As a graphics and media guy who's passionately hated flash since its first release in the late 90s, I'm not frowning at Apple's disdain for flash. Point of fact, I'm giggling at all of the people shrieking and moaning about the lack of "support" for it on the iPhone - after years of Flash running like lukewarm shit on the PPC and additional years of it running like microwaved shit on Intel macs (running like greased butter on the PC all the while), with flashblock being one of the few firefox plugins I use, I can't say I care one way or the other. For me, Flash is little more than an annoyance, long since filtered out.

And if Adobe hadn't bought Macromedia to get Flash, I wouldn't care.

Adobe's had a love/hate relationship with Apple for decades - they love that graphics nerds buy macs to use photoshop, they HATE Apple for consistently kicking APIs and architectures out from under them. They've owned Flash for awhile now - with Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, the Flash and artist-friendly media tools acquired through the Macromedia acquisition... Adobe's the ONLY non-Apple ISV you need on your machine if you're a Creative Professional.*

Apple can live without Flash. They could certainly survive without Adobe, but could they take the publicity (and userbase) hit of losing the Creative Suite? Would Adobe threaten to pull their Mac apps to pressure Apple into supporting Flash? Will they? They certainly could, if they felt like it. Maybe they already have - it would certainly explain Apple's de-emphasis of Pro Anything over the past few years.

* It's an old argument, but screw Office. Ten years in media design and I've used openoffice on one project, to deal with an excel spreadsheet.

Unfortunately, for those of us in the graphics biz, the only remotely-useable alternative is Windows.

Mobile devices, etc. is fortunately a different story.

One is an ex-elite soldier recovering from torture/experiment-induced amnesia and a feeling of duty to a dead comrade. The other is a supersoldier who is REALLY good at killing things, and is the last survivor of a battle that, until last week, was never really shown. Now, which sounds like a more interesting story?

One's a pointy-haired emo whiner, the other is a heavy metal astronaut.

Now, which character would you rather play?

Seriously. Anyone else try to download Alien Swarm on Monday?

Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. Let the "cloud" be an opt-in, "use THIS much of my up/down" defined thing so that anyone either downloading a game or willing to serve as a content node for a game is then using their bandwidth to - effectively - make the "It's FREE AND YOU CAN GET IT NOW!" statement from Valve actually MEAN "get it now" and not "you can watch Steam poop itself every time you try for it until you magically without any explanation get a slot!"

In certain circumstances, BT is potentially a Damned Handy thing for content distribution.

(In other circumstances, it's a damned aggravating thing that makes lawyers salivate, but that's not what I'm talking about here)

If this ever happened to me, there wouldn't be much of a decision-making process. I'd either roll back the OS to a version that actually works (eg doesn't have the ad shit), disable the ad thing somehow (even if it means going crazy with the hosts file), or, failing all of that, just install Windows on my mini.

I did the same thing with tynt.com - That it's an ad/analytics thing is one thing. That the assholes break twenty-plus years of clipboard DWIM in the process, however.... unforgivable. Absolutely unforgivable. Fortunately, you can add tcr.tynt.com to your hosts file - problem solved.

Apple's been cutting corners on hardware since the beginning - on the desktop side, they've always made up for it in software. Here, not so much. This isn't a new thing - you're having the same experience that Power Mac, Newton, Apple III and Performa owners the world over have had... the difference is that since it's happening to YOU it's NEW and SPECIAL and MUST BE FIXED NOW DAMMIT!!!

Yeah, get in line. Behind the Apple III owners, the eMate owners, anyone who's ever heard of a Pippen, and the rest of us who were sick of using Apple hardware BEFORE it was "cool."

I own an iPhone. It works, the battery life is a joke, and the keyboard is Fawlty Towers incarnated as software.

But it's COOL, dammit!

Talk about irritating - a few months ago (maybe longer), Google decided my handle is a plural. So now if I want to googlebate, I have to search for "solios -solio" (and throw in a few other minuses to weed out Matrox, etceteras). Google's first hit for 'solios' is not solios (there's a shock), whereas the first hit on Bing is something me-related. There's also this - a case example of Bing coming back with DWIM and Google sticking its thumb up its ass and getting drool on the floor.

Google was fantastic when there weren't any real alternatives - now, Bing is (largely) Better, and intertia is the only thing that's keeping me using it. Inertia, and Bing's UI doesn't feel quite as 'clean.'

Combine with the clunkiness of Analytics and GMail's refusal to sort by name or date (yes, you can SEARCH but sometimes you need a SORT, it's FASTER), and Google isn't particularly good at anything these days - they just happen to serve up a useable array of related services. They're more convenient than higher quality (and supported) alternatives, and some cases (iPhone, for example - at least for now), there is no alternative.

If Google's threatened 'socializing' of GMail goes through, it had better be opt-in. Not opt-out.

The ultimate monetary advantage of using OpenGL for games (imo and ime) is it makes Mac porting a hell of a lot easier.

The ultimate monetary downside of making Mac games is that only a small fraction of the install base can upgrade their video cards - the one constantly-moving PC gaming component.

You can build a useable gaming PC for under $700 - the buy-in for a Mac with an upgradeable video card is presently $2499. With the vast majority of PC gamers using wintendos, Windows/DirectX is the LCD. It's where most (or all) of the money is.

I think it's fantastic that iD uses OpenGL and makes all of their games cross platform. I also think it's unfortunate that iD is the exception to the rule... but I also vote with my wallet, and I use a $600 non-upgradeable (video, anyway) Mac Mini for all of my Mac-oriented needs, and a massively-upgradeable, equally-priced Shuttle PC for everything else. Which includes a long list of games that haven't been released on the Mac - and even if they had been, wouldn't be playable on the GMA-950 video chipset. It's shite for games, fine for Photoshop... and Windows is the reverse for me.

If I need a wintendo to play Orange Box or S.T.A.L.K.E.R., does it really matter if the game uses DirectX or OpenGL?

Not really. :-|

Which might make for some interesting theoretical attacks -- if I can craft a block with the same hash as a block I'm interested in, I can read the contents of the other block.

// Assume that an information-leak bug that allows the attacker to read the hash values and other metadata necessary, which is entirely possible.

The only FPS game I've come across in recent memory that offers the pleasures of Tetris With Guns - eschewing Story in its entirety - is Team Fortress 2. On the right server, that game is more fun I've had with a computer since I first discovered porn on the internet.

I got TF2 with the rest of The Orange Box - and while Half-Life 2 and its episodes were beautiful and mostly entertaining (occasionally irritating) to play through, and while Portal kicked all the ass in the world, both games have, for me, extremely limited replay value. I'll play HL2 Episode 3 when it comes out so I can Find Out What Happens Next, and I may try some Portal Advanced Maps one of these days... but for me, TF2 is all the potential of the FPS, realized. I would have payed the full Orange Box price for just TF2 and considered it money well spent. $30 for a pair of games I'll play twice at most? Okay... $30 for a pair of games I'll play twice at most and a game I've played at least an hour a day for the past three weeks, just for the fun of it? That's value for money.

Being a subsistence-level wage slave, I need value for money - $30 or $50 for a game needs to pay off in hundreds of hours, not the typical 5-35 of Portal or Halo or your average Final Fantasy.... and that's ultimately the issue with story-based games for me - you get a few hours out of them, and that's it... if you want to play it again just to enjoy the gameplay, well... tough noogies.

... for serious. The ability to see who's running what, how much of the machine resources they're eating, and the ability to run the machine equivalent of an airstrike on their ass? Priceless. I've been able to clean up so much in the way of dirty, nasty BS with a sudo ps -aux followed by a selective sudo kill... it's just not even funny.

For sheer utility, cat and tail are a close second.

As with anything *nix, ymmv.

Eh. They're no more of an inconvenience than any other ISP, and are far, far less evil than Comcast or Verizon when it comes to what they'll let you do with the connectivity they're selling you.

Seriously. Speakeasy has been doing this for at least the last five or six years, at least with their home service, and nobody's pissing and moaning and calling them evil.

True, it's Raining Eye Candy and while that's definitely a good thing (the burgh's population being generally Geriatric), life would be quite a bit easier if they'd work up a healthy froth of Common Sense in days rather than years.