Want Flash Player On a MacBook Air? Download It Yourself 353
AmiMoJo writes "MacBook Airs are no longer shipping with Flash. Apple spokesperson Bill Evans said: 'We're happy to continue to support Flash on the Mac, and the best way for users to always have the most up to date and secure version is to download it directly from Adobe.'"
It just works... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Lies. (Score:1, Interesting)
Crap...I have a vendetta against Flash and Apple....Who do I root for?
Re:Lies. (Score:3, Interesting)
Adobe just released a HTML5 player as well. Surely, this means Flash's future will no longer be based on ActionScript but HTML5. Consider it the new platform and with a nice framework, it might just be a win for Adobe.
Re:Lies. (Score:1, Interesting)
I can't wait for the day when I can safely uninstall Flash, like Java before it.
At least with Flash there's nothing of long-lasting value, so the inevitable switch won't be as drawn out and painful as Java was. Flash games have a web-awareness life of 1-2 years at most. And when people finally see what's possible with WebGL and native bindings, they will be flocking away. 2011 will be an interesting year.
Good riddance (Score:4, Interesting)
Okay, so I'm playing around with a Drupal site concept in Artisteer. Artisteer lets you drop in Flash animations as little overlays on banners and the like and it comes with a couple of samples. A dead effing simple moving cloud overlay caused the fan in my machine to crank up to hurricane speed. And this is the most recent build of Flash. IMO (definitely not being humble here), Flash blows, literally and figuratively. If Flash had to be certified EnergyStar compliant it would fail miserably.
Re:Lies. (Score:2, Interesting)
Well I would expect Steve to take away peoples ability to "root" on a Mac soon. You know he wouldn't want them having control over their own computer that they bought. Plus, Darth Steve always knows whats best ;)
Re:Damned if they do, damned if they don't (Score:2, Interesting)
AFAIK Apple doesn't have a bad rep for not supporting Flash on the iPhone. It's Xerox who has all the blame since Macs and all Apple's products are really copied from Xerox systems. They didn't support Flash either. Also Microsoft Windows is really a DEC VMS system so blame Digital if you have problems with Windows.
For those that don't know, David Cutler, who designed VMS while at DEC, went on to Microsoft where he designed Windows NT. Now, although Mr. Cutler attributes it to coincidence, W N T = V+1 M+1 S+1
Not unlike how it happens that HAL of HAL 9000 fame happens to be I-1 B-1 M-1.
Re:Lies. (Score:5, Interesting)
I will say in all my years in professional development, I have only met one legitimate Mac fan boy and this was in the past three months. Maybe they're more prevalent on messageboards or hang out in the Apple store, but the stereotype (in my experience) is far different than the normal mac user.
The funny thing about this guy ... we were all talking about the iPhone 4 fiasco and the people around started to pile it on. So he turns to me with a beseeching look because I was the only other mac user in the group. I was like, "yeah, these guys are right. Apple has made some boneheaded moves." and he was crushed. He just couldn't understand how another mac user could abandon him. I tried to tell him that I prefer unix and that the mac is a marriage of convenience for me since I have yet to find a linux distro that scratches an itch for me, but he didn't really pay attention to my arguments.
Re:Lies. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't like either case. In the locked down Android case, my annoyance would go for the carrier though, and I'd avoid dealing with that carrier if at all possible. Fortunately here I can (and do) buy unlocked phones. I haven't ever bought a phone from the carrier for this reason.
In the Apple case I don't get to do such a thing, because it's always locked down, no matter who I buy from.
Astroturfing on Slashdot (Score:4, Interesting)
I've had a suspicion for a while now that Slashdot is being astroturfed by people who are either directly involved with Google or have a vested interested in its platforms like Android. Slashdot used to be friendly to Apple, critical of some things but congratulatory toward their products and success. Since Android has come out, every Apple article now is filled with Apple-bashers, people who really seem to be working unusually hard to convince everyone that Apple is evil, not worth your time, and only used by sheep. Often, they reference Steve Jobs by name, as if he can hear them or something.
I'll get accused of wearing a tinfoil hat, and I don't dismiss the fact that there have always been Apple-haters posting on Slashdot regardless of Google, but watching the tone of the comments shift so radically has been unusual, especially when the tone in articles that are critical of Google are the exact opposite--a ton of defenders justifying Google's every move, even when they're caught archiving emails and passwords from WiFi networks or when it turns out Android isn't open at all because it's controlled by the carriers. People who bash Google get modded down or drowned out by apologists.
Apple can't even introduce a Mac App Store without it some slippery slope argument claiming that the Mac will become a closed platform, despite Apple specifically mentioning that it won't be the only source of software. Linux distros have quality-tested, centralized repositories of software. Microsoft is introducing an app store in Windows 8 according to that leaked presentation. But when Apple does it, it's evil.
There's something suspicious about the sudden antagonism toward Apple. Like I said, there's always been a level of criticism over things like prices or hardware specs, but it's never risen to the degree it's at now where even things like not pre-installing Flash is some crime, even though Windows and Linux don't ship with Flash either. You have to install it yourself, whether it's from Adobe's site or using apt-get. There's a lot of misdirection going on. Look at the recent Java article whose headline and summary implied Apple was deprecating Java itself and not simply deprecating their pre-installed JVM. Again, Windows and Linux distros don't ship with Java pre-installed like that either. Apple was shipping these things back when the Mac was still clawing it's way back out of obscurity, and they couldn't count on companies like Sun to bother with their platform.
I believe Slashdot is getting astroturfed hard. The constant argument that only rubes use Macs is an attempt to rally "independent-minded" Linux users against Apple and keep them away from products like the iPhone, because some of these trolls have--I believe--a vested interest in Android. So many of the posts are just too suspicious. If Apple had been caught archiving people's emails and passwords, or if Steve Jobs had come out and said that the only people who care about privacy are people who have something to hide (as Google CEO Eric Schmidt did), the comments to the stories would have exploded in their level of sheer Apple hatred, yet those Google stories had defenders out in full force protecting the company. Something fishy is going on.
Re:Lies. (Score:4, Interesting)
The iTunes hate comes from the fact that VLC, a leaner install of Winamp, FOObar2000, Mediamonkey, and countless other random applications on Softpedia don't have 101MByte installers, don't add half a dozen services to my startup. Quicktime (which has had plenty of security vulnerabilities over the last few years) and Bonjour (which "simplifies" networking at the expense of adding another network attack surface) are both non-optional installs. Syncing an iOS device requires a bunch of guesswork and voodoo as to whether iTunes will ACTUALLY do what you want it to do, or delete all your files. There is still no legit way to play purchased movie or TV episode besides iTunes/Quicktime, and playing them back takes triple the CPU time for me than an XviD in GOMplayer.
All of that ignores the fact that I personally (and thousands of other people) have had our accounts hacked, (and yes, I was using a strong password) since that's a store issue, not a code issue.