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What could ever replace the durabiliy of magnetic tape? Duct tape, maybe.

Homestarrunner Abandoned flash and put their content on Youtube as videos (sadly you lose a lot of in interactivity).

Never fear. You can burninate without Flash.

A reporter at ZDNet counters that "the only way to really secure Flash is to get rid of it... If Flash lives, people will continue to use it, and without security support, it will be even more insecure than ever."

Flash was not intended to be the de facto scripting language for the web. Repeat: Flash was never intended to bring scripting to websites.

Flash was designed to do one simple thing: Allowing animators to transmit animated movies over low-bandwidth dial-up connections. (YouTube version if you don't have Flash). Instead of transmitting compressed video, it would transmit a background, sprites, and instructions for moving, rotating, zooming, and animating the sprites against the background according to a timed script. It's still used for this purpose today.

To understand why Flash took over the web, you have to go back to the mid-90s. The web had just become mainstream, and the new population of web designers were pushing the envelope of HTML's capabilities. They sorely wanted to be able to add animation (other than the ridiculous blink tag), audio, and scripting so visitors could do things other than just view static content. The W3C (organization setting HTML standards) refused. So web designers looked elsewhere, and lo and behold they found Flash. It did most everything they wanted. But because it was only designed to play animations, not run scripted websites, security was never considered in the design. But with the W3C refusing to add these capabilities to HTML (they wouldn't for over 15 years), web designers all began using Flash on their websites. It soon became a de facto web standard, and everything went downhill from there.

I don't give a whit about Flash websites. I hated them when they first appeared, I still hate them now. Nothing would make me happier than if they all disappeared forever. But there's a huge amount of artistic and programming content out there written for Flash (I have a folder full of a few Flash movies, early zombie games, and old arcade game clones). It would be incredibly short-sighted to consign these locally run Flash animations and games to the dust bin because I hated Flash websites.

The Apple fans will say Jobs and Apple did. But while Apple complained about Flash and threw temper tantrums over it, they never offered anything to replace it (at least not alone). HTML5 (along with Javascript and CSS) is what replaced Flash and kiled it.

The only reason Flash ever became a thing was because web designers were begging the W3C to add multimedia capability to the HTML spec. The W3C saw the web as a medium of information exchange (the way Berners-Lee originally envisioned it was a way for researchers to exchange journal articles they'd authored). They saw the requests for multimedia capability as the petty desires of advertisers and marketers. You see, photos and text you can scan and grok as quickly as you want in whatever screen format you want. Audio and video are limited to the speed and format that the creator sets. So the W3C saw adding multimedia capability to HTML as counter to the web's original design goal.

Then web designers discovered this little thing called Flash. It was an artist's tool for transmitting animation over slow Internet connections (here's a YouTube version if your browser doesn't support Flash anymore). Instead of retransmitting redundant information like video does, it transmits backgrounds, scalable vector graphics, and sprites just once, and lets you animate them with on the client side. That's all it was designed to do - help artists create animation. It was never designed to be a multimedia web platform.

But since the W3C refused to give web designers the hammer they asked for, the designers grabbed the closest thing they could find which resembled a hammer and started to hammer away with it. Flash began to be used for multimedia - animated websites, ads, and movies. That's why it was so full of security holes. The guys who wrote Flash never imagined it would become The Global Standard for creating multimedia websites. They thought they were just making a simple way for artists to create animation that could be transmitted over 56 kbps dialup lines, and didn't give any thought to security.

By the mid-2000s (long after the tech bubble), the problems with Flash were becoming clear. The W3C still refused to budge from their anti-multimedia stance, so the web browser developers themselves got together and began coordinating a way to add multimedia capability to HTML to help replace Flash. They came up with what eventually became HTML5 when the W3C finally relented. All this was going on years before Jobs wrote his "Thoughts on Flash" letter, but because those in the print media were widely ignorant of any of this, they mistakenly saw Jobs as the impetus behind the switchover. To repeat what I constantly seem to have to tell Apple fans, just because the first place you ever saw something was on an Apple product, does not mean Apple invented it. (Here's pinch to zoom in 1988!)

Outside of the whirlwind of controversy over web security, Flash continues to live on in its original intended design purpose, and rather successfully at that.

Confirmed: "the s is for sucks" (quote is from the text bubble said by the original dragon -- before Strongbad draws Trogdor)

When Flash was first introduced, a large number of people were still on dial-up and Flash sites were a big no-no because by then we already knew that people would click away if their site didn't load in 5s or less. Flash was then marketed towards people marketing towards broadband (video and interactive sites and DHTML were going to be all the rage once everyone got broadband).

You've got that backwards. The very reason Flash exists was to reach people trying to access the Internet on dialup. Dialup wasn't fast enough to stream video, but real-life video is different from animation. Flash was originally an artist's tool to allow animation over dialup. Instead of having to send a constant video stream, you could send a few sprites and images of backgrounds, then animate those on the user's local computer.

It was only later when web developers realized that Flash was flexible enough to essentially run universal interpreted code (same code would work on PC, Mac, and Linux) that they went nuts. Entire websites in flash, thus defeating the whole purpose of HTML (displaying info in the format the end-user decided was best). Flash ads bypassing the user blocking animated GIF ads. And flash streaming video became ubiquitous (which wouldn't have happened if the folks at W3C had actually added the features web developers were asking for like embedded streaming video, instead of waiting 10 years like they did with HTML 5).

That's why Flash is so full of security holes. Because when Macromedia invented it, they were just thinking of a a good way to animate stuff on the end user's PC. They had no idea it was going to become The way for web developers to do everything they wanted but couldn't because "HTML didn't support it." It's still an excellent animation tool. A large number of animated TV shows and animated movies are partly or completely made with Flash.

Macromedia never asked for Flash to become the de facto web standard for multimedia on web pages. All they wanted to do was make a tool which allowed artists to stream animated video using less bandwidth than real video - very important in the early days of the Internet when people were connecting over dialup on 56 kbps modems. So rather than transmit ever frame, it'll let you transmit the spirtes of the animated characters and a background image, and scroll the background image as the sprites move around. Being an artist's tool, they added lots of features to help with the creation of animation. The features have gotten good enough that Flash is still being used for this purpose by animators making TV shows.

Flash became widely adopted on the web because the W3C dragged their feet for 15 years. Users wanted multimedia in web pages. Web designers wanted multimedia in web pages. A bunch of W3C people with sticks up their asses decided there shouldn't be multimedia in web pages (probably traumatized by the way the blink tag was abused), and refused to update the HTML standard to allow it (until HTML 5 was standardized a couple years ago). So web designers looked around for the next best thing, and hey! There's this thing called Flash. It's originally meant for creating animated videos, but it's flexible enough for us to add scripted multimedia to our web pages. Let's use that instead!

The situation is analogous to users wanting hammers, and stores wanting to sell hammers, but the government refusing to pass safety standards which would allow the sale of hammers. Then people realize they can buy rocks from a decorative landscaping store and use them as hammers. Soon everyone is using rocks as hammers, except that being rocks they frequently break and injure the user. Do you really think the rock-selling company should be liable for damage caused by people using their product in a manner in which it wasn't intended?

Flash was originally created as an artist's tool - to allow streaming animation which didn't take up as much bandwidth by only transmitting backgrounds and sprites once and animating them on the client, rather than streaming raw video. For that purpose it's a fantastic tool, with several TV shows and animated movies still being created with it.

Flash didn't ask to become the de facto scripting language for the web. It only became that because the HTML standard lacked scripting and programming capability which Flash provided. It was a security disaster because it was only ever intended to be an artist's tool and little thought went into making it secure. If you want to blame someone, blame the folks in charge of the HTML standard. They dragged their feet for over a decade, and didn't update HTML to provide many of the capabilities Flash provided until HTML5. HTML 4.01 was standardized in Dec 1999. HTML 5 was standardized in Oct 2014. It should have been made standard in 2001-2003.

What about those Flash games, interactive http://homestarrunner.com/ etc.? :P

it's just unbelievable, how often flash needs to be updated. [...] how many bugs/security holes can one poece of software have?

Flash was never supposed to be the universal scripting language of the web. It was designed as an artist's tool for transmitting animated graphics over low-bandwidth connections. Consequently, security was a very low priority in its original design.

If you want to blame someone, blame the folks behind the HTML standard who dragged their feet for a decade on adding features to the standard that web designers wanted to use. Websites resorted to using Flash because there wasn't a way to do it with HTML. It was so bad, for a while there I was thinking maybe it would've been better if Microsoft had completely succeeded at gaining control of HTML and "extended" it with a bunch of proprietary features.

8.13 MiB on YouTube (480p, combined audio/mp4 and video/mp4)
3.25 MiB on Homestar Runner, (flashisdead.swf, application/x-shockwave-flash)

It also depends on the codecs used and the data rates chosen. I downloaded the 720p version of the video (H.264, AAC) from YouTube which is about 18 megabytes. I transcoded it to VP9 and Opus using the encoding guide and set low rate targets for the video (250 kilobits) and audio (64 kilobits). I ended up with a video one third the size at 6.1 megabytes which looked and sounded comparable to the H.264 version. So my VP9 version is less than a factor of 2.

I'd like to see some data for that 'factor of ten' stat you've mentioned here and once before.

Here is the data for a quick comparison I did just now for Homestar Runner's Flash is Dead:

8.13 MiB on YouTube (480p, combined audio/mp4 and video/mp4)
3.25 MiB on Homestar Runner, (flashisdead.swf, application/x-shockwave-flash)

Not exactly a 'factor of ten'.

I don't think Flash is dead just yet; what it does really well is vector animation with sound and (optionally) interactivity. There's no substitute for Flash in that area, at least not yet. (Animated) SVG doesn't do sound (at least not without the addition of embedded Javascript and surrounded by an HTML5 browser; even then it wouldn't work very well since the sound is separate from the animation). Plus, being XML and Javascript-based, I can't imagine it being as small as the binary Flash files are.

HomestarRunner already has you covered.

(Requires Flash. Bite me.)

Fair use does allow short excerpts from others work to be used legally.

Fair use only allows certain excerpts to be used under certain conditions. IANAL and I'm not familiar with all court cases that that might have affected the interpretation of U.S.C. Title 17 Section 107 (the portion of copyright law that implements the "Fair Use" exception), but this might not be covered under that.

That section of the law specifies a few example purposes that can be covered and the closest example is "Scholarship", which this might fall under. I don't think that that is guaranteed though since the use of Mario and related ideas (Goombas, Bob-ombs, etc) as well as the first level of Super Mario 64 was not required for Ross to learn to use or demonstrate the Unity engine, and releasing his work afterwards beyond the video trailer was definitely not needed for the purposes of scholarship (whereas if he released this as part of a project in a class to other students it would have been).

Having said all that, I feel that Nintendo missed a great opportunity for positive PR by not instead contacting Ross and retroactively giving him permission to use the content found in the first world of Super Mario 64 to make this recreation and then using the project to generate excitement for more complete and official re-releases.

This is NOT a fully game re-implemented but I wonder if we'd be better off allowing full fan-fiction games, art, etc under the 1st amendment, freedom to express, freedom to make art, with the publics interest in mind.

This actually perfectly describes one of the things US copyright law is specifically designed to prevent. You have to freedom to make your own art like a 3D platformer game, but you do not necessarily have the freedom to use other people's art, such as the character of Mario or distinctive level designs made by other people, as a part of your art. This was supposed to be off-set by older works passing into the public domain, but that part of the system got broken by Disney; Shame on them.

I would say a 'parody work' that remakes the game top-to-bottom should be allowed, in the creators own mind and image, but a complete dupe of Nintendo's original work might be a "counterfeit" or "illegal duplication."

A parody game is definitely allowed, but you need to remember what a parody is. It generally needs to be humorous twisting of the original work the results in an ironic meaning. An example of a parody would be "Stinkoman 20x6" from Homestarrunner.com (man, didn't think I'd mention that website ever again) which riffs on the Megaman series of side-scrolling video games, other examples include most "[insert popular anime name] the abridged series" videos on youtube. What Ross did is much closer to a duplication of the original work, in fact it's even being referred to as a modern recreation.

Certainly a mere single world recreation is akin to taking a 3 minute excerpt from a 2 hour film and is completely fair use of Nintendo's IP.

This guy's demo is probably legal but he doesn't have a lawyer to take his case to court to test the waters.

This work looks like fair use, like a parody, like new content, like a transformation, like a demo, with public interest - art protected by the 1st amendment. That will be his argument in court.

This seems a bit like comparing apples and oranges. It might be like 3 minutes out of 2 hours in terms of relative length compared to the original work, but that does negate the fact that it's 20-60 minutes of gameplay, not 3 minutes. Additionally many aspects of the recreation would be separate copyrights, use of a likeness of Mario can violate copyright law on its own even without recreating a level from one of Nintendo's games.

You might think this guy's demo should be legal and that's your opinion, but I'm showing you another int

http://www.homestarrunner.com/...

Sorry, try this instead...

You could have just looked it up in 3 seconds rather than posting, but Here...

OK, for those who have no idea what this is (the internets is a big place):
http://www.homestarrunner.com/

From Wikipedia:
"Homestar Runner is a Flash-animated Internet cartoon series. It mixes surreal humor with references to retro pop culture, video games, classic television, and popular music. [....] The site is one of the most-visited sites with collections of Flash cartoons on the Internet and is notable for its refusal to sell advertising space (the creators pay for everything through merchandise sales, which includes a line of T-shirts)."

Try this cartoon to understand a bit of the site's humor:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/...

OK, for those who have no idea what this is (the internets is a big place):
http://www.homestarrunner.com/

From Wikipedia:
"Homestar Runner is a Flash-animated Internet cartoon series. It mixes surreal humor with references to retro pop culture, video games, classic television, and popular music. [....] The site is one of the most-visited sites with collections of Flash cartoons on the Internet and is notable for its refusal to sell advertising space (the creators pay for everything through merchandise sales, which includes a line of T-shirts)."

Try this cartoon to understand a bit of the site's humor:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/...

What could ever replace the durability of magnetic tape? Duct tape, maybe.

You'll need to fight Strong Bad for that one.

Oblig. homestarrunner link: the movies

Hola que tal, excelente nota mil respetos para Steve Jobs el siempre será el padre de la tecnología
http://www.oscarherrera.info/blog/branding-personal-muestras-o-escondes-tu-talento/

EENNGLISH!

So, aside from this being a likely April Fools' article...

The best dissertation on the "indie" phenomon I've yet seen:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail203.html

I do like a fair number of indie games, of course...but there's something to be said for the established mores of "professionalism."

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail51.html

"Okay, next on the checklist: lots of animated GIFs! or... GIFs... or however you say it. I don't know. I heard a couple of nerds arguing about it one time."

CAPTCHA: accent

You need to imagine Strong Bad's voice saying it for full effect:

HANDSPRING'D!!!

I remember when the CEO of Handspring announced that smart phones were the future for Handspring, and sales of the Visor PDA went almost to zero immediately, and sales of Visor accessories (Springboard cards, etc.) also went almost to zero immediately.

The Cius Tablet has been shipping for less than a year, and the CEO just announced that no further development will ever be done. The chances of anyone getting interested in this now: 0%

And wow, Android 2.2 on a $750 device with a 7 inch screen and a funky Intel chip? 680 grams (about 1.5 pounds)? The review didn't say anything about an ARM emulator so I assume any Android apps with native code for ARM just won't run on this thing. I'd sooner put CyanogenMod 7 on an old Nook Color. 448 grams (just under a pound) by the way.

(Oh wait, I already did that. A Nook Color makes a surprisingly nice Android tablet! It is a lot faster with CM7 than with the factory Nook software.)

The fact that the CEO was willing to Handspring this device probably means that the sales were already close to zero, so he didn't feel there were any sales left to discourage.

YOUR HEAD A SPLODE! top 4 features:

1. Like, it looks so awesome, girls would probably try to make out with the screen
2. The player wouldn't control me BECAUSE YOU CAN'T CONTROL ME!
3. And you'd have to block my perplexing 3d geometric attacks or face certain 3-D doom!
4. Naturally there would be some problems with bad translation.

Exactly. Here's a good reason to keep Flash around: Homestar Runner.

There was quite a bit of collaboration with the Chaps brothers of home star fame. They seem to have taken a break from the website... Any chance this is because they're collaborating on project with you? If not, any plans to in the future? It seemed like a perfect marriage to me.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/expfilm.html

My favorite: http://www.homestarrunner.com/404

No, the next one after gmail would be HeMail, pronounced

Ahee-Mayal.

Homestarrunner FTW!

http://www.homestarrunner.com/main8.html
"Email" tab

Oh, If you want it to be possessive, it's just I-T-S. But if it's supposed to be a contraction then it's I-T-apostrophe-S. Scalawag.

Flash video on my Nexus One is hit-or-miss - sometimes it's fine, sometimes it's barely watchable. Flash video on my wife's iPhone is always miss - she doesn't even know there's video there. If it's not YouTube, she's out of luck completely, whereas I can mostly get something usable.

It's all the non-video uses of Flash that make the real difference though. See how far you get on homestarrunner.com without it; they're not going to convert all that older content to HTML5 any time soon, so iOS users will never see it. When my kids (or myself) are bored, it's very handy having a Flash-capable mobile device around.

Choice >> no choice, regardless of some bloke's experiences with a handful of sites.

Homestarrunner.com is still running on flash.

I thought this character is already reserved for Trogdor!!!

obligatory Homestarrunner reference: http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail109.html

"I can make it on my own."

humans do eat some types of those animals.

Some people are not on fire.

Peasant's Quest

You need a minimum of a Cortex A8-family processor to run Flash and many lower-end and older Android phones just don't pack the horsepower to pull it off.

Really?

If you need that much power then how are the Cortex A8-family processor-based machines ever going to handle everything through jscript+html5 canvas?

I saw a comment elsewhere that pointed to some HTML5 demos at http://smokescreen.us/demo/

I decided to hit the very first one on my Pentium Mobile 1.6GHz, strongbad's e-mail #45:
http://smokescreen.us/demos/sb45demo.html
Result: 100% CPU use, sound/video synchronization issues, stuttering, etc.

Then I checked out the standard Flash version:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail45.html
Result: 16% CPU use, perfectly smooth.

Then I read your comment and remembered that Adobe in fact have a Flash player available for my old Windows Mobile 5 phone (a QTek 9100 / HTC Wizard. TI OMAP 850, 200MHz). You can download it from:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer_pocketpc/downloads/player.html
So I checked that same SB email out on that device:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail45.html
Result: Perfectly smooth, running full-screen within Pocket IE. Can't give you a CPU use number as I don't have any CPU use app installed on it, but I had no problem playing back some MP3s in the background.

Surprised? You shouldn't be. I highly suspect you're thinking of h.264 video being played back - and indeed, checking out a YouTube video is a different experience altogether - i.e. slow with lots of video frames skipped; although I can watch (barely, as the screen is so small) my favorite StarGate SG-1 episode on it just fine (re-encoded for the format, of course).

But Flash is more than just video... so saying you need a beefy processor for Flash-in-general is inaccurate at best.

You need a minimum of a Cortex A8-family processor to run Flash and many lower-end and older Android phones just don't pack the horsepower to pull it off.

Really?

If you need that much power then how are the Cortex A8-family processor-based machines ever going to handle everything through jscript+html5 canvas?

I saw a comment elsewhere that pointed to some HTML5 demos at http://smokescreen.us/demo/

I decided to hit the very first one on my Pentium Mobile 1.6GHz, strongbad's e-mail #45:
http://smokescreen.us/demos/sb45demo.html
Result: 100% CPU use, sound/video synchronization issues, stuttering, etc.

Then I checked out the standard Flash version:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail45.html
Result: 16% CPU use, perfectly smooth.

Then I read your comment and remembered that Adobe in fact have a Flash player available for my old Windows Mobile 5 phone (a QTek 9100 / HTC Wizard. TI OMAP 850, 200MHz). You can download it from:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer_pocketpc/downloads/player.html
So I checked that same SB email out on that device:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail45.html
Result: Perfectly smooth, running full-screen within Pocket IE. Can't give you a CPU use number as I don't have any CPU use app installed on it, but I had no problem playing back some MP3s in the background.

Surprised? You shouldn't be. I highly suspect you're thinking of h.264 video being played back - and indeed, checking out a YouTube video is a different experience altogether - i.e. slow with lots of video frames skipped; although I can watch (barely, as the screen is so small) my favorite StarGate SG-1 episode on it just fine (re-encoded for the format, of course).

But Flash is more than just video... so saying you need a beefy processor for Flash-in-general is inaccurate at best.

Here's my two cases for Flash:

Homestar Runner
MS Paint Adventures (the current story, Homestuck, has some amazing timed animation/music segments done in Flash)

Now, yes, Flash could be replaced with someone else. But, as of right now, the animations are done in Flash, not anything else, and I'm still going to visit them (Well, maybe not H*R if they keep not updating, but the long-awaited End of Act 4 for Homestuck ought to be awesome.) There need to be the tools to do the animation work that are as good (to the artists/etc.) as Flash, not just the capacity to play them back.

Fixed that for you.

Fixed that for you.

BFS stands for Bread-first search. It means I searched for bread, then sang a few songs about it, then went on driving.

Or was the good doctor merely going after being 'first' at something?

Yeah. And as we know, firsts are kinda like records.

Not everything flash is bad: http://www.homestarrunner.com/, although I suppose that site *could* theoretically be done with SVG...

That's right, the problem though is that while what Flash does can be accomplished by stringing together a bunch of technologies tied to HTML5 there is still no even half-decent way for designers to do this. There is no tool or suite of tools to create a comparable Flash-like experience in HTML5 the way there is with Flash, this leads to designers needing to do a larger amount of coding and one thing we all know is that while just about anyone can program, not many people can program well. Sure there are complaints about the speed and resource use of Flash but the more code that you make designers (who aren't programmers) write, the more inefficient and resource-hungry websites will be out there. It's quite easy to inadvertently develop a unnecessarily overly resource-hungry web app with HTML5 technologies.

Im not really a fan of Flash, i won't be sad to see it go as a defacto standard and i would suggest that isn't too far off, and im not a web dev or designer, but i can see that for HTML5 to replace Flash there are going to need to be comparable tools available to content creators and for browser support for it to reach the same levels as Flash installations. It's not enough to just have a bunch of technologies that, put together, are capable of what Flash is.

With the exception of the old-style vector-animated .swf stuff

And it is this "old-style vector-animated .swf stuff" that will keep Flash Player installed on people's PCs. Ever heard of All Your Base, or Hatt-baby, or Hyakugojyuuichi, or Badgers, or Weebl and Bob, or Homestar Runner? All vector-animated. Newgrounds? Entirely vector-animated until Numa Numa Dance proved the concept of FLV, and the vast majority is still vector-animated thanks to YouTube siphoning off the authors who would have used H.26x or VPx. For example, Hatt-baby is 1 MB, and it'd probably be ten times bigger if rendered and encoded in H.264.

Not everything flash is bad: http://www.homestarrunner.com/, although I suppose that site *could* theoretically be done with SVG...

Grandparent mentioned Homestar Runner. If you oppose the installation of Flash Player, then which method, whether built into the browser or as a plug-in, do you recommend for sites like Homestar Runner and Weebl's Stuff to present vector animations with synchronized audio? Or do I misunderstand you and you really prefer to install Flash Player, visit the site containing vector animation, and then uninstall Flash Player each time?

1) so, what is the proper term for this then? "hard disk"? ARGHHH

Obligitory link:

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail143.html

Someday it's going to say:

FLAGRANT SYSTEM ERROR

Computer over.

Virus = Very Yes.