Most people do not understand that Hydrogen, due to it's inherent instability and desire to chemically change in a volatile manner, is simply an anergy storing devices. Hydrogen is not very energy dense. Understanding it's role is important to determining whether or not to us it as it essentially acts as a battery. If you have X units of energy (electricity), the key question is how many units will you get back out of the hydrogen. So far most the most advanced systems have show that Energy in (Ei) has an Energy out (Eo) roughly equal to Eo = Ei/10. Not anywhere near as efficient as a lithium ion battery. Even lead acid batteries have better performance.

I guess people are worried that our state of the art igloo geometric designs, dogsled aerodymanics and maple syrup chemistry are in danger if poltical decisions are made without the benefit of science. Luckily there are only 78 of us in the whole country. We can probably sort it out in about a fortnight over a few Molson's beers while watching ice hockey. duane "Who won the damn gold medals at the last Olympics anyways?"

Because there are lots of us who work at Adobe who have been very vocal internally about ensuring that Linux is a first class O/S and released at the same time as the other O/S's. That is why Linux is getting the 64 bit Flash Player. More and more of us are using Ubuntu and RHEL on the server (our enterprise ESB uses RHEL/(WebSphere || Weblogic || JBoss) as a reference implementation!). Now if we could only talk our bosses into CS5 for Linux.....

It still wouldn't be irony, irony is sarcasm and that is not a sarcastic statement.

Agreed. We have been moving in this direction with the open screen project. My goal is to have the SWF format as open as PDF one day but there are a few hurdles. If we did it today, it would break backwards compatibility (bad). Many of us at Adobe believe we should not be a standards development org as we really don't own it (the community owns it). We just filter feature requests and build the reference implementation. Some of the components we open sourced (Tamarin) and many of the specs are published such as RTMP, AMF. I hope we get there one day. THanks for the input. We actually do listen and appreciate this type of feedback.

YOu could say you are also forced to use a browser then. You have a choice. If you want to see certain sites in their entirety, you can choose flash. If you want to experience only the text, use wget. If you want to see something in between, use a browser. your choice. There are still some old guys who don't even like to load images and only read the alt text. Can't make everyone happy so giving people choice is the only path we can take.

I am lighting fires under the PM's for this every day (I work for Adobe). There are many of us here that want support for 64 bit linux. You guys have every right to be whiny about this. I bitch about it myself. THere are Duane Nickull dartboards on more than one Flash Player engineers door. Keep up the pressure. - DN

Kenja is correct. You do not have to have it. YOu can choose other technologies. Adobe (which I work for) is all about choice. Anyways, I posted a couple of videos showing some of the experiences of Flash on the Android powered Nexus 1 phone. The experience is actually quite amazing.

http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2010/06/comparison-full-screen-h264-video-on.html

http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2010_06_06_archive.html

Duane (Disclaimer: I must disclose I do work for Adobe)

There's a restaurant in Vancouver (the Elbow Room) that's been doing something like this for years - if you don't eat all your food they request a donation to a food charity.

130 mb of ram while sitting idle? Then it's perfect for windoze and osx.... So what are the alternatives for *nix users now? dn grep this: s/$your_beliefs/$common_sense/i;

you are right. The way Flash (the swf format only, not the whole platform) was written circa 2003, it wasn't optimized to go to mobile devices. There were some issues and technical hurdles to get around. Some of them were simple (like stopping FP instances that are not in the visible part of the screen) or simply reducing the frame rates of flash applications that are using battery power when they are not in focus). Some required much more thinking such as form fields receiving focus when the tab is hit from an HTML form element above a flash form element). To scale to mobile was a challenge which has been met with the Flash PLayer 10.1. The Google Nexus 1 phone (which I own) does a great job of running the full version of Flash (not Flash Lite). The FP 10.1 has *huge* technical improvements from previous versions Adobe is full on excited about HTML 5 too. There are some really cool possibilities about using HTML 5 features side by side with Flash. Serge Jespers did a great job of showing this on his blog late last week: http://www.webkitchen.be/2010/03/05/the-html5-flash-marriage-geolocation/ The fact is that HTML being updated is not something everyone asked for, but in it's execution, there are some obvious features that I am glad to see such as the Video element. I do share some concerns about how more advanced API's get implemented (such as the document.evaluate(); API) for complex XSLT processing but hope the industry will figure it out. DN " any technology can be used for good or for evil. The only question is how you decide to use your coding time in between " - Gandalf

It's not an obsolete concept - HTML fails if you don't have online access or if you need a wet signature. Sure you can print out the HTML form but it's going to look like crap.

Adobe's security specifically doesn't allow you to do those kinds of operations unless you have access to the user's hard drive beforehand for installing trusted functions. Only really useable in a networked office/enterprise.

I too develop interactive PDF forms using LiveCycle and I'd like to add a few things.

Why PDF vs HTML forms? You don't have to be connected to the internet. Forms can be saved partially completed and be finished later (with Reader Extensions which allow saving, among other things, with Reader).

Do you need a signature with that form? HTML fails. With PDF you can print the form out, sign it and send it in - with 2d barcode technology that form can be scanned in on the receiving end and all data retrieved electronically.

Why Javascript or any other scripting ability (there's also FormCalc in PDF)? Besides error checking, math and other obvious things - interactivity. I can have the form adapt as it is filled in. Clicked a checkbox that says you're not married and don't have kids? You won't see those kinds of questions later on in the form.

This only scratches the surface - with the full suite of LiveCycle server technology you can do some pretty amazing stuff.

Sorry but you are completely wrong on your PDF history.

PDF was developed as a document exchange format. It had absolutely nothing to do with prepress, that didn't come about until version 3.

http://www.adobe.com/pdf/about/history/