I realize that Slashdot is pro-nuclear, and hell, even I'm pro-nuclear. But please don't embarrass yourself or this site by referring to the ongoing disaster at Fukushima Daiichi as a plant "having some problems". I assure you the experts dealing with this problem are not minimizing the seriousness of what's going on. It's very serious, it's ongoing, and until the plant is stabilized, it's legitimate world news.
More like pro-physics/reality to be honest. I would characterize the nuclear power plant event as an accident that should be a minor note in the japanese coverage. Tens of thousands of people might be dead from the tsunami and oil refineries / chemical plants are/were on fire with a lot more serious effects than a minor radioactivity release and a partial meltdown. Even a full meltdown would only have had effects that were confined to the power plant. The media coverage and the evacuation zone is a total overkill. This is costing lives, they are evacuating people from a non-event when other people need assistance. It's winter and they are still finding people trapped on rooftops etc.
The lesson that pro-nuclear folks should be learning from this disaster is that Fukushima Daiichi and similar 1960s-era reactors should not be operating in the year 2011, and most especially not in an area with high seismic activity. You know this, I know this, and I guarantee that the experts who run the plants knew it before the quake.
The lesson that anti-nuclear folks should be learning from this disaster is that 1960s-era reactors shouldn't be operating in the year 2011, but those fuckers blocked the building of 2011 era reactors, so we're stuck with 30-40 year old designs - which weren't bad as this event shows, but we could do better.
While this particular incident seems to be under control, as long as these plants are operating, there's a very real possibility of a catastrophic meltdown somewhere, in the next few decades. And that will do ten times more to stop the deployment of nuclear power than Greenpeace --- or the Slashdot boogeyman of the day --- could ever do.
Sure, a meltdown might happen, but once people realise that it only costs a lot to clean up, but doesn't have major effects outside the power plant and doesn't make 400 km^2 uninhabitable, then it might actually reverse itself, at least hopefully. Personally though, I wouldn't bet on a full meltdown happening in the next 30 years. Even a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami wasn't enough to achieve that.
It is widely used with a huge range of hardware implementations.
Quoting from wikipedia: AMD, ARM, and Broadcom have announced support for hardware acceleration of the WebM format.[31][32] Intel is also considering hardware-based acceleration for WebM in its Atom-based TV chips if the format gains popularity.[33] Qualcomm and Texas Instruments have announced support,[34][35] with native support coming to the TI OMAP processor.[36] Chip&Media have announced the fully hardware decoder for VP8 that can decode full HD resolution VP8 streams at 60 frames per second.[37]
It gives much better compression than WebM will ever have.
No. VP8 already has better compression efficiency than h.264 and at the same time being on par in quality with h.264. From the technical point of view, WebM has the potential to be a lot better than H.264.
The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. -- Paul Erlich