[ale] macromedia & internet future

[David S. Jackson]

I was just looking at www.playhousedisney.com with my four year
old on her windows box.  Amazing.  Have you all checked that out
with your little ones? (Better do it with windows and d/l the
macromedia products for it...but when you do it's pretty cool.)

I was wondering if you had any thoughts about those sorts of
products (flash, shockwave, etc) in general, whether they're
good, bad, potentially good, or just a PITA.  

My thoughts are first, they're really good in the sense that my
daughter loves them.  It's like playing a CD-ROM (learning) game
on a distant computer.  Second, the downside is that it's closed
source, so you don't know what the security problems are and
you're really taking a security risk.  Lots of abuse potential.
Even behind a firewall, you could be getting surprises in what
you're feeding your runtimes from remote sites.  But it would be
pretty slick to have an open source product that allowed
developers to do this sort of thing.  I'd want to get some limits
set in some sort of open standard so I knew what to look for on
the required ports, assuming they weren't just http ports.

What are your thoughts?

TIA!

--
David S. Jackson                        dsj at dsj.net
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Nirvana?  That's the place where the powers that be
and their friends hang out.
		-- Zonker Harris
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