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January 24, 2008
Energy costs, bashing
Energy costs, bashing: Link goes to a LiveJournal article which attempted to document the energy loads of some MySpace sites. Chad Udell offers analysis of how its measurements don't support subsequent Flash-bashing. But it's some of the later comments at the original article which really concern me... the name-calling risks negative longterm effects... "bastard" and "freetard" and such don't add anything. If you know someone who reacts emotionally when useful technology is attacked, and if you could you influence them to cool it, then you'd have my thanks, thanks. ;-) (By the way, I like how this commenter went with the flow: "I always turn off all the lights in my room before watching a flash-website, just to compensate my energy consumption, and totally save the planet by doing so!" Very wu wei, that. ;-)
Posted by JohnDowdell at January 24, 2008 08:45 AM
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Is immediately flipping the bozo bit to call my opinion "bashing" easier than addressing my technical complaints in a substantive fashion?
Please, do me a favor. Ask all of the Flash software developers and all of the Flash support people if it's possible to run any unmodified, publicly released Flash player on any Linux distribution running on a PPC chip, or a Sparc chip, or an ARM chip, or a MIPS chip. If anyone answers to the affirmative, ask for a demonstration.
If that works, then I'm wrong, and I'll give you and Adobe a very public apology.
Posted by: chromatic at January 24, 2008 10:05 AM
The "bashing" I was concerned about in that title was the bashing of people calling others names, rather than your relatively minor "Flash is killing the planet!" title. (ie, I wanted people to stop bashing you! ;-)
Here's a list of the environments where Adobe has invested in providing predictable multimedia capability atop diverse systems. (The full set of such diverse systems will, naturally enough, always be larger than the subset of those systems which can be bridged.)
Posted by: John Dowdell at January 24, 2008 01:47 PM
Ah, I've re-read what you wrote and I owe you an apology. I apologize; I completely misunderstood.
[jd sez: No worries, but thanks for making me feel better about *me* misreading the prior post...! ;-)]
Regarding the supported environments, Adobe is completely within its rights to choose which operating systems, processor families, and platforms to support. I do hope that you can understand my position, however. I cannot, in good conscience, support a proprietary platform -- no matter how well-designed, well-implemented, or well-intentioned -- that deliberately excludes specific operating systems, processor families, and platforms for non-technical reasons. Certainly no one can reasonably expect a Flash player for the Commodore 64 or the ZX-Spectrum... but locking *BSD users or people without the correct processor out of your proprietary ghetto is, to me, unacceptable behavior for the open web.
I don't expect you to agree, and that's fine. Your employer has the right to make its own choices, just as I believe I have the right to call the effects of those choices hostile to the nature and future of the technologies that allow Adobe to make those choices.
Posted by: chromatic at January 24, 2008 02:44 PM