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.)

It's not yet clear how well the app will perform on Android devices or as an iPad app, as our colleagues at Gizmodo point out — or whether Apple will even allow the Wired app on its tablet device. Then there's the question of pricing. Wired editor Chris Anderson mentions getting people to pay for content in the video, but figuring out how much to charge for a brand-new digital category is, as the New York Times has learned, quite tricky. In any case, this slick-looking app sure beats out Sports Illustrated's imaginary tablet edition. Sorry, jocks. This is an away game for you.

What I want to know is: Which Apple employee hasn't drank enough Kool-Aid/has the balls to stand up in a room with Jobs, and grill him about Google and Flash? Either way, they got the answers. But how do they stand up on the REALTALK-o-Meter? Graded on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being Sign Language, 10 being REAL TALK.

On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won't let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there's no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don't be evil mantra: "It's bullshit." Audience roars.

Emphasis mine, though Wired later clears up that Jobs may have said "crap," instead of "bullshit."

REAL TALK-o-Meter: 6 if he said "crap," 7 if he said "bullshit," somewhere in Whitney "Hell to the No" Houston territory. Because any companies in the business of technology telling people they're out to make the World a Better Place are basically full of it, which obviously includes Apple. In fact, aren't most passive-defensive declarative statements bullshit? When someone says "I can't stand stupid people," it's like, why would you say that? Are you insecure about being stupid? How is everyone else stupid? Etc.

About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don't do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it's because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.

REAL TALK-o-Meter: A low 3. Yes, he was talking about the Decision Makers of Adobe, but writing an entire company off as "lazy" to your own employees is pretty disingenuous. Is Adobe really not up to speed because their guys are sitting around on beanbag chairs all day, smoking weed and playing Dolphin Olympics on their laptops? No. And is the reason the iPad and iPhone don't support Flash because it's buggy? Might have been taken into consideration, but to speak to it as the primary reason Apple's are crashing at least sounds misleading. So many of the websites you visit every day utilize flash. Why can't Apple's products—among other things—crash less, even if Flash is buggy? Then again, it's Jobs' decision to use Flash or not, REAL TALK. As for HTML5, if by "the world" Jobs means "Apple and whoever follows," he's correct. Which he probably does mean, because he's a computer nerd who's trying to run the universe.

Other notable notes that Wired picked up in the MacRumors forum:

- Apple will deliver aggressive updates to iPhone that Android/Google won't be able to keep up with
- iPad is up there with the iPhone and Mac as the most important products Jobs has been a part of
- Regarding the Lala acquisition, Apple was interested in bringing those people into the iTunes team
- Next iPhone coming is an A+ update
- New Macs for 2010 are going to take Apple to the next level
- Blu-Ray software is a mess, and Apple will wait until sales really start to take off before implementing it.

So, in this grading of the REAL TALK-O-Meter, Steve Jobs gets a 4.25 average, for which he gets nothing. At 8, we'll send him a Golden Shirt Microphone. Any employees who dare question Jobs and still have their testicles fully intact get figureative salutes from people all over who are too afraid to stand up to their power-crazy nerd bosses, and any tipsters who have anything else to say about how REAL the REAL TALK of Steve Jobs is (or the employees who questioned him, for that matter) gets an email address to say it to.

Oh, and as a reminder: this is what REAL TALK looks like.