257
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
257 points (97.4% liked)
Linux
57255 readers
1254 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
Honestly it's a little staggering how much better web video got after the W3C got fed up with Flash and RealPlayer and finally implemented some more efficient video and native video player standards.
<video>was a revolution.I remember, that was a dramatic change.
Also, most people now dont remember this, but YouTube was initially popular because their flash video player was efficient, worked acrossed many different system configurations and browsers and dynamically changed resolution to match your connection.
At that point you had some people with broadband connections and a lot more with dial-up. So often dial-up users would not be able to watch videos because they were only available in one resolution.
YT had 144p (or less!) videos ready for dial-up users and higher resolution videos for broadband users and it automatically picked the appropriate video for the client. This made it so most people (dial-up users) would look to YT first, because you knew that YT would have a video that you could actually watch.
Then Google bought them.
I forget that people still had dial up in mid 2000s, I always associate it with the 90s
YouTube blew up the year I went to college and got access to a T3 line. 🤤 My school had pretty robust security, but it was policy-based. Turns out, if you are on Linux and can't run the middleware, it would just go "oh you must be a printer, c'mon in!"
I crashed the entire network twice, so I fished a computer out of the trash in my parents' neighborhood, put Arch and rtorrrent on it, and would just pipe my traffic via SSH to that machine. :p
Ah, and the short era of iTunes music sharing... Good memories.
Yeah, my high school had a computer lab donated by Cisco to teach their CCNA course. There were like 2 students taking the class and 25 PCs, so we setup one to run WinMX, Kazaa and eDonkey.
They all had CD-RW drives. We were minting music and movie CDs (divx encoded SD movies were under 650MB so they would fit on a CD), and selling them on campus for $3-5. You could get a 100 blank cd-rs for around $40, so it was very profitable.
Oh man, I was like a kid in a candy shop when I got my hands on Flash 4... built quite a few sites with it.
My unpopular opinion is that Flash was perhaps one of the greatest media standards of all time. Think about it — in 2002, people were packaging entire 15 minute animations with full audio and imagery, all encapsulated in a single file that could play in any browser, for under 10mb each. Not to mention, it was one of the earliest formats to support streaming. It used vectors for art, which meant that a SWF file would look just as good today on a 4k screen as it did in 2002.
It only became awful once we started forcing it to be stuff it didn't need to be, like a Web design platform, or a common platform for applets. This introduced more and more advanced versions of scripting that continually introduced new vulnerabilities.
It was a beautiful way to spread culture back when the fastest Internet anyone could get was 1 MB/sec.
It worked great only on Windows PCs in the times when PC and Windows still weren't the definite winners of the technological race and people have been using all kinds of computers.
Wasn't that when Whatwg took over the spec?
Ah I am not sure. I just assumed it was W3C.