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Archive for the ‘Opinion & Rant’ Category
Amazing Sand Painting
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
Some things are so amazing, they just have to be shared. Sand painting over a light box by Kseniya Simonova, who won Ukraine’s version of “America’s Got Talent.” It’s an interpretation of Germany’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine during WWII, and you can tell from the audience’s reaction how emotional the subject is there. Thanks to my sister for passing it along.
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Flash Takes It in the Teeth
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
It’s been a bad couple of weeks for Flash.
First you had some quotes from Steve Jobs of this ilk:
Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.
Ouch.
Adobe quickly put out a statement that they never ship Flash with known crash bugs (I’m not sure whether they did themselves any service with that remark), and then someone quickly proved they did. If you click on this link your browser will likely explode. It’s a Flash bug first reported in 2008. Only the 10.1 beta is safe.*
With support for HTML5 video and canvas, Flash is in trouble. If you’re using anything but IE, check this out. No Flash or Silverlight or Java here – just HTML5 canvas and JavaScript. The biggest supports under the Flash tent are market share, the lack of a specified coded for HTML5 video and, ironically, Internet Explorer, since they don’t offer much in the way of HTML5 support yet. If there was a HTML5 standard video codec and IE supported it, I don’t think their market share would last long. Big sites like YouTube are already experimenting with HTML5 video (h.264). And with breakout gadgets like the iPhone and (less likely) iPad not supporting Flash, consumers will demand alternatives.
Every time I hear about devs (some of my co-workers included) choosing the Flex API for AGS I have to bite my lip. With the life span of web mapping sites they’re probably more than safe going with Flash – it’s slide will likely be long and slow. But I think that slide is becoming inevitable.
*btw, if you have a supported graphics card the 10.1 beta will hit the GPU rather than clobber your CPU. It’ll keep your media center PC from eating itself.
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8%
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
From Slashdot:
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Happy Holidays!
Monday, December 21st, 2009
Have a happy and safe holiday season!
–Fuzzy Tolerance
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I Still Don’t Get Chrome OS
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
In general I’m a big fan of the fine folks at Google. You’ll rip Gmail and Google Docs and Google Reader and Google Chrome and Google Voice and a bunch of other Google stuff from my cold dead hands. But I just don’t get Chrome OS.
When I wrote about it a while back I said it was Google’s version of SplashTop – a hardware based VM that would launch extremely quickly and let you do a couple of basic things, like web browsing and instant messaging. After reading about it and checking out a VM version, in some ways it’s less than that.
I thought maybe they’d do something cool with their new windowing system like Moblin does with Clutter. As it turns out, their new windowing system is no windowing system – it’s a maximized Google Chrome browser. You aren’t going to be installing any other applications that might require another window, with the root partition being mounted as read only to emphasize that fact. It’s a web browser on top of a Linux kernel. Period. Whatever else you run will have to be a plugin for the Chrome browser.
I thought it could one-up SplashTop in that it could run on anything (vs SplashTop’s hardware solution), but that’s not the case either. Chrome OS is both hardware and software – it’s SSD only and will target specific WiFi chips. It’s an open source project so maybe somebody will port it (don’t know why), but out of the box you’ll likely need a netbook made specifically for Chrome OS or you’ll have to break out your toolbox and start replacing parts.
The security model is kind of cool. Since you can’t write to the root partition, the OS checks itself on every boot and if something is wrong it just restores the OS.
That’s a tight security model. With a Linux foundation, however, it isn’t like you’re walking around with your pants down.* I’m not sure how useful that level of security is.
I understand I’m not the target of this type of OS for the same reason Moblin (a very nice OS) doesn’t live on my netbook for more than a few days per release. I don’t want my netbook to look and act like my cell phone. It’s isn’t a cell phone. It’s a little laptop. I want it to look and act like a 1024×600 desktop OS. So maybe my thoughts on this type of OS are misguided and casual users will snap it up like hotcakes next year. But I still don’t get it.
*I’m looking at you Windows <fill in the blank>.
Tags: Google, Linux
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