Recent Comments:
How to transmogrify your clothie into High Inquisitor Whitemane {WoW}
Feb 15th 2012 12:45AM Good article, but you should include alternatives for quest reward items, since many of us did the quest involved years ago and have long since dumped the item.
Adobe's CEO: Jobs' Flash letter is a 'smokescreen' for 'cumbersome' restrictions (update: video) {Engadget}
Apr 30th 2010 2:48AM @Wesscoast "Flash Sucks and it's Buggy" is not the message I was sending at all.
I don't think Flash sucks. I think there are some poorly designed Flash applications out there, and some of them are somewhat slow, but those are individual applications and not the platform.
And as for Flash being buggy, my experience does not agree. Again, there some some individual programs that have bugs, but the platform itself is pretty stable.
Plus, don't forget that Steve Jobs' idea for getting around Flash is to use HTML5 and JavaScript. Have you ever kept track of how many JavaScript errors you see while browsing around a variety of sites? It's got to be at least as buggy as any problems with Flash, and more likely quite a bit moreso.
Most importantly, the decision to deal with a "buggy" Flash-based website should be MINE. Not Apple's and not Steve Jobs'.
@onlymyrailgun What Jobs' had to say about 3rd party development tools was just simply ridiculous. There's just enough truth in there to make the argument seem plausible, but as a practical matter none of the things he mentioned would be much of an issue in the real world.
First of all, any developer who is faced with the task of using new features from a new OS release always has the option of switching back to using the tools supplied by Apple. Sure, it may take time and money to switch, but it's always possible.
And even if a developer had to rewrite an application from scratch to access new OS features, the situation would be EXACTLY what Steve Jobs' already wants developers to do when he says they should rewrite their code to use HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript instead of Flash.
Secondly, in most cases the only reason why a company making 3rd party dev tools wouldn't be tripping all over themselves to support new features and OS releases is because the 1st party company (Apple) is refusing to cooperate with them.
OK, I'll admit, that one is a virtual certainty in this scenario. So if Steve Jobs' argument is that 3rd party development tools are a bad choice because Apple simply won't play nice, well, it's hard to argue with that.
Last, while I don't have hands on experience with Flash CS5, I'd be real surprised if there wasn't some provision for code to access native code APIs. It's less work for Adobe to do things that way -- they don't have to replicate all of Apple's APIs if they just give you a means to access them. So when Apple released a new API, it would be just as accessible as any previously existing one.
Adobe's CEO: Jobs' Flash letter is a 'smokescreen' for 'cumbersome' restrictions (update: video) {Engadget}
Apr 29th 2010 9:59PM As far as I'm concerned, any comment from Steve Jobs on this subject that does not include an admission that Apple's PRIMARY reason for blocking Flash (and Java) is because it would provide an uncontrolled (by Apple) means of code getting onto their hardware, is at best a prevarication and at worst an outright lie.
Let's look at some of Steve's "reasons".
* Steve says Flash is proprietary. Maybe so, but it's one of the more open proprietary standards around, with dozens of 3rd party products that can create Flash movies.
Besides, seriously, who the F*CK cares? How many people have ever looked at that little icon which indicates a Flash application wasn't loaded by mobile Safari and thought, "Oh good, Apple protected me against that darn proprietary code!"
Steve also says that most Flash-based video is also available in raw H.264 format. I'm skeptical about that, but at any rate there's still a lot of video that isn't H.264. Not to mention that Flash is far more than just video.
Right after saying that most videos are also available in H.264, Steve goes on to say that most Flash video uses an older video format with a different codec which is not accelerated by hardware.
Make up your mind, Steve... either most video is in H.264 and could be played by HTML5 as well as Flash, or else it's NOT in H.264 format and can only be played by Flash, except that Flash isn't supported.
* Steve says Flash is buggy. Well, even if this is true, i'd rather have a Flash-based web page crash on me occasionally than not be able to access it at all.
And why does my phone crash all the time even without Flash on it?
And what about Java? Is he claiming that this applies to Java as well?
* Steve says Flash is slow. I agree... sometimes it is. However, once again, I'd rather have a Flash-based web page perform slowly than not be able to access it at all.
* Steve says Flash chews up battery life, and points to hardware acceleration of H.264 video as being much more power efficient. I point to other versions of the Flash player that support hardware acceleration and ask Steve why Apple can't work with Adobe to create a Flash player that can use whatever hardware support is available.
* Steve says that Flash applications are designed for computers using a mouse rather than a touch screen. Perhaps a valid point, but couldn't you make much the same argument for websites in general?
Steve goes on to say that if you have to re-write your Flash application to be touch-screen friendly, why not just redo it with JavaScript and HTML5?
Well, for much the same reason that I don't buy a new house every time I decide a chair might go better on the other side of the living room. Many Flash applications would require only a minimal change to drastically improve their touchscreen-friendliness. Why spend weeks or months recreating everything from scratch?
Canon AE-1 Program SLR gets a digital retrofit {Engadget}
Apr 29th 2010 9:18PM It's quite obvious, as others have said, that they basically tore apart a point & shoot and wrapped the AE-1 around it. Cute, but hardly a technological marvel.
My guess is that the 50mm lens has had the glass removed so that the original P&S lens can simply look through the hole. Note that you never see the front of the lens without the lens cap on.
WSJ: Apple wants e-books to be $12.99 or $14.99 for hardcover best sellers {Engadget}
Jan 26th 2010 9:04PM Since Amazon has a Kindle application for the iPhone, and Barnes and Noble has a similar reader for THEIR ebooks, and since the new tablet device is theoretically supposed to run iPhone apps, it seems to me that you'll have a few choices of where to buy your eBooks.
Anyway, the cost of current hardcover releases is only part of the picture. To me, the main problem with eBooks is when they charge 90-100% of the same price for books that are out in paperback.
Microsoft loses patent appeal; Word and Office to be barred from sale starting January 11 {Engadget}
Dec 22nd 2009 7:20PM @Jack If i4i had sued Microsoft for COPYRIGHT infringement, then I'd agree, hands-down. But they didn't sue them over that... Maybe they should have, but instead they sued over patent infringement. No doubt because the payoff for a patent infringement suit is typically much greater than for copyright.
In a patent infringement suit, the issue isn't just as simple as the question of whether or not Microsoft copied from i4i. Maybe they did, but that wouldn't matter if it's true that the patent never should have been issued in the first place. And in my opinion, that is the case.
Microsoft loses patent appeal; Word and Office to be barred from sale starting January 11 {Engadget}
Dec 22nd 2009 3:04PM @Jack The point is that there never should have been a patent granted in the first place. Even if Microsoft did EXACTLY the same thing as i4i (something that's been neither established nor even claimed), it shouldn't matter 'cos there never should have been a patent on the technique. Microsoft did nothing more or less than exactly what XML was created to do from the very start.
Microsoft loses patent appeal; Word and Office to be barred from sale starting January 11 {Engadget}
Dec 22nd 2009 2:04PM This is just ridiculous and a perfect example of how screwed up the patent office is these days. There never should have been a patent granted for something like a "custom means of writing XML" since the whole point of using XML is being able to customize it in the first place.
I don't know if Microsoft made that argument in the trial, but it wouldn't surprise me if they did not, since they undoubtedly have a few dozen patents that are equally unjustified.
Ultimately, what's going to happen here is that Microsoft is going to probably just buy out i4i and make the problem go away.
Fusion-io ioXtreme PCI Express SSD reviewed: wicked fast, bloody expensive {Engadget}
Nov 16th 2009 10:43PM When they make one with 512gb that costs half as much then MAYBE it will be useful.
People have been citing one use that justifies this card as being the editing of uncompressed HD video. Unfortunately, at 1080p resolution, 80gb would hold less than 8 minutes worth of uncompressed video. Maybe if you're editing fairly short segments that's enough, but there just aren't going to be that many people who need that kind of speed but can live with that little storage.
And let's not forget to add in the time needed to copy 80gb of data from your archival hard drive to the SSD before you start editing, and then the time needed to copy it back after you're done.
Priced as it is, I'm thinking this card is at least 75% profit. The real trick to making a card like this fast isn't to use fast Flash RAM, although that will make it even faster. But the real trick is to make the whole thing massively parallel. We can see that it's got at least 12 Flash RAM chips on it, and I'd guess that the big chip under the heat sink is a custom controller that spreads read/write requests across those 12 separate channels so that it can read or write 12x as much data in about the same amount of time it would take to access a single chip. Ultimately, this is a RAID device for flash RAM chips. It doesn't have to look like a RAID device to the computer it's installed in for it to work that way internally.
I have no doubt there will be soon be a variety of similar devices from other companies, at much lower prices. Heck, how about a PCI-E device that has something like 8 or 16 slots on it for you to install your on SDHC cards?
Adobe lets you use Flash to create... non-Flash apps for the iPhone {Engadget}
Oct 5th 2009 8:14PM @Michael Scrip
Dunno about other platforms, but there is a version of Flash for Windows mobile.
