Apple Hires Former Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, Destroyer of iPhones 209
Nerval's Lobster writes "Why did Apple hire former Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch as vice president of technology? Adobe and Apple spent years fighting a much-publicized battle over the latter's decision to ban Adobe Flash from iOS devices. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was very public in his condemnation of Flash as a tool for rich-content playback, denigrating it in an April 2010 letter posted on Apple's Website as flawed with regard to battery life, security, reliability and performance. Lynch was very much the public face of Adobe's public-relations pushback to Apple's criticism; in a corporate video shot for an Adobe developer conference in 2009, he even helped run an iPhone over with a steamroller. (Hat tip to Daring Fireball's John Gruber for digging that video up.) As recently as 2010, he was still arguing that Flash was superior to HTML5, which eventually surpassed it to become the virtual industry standard for Web-based rich content. It's interesting to speculate whether Steve Jobs would have hired someone who so publicly denigrated Apple's flagship product. But Jobs is dead, and his corporate successors in Cupertino—tasked with leading Apple through a period of fierce competition — obviously looked at Lynch and decided he'd make a perfect fit as an executive."
Game of Thrones (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Game of Thrones (Score:4, Insightful)
Or maybe it's just a guy who wants a well paying job and he knows all the technobabble is just that...
I think too many geeks think that they world does really work out like a Game of Thrones scenerio. Thinking that one company needs to live for another to thrive and that any time someone jumps ship it's because the ship is sinking. I've seen this kind of talk around Slashdot for more than a decade and so far most of these entities that were suppose to turn belly-up at any minute are still around.
Give up. Live a fulfilling life. You're wasting your time trying to get everyone to agree with you.
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Or maybe it's just a guy who wants a well paying job and he knows all the technobabble is just that...
I hear he's going to be in charge of T.P.S. reports
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If you think Flash vs HTML5 is just technobabble, I invite you to GTFO.
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Would that make Steve Jobs Joffrey Baratheon?
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We don't need to see them in bed to figure where this is going, do we?
Re:Game of Thrones (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, but HBO feels they'll have more rating if they show them having sex while explaining their reasons for stabbing each other in the back.
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You should watch the series, it does introduce several extra scenes of "sexposition".
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Full circle (Score:2)
Do you honestly believe.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you believe that everyone has a brand loyalty problem? A professional can see beyond all of this kind of noise while exploiting it to their will at the same time.
It reminds me of a DJ from a classic rock station who got let go, he went on to a country station and was in all their ads about how the "new country" music was exciting and great. I know someone who met him and talked about it and the DJ's reply was along the lines of "It's just another gig. It's my job to make it sound like something you'll want to listen to." This really is no different. Even fanboys who are forced to move on eventually shrug off their old brand and act like whatever they were forced into is the best thing going. Some people thrive on making what they own is the best even if they know it isn't.
Meh.
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Wow, great post. Sales & Product branding 101. Sad to think the basement dwellers here on Slashdot needs that explained to them.
I'm in technical sales and have changed jobs to my competitor. Even my customers (engineers) understand that my zest for Company A is now turned to zest for Company B. They know I am passionate about whoever I'm representing, and they respect that.
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At best I consider this a workaround, not a fix. I have considered legacy PR obsolete for a while now. Reminds me of this too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4717449 [ycombinator.com]
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Very, very true, but it also misses the point a bit.
Where I think some of the confusion over this hire comes from is in the fact that, as an executive over Flash while he was with Adobe, he not only preached the message that the company wanted preached: he was the one that came up with the message they should be preaching. Which is to say, he was in the perfect position several years ago to both recognize that Flash was at its peak and to reposition it accordingly with a new direction for its marketing.
Put
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What the devil was he supposed to do? "Gee, I guess Apple is right. Time to pack in one of our biggest money-makers and the product my entire job is centered around and admit it isn't any good any more." He needed to make the strongest case possible for Flash and since the iPhone had declared Flash worthless and anybody using an iPhone would, by definition, *not* be using Flash, his only alternative was to bash the iPhone.
He's not a true believer; he's just somebody who used to have a job that involved k
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Bashing the iPhone while setting up a long-term repositioning of the product is a good strategy. It mitigates short-term damage and prepares the product for the future. I'd have no problems with that. What I was saying in my last post, however, was that he did the former without also doing the latter. It wasn't until years after Flash was well past it's prime that we finally started to see some efforts to rethink how Flash is being used, rather than seeing those efforts being made right as Flash was startin
Re:Do you honestly believe.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Everyone's replying in agreement to you, but that is not the reason why people are concerned.
The reason is that this guy wasn't an employee, he was CTO. As CTO, he had the power to influence decisions.
He didn't have to follow the company's lead, he was the one dictating what that was.
And he sucked at that.
If you can't beat them... (Score:3)
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If you can't beat them, join them.
Or beat them from the inside.
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Problem is, Adobe gave up the fight, outsourced, and has a crappy CEO who wants to outsource the entire company to India. So yes, it was a smart move to bail on Adobe. They mis-played their hand big time.
wonderful! (Score:5, Funny)
Just announced: iPhones will now feature a permanent pop-up message that says "A new version of the IOS is available, do you want to install?"
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In all honesty, that's not a bad thing. Aside from the annoyance factor, it means things are getting fixed and features being added and the updates are at least available to the public.
I don't own an iDevice, so I don't know if they have easy or automated OTA firmware/iOS updates or not.
I have a cheap 2 year old Android phone and it does not have firmware/OS updates available (v2.3.4).
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I don't own an iDevice, so I don't know if they have easy or automated OTA firmware/iOS updates or not.
I have a cheap 2 year old Android phone and it does not have firmware/OS updates available (v2.3.4).
(a) They do, and (b) that seems to be a fairly common problem.
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Just announced: (buffering)iPhones will now feat(buffering)ure a permanent pop-(buffering)up message that says "A new versi(buffering)o(buffering)n of the IOS is availabl(buffering)e, do you wan(buffering)t to install(buffering)?"
Fify.
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Wait, they got the guy from the Java division at Oracle too???
HTML5 has surpassed Flash? (Score:5, Insightful)
HTML5, which eventually surpassed it to become the virtual industry standard for Web-based rich content
I would disagree. Flash is still very much the de facto standard, like it or not.
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Well, the pages he can't see due to lack of Flash weren't worth viewing anyways. I'm certain he's not missing all the Flash ads and Flash-borne malware either.
Tim Cook's at the helm now (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe it's as simple as Jobs' advice to Cook: "I never want you to ask what I would have done. Just do what's right."
Or maybe it's a cheap way to buy out an antagonist, let him spin his wheels in a harm-free zone for a couple years, and do what Apple does with less angst.
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Baloney. Steve Jobs would lie to make his products look better. Remember when the iPhone launched and we heard about how nobody wants native applications, that JavaScript and HTML are the future? That was just because the SDK wasn't ready. There are numerous examples of this and also how he thrashed competitors' products when his copy was behind schedule.
This new guy may or may not have believed what he was saying (how could he, really?) but he was good at toeing the party line for his employer. In Gut
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Baloney. Steve Jobs would lie to make his products look better. Remember when the iPhone launched and we heard about how nobody wants native applications, that JavaScript and HTML are the future? That was just because the SDK wasn't ready.
Yeah, they actually wrote the apps the iPhone came with with Flash, because there was no other way.
It's all a game (Score:5, Insightful)
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Steve Jobs famously did care about things on a personal level, and would let his personal prejudices rule him on many well-documented occasions. That's why this is news, it's not business as usual for Apple. Of course, it shouldn't surprise anyone, because Steve Jobs is dead. Some people seem to have missed this, or maybe they just think he slid to unlock and rose after three days.
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Puzzling From All Perspectives (Score:3)
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I think your mistake is that you believe Apple cares about technological innovation. They care about profits. Was Adobe profitable? Were they able to monetize and existing product, extracting as much value from customers that were already invested in their product and either unable or unwilling to leave? Yes, they were very profitable. That's exactly the situation apples in now. They've got people locked in and no-where to go with them. Time to put the squeeze on.
Where's the value in this? (Score:4, Insightful)
At the end of the day these guys usually are not much more than figureheads. They institute a vague vision and ambiguous goal that is mostly reactive to industry trends. It's the people beneath them who do the real thinking, who worry about specifics, implementation and execution. The only real benefit they bring is that they have intimate knowledge of the process, philosophy and goals of their previous employer.
What else does he really bring to the table?
Flash (Score:5, Interesting)
I trust this doesn't mean they'll be bringing Flash back though *shudder*
It's one of those interesting points with Steve Jobs. At the time, the decision seemed awful and a lot of people were cheering on alternatives such as Android for including it. But a couple of years on it would seem that many share my view of: hey, he was right! Flash IS an awful resource drain, and because of him banning it from iOS there's been great progress towards HTML5 and the drive for efficiency. I seem to recall even Adobe have agreed it's the correct move at this point. Android has had Flash for a while but the latest versions have dropped it. It'd be so ironic if (unlikely) iOS gained Flash and everyone flocked to Android to get away from it this time.
Re:Flash (Score:4, Insightful)
HTML5 was intended to do those things. So it was pretty much inevitable that sites would move to HTML5 for that sort of thing. However, as I said, Flash is still wildly popular among artists (so much so that it's been used to produce several animated TV shows and movies). I don't see it going away any time soon.
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Flash was never intended to be a universal code interpreter to run across all systems (like Java was supposed to do).
Yep, but then you had IE 6. Around that time you had to test your javascript against two browser versions of IE on two platforms (mac and PC) and write additional browser detection and code for each case where code differed. I remember around that time there was something quite simple I was trying to do, a mouse over, which required different code to run for each of the four cases. Flash on the other hand worked fine across both versions and both platforms. It was easier and more reliable to just do everyth
Genius (Score:2)
Flash ban was never about battery/performance (Score:5, Insightful)
That was just PR to keep the masses thinking Apple was on their side. The real reason they ddin't support Flash was because it was a code interpreter. i.e. It let you run external code. That meant if iOS supported Flash, you could use it to run apps on your iOS device without having gotten them via the App Store.
At the time, Apple had a very strict policy against code interpreters [archive.org]. They've loosened their stance somewhat since then, but it's still pretty restrictive. It's their garden, and they want to keep it walled off. On the one hand this does improve the security of their devices somewhat. On the other it means all executables which are bought and sold for the device have to go through their App Store and 30% cut.
Battery life, reliability, and performance were all red herrings because in most Android browsers, the Flash plugin wouldn't play by default. If you went to a web page with embedded Flash, an image of a stylized F would show up in its place, and you had to click on it before the Flash would actually play. No hit to the device's performance unless you specifically wanted the Flash to play.
Re:Flash ban was never about battery/performance (Score:4, Insightful)
That was just PR to keep the masses thinking Apple was on their side. The real reason they ddin't support Flash was because it was a code interpreter. i.e. It let you run external code. That meant if iOS supported Flash, you could use it to run apps on your iOS device without having gotten them via the App Store. At the time, Apple had a very strict policy against code interpreters [archive.org]. They've loosened their stance somewhat since then, but it's still pretty restrictive. It's their garden, and they want to keep it walled off. On the one hand this does improve the security of their devices somewhat. On the other it means all executables which are bought and sold for the device have to go through their App Store and 30% cut. Battery life, reliability, and performance were all red herrings because in most Android browsers, the Flash plugin wouldn't play by default. If you went to a web page with embedded Flash, an image of a stylized F would show up in its place, and you had to click on it before the Flash would actually play. No hit to the device's performance unless you specifically wanted the Flash to play.
Don't think you understand how these technologies work. Apple has adopted HTML5 capabilities such as local storage, offline caching, and web workers as fast as anyone. You can make fantastic mobile web apps on top of HTML5 completely bypassing the app store. Flash is an abomination and needed to go. There was no ulterior motive here. It was a terrible technology that needed to be put down.
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I don't think your point is so valid regarding leaving basic features like a camera out, because Apple can count on the fanbois to buy anything resembling an iPhone upon its release; they'll camp out overnight for it. Apple knows they can skimp on features like that to release a product, while giving their engineers time to actually develop things like a camera, and A2DP bluetooth *years* down the road.
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Apple knows they can skimp on features like that to release a product, while giving their engineers time to actually develop things like a camera, and A2DP bluetooth *years* down the road.
The very first iPhone shipped with a camera, and A2DP Bluetooth was in the 2nd generation (iPhone 3G).
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I stand corrected, although please let me clarify as to the source of my own confusion earlier.
Apple released the iPhone 3g with A2DP bluetooth in June 2009.
The Nokia N95 (with A2DP bluetooth) was intially released in March 2007.
http://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_3gs-2826.php [gsmarena.com]
http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_n95-1716.php [gsmarena.com]
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But you have to give credit to the company who put out the original iPhone without a camera, knowing full well that every tech reviewer was going to ding them for it. Such discipline and customer insight should be admired in a world where bloat is the norm.
Whilst I agree with the sentiment, the original iPhone did have a camera.
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Don't think you understand how these technologies work. Apple has adopted HTML5 capabilities such as local storage, offline caching, and web workers as fast as anyone. You can make fantastic mobile web apps on top of HTML5 completely bypassing the app store. Flash is an abomination and needed to go. There was no ulterior motive here. It was a terrible technology that needed to be put down.
Translation: "Steve Jobs was right, Flash sucks."
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I don't think you know how these companies work. We've seen this exact scenario play out with IE and firefox. Apple embraced HTML 5 because they had no real choice, they must keep up with web standards in order to remain competitive.
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Except that Apple was early to the HTML5 table, not a laggard. They had a real choice, the choice that the majority of other's were using: Flash. Apple killed Flash in favour of HTML5.
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And how long ago was that? You still bitching about single button mice as well? How about cooperative multitasking?
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It had nothing to do with performance (which was admittedly terrible).
So the performance was terrible, but that wasn't the reason, it was because you could run apps? Except that Safari shipped with a full javascript engine, which could also run apps, but had pretty good performance?
Doesn't really make sense does it?
FWIW, I used to develop flash too, but I don't think it's ever going to really go away. HTML5 is still a long way from being even as capable as flash, not to mention the thousands of flash games that are still out there.
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You have heard of Microsoft, the "go to" competition in Operating systems... how is their cash cow producing? 2.6 % of the market?
Huh? Microsoft has 2 cash cows. MS Windows on the desktop, and MS Office. It has far more than 2.6% of both of them. More like 85% of desktop OS and similar for Office.
You seem to be referring to Windows Phone and/or Windows Mobile. These never had cash cow status.
So how has MS done out of their cash cows? Fucking brilliantly. The've served the company well for 25 years or so, and whilst they have started to lose ground, they are still where most of MS's money comes from.
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I don't think that's true. I'm a mobile developer, and have Been on and off for 15 years. Now on iOS, but originally on Symbian. Apple announced their App Store, a one stop shop, with basically one click to buy, download and install. And there was no doubt in my mind that it was going to be huge.
Why? Because I knew on the one hand what a pain in the ass it was to buy, download and install native apps on other mobile devices. How shit non-native apps were. How sucessful the iphone without apps already was. A
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>> Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was very public in his condemnation of Flash
>> as a tool for rich-content playback, denigrating it in an April 2010 letter posted
>> on Apple's Website as flawed with regard to battery life, security, reliability
>> and performance.
> That was just PR to keep the masses thinking Apple was on their side. The
> real reason they ddin't support Flash was because it was a code interpreter.
> i.e. It let you run external code. That meant if iOS supported
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Right, just like how the iPhone is not only missing an SD card slot, but an 8-trac player.
Because flash isn't dead, not yet (Score:2)
So the obituary for flash is premature.
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It's pining for the fiords.
Duh! (Score:2)
How is this any different from a lay person at Adobe switching over to Apple or vise versa? People go from one employer to another all the time anymore, so what? I guess the only thing that's notable is that we have a cool video of an iphone getting crushed, but that was just marketing.
Lynch to be Head of iPhone Hit Squad (Score:3)
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There, there...buy some more tin foil...
Same guys (Score:2)
The same guys that hired the dude from the down-market UK retail chain... how'd that work out?
Magic's gone.
It's about iBooks and YouTube replacement (Score:3)
Surpassed? (Score:2)
As recently as 2010, he was still arguing that Flash was superior to HTML5, which eventually surpassed it to become the virtual industry standard for Web-based rich content.
What? Surpassed? When? HTML5 has a long way to go before it properly uproots Flash. We've been hearing that Flash is dead for years and years now, and yet aside from the mobile space (which admittedly has grown considerably), Flash is still pretty much on top in the PC space. I wait in earnest for HTML5 to be the flash killing beast it is portrayed as, but that time has not come yet... There is still much work to be done.
Nothing to do with flash (Score:2)
Lynch is a CTO who took a desktop-based software company with incredible institutional inertia and reoriented it towards cloud services in record time.
Here's a quote I read somewhere else: "Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at services." Apple has sucked at services from day one, iDisk, MobileMe, iCloud, whatever, it's all shit. It needs someone to sort that out - maybe Lynch is the guy they picked.
Re:Apple banned Adobe because iPhone sucked. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Apple banned Adobe because iPhone sucked. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure they have gpu acceleration now but I suspect it's just to work around that issue.
No GPU acceleration is the fix to the issue, not just a workaround. It's like deriding a 3D engine for having really slow CPU-only rendering and claiming that enabling 3D acceleration is "just a workaround" for a slow 3D engine.
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I read that analogy 3 times and I still don't get it.
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The way I read it jjjhs is suggesting that Flash using GPU acceleration for video is "just a workaround" for slow non-GPU accelerated video when obviously non-GPU full screen video is going to be CPU intensive and using GPU acceleration is the only solution.
Re:Apple banned Adobe because iPhone sucked. (Score:5, Interesting)
It turned out that their preferred design for GPU offload involved decoding H.264 on the GPU, copying the frames back to main memory, compositing them on the CPU, and then copying the resulting frames back to the CPU. As you can imagine, this was a long way from being the fastest possible solution.
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Except, the APIs were not public until AFTER this entire kerfufle came out. No non-apple apps were allowed to use those hidden APIs, including competing video editing suites (Like Avid or Adobe's suite).
As soon as the APIs became available in 10.8, Adobe started using them. They decode encrypted traffic and then write them to the GPU buffers, like the API allows them. It is still slower than the Windows (and Linux) implementation, but it is what they have to use in order to use the PUBLIC APIs that Apple
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Except, the APIs were not public until AFTER this entire kerfufle came out.
That didn't stop VLC from running fast on the same hardware, though, and I don't think they were privy to any special secret API. And even if they were, Adobe could have examined the open source project to see how it was calling the not-so-secret API.
No, Flash was dog slow on its own merits.
Re:Apple banned Adobe because iPhone sucked. (Score:4)
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It's more likely to be a legal concern. Big corps like Adobe have teams of uptight lawyers that stop them from doing anything even remotely legally questionable.
Calling undocumented API's "just because some dudes on an open source project do it" is not a legally defensible position.
Flash ran like shit on Mac's, for sure. Ran great on Windows, generally. I have no idea what Linux users were/are forced to endure.
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Go back and read the original part of this subthread. The point was that when flash was originally ported those API's were undocumented / secret, and it was only after awhile they became available, at which point Adobe started using them.
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Except, the APIs were not public until AFTER this entire kerfufle came out. No non-apple apps were allowed to use those hidden APIs, including competing video editing suites (Like Avid or Adobe's suite).
As soon as the APIs became available in 10.8, Adobe started using them. They decode encrypted traffic and then write them to the GPU buffers, like the API allows them. It is still slower than the Windows (and Linux) implementation, but it is what they have to use in order to use the PUBLIC APIs that Apple offered.
-Nick
You know, this whining about hidden video playback APIs was never able to explain why the whole fucking rest of Flash was so damn slow on Macs. And Linux for that matter.
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Tale, told by idiot. I don't know why I don't have these problems with flash... oh, yes I do. I have an nVidia graphics card. Flash works fine on my Linux system and has for a lot of years. And virtually all the video I see is flash video.
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I'll take Rudolph Flash over Adolph Apple.
Whatever merit your argument might have had, it was invalidated by Godwin's law. You lose.
Re:Apple banned Adobe because iPhone sucked. (Score:5, Funny)
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Godwin's law says nothing of the validity of an argument--merely that the longer a debate rages, the more likely one side is to compare the other to Nazis or Hitler.
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Whatever merit your argument might have had, it was invalidated by Godwin's law. You lose.
Godwin's law doesn't say that if you invoke Hitler, you lose. Consequently, you lose. It's incredibly hyperbolic to invoke Hitler in this context, but that doesn't mean that the point is invalid. It only means that any response may reasonably be accompanied by a lot of eye-rolling.
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BS.
Apple didn't need a competing app delivery mechanism to "backdoor" delivery behind the app store.
Adding Adobe's Flash would have done this, while also opening up the "Turing-complete, vulnerability of the week processor" to a stable platform.
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How quickly they forget. When the iPhone was announced, there was no app store and no plans for an SDK. Jobs said that you should make web apps. Maybe there were secret plans for an SDK but that was the official story for some time.
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BS.
Apple didn't need a competing app delivery mechanism to "backdoor" delivery behind the app store.
What "App Store"? There was no App Store when the iPhone was started. There was no way to install apps on it either.
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To be fair, Flash on the N800 *was* a battery hog that substantially impacted performance. On the other hand, the N800 could use FlashBlock and/or AdBlock Plus, so you could get all the benefits of Flash (I used to use it to stream from Pandora, for example) without the downsides (slow ad networks impacting browsing performance, annoying animations leaping out at you, pages slowing down while the CPU struggles with Flash, etc.)
At the time that I was messing with the N800 (Maemo OS2008 had just come out, I t
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This isn't exactly true, though, a lot of people keep repeating it.
Fact is, there are well written flash apps and poorly written ones. The same can be said of javascript, I have gone to some "cutting edge" HTML5 pages and had them bog my browser down as well. Writing shitty code isn't limited to flash developers!
I'm not saying flash is great, I'm just saying this particular argument is kind of bullshit and no-one really thinks it through.
In a way I kind of like that flash is around still because advertise
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It also performs better than HTML5 + javascript. If you create an animation or game, it requires a MUCH beefier computer to run it at the same level in HTML5 as in flash. So, doesn't that mean HTML5 is even more of a resource hog?
Although I'll concede flash is buggier.
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Well, hopefully he'll be in a position to help Apple as much as he helped Adobe.
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Well, on an average day I see precisely zero flash content, because I don't even have it installed. :-P
I think he means as in de-facto, as in most people use it but it's not a 'standard' that is enforced.
Unfortunately, most forms of "rich content" on the internet is what has caused me to be uninterested in Flash in the first place -- well, that and the fact that it's been a security hole for
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The fact that you refuse to look at it doesn't change the fact that it's still what most people use.
No, most people do *not* use it. Most people use Flash. That was his point.
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Executives employed by companies try to make those companies do well.
...unless that executive is named Stephen Elop, Steven Ballmer, or Leo Apotheker. ;)
Re:Business as usual (Score:5, Funny)
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12-hour analog clock is less error-prone than the 24-hour version. If you are willing to go all-digital then this advantage disappears.
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Look at a 24 hour clock when you are too far from the numbers. Tell me the time. Now repeat with a 12-hour clock.
Alternately, how many 24-hour analog wristwatches do you encounter? They exist, but what a PITA. When you do find one, look how enormous they make the numbers, often only printing every other. This is because you need to be able to read the numbers to make the clock usable.
The military uses 24-hour time to remove the ambiguous AM/PM nature of the 12-hour clock. And for the past 30 years, they can
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Once, some well known "C" developer, post an article about the current version of the Pascal programming version. Contrary to the Pascal community beliefs, the article had a lot of good critical points.
So, the main "Pascal" developer, added or changed features, and, the newer versions, allow to do everything, that was missing.
This sounds like a garbled reference to Kernighan's Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language. The title is drily amusing, and the points made in the article are technically true, but I can't help thinking that the dissing of Pascal is a bit disingenuous and/or missing the point. The language wasn't even designed for system programming, but as a teaching aid. Its popularity far outside the original remit just underscores the dearth of sane high-level languages at the time.
Anyway, Wirth didn't tweak