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[jhocking]

It's a pretty cool read:
http://gawker.com/5539717/steve-jobs-offers-world-freedom-from-porn

[scarred]

Freedom from porn? Fuck that.

[mberan42]

Freedom from porn? Fuck that.

[Tom]

Freedom from shitty porn apps?

[KvP]

Freedom from shitty porn apps not backed by major media conglomerates?

[evilbobthebob]

Arbitrary censorship?

[the_pied_piper]

...despite that if they turned the hands around, they'd find the Safari-blue still-hairy palms.

Freedom from furry porn?

[jhocking]

It's a good thing you're in another country, because otherwise Steve would send over some goons with blowtorches to eliminate that filth.

[Metope]

(...That Tyler helped me pick out.)

[Ozymandias]

Apple: Freedom from choice.

You know, Google just shipped the "Froyo" update to Android, which gives you the option to have Flash in your browsing and makes the browser absurdly fast. Unless you turn Flash on in which case it's really slow. Unless you turn the apply to pick and choose when to let the flash run and when not to in which case it's really fast again AND you can use Flash.

Weird how neat choice is.

[StreetSpirit]

Choice is obviously too much for the obvious Apple user anymore, at least in the eyes of Steve Jobs - his customers like what he likes, and that is all.

Haha.

..... but I, just like many of you (obviously) appreciate and thrive on choice!

Freedom from Freedom?

[est]

What I don't get is that if you go into the options section on the iPhone you can turn on a passworded restriction to disabled installation/execution of apps based on a certain rating level.  Like, it's literally maybe four or five really logical, easily-found clicks.

I've said this before, but like, I would have a hell of a lot more respect for Jobs if he had the balls to out and out say "we currently don't allow Flash on the iPhone because Adobe are too lazy to provide us with a way to place restrictions on the content to ensure the revenue streams of our development partners" or someshit like that.  Trying to cover it up with other bullshit is terribly transparent and insults our intelligence.

[Johnny C]

the technical thing seems like kind of a "fuck you" to every single entity who's ever programmed to flash though, because instead of finding a workaround to accommodate the existing internet apple has just said "the internet has to change to reflect our hardware" which is probably a pain in the ass for every single company who's ever invested in flash which, i must point out, is not an unreasonable programming standard

[Johnny C]

i mean, ultimately the loser in the fight between hardware provider and content provider is going to be the end user

[Catfish_Man]

Jeans: by Eric did you mean David?

Regarding the technical thing, yeah, it sucks. Security often fucks everything else in the ass. See also: captchas, cross-domain restrictions, password hassles, <insert rest of list of half the annoying things about computers here>. Turns out not every technical problem has a satisfactory solution.

<edit>
Adobe could theoretically write a faster interpreter to deal with not being able to use their JIT. Theirs is shit slow compared to JavaScriptCore. Apple can't really help them not suck though.
</edit>

<edit2>
Also even if they did it might still get killed for nontechnical reasons. I'm not nearly as good at nontechnical stuff, so no analysis there.
</edit2>

[Ozymandias]

I have to reiterate this, though:

The technical concerns seem silly when Google just proved Flash can be used in a smartphone and used well. Yes, it's a major slowdown when you have all Flash running at all times, but the option to have Flash on demand is easy and effective.

[est]

Yeah, and Apple didn't say "OK Adobe, the current version of Flash won't work for these technical reasons, let's sort this shit out".  Adobe wanted to get Flash working on the iPod/iPhone but Apple didn't take them up on it.

Also, hiding behind technical restrictions is a pretty lame excuse.  Jobs otherwise seems like a "just get it done" kind of guy, so that plus the new rules against cross-compiling forcing devs into Apple's way or nothing at all makes me believe there's more to this than just a tech issue.

[jhocking]

Yeah, and Apple didn't say "OK Adobe, the current version of Flash won't work for these technical reasons, let's sort this shit out".

How do you know they didn't?

[Catfish_Man]

I have to reiterate this, though:

The technical concerns seem silly when Google just proved Flash can be used in a smartphone and used well. Yes, it's a major slowdown when you have all Flash running at all times, but the option to have Flash on demand is easy and effective.

That really doesn't sound like "used well" to me. That sounds like "Flash performance blows, but sometimes you're ok with that". I wonder if they're allowing the Flash Player JIT to run or not (i.e. whether they decided the security tradeoff is worth it).

<edit>
To clarify, I don't think this is "The Reason" Flash isn't on the iPhone. Even in my personal life I rarely do something for only one reason, and this is a vastly more complex, longer-term decision than most of those.

I mostly just wanted to defend my profession (software engineering) a bit by pointing out that behind the surface-visible layer of corporate posturing and apparent petty bullshit, there's another layer of decisions being made based on more practical concerns, like "can this be done", and "can this be done without sacrificing security/performance/etc...".
</edit>

[Ozymandias]

It's used well because while it makes the overall performance of the browser suck if it's constantly running, you can make it so you only use it when you need to use it which means you get almost no net performance decrease overall.

[Alex C]

Well, it depends on what your goals are. If you're an advertiser, yeah, poor Flash performance is a big deal. You don't want your Flash ads to be an opt-in only deal because people are tired of their shit being slowed to a crawl whenever you try selling them Gatorade. So I could see why people would push for a different standard there. But as an end user? Hell yeah, I want opt in Flash compatibility. These things aren't amazing multi-taskers to begin with, and as meme Hitler pointed out, sometimes a man just wants to play Bloons, in which case the performance hit really doesn't matter.