What almost everyone fails to realize is that Flash is already as open as it possibly can be. The SWF file specification and the player virtual machine are open and completely described here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/
The only thing that keeps Adobe from completely open-sourcing their own player is codec licenses, not Adobe's stubbornness. Adobe pays a lot of money to license codecs that are closed (like h.264) and therefore have to protect those interests within their player. If there were a common open standard for video/audio, this would be a possibility.
This framework was developed by my friend's brother, and was released this evening. He's been working on it for over a year and quit his job to focus on it. I think he is the single developer on the project - looks like quite an undertaking! I've not tried it out myself as he's kept it pretty close, but I'm glad to see it's now available.
Not in my install, at least. I will admit the scanning is more obtrusive than I would like, but besides that there are no irregularities like that that make it an annoyance.
This is an old article. I also removed AVG after seeing this ridiculous behavior, but after updating it on a different machine I realized they had seen the error of their ways and fixed this issue. They have since removed the error sign when the link checker is disable, and as far as I can see remember they now allow (at least custom) installation w/out the link follower at all (as my installation doesn't even have it!).
I do notice issues when AVG does it's weekly scan - the computer runs quite a bit slower - but besides that I've got no problems. I was upset when they released the version with the noted problems, but since they quickly released an update with fixes I'm happy enough to continue to use AVG. Everybody makes mistakes!
If you use iTunes, check out Genius. I only tried for the first time yesterday, but was amazed at the degree of interesting new music that matched my tastes.
edit: found your email in comments, so no need to contact! Again, great work. Think of how much you could accomplish for non-profits if half the visitors to this site spent 1 week working on a project instead of reading articles - amazing!
I've literally been talking about the same idea with friends for almost a month now! We'd met with quite a few non-profits with the intentions of providing some unique contributions using our technical/marketing skills, but soon realized that the barrier to entry for that kind of assistance was high and that we'd probably do better to reduce this barrier to entry and let anyone with design/marketing/programming/etc skills help for a few hours on an existing, managed project. Our plan is to reach out to non-profits to help them generate new ideas for promoting their cause, then break up tasks and provide an interface for those that want to contribute over the web - looks pretty close to what you're doing!
I think it's great that you've put this together. I'd love to speak with you directly about your experience and how we might be able to assist you or work together in the future. If you have a minute, could you contact me at ben @ widgetinvolved.org?
Interestingly enough I was planning on emailing your company already! Don't see an email in the profile but you can reach me @ benporterfield on gmail. I'll try to send a mail to the contact us page and maybe I'll reach you - we should go surf!
Ok, but all jokes aside, we're still waiting for an email :(. I might have made a mistake, but I'm pretty sure I triple-checked my email address in the application, and I also have it in my profile. I know my application was submitted, since I received a question from pg himself.
Maybe something went awry with the mail script? I don't want to assume one way or another until I get an actual response...All I know is that productivity is going to suffer today! Is anyone else still waiting?
Perhaps providing responses through the HN profile could be a good fix to this problem and the spam folder issue for future cycles?
I'm still waiting on a response too...maybe it's some kind of YC startup challenge; none of the undecideds get notified, and the team that handles the pressure the best gets the final spot!
The only thing that keeps Adobe from completely open-sourcing their own player is codec licenses, not Adobe's stubbornness. Adobe pays a lot of money to license codecs that are closed (like h.264) and therefore have to protect those interests within their player. If there were a common open standard for video/audio, this would be a possibility.
(edit) http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/02/following_the_open_trail...