"Do one thing well..." (Flash)

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

"Michael ODonnell" <michael.odonnell at comcast.net> writes:
>
> "One Year Later: Adobe Abandons 64-bit Linux Again":
> 
>   http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/06/one-year-later-adobe-abandons.html

    "This decision makes even less sense than it did a year ago.
     32-bit processors have effectively become legacy technology.
     Even the low end of the market, nettops and netbooks,
     now mainly ship with 64-bit processors. Yet it seems Adobe
     is unable to maintain a 64-bit Flash player for any platform:
     not for Windows, not for MacOS, and certainly not for Linux."

Indeed--where `whether something is 64bit-clean' was a natural question
to ask a few years back, 64-bit machines were unusual `specialty' hardware,
and many sofware projects just didn't have anyone involved who had
access to such machines..., now I find myself fielding questions
from users (though only occasionally!) about whether my packages
are `known to work on 32-bit systems', and I know that I'm not alone--
I've seen messages on the mailing-lists for some of the embedded
projects with which I'm involved, where people ask things like:

    Is it possible to get a build of the toolchain that runs
    on 32-bit hosts?

I have a single 32-bit x86 machine left running in my workshop,
and don't have any plans to replace it with a similar vintage
when if it ever finally dies--I wouldn't even know where to
get x86-32 hardware, anymore. Thank goodness for chroots
and virtual machines, I guess.

Reminds me of maddog's remark in his section on linuxpromagazine.com:

    http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Online/Blogs/Paw-Prints-Writings-of-the-maddog/Do-not-say-Closed-Source-or-Proprietary-Software-instead-say-Legacy-Software

... that `closed source' it's not merely closed source, but `legacy'--
from the moment that the binaries ship.

Seeing Adobe's comments, I posted this remark on identi.ca, yesterday:

    Adobe suprised that only 1% of downloads are for legacy
    software that doesn't work or doesn't exist (wait—what?):
    http://lwn.net/Articles/447576/

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."