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Mozilla Considers H.264 Thanks In Part To Google's Latest Boondoggle

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:40:44 +0100

Mozilla Considers H.264 Thanks In Part To Google's Latest Boondoggle:

This is much more interesting than it may appear at first. Mozilla has previously been not just opposed, but vehemently opposed to using the H.264 codec. They view it as patent encumbered.

If you ask Google, one of the reasons they started work on the rival VP8 (the video portion of WebM, which may still also be patent encumbered, by the way) was because of this. They wanted a HTML5 video codec that would span the entire web.

It caused a bit of a shitstorm when Google announced they’d drop H.264 support in Chrome — even though they were keeping Flash built in. It sounded like a nightmare scenario that wouldn’t work.

And it didn’t. In fact, over a year later, Chrome has yet to drop H.264 support.

Now Mozilla is talking about supporting H.264 because basically they have no choice. Their Boot2Gecko mobile OS project will be a complete non-starter without it. And if they do it there, they’re thinking about doing it elsewhere, it seems.

The most interesting quote from Mozilla director of research, Andreas Gal:

Google pledged many things they didn’t follow through with and our users and our project are paying the price. H.264 wont go away. Holding out just a little longer buys us exactly nothing.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Google over-promised and under-delivered. Badly.

http://soundcloud.com/blacklightodyssey/omd-if-you-want-it-black-light-odyssey-remix

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 19:24:14 +0200

http://soundcloud.com/blacklightodyssey/omd-if-you-want-it-black-light-odyssey-remix

themarysue: Fallout… and Daria. via @TheAnimeGodess

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:51:02 +0200

themarysue:

Fallout… and Daria.

via @TheAnimeGodess

perfect win!parislemon: A perfect example of just how much...

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 09:16:54 +0200

perfect win!

parislemon:

A perfect example of just how much editorial oversight TechCrunch has — and the impact of “conflicts”.

I get some info, and I publish it. Little do I know that it was being saved as an on-stage surprise for our own conference. Nor do I care.

Again, information is all that matters.

seldo: This is genuinely Microsoft’s idea of a “streamlined”,...

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 15:34:10 +0200

seldo:

This is genuinely Microsoft’s idea of a “streamlined”, “optimized” UI for Windows Explorer. They were so proud of it they wrote a blog post about it.

The post is a sort of masterpiece of crazy rationalization, but I think my favourite part may be this screenshot:

Here, they proudly overlay the UI with data from their research into how often various commands are used. They use this to show that “the commands that make up 84% of what users do in Explorer are now in one tab”. But the more important thing is that the remaining 50% of the bar is taken up by buttons that nobody will ever use, ever, even according to Microsoft’s own research. And yet somehow they remain smack bang in the middle of the interface. The insanity is further enriched by this graph:

Again, this is Microsoft’s own research, cited in the same post: nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right?

Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.

Notepad++ regex

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 11:52:24 +0200

Notepad++ regex

Video

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 09:43:00 +0200

omcap tickets for everyone

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 10:56:13 +0200

i wonder if +Andre Alpar and omcap.de, after raffling tickets on Xing, G+ and Facebook, will offer us losers a chance to win a ticket on LinkedIn… or maybe twitter, or Tumblr, or Reddit, or Posterous or even myspace MySpace! #wanttogo