it's not that i really liked flash. it's that html5 is so unnecessarily cpu-heavy. this is needlessly eliminating a whole class of perfectly functional machines, and is going to pointlessly create a lot of waste right at the point where we should be doing so much more to prevent it.

years ago, now, i decided to put aside an old pIII for the purposes of sending a signal from youtube out to an even older television. "surely", i reasoned, "a pIII is plenty good enough to send a signal out the back of a video card". and, for years, it certainly was.

a lot of younger people are likely to scoff at the premise of utilizing a pIII for anything at all. but, in fact, it is the idea that a pIII is not powerful enough to launch a web browser to run a video out that is preposterous - as those of us that are old enough to remember running half-life on even slower machines will remind you. it's a pIII - ok. but, you should be able to stream video with a 486.

i've watched this machine slowly lose it's functionality. there's not actually any reason for it, though. the cpu is in perfectly good working order. it has a gb of perfectly good ram. and, it's running a newly refurbished 40 gb hard drive, which is plenty of space to boot windows xp from.

i suppose that the easy thing to do is to buy a quadcore raspberry pi. they're only $100, right? but, the premise is ridiculous. why do i need multiple cores to do something that a 486 should be able to do? and, why should i create a pc full of waste in order to do it?

what is my solution, exactly?

well, the thing that's killing me right now is flash. a few months ago, i had to update firefox in order to block html5 - as absurd as that is. now, i can no longer block html5, and the cpu just sputters out when i try and run video. there is no logic underlying anything that is being pushed down, except the logic of google pushing the hardware market. they may claim that flash is insecure, but that is something to do with porn sites, and not something to do with youtube - unless they are blocking flash to prevent nsa spying of user histories, which they're required to hand over by law, anyways. that excuse is nonsense.

there's no reason youtube needs to block access to older hardware like this. nor is it going to actually drive the market in any meaningful way...

after losing resources to upgrade firefox in order to block html5 to allow flash playback, and then having to succumb to html5 itself, my next step in this fight against google is going to have to be to downgrade to a tiny linux. but, this is a pIII. these distributions are designed for commodores and amigas. it's ridiculous that i need to downgrade a pIII that runs xp perfectly in order to access playback on a website!

but, i can only strip out so many unnecessary cycles before i'm forced to deal with the reality of the site's heavy javascript.

...and there's no reason for any of this besides greed.