Apples actual response to the Flash issue

[Randall Lee Reetz]

Ok, a real discussion.  People choose the best choice available to them.  The choices we in computerdom have offered are not exactly overwhelming in their scope.  If my choice is between a horrible spreadsheet, a really snappy one, and a game that makes me feel like I full a fliing dinosaur world, guess what the royal I will choose.  Can you blame me?  As computers have become a million times faster software has become about three times better.  That isn't a very proud ratio.  The revolution to come is a revolution of self evolving software that never sleeps, is using the most hardware it can round up, and wants to learn so that it ca help us.  That is the kind of jump in choice the public deserves.  Until then, I cheer the public even if I am not always one of them.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Richmond Mathewson <richmondmathewson at gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, May 02, 2010 10:35 AM
To: How to use Revolution <use-revolution at lists.runrev.com>
Subject: Re: Apples actual response to the Flash issue

  On 02/05/2010 20:07, Randall Lee Reetz wrote:
> Adobe didn't conceive postscript, photshop, illustrator, flash, etc.  Mathematica isn't derivative.  Wolfram (for all I rail on his philosophy) is one of the last remaining computer scientists.  I think there is something about the act of writing software the way we've been doing it that either strips the science out of us or keeps the scientists away.  Wolfram is an interesting guy.  His mathematica is like most of this first wave software simply a digital "analog" of a tool we did manually before.  Yet at the same time, he actively promotes the idea of properties and tools unique to computation (his "new" kind of science).  Anyway, this discussion was about steve jobs when I think it should be about adobe's all to familiar entrenchment approach to "innovation".  This, once the disappointment and anger wears off is what has driven steve jobs into such unpopular and dangerous a stance.  Like all tertiary species, runrev can only eat the debris that falls to the ocean floor.  When xtalk was abandoned by apple, that was the day the music really died.
>
Fair point, Randall:  "adobe's all to familiar entrenchment approach to 
"innovation" "; but that is a problem
that tends to happen with ALL successful organisations (including 
Apple); they become complacent and
slack off.

Unfortunately, like it or not, the vast majority of folk use their 
computers as nothing more than
typewriters and video-phones, home entertainment centres and 
mind-numbing devices; and,
despite your ideals, and mine (however much they may differ; and I 
suspect not as much as you might
think); it is again the old problem about who pays for the bread and cheese