Adobe (Temporarily?) Kills 64-Bit Flash For Linux 272
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that with the release of the 10.1 security patches, Adobe has, at least temporarily, killed 64-bit Flash for Linux. The statement says: 'The Flash Player 10.1 64-bit Linux beta is closed. We remain committed to delivering 64-bit support in a future release of Flash Player. No further information is available at this time. Please feel free to continue your discussions on the Flash Player 10.1 desktop forums.' The 64-bit forum has been set to read-only."
Re:This is why Flash must die. (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Not losing much... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Flash itself supports H.264 (Score:5, Informative)
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His point was that the big feature for 10.1 was hardware acceleration for flash (and therefore h264), which Linux doesn't get. Linux gets nothing but downsides from this.
Re:Adobe has one target market: (Score:5, Informative)
IIRC, they considered abandoning the Mac back in the non-Jobs era, but the wailing from their customer base reached even their ears. Had they done so they might have managed to destroy Apple.
Got an Education? (Score:5, Informative)
Stupid comment, get an education. If you want to create your own Flash player you can do that. It is OPEN. Stop drinking the Apple Kool Aid without question.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ [gnu.org]
http://flowplayer.org/ [flowplayer.org]
http://www.swift-tools.net/Flash/ [swift-tools.net]
http://www.swftools.com/tools-category.php?cat=968 [swftools.com]
There are also dozens of tools that create Flash apps so you are not restricted to Adobe's tools either.
Re:flash killer (Score:3, Informative)
nspluginwrapper (Score:5, Informative)
I think it's worth pointing out that Ubuntu's repositories have always used 32-bit flash + nspluginwrapper even while 64-bit flash was available. I've never found either of these solutions to be particularly stable, but this doesn't mean 64-bit Linux is going without flash completely.
Re:Committed (Score:1, Informative)
We know that Silverlight is suppoting 64-bit....
Silverlight doesn't support 64-bit yet.
Now with a clickable link :) (Score:1, Informative)
Now with a link :)
http://nxadm.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/install-64-bit-adobe-flash-player-on-ubuntu-904/ [wordpress.com]
Re:More than video (Score:3, Informative)
Why not just host a browser on a Windows box and serve the applications through Citrix? (It works not unlike X remotely, where the end user experience is roughly like if the application was running locally). Thats what we did at my previous company when stuff was incompatible with user workstations.
Re:Got an Education? (Score:5, Informative)
90% of the flash content on the web does not need any more than Flash 5-6
[citation needed]
I think youtube alone will barf on anything lower than Flash 8, and they've probably got more than 10% of the "flash content" (well, content that is displayed through flash) on the web right there.
Re:Adobe has one target market: (Score:3, Informative)
Tell that to Premiere users. Hear the manic laughter.
Re:Got an Education? (Score:5, Informative)
While Hulu may require 10.0.22 for the newest features, it requires 10.x just to work at all.
Critical components of Adobe's Flash implementation formerly used by Hulu (RTMPE) were never documented by Adobe, only a reverse engineered specification for RTMPE exists and anyone implementing that specification within the United States will get a DMCA takedown issued by Adobe.
Hulu has since moved to an even more "super-secret" undocumented protocol, most likely with Adobe's cooperation.
So no, Flash is not by any means open, when any attempt to create or distribute a fully compatible alternative within the United States will result in a DMCA takedown notice issued by Adobe.
Re:nspluginwrapper (Score:2, Informative)
Except nspluginwrapper doesn't seem to handle flash 10.1 very well. For example, don't right click on the flash test at http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ Sadly nspluginwrapper's web site and subversion repository have fallen off the net.
Re:Committed (Score:4, Informative)
Multimedia operations that are be done in a browser process don't usually benefit from working on big numbers, but they do benefit from crunching lots of smaller numbers at one time. That's what these SIMD extensions do, and a "64-bit" architecture isn't necessary for that.
No, but on Intel architectures they do benefit from the fact that in x64 mode, you have twice as many general purpose registers on chip. More registers means that more data can be kept in the CPU at once, reducing cache hits and speeding up all computation.
64-bit compilers for x64 processors can thus better plan register layout. This can make a noticeable difference for all 64-bit applications (beyond the most trivial cases that wouldn't need to use more than 8 general purpose registers in the first place).
Note that this isn't an intrinsic benefit to 64-bit computing, but more a benefit of 64 bit computing on Intel-based architectures, which have traditionally been low on general purpose registers. PowerPC systems, for example, don't benefit from running most apps in 64-bit mode, because the register count between 32 bit and 64 bit is identical (32 GPR, 32 FPR). x64 was a sufficient compatibility break that it was deemed possible to add more registers in this mode (although IMO, they didn't go quite far enough).
Yaz.