Anil Gulecha's Musings

Big Brother from Apple's 1984 Ad

It’s time to take a stand on the battle between Apple vs Adobe.

Short Answer : Adobe. Read on for the long answer

Apple’s position in the debate is that Adobe’s Flash is closed, a battery hog, performs badly on mac/iphone, not touch oriented and that it will create developer fragmentation (developers would be at Adobe’s mercy to pick up new features provided by iPhone OS). Read this in much more detail on apple’s site, but I think I’ve covered the major points of the argument.

Adobe responded to this with a public “We Love Apple” campaign. That got a +1 from me for sheer wit, passive sarcasm, and a poetic counterattack. But do the various points it’s founders make hold up?

Let’s look at Apple’s points, and Adobe’s reply to them.

Openness

Apple’s contention is that Flash is closed, while their little-boy HTML5 (an industry open standard) is Open.

I think Joe Hewitt captured the point I want to make quite well:

I’ve been hard on Flash, but we should all thank Macromedia/Adobe for 10 years of picking up the slack of the W3C, Microsoft, and Mozilla.

I’ve worked on Flash (back at version 5). It was a wonderful tool, and being interested in Animation and Programming, allowed me to create various things very easily with some drawing and ActionScript. It had no competition. From what I hear from respectable sources, the technology has only improved since.

HTML5 is a nascent technology. For all these years Adobe’s (ex-Macromedia’s) technology kept the more-dynamic-content needs of the web filled. While I abhor the jumpy, stroke inducing Flash ads on the net, I recognize them as only being a small part of the role it played on the web. It allowed the creation of beautiful content, like you can see at Orisinal.com.

The web was quite happy to accept Flash when there was no alternative. Adobe respected this, and provided groundbreaking tools to create flash content. As it states in it’s reply, the file formats and specifications are open. So .fla, .swf, etc could potentially be created via other tools. No competitor could match the power of Adobe’s Flash IDE. Sure, the formats were Adobe’s and they had a head start, but it’s been a decade since these technologies were born.

I’m OK with proprietary tools, when the underlying file formats are open. You can create a bitmap with Gimp or Photoshop. What I admire is Adobe didn’t employ Microsoft-esqe owning of both the format and the tool, as the latter did with their document formats. Adobe won on their tool’s technical merits, and that should be commended. Apple is looking to win this argument simply on business tactic of blindly rejecting competing technology. This is a shitty (and bone-headed) move.

Battery Hog, Bad Performance

Apple claims Flash is a battery hog. There’s no reason not to accept this. Adobe, via it’s reply, agrees, by pointing out that performance has improved, as it now uses hardware acceleration.

Adobe also points out that Apple did not provide necessary APIs until recently to make hardware acceleration possible. If this is true, and I don’t see a reason otherwise, Adobe did alright in my books. How can Apple complain about the lack of a feature, when they didn’t provide the means for implementing it.

Of course, another point to note would be Adobe’s reply rings hollow. Mac has only recently gone primetime.. it was delegated to a sub-5% market share until the recent Mac OSX releases. Adobe perhaps saw no need to invest in such a small part of the pie. Linux has API to access HA, and Flash on my Ubuntu x64 still sucks. Could it be that Linux has too small a market-share for Adobe to care?

Security

This is judgment call. Yes, Flash has had many vulnerabilities published. However, I don’t think it’s on a scale to warrant it’s elimination from a platform. It’s advantages far exceed the negative of the vulnerabilities.

It should also be noted that exploiters go after the big fish. Microsoft suffers with Windows. So does Adobe with Flash. Adobe has maintained a good record of fixing issues, and issuing updates. This is as it should be.

Not Touch/Multitouch oriented

This is just a silly argument. Of course Flash content hasn’t been written for multitouch. Here’s some news.. so wasn’t HTML and AJAX content prior to Iphone and Android. The web evolves. So do interfaces and tools.

Adobe announced they would make “the best tools in the world for HTML5″. Adobe better. It’s in their interest to do so, and their argument on building the best tools on open standards gains more weight. They seem to have bet on technical innovation so far on all products they make, and there’s no reason to change direction. The practice works.

If Flash were on iPhone, you can bet the content written on it would support, and indeed be optimized, for touch.

Will Fragment Developers, and put them at Adobe’s mercy

This is is most telling of all of Apple’s points. Apple, by this argument, accepts that Adobe has very good tools, and a huge community that depends on these tools. They’re scared Adobe would attract more developers than their own. In effect, developers for it’s platform would generate business for a different vendor.

I think Apple is wrong here in their assumption that Adobe would not pick up new features. With millions of developers buying your tools, a good way of selling more tools would be to implement features developers want. The market would take care of this. Apple seems to think it wouldn’t.

So what’s Apple’s move? Outright ban of non-Apple tools. That should be enough right?

Unfortunately, this move by apple is by far the biggest “bad thing” in all of the above. It shows their openness arguments were paragraph-fillers. They proped openness up an altar, only to take a big dump on it afterwards.

Imagine if Intel only allowed developers to write for their chips on Assembly and C. “That’s the only way you’ll get access to all underlying features”, they would say. “Those Pythoners have not yet implemented this cool new stack counter we added. You want to use our shiny new stack counters, right?”

Free and open specifications and standards are more important than open software. The former will lead to the latter, and competition would be on technical merit alone. I dont grudge Adobe the massive amounts of money it makes by producing wonderful tools that make creating content easy. I love open source, but I can live with a technically better solution, when an open source solution doesn’t cut it.

Apple’s letter, constantly sprinkled with ideas that don’t stand introspection, reads like a call to arms. Adobe’s response is a far more rational and level-headed take.

Jon Stewart said it right. Apple, go take a look at your 1984 Ad. Then take a look at your iPhone store, look at your dev SDK, look at the guy whose porn app you blocked, look at a competing app by google you were too scared to accept, and tell me: Are you the girl in red shorts, or “The Man” on the screen?

I stepped out of my office. The power cuts were getting worse, and the heat had gotten to me. I needed a breath of fresh air.

As I stepped out, a vegetable-seller was going past in his cycle. A bamboo container filled with cabbages was placed behind the bicycle seat.

He motioned to me.. asking if I wanted to buy cabbages. I shook my head. He continued looking (perhaps pleadingly, but he had a face that suggested he was always in this state).. and asked if he could speak. I went to him.

“Kannada baratta”, he asked. (“Do you speak Kannada”)
“Swalpa”, I replied (“Yes, a little”)
“Do you speak English”
“Yes”
“I need help with my daughters’ education”

I shrunk back. This is one of those money grabbing stunts, I thought. Something else told me to continue listening, and not walk away. He pulled out a sheet of paper.. it had a list of textbooks and authors.

“She got 92% in her finals.. and is now preparing for her MBA”. I don’t exactly recall what he said next, except that it was genuine pleading (atleast sounded genuine). The gist was that he needed help with getting those books for her daughter.

What struck me most was his English. I have friends who abuse the language and grammar, what is termed locally as Hinglish (a mixture of Hindi and English). Yet this wretched man seemed to speak in an almost perfect grammar. He didn’t use big words, but what he said was simple and correct.

I now looked at the numbers on the list.. books listed at 275, 300, 150. The college asked for the “latest editions”, he said. This could be construed to mean he’d rather have cash, than the books themselves, in case I had any. But having experienced this “latest edition” gimmick in college myself, I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

The suspicion that I was being suckered never fully left me as I stood there listening to him. Perhaps the previous experienced with being cheated still left a bad taste.

Then I mulled, So what if I was being tricked. The man stood there.. in worn-out clothes. He was educated (by his good English). He was going from door to door, on a dilapidated cycle, trying to trick people by pretending to be a cabbage seller. Isn’t that a bad enough state to be in? To be forced to seek charity as a way of life. Where begging, rather than being a state of last resort, is instead the common state.

I’d decided to give him 100 Rs (I spend that on coffee with friends). He didn’t thank me.. but said something else. I think it was in Kannada, to the effect “can it be 200?”, but I’m not sure. I answered “Sorry, that’s it”. His expression said “Thank you”. He handed me a cabbage. We both knew that was not a fair trade. Was it a gesture of thanks, or simply a ploy to convert the act that took place from charity to a trade. What misery was his, to be put in such a position?

I refused the cabbage, asking him to keep it. He cycled forward, looking for the next person to sell to. I went back into the office, back to being concerned about the summer heat.

[The below article appeared in the Times Of India, dt 12-12-07 in the extra edition. It was, however, modified and not posted in it's entirety, and few sentences were reworded that made my stance on the subject of Ayurveda and Yoga look a little lenient. In the future, I will note that any modifications to my articles need my review. Below is the article as I actually wrote it]

Open Letter: Challenges of Science

Dear Parents and Teachers,

As recent events have shown, science is under attack by superstition, and seems to be losing. Television has many campaigns that extol the virtues of various methods and objects without any verifiable evidence. Even more disheartening is that there is no active movement against these.

I would thus like to shed a little light into the future we are entering. The world is being fully interconnected and Indian children will interact with people around he world. A group’s intellectual powers are measured based on how rational their view of the world is. That is sadly not the future Indian children will thrive in.

Given the dominance of superstition and dogma in the country, the proponents of science have an uphill battle at hand. The first step would be to eradicate superstitious beliefs from the minds of it’s citizens. A seemingly scientific idea that is not based on any rational and verifiable studies is known as pseudo-science.

Pseudo science in India includes Astrology, Palmistry, Mind-reading, Ayurveda, many types of Yoga, Vaastu Shastra, Homeopathy, Chiropractic treatments, Lucky gemstones and numbers, Rudraksh necklace, etc. At best these ideas will waste time and money of it’s pursuers and at worst can cause bodily harm due to negligence of other truly scientific methods that would’ve worked. When any of the above has worked, it is due to plain chance, placebo effect or by processes that are understood by science.

Minds seemingly grow immune to change of ideas with age. Thus, emphasis has to be given to educating children on science and instill critical thinking into their bloodstream. This is ensure that the upcoming generation will be more open to ideas than the current. With this goal, we need to drive nation wide programs to spread the word of science. I’m not experienced enough to say what these could be, but there are many who could. Those in power need to encourage and those who promote science and take action against fraudulent practitioners of pseudo-science.

I hope we can look into a future where dogmatic beliefs would make way for rationality. Into a future where we would prefer reason over authority. If there’s a challenge we need to overcome, this is one.

Hi there..

Are you a patriot? Do you love your country? And be willing to lay down your life if it came to it? Allow me to be break you up.

I was disillusioned when I read Albert Einstein’s “The world as I see it”. He says:

This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of the herd nature, the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that does by the name of patriotism–how I hate them! War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business. And yet so high, in spite of everything, is my opinion of the human race that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the nations not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the Press.

He was of course talking about “patriotic” soldiers. I want to go beyond this and look into all sorts of chauvinism, where patriotism like behavior is seen: religion, culture, nationality, creed, the college you attend, the place you work.

Have you ever expressed opinions of the kind “I am a proud Indian” or “India is the greatest country” or “We have the best culture” (substitute with any other country as the case may be). If you make such a statement, you owe yourself a little question. “WHY?” What makes India better, that you are proud of it. Why is it better than the US, or Australia, or Denmark, or Switzerland?

Do you defend your university as “It is the best?” or “My religion is the best”. Again.. how is it better than others?

Coming to the soldiers in you, who are ready to lay down your lives for the country, have you for a moment wondered what it is that you are laying your life down for? Why is the land on one side of the border worth your blood, and the land on the other side the blood of another being? Just because you were born into it? Just because the people around you consider it ‘noble’. Those people, who in turn base their opinions upon the opinion of still others?

These are manifestations of what I call “Chauvinism-by-default”. You defend, or are proud of, an entity solely on the reason that you were born into it. If you were instead born in another country, you would be ready to lay your life down for that country. If you were born into another religion, you’d have gone through a separate set of activities and events, that would have led you into believing that that religion is “The one”.

Some of you might have seen the fallacy by now. Some of you may say “Well yes, thats true. I agree with the you, I would be a patriot of the US if I were born there. It’s the being a patriot that is the good thing, the virtue.”

THAT is the fallacy. It is nothing short of an abominable evil to be a chauvinist-by-default. Just being born, or enrolled, or selected into something, does not bring it above others. It does not prove it correct, it does not alter it’s nature. And it should not be, even in your own eyes.

I hope you see the reasoning. Take some time to mull over these words. You have been shown the door; entering it is wholly up to you. For some, this disillusionment may be the hardest thing to do. If you believe that the truth, no matter how hard, should be accepted, then you will come out of these reflections as a non-patriot.

If you do continue being a patriot, a chauvinist-by-default, understand that you’ve just lost your right to blame the world for its sad state. The reason, simply, is you.

[This was written sometime back, but disappeared when I changed my webhost. So, back again..]