Mike Chambers

There's many reasons this didn't happen. Some of them Adobe's fault, some not.

The main thing to realize is that Adobe based AS3 on many leading proposals for Ecmascript 4. Ecmascript 4 would lay the groundwork for future versions of javascript, etc. Flash would still be closed source, but the language would be useful elsewhere in the browser. Several people have described the political issues surrounding this ES4 situation in far more detail, and how we arguably ended up the worse for it:

Resig: http://ejohn.org/blog/ecmascript-harmony/
Canasse: http://ncannasse.free.fr/?p=82
Mike Chambers: http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2008/08/14/actionscript-3-and-ecmascript-4/

So, why didn't Adobe just open source the flash plugin? One main reason not to was Microsoft:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine#Sun_vs._Microsoft
Another reason was, naturally, control. Both for Adobe and for user development. The Flash player was quirky, but incredibly consistent with decent performance. There really was no other option... js, java applets, activeX, they all had significant weaknesses due to differing availability and performance.

If you wait around long enough in web development, you will have seen this type of situation many times. Haxe is a "free agent" that can break this cycle imho. It is not tied to a company like Typescript or Dart, nor is it tied to corporate controlled committees like ES4. It has an incredibly gifted language author, and a great…

> Does anyone know of any other incidents that make case against centralized servers?

Yes. Many of these are undemocratic, but others are merely unintentional problems of reliability induced by a single point of failure.

http://www.delicious.com/kragen/decentralization-stories has a few dozen items up through 2008.

http://beckyzoole.livejournal.com/395310.html
livejournal users want more control of livejournal. decentralization-stories

omg decentralization-stories:
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/when-google-owns-you/
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/google-gets-back-to-nick/

http://valleywag.com/5053704/kentucky-judge-moves-to-seize-gambling-sites-domains
more decentralization-stories: caribbeangold.com, etc., censored

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341378
more decentralization-stories: legal intimidation takes a site offline

http://blog.wikiring.com/Blog/BlogEntry28
decentralization-stories: the TWiki Takeover

http://norayounis.com/2008/11/04/308
The impressive flickr account of blogger and friend Hossam el-Hamalawy
is facing censorship by flickr themselves! First they disabled
pro-palestine photos he had taken in Ireland, then they started
searching their old drawers for reasons to un-list his account from
public search.
decentralization-stories

http://arabist.net/arabawy/2008/11/04/flick-censors-my-account/
more details. ugly. decentralization-stories

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/11/05/support-the-arabist/
global voices picks it…

"You seem to think that the entire mobile platform runs iOS."

It's silly to assume that someone on HN would be unaware of the players in the mobile marketplace.

Adobe themselves said that Apple's move to block them proved to be the clincher: http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/11/11/clarifications-on-flash-player-for-mobile-browsers-the-flash-platform-and-the-future-of-flash/

Quote: "This one should be pretty apparent, but given the fragmentation of the mobile market, and the fact that one of the leading mobile platforms (Apple’s iOS) was not going to allow the Flash Player in the browser, the Flash Player was not on track to reach anywhere near the ubiquity of the Flash Player on desktops."

I have trouble swallowing some of this. A few of these theories have been debunked successfully.

I have a small problem with this "don't look at the man behind the curtain" routine. Proprietary is proprietary. Don't try and swing it.

Battery Life: http://vimeo.com/9705969, http://vimeo.com/9724682

Delays: http://www.neowin.net/news/adobe-quotapple-hurts-customers-flash-101-delayed-beta-for-android-announced

Touch/Scroll: http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/02/22/flash-player-content-mouse-events-and-touch-input, http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/02/23/scrolling-html-with-flash-content-on-touch-devices

Speed: http://jobemakar.blogspot.com/2010/04/flash-is-speedy-on-android.html

Yeah, I got my general license a couple of years ago, and was really trying to get into it, but where I live in the SF bay area, there is just too much interference.

I am looking forward to when I eventually move and hopefully have some more electronically quieter spaces. Its really fun and exciting doing digital modes to see how far you can send / receive on simple antennas.

I wrote up some info on on of the digital modes JT65 here:
http://mikechambers.com/blog/2016/02/19/example-jt65-qso-exchange/

(not sure if that mode is still used.)

(I used to really love listening to shortwave, especially to get difference news / views, but not shortwave is mostly just religious stations)

If by 'working with flash' you actually mean, 'producing a SWF to run in the Flash Player'...

1) I've been using Vim for years to produce SWFs. I hate their tool too - that's why I don't use it. You can use any text editor you want.

2) The 'Flash UI' is very skinnable (not as skinnable in Flex3 as in the upcoming Flex4, see: http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2008/08/27/everything-there-is-to-know-about-flex-4-gumbo/ )

3) I'm not sure what you mean by tedious. You might be referring to the Flash editor's use of the timeline. If that's the case then you'll want to look into the Flex SDK I mentioned. I haven't used a timeline for over 5 years.