ftf, It was an evident and welcome news from Abode on Flash. By mitigating the Mobile browser piece of functionality to upcoming HTML5 standards (tasks that HTML5 could handle now, which couldn’t when being HTML4, for over two decades), Adobe has made the right call with letting Flash to focus on future and innovation, and at the same time aggressively contributing to HTML5 (as in the case of acquiring the likes of PhoneGap and building HTML5 design/authoring tools) by extending the focus to Desktop, ‘Mobile’ App development and beyond, with advanced Gaming (graphic accelerator features), 3D, secure Enterprise apps, premium Video broadcast, Rich Interactive apps and more. Flash is not just the Flash Player Plugin in a browser. Flash ecosystem has the premier Flash Professional + Flash/Flex Builder + AIR packager/runtime, IDEs and Authoring tools which continue to provide frontier solutions in a wide diaspora of tech landscape.

Flash will continue to torment the naysayers. FLASH is ‘Alive and Well’.  The opinion comes from being a technologist with a bias for creativity, technology and innovation.

from ‘THE SATURDAY READER’ August 4 1866 VOL II No 48:
on “LONG LIFE”:
…Possibly after all, however, there are not many who think extreme old age worth striving for- worth taking a deal of trouble to obtain- who are of the same opinion аs Northcote, the painter, that life, after the power of labouring with, zest has gone, is like keeping the candles lighted in a church after the congregation have left – waste of time, waste of existence. It is not every one that can take the same pleasure in fourscore and ten that Cornaro and Fon-tenelle did. The latter, who lived to be ninety five, said the age at which he had been most happy was from forty five to seventy five because at forty five the condition of life was established, and dreams vanished or fulfilled, so that then really began the season of quiet enjoyment.

Southey said: “Live as long as you may, the first twenty years is the longest half of your life.” Dr Cadogan held that the life of man was properly ninety years instead of three score and ten- “thirty to go up, thirty to stand still ,and thirty to go down.” “Fortunately there is a tranquillity,” to quote Southey once more,”which nature brings with it as duly towards the close of life as induces sleep at tho close of day.”

Be life short or long, remember, with Carlyle, that, “to the pitifullest of all sons of earth, life is no idle dream, but a solid reality. It is (he adds) thy own, it is all thou hast to face eternity with.” Or better, perhaps, and still more brief, are the words of the old Scottish divine: “Time is short; and if your cross is heavy, you have not far to bear it.”

Our divine poet Shakspere pertinently says “The time of life is short: To spend that shortness basely were too long, If life did ride upon a dial’s point, still ending at the arrival of an hour” I Henry IV Act V Sc 2. If we spend our days in labour, selfishly for own sakes only, we shall spend them in “Letting down buckets into empty wells, And growing old in drawing nothing up.”