Ahh, yet again, Reality forcing it's way in the face of Idealism. Exactly as I predicted ~1.5 years ago. Once standards become entrenched, they are next to impossible to displace, and for better or worse, H.264 is the de facto standard.

But as i mentioned in that old post: this is not a total loss! The codec war may be lost (for this generation), but the CONTAINER and IMPLEMENTATION are easier to replace, and could still be a place to gain ground! To put it simply: displacing FLASH with a Free Software (but still patent encumbered) implementation is still a win! And more to the point - it's a win that's worth fighting for.

And even if a System Codec technique relies on a proprietary solution for now, that's a LOT easier to replace with a Free version in the future! (you're not telling people to replace all their existing infrastructure; it's just a "different install-and-forget driver")

Focusing on the codec ONLY ends up just giving these other areas back to Flash ("it makes my $FavoriteVideoSite work!"). for no good reason...

ext4, which was somewhat light on tools last i checked (have to look into that...)

More to the point, though... halting writes wasn't really possible, due to a lot of unrelated (and probably more important) things thrashing the disk.

It's a beautify example of why a well though-through backup plan is important, unfortunately. RAID doesn't protect against being an idiot with 'rm', and it's probably a good idea to research things like those undelete tools before you need them...

especially when combined with 'find' and 'xargs', in what is supposed to be a simple task.

If you don't, you'll do something like what i just did ("worst typo in a decade"): you see, i was trying to update emacs and wanted to purge all the .elc files from ~/.emacs.d
Unfortunately, through a bad typo, some miss-applied keyboard shortcuts, and rushing through without mounting a scratch monkey... what actually ran was effectively "find ~/.emacs.d | xargs rm".

accidently deleted the 'grep'. Oops. 15+ years of elisp/etc destroyed.

Was it backed up? Nope! Been meaning to check it all into git, but always put it off as a "minor, unimportant" task I'd get to later. Of course, we all think that way up until the disaster hits...

*sigh*

Printer? What printer?

You can't grep dead trees.

It seems that we've come full-circle back to "brown".

I thought we had left that with Q1. D3 may have been way too dark, but at least they used some bright colors now and then. I blame the recent Fallout games. I love them, but they seem to have kicked us into a heavy steampunk-rust-brown fad.

Actually, the game looks pretty decent; it's just that an all-brown color scheme gets boring after a while.

Yet another reason I'm glad I've always recommended against Linksys to friends and family. Shoddy equipment in the past, and no preparation for the future now.

You don't need to split the screen to play Contra!

Proper co-op should be one screen.

So I'm running FF3.6.9 and click on the first of the video tests, which they claim they got "no result" for in both FF 3 and 4.

It seems to pass just fine, and matches their example image.

This makes me wonder if anybody even bothered to check the results.

IE and Netscape came bundled with the flash plugin in various versions.

On the other side you'll have Safari (on iOS and OS X) and IE (partially, see above) who will support H.264. This is not exactly a clear-cut battle.

Chrome also supports H.264. Including the partial IE support, it's really only firefox that's left out.

You'll also have recording devices like video cameras, cell phone cameras,

And these all support H.264, often with specialized DSP support. This is also the fastest growing market for the web, and likely to be increasingly important in the near future. Ignore mobile support at your own peril.

But first, before any major moves, Google has to make WebM workable - i.e. fully optimized encoders, decoders, quality, etc.; then start making major moves towards its adoption.

This is not even remotely relevant. It's important to us geeks, but we basically don't count. Managers don't make decisions based on quality or decoder speed. They offer their web pages in what they believe to be the popular, common choice.

This puts WebM, as a newcomer, at the very bottom of the list.