The work that this guy did is amazing, no doubt. But the player supports SWF v1. The current version is 10!

Gnash already supports v7 and some features of v8/9 and is still not very usable.

Doing simple animations is one thing. Do you really expect to have a decent AS3 interpreter running in javascript? No question about video of course.

On the other hand this player could have some niche applications. If someone knows flash, needs some simple animations without violating standards and without messing with JS/SVG directly, they could use this. But as a general-purpose flash player? I don't think so.

So is "apple", would you name your new phone like that?

Trademarks is all about registering common words for business purposes. And it makes some sense (at least much more than patents or copyright).

Thanks for your deep insights, I am now convinced that the Gnome people should listen to anonymous trolls like you to make their decisions.

If gnome (and linux in general) wants to escape the geek-in-a-basement marketshare, it has to focus on the average non-tech user. And no, pasting a link to a windows share is not what this user does.

Instead, this user is interested in finding "that god-damn file" that he saved somewhere yesterday morning and has no idea where it is. He doesn't organize his files, he doesn't care about file hierarchies, he just wants his file. He also wants to easily find that openoffice window that got lost in the 20 windows he opened and never closed in the last hour. Believe it or not, no desktop environment makes it really easy to do such basic stuff.

IMHO Gnome Shell and Zeitgeist is a step in the right direction for the average user.

If you run your site on a single server then it's much smaller than slashdot, no matter how many cores or ram you have. Also, it means that your site is down much more often than it should. If you want a serious infrastructure with redundancy, EC2 is a quite cheap solution, with many advantages in terms of maintenance and scaling.

With the two new types, their instance list looks like the McDonalds menu.

I'd like a Quadruple Extra Large with cheese please.

Yes, but I don't think that RMS in his letter actually wanted to promote dual licensing.

The letter states his opinion on a very specific issue: the acquisition of Sun by Oracle. RMS thinks this is bad for MySQL and one of the reasons is that a source of funding, namely dual licensing, that used to be re-invested in the development of MySQL will probably stop being used that way. The point is that, if Oracle holds the copyright, sells licences, but doesn't give back to the community in terms of development of the GPL version, this will be worse than the current situation. RMS prefers that MySQL stays away from Oracle, this doesn't mean that he likes dual licensing (after all, none of the GNU software is dual licenced).

The letter was sent to the European Commission in support of blocking the acquisition. It's not the usual RMS speech.

It's called Affero GPL

Quoting from one of TFAs (emphasis mine):

Ok you don't mind paying a little extra to make your mp3 player work with your Mac, fine by me.

Now tell me, do you want your printer to work with your Mac or not? What about your camera, external hard disk or DSL modem? Do you visit any websites other than apple.com? Do you expect them to work with safari?

If you do want these stuff then you do give a huge damn about interoperability and standards, even if you are too short-sighted to realize it.

It will be quite fun if a bot-wars started, where the rest of the bots try to kill Mydoom before it kills their hosts.

This is totally irrelevant. HTML5 is a new standard and can use whatever is best for the job, not what was popular for whatever reason before. Because otherwise we should use the crappy Sorenson H.263 (old flash codec), it's probably still the #1 codec on the web.

The fact is that for something so important and so widely used as the web, it is indispensable that the standard can be freely used by everyone, and not controlled by whoever happens to have the patents for some video format. Freedom of the web is much much much more important than picture quality. Let alone that if ogg is used in HTML5, it will attract a lot of research and very quickly we'll have a high quality, free to use video format.

Btw, your codec list is misleading. Flash does support H.264 but still its old format (H.263) is more widely used. Moreover it supports HTTP and 99% of the video sites (including youtube) use HTTP to serve videos. RTMP is used for "real" streaming with Flash Media Server (Adobe's streaming server that few people use due to high price) and RTMPe that you mention, is the encrypted version of RTMP, used by very very few.

The only thing these web sites know is that you IP visited their website. Similarly, these people on bittorrent only know that this IP downloaded one particular song. Now what if your ISP reveals the complete list of sites you visit? Or blogspot reveals that you own a blog? By your reasoning this should be ok, these sites know the IP anyway.

Privacy is not about hiding secret information, it's about hiding the link between public information. Your IP is public and the list of all websites in the world is public, but the link between the two is very important.

In court you don't need mathematical proof, you need evidence. Arguing that an mp3 tagged as "metallica" was in fact a recording of you singing in the bathtub is not the best defense.

Being free has nothing to do. I expect a high level of privacy from well known sites like last.fm. And in many countries websites are actually required by law to be very explicit about their privacy policies and let users decide if they want to use the site or not.

Right now you shouldn't care, I agree.

Now let's jump in time, say 10 years from now, and suppose that the vision of the "software as service" supporters turns out to be completely true. There is no operating system, no Windows, no Linux, no OSX, you just buy a "Google Machine (TM)", you switch it on and it shows a browser (without saying that it's a browser) with google.com loaded (but you don't know that either). Your Google Machine is always connected wireless to the "cloud", you type "write a document" to the box and an empty document appears and fills your screen. What is happening in your computer is that javascript code is being executed (but you don't know that). This code communicates with google servers where some other code is running. Everything is cloud and javascript.

So, do you care now?

Call him crazy but Stallman tries to see where technology goes and predict how this can create a threat to our freedom. Don't think about today, think about the future.

I bet when Stallman was announcing GNU in the early 80s, many people were thinking "why do I care if binary proprietary code runs on my computer" (well most people didn't even have computers).