When you see Flash, Duck and Cover

Quoting:I can't see why someone hasn't leveled anti-trust allegations against Adobe.

When it comes to Flash that's easy: -Because the people who have Flash on their PC chose to install it themselves (AFAIK), -Because it's not tied to another product in a market where the producer of the tied product has a dominant position; -Because the one complaining should suffer from the abuse of a dominant position of the one accused. Normally, only companies or foundations are able to file a complaint, because doing so requires rather a bit of effort and probably some costs as well. As a single end-consumer it's hard to proof you are suffering from Flash; though not impossible. The FSF doesn't have an alternative which is suffering from Flash. Even worse, they recreated it showing they don't see Flash as a problem, but as a good platform which they have to emulate. Actually only Microsoft would suffer from Flash because they are the only ones providing an alternative at this time I believe. So the only one entitled to such a complaint - at this time as far as I could tell - would be Microsoft. They are not going to sue Adobe for anti-competitive behaviour, because it will hit them back like a boomerang some other day.

If you don't agree, go ahead, be my guest, and file your complaint (or ask a company or foundation to do so):

http://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/others/formc.html http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/contact/newcase.htm#document * (or whatever it may be if you live 'somewhere else').

We can only benefit if the EC/USDOJ decides you're right, I'm wrong and 'end consumers suffer from Flash'.

*However, when it comes to anti-trust don't expect them to actually do anything except admitting "there's an infringement".

@gus3

Quoting: I actually agree with you on that. The problem is that, when you make a tool any moron can use, only a moron will use it.

An IDE made by anyone, Microsoft Visual Studio, Java NetBeans, GPL-licensed, or something else, can go only so far before its assumptions for your code become hindrances. At some point, you must get into the text editor and type. This is true for any non-trivial task; an accomplishment that doesn't involve manual code entry is, almost by definition, trivial.

Excuse me, but this has to be one of more senseless points made in these forums. By your logic those using GUI designers like glade/qtdesigner or even vim/emacs with all IDE like features are morons. The point of IDEs is to make programming easier for all including those who you think are morons, but particularly for programmers. There is no reason for programmers to hunt around in files to find some type or call hierarchy or write code to create and place GUI elements, for example, when an IDE can do it perfectly in a few keystrokes/clicks.

The point of programming languages themselves is to be tools to make things easier else we better use machine language. The importance is only of design, algorithms and not of the programming language itself. So far no one (in my knowledge) has found a turing-complete way to express the same in a simple point and click fashion else I would say that approach would be more desirable if it is decidedly quicker. In my opinion, it is quite unnecessary for people like scientists etc. to become programming experts or hire some, to be able to effectively use the power of computers in their fields and it will be wonderful if someone could come up with a simple point and click approach for the same.