Zed Shaw on Flash | Hacker News Reader

Zed Shaw on Flash

oppugn.us

100 pointswhalesalad35 comments

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?

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?

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?

I'm really not a serious guy... I thought it was a funny article too (I chuckled once or twice). My "serious" response was because it was a "serious" (non-satire) post... I would have had a funny response if it was from The Onion.

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'

Thanks. For OSX users, those files are in ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash\ Player/.

For Windows users just right click on the movie, settings, storage, put the slider on 0kb.

There's a new global settings option that probably does it on a global basis.

If you play Flash games you will probably find achievements/progress/etc don't save though.

That's why it's also nice to have a script which cleans out the flash storage. You can play the movies, etc, then just wipe everything out. I didn't realize that the local slider worked for their cookies. I thought you had to do that on their website.

Yeah, there's some other stuff coming for it soon too ... Adobe's started paying a bit of attention to it since the private browsing debacle.

I hope they fuck that stupid web settings manager* off next, that's probably the best thing they can do to make the settings/options easier to understand.

* http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay...

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

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

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.)

Why is it more secure? Because it is less error prone?

Don't forget 'o', for others!

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

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.

Couldn't have expressed it better myself.

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.

It's a shame because he's dead right ... It must be difficult waking up every day with that kind of anger ...

I have no problem with the chosen writing style because that's all it is. I don't think he's actually thrashing around his room and loading a pistol.

It's a hard one to say isn't it? On the one hand, ad hominem is mostly useless, but on the other hand, some things are so deeply wrong and reeking of badness that to not attack them when discussing them is to do a disservice to any discussion of the debacle.

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.

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.)

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.

I think you're missing the point of the oppugn.us website? http://oppugn.us/posts/1270018322.html

I'm not particularly offended by the language or writing style, but signal to noise ratio was pretty low. If you are going to write like this, at least be funny.

If you're going to read one of Zed Shaw's rants, at least have a sense of humor.

The guy has a strong opinion on many things. Strong enough to piss off the people that agree with what he says. He also adds in a lot of "noise", because frankly, it gets people's attention. Case in point: This article.

The rant is an important traditional form of rhetoric in hackerdom, and this is a fine specimen. Both vitriolic and poetic (Neckbeard 9000!), the point, in case anyone missed it, is: Flash bad.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

I bet you commend this poster as well: http://www.ironstarmovement.com/forum/topics/top-10-reason-w...

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.

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