ecopolis

Ei fu. Siccome immobile,
dato il mortal sospiro,
stette la spoglia immemore
orba di tanto spiro,
così percossa, attonita
la terra al nunzio sta,
muta pensando all’ultima
ora dell’uom fatale;
né sa quando una simile
orma di pie’ mortale
la sua cruenta polvere
a calpestar verrà.
Lui folgorante in solio
vide il mio genio e tacque;
quando, con vece assidua,
cadde, risorse e giacque,
di mille voci al sònito
mista la sua non ha:
vergin di servo encomio
e di codardo oltraggio,
sorge or commosso al sùbito
sparir di tanto raggio;
e scioglie all’urna un cantico
che forse non morrà.
Dall’Alpi alle Piramidi,
dal Manzanarre al Reno,
di quel securo il fulmine
tenea dietro al baleno;
scoppiò da Scilla al Tanai,
dall’uno all’altro mar.
Fu vera gloria? Ai posteri
l’ardua sentenza: nui
chiniam la fronte al Massimo
Fattor, che volle in lui
del creator suo spirito
più vasta orma stampar.
La procellosa e trepida
gioia d’un gran disegno,
l’ansia d’un cor che indocile
serve, pensando al regno;
e il giunge, e tiene un premio
ch’era follia sperar;
tutto ei provò: la gloria
maggior dopo il periglio,
la fuga e la vittoria,
la reggia e il tristo esiglio;
due volte nella polvere,
due volte sull’altar.
Ei si nomò: due secoli,
l’un contro l’altro armato,
sommessi a lui si volsero,
come aspettando il fato;
ei fe’ silenzio, ed arbitro
s’assise in mezzo a lor.
E sparve, e i dì nell’ozio
chiuse in sì breve sponda,
segno d’immensa invidia
e di pietà profonda,
d’inestinguibil odio
e d’indomato amor.
Come sul capo al naufrago
l’onda s’avvolve e pesa,
l’onda su cui del misero,
alta pur dianzi e tesa,
scorrea la vista a scernere
prode remote invan;
tal su quell’alma il cumulo
delle memorie scese.
Oh quante volte ai posteri
narrar se stesso imprese,
e sull’eterne pagine
cadde la stanca man!
Oh quante volte, al tacito
morir d’un giorno inerte,
chinati i rai fulminei,
le braccia al sen conserte,
stette, e dei dì che furono
l’assalse il sovvenir!
E ripensò le mobili
tende, e i percossi valli,
e il lampo de’ manipoli,
e l’onda dei cavalli,
e il concitato imperio
e il celere ubbidir.
Ahi! forse a tanto strazio
cadde lo spirto anelo,
e disperò; ma valida
venne una man dal cielo,
e in più spirabil aere
pietosa il trasportò;
e l’avvïò, pei floridi
sentier della speranza,
ai campi eterni, al premio
che i desideri avanza,
dov’è silenzio e tenebre
la gloria che passò.
Bella Immortal! benefica
Fede ai trïonfi avvezza!
Scrivi ancor questo, allegrati;
ché più superba altezza
al disonor del Gòlgota
giammai non si chinò.
Tu dalle stanche ceneri
sperdi ogni ria parola:
il Dio che atterra e suscita,
che affanna e che consola,
sulla deserta coltrice
accanto a lui posò.

An episode from Green Porno, Isabella Rossellini’s new series.
Here more.

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.

More Job’s Thoughts on Flash via Apple

Productions by internationally renowned media artists and the innovative works of new masters from the academies will be presented at the 23nd European Media Art Festival (21-25 April 2010). The EMAF is one of the most influential forums of international Media Art. As a meeting point for artists, curators, distributors, gallery owners and an audience of specialists, the festival has a great impact on the topic and aesthetics of Media Art. Each year the festival offers its visitors a current overview of new experimental films, performances, lectures, an exhibition and the Media Campus.

The frame of content of the festival is ranging from personal and political subjects or formal experiments to provocative statements.

The motto of the 2010 festival is MASH UP, reflected in film programmes, lectures and specials.

Today, the reinterpretation and re-coding of media content, works of art and music take place in popular culture and art alike. In the process, mashing up citations and references evolves into the aesthetic, satirical and subversive stylistic device, where it also infringes on the rights of third parties.

In January, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg declared the age of privacy to be over. A month earlier, Google Chief Eric Schmidt expressed a similar sentiment. Add Scott McNealy’s and Larry Ellison’s comments from a few years earlier, and you’ve got a whole lot of tech CEOs proclaiming the death of privacy — especially when it comes to young people.

It’s just not true. People, including the younger generation, still care about privacy. Yes, they’re far more public on the Internet than their parents: writing personal details on Facebook, posting embarrassing photos on Flickr and having intimate conversations on Twitter. But they take steps to protect their privacy and vociferously complain when they feel it violated. They’re not technically sophisticated about privacy and make mistakes all the time, but that’s mostly the fault of companies and Web sites that try to manipulate them for financial gain.

To the older generation, privacy is about secrecy. And, as the Supreme Court said, once something is no longer secret, it’s no longer private. But that’s not how privacy works, and it’s not how the younger generation thinks about it. Privacy is about control. When your health records are sold to a pharmaceutical company without your permission; when a social-networking site changes your privacy settings to make what used to be visible only to your friends visible to everyone; when the NSA eavesdrops on everyone’s e-mail conversations — your loss of control over that information is the issue. We may not mind sharing our personal lives and thoughts, but we want to control how, where and with whom. A privacy failure is a control failure.

via CRYPTO-GRAM

What gave Microsoft the keys to the kingdom was partly the way it embraced an open platform based on the Intel processor plus slots for other manufacturers’ components to plug into. Even more important, though, was the vast number of applications written by independent programmers that worked exclusively with Microsoft’s operating systems.

Mr Jobs has no intention of ever opening Apple’s hardware for others to mess with. But software that meets a minimum standard is a different matter. At the last count, the App Store (Apple’s online outlet for iPhone software) listed 185,000 applications for users to choose from. So far, some 4 billion software utilities, games, maps and music tracks have been downloaded by owners of iPhones, iPods and lately iPads—all of which share the same operating system and can therefore use many of the same applications. The App Store offers Mr Jobs his best chance yet of creating a global franchise on a par with Microsoft’s Windows. From Apple’s perspective, the last thing it should therefore do is allow that unique source of customer satisfaction to be threatened in any way.

No surprise, then, that Mr Jobs has banned programmers from writing iPhone apps using cross-platform programming tools like Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s .NET, which make it easy to write an app for many different devices and operating systems at once. Flash plug-ins, running inside web browsers, can be found in Macintosh computers, but in none of Apple’s mobile toys.

Were Flash ever to find its way in through the back door to the iPhone operating system, Apple’s armlock on its customers would be severely weakened. If most apps are built to run on Android and BlackBerry phones, as well as iPhones, then Apple would lose the advantage of being able to offer the widest choice of apps. With all smart phones able to do similar tricks these days, there would be less compulsion to buy an iPhone in the first place.

But there is a big problem with banning Flash: without it, people cannot play most of the videos, animation and games encoded on websites using the industry’s most popular tool. Adobe’s Flash software powers the vast majority of multimedia clips seen on the web—from YouTube videos to the simplest animated chart or advertisement. Apple’s devices include software that can play YouTube videos when needed. But apart from that they are incompatible with content built in Flash. (Bad luck, Farmville fans.)

Still, Mr Jobs remains adamant. In his view, Flash is a rat’s nest of buggy software that hogs processor cycles, drains battery life and causes needless crashes. That is why he has just blocked an end-run Adobe was planning around his ban on mobile Flash. Henceforth, developers creating applications for the iPhone and its ilk will have to sign a revised agreement that forbids them from using any programming tools other than Apple’s approved set.

The move was prompted by the arrival of Adobe’s latest programming aid, Flash Pro CS 5. This threatened to turn Flash applications of the kind seen on the web into stand-alone iPhone apps capable of slipping onto the App Store undetected. Adobe even boasted—rather rashly, as it turned out—that over 100 such programs had already done just that.

Does Apple’s latest clamp down on Flash mean that people who have bought iPhones, iPods and iPads are now stuck with a crippled version of the web? For the time being, yes—though there are partial workarounds that might yet help. Eventually, though, a technology known as HTML5, which has been in the works for the past six years, promises to render Flash largely irrelevant. Among other things, the attraction of HTML5 is that it is designed to handle audio and video internally, without the need for browser plug-ins such as Adobe’s Flash (or others like Microsoft’s Silverlight and Oracle’s JavaFX).

Unfortunately, HTML5 remains a work in progress. Where, today, Flash can seamlessly handle a variety of “codecs” for compressing and decompressing the video’s data stream between the web server and the viewer, HTML5 is experimenting with two distinctly different codecs for video playback: one, called H.264, is used in Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s forthcoming IE9 browsers, while the other, known as Ogg Theora, has been adopted by the Firefox and Opera browsers; Google’s Chrome has embraced both.

Experts agree that the H.264 algorithm produces a superior picture, but it is a proprietary technology—though free to license, at least for the time being. For internet purists, Ogg Theora’s attraction is that it is open source. A religious war has broken out between the two camps over which codec to standardise on.

The good news is that a solution may yet be in sight. By all accounts, Google is poised to open-source its highly regarded VP8 video codec. The search giant has hinted as much ever since acquiring the codec’s maker, On2 Technologies, earlier this year. Insiders reckon VP8 uses only half the bandwidth of H.264 while delivering an even better picture. Mozilla, the open-source organisation behind Firefox, would welcome VP8 into the fold.

But would Apple, after having backed H.264 so enthusiastically? If it promised a quick and certain death for Flash, Mr Jobs would doubtless be delighted to go along. For deprived iPhone users, the crippled web might then be a thing of the past.

via The Economist