I think it's more deperate that Adobe has basically faked the Google Finance screenshot. The site degrades gracefully in the absence of Flash, and will still show a graph. The author has edited the graph out and imposed a 'missing plugin' icon. That is terrible! I use GF on my iPhone all the time - it's never looked like that...
Porn companies are surprisingly innovative and technologically savvy - they will figure out a way to deliver their experience on the iPad without Flash.
As long as there is a media player which works on the ipad, porn will too.
On a side note. I find the example very very funny. If Apple did indeed hurt Adobe's feelings, then I think the best way to say "You need me" is to show why. Gosh. Am I the only one who finds this example amazing on so many different levels?
1) Movies wont work
2) Flash sites wont work
3) Tv sites like Hulu wont work (based off of the example?)
4) Porn, what the internet is really really great for, wont work
I usually browse with Flash disabled, and I have never needed to enable it to find porn. This is the first I'm hearing of a porn site that requires Flash, in fact...
Porn comes in all shapes, sizes, colors and formats, just as about everything else on the internet. You're bound to be able to find most things on the internet not requiring flash, but many other sites do too. Flash enabled rich internet applications first, and was there to enable such functionality before our browsers could natively handle such things. Flash is an extension of the browser, an extension featuring functionality heralded now by HTML 5.
I don't get why people hate Flash. Sure it's proprietary, but it was there first, doing something we all wanted before anyone else came around. And frankly it's still serving that purpose because HTML 5 still isn't ubiquitous enough.
It probably contributed to YouTube's success, and the general flourishing of online video. It's enabled rich browser based games. I think it contributes greatly to the advancement of the internet, if not by any other means than by encouraging the proliferation of rich applications.
FOSS advocates should thank some deity that Adobe is as marketdroid infested and incompetent as it is. There's nothing so good to shore up your case as your enemy making a hash of his.
Doesn't excuse them for making Acrobat installs that are clearly marketdroid-devised bloatware. For heaven's sake, they once installed stuff with Acrobat that wasn't VBScript malware but might as well have been! (Yes, they had VBscript background processes bogging down Windows.)
Thanks in part to them HTML5 is seen as a blessing by many, even as late as it is.
Truth be told I'm not a porn surfer. I'm not a member of any porn site or anything, so I have no idea whether porn sites actually use flash. The thing which really gets me, is that adobe is clearly attempting to get a message across.
I like sticking it to the man. I'm not one of those people who spend their life sticking it to the man, but I always find it humorous when other people do it. Especially one big company to the other. One big company to a country. Makes me happy to see people challenging and keeping others in check- so to speak.
One doesn't have to be a member of a porn site to look at porn on the internet. Most of it is completely free. Check out redtube.com, youporn.com, wide6.com, etc.
Why not? You could encode the original video as multiple segments, in order to watch the next segment, you have to watch an ad. Maybe use some kind of long polling to ensure that the advertisement was watched in its entirety -- supply a unique key at the end of the 30 seconds that the client has to rehash. It's a relatively minor engineering challenge, but I'm sure it can be solved.
I believe Adobe should show that flash works on both the Iphone and the Ipad. I heard some people saying that apple reject their implementation because was draining all the battery in 30 minutes and suggested that they should "rewrite" it using gpu to make it faster.
3) Tv sites like Hulu wont work (based off of the example?)
I don't suppose Silverlight is going to get on the iPad either. It's how I started to watch Netflix streaming on OS X. I see now that it's used on the PC side too.
HTML5 already works on mobile Safari, Apple use it, Youtube use it, Vimeo use it.
Porn will start to use it too.
Adobe can call shit on Apple for games and applications (bleh! Flash apps) but not so much for video. HTML5 video is obviously way more open than Flash.
How long until the default way of putting video online is using the <video> tag and a snippet of JS to fall it back to a flash-player for non-HTML5 browsers?
I'd guess that the iPad moved that date up quite a bit. And suddenly Flash-plug-in risks going the way of the Shockwave-plug-in: nice to have, but not really missed. And sites that depends on Flash for stupid eye-candy will see the drop in compatibility, and switch to stupid jQuery eye-candy.
My point is that web games is all that Shockwave did when it died/was retired by flash. Flash got its initial traction by spicing up the pretty static web (that role is largely replaced by jQuery (and similar)) but it's complete indispensability came with video.
Actually that's a good point. JS+Canvas will get there at some point soon. Especially with HMTL5 web workers. Check out an example of a WebGL Game (not HMTL5).
This statement has become a cliche of sorts. Does it really hold truth? I hear it so often that I just accept it, but what are they actually doing to make so many people say this?
I've always thought it was because they provide content that is fungible. One porn video or picture is pretty much replaceable with any other, perhaps within a certain genre.
Compare that with Hollywood video, TV or the music industry. Is one movie or show really replaceable with any other or do you want a specific film, show or album.
So, by comparison they are a more competitive, freer market hence greater innovation.
The other fast mover is scripture, which is public domain and so finds its way onto each new medium very early on for similar reasons.
I think the innovation is in quick adoption as it is usually said that the porn market is always one of the first to adopt a new media, be it mobile devices or blue rays or a new touch screen computer.
Not surprisingly, the porn example has been yanked with an apology.
Also worth noting the original showed 10 example, not the four in this link, so the porn wasn't quite as obvious (1 of 10 v 1 of 4, and the final one at that).
I never understand this sentiment that crusading against porn is noble. People enjoy it. Isn't taking away people's happiness a much larger problem (discounting the porn that is actually illegal)?
It's a matter of akrasia—if we can decide what makes us happy, then that implies that there's some sort of "meta-happiness"—a utility function that will be "best" maximized compared to other ones. Some people think that a utility function that doesn't include enjoying porn is better than one that does.
Of course, this is all theoretical if you can't change what makes you happy—and, since psychological studies say that how much you can change your utility function is something that varies individual-to-individual, there will never be a widely-accepted belief that it's impossible to decide what you like, as there will always be some people who can.
I'm not a crusader for or against porn (too cynical to crusade at all, really), but I think you've picked up the wrong end of the stick.
The problem in many people's minds is not with the consumers of porn but with the creators or actors of porn, especially the women. Like a lot of other so-called sex work fields, many human rights advocates end up torn: on the one hand, it's a field where women can make money with a certain amount of independence; on the other hand, the field can be violent, unsafe (drug addiction is rampant, sexually transmitted diseases are a constant fear, etc.) and (arguably) is enormously degrading to the spirit and the bodies of the women it employs.
Anyhow, I think that people who want to clamp down on porn are generally worried about the producers rather than the consumers. (In fairness, one influential argument from Catherine MacKinnon argues that porn makes the men who consume it more likely to be violent towards women. But I think that argument is the exception not the rule.)
Nobody doubt that (I hope). The point is, that you generally don't use it in competitive add campaigns, because it shows how pathetic/desperate you got.
Porn will find ways to users, one or the other way anyway, so it's also pointless.
Initially I was wondering where you saw the connection between BDSM and Flash. But thinking about it a little more I do get it now. Visiting a site full of Flash sometimes makes me feel beaten up and spat upon. Web Masters are clearly trying to dominate and humiliate me and Flash is their tool of choice.
I don't mind flash but I found this hilarious. How exactly does a video format treat you so badly ? Flash eats up my CPU like crazy but it seems to run just fine when viewing sites like TheDailyShow.com or Hulu.
You're absolutely right. It all depends on how it is being used. I wasn't completely serious obviously, but so many websites use Flash in a way that is insulting to their users in my view.
I suspect what will happen with porn in the iPad is what happened to porn in the iPhone: big video porn sites like xvideos.com and tnaflix.com will have a mostly pay site when the iPad is detected (that's what happens for the iPhone) and will be free for all the rest.
Their reasoning is probably that iPhone/iPad users are more likely to pay for the service, as they already do with songs, videos, and applications: this is one of the first results of this new closed world Apple is orchestrating for us, other companies will start to follow.
But... I'm starting to hope that the iPad will not be a success, as with iPhone the tech guys were mostly happy with it, as the constraints in the iPhone (let apart the approval process madness) are more or less acceptable for a phone. Instead power users mostly think at the iPad as a too limited device, as it is "almost" a computer but is limited in too many ways. Maybe if power users will not get an iPad this will have an effect in the whole market, as past successful apple product started to be popular among geeks first.
If I was surfing for porn with Adobe Flash enabled, I'd be worried about the entirely seperate Flash cookies that no-one seems to know about and which are totally unaffacted by your browser's Privacy (aka Porn) mode.
I'm pretty sure that Lee Brimelow, even though an employee of Adobe, doesn't see himself as all of Adobe. He might just start thinking that way after Wired and Engadget both reported his evangelist blog as the official word of Adobe. Sure hope Adobe doesn't punish Lee Brimelow too harshly, he's done a good job with his sites like gotoandlearn.com
I guess someone complained or someone feared that someone would complain or someone didn't like hearing that "the porn card" meant it was over. If you go to the actual blog post that the story is about, where the porn screenshot was it now says "Screenshot removed. My apologies if it offended anyone."
Well, I've heard it said that one of the first things many new computer technologies are used for is porn. It is sort of surprising, though, that Adobe would include porn as a need for flash. Surely there are other better arguments to support flash.
"Adobe is playing the porn card. It's over" - spoken like a true fanboy.
There are many reasons to hate flash - it's proprietary, it's slow on anything other than Windows, it's sub-optimal on Windows compared to alternatives (such as just streaming video directly - Youtube HD being a case in point).
It's also something that runs a large part of the Internet. I went without Flash for 3 months and whilst my Internet experience didn't feel that much less after getting used to it, I did feel left out by not being able to watch Youtube, play games on newgrounds etc.
To me this smacks of severe desperation on part of the Apple fanboys' attempt to defend iPad at any cost whenever anyone points to its real flaws. It simply shows that they can't take real criticism.
This is just a blog which showed several examples, 10 to be exact, including Hulu and Disney, to question Apple's claim of showing "real" internet, and all the fanboys see is the porn example.
It is the Apple fanboys who are playing the porn card, not Adobe.
I was discussing creating a website with my girlfriend today. I listed a few topics and possible keywords that would be easy to gain control over in our local area. After an hour of explaining page rank and how that google search button really works, she had one thing to say, "if you want people's attention, make a porn site!"
The internet has many roots, but the main source of nutrients is from porn.
So what, one out of 10 images is a porn website and now "it played the porn card". Duh. I can't say if porn sites or farmwille is a bigger waste of time.
I had a kids games site, and MOST kid's games (or other forms of edutainments) moved to Flash so kids can play them without installing anything, paying, and getting viruses. I "claim" it played the kids card and iPad is not a kid-friendly device.
My impression is most iPhone users prefer using native apps or mobile optimized web sites. Who goes to cnn.com on an iPhone? They have a great app. I'd be surprised if FarmVille doesn't have an iPhone app -- probably coming soon if not. Porn? There's no m. porn sites? If not I just had a great idea for a new site...
I personally hate mobile version of sites. It presents a new interface where I have to find all over again the buttons I need. And sometimes those buttons are missing.
Personally, my thoughts tend to move to the erotic when I'm in a situation without access to ordinary media. I'm unsure if the iPad would help or hurt this though. Accessing my TVersity server on the toilet might stop my mind wandering.
Where is most paid-for porn consumed? In hotel rooms by business travelers. Ubiquitous media access threatens that very lucrative market - but also presents opportunity.
I'm sure of one thing though: Using an ipad for extended periods of time on the toilette can hurt your asshole by causing hemmorhoids. Whatever you do with it, do it quick!
