I took anti-depressants for three years. My first course was Fluoxetine (Prozac to my US cousins): within a week I was a zombie. I would sit and stare at walls, or out of windows, until someone snapped me out of it.

After a month of this I was moved to Citalopram. This seemed better; there was less staring at walls, certainly. I spent over two years on Citalopram.

Then one day I stopped. It was kind of an accident; it was Easter weekend, I wasn't paying attention and ran out without a prescription to get more. So I ended up going cold turkey, which is the thing you're really not supposed to do with any SSRI.

I can tell you now, within three days I felt like I had woken up from a trance. I didn't realise it at the time, but the Citalopram made me feel like I was wrapped in cotton wool and wearing ray-bans. The feeling was exactly like the feeling of a dental aesthetic wearing off, except all over. I hadn't noticed because I'd come from Fluoxetine, which was even worse. So I thought I was onto a good thing with the Citalopram.

So please don't go around calling it a "myth". For some people, SSRI's really do have that kind of effect. In fact I suspect it's more pre-valiant than people realise, either because of long term use, because people think it's "normal", or because most people come down gradually and never really notice.

Oh and for all that, I really do believe I was much better off taking the SSRI's at the time than I would have been without them.

He was specific and correct based on my experience in the UK of 2007.

Based on my experience of the past 34-and-a-bit years in the UK, he was talking complete bollocks, but continue to talk bollocks. That doesn't change the reality.

Has an intermediate species ever been found?

What the hell is an "intermediate species"? Just out of interest?

Why not? Do you think Oracle paid their developers and managers in promises and unicorn farts? Why couldn't Oregon simply have paid for those developers & managers themselves?

The point of hiring contractors is that they're supposed to bring instant expertise to a project. If they don't actually do that, why bother with the extra expense of the middle man?

OpenStack isn't exactly a lightweight easy option, you know.

it's possible that the situation has improved

It has.

There are implementations of both available.

There are various incomplete reference encoders for both, but I'm not aware of a single non-alpha and complete implementation of either. vpxenc is close but lacks things like multi-threaded encoding, which will obviously have an impact on encoding speed.

If you know anyone who cannot legally play an MP4 video, I would like to meet them.

I've got a better question for you: why are there still people who are unable to open and play back a WebM video? What's the driver behind not including WebM support in the handful of OSes & devices that have refused so far? It isn't technical. It certainly isn't a cost issue. It surely can't be licensing. So that only leaves, what, ideology?

Are Apple & Microsoft going to continue to make their users lives more difficult because of their own ideology? Why are they doing that?

the terribly performing FLOSS codec of the day

I'm not sure which codec you're referring too, so I can't answer you there.

I guess my optimism is based on WebM being an open format, thus allowing anyone to implement it on any future platform. Unlike various proprietary formats, that won't. I mean, does your 'phone support Intel Indeo or RealPlayer G2?

VP9 doesn't even match h.264, let alone h.265

That's really odd, because the benchmarks I've seen show VP8 & h264 to be evenly matched, and no one has produced a finished h.265 or VP9 codec, so I do wonder how you think you've seen those two codecs fairly benchmarked?

The users are exactly the people they're thinking about. Because in ten years time, it's the users who'll be happy not to deal with some proprietary closed format that isn't supported on their new device, because sadly it's obsolete and no one cares about Intel Indeo, oh sorry, I mean, MPEG-2, oh wait, I mean, h.264. They care because by using an open format they stand a chance of providing support to the latest iBrain 7, without having to destroy the content with yet another lossy conversion.

Of course if your outlook is limited to the short term of less than the next 12 months then I guess the decision looks bad, but then you're not thinking about the long game.

What about them? This is a UK study. The UK doesn't operate any mobile telephone devices between 900Mhz & 1800Mhz.

The Colossus wasn't used to crack Enigma: Bletchley has simple electro-mechanical machines (Bombes) for that. Colossus was used to crack Lorenze, which was an entirely different cipher. The basis for the software that ran on the Colossus was basically Alan Turings work on cryptanalysis, and of course it was also Turing complete. The actual design however was almost entirely the work of Tommy Flowers; a post office telephone engineer.

You can count on 0 wind power output during a "big storm", because you can't run the turbine in high winds. Yes, you read that right, you can't use a wind turbine when it's windy!

Most of it is personal to me, but in all honesty the ATA driver is rather funky: a ring 0 multi-threaded driver. If you ignore the completely insane stuff for handling various horrifically broken ATA hardware implementations, then the actual implementation itself is rather elegant.

I also wrote a rather interesting multi-stage asynchronous media pipeline that emulated Java/C# interfaces in C++, but that never made it past the prototype stage.

I love writing code and working on hard problems, but do I feel like working on them for 80 hours a week, every week? No, I enjoy having a life outside of work and a separation of work and home life is necessary.

So much this. I enjoy solving difficult problems, but I also enjoy a not using a computer.

Nor do I currently have any active open source projects on my Github account; because you know, I spent over ten years working on Syllable and frankly that was more than most people do in a lifetime, so I'm O.K with that.

Happily the sorts of companies I work for are O.K with that too, and prefer to judge me on my experience and work I produce professionally, rather than an irrelevant body of work that I produced in my spare time.

That sounds like a lot of work. Can we at least wait until after second breakfast?