FFS
Let it fucking die.
Petition calls for Adobe Flash to survive as open source zombie
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 The petition to open-source Flash acknowledges Adobe's reasons for killing Flash, namely that it's been superseded and is woefully …
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Monday 31st July 2017 10:55 GMT Lotaresco
Re: FFS
"Let it fucking die."
Indeed. I've no idea why you have so many downvotes for that. I can only assume that some bearded hipster "web designers" have managed to get in here, somehow. The faster that Flash goes, the better. All we need to do is to make sure that no one bleeds into the coffin.
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Friday 8th September 2017 15:38 GMT jelabarre59
Re: It's doubtfull Adobe will want to open source this
It's doubtfull Adobe will want to open source this
.. and I can only begin to imagine the horrors lurking within.
I had suggested the reason Lotus didn't release their SmartSuite specifications for so long was they didn't want people laughing at their coding. Either that or they didn't know where they kept them.
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Monday 21st August 2017 19:07 GMT Pirate Dave
Re: "and didn't have a million holes?"
"I wouldn't bet any open source implementation would be better.... especially if they reuse the old code and start to add features instead of rewriting it - and even rewriting it would be dangerous."
Haven't we seen this before?
First it would be a lone hacker with an itch to scratch.
Then he'd invite his friends to help so he could finish the 0.9 version.
The public would love it and download it millions of times.
It would become too much for the lone hacker, so he'd pass it off to the community.
The Community would make it awesome, way better than it was before.
The Community would need a Committee.
The Committee would want to start reigning things in for managability.
The hacker influence would start to wane. Bloat would ensue.
The Committee would recommend forming a Foundation.
The Foundation would start making decisions on their own with little attention paid to the wants of the Community or the users.
Eventually the Foundation would remove all menus, and other features that some users found useful
The Community and users would complain
The Foundation would suggest the users are ignorant and that they go fuck themselves
Some details might be blurred in the shadows of time, but I swear I've seen something like this before, I just can't remember where.
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Monday 31st July 2017 10:46 GMT luminous
Re: Destroy the culture too
How about pointing to an open standard that is around now that can compete with the functionality you can get in flash?
I remember some really incredible sites (one that comes to mind is Jim Carrey's old one), and it would cripple all but the very high powered computers to do anything even remotely like that using modern open standards.
I've got nothing against retiring technologies, but doing it before there is something else that can do the same job seems a shame.
One example I can think of is a client wanted an animated logo on their splash page. The swf is 16kb, the jquery version is 205kb. Is that really progress?
Just because many people use a technology in a bad way, doesn't mean you should get rid of it. Should we just ban all music because of the likes of bieber et al?
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Monday 31st July 2017 12:33 GMT Lotaresco
Re: Destroy the culture too
"Just because many people use a technology in a bad way, doesn't mean you should get rid of it. "
So you haven't understood the problem with Flash then, have you? It's not "people using it in a bad way". It's the problem that Flash is a buggy mess of insecure code that compromises the security of both servers and clients. It's a foul mess best done away with.
Do you own a lumberjack shirt despite living in the heart of the Crapital?
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Monday 31st July 2017 16:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Destroy the culture too
"The swf is 16kb, the jquery version is 205kb. Is that really progress?"
Where in the hell did the 205kb come from? If you want something small and quick, you don't use jquery, everyone knows this. That said, 205kb... not minified or something?
jquery was great 8 years ago, but with all the native API changes added to the language, jquery has turned into the new Java Trap. Even WORSE actually, because people can learn to write better code than what jquery can provide, but they're just lazy and really don't know what they are doing.
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Friday 8th September 2017 15:47 GMT jelabarre59
Re: Destroy the culture too
Should we just ban all music because of the likes of bieber et al?
Not a problem, the right kind of software can replace him.
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Monday 31st July 2017 06:21 GMT Tim99
Please, No!
If academics and researches need to access "orphaned" flash works, they could have an old PC running whatever version of Windows, or a virtualised instance just for this work. It really should not be attached to any other network, and when crap infects it, it could be rebuilt. Then use them to create a new instance of the media with something saner.
How about, as a last resort, playing it through a nice large screen with a decent audio output and recording it onto another device? Although one of the problems is that people, at the time, cannot always recognize what will be important in the future.
We are now in danger of trapping ourselves so that we lose access to older material. The idea that if something is on the internet it will be there forever is rubbish - We have already lost much of the content from more than 10 years ago.
In the early C19th using chlorine bleaching of wood pulp to make paper became common, and by the early C20th was ubiquitous. Unfortunately, the chlorine bleached paper was unstable and could crumble away over a few decades. Before this, most important "paper" documents were on vegetable/linen fibre paper. As a result, many documents since that time have disappeared from record, or are so fragile that they are not available to modern researchers. For important documents, archivists now have them printed onto "acid free" paper, which are expected to last 500-1000 years. This is one reason why old church records are often in good condition and can still be read, but many Victorian documents have disappeared.
In the early 1980s I was involved in having to archive workplace health records which needed to be kept for 60+ years - It was suggested by a major IT supplier that we use "Write Once, Read Many times"(WORM) optical disks as they used a similar technology to CDs which were initially advertised as "Perfect Sound Forever" - They came back to us only a couple of years later when they realised that some of the media was failing. They recommended that we keep multiple copies of the data on hard drives, and move it on to new devices every few years - We did, but made certain that we printed multiple copies of everything using decent ink onto acid-free paper and archived the copies at multiple sites...
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Monday 31st July 2017 08:43 GMT Adam 52
Re: Please, No!
How well does virtualization work?
Suppose I want to emulate a Windows XP box in 2117, would I need a copy of Virtual Box running inside a copy of my Core i700 emulator running inside...
And how would I activate Windows XP without the activation servers? Even with emulation we need to resolve the licensing and activation issues.
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Monday 31st July 2017 10:44 GMT karlkarl
Re: Please, No!
Heh, you nailed it. This problem will become a major concern in the future and will lead to new laws on software lifespan to be created (and DRM terminated).
Virtualization is a temporary solution to running oldish operating systems. In 2017, The fact that most 3D Windows 95 games are in the sweet-spot of being too old to run on a current system but too new to emulate is a great demonstration of what running software will be like at any point in the future.
Virtualization (while it exists) only ever targets running modern systems as a VM whereas older systems are supported only as a "lucky byproduct". Oracle, Microsoft, VMWare and Extratiq all state that something like supporting Windows 95 does not make "business sense" and will never support it. In 100 years, Windows XP will not make "business sense" either.
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Monday 31st July 2017 22:57 GMT Adam 52
Re: Please, No!
I think it's pertinent that we consider emulating a 20 yr old OS on a chipset with a backwards compatible design to be an achievement.
That's a long way from the optical quantum machines in 2350 being able to emulate Windows XP. Hopefully they won't be x86 with quantum extensions.
And yet I can nip over the other side of town and read Principia Mathematica from 330 years ago.
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Monday 31st July 2017 10:51 GMT phuzz
Re: Please, No!
Just write your emulator in Javascript and you never have to worry about what the host machine is going to be again.
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Monday 31st July 2017 15:16 GMT mark l 2
Re: Please, No!
"And how would I activate Windows XP without the activation servers? Even with emulation we need to resolve the licensing and activation issues."
I haven't activated a copy of XP for ages.(even when it was still in support) Using a OEM edition with the SLIC entries in virtual box you can trick it into thinking its a factory install on a Dell, HP, Lenovo or other manufacturer which activate without needing an internet connection and will pass any of the validity tests.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
