Nonsense. They were based on profiles of usage of harmful industrial chemicals and irresponsible disposal policies, and Greenpeace took into direct corporate policy statements on timelines for reversal of these policies. Apple's manufacturing was rife with these chemicals, their disposal policy utterly irresponsible, and their timeline nonexistent. Apple very quickly turned this around.
"... but that doesn't mean people are still actively being harmed" by this particular chemical. Surely the treatment of workers in China has much further to go than the (largely unenforced) banning of a single chemical solvent.
It's only your fault that you're funneling riches into the pockets of those who keep the conditions crappy. If we stop rewarding the people doing that, they will be unable to keep doing it. And Chinese workers will have much more room to improve their own conditions. There is no incentive for improving conditions to be had by trading our own morality for electronic gizmos.
"No such thing as bad publicity" tends to have a pretty abrupt threshold. People are generally content to be complicit in horrific exploitation until they are forced to look in the mirror. Excepting sociopaths, atrocities are impossible to commit if they're being honestly acknowledged. More than that, Apple is extremely conscious about its brand's reputation; bad publicity from a small but vocal minority often prompts Apple to at least pay lip service to changing its ways. As an example, when environmental groups ran campaigns to disproportionately shame Apple, their first response was damage control in the form of publicly asserting that they're no worse than their lowest-common-denominator competitors, but their long-term response was to not only make major changes in their corporate environmental policies but to trumpet them as yet another value in the Apple brand. In other words, while Apple benefited from this campaign in the long term, so did the campaigns which targeted them. Not only did Apple make major changes to both its policies and its public image, they also raised the level of pressure on their competitors to follow suit. Strategically, the moral campaign exerted greater leverage over the brand-conscious Apple than the reverse.
Apple also bears a disproportionate amount of responsibility by virtue of reaping a disproportionate amount of benefit. With great power and influence comes great responsibility. And being that Apple consistently and consciously cultivates this power and influence as a matter of executing its extremely successful business strategy, its willingness and eagerness to shirk that responsibility while promoting itself as some kind of a kinder, gentler corporation is all the more insidious.
Yeah. That's the real tragedy about workers being poisoned to enrich the pushers who prey on our society's high tech addictions. The damage to, or inflation of, the value of Apple Inc.'s brand.
Maybe instead of the straw man about how we shouldn't be dictating other countries' policies, we should think about our own moral obligations. I may not have a moral obligation to change China's policies—in fact, I have a moral obligation not to—but I certainly have a moral obligation not to enjoy the fruits of their ill-gotten labor, and not to enrich and empower them for the privilege.
Discretion in one's own behaviors is far from revolutionary, and it's also far from hegemonic. It's frankly a pretty basic foundation of minimal human decency.
We all have to walk a rather fine line in this regard, particularly as most of us (commenting on Slashdot) depend on violating this basic decency in some form or another for our own livelihood—as a matter of operating in an economic environment that's largely out of our immediate control—but it's not a matter to take lightly or dismiss with conveniently naïve rationalization. And it's not a matter that we can take greater responsibility for without a much more honest and sobering look in the mirror.
Not trying to start that flamewar but... why isn't Adobe distributing Flash as an Ad Hoc app? (I mean, they could also ship it to Jailbreak iDevices, but I can imagine why they're not doing that.) It seems to me that Adobe could provide Flash to those brave souls who want it, but they don't. I strongly suspect that Adobe knows that Flash is not suited to run on hardware with the relative power and battery life of a mobile device.
AIR is, basically, just a desktop Flash runtime, with a WebKit renderer and a few APIs exposed to developers that Flash surely uses itself anyway. It's definitely not WebKit slowing AIR down, so my guess is you're either experiencing a placebo or you're just kvetching.
Ah, I get you. Well, some of the more competent Flash blockers will display H.264 content in an HTML5 video container from known players (ClickToFlash does this for YouTube for instance).
I see it as being beneficial mostly to the vast majority of web designers who don't actually know HTML and just export stuff directly from DreamWeaver or whatever.
I made that point in another comment. But I added: on second thought, maybe I don't want to see their videos.
But seriously, yeah. Adobe doesn't have a history of giving people good off the shelf web tools. To some extent, this is an improvement on that reputation. Just... not good enough.
Also, I haven't looked at this particular player, but I would hope it has a nicer set of controls than the default HTML5 video container's controls.
Default HTML5 controls are implementation-specific. The controls in what Adobe's pushing are lacking compared to, for instance, Safari's implementation. Adobe's offering has a "full screen" button which, in HTML5 mode, fills the browser window; Safari's default controls include a real full screen button. I imagine the Flash fallback has proper full screen as well. Adobe's offering is an old and broken solution that puts unnecessary JavaScript behind the selection of HTML5, has no fallback without JavaScript, and does a poor job at feature detection.
But it does mean that "web designers" who just export from Adobe products are more likely to put videos on the web that can be viewed on a much wider array of platforms and configurations. On second thought... I'm not sure I want to see their videos.
Regarding quality, the vast majority of web video is not served at a high enough quality that the codec matters that much. But you can still accomplish that with HTML5 video as the default, by simply not providing a Theora version.
It would be a good thing, if it weren't a particularly bad implementation. The solution's design ignores properties inherent to HTML5 (and implemented correctly in all browsers with HTML5 video support, and designed specifically to be backwards compatible on browsers without) that make the solution itself unnecessary. A much nicer solution would have looked basically like this:
A video tag, containing WebM, H.264 and Theora source tags, an object and embed tag with the same WebM and H.264 sources as arguments, JavaScript to add developer-styled controls if JavaScript is enabled, and a Flash shim that mimics the styles of those controls. Everything would work, even without JavaScript enabled, unless the end-user is on a browser from 1996.
Adobe gave up on Flash having a monopoly on Internet video when they agreed to put WebM into Flash. They have completely shifted gears in their web strategy by promoting their software as tools to generate HTML5/etc-buzzword output. More and more, Flash will be driven even more in the two opposite directions it's been going for a couple years now: as an animation tool, eventually preferentially targeting SVG/canvas output; and as an application development tool, eventually preferentially targeting quasi-native environments like AIR.
It essentially *does* let the browser determine that for you, but with a bunch of unnecessary JavaScript in the middle for no apparent reason. A better design is already possible, with video at the top of the hierarchy, and the flash object/embed tags as child elements. The only conceivable "benefit" of using JavaScript to do the detection is to enforce branding in the player UI by having Flash be the default if JavaScript is disabled. But looking at the source code of the library, they didn't even make *that* design decision, so it's essentially useless.
You can do both without any library. The markup for HTML5 video with Flash as a fallback is, basically, a video tag wrapping source and object tags, and the object tag wrapping an embed tag. The markup for Flash with HTML5 video as a fallback is to simply move the object tag to the top of the hierarchy and the video tag within it. The relevant part of the HTML5 spec was designed *specifically* to make this possible, and it has been possible ever since the first browser with video-tag capability was released. No Adobe library (borrowed though it is) is necessary to achieve this.
With all of that said, I can't imagine why you'd want to use Flash at the top of the hierarchy unless you're a sadist. Flash has more wrong with it than the fact that it's not open and requires a plugin.
Corporations, labor unions and national banks cannot contribute directly to any candidate's political campaign.
Of course they can. By contributing to political ads, the campaign budget can be redirected to other costs. If I pay your bills, my money never passes through your hands but it is identical to giving you the money for that purpose.
Yeah, recognizing destructive behavior and changing it is way stupider than trying to fundamentally change the way a planet naturally maintains equilibrium. Damn those ecoterrorists for wanting to address existing problems at their roots, rather than create new problems with far-reaching consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
Different verses of the same song.
Nonsense. They were based on profiles of usage of harmful industrial chemicals and irresponsible disposal policies, and Greenpeace took into direct corporate policy statements on timelines for reversal of these policies. Apple's manufacturing was rife with these chemicals, their disposal policy utterly irresponsible, and their timeline nonexistent. Apple very quickly turned this around.
I'm about to fall asleep and I read that as "a few measly peasants".
"... but that doesn't mean people are still actively being harmed" by this particular chemical. Surely the treatment of workers in China has much further to go than the (largely unenforced) banning of a single chemical solvent.
It's only your fault that you're funneling riches into the pockets of those who keep the conditions crappy. If we stop rewarding the people doing that, they will be unable to keep doing it. And Chinese workers will have much more room to improve their own conditions. There is no incentive for improving conditions to be had by trading our own morality for electronic gizmos.
"No such thing as bad publicity" tends to have a pretty abrupt threshold. People are generally content to be complicit in horrific exploitation until they are forced to look in the mirror. Excepting sociopaths, atrocities are impossible to commit if they're being honestly acknowledged. More than that, Apple is extremely conscious about its brand's reputation; bad publicity from a small but vocal minority often prompts Apple to at least pay lip service to changing its ways. As an example, when environmental groups ran campaigns to disproportionately shame Apple, their first response was damage control in the form of publicly asserting that they're no worse than their lowest-common-denominator competitors, but their long-term response was to not only make major changes in their corporate environmental policies but to trumpet them as yet another value in the Apple brand. In other words, while Apple benefited from this campaign in the long term, so did the campaigns which targeted them. Not only did Apple make major changes to both its policies and its public image, they also raised the level of pressure on their competitors to follow suit. Strategically, the moral campaign exerted greater leverage over the brand-conscious Apple than the reverse.
Apple also bears a disproportionate amount of responsibility by virtue of reaping a disproportionate amount of benefit. With great power and influence comes great responsibility. And being that Apple consistently and consciously cultivates this power and influence as a matter of executing its extremely successful business strategy, its willingness and eagerness to shirk that responsibility while promoting itself as some kind of a kinder, gentler corporation is all the more insidious.
Yeah. That's the real tragedy about workers being poisoned to enrich the pushers who prey on our society's high tech addictions. The damage to, or inflation of, the value of Apple Inc.'s brand.
Maybe instead of the straw man about how we shouldn't be dictating other countries' policies, we should think about our own moral obligations. I may not have a moral obligation to change China's policies—in fact, I have a moral obligation not to—but I certainly have a moral obligation not to enjoy the fruits of their ill-gotten labor, and not to enrich and empower them for the privilege.
Discretion in one's own behaviors is far from revolutionary, and it's also far from hegemonic. It's frankly a pretty basic foundation of minimal human decency.
We all have to walk a rather fine line in this regard, particularly as most of us (commenting on Slashdot) depend on violating this basic decency in some form or another for our own livelihood—as a matter of operating in an economic environment that's largely out of our immediate control—but it's not a matter to take lightly or dismiss with conveniently naïve rationalization. And it's not a matter that we can take greater responsibility for without a much more honest and sobering look in the mirror.
Seeing Dead Prez lyrics posted on Slashdot is really disorienting. In a great way.
Being an honest sociopath doesn't make you any less a sociopath.
Your Memories Will Be Rewritten: http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/memory/
Not trying to start that flamewar but... why isn't Adobe distributing Flash as an Ad Hoc app? (I mean, they could also ship it to Jailbreak iDevices, but I can imagine why they're not doing that.) It seems to me that Adobe could provide Flash to those brave souls who want it, but they don't. I strongly suspect that Adobe knows that Flash is not suited to run on hardware with the relative power and battery life of a mobile device.
AIR is, basically, just a desktop Flash runtime, with a WebKit renderer and a few APIs exposed to developers that Flash surely uses itself anyway. It's definitely not WebKit slowing AIR down, so my guess is you're either experiencing a placebo or you're just kvetching.
I... just said that.
Ah, I get you. Well, some of the more competent Flash blockers will display H.264 content in an HTML5 video container from known players (ClickToFlash does this for YouTube for instance).
I see it as being beneficial mostly to the vast majority of web designers who don't actually know HTML and just export stuff directly from DreamWeaver or whatever.
I made that point in another comment. But I added: on second thought, maybe I don't want to see their videos.
But seriously, yeah. Adobe doesn't have a history of giving people good off the shelf web tools. To some extent, this is an improvement on that reputation. Just... not good enough.
Also, I haven't looked at this particular player, but I would hope it has a nicer set of controls than the default HTML5 video container's controls.
Default HTML5 controls are implementation-specific. The controls in what Adobe's pushing are lacking compared to, for instance, Safari's implementation. Adobe's offering has a "full screen" button which, in HTML5 mode, fills the browser window; Safari's default controls include a real full screen button. I imagine the Flash fallback has proper full screen as well. Adobe's offering is an old and broken solution that puts unnecessary JavaScript behind the selection of HTML5, has no fallback without JavaScript, and does a poor job at feature detection.
But it does mean that "web designers" who just export from Adobe products are more likely to put videos on the web that can be viewed on a much wider array of platforms and configurations. On second thought... I'm not sure I want to see their videos.
It does fall back to the object/embed inside.
Regarding quality, the vast majority of web video is not served at a high enough quality that the codec matters that much. But you can still accomplish that with HTML5 video as the default, by simply not providing a Theora version.
It would be a good thing, if it weren't a particularly bad implementation. The solution's design ignores properties inherent to HTML5 (and implemented correctly in all browsers with HTML5 video support, and designed specifically to be backwards compatible on browsers without) that make the solution itself unnecessary. A much nicer solution would have looked basically like this:
A video tag, containing WebM, H.264 and Theora source tags, an object and embed tag with the same WebM and H.264 sources as arguments, JavaScript to add developer-styled controls if JavaScript is enabled, and a Flash shim that mimics the styles of those controls. Everything would work, even without JavaScript enabled, unless the end-user is on a browser from 1996.
Adobe gave up on Flash having a monopoly on Internet video when they agreed to put WebM into Flash. They have completely shifted gears in their web strategy by promoting their software as tools to generate HTML5/etc-buzzword output. More and more, Flash will be driven even more in the two opposite directions it's been going for a couple years now: as an animation tool, eventually preferentially targeting SVG/canvas output; and as an application development tool, eventually preferentially targeting quasi-native environments like AIR.
It essentially *does* let the browser determine that for you, but with a bunch of unnecessary JavaScript in the middle for no apparent reason. A better design is already possible, with video at the top of the hierarchy, and the flash object/embed tags as child elements. The only conceivable "benefit" of using JavaScript to do the detection is to enforce branding in the player UI by having Flash be the default if JavaScript is disabled. But looking at the source code of the library, they didn't even make *that* design decision, so it's essentially useless.
You can do both without any library. The markup for HTML5 video with Flash as a fallback is, basically, a video tag wrapping source and object tags, and the object tag wrapping an embed tag. The markup for Flash with HTML5 video as a fallback is to simply move the object tag to the top of the hierarchy and the video tag within it. The relevant part of the HTML5 spec was designed *specifically* to make this possible, and it has been possible ever since the first browser with video-tag capability was released. No Adobe library (borrowed though it is) is necessary to achieve this.
With all of that said, I can't imagine why you'd want to use Flash at the top of the hierarchy unless you're a sadist. Flash has more wrong with it than the fact that it's not open and requires a plugin.
Of course they can. By contributing to political ads, the campaign budget can be redirected to other costs. If I pay your bills, my money never passes through your hands but it is identical to giving you the money for that purpose.
Yeah, recognizing destructive behavior and changing it is way stupider than trying to fundamentally change the way a planet naturally maintains equilibrium. Damn those ecoterrorists for wanting to address existing problems at their roots, rather than create new problems with far-reaching consequences.