I'm not lying, that's the actual size, something like 420k. It may have been a bit shorter playtime, perhaps 20 seconds (I didn't time it), but still, it was quite small.

Nobody said videos on Facebook are Blu-Ray quality. But you seem to have weird concepts about how big videos need to be to be good enough quality for a web page. Just as a test, I took an original high quality full-motion video of a concert, reencoded it with ffmpeg, audio codec aac, vbr audio quality 0.5, video codec x264, preset veryslow, cf 33, resolution 512x288 (half original size), 20 seconds. File size? 420k. Of course the video from facebook was darker and quieter, so one would expect it to compress better. If we give my sample concert clip an allowable size of, say, 550k, then I can up audio quality to 0.7 and cf down to 30. Either way, the resultant clip was fine, the sort of thing you'd expect to see on a Facebook wall.

Anyway, the key point is, Facebook feeds aren't loading you down with 50 meg videos, they're little couple-hundred-k clips, the same size as animated gifs. And while I haven't measured it, they don't appear to start streaming until you scroll down to them, and look to stop after you scroll away.

1) I just went and pulled the first anim-gif I saw off 9-gag, a fairly simple thing of Ralph Wiggum with little motion, so it should compress quite well for an animated gif. Size: just over 400k. I then pulled the first video that showed up on my Facebook feed, a 30 second full motion clip, and downloaded the entire thing (including the audio stream, full quality). Size: just over 400k.

So....?

2) Are you actually sure that it is downloading the audio stream when it does muted autoplay? Not saying that it oes or doesn't, but do you actually have evidence either way?

3) See the reply below.

There's really no argument. If you're going to allow animated gifs, you should allow autoplay videos. So that we can finally put the nail in the coffin of the awfulness that is gif by removing the last common use of it.

And FYI, 400k is not that much. Slashdot is a pretty simplistic website compared to most, and I just measured how much data is downloaded just to read the front page: 1.4M.

Why is it any more evil than animated GIFs? Both play automatically, neither happen with sound, and compression on x264 is *way* better than with animated gifs.

I was initially opposed to autoplay on FB, but after thinking about it, I changed my mind. We already see tons of animated stuff on web pages, and the videos from people who show up on my page about are usually things I'd find interesting (if the user posting them didn't usually post interesting things, I'd have stopped following them). There's no unexpected sounds to bug me, and the quality to size ratio versus animated gifs is, what, two orders of magnitude better?

Which is an argument ethically akin to car companies knowing they have a potentially fatal defect but weighing up the cost of actually fixing it and saving lives vs. the expected cost of compensation lawsuits and not fixing it if the latter is lower.

The solution, of course, is to structure the law and/or regulate the industry so that the cost of screwing people unreasonably is always substantially greater than the cost of behaving more appropriately. Passenger suffered unreasonable discomfort on any flight? Automatic 100% refund, with a presumption in favour of the passenger if your provision is significantly below the industry average (or minimum regulated standards if the industry colludes to reduce the average).

I would have a lot more sympathy if budget airlines didn't keep pulling so many obviously shady moves to try to look cheap yet acceptable quality while actually charging more that customers expected and not always offering the experience people thought they were buying. This has become so bad that we literally have new consumer protection laws taking effect in Europe around now precisely to make a bunch of the tricks that some of these airlines pull explicitly illegal.

It should have been a reasonable and simple solution to offer transparent pricing and mid-range options, but I think that ship sailed^W^Wplane departed already. Now the industry, particularly on the budget end, needs to clean up its act or face increasing levels of customer dissatisfaction at a time when people are already looking to alternatives where viable ones exist.

Or a live badger. That would just be awesome. Franklinator 2.0.

It both scares me and pisses me of that the government can do whatever it wants with nuclear weapons, while my ability to use them is very, very restricted.

Who do they think they are, claiming the right to use things that the general public can't? Let me use my nuclear weapons!

Until I can be sure things are as safe as they reasonably can get I'd rather not have drones delivering packages yet

But that's exactly what drone proponents are asking for - a permitting standard that gives them the right to fly in these conditions and for these purposes in exchange for meeting a set of safety standards. Passive or automatically-engaged active safety features that ensure that "death by falling drone" is effectively an impossibility, whether that things like be cowled propellors, parachutes, an inherently low terminal velocity, fully independent backup propulsion, or whatever the case may be.

And in case you didn't notice, massive objects weighing hundreds of tons loaded with massive amounts of fuel and capable of taking out whole city blocks and/or skyscapers already fly extensively over your head. But you're worried about little plastic helicopters?

*Happy spices!* We *happy bubbles* second Star Control II; only *silly cows* do not enjoy *smelling* *pretty colors*!

Yes, there's a standard way to specify autoplay for HTML5 videos. However, not all browsers will respect it. For example, Safari on iOS won't play unless the user specifically starts the video, and this was a deliberate decision on Apple's part.

In some ways, I wish more sites would do stuff like that. It would stop my mobile ISP from "helping me save bandwidth" by intercepting all the images on sites I visit and compressing them so horribly that they are often useless. I didn't ask them to do that, I don't get anywhere near my bandwidth allowance, and they aren't providing the service I pay for.

Is it? I've worked for plenty of employers who said they offered things like on-the-job training, but in practice that often meant they had a book shelf and sometimes a senior developer would give a 45 minute talk. Compared to attending multiple lectures every day for a few years... well, it's hardly a comparison at all, it's a completely different depth of study.

As I wrote elsewhere, I firmly believe that studying for a degree is not the only way to acquire this level of theoretical knowledge, but I find the idea that any developer would just pick up the same material as a normal result of day-to-day work in a typical programming job implausible. It's not about being stupid, it's about being ignorant (in the literal sense, not the derogatory one), and it takes a lot more than reading a few chapters in a book from the office library and a couple of blog posts to meet the standard.

Perhaps, if all you do is join-the-dots programming for CRUD front-ends. Personally, my clients pay me to create new data structures and algorithms that solve problems no-one ever solved before. I can't just write result=solve_my_problem(), because I'm the guy they hire to create that API.

Remember all that theory about space and time complexity, and which guarantees you can and can't achieve in distributed systems, and formally proving algorithms correct, and how compilers and virtual machines and run-time environments work? I use this stuff all the time.

Yes it is, but the quality of that experience -- what you know and how you think as a result -- matters. As has been noted many times in this industry, there is a difference between someone who has had ten years of experience and someone who has had the same year of experience ten times.

A good CS degree course is one way to gain a lot of useful experience in a relatively short time. There are others, but a job where you spend all day writing glue code that joins up someone else's library and framework APIs isn't one of them.

It's not a "non-need", but it's not the end of the world, for several reasons.

First off, everything comes down to time. If one had, say a decade, they could build a full, brand new gas production infrastructure from scratch, designed to produce in different parts of the world and export straight to the EU.

Great, except EU gas reserves aren't that big. They have a max capacity of about 6 months, usually filled to about half that at this time of year, though higher than average now. Russia makes up 30% of EU imports. Basically, reserves provides something like 9-12 months of Russian cutoff.

Next we have instant displacement. Much of the EU has been working to shut down coal power plants, and ones that are in operation are often run at lower and lower capacity factors. In the event of a full Russian gas cutoff, these would be all fired up and used heavily, while NG plants would instead be mostly shut down.

Then we have slower displacement, which can take anywhere from a month or so to a couple years. NG power plants can be converted to other thermal sources. Industrial consumers of NG for heat can switch to other heat sources. Etc.

On the home and commercial perspective, the higher cost of gas will lead to more investment in efficiency on its own. Government efficiency programs can improve this even further.

On the production side, the spike in gas prices will instantly make higher-cost, formerly unecomomical European fields economical. Some of these will be available right away, some will require weeks, some months, some years to bring online. But it does put a lot of new gas into the picture.

On the non-European side, there's LNG. The US is really a read herring on this front, at least for the time being, as Sabine Pass won't come online until the winter after next, and others even later. The Middle East is the primary LNG exporter here, particularly Qatar, whose LNG capacity alone is more than all the gas Russia sells Europe. Thankully, the EU is loaded with largely idle LNG import terminals (nearly enough to replace all of Russian gas as-is), and LNG tanker rates are very low right now, there's a glut. Now, Europe would have to pay a very high price for it. LNG is expensive to begin with, and they'll be competing with the gas's current customers, primarily Asia. Europe, of course, would pay more, leading to all of the aforementioned things - increased production, increased displacement, etc - to occur in Asia to offset their reduced LNG imports. Interestingly, the US actually *can* help there - the US does have a Pacific LNG export terminal that was recently brought back into operation at Kenai, Alaska.

The net combination of these factors is that, no, Europe will not just "run out of gas and freeze to death" or any of those other doomsday scenarios that people throw around. But there's no question that Europe will have to pay more for gas, probably at least 50% more. And nobody's going to like the resumed usage of coal power - but in the short term, they're not going to have a choice.

On the other hand... for the EU, the extra energy costs for gas and oil may represent something like a 5-10% GDP hit. But for Russia, losing all of their oil and gas exports would be like dropping a nuclear bomb onto their economy.

What do you mean "no real excuse to not help out"?

I think FOSS is great. I appreciate the work that a lot of people in the community do, and I'm happy to help out a bit myself if I can. I also think competition is healthy in the browser market, and I'm glad that Firefox is out there.

But the last time I tried to be helpful by following a Mozillian's bug reporting advice, it took me several hours to fix the damage after their instructions resulted in damage to my normal set-up. That was time I was not then billing to a client, which ultimately reduced my income by a few hundred bucks that month. Setting up a VM on my normal (Windows) PC as suggested a few posts up is not a trivial undertaking either. This is more than I'm willing to do as a favour on personal time, and it's not what my clients pay my company to do.

Mozilla Corporation is a commercial organisation. It has over 1,000 employees, it brings in millions of dollars in revenues, and it reportedly pays its CEO more than most of us here are ever likely to earn. I'm a professional, and my company is available for software development and consultancy work. If you want me to do your testing or bug fixing for you, there's a line from Goodfellas that comes to mind.

Given my own past experience with trying to help, and my position on why I won't do it myself any more, I do find it irritating when Firefox developers/fans start writing as if anyone else has some sort of moral obligation to follow onerous procedures to help out. I rarely write about this myself, but since you've pressed the issue, I thought a few facts might bring some perspective.

Obviously your second statement is over-generalised, but in any case, you're assuming that the only reason to understand different sorting algorithms is to implement them. How do you know which of a variety of algorithms to choose, or even that there's a useful question you could go ask the Internet, if you aren't even aware of the possibilities that are out there?

Sure, I could go read a bunch of papers every time I needed to choose which tool to choose, but if I had to do that then someone who actually knew their data structures and algorithms would be getting useful stuff done while I was reading. What next, don't bother learning the syntax of your programming language, you can just look up operator precedence in the on-line help of your IDE, and if you get it wrong your compiler will probably just give you a warning anyway?