It seems like almost every gadget announced or introduced these days comes with the assurance that it ‘does’ HD video. Even if it has a tiny little lower-than-standard-definition screen and isn’t likely to be used by anyone to watch movies in high quality. I get the feeling that hardware manufacturers think they need a 1080p sticker on the box to sell gadgets, even if it means cheating a little. I say cheating because with many of these devices, HD video is the only thing they’re really good at.
More The (non)sense of using HD video as a benchmark

I came across this article on Ars Technica a while ago while looking for ways to improve Flash performance on my two Ubuntu machines. I wanted to see if there was a way to get YouTube clips to play properly. Both my 1 GHz Pentium III and the 1.6 GHz Atom have trouble with Flash videos and especially it seems with Flash’s full screen mode.

Ars tested how much CPU load YouTube caused on some pretty interesting machines.
More What’s up with Linux and Mac Flash performance?