The Three Laws of Business

Today I was revisiting the Powerthirst videos on YouTube to work up enough motivation to yell at some morons, when I noticed that their shitty flash video player was sucking down about a quarter of my CPU more than a normal video player would for the same content. Investigating this (checking out a bit of RedTube during my second lunch break) I noticed this is a fairly consistent phenomena.

Flash video performs like the entire multimedia pipeline is written in that shitty ActionScript rebranding of JavaScript it uses.

Gratuitous Amounts Of Energy

That quarter of my CPU is about thirty fucking watts being eaten up by developer incompetence. With YouTube pushing out a billion views per day – average clip length of two and a half minutes – a constant 1.7 million streaming lolcats, emo video diaries, and other pointless crap are being pushed through Adobe’s abomination of a video renderer.

Its not often you can easily slap a monetary figure on developer failure – but there’s no difficulty here. For YouTube alone, Adobe fails at a constant rate of 52MW. At (.au) base power rates we are looking at around 70 million bucks a year burnt up for no gain.

You Will Even Win At Irony

If I gave a shit about the environment I’d probably have a cry over the quarter-million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions this causes as well, around 0.02% of global emissions. So remember kids; every time you rickroll, Adobe kills a penguin.

Fuck you Adobe. Top Score.