On the surface it sounds like a BS argument, but if you do a little analysis on it theres probably quite a bit of truth to it.
It's much more than a bit of truth: it already happened! NASA tried to pull that stunt after the Apollo program. There was a big gap between Apollo 17 and the first Space Shuttle flights and NASA fired a lot of engineers and workers with valuable skill sets. They tried to hire them back more than 5 years later.
Moreover many of the problems that NASA is facing with the Constellation program are due to the stupid insistence of the current Administrator, Michael Griffin, with the Ares architecture with two launchers. In particular, Ares I it's a running joke between actual rocket scientists. NASA engineers have developed a cheaper, safer and faster alternative: DIRECT (the site includes hi-res images and videos).
The first thing Obama should do is replace Griffin and then do a real independent review of all the alternatives, including at least Ares, DIRECT and the EELVs.
Apple is never going to use Theora, neither is Microsoft, and with good reason they both have better codecs.
You can support more that one codec. E.g. both Apple and Microsoft support MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. The next version of Safari will support Theora if you have installed the Ogg Quicktime components, and IE will support it with a JS and a Java applet.
And maximum quality isn't the only factor for the success of a media format, software patents and actual implementations count much more IMO. Otherwise we will be all using JPEG2000 and not JPEG or PNG today.
Theora is not VP3. The format is *much* more flexible and the 1.0 decoder supports all of it. Which means that in the next years we will see many improvements in the quality, with the same bitrate and 100 backward binary compatibility, just enhancing the encoders.
Why? Ins't going to affect you if you don't visit pages with videos and, unlike Flash there's a browser preference to start all videos in paused state. The Theora binary library is only 250 kB on AMD64, even smaller on x86. The Flash plugin, is much, much bigger.
Video on the internet (think youtube, movie trailers, pr0n, etc.) isn't going away any time soon.
The current state of the art is to have a proprietary Flash plugin installed in almost every browser. Switching to native support for an open format directly in the browsers seems like an improvement to me. In the good ol' days, people considered image support in browsers as bloat too..
And Firefox isn't alone here: Opera and Safari will support it too (altough Safari will not support Theora out-of-the-box).
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On the surface it sounds like a BS argument, but if you do a little analysis on it theres probably quite a bit of truth to it.
It's much more than a bit of truth: it already happened! NASA tried to pull that stunt after the Apollo program. There was a big gap between Apollo 17 and the first Space Shuttle flights and NASA fired a lot of engineers and workers with valuable skill sets. They tried to hire them back more than 5 years later.
Guess what most of then answered? No, thanks.
Good point.
Moreover many of the problems that NASA is facing with the Constellation program are due to the stupid insistence of the current Administrator, Michael Griffin, with the Ares architecture with two launchers. In particular, Ares I it's a running joke between actual rocket scientists. NASA engineers have developed a cheaper, safer and faster alternative: DIRECT (the site includes hi-res images and videos).
The first thing Obama should do is replace Griffin and then do a real independent review of all the alternatives, including at least Ares, DIRECT and the EELVs.
Apple is never going to use Theora, neither is Microsoft, and with good reason they both have better codecs.
You can support more that one codec. E.g. both Apple and Microsoft support MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. The next version of Safari will support Theora if you have installed the Ogg Quicktime components, and IE will support it with a JS and a Java applet.
And maximum quality isn't the only factor for the success of a media format, software patents and actual implementations count much more IMO. Otherwise we will be all using JPEG2000 and not JPEG or PNG today.
See:
http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo5.html
http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/ffmpeg2theora-0.22-thusnelda.exe
And this is only the start. Just look at what the Lame encoder was able to do with the MP3 format in quality.
Sounds like feature creep and bloat to me.
Why? Ins't going to affect you if you don't visit pages with videos and, unlike Flash there's a browser preference to start all videos in paused state. The Theora binary library is only 250 kB on AMD64, even smaller on x86. The Flash plugin, is much, much bigger.
Video on the internet (think youtube, movie trailers, pr0n, etc.) isn't going away any time soon.
The current state of the art is to have a proprietary Flash plugin installed in almost every browser. Switching to native support for an open format directly in the browsers seems like an improvement to me. In the good ol' days, people considered image support in browsers as bloat too..
And Firefox isn't alone here: Opera and Safari will support it too (altough Safari will not support Theora out-of-the-box).