Yeah, Flash is fine.

Unix/Linux: I cut my teeth working on SGI/Irix based machines ‘way back when.’ Moved on to Solaris when SUN had more floating point than anyone else could touch. I still have a warm fuzzy for straight DOS though, but certainly its use is limited.

I think I need to redo my debian load. It’s been quirky.

As for Greg being a “newb,” it hardly matters. This is a sort of political/opinion/anthro/anything-goes blog, most of the people here probably don’t have a lot of exposure. The rest of us, well, I actually enjoy the *nix topics, even if revel is pointing out the (often simple) windows equiv.

The attitude you express in this comment is very typical of the “old days” (more than about two years ago?) when people who wanted to get into using Linux were often scared off or driven off by postnoobule hacker talk.

We call those the “old days” because it is not so much how it is done now. Ignorance of Linux is not something to be disdained, it is something to be valued as this ignorance is a beautiful, empty vessel waiting to be filled with kernel talk and one liners.

Perhaps you should cut back on your coffee intake for a couple of days…

HAHHAHAHAAHAH!!!

It only seems fine if you use Windows, where it is one of many software technologies that break your computer ll the time. On my computers, it’s the only thing that regularly does not work perfectly .

but the advantage was that I could create something in Flash and not have to worry about how it would look – it’d look exactly like it looks on my machine here.

Which is why I don’t even look at flash-only web sites. High resolution moniters + morons designing flash web sites = I can’t see them.

But seriously, I have no clue what you are saying regarding hardware. Why does flash need to know the processor it is working on????

The Flash download is acceptably lightweight and the actual binary format is open and accessible (though not changeable) by anyone who wants to read it. That it’s binary isn’t really the problem it’s made out to be, unless you’ve never spent time sifting through things with a hex editor and a look-up table to correlate codes with instructions (which I remember doing back in the early 90s when I was working with the TIFF format).

But these days, Flash is waning. Most people who had learned ActionScript 2.x (which is essentially ECMAscript on a parallel with Javascript 1.5) looked at the completely different ActionScript 3, and decided not to learn it and jumped ship to become Ajax practitioners instead. This is good, because it demonstrated that the advance in libraries that we now work with has rendered many of the reasons for adopting Flash as invalid – Ajax libraries can more or less mean that things look predictable on different platforms, can move, and are not tied to a specific provider (although to be fair, Adobe’s ownership of Flash was actually quite beneficial, stimulating and benevolent compared to what it might have been if it were a MS technology then).

Now we have other ways of achieving the same sort of ends – SVGweb for example ( http://code.google.com/p/svgweb/ ) which uses open and free standards, authorable by anyone. Ironically, it still uses Flash as a fall-through technology if it can’t find suitable capabilities on the browser it’s working on, but at least you’re now able to get a predictable output across platforms, until at least the horrible non-compliant browsers go away one day.

Flash is basically just used nowadays as a container for video (which is demoting the whole Flash platform to about 0.5% of what it can do), and even that might go away given widespread adoption of html5 browsers if they ever decide which video formats to prioritise. Then there’s be no Flash at all.