I'm cruising XstreetSL this weekend and I noticed that stupid pop-up window on my browser about "Plug-in Content" and how I need the plug-in to display the content. It was irritating. I dismissed the dialog and continued on.

Then a few pages later it appeared again. My first thought was WTF? What has Linden Lab broken now? Then I realized what was going on. Bonehead merchants buying banner advertising at XSL are now putting-in Flash-based advertising and it's their loss and waste of money.

The last time I purchased a banner advert on SL Exchange (as it was still called back then) - only JPG or GIF images were allowed. Nothing else. Hence, Linden Lab has obviously changed the rules - probably charging even more for a Flash advert.

Here is why it's a waste of money:

• First, it's a banner ad. Non=targeted, meaning whomever it is shown to probably isn't even shopping for whatever you're selling. You might get one click-through in a thousand.
• It's a banner ad. People have trained themselves to tune-out banner ads for the last couple decades. Fewer people will even notice it there, much less pay a lot of attention to it.
• It's a Flash banner ad. Flash is obnoxious and people already know the low-quality spammers who use them so often, therefor more unlikely to actually click on it.
• It's a Flash banner ad. A significant number of people (not saying it's a lot, but significant) actually have Flash turned off. However, the advert was still served, so it still counts against your "impressions" number. You paid to show me the ad I (happily) never even saw.

Flash is so Windows 98. It's an old, useless, unstable and radically unsecured platform. Hackers and crackers target Flash all the time. It also is easy to develop Flash whatever, so Flash developers usually end-up becoming lazy, putting-out garbage, crap, shit.

I'm serious here. There are three instances where I see Flash used at all:

• Garbage, obnoxious, irritating, loud-mouthed advertising from spammers and scammers, sometimes legitimate companies.
• Flash "games" which are waste-of-time trinkets targeted at 5-year-olds whose attention span is but a few minutes at a time.
• Video presentation - which anyone who even cares about the video they produce would never, as Flash is among the worse CODECs (COmpressor/DECompressor) around. It sucks computer processing cycles, crashes computers, causes the computer to work overtime and overheat and is riddled with holes for hackers and crackers. And above all: the video looks like shit, even when displayed at half the size of a 3x5 index card. Only "throw-away" video is distributed in Flash format - or Flash is the alternative, not the primary distribution model.

Now Adobe is releasing Adobe CS5 - and they are tooting the Flash horn. The "big thing" about Flash CS5 is the ability to write a Flash "application" (using that word in the same sentence as "Flash" is a fucking joke) once and be able to "port it" or "export it" into many platforms, including iPhone OS (though Apple put the kerbosh on that idea with upcoming iPhone OS 4 - thank God).

Show me a single, useful anything that was created in Flash. Anything. Anyone? Show me a Flash "application" that is useful and that I would miss by not having Adobe's crappy plug-in installed on my system.

You can't.

There is nothing. Perhaps some big company has created a proprietary application for internal use - but 99.99% of all viable companies are not that stupid. Ask any I.T. department anywhere. The security of Flash is laughable. The use of it opens all kinds of doors into their networks (and coincidentally: your own computer).

All these bullshit claims that the Internet is "crippled" on the iAnything because they don't support Flash is laughable. Not supporting Flash on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad is a feature.

Gee, thanks Linden Lab for taking a massive leap backward by allowing/implementing or whatever...introducing: Flash anything on your web sites. You dip-shits. Doesn't matter, I have one foot outside the grid now and leaning heavily in that direction. Go ahead, come up with another something new to push me over the edge toward the outside.

I know: whether I and many others come or go isn't even worth a fleeting thought to you. But it does to me.

And I rest my case with this:

Was watching #Adobe #CS5 launch videos, alas the #Flash plugin crashed my browser. O the irony --Trilo Byte