Re: Please, No!
"And how would I activate Windows XP without the activation servers?"
By 2117, shouldn't the hardware be able to crack the 2003 activation key encryption in like .25 seconds?
A group of developers have taken to GitHub with a petition to save Adobe Flash following the Photoshop giant's largely welcomed decision to end support for the oft-reviled software in 2020. The petition to open-source Flash acknowledges Adobe's reasons for killing Flash, namely that it's been superseded and is woefully …
"How about, as a last resort, playing it through a nice large screen with a decent audio output and recording it onto another device?"
Well for a start that would turn a dynamic & interactive presentation into a static one... At least I've never seen a video with a working button....
@dv3y
I was talking about academics and researchers - They, or their assistants, have plenty of time :-)
So record all of the possible permutations and combinations separately, and edit them together into a different format of media with the necessary links? It should be possible with HTML5...
So record all of the possible permutations and combinations separately, and edit them together into a different format of media with the necessary links? It should be possible with HTML5...
And while you have solved the combinatorial explosion you will move on to the Halting problem?
@Tim99
"So record all of the possible permutations and combinations separately, and edit them together into a different format of media"
Lets look at an example, a firm favourite from the golden days of flash, the 1990s - Joe Cartoon Frog in a blender.
Go and google that *Simple* animation with at most 10 interactive buttons and tell me how long you think it would take to convert to something usable that worked in a close enough manner to not lose the meaning of the original.
Now, thats obviously a daft example, no one is going to waste time converting that, but its a simple application and it would be massively time consuming - imagine the same for a bigger - more useful resource, why bother with that when the people that need it could just use the open source version that is being asked for here...
Think of the resources serious and otherwise which will be lost if we can no longer run flash.
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@Symon, have an upvote.
Prior to 1849, record copies of Acts were handwritten onto animal skin parchment (usually goatskin). From that time onwards printed record copies use high quality vellum (calfskin). Private Acts have been printed on archival papers since 1956. In 2015 The National Archives advised that they do not need a vellum copy of Public Acts and that archival paper was sufficient. Printing on vellum continued for heritage and traditional reasons. In a FOI request the 2008 cost of printed vellum was quoted at £31.08 a page, which seems reasonable.
In churches, records of important events like births, deaths and marriages were handwritten in archive quality paper books; as are the "original" signed copies of these documents. Normally Wills, etc., are on acid-free paper. Early church codices were written onto papyrus or animal skin. Unbleached cellulose fibre paper goes back at least 2,200 years in China. Good quality paper can still be made from reclaimed hrmp, linen and cotton rags.
There already *are* open source alternatives to Flash that can play older games and a VM ( as suggested above) is a viable solution for the remainder. I think this new proposal would simply keep Adobe's implementation, bugs and all, limping on indefinitely. (The sociopaths who currently refuse to remove the Flash crap on their websites would jump at the chance to keep it alive forever.)
that a couple of open source media players already play flush files aside from gnash. For those who want to use those files of course. Now if the c****n* who insist on using Flush as part of their government associated sites could just be flushed down sewers also I would be slightly mollified.
You may laugh but considering that Poettering gets his OS user-space design classes from Microsoft, and there is Windows service "WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery", which in fact is HTTP stack built into the OS, it is imaginable he might just do the same. And then invite Gnome developers to make it a dependency.
As others have said, it's a bad idea to revive Flash as an open-source zombie. It would only make the technology live longer than useful.
And for people worried about history being lost, get a VM to emulate it, already ! The Amiga still lives in emulators after all, there's no reason Flash wouldn't do the same.
If you wanna play with it, fire up a Windows 98 VM without internet access, the same way that someone would want to play with any old versions of stuff in a secure way (Looking your way, RealMedia)
Nothing stopping you building an oldskool machine with 1995/1998/2001 era technology and software. No need to keep this zombie shuffling on for the rest of us.
> If you wanna play with it, fire up a Windows 98 VM
How long before you need an emulator to run the VM that can run Windows 98?
> Nothing stopping you building an oldskool machine with 1995/1998/2001 era technology and software.
Yes, nothing, except possibly the enormous effort required.
"Yes, nothing, except possibly the enormous effort required."
And cost.
I wanted to play some dos based games a while ago and they just wont work well when emulated.
So I though, "I know Ill jump on eBay and pick up a 90's era machine for a few ££"
How wrong I was, back in '98 I built an (at the time) kick ass machine.
AMD K6 266MHz processor
32MB Ram
4.3GB HDD
15" Monitor
Voodoo 3 Graphics Card
It cost me around £450
To buy a machine on eBay with the same spec now I'd need about the same money again.
Wish I'd kept it now instead of binning it.
That's why it's important to remember history so we don't make the same mistakes. After all, only complete morons created entire websites out of flash (rather that using flash to enhance a real website)... we wouldn't want the same class of morons to do the same with new technology would we?
Oh wait... JavaScript...
"only complete morons created entire websites out of flash (rather that using flash to enhance a real website)"
With 'Snarg', Artist Drops Oils for Flash
Presumably "real" websites are created with oil paint on hand-woven linen canvas from the Himalayas...
NB. I've linked to Jef's original Snarg from ca. 1997 rather than what it has evolved into and the NYT article now links to.
Just FYI, the standards today are controlled by the same clube of 33 you hate because of corporations blabalbla....
https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List
so if you think that to be against a type of technology thinking that you are a freedom rebel so you have been fooled.
Personally it's much much more fun to program in Actionscript that Javascript, I would say javacrap...
and take much less time, allowing me enjoy life with my beloved ones.