lots of applications are simply impossible in anything approaching real time... with a pure-software render path
Expanding on that: lots of 2D applications require the GPU to perform well nowadays. Games and graphics apps especially, but lots of other parallel data processing like physics & audio processing benefit from the GPU too. Personally I'm hoping WebGL will enable more of that rather than the "check out my spinning 3D cube homepage!" sort of crap.
A couple weeks?? We should be so lucky for it to be that short... These days it feels like almost continual year-round campaign mode. Even on November 5, hey, the midterm elections are less than two years away!
I'm amazed that you somehow managed to skip the U.S.A. in your research:... There you have it, an absolute right to free speech in perfectly plain English. Any law which imposes a fine or punishment, or any other penalty, as a response to any speech on any subject whatsoever is unconstitutional.
Nooo, not true at all. The Constitution, like the bible, is rarely given a literal reading. The Supreme Court has always ruled that the government can place limits on speech. You can't shout "fire!" in a crowded people, you can't incite a mob to immediate and specific violence, you can't slander another person, you can't communicate "obscene" material (e.g. child pornography), and there are many limits on advertising ("commercial speech") and limits on the free speech of minors at school. Take away virtually any of those time-tested restrictions and you'll have complete anarchy.
100% code coverage might be a better requirement -- if any code is dead from the standpoint of all the testing you've done, then it's either unnecessary (truly dead code) or trouble waiting to happen (as in this case).
Gun control does not infringe upon your right to bear arms. Total gun bans do.
Oddly enough, the Supremes disagree with you.
Really? Perhaps you'd care to explain why gun control laws are still on the books then? For examples of the Supreme Court upholding gun control, consider reading United States v. Miller or District of Columbia v. Heller ("nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on... laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms").
Obviously a restriction that is effectively identical to a ban – like your hypothetical 1,000,000% tax – would be treated the same as a literal ban by the courts. But that doesn't mean all regulations would be struck down. Courts are perfectly capable of distinguishing between reasonable restrictions and unreasonable ones (in fact you might argue that's their main purpose).
Poor BlackBerry, who always get all the flack, actualy got this one right: in the PlayBook app store anything with in-app purchases shows a little tag saying "Contains items for sale." It's a great help for weeding out those "free"-in-name-only apps you describe.
That sort of depends on your perspective, no? If I was a government employee I would hope that using toilet paper was pretty much mandatory for all my coworkers that I had to sit next to all day.:-)
The thing is, the government is a large organization with a lot of employees, and employers have lots of fringe expenses that scale up per employee. Restroom expendables being one. It's easy to trot out absolute values as ridiculous and wasteful when you disregard how many people they're split across.
For all I know you pulled that $3.7M out of your... well... let's just assume that's a real data point from somewhere. According to this page, the average person goes through ~$21 worth of toilet paper every year. The federal government has about 2.5 million employees, so if just 10% of their toilet usage occurs at work, that's $5 million the government spends on toilet paper for its employees every year. Wasted money? I dunno, good luck finding competent people willing to work in an office with no toilet paper.
Hmm, way to not actually respond to any of the points I was making. If I'm such a shill it should be easy to shoot them down, no?
Truth is, I've spent a bunch of years doing serious HTML/Javascript development and a bunch of years doing serious Flash development. I think I'm in a position to compare them fairly. There are lots of things on the web you should never use Flash for, but there are plenty of things where it's still clearly the better choice. So sure, I get annoyed and speak up when people who don't know any better run around screaming "omg Flash is teh sukz"... but believe me, I'm equally annoyed by people who are 100% all about Flash and can't build an HTML site/app to save their lives.
I'm comparing equivalent apps to each other. Lightroom went 64-bit over 1.5 years before Aperture (July 2008 vs. February 2010). Premiere and After Effects went to Cocoa/64-bit 14 months before Final Cut Pro (April 2010 vs. June 2011... and FCP X is much more limited). iTunes only just moved to Cocoa in July, and iLife/iWork are still Carbon afaik. I don't care if a few smaller Apple apps migrated over sooner -- if you sum it all up, Apple has no right to call others "lazy" over this transition.
Btw, I'm not saying Apple is lazy either. Rewriting any complex piece of software to use totally new platform APIs is a crap-ton of work. Apple puts third party devs (as well as themselves) through these massive transitions a lot, but it never really gets any easier...
Some of the apps I'm talking about hit #1 on the App Store charts, and many climbed into the top 10. You have a funny definition of "suck" if you think all those apps suck.
For all intents and purposes, those apps ARE Flash. An iOS AIR app is basically a copy of the Flash runtime glommed together with the app's Flash content (with all the ActionScript code pre-JITted to get around Apple's "no interpreters" rule). Afaik the Flash runtime part is almost exactly the same as what would be running in the browser if Apple allowed a browser plugin.
So the difference between Flash that Apple allows and Flash it doesn't isn't technological. I think there's two reasons for the difference: Apple prefers to have all rich iOS content go through their App Store gateway (they don't believe HTML5 will compete with the App Store yet, but Flash sure could); and they want iOS browsing as unencumbered by legacy website design as humanly possible. It doesn't hurt that blocking all Flash ads gave Apple a huge opening to push an iOS specific ads platform too.
Man, I am so tired of this meme going around. Have you ever quantitatively compared Flash's performance to HTML? Because others have, and they found Flash to be twice as fast. Have you ever quantitatively measured Flash's impact on battery life? Because it turns out battery life is almost exactly the same as equivalent HTML content (despite running 2x-4x faster in many cases). And do you have statistics on how often Flash crashes on mobile devices, compared to other apps? In my experience at least, Safari on my iPad crashes more often than Flash on my Android devices (which has never crashed to my knowledge).
crashed on my phone or used lots of CPU and killed my battery
Fwiw, that only hard data I've ever seen totally contradicts what you're saying. In performance tests, Flash runs 2x as fast as equivalent "HTML5" content, so it's actually more CPU efficient. This means it's probably more battery-efficient too. Another test shows an older, less optimized version of Flash running up to 4x faster but only using 10% more battery than HTML.
I can't find any statistics on crashing, but anecdotally... for a year I've owned three mobile devices that run Flash, and it has never crashed on any of them. Not once. Meanwhile I also have an iPad, and Safari crashes on it once every several weeks. Safari doesn't need Adobe's help to be crashy:-)
Job's complaint about Adobe & Carbon is slimy enough to run for Congress -- and a nasty case of the pot calling the kettle black. If you want to hear the real facts, I posted about this earlier in the thread.
There are lots of Flash-based apps on iOS (see: Adobe AIR). You probably just don't notice it because you assume everything related to Flash sucks, and it never occurred to you that apps you actually like might be using Flash under the hood...
Actually, the Flash file format is published openly and the entire Flash VM is open source. The fact that no one else seriously tried to create a Flash implementation doesn't mean it's not possible (although it's maybe a testament to the fact that what Adobe built was a lot harder than most people give them credit for).
There were many problems with Jobs's arguments, but the most important one is that Apple's own actions proved him wrong. Remember that after all this bluster, a few months later Apple actually reversed course and decided to allow Flash-based apps into the App Store after all. There are currently hundreds of Flash apps available on iOS, and some have hit #1 rankings on the charts.
That's a clear demonstration that -- contrary to everything Jobs wrote -- Flash apps aren't guaranteed to suck, are enjoyed by consumers, and thus contribute to the device's ecosystem. If Jobs had kept on the course set out in his letter, who knows how many of those popular apps would never have been available on iOS?
Except that Jobs calling Adobe lazy over Carbon/Cocoa (or 32/64-bit) was about as disingenuous as you can get. Apple dragged their feet far worse than Adobe did during that transition: Finder, QuickTime, Aperture, and Final Cut Pro all made very slow transitions to 64-bit / Cocoa. In the latter cases, the competing Adobe products (Lightroom, Premiere, After Effects) all finished the same migration about two years ahead of Apple's products.
Apple also publicly promised that 10.5 would support 64-bit Carbon as a transition stage. They even shipped multiple betas with that support in place -- only to yank it at the last minute, even though Cocoa at that time didn't have full parity with Carbon APIs.
So Apple reneged on a transitional API they said they would support, shipped a new API with missing features, and didn't even bother to convert most of their own flagship apps over to the new API... and then had the audacity to call others "lazy" for not instantly dropping everything and making that same conversion? Sorry, but that's politician-worthy behavior right there.
Jobs didn't blink when he said Flash will never work on mobile.
Comments like this are reading wayyy farther into the Adobe announcement than is warranted. Flash as a technology has been available on mobile devices in two forms for well over a year now: the Flash browser plugin, and AIR apps (essentially Flash apps packaged for distribution in app stores). On iOS, Apple disallows browser plugins, but AIR apps can and do run on iOS (i.e. Flash is ok as long as it goes through the App Store garden gate). The only part of that story Adobe said they're changing is the Flash browser plugin. Flash-based apps will continue to be possible, even on iOS.
Incidentally, some of the top-selling iOS apps running on Flash/AIR. So it's awfully hard to justify the claim that Flash will "never work on mobile" -- since it already works well on mobile, and has for quite some time.
Flash has had hardware-accelerated video decoding for quite a while now. That's why it DOES play back 720p and 1080p... even on mobile devices (see: Xoom, PlayBook).
Also, I don't know what makes you say Flash was "designed for mouse" (other than the fact that Steve Jobs said it first). Flash is like any other interactive platform. It gives you mouse events, keyboard events... and on mobile, things like accelerometer and multi-touch/gesture events. You can make content that's optimized for mouse, touch, or both. Complaints about Flash and the mouse are essentially complaints about legacy content in general, which applies to basically any website that predates mobile devices. What Jobs should have said is that all websites need a rewrite to support small-screen, touch-only mobile phones well. (Don't want / can't afford a rewrite? Tough -- that's been Apple's mantra since way before iPhones were around).
Visual Studio is not what I'd hold up as the gold standard for toolsets. Have you ever used a good, modern Java IDE like IntelliJ? Or even Eclipse? After years of using those, I cry a little every time I'm forced to go back to VS.
Slashdot Mirror
) http://www.xkcd.com/859/
Ethiopian goat herders don't have nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at the US. China does.
lots of applications are simply impossible in anything approaching real time ... with a pure-software render path
Expanding on that: lots of 2D applications require the GPU to perform well nowadays. Games and graphics apps especially, but lots of other parallel data processing like physics & audio processing benefit from the GPU too. Personally I'm hoping WebGL will enable more of that rather than the "check out my spinning 3D cube homepage!" sort of crap.
A couple weeks?? We should be so lucky for it to be that short... These days it feels like almost continual year-round campaign mode. Even on November 5, hey, the midterm elections are less than two years away!
I'm amazed that you somehow managed to skip the U.S.A. in your research: ... There you have it, an absolute right to free speech in perfectly plain English. Any law which imposes a fine or punishment, or any other penalty, as a response to any speech on any subject whatsoever is unconstitutional.
Nooo, not true at all. The Constitution, like the bible, is rarely given a literal reading. The Supreme Court has always ruled that the government can place limits on speech. You can't shout "fire!" in a crowded people, you can't incite a mob to immediate and specific violence, you can't slander another person, you can't communicate "obscene" material (e.g. child pornography), and there are many limits on advertising ("commercial speech") and limits on the free speech of minors at school. Take away virtually any of those time-tested restrictions and you'll have complete anarchy.
Which other companies do you know have so much faith in their test systems that they successfully deploy them for real world operations?
"Successfully" might not be the right word to use in this case... ;-)
100% code coverage might be a better requirement -- if any code is dead from the standpoint of all the testing you've done, then it's either unnecessary (truly dead code) or trouble waiting to happen (as in this case).
Oddly enough, the Supremes disagree with you.
Really? Perhaps you'd care to explain why gun control laws are still on the books then? For examples of the Supreme Court upholding gun control, consider reading United States v. Miller or District of Columbia v. Heller ("nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on... laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms").
Obviously a restriction that is effectively identical to a ban – like your hypothetical 1,000,000% tax – would be treated the same as a literal ban by the courts. But that doesn't mean all regulations would be struck down. Courts are perfectly capable of distinguishing between reasonable restrictions and unreasonable ones (in fact you might argue that's their main purpose).
.
Poor BlackBerry, who always get all the flack, actualy got this one right: in the PlayBook app store anything with in-app purchases shows a little tag saying "Contains items for sale." It's a great help for weeding out those "free"-in-name-only apps you describe.
That sort of depends on your perspective, no? If I was a government employee I would hope that using toilet paper was pretty much mandatory for all my coworkers that I had to sit next to all day. :-)
The thing is, the government is a large organization with a lot of employees, and employers have lots of fringe expenses that scale up per employee. Restroom expendables being one. It's easy to trot out absolute values as ridiculous and wasteful when you disregard how many people they're split across.
For all I know you pulled that $3.7M out of your... well... let's just assume that's a real data point from somewhere. According to this page, the average person goes through ~$21 worth of toilet paper every year. The federal government has about 2.5 million employees, so if just 10% of their toilet usage occurs at work, that's $5 million the government spends on toilet paper for its employees every year. Wasted money? I dunno, good luck finding competent people willing to work in an office with no toilet paper.
Hmm, way to not actually respond to any of the points I was making. If I'm such a shill it should be easy to shoot them down, no?
Truth is, I've spent a bunch of years doing serious HTML/Javascript development and a bunch of years doing serious Flash development. I think I'm in a position to compare them fairly. There are lots of things on the web you should never use Flash for, but there are plenty of things where it's still clearly the better choice. So sure, I get annoyed and speak up when people who don't know any better run around screaming "omg Flash is teh sukz"... but believe me, I'm equally annoyed by people who are 100% all about Flash and can't build an HTML site/app to save their lives.
I'm comparing equivalent apps to each other. Lightroom went 64-bit over 1.5 years before Aperture (July 2008 vs. February 2010). Premiere and After Effects went to Cocoa/64-bit 14 months before Final Cut Pro (April 2010 vs. June 2011... and FCP X is much more limited). iTunes only just moved to Cocoa in July, and iLife/iWork are still Carbon afaik. I don't care if a few smaller Apple apps migrated over sooner -- if you sum it all up, Apple has no right to call others "lazy" over this transition.
Btw, I'm not saying Apple is lazy either. Rewriting any complex piece of software to use totally new platform APIs is a crap-ton of work. Apple puts third party devs (as well as themselves) through these massive transitions a lot, but it never really gets any easier...
Some of the apps I'm talking about hit #1 on the App Store charts, and many climbed into the top 10. You have a funny definition of "suck" if you think all those apps suck.
For all intents and purposes, those apps ARE Flash. An iOS AIR app is basically a copy of the Flash runtime glommed together with the app's Flash content (with all the ActionScript code pre-JITted to get around Apple's "no interpreters" rule). Afaik the Flash runtime part is almost exactly the same as what would be running in the browser if Apple allowed a browser plugin.
So the difference between Flash that Apple allows and Flash it doesn't isn't technological. I think there's two reasons for the difference: Apple prefers to have all rich iOS content go through their App Store gateway (they don't believe HTML5 will compete with the App Store yet, but Flash sure could); and they want iOS browsing as unencumbered by legacy website design as humanly possible. It doesn't hurt that blocking all Flash ads gave Apple a huge opening to push an iOS specific ads platform too.
Man, I am so tired of this meme going around. Have you ever quantitatively compared Flash's performance to HTML? Because others have, and they found Flash to be twice as fast . Have you ever quantitatively measured Flash's impact on battery life? Because it turns out battery life is almost exactly the same as equivalent HTML content (despite running 2x-4x faster in many cases). And do you have statistics on how often Flash crashes on mobile devices, compared to other apps? In my experience at least, Safari on my iPad crashes more often than Flash on my Android devices (which has never crashed to my knowledge).
crashed on my phone or used lots of CPU and killed my battery
Fwiw, that only hard data I've ever seen totally contradicts what you're saying. In performance tests, Flash runs 2x as fast as equivalent "HTML5" content, so it's actually more CPU efficient. This means it's probably more battery-efficient too. Another test shows an older, less optimized version of Flash running up to 4x faster but only using 10% more battery than HTML.
I can't find any statistics on crashing, but anecdotally... for a year I've owned three mobile devices that run Flash, and it has never crashed on any of them. Not once. Meanwhile I also have an iPad, and Safari crashes on it once every several weeks. Safari doesn't need Adobe's help to be crashy :-)
Job's complaint about Adobe & Carbon is slimy enough to run for Congress -- and a nasty case of the pot calling the kettle black. If you want to hear the real facts, I posted about this earlier in the thread.
There are lots of Flash-based apps on iOS (see: Adobe AIR). You probably just don't notice it because you assume everything related to Flash sucks, and it never occurred to you that apps you actually like might be using Flash under the hood...
Actually, the Flash file format is published openly and the entire Flash VM is open source. The fact that no one else seriously tried to create a Flash implementation doesn't mean it's not possible (although it's maybe a testament to the fact that what Adobe built was a lot harder than most people give them credit for).
There were many problems with Jobs's arguments, but the most important one is that Apple's own actions proved him wrong. Remember that after all this bluster, a few months later Apple actually reversed course and decided to allow Flash-based apps into the App Store after all. There are currently hundreds of Flash apps available on iOS, and some have hit #1 rankings on the charts.
That's a clear demonstration that -- contrary to everything Jobs wrote -- Flash apps aren't guaranteed to suck, are enjoyed by consumers, and thus contribute to the device's ecosystem. If Jobs had kept on the course set out in his letter, who knows how many of those popular apps would never have been available on iOS?
Except that Jobs calling Adobe lazy over Carbon/Cocoa (or 32/64-bit) was about as disingenuous as you can get. Apple dragged their feet far worse than Adobe did during that transition: Finder, QuickTime, Aperture, and Final Cut Pro all made very slow transitions to 64-bit / Cocoa. In the latter cases, the competing Adobe products (Lightroom, Premiere, After Effects) all finished the same migration about two years ahead of Apple's products.
Apple also publicly promised that 10.5 would support 64-bit Carbon as a transition stage. They even shipped multiple betas with that support in place -- only to yank it at the last minute, even though Cocoa at that time didn't have full parity with Carbon APIs.
So Apple reneged on a transitional API they said they would support, shipped a new API with missing features, and didn't even bother to convert most of their own flagship apps over to the new API... and then had the audacity to call others "lazy" for not instantly dropping everything and making that same conversion? Sorry, but that's politician-worthy behavior right there.
Jobs didn't blink when he said Flash will never work on mobile.
Comments like this are reading wayyy farther into the Adobe announcement than is warranted. Flash as a technology has been available on mobile devices in two forms for well over a year now: the Flash browser plugin, and AIR apps (essentially Flash apps packaged for distribution in app stores). On iOS, Apple disallows browser plugins, but AIR apps can and do run on iOS (i.e. Flash is ok as long as it goes through the App Store garden gate). The only part of that story Adobe said they're changing is the Flash browser plugin. Flash-based apps will continue to be possible, even on iOS.
Incidentally, some of the top-selling iOS apps running on Flash/AIR. So it's awfully hard to justify the claim that Flash will "never work on mobile" -- since it already works well on mobile, and has for quite some time.
Flash has had hardware-accelerated video decoding for quite a while now. That's why it DOES play back 720p and 1080p... even on mobile devices (see: Xoom, PlayBook).
Also, I don't know what makes you say Flash was "designed for mouse" (other than the fact that Steve Jobs said it first). Flash is like any other interactive platform. It gives you mouse events, keyboard events... and on mobile, things like accelerometer and multi-touch/gesture events. You can make content that's optimized for mouse, touch, or both. Complaints about Flash and the mouse are essentially complaints about legacy content in general, which applies to basically any website that predates mobile devices. What Jobs should have said is that all websites need a rewrite to support small-screen, touch-only mobile phones well. (Don't want / can't afford a rewrite? Tough -- that's been Apple's mantra since way before iPhones were around).
Visual Studio is not what I'd hold up as the gold standard for toolsets. Have you ever used a good, modern Java IDE like IntelliJ? Or even Eclipse? After years of using those, I cry a little every time I'm forced to go back to VS.
No... the same exact version of Flash is available on Mac, Windows, and Linux/Solaris. See the table here: http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/
And of course Flash is fully supported on OS X... what on earth makes you think it isn't?
Huh? No, Stage 3D works on every web browser that Flash runs on – IE, FF, Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc.