*sigh*

[NewF]

"Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe's Flash Player. Get the latest Flash player. "



Updated and installed what.....4 times? Restarted comp, installed IE 7, restarted comp, installed flash player again....still
"Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe's Flash Player. Get the latest Flash player."
Fuck off youtube?

[Malwyn]

You could try firefox, or miro. Miro lets you search youtube, dailymotion, google video, yahoo video, blip.tv, veoh (I think?) and about a dozen other websites and subscribe to internet tv channels. Why is this awesome? Because it's convenient, and you can avoid classic youtube comments like "lol this guy needz to get laid" and "photoshopd!!!!1".

Why am I spamming? Because adobe flash player can die and rot in hell. It was neat and cool in 1995 and still pretty awesome through to 2002. Five years later though, it's a sloppy piece of crap that kills interoperability, makes things horribly unstable and chunky in setups that aren't windows on x86 architecture. Flash's shiny gruel is a key proponent of "web 2.0".

So it can die, painfully. D:

[Bobbias]

Haha, yeah, flash is WAY too clunky. They tried porting it onto a Nintendo DS only to find that it could only achieve framerates somewhere in the range of less than 10. It is just too much for the DS to handle, and the DS is a pretty well built and powerful architecture as far as handhelds are concerned.

[Spectere]

Dude, Flash works poorly on the PSP and that's more powerful than the DS. XD

To think, Flash was designed when 486's reigned...who would have thought it would wind up to the point where P3s and P4s struggled to cope with it.  I can't help but respect it a little, though -- the player can still fit on a floppy (IIRC, a 720KB one, at that...haven't checked in a while, though).  Not bad for a modern multimedia platform.

I could even deal with the slowness if every site in the world didn't have unnecessary Flash crap in it.  It's one thing to have, say, a YouTube video, but to waste all of that processing power (not to mention the few seconds that Flash takes to start) on a damn menu or crappy intro is fucktarded at best, especially when it totally screws people who like or need keyboard navigation.

[Bobbias]

Lol, I've never been fond of flash sites. Maybe it's me being a traditionalist, maybe it's because I just hate flash in general, I don't really know.
I mentioned the DS because I'd heard mention of someone trying to make it run on it, only to find that even optimizing the shit out of it and hacking it into something that would run on the DS, it could still only manage some abysmal framerate that rendered it pretty much useless.

In any case, I've always been picking on flash. Even when newgrounds was like THE place to be on the net, I was still hating on flash for being some ultra-clunky slow, large thing. Sorta like my beef with java. Java is nowhere NEAR as clunky and slow as flash, (Ever play the flash adaptation of a megaman game? That was the laggiest game I've ever played...) At least you can make a game that doesn't run at barftastic speeds unless it's overly complicated and poorly written in java.

[Spectere]

I don't really mind Flash that much.  It's a lot like Java, though; I don't mind it if I know that I'm going to a page with a Flash or Java object on it.  What I do mind are when Flash and Java objects appear in pages in completely unnecessary ways.  Like I mentioned before, intros and menus that use Flash are bloody stupid and generally just pointless.  Sites built using Flash are also plagued by numerous problems.  For one, it's an accessibility nightmare.  Anyone using a screen reader, navigating by keyboard, or dumb enough to expect things to run smoothly and in a sane, standard way are all screwed.  They also foil any attempts to link to a certain page, not to mention eliminate the possibility of doing a simple copy-and-paste operation most of the time, as well as make printing virtually impossible.  Let's not forget that while your monitor may be running at a high resolution -- say 1600x1200 -- you're still stuck in the Flash object's tiny window.  A lot of detection methods are also horribly broken, breaking the page on Firefox, IE, Opera at best, breaking them on Linux, OS X, or portable Flash-powered devices at worst.

Java is pretty good, though, probably the most mature cross-platform interpreted language in existence (I still say that .NET would be very good competition if Microsoft provided more resources to the Mono project, but that's neither here nor there).  The biggest problem that I have with Java is how long it takes to start up the bytecode interpreter.  Flash objects typically take a second, tops, while Java applets take five or more seconds to start up.  It's not a whole lot of time, but still, having your browser freeze up for seconds at a time on a fairly quick system is annoying.  It's fine after that, thankfully.

[Bobbias]

Yes, I'll give it to them for making java what it is. I understand everyone one of those misgivings with flash, because I've encountered a couple of them myself. I absolutely HATE when things are stuck in a certain resolution, copy and paste can be rather helpful, being able to see where a link for a download sends you can be useful at times, it's nice to link to pages instead of "ok, click this then that etc." to get them to the right place.

And yes, java locks firefox up for a long time sometimes, even when it's only a small bit of code that probably doesn't do anything meaningful on a site. That gets irritating really quickly.

[Spectere]

I absolutely HATE when things are stuck in a certain resolution

That's one of the things I hate about today's Internet.  CSS allows you to do some pretty awesome things, but at the same time it allows you to do some pretty bloody stupid ones.

My favorite are sites that have, say, a 200px navigation bar and a 500px content area (I think that's being a bit too generous sometimes, but what can you do).  You could imagine how that looks with a 1280 pixel width, but think about how it looks on my laptop's display.  At 1920 pixels wide, the page just looks barren.  Widescreen displays are very popular now because we naturally scan our eyes from left to right; web sites with a very vertical layout do a good job wearing out scroll wheels, annoying people, failing usability tests, and little else.

I'm a bit of a pedant when it comes to web and user interface design simply because it's not that hard to think for a few seconds about what people would want to see.  I can honestly say that I've designed more readable and usable web sites when I was 10 with FrontPage Express than a lot of professionals do now (for the record, even then I was obsessed with readability -- I never liked dealing with hard-to-read fonts, clashing colors, etc).

[Bobbias]

Haha, I've never really designed a layout, but that stems in part from failing to find any good color combinations. And I happen to run my widescreen at a fucked up 1440x900, so I've got quite a bit of horizontal space, but not so much vertical. It was really awkward to make the switch, but my only misgiving is that I think I'd rather a slightly larger 16:9 display, since like, NOTHING runs at this aspect ratio. Widescreen gets like, half inch letter boxing on the top and bottom, and I just wish I could get something to actually use my whole screen, lol.

[Spectere]

Yeah, the only thing that really utilize my lappy's entire display are GUIs (well, obviously ) and some games.

As far as things that aren't 16:10 (or, in my desktop's case, 5:4) go, I always maintain the aspect ratio...I'm pedantic like that.

[Bobbias]

Yeah, 16:10 is a pain :/ I always maintain the original aspect ratio of the video, because it looks like ass in any other ratio. Anamorphic DVDs video on a normal TV anyone?

[Spectere]

I rather like 16:10 for desktop work.  As far as videos go, most of the widescreen DVDs that I have are anamorphic, so they doesn't play in full screen on an HDTV anyway.

[Bobbias]

Well, upstairs we watched the new war of the worlds DVD a while back and it was in anamorphic, and I swear to god his head was ridiculously tall. It just looked so bad.

[Ulti]

It's probably all the thetans in it.