This is an unexpected turn of events. Apple with its “closed” approach versus Adobe with ITS “closed” approach leading to more openness. Two wrongs do not make one right, you say, and I point at this wonderful, glorious exception of where just precisely that is happening. The very nature of “closed” means you can shut out whoever you want however you want, and Adobe in all of its proprietary glory shuts pretty much everyone except Windows users out (yea, Flash runs horrible on the Mac apparently, it’s a resource hog, and crashes constantly).

And Apple shuts Adobe out. Do you hear my giggles as I wheeze for breath?

It reminds me of MSIE back in the day. It was THE browser. The alternative was Netscape Navigator and it was a disastrous piece of crap where Internet Explorer was a shiny piece of solid gold. So developers ignored everything else. Even when Firefox came around, they continued doing so, at least the short bus folks did. Fuck web standards. Then suddenly, their “dis sait rekirs intrnet exprdorerlolstfu” sites were hurting, badly.

But it took a long while. Banks in Sweden required Internet Explorer up until a mere few years ago. My mother’s stock market site (uh yeah, my mom’s dealing in stock, but that’s another story) even to this day requires Internet Explorer.

Now we have Flash, and we see people doing the same mistake all over again. Especially with the web as it is today, with video content and all that, it’s no wonder people are going for Flash, because Flash is pretty much the only alternative. Well, sort of, anyway. Ah-yep-. If you clicked the link you probably noticed that it said “HTML5″ and if that didn’t mean much to you, let me rephrase:

No Flash.

Actually, I can rephrase that even nicer:

No Proprietary One-Company-To-Rule-Them-All Plugins Required.

Did I mention that HTML5 video is supported by the iPhone?

As a developer, this is the part where you go look at the figures for exactly how many people own an iPhone. And the part where you take a stand on whether the iPad will sell to millions or if it’ll flop over and keel. This is the part where you get the numbers fed to you: 42.5 million.

Forty two point five million iPhones as of Q1 2010. And your cute, bunny-hopping Flash-site? It’s a fucking piece of Lego right now, for those 42.5 million users when they browse on their phone.

Game software copy protection goes far back beyond that, of course, and in contrast, GCP (I invented this acronym, probably) can be justified a bit more. Music is something that we, on a nearly instinctual level, love to share with each other, be that by playing together or listening together or simply showing each other the kind of stuff that makes us feel certain ways. Music is such an integral part of the human society that’s been with us for as long as we’ve had hands to play with or mouths to sing with. The industrialization thereof is perhaps the most critical error of ours. Games on the other hand may have been with us for a long time (Go for example dates back to the 4th century BC), but it’s not as intimately associated with sharing as music. That said, game piracy of course thrives just as any other software piracy does, and the game developers seek new methods to battle the piracy.

Most recently, Ubisoft, the makers of titles such as Assassin’s Creed, have decided to take this a step further, thus evolving the DRM. Rock Paper Shotgun has an article on the subject of how Ubisoft not only restricts the player from starting the game without doing an online check to verify the game has not been pirated, but it even throws the player out of the game if their internet connection at any point in time drops offline, while playing.

I actually think that’s pretty awesome. I mean, the balls required to do that? Not to speak of, the conviction that their players will be loyal to the point of ridicule, that they buy the game anyway. Reminds me of Metallica.

And thus, a meme. Make a post on your blog listing up to 5 sites or services that amuse you/intrigue you/help you the most at the moment. This list (at least for me) always changes, as I tend to discover new things, or grow bored with old ones.

Or as in the case with dictionary.com … I had enough of the god damn ads. It’s as if they added a new banner or “text-ad” once a month for the last year. I used their dictionary service very very satisfied for I can’t count how many years (from before my Skotos days), but now my faithful “di” keyword in Firefox went from dictionary.com over to dict.org, which is quite ad-free, thank-you-for-asking.

So my list of 5, backwards because I’m hip that way:

5. dict.org — a free dictionary, and by free I mean very free, as in free of ads and stuff

4. smart.fm — I have been lagging behind recently, because I’m nearing closure on my kanji studies and that’s taking up most of my spare time, but this is a cute site for hammering Japanese (or whatever language it is you wish to study) vocab into one’s brain.

3. gmail — boring, I know, but gmail is actually sort of new to me. I went with POP3 for the longest time, but when my move to Japan started drawing near, I realized that it was just stupidity not to stop with the POP.

2. VISA exchange rates page — call it a blessing, call it a curse, but at least it tells the truth. Most of the time*. Oh and yes, this is above gmail. That says something about my economic situation, I’d say.

1. Zero Punctuation — this guy makes my day. Totally. He reviews games (PC, console, etc) and as the title suggests, he speaks very very fast and very angrily, most of the time. You’ve gotta see it to understand. Even if you don’t know any of the games on the list, just check one out anyway.

Now your turn. I’m not asking you to do this to make me feel all gooey about having started a meme, I’m asking you to do this because I’m honestly curious about what the people I know are entertaining themselves with that I have yet to discover. Call me a greedy bastard.

*) Once about a month ago I went there and saw that the yen had dropped like a rock in the ocean. It had happened overnight, and it was a matter of something like a 30% difference in “price” for me right there. So I scampered off and withdrew money, and when I got home, the amount withdrawn was not at all matching up with this new, glorious number. Turns out the Visa site screwed up somehow, because the day after it was all back to “normal”.

It’s a bit comforting I admit, to laugh at what’s causing so much trouble for oneself. I’ll have to try that more often. Heartfelt thanks, Erwin.

Funny! I love this world sometimes.

So I tried going to different pages, and as I typed in “http://kalleblog.livejournal.com/feed/” and hit enter, I was greeted with a 404 error. I hope the LJ team doesn’t mind me quoting it in its entirety. It’s hilarious:

Page Not Found

I’m sorry, you’ve reached a page that I cannot find. I’m really sorry about this. It’s kind of embarassing. Here you are, the user, trying to get to a page on LiveJournal and I can’t even serve it to you. What does that say about me? I’m just a webserver. My sole purpose in life is to serve you webpages and I can’t even do that! I suck. Please don’t be mad, I’ll try harder. I promise! Who am I kidding? You’re probably all like, “Man, LiveJournal’s webserver sucks. It can’t even get me where I want to go.” I’m really sorry. Maybe it’s my CPU…no that’s ok…how bout my hard drives? Maybe. Where’s my admin? I can’t run self-diagnostics on myself. It’s so boring in this datacenter. It’s the same thing everyday. Oh man, I’m so lonely. I’m really sorry about rambling about myself, I’m selfish. I think I’m going to go cut my ethernet cables. I hope you get to the page you’re looking for…goodbye cruel world!

-the webserver

Error: could not find server

What other funny 404 errors are out there? This one got me curious.