Job’s Thinks Flash Is Crap

During last week’s town hall, Jobs also took a swipe at Adobe Flash – still absent from the iPhone and apparently absent from the iPad as well. “They are lazy,” Jobs allegedly said of Adobe. They have all this potential to do interesting things, but they just refuse to do it…Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy…

“Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash…The world is moving to HTML5.”

This was taken from an article at theregister.

I have to say though, the guy has a point. I have been working with Flex now for a couple of years and we have found A LOT of bugs and errors with the platform and are always having to find a work-around. I started imagining the situation when Adobe thought up Flex. I just imagine this meeting where everyone is sitting around this big table scratching their heads about what to do next. “Why don’t we create a ‘framework’ that let’s people do these new RIA thingy majingies. We can just build it right on-top of flash with hardly no work at all”. That explains why its near on impossible to create real powerful applications. It turns out that Silverlight was actually thought about properly and designed and implemented from the bottom up correctly. I really wish that Adobe would sort out a lot of the problems it has with Flash. I mean we’re at version 3 of Flex now and its still buggy. Version 4 is about to come out soon so we will have to see if it gets any better. I doubt it will though for the security model (where most of my issues lie) as this is within the flash engine itself. We all know that Flash has had some (and most likely still does) incredibly shit security holes. It seems to me that they have just patched it up non-stop to fix the issue at hand. Some things we have tried to do are just impossible and I have found that the security model contradicts itself in many places.

I would like to end it on a positive note though. There are a lot of things that I do like about Flex and Flash or else I would never use it at all. I just wish that the player itself would have a complete rewrite going forward with perhaps a compatibility mode so the older stuff still works.

UPDATE.

As we suggested recently, the myriad bugs that over the past few years have routinely imperiled the entire internet have made Adobe the Toyota of the software industry. Company security personnel seem intent of correcting the problems, but the only way for that to happen is to launch a comprehensive initiative that makes a top-to-bottom review of the company’s entire code base.

It would seem that things are just getting worse for Adobe and other people are also suggesting that Adobe revamp their whole product security.

Has Dell Just Given Up?

I have had to deal with Dell again in the last couple of weeks, first off to order a computer for someone else and then for a cheap linux box myself (I must be crazy).

The story starts with me ordering a computer for someone else (they really don’t get the internet hence they want a computer to learn). The laptop was around £900 and ordering it online went well. Literally like 3 minutes after I placed an order I had a call from my credit card company for a fraud check (Well done to Virgin (MBNA)). They said to contact Dell by phone or email to let them know that they can take the payment now. So I thought I would give them a ring. I called their number, ending up getting through to India once again. I must have pressed about twenty different options, and when I finally got through to someone I get passed passed around about four times. It appears that no one there actually understands how to deal with this matter. During this they decide to drop my call – this is after having been on the phone for about 40 minutes. Furious now, I ring them again. I finally get through to someone after about 20 minutes and guess what, yes, they pass me over again. This time I was angry enough to stick it to the next person who picked up and said this was a disgrace – never in my life have I had to fight for a company to take my money. The annoying thing as well is that I am having to wait back in the queue every time they pass me over to someone else.

Anyway, I finally get through to someone who can deal with me. Within about 1 minute she does something and that’s that. Something which just took me about an hour on the phone was completed in about 20 seconds – I was even more peed off now. I told the lady that the credit card company has allowed them to take the money out within the next 24 hours so they must do it by then or else it wil bounce again. Can you guess what happens next? Yeah thats right, they didn’t take the payment again so it bounced once again. I was seriously pissed off by now. How unprofessional can one company be? It turns out that very!

So I now have visions of being stuck on the phone again for another lifetime but thought sod it. I just called my credit card company, and got through to a human in like 3 minutes (take note Dell), and told them to extend the time for the payment which they did. I thought I would just wait for Dell to take the payment again and if they don’t then its tough luck and they can sod off. Anyway, they did end up taking payment later on Sunday night (remembering that I placed the order on Thursday). I get my confirmation email and the date of arrival is a month in the future – WTF! I even called the sales team before I placed the order to get an idea of how long it would take and they said about 7 – 10 working days. This would come way after Christmas so was a bit pointless as a christmas present. I ended up calling them up again to cancel the order. This time it seemed fast for Dell’s standards – about 20 minutes on the phone.

Now for the second machine. I have wanted a cheap laptop to install ubuntu on and I know that on Dell hardware it pretty much installs easily, so went for the £300 Inspiron 1545 and upgraded the battery and memory so it came to about £335. Exactly the kind of price I wanted to pay. I know I should have known better by now but it was cheap (and I think this is the only way Dell gets business these days) so thought what the hell. Anyway, this one went fine with the payment but when I got the arrival date it would arrive after I head back to Germany, so again would be no use to me. I cant believe they cant get it to me within 2 weeks. So anyway, I am literally now on the phone waiting to get through to someone to cancel the order (again) and have had time to write this while waiting.

I have just come off the phone with them – a total of 30 minutes! I told the guy on the phone that I was not happy about having to wait 28 minutes to get through to someone, his reply was “that they have a very high volume of calls coming through” blah blah. It’s the same answer I get every time I call. I told him the mechanics of the company don’t interest me in the slightest, and if they are struggling isn’t that enough information for them to hire more call operatives. He seemed a little puzzled by that question for some reason.

So my question is “What has happened to Dell?”. I can say that they used to be fantastic – absolutely fantastic! I wouldn’t have gone with anyone else for the same sort of price. Their customer service was brilliant. I remember getting through to an Irish call center and their staff there would always deal with your issue immediately without having to pass you on to about twenty people. When you had problems with the hardware you got through to some technician who understood your point and opinion and sent your stuff out pretty quickly so you can do it yourself. They listened to reason and took your word for it accepting that you may have a brain.

Since HP took over from them as the biggest computer seller it seems that they completely panicked and thought of nothing but getting that spot back again. They seem to have removed all the Irish centers (I have not yet got through to one in a while) and moved them all to India. Now I don’t have any problem with Indians in the slightest but I find that it just takes so much longer to explain to them what’s going on and you have this problem when they just don’t hear things right (accents play into it here). I remember having to repeat my address to this one guy about 20 times. The technicians just don’t take your word for it and make you go through all this crap just to get to the place where you started.

It seems to me that in the hope of cutting costs they have lost the one major thing that is important – the customer’s respect!

Update: It would seem that Dell has now been put into third place thanks to Acer

TwitterCrap

© 2008 Twitter

© 2008 Twitter

After much badgering I thought that I would give twitter a go and see what all the fuss is about. I created an account ages ago but have not bothered doing anything with it (and will probably continue not to).

The only problem with this is that I have gone into my account and tried to update a few things, and I am not kidding when I say that every request either didnt complete by just timing out or I got some dodgy “Technical Error” page from them. How shit is that! I thought that they were meant to have sorted these issues out? It can be done I am sure and its about time that they sent in some proper engineers who know what they are doing and sort it out if they hope to get anywhere and start earning some money. It wont be long before Facebook are at their heels and compete with them considering they have just turned down a takeover offer. I know that Facebook also suffers technical problems but so far in my experience no where near the amount with twitter.

I also put a little update javascript thing in my side bar but it only loads in every other page request. It doesnt interfere my page loading because I put the JS at the bottom of the page (I know why they recommend this now) so I will leave it in for now hoping that it at least gets a little better. Not very impressed so far – not at all.

UK2 Are Useless

You may have noticed that my site had been down for quite a few hours this morning. This was due to UK2 updating my hosting package but then completely fecking it up by deleting all my files and removing the DB.

After deciding that I did not want to pay 50p/minute on their support line for something that they had caused in the first place, I sent them a mail (not very nice one at that) and then it took them about 4-5 hours to get a backup copy of my files. I still had to reset all my settings and then create a new DB etc by importing the old data but at least it is back up again. The one thing that has annoyed me the most is that no one from UK2 has actually apologised for doing this to my account. Now that it is working again it seems slower than it ever has. I have to say, with all the other problems that I have had, UK2 is absolutely crap. I would never ever recommend them for anything. I had my other domains pointing to a folder in my account (part of my shared hosting) and for some reason they decided to change the DNS of these domains to point to some random domain parking sites. They seemed especially interested in my cheapestgamesonline.com domain which completely pissed me off. I have started transitioning my domain management to another host and will continue to do so until I have everything off of UK2.

Anyway, I have now signed up with a proper host (mediatemple) and will be trying them out for a while. You should soon notice a period of transition, but I will provide more details when I finally do it. Hopefully you should also notice a significant speed improvement. Well it should’nt be that hard not to get a speed improvement with how slow UK2 is now. I expected more from UK2 and they have completely let me down.

This was basically the communication through the support system. Notice how they never say sorry!

Me: Posted On: 28 Aug 2008 10:29 AM

I received my bill this morning for my host account. Along with that email was another informing me that I have now cPanel on my account.

ALL MY FILES AND DB HAVE BEEN DELETED AND ARE NO LONGER AVAILABLE!!!
MY SITE IS NOW NOT ACCESSIBLE BECAUSE OF THIS!
I NEVER ASKED FOR CPANEL AND ESPECIALLY WOULD NOT IF IT DELETES SETUP!!

I am not very happy at all. What kind of host deletes their clients files and completely messes up the configuration. I expect to get my files and website back ASAP.

Please contact me as soon as possible. You are able to contact me at the following number (If you think I am paying 50p/minute considering you fecked up my system in the first place think again): 020 —- —-.

Sincerely,

Landon Wainwright.

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Them: Posted On: 28 Aug 2008 11:00 AM

Hi

The ticket is now being sent to our 2nd level support team.
They will assist you soon.
Please wait.
Regards,


Alexander M.
Technical Support
UK-2 Ltd

Account Login Page: http://www.uk2.net/index.shtml

Domain Control Panel: http://www.uk2.net/domains.shtml

Knowledgebase & Frequently Asked Questions:

http://support.uk2.net/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=view

——————————————–

Them: Posted On: 28 Aug 2008 01:26 PM

Your files are restored, database .sql dump is in “dbbackup” folder in root of your space.
Please create brand-new MySQL database, username and password via your Cpanel:

http://landoweb.com/cpanel/

user: landoweb
pass: ipodmini

Once it’s done, we’ll restore your SQL-dump data.
Regards,


Alexander M.
Technical Support
UK-2 Ltd

Account Login Page: http://www.uk2.net/index.shtml

Domain Control Panel: http://www.uk2.net/domains.shtml

Knowledgebase & Frequently Asked Questions:

http://support.uk2.net/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=view

——————————————–

Me: Posted On: 28 Aug 2008 02:46 PM

I have now done the backup myself so the site is running again.

——————————————–

Them: Posted On: 28 Aug 2008 03:47 PM

Hi,

So may this ticket be closed or you need more help?
Please let me know.
Thank you.
Regards,


Andrey R
Technical Support
UK-2 Ltd

Account Login Page: http://www.uk2.net/index.shtml

Domain Control Panel: http://www.uk2.net/domains.shtml

Knowledgebase & Frequently Asked Questions:

http://support.uk2.net/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=view

——————————————–

Me: Posted On: 28 Aug 2008 03:54 PM

This ticket can now be closed.

——————————————–

Them: Posted On: 28 Aug 2008 04:11 PM

Hi,

Thank you for using our service.

If you have any issues please contact us.
Regards,


Andrey R
Technical Support
UK-2 Ltd

Account Login Page: http://www.uk2.net/index.shtml

Domain Control Panel: http://www.uk2.net/domains.shtml

Knowledgebase & Frequently Asked Questions:

http://support.uk2.net/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=view

  ”Thank you for using our service”. – Yeah and thanks for the apology.

Thanks UK2 for Going Down Again

Well I’m sorry for the downtime recently. It appears that UK2 somehow managed to turn off the database and then magically get it back up again, then saying that it was never down in the first place :s Can you believe those guys. Still, it is now “magically” back up again so thats all that really matters. I used to think that UK2 were alright, but it now appears that it is full of non technical people who to be honest, cant even spell. I mean check out the email below which is what I received back from them. They cant even seem to answer John back about how he can park his domain on his space. So far it has been moved through 3 different levels of support, moved from low priority (which John put it in at) to critical by them and it still hasn’t been sorted. Its all going to pot it seems.

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Dear Customer,

Please clarify your problem, is your domain name landoweb.com? If it is, so this one work fine [sic], I doesn’t receive [sic] any error messages. Thank you for using our service. If you have any questions and/or problems, please contact us.
Warm Regards,


Nikolai
1st Line Customer Care
UK-2 Ltd

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