Re: linux-flashplugin7

Begin <45147931$0$63827$a726171b@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On 2006-09-23, "james <at> hal-pc.org" <"james <at> hal-pc.org"> wrote:
jpd wrote:
See for example http://ronja.twibright.com. Nevermind that all that
dark fibre and copper won't go away even if the original owners aren't
operating it. Also, quite a few people have 802.11 gear that could be
used.

The city of Houston (Tx, USA) is trying to build a public wireless
network, but are being hindered with our local telco and cable companies
suing them.

That presumably still has a fibre or copper backbone. mesh-routing might
be more interesting in that regard. Apparently the military are looking
into this also, using as much COTS h/w as they can. They seem to have
figured out that having everything tailor-made has its downsides.


Adobe does have a fairly good record with opening up file formats. Look
at SVG, PS, and PDF for example.

Wouldn't mind if they followed up that with the flash format. That would
be an improvement. It would probably still require a plugin of some
sort, which is just the thing if you want a stable browser. And it'd be
an excuse for webmonkeys to flashify even more, of course, where I'd
still prefer content in as simple a format as is reasonable.


There's more to Flash than stupid dancing hamsters and "eCards" [...]

Rumours have it the web is also more than that.


[...] I do wish people^Wwebmonkeys were a bit more concious of the
effects of concentrating on dancing hamsters instead of presenting
the content in an effective (readable) way.

True. Same goes for things being released in PDF. Fortunately Google
has the knowhow to make them searchable. It's a lot more than you can
say for Sun's website. EVERYTHING is PDF and therefore non-searchable.

Is it? It used to be both, but I haven't checked in a while. They are on
a silly spree there, adding requirements to login with no discernible
benefit for anyone but sun, removing anon ftp access, and so on.


[sun T1 and so on]
Did you see that they will make you one for free as a "student project"?

No, I didn't. It's a good start, but not what I ment. :-)


So what does macromedia and now adobe do? Create another thing that
the great unwashed likes and all the while it's not even a couple of
unsupported-elsewhere html tags, but an entire proprietary format, just
like, say, skype.

I agree whole heartedly, but as I stated before, there is a niche that
needed filling and the opportunity to make a buck presented itself.

Except that of course it gets then pushed to include more and more that
doesn't belong there, de facto locking out everybody who doesn't run
systems to the spec the plugin manufacturer deigns to support.


A company is looking out for their share holders and that's it. In
a free market the only way around that is to come out with a better
product (actually better or just cheaper) that will force them out.

The traditional (and a tad shortsighted) view is indeed just that.
Taking the long view, however, shows that being endlessly greedy in the
name of the shareholders is actually doing them, nevermind everyone
else, a disservice.

But that indeed does open the door for competitors to oust them, except
where things like network effects and monopolies force the reality to be
otherwise. Then again, large scale free market is pretty much impossible
without some government-provided infrastructure (laws, stuff like that)
so objecting to all regulation completely is a bit silly. But I digress.


So yes, I say it's crappy to try to try to lock in people and make us
all relive the wonderous days of mutually incompatible browsers of
back when. Only now the market is more skewed as it's drawn along
platform lines with macromedia^Wadobe actively thwarting efforts to
make their proprietary crap available on non-toy-os environments.

Please elaborate. Granted they have yet to release > Flash7 for UN*X.
Is that what you're referring to? They do have their own reader for
PDFs that runs in Linux.

I was talking about flash, and not even about specific releases. More
about a company *objecting* to people making their player for linux work
on FreeBSD, and of course about no specs to allow people to make a third
party player.

On pdf, well, see elsewhere in this group, a couple of weeks ago. :-)


They *could* have opened up the specs, but they chose to not do that
either. It would, among other things, have meant they would have to
compete on product quality and service delivered. Guess they don't stand
for that, eh.

Maybe that will happen now that Adobe has the rungs. Then again, what
would it matter? Isn't the majority of your argument that it's not
plain text?

I'd say it's at least two arguments. People being sensible about what
format to use I prefer over them letting themselves be blinded by flashy
dancing hamsters. I would prefer the format specs to be open over them
not being open, regardless of whether I prefer people not to use it.

Altough, not having access to the specs and/or alternative players makes
the latter preference that much stronger, of course.


[1] You thought the stuff on television was there to entertain you?
Ha! Think again.

Yet another reason I don't even own a TV. Freevo works well for movies
and I get my news from radio and the web.

No tv, no radio either. It seems that soon in Germany everybody is going
to be forced to get their money's worth of video and radio out of their
internet connection, that with the proposed monthly fee on any computer
that might possibly have access to the interweb and all the internet
tv... is there any? I haven't seen it. But hey, in theory you could,
maybe, so you get to pay.


I do believe I've gotten my point across and your opinions are duly
noted. Thank you for the exchange (other than the "haven't a clue" bit...).

Likewise, and you're welcome, including for that bit. :-P


--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.
.

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