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Comment: Re:Good if they succeed. (Score 1) 132

by Vanders (#46413901) Attached to: Oregon Withholding $25.6M From Oracle Over Health Website Woes
Why not? Do you think Oracle paid their developers and managers in promises and unicorn farts? Why couldn't Oregon simply have paid for those developers & managers themselves?

The point of hiring contractors is that they're supposed to bring instant expertise to a project. If they don't actually do that, why bother with the extra expense of the middle man?

Comment: Re:Tempest in a tea pot (Score 1) 235

by Vanders (#46265501) Attached to: FLOSS Codecs Emerge Victorious In Wikimedia Vote

it's possible that the situation has improved

It has.

There are implementations of both available.

There are various incomplete reference encoders for both, but I'm not aware of a single non-alpha and complete implementation of either. vpxenc is close but lacks things like multi-threaded encoding, which will obviously have an impact on encoding speed.

Comment: Re:Thin. (Score 2) 235

by Vanders (#46259075) Attached to: FLOSS Codecs Emerge Victorious In Wikimedia Vote

If you know anyone who cannot legally play an MP4 video, I would like to meet them.

I've got a better question for you: why are there still people who are unable to open and play back a WebM video? What's the driver behind not including WebM support in the handful of OSes & devices that have refused so far? It isn't technical. It certainly isn't a cost issue. It surely can't be licensing. So that only leaves, what, ideology?

Are Apple & Microsoft going to continue to make their users lives more difficult because of their own ideology? Why are they doing that?

Comment: Re:Tempest in a tea pot (Score 5, Insightful) 235

by Vanders (#46257359) Attached to: FLOSS Codecs Emerge Victorious In Wikimedia Vote

the terribly performing FLOSS codec of the day

I'm not sure which codec you're referring too, so I can't answer you there.

I guess my optimism is based on WebM being an open format, thus allowing anyone to implement it on any future platform. Unlike various proprietary formats, that won't. I mean, does your 'phone support Intel Indeo or RealPlayer G2?

VP9 doesn't even match h.264, let alone h.265

That's really odd, because the benchmarks I've seen show VP8 & h264 to be evenly matched, and no one has produced a finished h.265 or VP9 codec, so I do wonder how you think you've seen those two codecs fairly benchmarked?

Comment: Re:Tempest in a tea pot (Score 4, Interesting) 235

by Vanders (#46257077) Attached to: FLOSS Codecs Emerge Victorious In Wikimedia Vote
The users are exactly the people they're thinking about. Because in ten years time, it's the users who'll be happy not to deal with some proprietary closed format that isn't supported on their new device, because sadly it's obsolete and no one cares about Intel Indeo, oh sorry, I mean, MPEG-2, oh wait, I mean, h.264. They care because by using an open format they stand a chance of providing support to the latest iBrain 7, without having to destroy the content with yet another lossy conversion.

Of course if your outlook is limited to the short term of less than the next 12 months then I guess the decision looks bad, but then you're not thinking about the long game.

Comment: Re:Bomba kryptologiczna (Score 4, Informative) 110

by Vanders (#46171921) Attached to: Second World War Code-cracking Computing Hero Colossus Turns 70
The Colossus wasn't used to crack Enigma: Bletchley has simple electro-mechanical machines (Bombes) for that. Colossus was used to crack Lorenze, which was an entirely different cipher. The basis for the software that ran on the Colossus was basically Alan Turings work on cryptanalysis, and of course it was also Turing complete. The actual design however was almost entirely the work of Tommy Flowers; a post office telephone engineer.

Comment: Re:Always looking for passionate programmers (Score 1) 533

by Vanders (#46125383) Attached to: The Moderately Enthusiastic Programmer
Most of it is personal to me, but in all honesty the ATA driver is rather funky: a ring 0 multi-threaded driver. If you ignore the completely insane stuff for handling various horrifically broken ATA hardware implementations, then the actual implementation itself is rather elegant.

I also wrote a rather interesting multi-stage asynchronous media pipeline that emulated Java/C# interfaces in C++, but that never made it past the prototype stage.

Comment: Re:Always looking for passionate programmers (Score 1) 533

by Vanders (#46123281) Attached to: The Moderately Enthusiastic Programmer

I love writing code and working on hard problems, but do I feel like working on them for 80 hours a week, every week? No, I enjoy having a life outside of work and a separation of work and home life is necessary.

So much this. I enjoy solving difficult problems, but I also enjoy a not using a computer.

Nor do I currently have any active open source projects on my Github account; because you know, I spent over ten years working on Syllable and frankly that was more than most people do in a lifetime, so I'm O.K with that.

Happily the sorts of companies I work for are O.K with that too, and prefer to judge me on my experience and work I produce professionally, rather than an irrelevant body of work that I produced in my spare time.
