[ale] macromedia & internet future

[Wandered Inn]

"David S. Jackson" wrote:
> 
> 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.)

Looks great on my Linux box, why do you suggest Windows?   There is
flash support for Linux.

> 
> 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.

I like it, I wish there was a way to develop flash on Linux.  There is
some work being done here though.  There are some perl modules that do
some flash stuff, but it's still pretty green.  Anyone interested, I'll
send them the url info.

> 
> 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.

With the proper firewall configuration, you can see anything and
everything that's passing through, that is, if you have the disk space
and time to research all the data.

I'm working on porting my 2.2.18 kernels to 2.4.2 right now.  I
understand the new iptables stuff is more flexible than ipchains.

> 
> 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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Until later: Geoffrey		esoteric at denali.atlnet.com

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The
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