Except that 'Something to tinker with as the mood strikes them" is exactly what it is. It's open source and it's their project. It is whatever they want it to be, with whatever goals they want it to have. Now, those goals might be very different from what you, or me, or anyone with larger ambitions for the Open Source community might want them to be, but that's tough luck.

It's the big stumbling block of the Open Source movement. When the goals of the developers just happen to align perfectly with what users and the general community envision (i.e. the development of Firefox) the results are stupendous. When the developers are really just scratching their own itch with a public project (GIMP) you get years of frustration as features and design decisions completely baffle observers.

If you want it done differently, you can fork it yourself. And if you think there should be a middle ground between "meekly accepting whatever is tossed your way" and "full fledged OS developer", well, the OS community doesn't have a lot to offer.

Of course, you could provide monetary incentives to get people to provide the features you want. However, given the cost of funding an entire OS development team to do what you want you'll probably have to find some way to recoup the expense. Next thing you know, you're charging people money in exchange for software that does the things they want in the way that they want. What a ridiculous idea.

Subsidies and long term planning for essential infrastructure is one of the few things that almost everyone agrees is firmly in the role of government. Why even subsidize it? Just build it and run it and screw corporate profit. Break even on the power generation and reap the benefits of increased industry.

There are many good answers, most of which were figured out before the first nuclear plant was ever built. The most popular seems to be sealed off at the bottom of extremely deep and stable mines. The catch is that the creation of nuclear waste has largely been placed into private hands, but the cost of disposal is largely in government hands.

So why give the money to for-profit companies? If there is no profit in creating basic infrastructure that every other business needs, then provide that infrastructure out of the taxes that all those other businesses pay. That's the point of taxes in the first place.

And because they no longer wanted to agree to Google's terms... they stopped using Google's service.

Name one successful app that Apple has cloned after it's become popular.

Yeah, but almost any serious printing requires a heated print area, even if only for the first layers. Otherwise things cool off too fast.

Great, so it's the fault of the manufacturers. But seeing as VP9 takes several times more processing power to decode in software than VP8, which would you serve up to a mobile phone: h265 that has hardware decode or VP9 that provides the exact same video quality/size but will choke on playback even as the battery life drops by the second?

The difference isn't in quality of the codec, it's the quality of support. One has a massive group that has spent a decade making sure that it is supported by everyone everywhere. The other has been tossed out into the public by a single company without any cooperation or support by other parties.

Production level codecs like ProRes have always supported alpha channels (along with a bunch of other stuff). Besides, content publishing codecs like this are completely unsuitable for production work. After only a generation or two the artifacts would render an alpha channel effectively useless for production quality. Also, their massive processing overhead would be a complete deal-breaker all by itself. Pro codecs require lots and lots of RAM due to the bitrate, but they need ridiculously low processing power. That's a big deal when you are working on a composite that might have dozens (or hundreds) of layers.

They really can't. Once something is released like this it can't be withdrawn and license terms can not be changed. Any attempt would be instant bad-faith and crash-and-burn in the courts.

Meh. Those are useful for professional video codecs because they are effectively lossless. One or two generations of even high quality VP9 encoding would render the alpha channel useless. And you'd never want to edit with it because of the extremely high processing overhead, even with hardware support.

I'm sure someone will find something cute to do with it on a web page some time, but I'd be shocked if it is anything more than a gimmick.

From a technical point of view it's basically h265's peer. That's partially because it's largely based on the same tech as h265, in the same way VP8 was largely similar to h264. And is speculated that it has the same licensing issues that VP8 had, for most of the same reasons.

And the speed issue is entirely due to an almost complete lack of hardware support. And while h265 already has announced and demonstrated support, I am not aware of any VP9 support so far.

And doing VP9 decode in software has order-of-magnitude higher requirements than VP8. If YouTube serves up a VP9 video to your phone, you'll wish for the good old days of Flash video.

Most of the early results show that, while VP9 isn't better than h265, it's within a percentage point or two. That's not its problem.
Rather, there are two big issues towards VP9 adoption.

First, there is no hardware support for it at all so far, where as the next generation of mobile and desktop chips already have h265 support announced. And since both VP9 and h265 have order-of-magnitude higher processing power requirements then their predecessors. If you're software processing it will be noticeable even on a decent desktop. So a year from now all the latest phones will already support h265. And since any site serving to them will already encode for that, why would they double up for a codec that does not perform any better?

Second, Google may be selling this as a fully free and open codec, but that's what they said about VP8. And as soon as that was announced everyone yawned and bet that it walked all over h264 licensing. And a few months ago Google finally admitted it and paid out a big settlement to license h264 for their VP8 codec.

So when Google says 'you don't have to pay a license fee' what it has meant in the past is 'we haven't done our due diligence to see what licenses you need'. And anyone who cares about paying or avoiding licensing costs would rather pay up a small known fee than worry about massive liabilities from trusting Google's word. Again.

And it's an interesting fight for the 'free as in freedom' crowd, because while h264/5 are not 'free as in beer' they are entirely open specs and many of the best h264 tools have been open source right from the start. The professional tools don't care about the minor licensing costs and the hobbyist tools don't bother paying.

Part of this might be that the terminology hasn't really kept up with the realities of the situation. Initially an Operating System was literately just the software layer that operated the hardware. But right from the very start there were useful apps and commands baked in that were not strictly required for interfacing with the hardware. And as more and more things got taken for granted as part of the basic computing experience, they got added to the basic level of computer installation, which is the OS.

If you have an operating system, and you add one useful feature to it, you still refer to it as an operating system. And then you add one feature after that but still call it an OS. Then you include a couple useful applications that everyone is installing anyways. And this keeps going for decades. At what point does the collection as a whole no longer count as an 'Operating System'? And what then do we call a complete and useful computer installation that includes a wide range of basic functionality, including applications?

Why pay hardcover price for an ebook? Because you get it same day the hardcover comes out. If you want to pay paperback prices, wait a couple years for the paperback to come out and the ebook prices typically drop at the same time.

How much of a hardcover price do you really think is physical costs? A 400 page hardcover is equivalent to 100 pages of double side letter paper. I can print that for 5c a page (or less) on a decent laser printer. So as a guy with basic consumer equipment my costs for for printing a hardcover book are $5 or less. Of course, a publishing house can do it for less. On a big run, I suspect their costs for printing, binding and shipping combined probably don't top that same $5.

The rest of the hardcover costs? Pays for things like editing and typesetting (which is more work for a ebook than a traditional one) and keeps the author fed so they can write more books. You don't see paperback editions of anything until all the above costs have long been paid off. And if you feel that feeding authors and their editors is unreasonable, then fuck off.

Being first to market can have advantages. Coming later to the market with an improved product can have advantages. Coming later to the market with a product that is no better than what is already out there has no advantages at all.

The cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been roughly 1.4 trillion dollars. Yes, with a T. That completely ignores the lives lost on all sides and the ongoing social effects, also on all sides. When it comes to propping up the middle east to prevent a complete systemic and hostile collapse, which is exactly what would happen if the region was just left to its own internal feuding devices, there is almost no amount of money that is a bad investment. At 1 billion a year of aid/support money it would take 140 years to equal the cost of two screwed up and limited wars. That's a damn fine investment.

If America pulled all support from the Middle East/Africa so you think it would even be five years before the region had reached the point where enough American interests were threatened that stepping in would no longer be voluntary? Way to save 1.25 Billion in Egypt aid in exchange for conflicts that would make Iraq look like a kid's piggy bank.

Moron.