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Vid.me has announced that they are shutting down on December 15th 2017, saying that they could not find a path to sustainability.
This news should be of concern as content creators have been getting increasingly frustrated with Youtube's algorithms that demonetize their videos and this means they have one less alternative to turn towards.
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Vid.me to Shut Down on Dec 15th 2017
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Nadia Comaneci, simple perfection.
-- '76 Olympics
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday December 06 2017, @09:02AM (1 child)
I said *about* 30 years ago anon. You trying to make the old man do math? Fine.
2017-1990 = 27 I'd say that's close enough to 30 with the 'about.' In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee already had it running. Granted it hadn't spread much beyond him, wouldn't really start getting distribution till after New Years, but it did exist.
And it wasn't like he invented that out of whole cloth either. Hypertext was used a lot through the 80s. Internet protocols for Email, News, and File Transfer were well established and widely used, as were non-internet connected BBS systems that made extensive use of hypertext. His bright idea was bringing that hypertext environment from the local BBS to the open Internet, and doing it in a way that properly abstracted hardware (and software!) incompatibilities out of the picture. This part of it is so important. It made it easy for you to make documents publicly available in a truly transparent way, so that EVERYONE could access them, whether they had an HP (HP made real computers back then!) or Sun or VAX or some sort of PC, whether it was IBM or Apple or Amiga or whatever... none of that mattered. This was revolutionary, because virtually everything outside of these internet protocols had system requirements and if you didn't have the right system, the right add-in card, the right monitor even, you could be shut out. And migrating systems? Imagine you've been running a popular and useful BBS for several years but one day the hardware dies. They don't make what you had it running on anymore, but there's better faster hardware available for less, so you go off and buy a new PC. You hook up the old HDD and there's your BBS, just like you built it, you copy it over and... oops. Yeah, the program you built it with won't run on this PC, of course.
No problem! You get the great new BBS server for the new system, and it's back online quickly after that, right?
Wrong again! Because even though these two different bits of software do almost exactly the same thing (hyperlinked menus and documents) they don't speak the same language. You built your old BBS in the language the old program used, and the new program doesn't speak that lingo. So now you have to translate it all. And 9 times out of 10 well before you get that done you realize it would be less work just to start over from scratch.
The other problem with the BBS system was of course that they were local, as we had to connect with modems and pay long-distance charges few people frequented BBSs out of their area. So there was a level of indirection, in that for instance a lot of the Free Software stuff would be distributed on the Internet first, via News primarily but not exclusively, and then a little later a few people that had internet and also ran a BBS would get it put up for their neighbors, and over more time it would slowly filter out from BBS to BBS and area to area.
WWW solved all these problems in one sweet stroke. It was a BBS language that wasn't proprietary (HTML) transported directly on the internet (HTTP,) and abstracted away hardware differences completely so that it could be ported to any system imaginable. You go from having to have very specific video hardware, for instance, to not requiring any video hardware at all! You go from a system that probably won't be maintainable when this system dies, to one that should be easily maintainable and portable to whatever system the future could possibly throw at you. You go from staying local to avoid long-distance charges to being able to connect from and to any point that can get to the internet.
Took off like wildfire because it rocked. But very very quickly the marketeers started in, the ad money, the speculators^winvestors cash, and it exerted a constant, corrosive influence. Bit by bit that initial sweet stroke of abstraction has been chipped away. And again, ecmascript is a very very important part of how that corrosion has been done. Now we're back where we started, in the bad old pre-web days, when you can only access this if your video card is up to it, only access that if you're on X network but not Y network, etc.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday December 06 2017, @10:38AM
Microsoft continues this tradition with its C++ compilers.