Funny Occupy Wall Street Protest Signs

by Justin Thomas

from: http://egotvonline.com/

The Occupy Wall Street Protests have been ongoing for nearly three weeks now, and it’s showing no signs of letting up any time soon. In fact, the movement is spreading to other cities across the nation at an alarming pace. While the central message of the protests is still clouded in a haze of frustration and disorganization, many have taken to making protest signs to voice their concerns. While most of the Occupy Wall Street protest signs are pretty serious, some people have still managed to maintain a sense of humor. Check out these funny Occupy Wall Street protest signs:

NPR, WSJ plan Flash-free Web sites for Apple iPad

By Katie Marsal
From http://www.appleinsider.com/

In addition to new App Store software, National Public Radio and The Wall Street Journal also plan to create specific versions of their Web sites completely devoid of Adobe Flash for iPad users.

This week Peter Kafka with MediaMemo revealed that both NPR and the Journal will convert at least some portions of their Web site to load properly on the iPad. The custom-built sites will feature the same content and run concurrently with the traditional and iPhone/mobile-friendly versions of each Web site.

"Visitors to the newspaper's front page will see an iPad-specific, Flash-free page," Kafka said of the Journal's iPad Web site. "But those who click deeper into the site will eventually find pages that haven’t been converted."

The news comes weeks after Virgin America revealed it dropped Flash content from its new Web site in order to allow users with iPhones to check in for flights.

But the Journal and NPR are both also creating App Store software specifically for the iPad, suggesting that content providers are taking a multi-pronged approach to Apple's forthcoming multimedia device. Kinsey Wilson, head of digital media for NPR, declined to give Kafka an advance look at the organization's forthcoming iPad application or Web site, but did provide a hint as to what the experience could be like.

"Wilson says that while iPhone apps are a 'very intentional experience' --you load the thing up and seek out specific content -- he thinks the iPad will be a 'lean back device,'" Kafka wrote. "That's traditionally the distinction multimedia types use to differentiate between a computer and a TV. Intriguing."

The exclusion of Adobe Flash from the iPad and subsequent comments attributed to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, in which he allegedly called the Web standard a "CPU hog," have led to a considerable amount of debate over its merits and shortcomings.

Contributing to the conversation in January was Google, which added support for rival format HTML5 to the most popular video destination on the Internet, YouTube. The beta opt-in program is available only for browsers that support both HTML5 and H.264 video encoding. Apple, too, has placed its support behind HTML5.

For more on why Apple isn't likely to add support for Flash in the iPhone OS, read AppleInsider's three-part Flash Wars series.

What Steve Jobs Said During His Wall Street Journal iPad Demo

From: http://gawker.com

We know that Apple's CEO is no fan of Flash, the Web animation software. But it sounds like Steve Jobs really unleashed on the Adobe system to try and convince the Wall Street Journal to ditch it for the iPad.

Welcome to the nasty side of Jobs's famous Reality Distortion Field. The fun side had its turn when Jobs unveiled the iPad tablet computer in San Francisco last month. The dark side came several days later, when Jobs sat down with select Journal staff on the third floor of the News Corporation building in New York as part of a broader media tour.

Like other newspapers, the Journal is heavily invested in Flash as a way to deploy not only video but also slide shows and other interactive infographics and news applications. So when Jobs showed off his iPad, editors were sure to ask him about the device's lack of Flash, at least when they weren't pissing him off by posting to Twitter from the device.

Jobs was brazen in his dismissal of Flash, people familiar with the meeting tell us. He repeated what he said at an Apple Town Hall recently, that Flash crashes Macs and is buggy.

But he also called Flash a "CPU hog," a source of "security holes" and, in perhaps the most grievous insult a famous innovator can utter, a dying technology. Jobs said of Flash, "We don't spend a lot of energy on old technology." He then compared Flash to other obsolete systems Apple got people to ditch....

• ... like the floppy drive, famously absent in iMac,
  
• .... old data ports, including even Apple's own FireWire 400, gone from iPods and now all Macbooks,
  
• ....CCFL backlit LCD screens, now entirely replaced in Apple's lineup by LED-powered screens (except for this). (Correction: We originally said Apple replaced LCDs with LEDs; LEDs are a type of LCD backlighting.)
• ...and even the CD, with Jobs apparently crediting Apple's iPod, iTunes Store, CD-ripping software and "Rip, Mix, Burn" campaign with doing in the old music medium (sort of: though CD sales are in free fall, around 300 million were sold last year in the U.S. alone, 80 percent of all albums).

No doubt, Flash is a known CPU hog and security problem on Macs, a major source of system headaches that, infuriatingly for Apple, it can't control. Even factoring in the fact that Flash can't leverage graphics processors built into many Apple devices, it's a pig.

But let's compare apples to appples. At the Journal, Jobs claimed the iPad's battery performance would be degraded from 10 hours to 1.5 hours if it had to spend its CPU cycles decoding Flash, we're told. That sounds like an unfair comparison; the iPad would unlikely achieve its advertised 10 hours of maximum battery life while continuously playing video of any sort, iPad optimized or not.

But Jobs offered more than a thorough evisceration of Flash; he also used his Reality Distortion Field to sell the Journal on alternatives to the technology.

Ditching Flash would be "trivial," he suggested.

For one, he suggested the newspaper use the H.264 video compression system ("codec" in geek), which is compatible with both the iPad and the Flash Player installed on most Web browsers.

Jobs reportedly said the Journal would find "It's trivial to create video in H.264" instead of Flash. Depending on how the Journal handled the video conversion, that could be true, and for the moment H. 264 is a cheap and effective way to distribute Web video. But we assume Jobs didn't mention that H. 264 is patented, privately licensed and could get expensive fast.

Even setting that aside, H. 264 does not fully replace Flash. While it can handle video, it does not comprise a system for the rapid development of interactive graphics, as Flash does. Yet Jobs also reportedly said Flash would be "trivial" in this sense, as well — that it would be "trivial" to make an entire copy of the Journal website with the non-video Flash content also redone.

That's just not right; even assuming the Journal could duplicate its Flash slideshows, infographics and other news apps using iPad-friendly technologies like Javascript, it would take a decidedly nontrivial amount of time and effort to create or acquire such a system, hire staff who understand it as well as Flash, train staff on how to use it, and integrate it into the Journal's editorial workflow. It might be a great way to advance web standards like HTML5, and a great way to get the Journal on more devices, but it would hardly be "trivial."

It's not clear to us how assembled Journal honchos collectively reacted to these statements, but its worth noting that shortly after the meeting, on Feb. 10, editorial board member Holman Jenkins issued a WSJ op-ed comparing Apple to Microsoft and saying the company "is in danger of becoming preoccupied with zero-sum maneuvering versus hated rivals." His primary and lead example of this sort of "maneuvering" was Jobs' decision to keep Flash off the iPad.

Jobs' Reality Distortion Field may need a bit of fine tuning, then. But we have a feeling the Journal will swallow its objections and hop on the iPad gravy train. The Wall Street Journal editorial page has had its impressive moments of influence in the history of American conservatism, but these days that's little match for the power of Steve Jobs when he puts on a black turtleneck and strides onto a stage.

(Power aside, if you've got any informed opinions on how difficult it would be to replace Flash in the editorial workflow of a large newspaper or magazine, we'd love to hear them.)

(Update: Added some context on Flash's objectively sucky performance.)

(Top pic: Jobs speaking at Yerba Buna Center in San Francisco, Jan. 27. Getty Images.)

Send an email to Ryan Tate, the author of this post, at ryan@gawker.com.

Darth Vader Opens Wall Street

Darth Vader and a number of Storm Troopers from the Star Wars Saga rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. They, along with R2-D2, were there as representatives of Lucasfilm Ltd. (Dec. 22)

Bernie's Madoff Jail Cell

Here's where Bernie Madoff sleeps tonight:

Here's where he slept last night: