I get it, when you sit in your basement hacking away at code potentially benefiting many people for free you are a socially unacceptable geek. As soon as you put together some graphics and make money from thousands of people you are the sex icon of the new computer era. It's not that perception has changed, but rather the contrary. Money and status derived from money is valued more than the work itself.

Though the ALAC decoder in rockbox is probably not perfect, the codec performance comparison at http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CodecPerformanceComparison clearly shows that decoding of FLAC is far more efficient in rockbox. Maybe ALAC decoding can close the gap now that ALAC sources are open.

Ludum Dare has been doing this for years now. Every competition has a more or less vague theme or motto, and people are invited to come up with a game of any genre and implement it in a 48 hours time frame. Check out http://ludumdare.com/ for more info.

When I first read the title I assumed that they found out that games with lower scores get pirated more. This would have made perfect sense to me, since I understand the idea of "try before you buy", especially for games which are reported to be flawed in some ways. Then I saw that they didn't weigh the amount of pirated copies by the sales of the specific game, which then only shows that good games are popular.

I will savour the three seconds which I save each half a year.

Also, a 20% decrease might sound like much, but when we're talking about 15 seconds vs. 12 seconds, it's just not something most people will even notice at all.

Funny how you mention wasted bandwidth and 320kbit CBR MP3s in the same sentence, since CBR encoding is the prime example of wasted bandwidth (i.e. virtually no quality gains while needing more bits).

It has already been proven that these machines don't work on german television: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6iBzlXar50 Still german airport security is using x-ray machines now, at least in Hamburg.

If you compare the actual frames, you'd see that the 4k variant has insane blocking, which destroys all the information. 1080p just blurs these sections, but still looks way better because it doesn't create 8x8 blocks. Youtube can only encode to 4k because they use an inferior entropy coding and no proper deblocking. Otherwise 4k wouldn't run on any but the fastest CPUs, even without the flash overhead. As it is, the 4k variant is inferior to 1080p and 720p because of the massive blocking, I don't see why Youtube wastes space and bandwidth on this unless they are just experimenting.