I think it’s a little hard to blame Tim here, DRM was happening with or without it being part of HTML. Either it could be in proprietary plugins or it could be part of the spec, but as long as movie studios were requiring DRM, DRM was going to happen. If anyone railroaded it through, it would be Google, who owns Widevine, and via Chrome, basically can determine web standards with or without the W3C’s support, from a practical sense.
So the W3C has to accept DRM to prevent it being in a proprietary plugin, and Firefox had to also accept the DRM to avoid being “the browser that can’t play Netflix”, and everyone effectively has to go along with it to ensure they still have a seat at the table on the issue, but it all, at the end, comes back to the MPAA, which isn’t going to let you have a license to stream their content unless it is locked with DRM, regardless of how futile DRM actually is.
.. I think the following quote from Braveheart is awesome. The whole movie seems designed to turn the audience into William Wallace worshipers, except for this line, which causes an attentive viewer to stop and think:
“Admire this man, this William Wallace. Uncompromising men are easy to admire. He has courage, so does a dog. But it is exactly the ability to compromise that makes a man noble.”
Electron is flash for the desktop
slack isn’t a native app. At least – not a normal native app. Its built on top of electron, so when you download slack you’re actually downloading a complete copy of Google Chrome.
.. And chrome is a hog. Its huge and complicated. It uses ram and CPU like nobody’s business, and it totally thrashes your battery life.
.. By lines of code, chrome is about the same size as the linux kernel. Like the linux kernel it has APIs for all sorts of hardware, including opengl, VR, MIDI. It has an embedded copy of SQLite, memory management and its own task manager.
.. Does slack contain my code to use xbox controllers? Does the slack team know?
.. The other electron apps I have on my computer are Spotify (200 megs) and Atom (260 megs).
.. Developers don’t let friends write electron apps. If you want to use JS and react to make a native app, try react native instead. Its like electron, but you don’t need to distribute a copy of chrome to all your users
.. Facebook has been internally intentionally slowing down their office internet once a week to help build empathy with their users in other 3rd world internet speed countries (coughAustraliacough).