NASA Space Shuttle Discovery's Last Launch

Space shuttle Discovery lifted off at 4:53 p.m. EST Thursday February 24, 2011 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Commander Steve Lindsey was leading the STS-133 crew.

Samsung Galaxy Tablet Review | Adobe Flash Performance

Samsung Galaxy Tablet comes with Android OS version 2.2 codename FROYO, making it possible to run Adobe Flash applications. This addition makes it a powerful device that can display any flash based website on the Internet. Similar functionality is not available on the Apple iPad, the competing tablet device.

Samsung tablet successfully played flash based videos at CNN website. Here is an example video that it can play located on the CNN Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2011 Website.




The Samsung Galaxy tablet plays all the flash based videos flawlessly.

It also loads complicated flash based websites like this one at 360cities showing a large picture of London that is made up of 80 Gigapixels. The flash based application allows to pan and zoom around the picture and shows a panoramic view of London. The following slide show displays some of the screen captured images from the panoramic view of city of London as displayed on the Samsung Galaxy tablet's screen.

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This is very impressive because something like this is simply not possible on Apple iPad. However, the performance of Flash player on this website was slightly problematic. It crashed many times while trying to pan around the image or when an attempt was made to zoom on a scene. The navigation through the scene was jerky using the touch controls. It is difficult to judge whether it was due to the slow CPU performance of the Tablet or due to the Flash player's performance. Flash has done a good job on desktops using mouse controls but it has not shown the same responsiveness with the touch controls. This definitely needs improvement if Flash wants to be a viable application development platform in the fastest growing segment of Smartphones and Tablets.

Fred Wilson of AVC blog writes

When the tech landscape changes; from web browsers to mobile browsers, from flash to HTML5, from laptops to tablets, from typing on keyboards to typing on screens, from local storage to cloud storage, there are always companies that are started to solve the pain points that crop up from that technology change.

In his opinion in the changing tech landscape Laptops will be replaced by Tablets. It is easy to confirm that the Tablets are the future computing devices. Former Morgan Stanley technology analyst Mary Meeker supports this trend. In her presentation here she predicts phenomenal growth in the use of Internet across the world as shown in this figure below:

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She also predicts that smartphone+Tablet will overtake the PC shipment as shown below:

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These trends predict that Samsung Tablets have a bright future.

Fred Wilson also thinks that Flash will be replaced by HTML5 in the future. Flash has done well on the desktop. Flash applications are much more engaging along-with the availability of wide variety of tools to develop flash applications. HTML5 is a promising development as a web based technology but it lacks development tools. Currently, it is competitive at the lower end of the multimedia web development but flash still rules at the higher end of multimedia web development on the desktops like the example of 80 Giga pixels picture of London shown above. So far there is no HTML5 application like that on the web. This example shows that Flash is a much more mature multimedia application development environment as compared to HTML5 that is still in the developmental stage. This is the good part but the next generation of computing environment is migrating to smart phones/Tablets with touch screens and Flash development is not as robust as it is on the desktops.

The flash player on Android 2.2 OS works but its operation is not as smooth as one would like it to be. This raises some doubts about Flash as a robust multimedia development environment on smart phone/Tablets, especially the newer upcoming tablets that will be based upon Android 3.0 OS Honeycomb built. Dan Frommer from BusinessInsider also has similar concerns about Flash Player

Motorola's Xoom tablet, the first serious Google Android rival to Apple's iPad, will ship without Adobe Flash support. Big shocker. (Not really.)

This is surely a disappointment to Motorola, Adobe, and Google. But to anyone who has been watching Adobe fumble with Flash on mobile devices for as long as we have, it's hardly a surprise.

Flash on the desktop expects a mouse, not a touchscreen, so some Flash websites may not even work properly. And forget about using Flash on your Xoom to watch Hulu; the video site historically blocks Flash on mobile devices. Hulu wants you to pay for its Hulu Plus subscription, which has customized that don't rely on Flash.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/adobe-flash-mobile-2011-2#ixzz1El4RpsRq

Adobe needs to come up quickly with a workable Flash player on Android smartphones and Tablets to stay in the game on this fast moving growth area of next generation computing devices.

Also see REVIEW | Samsung Galaxy Tablet | Hardware

Media Critic Douglas Rushkoff | Program or be Programmed

Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

At PivotCon 2010, Douglas Rushkoff made some extremely cogent arguments about why brands cannot go viral on social networks — even when there’s plenty of activity on companies’ websites and Facebook pages — and why it’s pointless to try to push brand concepts (such as mascots) around as memes in the expectation of driving actual product sales.

Beauty of Math Equations

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