Originally Posted By: hybrid8
Flash video represents the majority of Flash content only on video-service sites. Everywhere else it's ads. Period. Full stop.

YouTube alone has somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million videos. You think there are that many flash ads? (Honestly, I can't say; I got tired of dealing with animated gifs and javascript nonsense ages ago and installed an ad blocker. I do recall a few Flash ads before then. Anecdotally, my AdBlock logs would seem to indicate that it's blocked something in the neighborhood of 40 pieces of Flash in the same time that it's blocked thousands of other ads. To be fair, some of those other ones may have contained Flash once they were loaded.)

And I love how you dismiss entire hugely popular segments of the Internet because, I guess, if you include them it doesn't fit your argument.

That doesn't really make any difference, though. If a user wants to view something available only in Flash, it doesn't make any difference that it can also provide things he doesn't want. This is true of any medium. The US Mail provides both paychecks and ads. Do you want to stop getting your paycheck because you don't want any ads? (Yes, I know that's an antiquated example, but it still speaks to my point.)

Originally Posted By: hybrid8
A lot of video served using Flash is encoded in H.264, the same codec used in the HTML5 standard video tag..

Yes, it is. And a lot is not. H.264 support wasn't added to Flash until 2007. YouTube started in late 2005. That's two years, and probably more, worth of Flash video that wasn't in H.264. It's reasonably easy to stumble across videos that still aren't available in it. YouTube's HTML5 opt-in silently falls back to Flash when this is the case.

Originally Posted By: hybrid8
the market has already shown that Flash does not matter

No, it has not. A choice between a product that doesn't contain Flash and another product that doesn't contain Flash is not any sort of proof about anything Flash-related. Get back to me in <x amount of time> (wouldn't want to imply a specific amount of time in my general speakings about the future. And "x" does not equal ten.) when Flash has become available on some other phone. You'll probably be right then.

But, once again, I don't care about the market. The market is not God. I care about choice. Apple has seen fit to limit the choices of its users. You agree that the license is bad, you agree that the app approval is bad, but some how those two bads add up to a good, as long as it restricts Flash. Or maybe that's not what you're saying. I don't know. I don't think I even care anymore.

Originally Posted By: hybrid8
you're still trying to put words into my mouth

If so, it's only because your fingers flap on the keyboard, but you aren't saying anything. You don't even respond to point-blank questions. You just respond and nit-pick at irrelevancies.

Originally Posted By: hybrid8
I'm … talking strictly of public acceptance of the (i)platform.

Well, that's a thrilling conversation. The iPhone sells well. That's a shocker. smirk Who cares? Is Flash on another platform likely to make people switch? No. But some folks will be annoyed when they realize that folks with that other phone, whatever it is, can do something that they want to do that they can't.

Anyway, I'm really done this time. It's just pointless. I shouldn't have let myself get sucked up into this again. Trying to respond to your amorphous "arguments" is like trying to grab smoke out of the air; I just end up twisted in knots, not knowing which way is up. I'd really rather you didn't respond to point out that you don't get US Mail because you're Canadian, or whichever other trivial irrelevancy you want to prattle on about. I still have a desire to defend myself, and it's going to make my eye twitch to ignore it.


Edited by wfaulk (14/04/2010 21:46)
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Bitt Faulk