Sadly, I’m not attending Max this year. I spent my budget this year on four other conferences (CF.Objective, CFUnited, WebManiacs and Scotch on the Rocks) and there just wasn’t time or good will enough from my wife to go to Max as well. So, with keen interest I’ve been watching the blogosphere to see what’s going on. I’ve seen the various announcements about Gumbo and Catalyst, which I think are very exciting. But the thing that really caught my eye was the 64 bit preview release of Flash 10 for Linux. Yes, Linux! And no, I’m not a Linux on the desktop kind of guy. I thought about it before switching to Mac, but I’m not one to want to run Photoshop in VMWare.
The reason I find this exciting and shocking is the largely positive press this has gotten in the Linux community. Historically speaking, I’ve never seen a truly positive article about Flash posted to Slashdot. Nor have I seen comments about Flash (or ColdFusion) on Slashdot be even remotely civil. Comments tended to deride Flash for being closed source, being non-free-as-in-speech, used to create annoying ads, being “buggy” or, most commonly, not running on 64 bit Linux. Today that seems to have largely changed! With the announcement of a 64 bit prerelease version of Flash player for Linux the comments on Slashdot have been downright civil and, dare I say it, praiseful of Adobe!
A few interesting quotes from the comments:
“Linux users asked, and adobe listened. Great stuff.”
“That’s the crux of the issue,”.
“Adobe Flash has [64-bit support], Sun Java does not”
“The vast majority of users aren’t going to cut off their nose to spite their face by refusing to use “non-free” software, and nor should they.” (Referring to the use of free-as-in-speech software vs. free-as-in-beer.)
“Where’s the 128-bit version?!” (You knew it’s be there as well as demanding support for FreeBDS, Sparc and other various 64 bit architectures.)
“I just tried it on my Fedora 9 64-bit installation and it works just fine. No crashes, no freezes”.
Now, really, has hell frozen over?! Slashdot had nice things to say about Adobe and the Flash Player! Excellent! So, for that reason alone I found the 64bit Flash preview release the most interesting announcement out of Max so far. What’s caught your eye?
DougHughes.net 
Comments on: "Is It Cold In Here, Or Is It Just Me?" (3)
It’s rare to see ANY comments on Slashdot that are even remotely civil!
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Not really related to Max, but I’m hoping that J2EE servlet engines start to make better use of 64-bit architecture sooner than later. I’m kind of expecting it to be something of a nail in the coffin on all the whining about ColdFusion being slow. Although I’d also love to see Adobe rip out the code that slows down its evaluation of structure keys (re: an earlier post from Gert Franz). I know it will all happen, given time, it’s just annoying to hear the yammering about it in the interrim…
It’s actually the very same yammering that was made about Java in the first place when it was released “the virtual machine adds an extra layer of complexity and it slows everything down — Java apps are hideously slow!” Yeah, sure they were a little sluggish at the time, but performance is a vanishing problem. After 15 years now people recommend Java for its speed! And given that I can buy a new consumer machine today for 1/3rd the price of my 3yr old business notebook and it’s got 3x as much physical memory and is twice as fast, I’d say it’s “rapidly” vanishing.
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I’m crossing my fingers tomorrow for a CF IDE announcement and it will be curious to see how “cross-platform” they can get it – will it be PC/Mac or PC/Mac/Linux?
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