This time, Flash will be great, honestly.

I know that when it comes to Apple/Microsoft/Google/Nokia/HTC you can never realistically have a sensible discussion of one methodology/ideology versus another. Team X will never admit team Y were right, and team Y genuinely can't understand why team X think they're right. It's human nature.

Baring in mind that I own several Apple devices and can not therefore be considered an impartial observer. However I read with interest the first brief Engadget review of Abode's Flash player 10.2. Allow me to highlight a section from one paragraph in particular;

With our trusty Droid 2's 1Ghz OMAP3 chip, we saw a slight but noticeable boost in framerate when playing a YouTube trailer at 480p, which admittedly only took took that particular video from "unwatchable" to merely "fairly jerky." With the Tegra 2-toting Motorola Xoom, however, 480p videos ran perfectly smooth, even as the tablet had trouble rendering 720p content as anything but a series of images.

The whole topic of Flash on mobile devices has reached a level of zealotry generally reserved only for wars of a religious nature. Apple decided not to support or even allow Flash on iOS for a number of reasons, claiming Flash was buggy, power hungry and would put a key part of the user experience in the hands of a third party developer with a history of poor support for OS X, but when the iPhone was announced Adobe said they were very close to having Flash working on the iPhone if only they had some support from Apple.

In 2007 the iPhone sported a processor running at 400Mhz and could easily cope with all but the highest resolution youtube videos. Four years later Abode have just release a version of Flash on Android that can play 480p videos "perfectly smooth" on a dual core 1Ghz device, but still can't play 720p videos.

Yesterday Evening Andy Ihnatko, a Chicago Sun Times technology columnist, tweeted the following

After playing just four "Funny Or Die" videos, Adobe Flash Player 10.2 on the Xoom chose the latter. (Still: a positive install)

So, still buggy, and despite four years of additional development time and a substantial step up in mobile device performance, Flash still can't do what Abode claimed they were close to achieving when the iPhone 1 shipped. Care to wager what it does to battery life?

There are many people who insist that for a full web experience you need Flash, and others who disagree. That discussion will continue for months/years to come and I can see both sides of the argument, but regardless of where we stand in that discussion, can team X and team y at least agree that Apple's doubts about Flash's abilities as a mobile platform had some validity? (that was a rhetorical question, the answer is of course no).

I sit very firmly on one side of this fence, but the question I want an answer to is this. What have all those people who insist we need Flash on mobile devices being doing for the last four years? Because it seems to me that after all this time Flash still isn't working properly on the mobile platforms that do support it.

Anyway, it's almost time for the Rugby, and if there's only one thing we can all agree on it's that Rugby is better than Soccer, and it has better battery life!

"Inch by inch, play by play, till we're finished."

As with many sports, the distance between victory and defeat in Rugby can be measured in inches. When Shane Horgan placed the ball in his out-stretched arm over the line scoring a last minute try to defeat England in the 2006 Six nations, the joke going around Dublin was that had Horgan been 6’ 3” rather than 6’ 4”, Ireland would have lost. But Shane Horgan is 6’ 4” and that last inch was enough to get the ball over the line for seven points. The difference between victory and defeat was 2 points, but it was that one inch that made the difference.

But at least Horgan’s try was not contentious. As frustrated as all English fans were at the score there was no doubt that the try was legitimate. There have been many moments in Rugby were a team has been rightly aggrieved at a try or penalty that should not have been awarded, and as many English fans will quickly point out, Horgan’s earlier try in the very same six nations match should not have been awarded, the touch judge failed to spot the ball had made contact with the touchline before Horgan hacked it forward to score.

Every rugby fan can recall a moment when their team come out on the wrong side of decision but given the incredibly physical nature of the game, the interpretation of ruck, maul and scrum and the simple fact that much of the game seems to involve piles of hands and feet all over the ball, it is a wonder that officials manage to officiate the game as well as they do. Mistakes will be made, referees will be taken advantage of and teams will be fortunate and unlucky, but as long as it happens in equal measure, the game continues.

But every now and again, there is a moment that is so clearly wrong and within the capabilities of players and officials to prevent that it becomes a talking point for the whole game. One of those moments occurred in the Wales versus Ireland match yesterday. A player illegally restarted play and the officials failed to understand what was happening. That mistake directly led to a score that changed the course of the game. The mechanics of the incident are not in doubt, nor is there any question that it was ilegal. Players and officials should know the rules, but in this case it seems that the only people on the pitch who understood the rules, conceded seven points.

We have to accept that in the heat of play, mistakes will be made and that on some of those occasions teams will be hard done by, but it is hard to accept when play has stopped and the people there to ensure fair play so clearly fail to do there job.

It makes no difference that the winning manager accepts it was wrong, or that some players described an incident of breaking the rules as “nice to have a bit of luck”, 55,000 Welsh fans won’t care that a moment of cheating followed by the officials' incompetence was the difference between their team winning and losing.

At the end of the day the championship table records the win, not the circumstance.

We are a Government

The news reports this afternoon suggest that Fine Gael and the Labour party have agreed the terms for the coalition government of the 31st Dáil Éireann. For the Fianna Fáil party the true cost of Ireland's €85 Billion bail out can now be measured. It cost them over 70% of the seats they held in the Dáil and brought about the end of 12 years of power. Unlike the recent fall of other governments, the revolution that saw the removal of Ireland's longest ruling political party did not require gunfire or bloodshed, just the ballot box and what former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern referred to as “stupid oul’ pencils”

It has been said that Irish society was held up by the three pillars of the Catholic Church , Fianna Fáil and the Gaelic Athletics Association. Today, after suffering the greatest defeat in it's history the Fianna Fáil party fell. After Ireland’s defeat of England in spectacular style in the Cricket world cup, perhaps the GAA should feel nervous.

While the removal of Fianna Fáil from power had been widely expected, a forgone conclusion in fact, it was the margin of the loss that was shocking. 70% of those eligible to vote turned out to deliver their verdict not simply on the government, but on the decisions they took that fed the property bubble and the led to the banking bust, and even for a party braced for the worst the result came as a shock. Fianna Fáil held 77 seats after the May 2007 election, not enough for a majority but enough to ensure they were the senior party in the coalition that followed.  By the time the counts for the 2011 election had finished, Fianna Fáil had won just 20 seats. From the party that had governed the Republic of Ireland for three quarters of it’s history, Fianna Fáil are now the third party in Irish politics, and in terms of parliamentary seats they are closer in size to the party in fourth, than the party in second. Their fall had been quick, it had been great and it was well deserved

Ireland is now faced with an unemployment rate that has soared form 4% to 14%, and this is despite the thousands of immigrants who left Ireland, their only remaining trace the cars bought with loans from Irish banks left abandoned at Dublin airport as their keepers looked for greener pastures. Those who claimed to be in the know spoke of soft landings, resilient banks that were adequately capitalised, and accused those who argued otherwise of scare mongering. What we really needed was someone who actually knew what there were talking bout, Those people did exist, but they were shouted down by the ever up-beat bankers and developers who believed that this property boom would continue

While there is increasing anger at the perception the bail out favoured the banks despite their reckless behaviour, the electorate has given the government a clear mandate to clean up Irish politics and improve corporate and banking governance. The price was high but we have an opportunity to permanently change Ireland for the better. 

Election Day!

The 2007 Irish general election was held 1,309 days ago. Estimates at the time suggested that Fianna Fáil, the incumbent party, would see their 81 parliamentary seats reduced by as many as 20. In the end Fianna Fáil lost just 3 seats. Fine Gael, the main opposition party, increased their seat count from 32 to 51. With the help of the Green Party, Fianna Fáil became the senior party in a coalition government.

But that was 1,309 day ago, and today as Irish voters set out to elect the 31st Dáil, times have changed substantially. The once lauded Celtic tiger has become a cautionary tale. Financial mismanagement and political cronyism, of a probably criminal level, turned the ineptitude of Irish bankers into a national crisis.

Fianna Fáil have, after almost fifty years of continuous rule finally seen their policies of endemic corruption come home to roost. This is the party which has so accepted defeat that even if it were to win every seat it contested it would still be unable to form a majority government. Before a single vote has been cast, the party that has ruled the Republic of Ireland for most of the last fifty years has, quite simply, given up.

Frankly, it is no more than they deserve. They were seen as the pro-business, pro-development, pro-'cash in an envelope' party. This was the party whose senior members have been accused of gun running, corruption, accepting bribes, and ultimately of gross misconduct by an Irish President. Make no mistake, this was a party for whom the means meant nothing  compared to the ends. Ireland is a country that will continue to pay the price for a political party that accepted its own well-being over the nations, over its citizens, and ultimately, over everything else. There can be few democratic counties in the world today who would have accepted Fianna Fáil's leaders as their premiers.

If one believes the press, the Republic of Ireland might see its first majority government in twenty-nine years, or it might not. In the space of seven days headlines have appeared in the national press suggesting both outcomes.

16th February - Press predict a Fine Gael majority

23rd February - We're back to a coalition
Even if Fine Gael fail to win an overall majority, it seems likely that Enda Kenny will be the next Taoiseach of Ireland.

In its February 19th edition, the Economist suggested that Ireland's "underlying economy is resilient enough, and Ireland's demographic outlook is favourable enough, for it to return to a path of prosperity." Adding that "far from seeing Ireland as a case-study in what not to do, the troubled Mediterranean members of the euro would do well to learn from it".

The Republic of Ireland's immediate future seems far from bright, but if one is to look for a silver lining there is a possibility that the political party directly responsible for so many of the country's woes may be sidelined for the foreseeable future. No panacea for our current and future pain, but there is the slimmest of possibilities that a collective lesson may have been learnt.

Déjà vu

On the 31st of October 1936, three days before the 1936 US presidential election, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered a speech at Madison Square Garden, in which he spoke about the battles his administration had, and was, fighting.

"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace, - business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organised money is just as dangerous as Government by organised mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me‚ and I welcome their hatred."

Roosevelt went on to win 523 of the 531 electoral votes in the 1936 election with his Republican opponent, Alf Landon, winning just 8 votes.

The animosity between President Roosevelt and the financial industry was partly a result of his signing into law the 1933 Glass–Steagall Banking Act. The banking reforms contained within the act were designed to control the speculation which led to the great depression. For 70 years the world experienced steady and sustained growth, but starting in the early 80's the banking industry lobbied the US government seeking the repeal of the Banking act, finally getting their wish in 1999, and many believe that its repeal was one of the major factors in the global financial crisis that followed less than 10 years later.

With us now just 3 days from the 2011 Irish general election we again have national economies in tatters thanks to speculation, and we again have banks opposed to the introduction of banking reform. But sadly we no longer appear to have politicians with the foresight to stand up to financial industry by even suggesting that the greater good might not be served by allowing those that have wronged us to continue on their course.

Is there a politician left here in Europe who could stand up and announce, to public ovation, that he welcomed the hatred of those with money? Is there even a public who would applaud such a speech?

Regardless of what the morally, and financially, bankrupt banks may claim, proper financial regulation was key to sustained economic well being, and I fear that it is to the detriment of the working and middle classes, and ultimately us all, that we don't have politicians of FDR's calibre to stand up and be hated.

Roll on Friday, the election, a new government, and maybe even, a future.