Well, it looks like the End Times are nigh, at least for the internet. The COPE Act, which give big companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast the ability to throttle bandwidth for sites who don’t pay their extortion fees. So, the internet, with its wonderful array of diversity, expressed by creatives of all classes, could be completely flattened, turned into a barren landscape with only the Wal-marts of the web surviving.
Running a site where I syndicate content using the Flash player, I’ve often thought about how one could harness the computing power of all of the computers viewing the content. Obviously there are ethical issues, but putting those aside for a second, it’s fun to consider the possibilities. Especially with the new Flash Player 9 and increased performance, it’s possible to concieve of a project like BOINC (see also Seti@Home) using Flash as an alternate platform. They could even have an API and a library of user-submitted alternative visualizations.
Listening to Packard Goose right now, I realize I could not function without the music of Frank Zappa. Somehow it makes work and life easier. When I listen to Zappa, those little annoyances… Comment Spam… IE patches… Remote Debugger never working… Trying to understand the Quicktime spec… they don’t seem to matter quite so much. I just wish I could figure out the meter in Keep it Greasey. Maybe it’s because Zappa was so good at what he did, that he made it look effortless. Someday I hope I’m that good at something. Mooo-aaahhhh….
I’m still seeing blogs out there posting misinformation about the Microsoft IE Eolas Patent Suit Patch. All of the misinformation is regarding exactly how the patch will affect ActiveX controls embedded on a page. People are saying that the content “will not run until the user clicks on it”. This is simply not true. Code WILL execute, and your apps will run. The only difference is that the user must click once within the bounding box of the embedded content in order to interact with it.
I have a bad feeling about this Javascript workaround for the IE Eolas Patch. This is only my opinion, but hey, I have a blog, so therefore I write. I don’t think it’s kosher for a couple of reasons. The first, and major one, is that using document.write to display primary content on a page is bad form.
It feels hacky. It relies on the user having javascript turned on, and makes pages more kludgy and slow. Since it uses doc.write, it is invisible to search engines. Sure, Google has trouble reading Flash, but eventually it will be able to. If everyone’s using document.write to push their Flash onto the page, search engines will never find it.
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