I tried linux back in 2001 or 2002 and nothing worked, and the desktop didn't do what I needed and it was hard (these are guys who have 10 things to do at the command prompt and are always both proud and nervous about their knowledge, but would be willing to learn if there was an easy path for them to follow). I often tell them that if they took a fresh look at what companies like RH or SuSE are shipping today out of the box for the desktop, they would see a big change. It's important to remember that OO is barely out of V1...
I'm a mixed linux/windows/OS X admin, and have found linux to be a remarkably stable and solid server of for our production and dev servers, when we got into linux, replacing a mixed W2k and AppleShare environment, things were still a bit shaky on the distros. We've recently been upgrading everything to SuSE 9 and I've been amazed by how strong the GUI/Yast tools are out of the box on the enterprise servers- I can imagine a Win2003 admin having an easier (point and click) time with this OS and maybe having the thought, "$300 for a licence and it does everything that a top of the line Win2003 box can do" (I'm talking about a LAN/office/file sharing installation here).
I sort of feel that these cases are the key... those of us that have taken time to dig deeper into the Linux OS to make it work for us and have discovered the posibilities it opens are not really of the right mindset to evaluate the future of the 'platform', to do that you have to kind of come in from scratch as a point and clicker and see what you can do. Most importantly I think is seeing what linux can do for one of these types on the desktop or on the server, and how they can grow with it as a new platform is the real key to the client growth we're talking about here. With real world experience of the fairly new, functional out of the box 'packages' we still have yet to see wheather it's truly viable.
The author is correct in the fact that apple has kind of beat out the linux distro's a little but in putting a killer front end on Darwin both on the Client and on the Server- it's a very attractive offering. OS X server has been very attractive to us, but hardware versatility has kept us on the Linux platform... we do have OS X machines everywhere in Video, Audio and Design and must say they fit into our Linux based, windows emulated network like a dream.
None of this of course takes into account emerging markets where if someone really figured out how to package a low cost powerful application platform that was easy to understand out of the box on linux, then 5 or 10 years from now, we could really be in a different ballgame worldwide.
I guess I'm saying that since we're really talking about switching here, it's really all in how people get started. First impressions are the killer.
Perhaps I misunderstood 'Obfuscation' - the iPod definately hides the files that you transfer to it in an unseen directory on the device, iTMS or not... these can only be accessed from the iPod or through non apple supported means- additionally one cannot plug an iPod into a computer and download tracks from it back to any computer through apple's software, so it definately puts some limitations on your own tracks... (although all of this is circumventable)
Does the sony player DRM them as well?
Don't forget in the head to head, that apple also 'Obfuscates' - I mean it's an easily broken obfuscation, and the iTunes platform has become so prolific that hacks to every aspect of it have been everywhere for years now and several parties have duplicated their DAAP protocol - easly the best LAN netradio scheme out there, and others have built clients to undermine it for p2p purposes...
But they do obfuscate.
Well... I am a gamer, and though am pretty die hard about my Macs for a personal/work machine (also a sysadmin) for most work tasks I deal with. I er, do um... have a PC hooked up in my living room for games- as games are pretty hopless on the Mac. In my opinion it is however the most rockin platform in the world if you have to administrate systems in a mixed Mac, PC and Linux environment- and do a lot of work with video audio and graphics and the web (as I do). As much as I appreciate the decision by apple to finally do this (as I said at the start of this thread), I'm most appreciative of not having boxes of useless one button mice and now happy, friendly two button mice that will play better in emergencies. (Everyone here, Mac or PC generally opts for a preferred input device from a 3rd party by their second day of work). I think this is the standard for most people in our sector.
PC or no apple has long supported two button mice which is fine for me (as that's all one would ever want to use...) in fact my mac also has 5 buttons, two of which are hooked into the expose features and one I use in a more traditional (X) oriented fashion...
The issue is really with powerbooks which only support one button on the case trackpad- a major pain - will apple release a two button config with the new PB's as well? I hope so.
As as side note, I use (as do many others) a program called sidetrack, ( http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/sidetrack/ ) which allows you to place regions on the track pad to support up to an additional 4 buttons, and v/h scrolling on the edges of the pad. It works well- but takes a lot of getting used to (to avoid accidentally hitting the buttons) IMHO but it's better than nothing- however howabout a mod for the PB itself to have it on the HW, along with the two button mouse.
I wonder how Job's will keynote this. Not a guy who likes to say 'I was wrong'
I don't think that the way people use today it is so much at issue in the long term, the creating of more 'advanced' stable systems for true web applictions, beyond just informational uses is.
but to speak to your point I feel that 'Flash Intros' are on the downtick, because they precisely serve no useful purpose but advertising is on the rise...
However us, macromedia, any developer needs to think about the future - broadband users are the majority now, and most dial-upers know they are less and less on the radar (at least in the US). The fact that one can (and do) use these capibilites to maximum effect in terms of ease of use, and versitility can only increase the use of flash as a standard. What we're talking about in macromedia's decision to add the toolbar is their long term market potential, something that will be hurt by this decision, and will in turn hurt the developers committed to realizing it as a next generation front-end platform.
Alt tags are a must though, and I feel that one thing that's important is to develop systems that allow the content to be available in dynamic ways even if it's primary display technique is in flash, (RSS, Meta, Html alt)
If there weren't annoying flash ads there would be something else- people can write terrible and annoying HTML (should we ban javascript from our machines because of how marketers take advantage of it?)
In our case: we have to.
I work in a company where we concieve the flash platform to have the utmost potential for developing interactivity for several reasons- it's cross broswer and cross platform (MM: linux soon pls?) in a way that allows for very high speed downloading of rich media applications (in a way that java is not with it's load time to run time, and lack in my opinion of true cross browser/platform standardization in the way that people generally develop for it)
Flash offers the ability to conceptualize and develop on the Authoring environment in a creative way to impliment complex graphic interfaces over the web in a fashion is simply not accessable to people focusing on raw code - and it's fast to develop in via this method for designers and animators, and to develop a process to work with the more application oriented people.
At the same time the people I work with who are more 'raw code' oriented can program in server side action script and raw AS to their hearts content to overcome tricky engineering problems- as a developer it provides a great synthesis between limitless interface design possibilities and ways to plug in to essentially any type of backend via XML, remoting, etc...
The possibility is fairly endless, and the elegance of it for rich media activities is it's main selling point. As an observer of social networking sites and the implications for the larger global social base in areas such as the arts, the potential is enormous to combine expressiveness with function- simple tools such as XML based mp3 players documented in such a way that an average musician knows how to plug them into their sites. The ability to create these type of tools quickly and easily is a boon for the emerging web community at large. For learning solutions, playerless web video streams, and the ability to leverage interactivity between users on a fully customizable platform has it's merits- it is next generation thinking on the web.
Though I wish there was a fully OSS platform to take advantage of these directions, macromedia is really doing a great job of expanding the creative potential of both actionscript and the swf format, which is essentially open while providing for a very strong and sophisticated authoring and design tool- what I've seen of the future of the flash player makes me buzz.
With that being said- this toolbar thing scares the bejezzus out of me. The one thing that's required for our work to continue is that I need to be able to tell clients (and know for my own projects) that the flashplayer is everywhere, and I've been trusting the flash player not to disincentivize users from actually downloading it. In my experience most of my clients have flash, understand what it is and are comfortable with the aquissition of it. Accept checkbox or not, we all know what users actually to when installing something (click-click-click) and I know at least 5 corporate IT directors who will block out macromedia at the first hint of anything that deviates from their up-till-now philosophy of ease of aquisition.
For me this brings up deep seeded fears of macromedia transforming from a developer for developers and a custodian of the future of the web, into a company looking to leverage it's assets to gain profit - nothing wrong with that, as long as it's not at the expense of marketshare and sustainability for their core customers and fans- their development userbase, with our big investments in their server side products, authoring platforms etc.
That may be so, but people very much value their TV, and at least if you asked the average american about it (and explained it to them)- what they can do with it. Sadly, more than their drinking water, air soil- what have you.
How many of you out there have your XBOXs 'chipped' - I personally don't because I have prefered to live in the land of legal XBOX IP's - but many friends who don't take such advantage of the Live service (which has been on the whole weak until Halo 2) do.
The amazing thing is that their chipped XBOX's with the modded hd's and their ports of MPLAYER and ffmpegx make for perfect medis center boxes- servers for mp3's, dvd rippers, btclients, and everything else you could want (complete librarys of classic MAME games for parties and the like) all in their little $200 console.
Microsoft really missed out, in that they are spending time and effort building bloated aggrivating Windows Media Center PC's all for the sake of DRM and an OS no one wants anywhere near their playback devices-
Microsoft could have DRMed the XBOX (boo hoo) and killed the console market if they had seen their device as a sucessor to the DVD player, CD player and computer like some adventuresome hackers did. If they droped the WinMediaPC and went this route with the Xbox2 they would definately see a plus to their marketshare.
If of course the consumers didn't get so upset by the DRM licencing strategies that they threw them out the 'window' and wend OSS.
Since we're talking about hot text editors I also thought I might slip in a plug for SubEthaEdit http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/ which I use a lot , which is a great text editor supporting a wide variety of syntax, multiuser editing and most importantly has a binary from the command line that allows piping to and from the gui on the CL
I can't help but point out that if you were going to google last night for any information about the electoral vote count in any given state, this site was first on the hit parade. Sure are a lot of americans with broadband these days...