Huhwhat?

January 6th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk

For the love of Satan, is it really too much to ask that sites that pur­port to report on tech­ni­cal mat­ters do at least a lit­tle research or even have the slight­est clue about what they’re talk­ing about? Case in point: this arti­cle by Stan Schroeder on Mashable. I really don’t give two shits about the fact that Roy Batty’s great-grandpappy runs Flash, but this quote enrages me.

If you’re an iPhone owner, you prob­a­bly don’t want to hear about Flash. Full sup­port for Adobe’s rich media tech­nol­ogy has been promised for the iPhone many times, but it’s still not there yet.

Really Stan? Full sup­port for Flash on the iPhone has been promised? Who made those fuck­ing promises Stan? Because it sure as hell wasn’t Apple. You know Apple, don’t you Stan? The mother-fuckers who con­trol every bit of soft­ware that makes it onto the iPhone.

For fuck’s sake, how hard is it really to actu­ally have some min­i­mal under­stand­ing about a topic before you start spout­ing off about it? At this rate I might as well start a blog detail­ing my expe­ri­ences as a poor black share-cropper in 1940’s Alabama. I have about as much expe­ri­ence with that sub­ject as most of these slack-jawed mon­goloids do with technology.

10 comments - (Comments closed)
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  • Mark Taber

    I’m still chuck­ling over this. Why? I was just bitch­ing to a co-worker about this very arti­cle and about this very thing. Keep up the good work.

  • bkhar­mony

    The Angry Sharecropper doesn’t sound too bad.

  • Bleeny

    I love your rants but your hair creeps me out.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    Um…fuck you.

  • http://mattstocum.com Matt Stocum

    I was just think­ing how much I love your hair, but that your rants creep me out. Really makes you think, doesn’t it?

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    Seriously. I mean, here we are in an indus­try that also con­tains Jim Dalrymple’s chin-badger, and it’s my hair that gets criticized?

  • http://mattstocum.com Matt Stocum

    Holy shit! What does he feed that thing?

  • Sigivald

    If you’re an iPhone owner, you prob­a­bly don’t want to hear about Flash

    Well, in a sense he’s right.

    I’m an iPhone owner. I also don’t want to hear about Flash. My sus­pi­cion is that there’s a lot of over­lap of the two sets.

    But the two facts are un-related — I don’t want to hear about Flash any­where, and I don’t want Flash on my phone.

  • Hamranhansenhansen

    What makes this even worse is that Flash runs on exactly one (1) smart­phone: iPhone. The only smart­phone which has NOT promised to sup­port Flash.

    What doesn’t run on iPhone is FlashPlayer, the Web browser plug-in that plays Flash. But it doesn’t run on any other smart­phone either. The min­i­mum sys­tem require­ments for FlashPlayer are Pentium4 2.33 GHz, roughly 10x the com­pu­ta­tional resources of a 2010 smart­phone.

    However, FlashPlayer is not required for play­ing Flash. You have always been able to export a Flash pre­sen­ta­tion from the Flash devel­oper tool as a Mac or Windows app, and in Flash 10 you can export as an iPhone app as well. So there are hun­dreds of apps in the iPhone app store right now that were made 100% with Adobe Flash. Including all of Adobe’s iPhone apps.

    Most of the talk on the Internet regard­ing Flash is obvi­ously by peo­ple who have no idea WTF they are talk­ing about. The other com­mon fool­ish­ness is peo­ple who don’t under­stand that the video for­mat in Flash is ISO MPEG-4, the 10 year old con­sumer video stan­dard used in iTunes, iPod, iPhone, Blu-Ray, YouTube, set-top boxes, dig­i­tal cable TV, game con­soles, Flip and Kodak and other cam­corders, and any con­sumer video device. If you are using a smart­phone (any smart­phone, not just iPhone) and you come upon some video you can’t play in a Web page, that is NOT because you don’t have FlashPlayer. It’s because the author of the page has hid­den the ISO stan­dard video inside a Flash pre­sen­ta­tion. All the author of the page has to do is pro­vide a sim­ple hyper­link to the video (using the “a” tag, invented in 1990) and it will play on any con­sumer device. It’s like dis­play­ing a PDF in an Acrobat browser plug-in and telling iPhone and Blackberry users “you need the Acrobat plug-in to see this”, when in fact all they need is a hyper­link to the actual PDF, because both iPhone and Blackberry (and oth­ers) have native PDF ren­der­ing. So the video prob­lem on the Web is content-hiding, not lack of FlashPlayer.

  • zax

    Thank you Hamranhansenhansen, that was didac­tic … and infor­ma­tive!
    -

    I like the tone here at TAD.

    One ques­tion tho, what beer are you are hold­ing in the pic?

    … Are you Malty Tasking? ;)

    zax.