There is a DataGrid component in the free Flex SDK. The AdvancedDataGrid is part of the data visualization package that comes with Flex Builder Professional. In general, the Flex community thinks the AdvancedDataGrid is garbage. Slow, messy, and written by engineers that aren't part of the main Flex team who don't follow the official best practices. There are functions in its classes that are hundreds of lines long. I'm not kidding. I know guys who have written their own implementation of the features in AdvancedDataGrid because it sucked so bad. Thankfully, most use-cases for a DataGrid will be handled just fine by the regular DataGrid in Flex.

I imagine that the content owners aren't quite sure how Internet TV can be most profitable yet. I doubt they make much from advertising through Internet streaming compared to the traditional TV market. In a knee-jerk reaction, they're saying that if you're going to watch their shows on a TV (which Boxee obviously lets you do), then you should do it with the full set of commercials, rather than the one or two that get displays with the on-demand Internet streams. For the time being, TV streaming through a browser is probably considered a hassle for most viewers, so they have to make up for it with fewer advertisements. Boxee takes away the hassle (and in many cases, makes things BETTER than traditional TV), so content providers think they're getting ripped off again. In short, they're trying to insert the maximum amount of annoyance viewers will tolerate, and Boxee is screwing it all up! How dare they.

Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, admitted on the company's blog that the content owners demanded that Boxee stop displaying Hulu content.

This happens with Adobe Flash Player with every new major release. Dozens, if not hundreds, of websites think you have an older version of Flash Player because they check for something like majorVersion == 9 rather than majorVersion >= 9, and they display a "please upgrade" message when you're actually running the brand spanking new player. It's amusing, but a little sad since it happens over and over again. Still though, everything is fixed within a couple weeks, and it's no big deal. Microsoft needs to suck it up, accept that some developers are dumb, and force those folks to fix their broken version checks. It'll only increase the number of devs who did it wrong next time, and the problem will be worse when the major version finally gets a change.

Notes on your Java vs Flash upsides. * Flash also supports TCP sockets, not just HTTP requests. Also, AMF (also commonly known as Flash remoting) is a lightweight binary format available to Flash commonly used for live streaming data. The primary implementation for the server-side is written in (you guessed it) Java. * Correct, Flash doesn't support signing to add increased functionality. However, Flash Player 10 now allows the user to open and save files from the local file system. * Yeah, OpenGL would be cool. There is now limited 3D support in FP10. * Have you heard of Flex? No keyframes in sight. Many Java developers love it for building web UIs that integrate with Java backends. Macromedia started working on Flex for exactly the reasons you describe. Developers aren't animators and frame-based UI development doesn't make much sense. * I've not needed to internationalize any of my recent projects, so I can't respond to the current state of this one. * Yes, Java is faster. However, Flash's VM speed is much closer to Java than that of most JavaScript engines.