If You’ve Lost Pornographers, You’ve Lost Middle America

Well, there go my videos. They might be dated, but they weren’t obsolete.

I was skeptical of the iPad dropping flash support, but when I saw some HTML5 demos the other day I realized it’s no big deal.

Here’s the great thing about HTML5: it adds a canvas element to HTML that you can then program with vector graphics or bitmaps. This is something I always felt was missing from HTML and it amazes me that it took this long to implement. Back in the day when I was creating web pages (in hand-coded HTML) I always found it annoying that you couldn’t do vector graphics on web pages. A simple pie chart had to be rendered on the server, converted into a .Gif and embedded into the web page. Ugh. Now, finally, HTML can do what my Atari 800 could do back in 1982.

Nice alt-text. “The Pause That Refreshes” would also have worked.

Is there nothing Steve Jobs can’t do? Is he God or wut?

But wait. Does this mean Mac users do more porn? 2nd question: there is porn on the internet? Srsly? I did not know that.

I kinda see Apple’s logic in this. Flash carries a heavy HW/resource overhead. Even on today’s phones, resources such as memory and storage space are at a premium and Apple would prefer to devote those resources to Apple related things than to Flash.

@Benedick: Slyboots. You’re so sexy when you get all coy like that.

@Tommmcat Still Gets Carly Confused With Meg: You said something over there on that other place yesterday that was just +100, FTW, Yay! But now I can’t find it, where was it?

porn is the driving force in our economy.
it developed the internet, it is in the process of developing robotics and now apple too.

three years ago yesterday Ghost (the then nameless stray) was hit by a truck and had his hip broken in front of my house. I was mowing the grass and saw it happen. I was sure he was a goner.
three years ago this morning he appeared on my doorstep and the rest is history.

@Prommie: Was it the thing about Joe Barton? Or the one about judicial activism? Those were my favorites from the last couple days…

@Capt Howdy: Happy anniversary to you and Ghost! What a beauty of a dog!

@Capt Howdy: Yay, Ghost! Impressive Paul Newman impersonation, BTW.

@Capt Howdy: Happy anniversary!

@Benedick:
found a nice home in the country for Lucy the lab.

@SanFranLefty:
he really is. how could you look into those eyes and not help him?
I have always seen him as a spirit guide

Obama Champions National Broadband Plan

Today the president signed a “presidential memorandum” directing the federal government and private telecom companies to identify unused airwaves that could be auctioned off or shared, to expand mobile broadband for consumers over the next decade. The goal of the government’s plan is to free up over 500 megahertz by reallocating airwaves now operated by companies, broadcasters and government agencies. The memorandum is part of the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan announced earlier this year.

While no one doubted that the Obama administration supported the National Broadband Plan, today’s memorandum takes the focus off of the fight to reclassify broadband (Net Neutrality) and puts it squarely back where the FCC wants it to be.

The broadband plan recommendation would see up to 280 megahertz of commercial spectrum freed up, as well as 220 megahertz of spectrum licenses held by agencies; the latter is controlled by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the technology division of the administration. Previously the FCC had proposed allowing television broadcasters to give up part of their large airwaves holdings in exchange for money from future auctions. The idea was not very popular with broadcasters who felt that they had already given up large amounts of spectrum for a previous auction in 2008.

Legal TJ: GOP senators who dug Thurgood Marshall out of the grave to shit on his corpse unable to name a single case of Marshall’s in which he was an “activist judge.”

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), failed nominee for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, also offers his unique perspective on Constitutional law, criminal law and criminal justice: To violate the 8th Amendment it has to be “cruel AND unusual punishment” so therefore if a majority of the states decide to draw and quarter thieves or drown suspected witches, it might be cruel, but it’s not unusual, and ergo it doesn’t violate the Constitution. Fucking tool.

@Capt Howdy:

You never know when love will strike, do you?

@SanFranLefty:

Apparently the teabaggers’ “I don’t know what’s in the Constitution but I’m sure this is against it” disease is contagious.

@Serolf Divad (and others re the Flash vs. HTML5 debate): The porn kings may determine where video goes on the internet, but HTML5 isn’t interactive. In another life, I’m a programmer, and the works that I mightily make all run in Flash. Flash is a full-on programmable thingy. That’s why it’s so heavy to run, but it also makes it a different beast from HTML5, which is only video, and can’t react to your actions more than stopping, starting or skipping to a different point. There’s no way to program a game in HTML5 (and there are a lot of Flash games — if you play it on a web browser, it’s probably a Flash game).

I’m not trying to be a Flash evangelist, just pointing out that calling out the death of Flash because HTML5 does video is like pointing to the death of blenders because food processors can knead bread. Who cares, when you want a margarita?

@IanJ: @Serolf Divad:

Good lord, you guys are geeks!

/off to write comments to Benedick about obscure Elizabethan revenge tragedies….

@Tommmcat Still Gets Carly Confused With Meg: It’s so hot with all their jargon. I, however, not only went to the gym this morning I also took the dogs hiking. I am the butchest person I know.

@Benedick:

You are looking very hairy-about-the-nethers this morning. I noticed that.

Speaking of Marshall, the bravest man ever to walk into little Southern courthouses and defend poor Black people, I’m looking forward to this.

@Dodgerblue: Oh, so jealous!!

@Dodgerblue: It was excellent.

@mellbell: Glad to hear it. I’m a subscriber to the Geffen and have sat through a lot of questionable stuff.

@Dodgerblue: This was originally going to be a round-up of three pron-inflected news stories called “Stinque After Dawn,” with a reference to Nomination Hearings Past as an opener.

One of the discarded items: “Pornographer buys Le Monde.”

TJ: Republican Sen. John Cornyn: “Liberty is not a cruise ship full of pampered passengers. Liberty is a man of war, and we’re all the crew.”

@nojo: I’ve enjoyed the lead photo, even though I’m a Diet Coke guy.

Annals of Self-Restraint: iPhone 4 just delivered, but I have to run off to the Stinque Remote Office to do some hackwork.

@nojo: >:-/

@nojo: If you mate your IPhone 4 and your IPad, what will happen?

@IanJ:

Re interactivity:
Smokescreen begs to differ. Javascript + HTML5 = Flash without Flash, FTW.

@Dodgerblue: Hot, steamy, subclassed NSURLConnections.

@al2o3cr:

Exactly! Javascript makes the interactivity possible. I’ve played an HTML 5 pong demo. That’s what convinced me that Flash is toast.

@Serolf Divad: But gad, AJAX is a beast…

What Flash really offers is not the programming as such, but useful development tools. Javascript approaches, even with libraries, are still somewhat DIY.

Flash also benefits from tying a scripting language to a browser plug-in, so you’ve installed the engine before you’ve visited a web page. With Javascript, you have the benefit of native browser processing, of course, but you’re still starting from scratch with each doohickey.

Adobe’s smart move would be “Flash AJAX”, using their design tools to spit out proper code and such. But they’re too busy trying to lock folks into their platform, and haven’t given it much thought.

@Serolf Divad: But you also get interesting proof-of-concept demos, like this:

http://graphicpeel.com/cssiosicons

And this:

http://demos.jeffbatterton.com/iphone-css3/

You’ll need Safari or Chrome (i.e., Webkit) to see the action, but these are renderings of iPhone icons and the iPhone world clock using nothing but CSS3 (including custom tags).

Adobe should be wayyyyy out in front of that shit, using Flash as the creation tool for whatever you can imagine. Silent Creative Partner would cream all over himself if he could play with a toy like that, instead of sending me Photoshop files and wishing me luck.

@nojo: Well, I looked at those in Chrome, my current browser of choice. Why is it that I’m supposed to be impressed?

@Dodgerblue: No hands!

Or rather: No images. No gif, no jpeg, no png, no Flash. Under the hood, it’s just pure code and CSS tags.

This is not the kind of thing you want to try at home. But to me, it shows what Adobe could be doing as a skunkworks project: Outputting a Flash design file to use only HTML/CSS/Javascript.

You don’t get the real benefits until all browsers (particularly IE) catch up with their mad rendering skillz, but you wanna be ready to deploy when the market’s ready. And since the majority of phone browsers (iPhone & Android) are based on WebKit, Adobe could start cracking that market now instead of whining about Steve Jobs being a bully.

@Capt Howdy:

Happy anniversary to you and Ghost. He’s a lucky pup.

@nojo: Beyond programming, my brother works in animation, using Flash. I guarantee he’s not going to jump to animating with HTML5 and Javascript any time soon. Many cartoons are animated in Flash these days, as it’s a cheap and largely effective way to do it, and very approachable for micro and small houses.

I guess all I’m trying to say is that Flash isn’t going away just because HTML5 and Javascript provide video and interactivity. I agree it has its downsides, and hopefully it’ll stop being de rigeur to have a stupid Flash plugin to watch video in the near future.

@IanJ: Yes, if Flash goes down, it’s taking Adult Swim with it.

@nojo: Will Kid Flash step up or will there be a New Flash? Remember that Barry Allen died but eventually came back, as dead superheroes always seem to do these days.

@Dodgerblue: iDontKnow

@Original Andrew:

meh
Im the lucky one.