What flash is for

[Jonathan Hutchins]

On Monday 04 August 2003 5:06 pm, Brian Kelsay wrote:

> http://www.bordergatewayprotocol.net/~jon/humor/web_animations/switchlinux3
>.swf

> And we all debated for a few days what Flash is for and now it is all
> plain to me

Because I'm working with a slow system here, and a slow link, I usually try to 
run several tasks in parallel - while one web site loads, I go read the first 
page of another web site, then click and go back to the first.

This used to work pretty well for me, but now OSs have expanded and the system 
I'm running on is farther behind the curve.  I can pretty much run three 
konqueror sessions and keep my kmail session open in the maxed-out 98M of RAM 
I have on this 300MHz system

However, every once in a while, I'll hit some stupid site that has a Flash 
opening page.  Even if they have a default under-page that allows me to 
proceede, I'm usually hosed with so much irrelevant Flash data and Java (or 
whatever) script being dumped into the browser that it's swap-city, and the 
system goes completely unresponsive.  Chances are, wahtever's on the 
offending web site won't ever get explored, and the other projects I'm 
working on will be fubar as well.

The most frustrating thing is that the best way to cope with one of these 
data-dumps is to yank the modem cord.  Given that I have to pay by the 
minute, when I get into no-response territory, it gets expensive.

I realise that I could tune this system better - run a lighter window manager, 
experiment with alternate browsers, make some setings for Java and Flash.  I 
have downloaded and installed the Flash plugin, but Konqueror doesn't find 
it.  Like I said, that's ok, there's nothing that Flash ever conveys that's 
useful to me.

The solution I'd really like to see though is for someone to find an 
unstoppable exploit of Flash, one bad enough that you'd pretty much have to 
disable it for any public web site or face complete loss of your workstation.  
Then maybe it would go away, or be relegated to "click here to see a stupid, 
meaningless animation in which our web designer struts his glory".

Oh well.  Some pestilences just have to be lived with.