Oi! Linux users! Want some really insecure closed-source software? Back in August Adobe reversed its decision to stop offering an NPAPI Flash plugin for Linux and promised that version 23 would come Penguinistas' way real soon now. At the time the decision was greeted with surprise, because Adobe had not thought to update Flash for Linux since 2012's version 11.2. But the company decided that …
I have not tried to fill in PDF forms, but a quick web search showed several options. The one I would go for is pdftk (tutorial). I found evidence that Okular and Evince did not handle US tax forms in 2014. There is a list of GUI PDF editors here and here. People have reported success running some Windows PDF software with WINE.
The good news is that Adobe appear not to have heard of ARM or MIPS. I considered trying QEMU on a Pi, but I am too lazy to read Adobe's EULA.
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[take screenshots and insert text]
Oddly enough, this is precisely the method I used to use on RiscOS some 20-odd years ago.
At work, Xara does a decent fist of importing PDFs these days (Windows only though). At home, I tend to read using Okular, which can handle some forms. Libre Office occasionally works.
Oddly enough, the PDFs that seem to cause the most problems are those which have "Microsoft Word Document" in the title...
M.
Doesn't work on the news pages though.
Change the browser identity. If the BBC website thinks you're using an iPad it generally seems to be happy to feed you HTML5. Personally I can't wait for them to make that a default rather than a convoluted, hard to access option - it's almost as if they have an interest in keeping Flash installed by their readers.
Windows jumpted the way that linux jumped from Feisty Dunnart to Zonked Quokka. The actual version numbers for Windows NT you listed are./were 4 and 5. I can't remember what the actual version numbers were for Win95/98 . so it might have been 95 and 98, but that was a different product - like comparing MSDOS version numbers to linux.version numbers.
According to winver.exe Windows 10 had version number 10.0, the Windows 10 update had version number 1511, the anniversary update has version number 1607. Those are pretty big leaps.
I think in the background though the current version number is 10.0.14393.576
The release version of 7-zip went from 9 to 15 but that's still not as big a jump as Linux flash.
Word also jumped from 6.0 to 97, 98, 2000 too? Can't remember the details.
Can we play a new game? Several programs jumped to low-digits to 2000 because everybody was doing it too -- Word, Wordstar, can you list others?
On the other hand CorelDraw seems to have a rigid version numbering. Wonder if all the papers in all the desks at Corel are neatly stacked and aligned.
What's this "flashplugin-installer" package that gets regular updates and downloads the new flash binaries from adobe for installation?? someone's missing something somewhere...
sudo aptitude install flashplugin-installer
OR (if the download site is overloaded and the initial update fails)
sudo aptitude reinstall flashplugin-installer
I have to wonder what they're hiding...
there was a gnu project for flash called 'gnash'. It wasn't being maintained, and then one day web sites stopped working with it. Some "thing" changed, a standard, a new feature, ??? and then you couldn't play embedded flash content any more [downloading flash files works fine, just no "live" play].
HTML5 seems to be the only real alternative now, which is fine [as long as I can BLOCK it]. I don't need html5 ads "flashing" content in my face and/or wasting my limited bandwidth.
Originally Flash was just a vector animation toolkit - the files basically consisted of a set of drawing instructions, triggers for actions, etc. Then came AVM1 - this added Turing complete scripting (in a JS-like untyped language). This is what was used for a lot of what you would typically think of as Classic Flash stuff - simple games and video players etc. This is what Gnash supports.
Then came AVM2. This is a complete high-performance (relatively speaking...) application runtime, comparable to Java for example. Supporting this in Gnash would mean rewriting most of it except the file format parser.
All of these come as SWF files, so without looking at the contents (or trying to play them in various old versions) there's no way to know which is which. An AVM2 file still has the same basic structure, but instead of drawing and scripting commands you just have assets and a big blob of AVM2 bytecode.
I remember when Flash was for creating interactive animated cartoons. You had before and after shapes, and it filled in the intermediate frames. Video came later.
Back when it was little more than a web-enabled player for Macromedia Director.
Back in the late 90's IBM had a Flash-like application which merely required Java. If they hadn't screwed the pooch (read that "standard IBM business practices") we could have been using that instead.
Oh, wait... an IBM Java-based product... Never mind.
In 1992 the Linux kernel went from 0.12 or so to 0.95 when it became X-Windows capable. That's only a difference of 0.83 but proportionally it's quite a leap. (The Wikipedia "Linux kernel" article mentions 0.12 and 0.95, but I dimly remember an 0.17, so there may have been some intermediate versions.)
I don't even have flash installed any more.
Google chrome doesn't even allow it to be used.
Don't have it on Firefox and I do not miss anything on the web.
So really why bother any more.
I quit adobe reader decades ago. Lots of open source choices for pdfs and to edit them too.
Last time I looked adobe was like 60 meg - really 60 meg for a pdf reader. Ok I will pass.
For those mystified that BBC should continue to use that steaming pile of manure called Flash, could it be that they do it because GCHQ have asked them to?
Ridiculous, right? Except ... can you think of any other remotely sane reason for them to be doing it? Bueller ...? ... Bueller ...?
PS—Hands up anyone who has NOT long since disabled Flash in their browser?
The BBC were going to develop their own open source Dirac codec. But the Murdoch press and other vested interests (Microsoft) co-operated in sabataging the effort. People moving from Microsoft to the BBC (and vice versa) to 'help' develop the media division, and then moving back again, once it's been helped into the ground. They did manage to spend an awful lot of money on the way.
Dirac attack: The Register Oct 2004
Adobe would just stop writing all software and drop anything remotely to do with any form of IT.
They should then concentrate all their time and efforts on trying to do a something that they at least have a vague idea about!
Who knows maybe they are able to make half decent yoghurt?
maybe not...
As me Da' used to say to me when I was young and wishing for something "wish in one hand, shit in the other and see which fills up first"
Microsoft came up with Windows 3, then 3.11. It means that all versions from 3.01 to 3.10 went to final stage of QA, but were such a crap that were never released and scrapped.
Considering how much crap saw the light of day, you wonder what kind of ugliness was left aside.
The same thing happened from Windows 3 to 95 to 2000 and so forth. And not just Windows, but also, Google Chrome, Xbox(en) and all software with several version numbers missing upon release.
And I shudder at the thought.
On the other hand, the best upgrade to Flash is to *uninstall* it.
Windows 3.1 very much existed. And the numbering makes sense: 3.0 to 3.1 was a much bigger jump than 3.1 to 3.11.
3.11 basically just added some networking support and "32-bit file access" (basically bypassing DOS for file system operations).
After that they dropped the version numbers and went 95, 98, Me - related to release year (duh).
The NT branch went from 3.1 (numbered like that to match 'the other Windows') to 3.51 (which was primarily about performance improvements) to 4.0 (which was a bigger leap).
Then they dropped the version numbers and went 2000, XP, Vista, then back to version numbers: 7, 8, 10 (9 dropped supposedly because of lots of buggy old applications assuming they were on 9x if the version string started with 'Windows 9'). With the server releases after 2000 being 2003, 2008, 2012.
So apart from some obvious difficulty in making up their minds, it kinda makes sense. And no unexplained gaps anywhere that I can tell.
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