I'm hoping that this rewrite, will give us less bugs than before because of simplification, bringing code up to date, etc. but the fact that we've already had problems so close to release makes me wonder if we'll gain as much advantage in that area as we (and Apple) would like. Hopefully after they squash some leftover problems, we'll see fewer bug fix releases with this upgrade. Only time will tell.
Yes! And the removal of legacy support of PPC is good (though I still have a few PPC Macs).
Because of its smaller install base [of legacy systems] and continued support for multiple OS X versions, Apple has the luxury to move forward without dragging baggage along. That's smart strategic positioning, that Microsoft just cannot match!
That said, Snow Leopard does have its issues. I have it installed on 5 machines. While mostly good, there are flaws. Most seem to be app-related (especially iMovie 09). The pro apps appear OK. The F-Finder sometimes hangs and dialogs are not always displayed topmost.
As the BeachBall spins: Safari still hangs, Flash still hogs the CPU(s), apps still abort...
... but happily, SNL is a bold move forward and we shall reap the rewards for years to come!
Yes! And the removal of legacy support of PPC is good (though I still have a few PPC Macs).
Because of its smaller install base [of legacy systems] and continued support for multiple OS X versions, Apple has the luxury to move forward without dragging baggage along. That's smart strategic positioning, that Microsoft just cannot match!
That said, Snow Leopard does have its issues. I have it installed on 5 machines. While mostly good, there are flaws. Most seem to be app-related (especially iMovie 09). The pro apps appear OK. The F-Finder sometimes hangs and dialogs are not always displayed topmost.
As the BeachBall spins: Safari still hangs, Flash still hogs the CPU(s), apps still abort...
... but happily, SNL is a bold move forward and we shall reap the rewards for years to come!
*
Things are snappier. But my third party screensavers don't work, and I've had to upgrade all of my utilities.
I had problems with two printers, which I fixed.
So far, that's to be expected. But otherwise, things seem to be moving along pretty well.
I haven't had a single Safari crash from Flash. but I have problems with a couple of other utilities that haven't been upgraded yet.
And Norton isn't updated yet. I know how the kidding goes on about them, but I've been using it, and it's successors for many years.
This was one reason they failed first with their hardware. I could afford the $9,000. I could even, manage the $16,000, but the last was too much. If I could have upgraded later, I likely would have bought a NEXT instead of my first Mac, which ended up costing me about $16,000 when all was said and done.
Well, what software would you have run on the NeXT? There were a few apps that were, to quote Jobs, 'Best Of Breed', like the Postscript-native Illustrator and Lotus Improv--which had features that even Numbers still lacks--but the big killers, as always, were the lack of Photoshop and MS Office. The latter was more of a checklist item for business types, but not having Photoshop meant that all that advanced (and expensive) hardware never saw its full potential.
But the underlying OS... ... .. .
I truly believe that if the breaks went the other way, where NeXT became self-sustaining early on, and Jobs learned to control his impulses, we'd be 15 years more advanced in software development, and Microsoft would just be another third-party vendor making office apps and wind-up Ballmer action figures.
Well, what software would you have run on the NeXT? There were a few apps that were, to quote Jobs, 'Best Of Breed', like the Postscript-native Illustrator and Lotus Improv--which had features that even Numbers still lacks--but the big killers, as always, were the lack of Photoshop and MS Office. The latter was more of a checklist item for business types, but not having Photoshop meant that all that advanced (and expensive) hardware never saw its full potential.
But the underlying OS... ... .. .
I truly believe that if the breaks went the other way, where NeXT became self-sustaining early on, and Jobs learned to control his impulses, we'd be 15 years more advanced in software development, and Microsoft would just be another third-party vendor making office apps and wind-up Ballmer action figures.
You know, I honestly don't remember anymore. Illustrator, yes, but I don't remember too much about what was available. Publishing programs were available, and graphics and publishing was mostly what I needed it for, though PS would have been nice, I had it at my company.
Well, what software would you have run on the NeXT? There were a few apps that were, to quote Jobs, 'Best Of Breed', like the Postscript-native Illustrator and Lotus Improv--which had features that even Numbers still lacks--but the big killers, as always, were the lack of Photoshop and MS Office. The latter was more of a checklist item for business types, but not having Photoshop meant that all that advanced (and expensive) hardware never saw its full potential.
But the underlying OS... ... .. .
I truly believe that if the breaks went the other way, where NeXT became self-sustaining early on, and Jobs learned to control his impulses, we'd be 15 years more advanced in software development, and Microsoft would just be another third-party vendor making office apps and wind-up Ballmer action figures.
There were some custom apps. I sold my house in Saratoga, in 1989, through Alain Pinal Realtors. They were NeXT-only in the office.
I agree that NextStep and WebObjects could have technologically set the bar... but they were too far ahead of their time, and took too much of an investment to become the lingua franca of their day.
Oddly, the iPhone SDK is plowing that same ground, with great success, more than a decade later.
And, IMO, this will bring the developers to the Mac... what goes around...
I really do not get the big deal with Flash. I have been using it since MX 2004, but I see it declining steadily. It is a processor hog and terrible for SEO. I try to steer my clients away from using Flash and instead towards QT and Javascript when needed. If you can not play it on the iPhone, what's the sense. Not every company is Nike. Adobe seems to be going in too many directions with it, it's just getting way over complicated and confusing. I wish Macromedia didn't sell out. Adobe is really screwing things up.
I am looking forward to HTML 5. Hopefully, while Balmer is not looking, the smarter engineers at Microsoft will slip in a modern web browser with the latest OS.
You know, I honestly don't remember anymore. Illustrator, yes, but I don't remember too much about what was available. Publishing programs were available, and graphics and publishing was mostly what I needed it for, though PS would have been nice, I had it at my company.
It had FrameMaker (albeit not as powerful as the Solaris version); a number of really cool but amateurish Stone Design apps for graphics; Pages, which was the first true WYSIWYG page-layout app (the Apple version is similar in recycled-name only); a number of really good diagraming and utility apps from LightHouse; and the still-surviving Omni Group apps. Every one of them was written in Objective-C and had the full power of UNIX, Display Postscript, TCP/IP (as opposed to Apple Talk or Novell's IPX), and other forward-carrying technologies to build upon. All initially implemented back in 1988!
Unfortunately, the initial enthusiasm and third-party investment waned when it couldn't compete financially with Apple, Microsoft, Sun, HP, IBM, and all the other established tech companies of the time. So NeXT retrenched over time, first shedding the hardware, then opening up to other platforms in limited enterprise-only deployments, but hung on long enough to see it's Chess.app eventually become one of the first 64-bit applications available on OS X. How's that for an accomplishment?
Flash isn't just used on YouTube. Almost every major Television network and News Media Web site uses Flash as the standard for providing Video content.
Hulu has become one of the most popular video content providers and they use Flash to stream media as well.
Only Mac users don't like Flash because it runs like shit on all OS's of Apple OS. It runs extremely well on PC's.
If Apple didn't piss off another major Vendor than Adobe would probably put more time into making it run better on the Mac.
You'll probably see Google apps to start being resource hogs here soon as Apple did a great job of screwing up that partnership.
Get over it. Flash is here and will be here for Years to come.
Holy crap, Linux and OS X users can't stomach Flash.
The fact that it's just a container for the avi, mp4 or other codec means nothing to Hulu and other content distributors.
Moving to an AJAX UI on the client to manage the VIDEO/AUDIO HTML 5 tags is not a problem for them to switch.
Since you've never been here before, it must have turned you on.
Well, I've been a regular reader of this site for awhile and I thought the irrelevant political interjections were an unnecessary distraction too. Especially the other recent post on using text to speech programs. It was interesting until it diverted off into a diatribe on health care politics that really had nothing to do with the technology being described.
So what, a minority player in the Mobile devices world supports (cut-down, not proper) Flash. All mobile devices have Flash LITE support, and it isn't really that great anyway.
Well, that's why I wrote, "Of course the "0 New Features" is overly simplistic...", but Apple was the one who made the slide, not me.
I’m not quite getting the significance of the slide you posted. That was all about showmanship. To get your attention with something unexpected. P. T. Barnum would have approved.
Note that after they stated “No new features” they went in and introduced new features, including an a new enduser accessible feature in Mail for Exchange support.
I?m not quite getting the significance of the slide you posted. That was all about showmanship. To get your attention with something unexpected. P. T. Barnum would have approved.
My post itself was intended as an attention-getter. The context of the discussion was I lamented that Adobe had added too many features to Acrobat (such as the inclusion of being able to embed/read Flash within a PDF, which turned out to open up a [rare] vulnerability), to which Mel responded that adding features was a natural course of software development, and such inevitable bugs will eventually get fixed. His post included, "No one would ever upgrade their software if features weren't added, and then companies would go out of business because upgrades are a bigger income stream than new programs."
The slide was a smart-ass way to say that Apple itself was pushing the concept of releasing a software upgrade (namely 10.6) that ostensibly contained no new features, where refinement was the emphasis of the effort. We all know that Snow Leopard contains many new features, but unlike previous releases, these new additions were downplayed (at least to the developer audience) so that everyone could instead concentrate on tightening up their compliance with the latest sets of APIs and underlying technologies.
Years ago (well, decades, actually) Volkswagon made the same appeal with the Beetle, comparing its (mostly) unchanging appearance with the superficial styling changes of american cars of the time. They were saying, in essence, "We don't rely on trivial marketing changes to sell our product - it stands on its own engineering merits." It's a tricky message to pull off, because it depends on your own confidence, and thus the customer's as well, that the product has inherent value independent of the distracting marketing battles that pit one feature set against another. I personally think Adobe has lost sight of that message with their current business directions.
My post itself was intended as an attention-getter. The context of the discussion was I lamented that Adobe had added too many features to Acrobat (such as the inclusion of being able to embed/read Flash within a PDF...
That's frightening! I could see making web analytics available as ColdFusion system functions so web developers could easily incorporate them into web sites. Sadly, I don't think that's Adobe's goal as they seem to have abandoned ColdFusion.
Rather, it appears they are going to incorporate analytics into Flash (likely as another ugly layer of Flex). Ugh!
On second thought, they could use it to monitor when Flash redlines the CPU or to measure [Flash-induced] browser hang time and crashes. We can look forward to the Flash three Rs being replaced with the Flash four Rs:
In other words. QuickTime is a proprietary plug in that is required to run a "standard" that may be wrapped in it.
Doesn't the article posting mean that HTML 5 will make the need for proprietary plugins like QuickTime go away.
Your posting suggests that Apple doesn't even support what this article is trying to say.
To run iTunes you need QuickTime.
No, Quicktime is one way to play H.264 video, it's not the only way. H.264 is a standard, companies are free to implement that standard any way they want to. Apple uses Quicktime, Microsoft uses something else. When Microsoft comes out with a new browser/os/platform, they don't need Apple to software to play H.264 video for their platform because there is no dependency or requirement for a quicktime runtime to play H.264 within a HML5 browser.
Take that same video and wrap it with flash for no other reason beyond the limitation of HTML and suddenly Microsoft, Apple and anyone else is dependent on a 3rd party to write code that allows them to play that video.
"A growing contingent of increasingly important players on the web, led by Apple, Mozilla and Opera, began looking at how web standards could be advanced to support open, vendor-independent, standards-based alternatives to the then existing landscape of the web, which was increasingly becoming dominated by proprietary Flash content that relied upon a separate plugin to render it, effectively turning the open web back into a proprietary system like AOL had been in the late 80s: closed, buggy and slow."
This is somewhat insulting & extremely inaccurate.
Statements like that make me question the author's accuracy across the entire article.
In fact, AOL's proprietary was extremely fast & in GM (gold master released software versions) very stable. Many people use AOL 5, 6 & 7 today without a hitch.
While truly closed and while presenting other issues for usability; this criticism has no merit, whatsoever.
Thanks guys for a most enjoyable thread - we've had it all; an excellent history lesson for Prince Mclean (I always like these articles, Al Gore invented the Internet!) - anti-Apple trolling and then the heavyweight contributions from Solipsism and Melgross - always good value.
Seriously its been great.
I hate Flash with a passion - in the Advertising industry in which I occasionally swim it had become an excuse to charge clients ridiculous fees for months of development for websites of dubious value and appalling useability. For some reason Flash based sites are de-rigeur in the luxury sector. I make a point of strongly advising against whenever possible.
Clearly HTML5 will win the day - it has strong backing and wins the 'moral' argument (in tech terms) hands down. Adobe's management have been moving in strange, and multiple, directions over the past few years.
Holy crap, Linux and OS X users can't stomach Flash.
The fact that it's just a container for the avi, mp4 or other codec means nothing to Hulu and other content distributors.
Moving to an AJAX UI on the client to manage the VIDEO/AUDIO HTML 5 tags is not a problem for them to switch.
Having read every one the the more than 160 posts in this article, all I have to say is "down with Flash" and bring on the the HTML 5 ads that can't be blocked.
Comments
I'm hoping that this rewrite, will give us less bugs than before because of simplification, bringing code up to date, etc. but the fact that we've already had problems so close to release makes me wonder if we'll gain as much advantage in that area as we (and Apple) would like. Hopefully after they squash some leftover problems, we'll see fewer bug fix releases with this upgrade. Only time will tell.
Yes! And the removal of legacy support of PPC is good (though I still have a few PPC Macs).
Because of its smaller install base [of legacy systems] and continued support for multiple OS X versions, Apple has the luxury to move forward without dragging baggage along. That's smart strategic positioning, that Microsoft just cannot match!
That said, Snow Leopard does have its issues. I have it installed on 5 machines. While mostly good, there are flaws. Most seem to be app-related (especially iMovie 09). The pro apps appear OK. The F-Finder sometimes hangs and dialogs are not always displayed topmost.
As the BeachBall spins: Safari still hangs, Flash still hogs the CPU(s), apps still abort...
... but happily, SNL is a bold move forward and we shall reap the rewards for years to come!
*
Yes! And the removal of legacy support of PPC is good (though I still have a few PPC Macs).
Because of its smaller install base [of legacy systems] and continued support for multiple OS X versions, Apple has the luxury to move forward without dragging baggage along. That's smart strategic positioning, that Microsoft just cannot match!
That said, Snow Leopard does have its issues. I have it installed on 5 machines. While mostly good, there are flaws. Most seem to be app-related (especially iMovie 09). The pro apps appear OK. The F-Finder sometimes hangs and dialogs are not always displayed topmost.
As the BeachBall spins: Safari still hangs, Flash still hogs the CPU(s), apps still abort...
... but happily, SNL is a bold move forward and we shall reap the rewards for years to come!
*
Things are snappier. But my third party screensavers don't work, and I've had to upgrade all of my utilities.
I had problems with two printers, which I fixed.
So far, that's to be expected. But otherwise, things seem to be moving along pretty well.
I haven't had a single Safari crash from Flash. but I have problems with a couple of other utilities that haven't been upgraded yet.
And Norton isn't updated yet. I know how the kidding goes on about them, but I've been using it, and it's successors for many years.
This was one reason they failed first with their hardware. I could afford the $9,000. I could even, manage the $16,000, but the last was too much. If I could have upgraded later, I likely would have bought a NEXT instead of my first Mac, which ended up costing me about $16,000 when all was said and done.
Well, what software would you have run on the NeXT? There were a few apps that were, to quote Jobs, 'Best Of Breed', like the Postscript-native Illustrator and Lotus Improv--which had features that even Numbers still lacks--but the big killers, as always, were the lack of Photoshop and MS Office. The latter was more of a checklist item for business types, but not having Photoshop meant that all that advanced (and expensive) hardware never saw its full potential.
But the underlying OS... ... .. .
I truly believe that if the breaks went the other way, where NeXT became self-sustaining early on, and Jobs learned to control his impulses, we'd be 15 years more advanced in software development, and Microsoft would just be another third-party vendor making office apps and wind-up Ballmer action figures.
Well, what software would you have run on the NeXT? There were a few apps that were, to quote Jobs, 'Best Of Breed', like the Postscript-native Illustrator and Lotus Improv--which had features that even Numbers still lacks--but the big killers, as always, were the lack of Photoshop and MS Office. The latter was more of a checklist item for business types, but not having Photoshop meant that all that advanced (and expensive) hardware never saw its full potential.
But the underlying OS... ... .. .
I truly believe that if the breaks went the other way, where NeXT became self-sustaining early on, and Jobs learned to control his impulses, we'd be 15 years more advanced in software development, and Microsoft would just be another third-party vendor making office apps and wind-up Ballmer action figures.
You know, I honestly don't remember anymore. Illustrator, yes, but I don't remember too much about what was available. Publishing programs were available, and graphics and publishing was mostly what I needed it for, though PS would have been nice, I had it at my company.
Well, what software would you have run on the NeXT? There were a few apps that were, to quote Jobs, 'Best Of Breed', like the Postscript-native Illustrator and Lotus Improv--which had features that even Numbers still lacks--but the big killers, as always, were the lack of Photoshop and MS Office. The latter was more of a checklist item for business types, but not having Photoshop meant that all that advanced (and expensive) hardware never saw its full potential.
But the underlying OS... ... .. .
I truly believe that if the breaks went the other way, where NeXT became self-sustaining early on, and Jobs learned to control his impulses, we'd be 15 years more advanced in software development, and Microsoft would just be another third-party vendor making office apps and wind-up Ballmer action figures.
There were some custom apps. I sold my house in Saratoga, in 1989, through Alain Pinal Realtors. They were NeXT-only in the office.
I agree that NextStep and WebObjects could have technologically set the bar... but they were too far ahead of their time, and took too much of an investment to become the lingua franca of their day.
Oddly, the iPhone SDK is plowing that same ground, with great success, more than a decade later.
And, IMO, this will bring the developers to the Mac... what goes around...
*
I am looking forward to HTML 5. Hopefully, while Balmer is not looking, the smarter engineers at Microsoft will slip in a modern web browser with the latest OS.
(Even more tangential - I still have one of the original BusinessLand/NeXT T-shirts in one of my drawers somewhere.)
Even more tangental, I have one of the original MacUser N E V R t-shirts around here somewhere
You know, I honestly don't remember anymore. Illustrator, yes, but I don't remember too much about what was available. Publishing programs were available, and graphics and publishing was mostly what I needed it for, though PS would have been nice, I had it at my company.
It had FrameMaker (albeit not as powerful as the Solaris version); a number of really cool but amateurish Stone Design apps for graphics; Pages, which was the first true WYSIWYG page-layout app (the Apple version is similar in recycled-name only); a number of really good diagraming and utility apps from LightHouse; and the still-surviving Omni Group apps. Every one of them was written in Objective-C and had the full power of UNIX, Display Postscript, TCP/IP (as opposed to Apple Talk or Novell's IPX), and other forward-carrying technologies to build upon. All initially implemented back in 1988!
Unfortunately, the initial enthusiasm and third-party investment waned when it couldn't compete financially with Apple, Microsoft, Sun, HP, IBM, and all the other established tech companies of the time. So NeXT retrenched over time, first shedding the hardware, then opening up to other platforms in limited enterprise-only deployments, but hung on long enough to see it's Chess.app eventually become one of the first 64-bit applications available on OS X. How's that for an accomplishment?
Flash isn't just used on YouTube. Almost every major Television network and News Media Web site uses Flash as the standard for providing Video content.
Hulu has become one of the most popular video content providers and they use Flash to stream media as well.
Only Mac users don't like Flash because it runs like shit on all OS's of Apple OS. It runs extremely well on PC's.
If Apple didn't piss off another major Vendor than Adobe would probably put more time into making it run better on the Mac.
You'll probably see Google apps to start being resource hogs here soon as Apple did a great job of screwing up that partnership.
Get over it. Flash is here and will be here for Years to come.
Holy crap, Linux and OS X users can't stomach Flash.
The fact that it's just a container for the avi, mp4 or other codec means nothing to Hulu and other content distributors.
Moving to an AJAX UI on the client to manage the VIDEO/AUDIO HTML 5 tags is not a problem for them to switch.
Since you've never been here before, it must have turned you on.
Well, I've been a regular reader of this site for awhile and I thought the irrelevant political interjections were an unnecessary distraction too. Especially the other recent post on using text to speech programs. It was interesting until it diverted off into a diatribe on health care politics that really had nothing to do with the technology being described.
He does make a fair point.
Microsoft already supports Flash on WinMo.
So what, a minority player in the Mobile devices world supports (cut-down, not proper) Flash. All mobile devices have Flash LITE support, and it isn't really that great anyway.
Well, that's why I wrote, "Of course the "0 New Features" is overly simplistic...", but Apple was the one who made the slide, not me.
I’m not quite getting the significance of the slide you posted. That was all about showmanship. To get your attention with something unexpected. P. T. Barnum would have approved.
Note that after they stated “No new features” they went in and introduced new features, including an a new enduser accessible feature in Mail for Exchange support.
In other words. QuickTime is a proprietary plug in that is required to run a "standard" that may be wrapped in it.
MOV, AVI, MKV, WMA/WMV are all containers for codecs that may or may not be open.
Quicktime/Windows Media Player/VLC are all players of which support playback of multiple containers supporting numerous codecs.
To run iTunes you need QuickTime.
Of course, because Apple's proprietary DRM scheme (FairPlay) is only implemented by the Quicktime container.
I?m not quite getting the significance of the slide you posted. That was all about showmanship. To get your attention with something unexpected. P. T. Barnum would have approved.
My post itself was intended as an attention-getter. The context of the discussion was I lamented that Adobe had added too many features to Acrobat (such as the inclusion of being able to embed/read Flash within a PDF, which turned out to open up a [rare] vulnerability), to which Mel responded that adding features was a natural course of software development, and such inevitable bugs will eventually get fixed. His post included, "No one would ever upgrade their software if features weren't added, and then companies would go out of business because upgrades are a bigger income stream than new programs."
The slide was a smart-ass way to say that Apple itself was pushing the concept of releasing a software upgrade (namely 10.6) that ostensibly contained no new features, where refinement was the emphasis of the effort. We all know that Snow Leopard contains many new features, but unlike previous releases, these new additions were downplayed (at least to the developer audience) so that everyone could instead concentrate on tightening up their compliance with the latest sets of APIs and underlying technologies.
Years ago (well, decades, actually) Volkswagon made the same appeal with the Beetle, comparing its (mostly) unchanging appearance with the superficial styling changes of american cars of the time. They were saying, in essence, "We don't rely on trivial marketing changes to sell our product - it stands on its own engineering merits." It's a tricky message to pull off, because it depends on your own confidence, and thus the customer's as well, that the product has inherent value independent of the distracting marketing battles that pit one feature set against another. I personally think Adobe has lost sight of that message with their current business directions.
One more example.
My post itself was intended as an attention-getter. The context of the discussion was I lamented that Adobe had added too many features to Acrobat (such as the inclusion of being able to embed/read Flash within a PDF...
One more example.
That's frightening! I could see making web analytics available as ColdFusion system functions so web developers could easily incorporate them into web sites. Sadly, I don't think that's Adobe's goal as they seem to have abandoned ColdFusion.
Rather, it appears they are going to incorporate analytics into Flash (likely as another ugly layer of Flex). Ugh!
On second thought, they could use it to monitor when Flash redlines the CPU or to measure [Flash-induced] browser hang time and crashes. We can look forward to the Flash three Rs being replaced with the Flash four Rs:
Rich, Reach, Retch and Report.
*
In other words. QuickTime is a proprietary plug in that is required to run a "standard" that may be wrapped in it.
Doesn't the article posting mean that HTML 5 will make the need for proprietary plugins like QuickTime go away.
Your posting suggests that Apple doesn't even support what this article is trying to say.
To run iTunes you need QuickTime.
No, Quicktime is one way to play H.264 video, it's not the only way. H.264 is a standard, companies are free to implement that standard any way they want to. Apple uses Quicktime, Microsoft uses something else. When Microsoft comes out with a new browser/os/platform, they don't need Apple to software to play H.264 video for their platform because there is no dependency or requirement for a quicktime runtime to play H.264 within a HML5 browser.
Take that same video and wrap it with flash for no other reason beyond the limitation of HTML and suddenly Microsoft, Apple and anyone else is dependent on a 3rd party to write code that allows them to play that video.
This is somewhat insulting & extremely inaccurate.
Statements like that make me question the author's accuracy across the entire article.
In fact, AOL's proprietary was extremely fast & in GM (gold master released software versions) very stable. Many people use AOL 5, 6 & 7 today without a hitch.
While truly closed and while presenting other issues for usability; this criticism has no merit, whatsoever.
Seriously its been great.
I hate Flash with a passion - in the Advertising industry in which I occasionally swim it had become an excuse to charge clients ridiculous fees for months of development for websites of dubious value and appalling useability. For some reason Flash based sites are de-rigeur in the luxury sector. I make a point of strongly advising against whenever possible.
Clearly HTML5 will win the day - it has strong backing and wins the 'moral' argument (in tech terms) hands down. Adobe's management have been moving in strange, and multiple, directions over the past few years.
Holy crap, Linux and OS X users can't stomach Flash.
The fact that it's just a container for the avi, mp4 or other codec means nothing to Hulu and other content distributors.
Moving to an AJAX UI on the client to manage the VIDEO/AUDIO HTML 5 tags is not a problem for them to switch.
Having read every one the the more than 160 posts in this article, all I have to say is "down with Flash" and bring on the the HTML 5 ads that can't be blocked.
Can anyone say 'Click to HTML 5'?