Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 29th Apr 2010 16:59 UTC
Holier-than-thou, an adjective, meaning "marked by an air of superior piety or morality". Everybody has moments in their life where they get into a "holier-than-thou" attitude, and I think Steve Jobs' open letter regarding Adobe, and Flash in particular, really fits the bill. There are three specific points I want to address to illustrate just how holier-than-thou, hypocritical, and misleading this letter really is.
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RE: Good Points/But Flash Is Crap
by mtzmtulivu on Thu 29th Apr 2010 17:58
in reply to "Good Points/But Flash Is Crap"
Member since:2006-11-14
But, on to Flash. Steve is right in the more narrow sense. Flash is crap, especially for mobile devices. And there are much better alternatives. In this case the ball is in Adobe's court and Jobs has put it there. Adobe should really and truly get rid of Flash and embrace the new tools. Again, I am speaking in this more narrow sense and not in the wider sense that Thom did.
flash is crap, nobody disputes this.
Question: Why does apple not want flash on their devices?
Answer: because flash has a runtime apple can not control. The prohibition of this is in their developer's agreement.
Saying this doesnt look good so they spin things.
Spin1: flush is a resource hog and drains battery life and that is why we dont allow it.
Adobe made their app to produce native code making spin1 moot and spin two was hence put forward
spin2: cross platform tools are inherently inferior.
it doesnt matter who has the ball, apple has the goal post and will move it around to maintain their strong hold on their devices and will spin things all day long.
not saying your point isnt valid, just saying it is used to justify moving around the goal post.
RE[2]: Good Points/But Flash Is Crap
by bousozoku on Thu 29th Apr 2010 18:14
in reply to "RE: Good Points/But Flash Is Crap"
Member since:2006-01-23
flash is crap, nobody disputes this.
Question: Why does apple not want flash on their devices?
Answer: because flash has a runtime apple can not control. The prohibition of this is in their developer's agreement.
Saying this doesnt look good so they spin things.
Spin1: flush is a resource hog and drains battery life and that is why we dont allow it.
Adobe made their app to produce native code making spin1 moot and spin two was hence put forward
spin2: cross platform tools are inherently inferior.
it doesnt matter who has the ball, apple has the goal post and will move it around to maintain their strong hold on their devices and will spin things all day long.
not saying your point isnt valid, just saying it is used to justify moving around the goal post.
If you wanted the best experience for customers of your hardware, wouldn't you be just as demanding of a high performance solution?
RE: Good Points/But Flash Is Crap
by aahjnnot on Thu 29th Apr 2010 18:20
in reply to "Good Points/But Flash Is Crap"
Member since:2008-07-24
Flash may be crap. But I want the freedom to choose crap.
Few things are new. In his classic 1934 novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley explored the issue that divides Jobs and Thom - how much is freedom worth? Mustapha in this extract sounds exactly like Steve Jobs. Thom sounds like the Savage. And I'm with Thom: there's more to life than anodyne, predictable, reliable comfort. I want to choose for myself.
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the nght to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”
There was a long silence.
“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the nght to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”
There was a long silence.
“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.
In Steve's world of control freakery, anything he determines is bad is banned. The rest of us must don our black polo necks and behave like the clones he wants us to become.
No thank you.
RE[2]: Good Points/But Flash Is Crap
by Hiev on Thu 29th Apr 2010 18:59
in reply to "RE: Good Points/But Flash Is Crap"
RE[2]: Good Points/But Flash Is Crap
by patrix on Fri 30th Apr 2010 04:48
in reply to "RE: Good Points/But Flash Is Crap"
Member since:2006-05-21
RE: Good Points/But Flash Is Crap
by StephenBeDoper on Fri 30th Apr 2010 15:37
in reply to "Good Points/But Flash Is Crap"
Member since:2005-07-06
But, on to Flash. Steve is right in the more narrow sense. Flash is crap, especially for mobile devices. And there are much better alternatives.
Of course, that didn't stop Apple from including Flash support in QuickTime for years... and they only removed that support when people started creating iMovie plugins using Flash (because QT's Flash support enabled iMovie plugins which added functionality that was otherwise only available in the Final Cut products).
RE: Good Points/But Flash Is Crap
by kaiwai on Sat 1st May 2010 03:57
in reply to "Good Points/But Flash Is Crap"
Member since:2005-07-06
Thom has made very legitimate points about Steve/Apple. I have not deleted Windows but, like Thom was saying, when I go from my Mac desktop to my Windows desktop and use iTunes, it is truly a cringe-worthy experience.
But, on to Flash. Steve is right in the more narrow sense. Flash is crap, especially for mobile devices. And there are much better alternatives. In this case the ball is in Adobe's court and Jobs has put it there. Adobe should really and truly get rid of Flash and embrace the new tools. Again, I am speaking in this more narrow sense and not in the wider sense that Thom did.
But, on to Flash. Steve is right in the more narrow sense. Flash is crap, especially for mobile devices. And there are much better alternatives. In this case the ball is in Adobe's court and Jobs has put it there. Adobe should really and truly get rid of Flash and embrace the new tools. Again, I am speaking in this more narrow sense and not in the wider sense that Thom did.
At what point did Steve Jobs nominate himself as the bouncer at the entry of my device? If I wish to install Flash on my i-device then I should be allowed to, just as I should be allowed to install what ever application produced with what ever tool I want on my device. Does Flash suck on Mac OS X? of course but how much of it is actually solely the result of Adobe because ultimately it takes two to tango.
Btw, don't think that HTML5 is going to be the saving grace of the internet given that all benchmarks shown that an equally as complex application as what is produced in flash will hog just as much CPU power. Was Flash 10.0 a hog? sure, but 10.1 has changed, improved, and it is up to Apple to work with Adobe to improve performance just as it is up to developers who write for Flash to ensure that they're using the best code to achieve a given objective.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 13:17 UTC
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 12:06 UTC
"According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.More News »
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2005-07-06
Thom has made very legitimate points about Steve/Apple. I have not deleted Windows but, like Thom was saying, when I go from my Mac desktop to my Windows desktop and use iTunes, it is truly a cringe-worthy experience.
But, on to Flash. Steve is right in the more narrow sense. Flash is crap, especially for mobile devices. And there are much better alternatives. In this case the ball is in Adobe's court and Jobs has put it there. Adobe should really and truly get rid of Flash and embrace the new tools. Again, I am speaking in this more narrow sense and not in the wider sense that Thom did.