#“Cloud Kids”
The kids use one of my old PCs to access all their favourite sites and print stuff off on a 10 year old Epson Inkjet. It's a solid setup and they are happy with it. However, as it was a self-build, it never had a Windows licence and actually runs Ubuntu Linux.
I've always found it interesting that the kids could switch from XP to Windows 7 to Ubuntu on different PCs and laptops without comment. The reason of course is that they spend their entire time in the web browser. The old days of installing "educational software" from CD are long gone. It's YouTube, Wikipedia, Nick Jr, Disney Playhouse, Webkinz etc etc. Everyone from the 3 y/o to the 10 y/o has that stuff mastered. However I find myself in one-time-only agreement with Steve Jobs on a particular topic and that's Flash. Either Adobe figures out how to improve its performance by 10x and reduce it's resource hit by a similar amount or it'll go the way of Wordperfect within two years. Flash is a general resource pig on Windows but it renders Linux boxes unusable. Open three browser tabs on sites that have Flash-heavy ads and watch your dual-core machine grind to a halt.As a matter of principle I don't disable ads in my browser. People have to make a living and that's how many of them do. But I'm afraid, as of last week, I have turned on Adblock Plus on my Linux boxes. The results are astounding. Suddenly my browser is usable again. I can race through Google Reader and open 100 tabs with minimal slowdown. But on principle, I will tweak the filters soon to only block Flash ads and let through the text and image based ones. An hour ago I did the same on the kids' Linux box. Again, an incredible change. All those Flash-riddled sites are now fairly usable with the Flash ads turned off and the CPU dedicated to playing the game(s) on the sites. So Adobe is now responsible for reducing their customers' revenue by forcing people to disable functionality. I think we are going to see a fast and massive switchover from Flash for ads and kids' sites to HTML5+h.264 in the coming 12 months with that switchover led by The Steve. I'm really not sure how Adobe can prevent it except through FUD or a complete screwup of cross-browser cross-platform compatibility in HTML5.