

Zed Shaw on Flash - whalesalad
http://oppugn.us/posts/1275555292.html

======
watty
Some of it is accurate but some of it sounds like an ignorant child fan-boy
ravaging against the PS3.

First, Adobe's bosom buddy isn't Microsoft. Microsoft created a direct
competitor to Flash called Silverlight. Adobe didn't intentionally make Flash
10 slower on your computer than Flash 9, just as nVIDIA's latest driver didn't
intentionally break my Starcraft 2. Adobe will work with any platform to get
Flash running.

I believe Adobe's developers are incompetent. They had a product leading rich
content on the web and failed to "finish". All they had to do was make it
stable across all operating systems (how many years have they had?). Adobe
failed but cursing the technology to the grave seems immature considering what
advancements we've made because of it. Like it or not HTML5 cannot completely
replace Flash and going backwards in technology will not happen.

"We should be rejoicing at their death because they represent the old
internet. The closed fucked up internet that ate people's productivity and
innovation" -- seriously, Flash ate productivity and innovation? Did you SEE
the web 10 years ago? Why is this getting upvoted?

~~~
yosho
oh c'mon, the post was hilarious. I think the HN community is a little too
serious sometimes. I definitely got a chuckle or two reading this. And while
not entirely accurate, I think the general points still remain valid.

The HN community reminds me of Sheldon from Big Bang Theory, anyone know what
I'm talking about?

~~~
lhorie
I think the general points have already been repeated to death elsewhere:
"flash sucks", "working with proprietary buggy APIs sucks", "filling a post
with swearwords makes me sooo alpha male", etc, etc.

Guys, we got the point the first 5 million times. Can we move along?

------
dhimes
Flash cookie control:

    
    
        alias playFlash='chmod 777 ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/\#SharedObjects'
    
        alias clearFlash='rm -rf ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/\#SharedObjects/*'
    
        alias stopFlash='chmod 555 ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/\#SharedObjects'
    
        alias showFlash='ls -l ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/\#SharedObjects'
    
        alias .cFlash='cd ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/\#SharedObjects'

~~~
holdenk
You probably don't actually want to make files in your home dir world
readable,writable, and executable [the chmod 777]

~~~
dhimes
Good point. It's just a lazy habit on my laptop I guess.

~~~
Saavedro
Use +w +x +r (Writable/Exec/Readable by user) and -w -x -r instead of octal.
It's shorter and more secure! (You can also prefix with u a or g, e.g. chmod
a+x, for user, all, and group, respectively.)

~~~
Gonsalu
Don't forget 'o', for others!

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chmod>

------
leviathant
Anecdote: I can run Hulu fullscreen on my 32" 1080p television from my 4 year
old Dell laptop, running Windows XP(!) - a laptop which cost me all of $700
when I bought it. It has 2gb of RAM and an Intel Core Duo processor T2300 (2MB
Cache/1.66GHz/667MHz FSB)

Flash can layer sounds, which is something that HTML5 can theoretically do,
but if I want to, say, emulate a drum machine, there's so much more I can do
in Flash that HTML5 is apparently years from being capable of speedily, let
alone capable of doing speedily. Additionally, I imagine it will be some time
before there's an HTML5-integrated equivalent to the Flash Media Server which
drives so many video sites.

If you can't run Hulu without lag on whatever your current system is, I
recommend you seek out a Dell E1505 laptop. It's four years old, mine was $700
when I bought it new (from the Outlet, mind you) so they can't be that
expensive now.

------
thejay
Couldn't have expressed it better myself.

------
pavlov
It's impossible to tell if there's any kind of point under all this "harsh"
language.

I feel a bit ill after wading through this post. It's like accidentally
stumbling upon hate speech. Disappointing that this got so many upvotes on HN.

~~~
pohl
Somebody get some smelling salts & move the lady to that fainting couch. Poor
dear just got out of finishing school only to discover that the world isn't
entirely made of taffeta dresses and lace doilies. That bad man was brusque,
profane, and made reference to Cthulu!

I'll give you this, though: "stumbling upon hate speech" is an innovative way
to Godwin a thread.

~~~
pavlov
All I'm saying is that I don't understand why he would make his point in this
manner.

English is not my native language and I only use the language in work
contexts, so my exposure to profanity is pretty much limited to Hollywood
output. I'm probably missing something important here.

(Btw -- the title has now been edited to include the author's name, but it
wasn't there when I wrote my original comment. If I'd noticed that this rant
is by Zed Shaw, I wouldn't have bothered trying to read it in the first
place.)

~~~
pohl
Zed's character in this piece (and others) is culturally-specific, so I can
see how it would perplex someone from elsewhere. It's easy to imagine veins
popping out of his forehead and his face beet-red, but it's actually just a
voice for expression, in a "ha-ha, only serious" way.

One could think of it like heavy metal music. From the musical output of some
bands, one might think they have serious issues, but if you look deeper you
might see bright, engaged, and literate folk - perhaps fans of H.P. Lovecraft
& Tolkein - adopting exaggerated characters for their own amusement, a little
catharsis, and maybe a groupie or two. While it's not my favorite genre, I
don't think anybody in Metallica really feels like a mute, paralyzed
paraplegic - I just think somebody liked Johnny Got His Gun.

I personally think that the world would be a boring place if the only way to
make a point was with your hands folded politely in your lap. Sure, it's
valuable and effective to do so, but to disallow other modes of expression
would be like saying that the only legitimate colors to paint with are
pastels.

I think Zed is hilarious, but I can see how you might not "get" him. He's a
writer. He may not be merely trying to persuade. He might also write to
entertain, vent, or just to express.

------
dspeyer
He has a solid point, but I can't help feeling the cure is going to prove
worse than the disease here. Apple blocking flash is like Galadriel taking the
ring and crushing Sauron. The reasons it's bad have nothing to do with any
redeeming qualities on Flash's part.

------
stevenwei
As a (former) Flash developer I've run into the HTTP header problem and am
shocked that they STILL haven't fixed it after all these years.

Flash is also horribly unstable under Linux (especially when dealing with Flex
apps).

And yeah, the whole using a web app to set shared object permissions and
security policy permissions is a bit ridiculous too. Considering you have to
actually _browse to the Adobe website_ to get to it. It makes internal
deployments (to devices which shouldn't have internet access) harder than it
should be.

I think anyone that has programmed in Flash for a while feels his
pain....thank god I'm no longer in that boat.

~~~
wanderr
Actually I'm told that the reason flash doesn't get the HTTP headers is
actually due to the browser API, not Flash itself. In that case Silverlight
shouldn't have access to them either unless it bypasses the browser altogether
for communications.

------
DrSprout
>It works great for them on their Neckbeard 9000 Triple Quad Dual X Neon
Nvidia NIOPIATE computer with SSDs in RAID-26 configuration.

That sounds a little more epic than my Core 2 Quad with 4GB of DDR2 and an
Nvidia 9800GT, but I can't imagine the Flash performance is any better on The
God Box. And Hulu, while it does run alright, definitely leaves something to
be desired on every machine I've used it on.

------
spanishbombs
What's with all the bitching about Microsoft in an Adobe rant? Maybe a better
title would've been "Zed Shaw on what Steve Jobs doesn't approve of"

> Look, I could drag this on, but Adobe fucked themselves over. They actively
> spent years shitting on everyone at Apple

I remember before Macs became trendy when the primary reason to buy one was to
if you did a lot of graphic design work. If I were Adobe and my plan was to
actively shit on Apple then i'd withhold Photoshop from Macs before i'd
withhold Flash. I don't think Adobe saw much future in the desktop Linux and
Mac platforms, which isn't a stretch considering how little market penetration
they had at that time. They were wrong, of course, but that doesn't mean they
were going out of their way to say fuck you to Apple or actively trying to
shit on them. It was a business decision in the same way Apple nixing Flash on
the app store is a business decision.

------
alttab
While extremely immature and probably half accurate, I commend the author for
speaking his feelings, ignoring political correctness, and sometimes even
fact.

I'm not even being sarcastic. To win wars one needs to be motivated. Very
entertaining read if not anything else.

~~~
watty
I bet you commend this poster as well:
[http://www.ironstarmovement.com/forum/topics/top-10-reason-w...](http://www.ironstarmovement.com/forum/topics/top-10-reason-
why-ps3-sucks)

------
not_an_alien
A bunch of hyperbolic crap. But hey, it says "Fuck Flash!", so this is gonna
be popular among the HN/reddits/slashdots of the world no matter how much it
doesn't stick to reality.

