Z Gallerie - Marshall Chair

Z Gallerie - Marshall Chair

Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash"

When anyone asks me how I like my iPhone, I think 50% of them are secretly hoping that I will complain about something so they will feel justified in choosing not to own one.  There are two issues which always come up: 1) "Well, you can't run flash on your phone." and 2) "You can't run multiple apps." (This was addressed in the last blog.) Flash is something that I RARELY miss. I would guess that 1 out of every 20 sites that I visit won't open without it, maybe even less.  I enjoyed reading Jobs' justification of staying out of the FlashPlayer mess.  I would be irritated beyond belief with a quickly draining battery or complete crashes!

My iPhone is THE most amazing purchase I have ever made.  It has literally changed the way that I am able to operate on a daily basis.  So, thank you Steve, for making sure that anytime you launch something, it is the best possible format for the end user.

Jobs' statement:
Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests.

I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.
First, there’s “Open”.
Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.
Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.
Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android’s browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.
Second, there’s the “full web”.
Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.
Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.
Third, there’s reliability, security and performance.
Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.
In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?
Fourth, there’s battery life.
To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies.
Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.
When websites re-encode their videos using H.264, they can offer them without using Flash at all. They play perfectly in browsers like Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome without any plugins whatsoever, and look great on iPhones, iPods and iPads.
Fifth, there’s Touch.
Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?
Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.
Sixth, the most important reason.
Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.
We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.
Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.
Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.
Conclusions.
Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.
New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind."

Steve Jobs
April, 2010

Apple iPhone to soon get long-sought multitasking - KansasCity.com

Apple iPhone to soon get long-sought multitasking - KansasCity.com

Partisanship, Propaganda, and Martyrdom: an Argument for the Human Tendency to Project Apotheosis

This correlation struck a chord, and with a bit of research I was able to find a host of scholarly research comparing Socrates to Christ and vice versa.  In fact, Percy Shelley called Socrates the "Jesus Christ of Greece, " and Voltaire went so far as to term Christ "the Socrates of Galilee."  If you reduce Plato’s final Socratic Dialogue, Phaedo, to a simple plot—it is actually quite similar to countless stories of martyrdom.  The innocent man dies for his beliefs.

In W.L. Courtney’s article, “Socrates, Buddha, and Christ” many of these parallels are examined: poverty, simplicity, ethical reform, and then—apotheosis. Courtney begins by pronouncing that, “within certain limits, all the grand ethical and religious reforms of history have much the same characteristics” (63).

Paul Gooch, in his article “Socrates: Devious or Devine?” tells of “the fifteenth-century Florentine Platonist, Marsilio Ficino. Ficino was known to keep a perpetual flame burning before a bust of Plato; and he writes of Socrates in imagery which reminds us of biblical passages. His commentary on the Symposium endows Socrates with all the perfections of love, including a compassionate concern for the salvation of his followers.  Socrates cares for the souls of others; and thus Ficino makes him into a pastor/saviour in the language of the Christian tradition.”

Courtney claims that, “the ideal Socrates gains his apotheosis in Plato’s dialogues” in effect doing for Socrates what the “Lalita Visara” did for Buddha or the “Gospel of John” did for Christ (64).

The similarities in the stories of each man are laid out in impressive detail, and while I won’t have time for them all, I will list a few of the most identifiable points:

·      Socrates has his early mission conveyed to him in            the answer of the oracle; Buddha learns to know his task while under the Bo-tree; Christ passes his initiatory ordeal in the desert. Buddha sustains a pro-tract-ed conflict with the Prince of Darkness, before the final victory            is gained.

·      Socrates has as his foes sophists, dem-a-gog-es, and those who accused him of “introducing new divinities.”

·      Socrates finds that Critas, his own pupil, consents his death ; Christ is betrayed by his own disciple ; Buddha’s Judas Iss-care-iot is called  De-va-datta.

·      There are points in the death-story of Buddha that remind the reader now of Socrates, now of Christ.

Chroust examines the Socratic dialogues written by Xenophon, considered to be the other chief example of positive propaganda other than the dialogues of Plato.  I say propaganda because, indeed, Chroust argues that both Plato and Xenophon do not recount the historical Socrates, but an embellished version, which appealed to Socrates’ followers and their own politics.

I found my initial doubt of a truthful recounting of Socrates supported by Chroust’s statement that, “the characterization of the person of Socrates in its strongly apologetic flavor, [and] strikes us as being fictitious... One cannot escape the impression, therefore, that this characterization here relies on some model or "legend" that had already become an established literary tradition” (Chroust 67)

He also asserts that “Plato‘s recounting is further from hard facts than others because of 'artistic temperament and talents and self-revelatory individualism'”.

Daniel Graham’s position in the article “Socrates and Plato” that, “Scholars almost universally recognize the Socrates of the middle dialogues as a mouthpiece for Plato” is similar to Chroust’s assertion that the historical Socrates was the actual successor of Anti-phon as the leader of the aristocratic-oligarchic faction, and that the philosophic Socrates was a fabrication of Plato, Xenophon, and others (Graham 141) (Chroust 191-223).

Graham also points out that, “’One candidate for a cri-ter-ion of sorts has been the distinction, recently championed by Vlastos, between Socratic and Platonic doctrines.’ Plato's complex meta-physics and e-pist-em-ology contrast sharply with the views reported for Socrates and exemplified in the early dialogues. These views change radically from the early to the middle dialogues, and hence it is reasonable to suppose that what is new in the middle dialogues is Platonic and what is old is Socratic” (151-52).

Neal Wood states in his article, “Socrates as Political Partisan,” that, “Far from being a detached, disinterested, and transcendent seeker after truth, Socrates appears to have been a political partisan.”

The original Socrates was probably an Athenian political figure changed into a philosophical and literary legend by those who wrote after his death.

Neal Wood explores many possible interpretations of Socrates:

·      Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey [describe] Socrates as the founder of political philosophy and the ver-i-ta-ble fount of political wisdom.

·      A.E. Taylor… sees in his life and teaching the basis of the European moral tradition.

·      Richard Crossman and Karl Popper… [judge] that he was a democratic man of the people who was betrayed by Plato.

·      Alban D. Winspear and Tom Silverberg [theorize] that he was a traitor to his proletarian origins and early democratic principles who became the toady of the aristocratic/oli-gar-kic party in Athens.

Gooch claims that, “Political partisanship in a broad sense would seem to be the necessary stimulus and condition for meaningful philosophic inquiry. The two are complementary rather than incompatible.”

It would seem that in order to objectively analyze the Socratic dialogues, one must do as Socrates did, and question everything.

Apple iPad To Come With 30k Free E-books, Report Says

Apple iPad To Come With 30k Free E-books, Report Says

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Followers, not leaders

Today I have been contemplating Plato's argument against democracy in his Republic.  Basically, he felt that people en masse are not fit to make decisions for the whole of a state, country, or republic.  With all of the banter back and forth regarding the current administration's decisions--I have really begun to agree. 

This is an excerpt from an essay I am reading on Plato's criticism of democracy in which the author, Matt Brazil, breaks down a potential evil of democracy, "What if, as a majority, the people decided to commit a heinous act, such as an unjustified military action against another nation for the sake of resources, no matter the cost in human lives? Such an action would lead to death and suffering for a great many people. Also, consider that the majority would not judge or correct themselves, for they were the ones who agreed to partake in that course of action. As such, they inflict evil upon many more people than an individual could ever hope to; after all, as a democracy, the majority’s actions affect the entirety of the state and its citizens."  We have actually seen this in recent years within our own democracy.

Plato advocated Oligarchy-governance/rule by the best.  This is typically taken to mean the aristocracy, but what if it didn't?  What if it meant "ruled by the smartest, wisest, most qualified?"  People allow themselves so easily to be swayed and manipulated by the media.  KNOWING that stations tend to be biased, why would ANYONE not take things with a grain of salt?

There was a woman at work today whose husband was an anesthesiologist.  She swore that the new bill would half her husband's salary.  Really?  Show me the math behind that!  She also said that her husband would be a government employee.  Seriously, this isn't the UK, and even then, Dr.s in London still drive Audi's... or whatever your pick of luxury car may be. 

If you look at the actual bill that was passed, all it does is regulate insurance agencies.  It sets rate limits, prohibits denials, and will ultimate benefit ALL consumers by forcing down prices on drugs and medical services.  Will people HAVE to have insurance?  Yes.  After 2014 anyone who does not can be fined.  SO?  We fine people for not having car insurance.  Why do we do that?  Because they are a liability to everyone else if they are uninsured!  The same goes for health insurance, not only because of disease issues, but for tax purposes.  When uninsured sick people don't pay/can't pay their medical bills--who foots that bill?  Tax payers.  Ipso facto, requiring insurance will free up some tax money for: lowering the deficit, creating jobs, fixing roads, public education... whatever!

My point in that is, people... READ the bill, and please, PLEASE stop regurgitating quotes from the press.  I am not saying that people shouldn't watch the news, but check your facts people.  I feel like I live in a country of conspiracy theorists!  The people who are opposing the health insurance bill are the same ones who opposed civil rights in the 60's and votes for women in the early teens.  Change can be, and often is GOOD!

With all of that said, I do often think that it would be better if people could not vote at all.  Or, if they elected a small body of representatives, those representatives would only function as an advisory board--a national thermometer of sorts--to those governing.  How would they come to power, well, that could be application to a board, similar to the supreme court, of proven officials. 

More to come on this... I am off to read.

Change

Transition

Rising tides, still waters of peace

Gathering clouds, raging storms

Faithful ideals.

Weakened of greed collective.

Sapping of confidence

- A nagging fear

Challenges.

Chosen hope

Fear dogmas

Reaffirm our precious gift

All are free.

Greatness earned.

Sacrificed ambitions.

Power undiminished.

Swift the sun runs

Under the ground shifts

Whether big or small

They move forward

Cheeky Umbrella at Zara, $30... A little more "Great Gatsby" than turn-of-the-century Londoner, but it would work for a Spirng-y look alternative for Hermes' Fall show.

Fall Shows 2010

Bowler hats, waistcoats, petticoats, and pom pons... and no, this was not the cheering section for "Sherlock Holmes" at recent award shows--we are talking Paris fashion week. This fall, it looks like we taking it back, back beyond old-school, beyond vintage, we're talking American Centennial style.

Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton showed frocks with pinched waists given ethereal buoyancy from the masses of petticoats hidden underneath. These dresses ranged in length from just below the knee to pooling the floor, but the majority flitted at mid-calf adding a decidedly 50's element to the fall aesthetic. The fabrics were lush and opulent but the hues were subdued: gray of all shades, aubergine, blush, deep steel blue, gold, faded aqua, lavender, and rose dominated the collection bolstered by neutrals in rich textures of leather and satin.
The accessories (of course) were fantastic, particularly the pumps, which were block-heeled and platformless. They came in every shade and fabric imaginable. Fuchsia, aqua, mustard, gray and velvet, silk, satin, ostrich skin. Each shoe was topped (or more appropriately, toed) with a flat wide bow in a contrasting shade (and often fabric) from the body of the shoe. The bags, all variations on LV's classic Speedy bag, were offered just as much variety in color and texture as the shoes.


Now to the bowler hat. I will preface this with, this is NOT a look for everyone! Many of the models faces were overwhelmed by the hat--and if it is hard for a model, well, then you KNOW it is tricky. It looks best on those with strong angular faces on the wide side rather than thin (the face not the person). This season Jean Paul Gaultier created for Hermes a collection so powerful that it can not be called men's-ware inspired. It is a tailored, sexy, confident collection that is all female. The hats, umbrellas, and pocket watches now belong to the ladies! So girls, go raid grandpa's closet, and take what is meant to be yours.


The pom pon's are sadly not listed for praise. They were ridiculous, impractical, and in no way attractive when worn as head pieces during the Sonia Rykiel show. They can be seen either as massive tumors, or as a satellite caught in the models gravitational pull. Either way, not good.

Other great shows: Balmain (channeling a very French mid-18th century look)

and Nina Ricci by Peter Copping.





Some major duds were, to my dismay, Burberry and Rodarte (I can't even begin to describe this, see the picture to the left).



Garreth Pugh was also awful, his models looked as if they had encountered a deranged priest on Ash Wednesday, who with no time to wash up before the show, were forced out onto the runway in the costumes from a remake of "Metropolis."

Also, Viktor and Rolf... clever concept, but too bad the clothes were... ugly.




All-in-all this season showed clothes that were pretty, nostalgic (in a refreshing way--maybe we have been pushing modernity a little to hard), and wearable. Enjoy!