The problem is, there's nothing quite like Amazon right now
Rackspace's Cloud is about as close as it gets. They are the clear #2 player in the IaaS market. DCs in Chicago, Dallas, VA, and Cali as I recall. Not quite as mature as AWS from a features standpoint, but they seem to have made better design choices in many ways. No transient instances that disappear all your data for example. They just introduced a feature comparable to ELB as well.
Any gateway router with recent firmware will have IPv6, you just enable it.
Ahh, but that is the problem. Who is going to enable IPv6 for grandma?
All Internet-connected appliances really need an auto-update function turned on these days (which can be disabled if the user chooses). Yes, that increases some risks, and but it solves many more important ones (such as security patching). QA needs to be rock-solid for those updates, and vendors can't abandon devices after six months as they do now. Vizio seems to do a good job with this: my internet-enabled TV updates itself every few months, and new features just appear. Shocked me the first time it happened, but I like the new features and bug fixes, and the product I bought has actually gotten better after I bought it!
Grandma should not need to "apply firmware update and turn on IPv6" on her Linksys that her grandchild set up for her.
So I have come to the conclusion that the solution is legislation.
Yes, please! Put the politicians in charge! What could possibly go wrong? I look forward to the Department of Address Education and its budget which increases by 15% every year.
First, there is no standard for WebM bandwidth-adaptive streaming yet, over HTTP or any other protocol. Secondly, a quote from that site:
One word about the adaptive bitrate mechanism on WebM : contrary to other OTT technologies, adaptive bitrate settings are controlled on the server side only...
So, it holds state on the server, meaning it requires custom server software, and therefore doesn't scale cheaply. The beauty of the streaming-over-HTTP solutions is that you can take advantage of the huge number of caches in CDNs, ISPs, and corporations for free. We did some testing, and around 75% of our visitors are behind some form of caching proxy (we're a B2B company). That means as much as 50% of our video bill can be covered for free by our customers if we switch to an HTTP based streaming solution. Note that progressive download over HTTP doesn't get high hit ratios, because many (most?) caches have some default maximum file size limits to prevent one user from blowing out the cache. HTTP-based streaming, with its smallish (10-second) chunking, solves that problem.
Except 48 Hz -> 60 Hz is basically the same problem as 24 Hz -> 30 Hz, which is already a mostly solved. So the same pull-up/pull-down/blending solutions (which are admittedly non-ideal) can be used. I think all recent HDMI/LCD based consumer and pro gear is already capable of 1080p48 or can be made so with a simple software update (since the gear already supports 1080p60).
The real reason not to go all the way to 60 Hz has to be associated production costs: that's 25% more storage, bandwidth, encoding time, effects rendering time, etc. with little visible benefit over 48 Hz for theatrical content.
Why is this better than a 12-core Opteron with quad-channel DDR3?
Because each Intel core is a lot faster than each of the 12 cores on the latest Opterons. For many workloads, single-thread performance still matters. Search for "SPECint2006 Rate" results on the latest processors - a latest-gen Intel core is about twice as fast as an AMD Bulldozer core. 2*10 > 12
I personally think this guy is a little bit stupid in his head.
As opposed to "stupid in his ballsack"? Where else can you be stupid besides the head, exactly? Is this "stupid in his head" some newfangled slang you faceplace and twaddler kids use?
The people I don't mind. It's the corporations that are the problem. They are single-minded golems that only know how to feed themselves.
Funny, many including myself feel exactly the same way about government. Despite massive failures, ineffciency, gross negligence, and outright harm to the citizenry, government programs continue to grow at rates far exceeding GDP, tax revenue, or inflation. The reasons are many, but the core problem is as P.J. O'Rourke said: "You spend other people's money on other people. And in this case, who gives a shit?"
No, but CS departments are not supposed to be ignoring the real world either. The fact that almost my entire CS degree in the early 1990s was taught via C and Scheme provided me with a good theoretical foundation, which has indeed made me adaptable and served me well over the course of time. But such a focus can made finding that first job quite painful; I was somewhat lucky. When you don't have $LANGUAGE_OF_THE_DAY on your resume, it gets circular-filed before interview, even when you come from a top-15 undergraduate school. It makes me cringe, but I actually find myself doing this circular-filing myself, as my small company cannot absorb the pain and expense of training up a newly minted CS student on the toolchains, languages, and libraries that are actually in use in the business world.
Uhhh.... ever hear of a VPN? Not all military networks are classified. Those that are are air-gapped from the Internet. If the military wasn't using public and commercial networks for unclassified operations, I as a taxpayer would be extremely pissed, as they'd be wasting a shit-ton of money. They already do that well enough (although one can argue they are still the only branch of government that actually accomplishes what it is funded for, regardless of the expense). No need for a gazillion OC-48s running everywhere to exchange unclassified data.
You may be able to encrypt beyond the government's ability to decrypt But how can you handle a court forcing you to reveal the contents?
IANAL, but at least in the USA, the fifth amendment protects you against self-incrimination. I do not think you can be compelled to divulge an encryption key if doing so would provide any evidence you committed a crime. Any decent lawyer and/or the ACLU's could probably prevail with this argument in court.
The trick, of course, is that the prosecution will typically give another party who has access to the encrypted data immunity from prosecution, so the 5th amendment does not apply. Then that party can be compelled to decrypt the messages. This makes getting at encrypted emails easy if the prosecution is only after one of the sender or recipient.
From what I can gather, in civil cases, so long as decryption would not provide evidence of a crime on your behalf, you could be compelled by the court to decrypt the data, even if it harms your arguments in the civil case. But if you're willing to risk perjury, you can always testify you forgot the key and likely get away with it.
Apple hardware is generally superior to other consumer devices.
Quality on Apple hardware is basically shit - it looks pretty, and is designed fairly well (iPhone 4 antenna aside). But the parts and assembly are the same "cheapest China can produce" quality as almost all other consumer electronics. I say this having gone through multiple iPhone 3Gs and 3GSs due to various hardware issues (mostly screens and speakers). I also manage an IT department whose help desk guys are constantly fussing with the hardware on the very few Macs we have. We have had more hardware tickets on the Macs than our HPs in the last two years, despite the fact that we have 15x more HP laptops. Nedless to say, our Mac experiment is over, and this batch is getting replaced with HP/Windows machines during the next upgrade cycle.
So... somebody who has no fucking clue how the real world works? You sit in your little isolated academic ivory tower and cast scorn upon the smart, hardworking, gutsy people who donated the building you work in and pay your salary - because you're too much of a coward to get a real job.
So why aren't we requiring the providers to at least make available what their uptime and average data rate per customer is? They know this number, they know how much data they can move in any area. Yet they protect this information like it is a trade secret, that the average user could not possibly understand that they are offering 20MBps to the entire county while only having 200MBps backbone, and have only had an uptime over the past year of 98%.
Such information could legitimately be considered trade secrets. Oversubscription ratio is a major component of network design, and increasing that ratio has a significant benefit to the bottom line. If a particular topology, peering design, or technology allows a network to increase oversubscription while providing similar QoS to customers, that is a huge competitive advantage.
As for requiring disclosure of specific metrics, that is something that regulation could mandate. But the reality is a lot more complicated, making such simple labels useless. If a provider has only a 200 Mbps backbone, but extensive private peering in all of their POPs, performance could be better than a provider with a 10 Gbps backbone and peering in only two exchanges. I would suggest that an organization such as Consumer Reports might be a better avenue. They (or anyone else) could offer people an incentive to install some sort of monitoring client that reported such metrics as uptime, thoughput to various networks, etc. for each ISP. BroadbandReports and Speedtest.net already do this to some degree, but the focus on one destination makes it too narrow to be generally useful. Keynote, Gomez, and others provide much more robust metrics and methodologies to the business market.
Seriously, all the kiddies here who complain about throttling, not getting 100% of advertised speeds, etc. have never dealt with real Internet transit costs. If you want a specific CIR and uptime SLA, you have to pay, and pay dearly. Note that FiOS, "business class" service from most residential ISPs, the cheap 100 Mbps circuits from Cogent, and the "2 TB/month" from your cheap hosting provider might have at least some form of SLA for uptime if you're lucky. But the CIR for such low-cost services is close to or exactly ZERO, and all throughput is best-effort "up to" a specific link speed.
It isn't just this way in the USA either, but worldwide.
So what you're saying is that a format that was only open sourced a few months ago is already within 50% of the quality of one with practically infinite resources behind it, and the best encoder they could find at that.
First of all, x264, the best H.264 encoder, has always been open source. There are hardly infinite resources behind that project.
VP8 quality could potentially improve, but probably not by anything close to 50% while still being VP8. Speed will improve a lot, but quality will likely not improve by a huge margin with the current bitstream. As a point of reference, x264 bitrate/quality ratio has improved by only ~15% in the past four years, after leaping ~25% during the first year of its development. VP8 has been around for much more than a year, and has probably already made its big leaps. A similar development path can likely be traced for other AV codecs, such as MP3, MPEG2, etc.
I thought Red Hat and Canonical weren't paying this $0.02 for Fedora and Ubuntu because it went against their licensing policy. When did this change?
Ubuntu Advantage already includes patent licensing and indemnification from Canonical. They distribute MP3, H.264, and other patented technoliges from their repositories.
Red Hat also has a framework for the inclusion of patented technologies in RHEL..
I'm not saying Canonical and Red Hat include H.264 by default today with their distributions, but they easily can in the future for paying cusotmers. They currently skirt the issue by distributing codecs and other clearly patented stuff from restricted repositories and requiring manual steps to install, but that can change. We're talking a very minor percentage of the video eyeballs using one of these OS in any case.
So your telling me that now i can't watch if i use Linux? Why should i be forced to apple/windows crap because you want to force me to pay corporations for codecs?
Your principles impress me. I am sure your laptop/desktop was made by hand by the native peoples of your homeland, and contains no patented technologies. And of course you generate your own electricity, and grow your own food, and spin and weave your own clothing, in order to prevent paying corporations for anything. But how exactly are you connecting to the internet?
Are you willing to buy everyone in the developed world a licensed encoder and a licensed decoder?
No, everyone will buy their own, by paying an extra US$.02 when they buy stuff from Microsoft, Red Hat, Oracle, Canonical, Sony, Panasonic and firends. Or it will be subsidized by advertising (as YouTube, the most frequent user of H.264 in the world, does today.)
WebM is technically inferior to H.264 by a wide margin, and it is not yet widely deployed. The toolchain for WebM currently sucks. If Vorbis couldn't beat MP3 in the market while being both free-as-in-beer and techincally better, WebM doesn't stand a chance.
Windows Explorer once had a bug which could execute arbitrary code via JPEG preview.
Of course, most Linux and BSD systems had vulnerabilites just as bad, where a simple view or preview would trigger an exploit.
Vulneabilities with PNG, gzip, TIFF, PDF, and many others. This happens when everything from your browser to the desktop manager's icon system uses the same vulnerable libary. OSX and Linux systems are simply a more obscure target, and not somehow immune from file parsing vulnerabilities. And before you go off on a "but the user isn't running as root" rant, recognize that Microsoft locked down user privileges by default starting with Windows NT version 4 in 1996. But only, of course, when those windows machines were part of a Windows domain...
"At Microsoft we respect that Windows customers want the best experience of the web"
Ohhh, right, that's why Ogg Theora isn't natively supported in Internet Explorer. Maybe you could concentrate on improving the support, capabilities and experience in your own browser before bothering to extend other browsers?
Because Ogg Theora is a peice of shit, techincally speaking, when compared with H.264 (or even when compared with WebM). There's no point in supporing an obscure, inefficient format which nobody uses or wants.
Right, but I haven't read (and probably could no longer understand now that I am 15 years out from my CS degree) the proof that 3-SAT was NP at all to begin with. Did Levin and Cook assume that 3-SAT was NP based on some prior work? Could that proof have been in error?
Couldn't the existence of this working polynomial-time algorithm mean that the previous work which showed the 3-SAT problem to be NP-Complete was in error? That seems more likely than P==NP.
Also since FF cannot include H.264 that means encoding your video in H.264 instead of WebM costs you nearly 40% of users.
Except all (well, 99+% anyway) of those FIrefox users will have Flash installed, or Microsoft's H.264 plug-in. The only thing this move will do is increase the prevalence of Flash. Vorbis was technically better than MP3, and free and open, yet could not supplant MP3 as the standard digital audio format. VP8 is technically inferior to H.264, and the licensing terms and scheme for H.264 are far more reasonable than those for MP3. In short, WebM is going nowhere fast.
If Google was truly interested in an openly specified and freely implementable video standard, they could have simply bought all the H.264 patents from MPEG-LA and freed them. This may not have cost them much more than On2 plus the inevitable patent lawsuits (VP8 may not actually infringe on any H.264 patents, but it is certainly close enough in many respects that there will be more than a few lawsuits.)
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is, there's nothing quite like Amazon right now
Rackspace's Cloud is about as close as it gets. They are the clear #2 player in the IaaS market. DCs in Chicago, Dallas, VA, and Cali as I recall. Not quite as mature as AWS from a features standpoint, but they seem to have made better design choices in many ways. No transient instances that disappear all your data for example. They just introduced a feature comparable to ELB as well.
Any gateway router with recent firmware will have IPv6, you just enable it.
Ahh, but that is the problem. Who is going to enable IPv6 for grandma?
All Internet-connected appliances really need an auto-update function turned on these days (which can be disabled if the user chooses). Yes, that increases some risks, and but it solves many more important ones (such as security patching). QA needs to be rock-solid for those updates, and vendors can't abandon devices after six months as they do now. Vizio seems to do a good job with this: my internet-enabled TV updates itself every few months, and new features just appear. Shocked me the first time it happened, but I like the new features and bug fixes, and the product I bought has actually gotten better after I bought it!
Grandma should not need to "apply firmware update and turn on IPv6" on her Linksys that her grandchild set up for her.
So I have come to the conclusion that the solution is legislation.
Yes, please! Put the politicians in charge! What could possibly go wrong? I look forward to the Department of Address Education and its budget which increases by 15% every year.
First, there is no standard for WebM bandwidth-adaptive streaming yet, over HTTP or any other protocol. Secondly, a quote from that site:
One word about the adaptive bitrate mechanism on WebM : contrary to other OTT technologies, adaptive bitrate settings are controlled on the server side only...
So, it holds state on the server, meaning it requires custom server software, and therefore doesn't scale cheaply. The beauty of the streaming-over-HTTP solutions is that you can take advantage of the huge number of caches in CDNs, ISPs, and corporations for free. We did some testing, and around 75% of our visitors are behind some form of caching proxy (we're a B2B company). That means as much as 50% of our video bill can be covered for free by our customers if we switch to an HTTP based streaming solution. Note that progressive download over HTTP doesn't get high hit ratios, because many (most?) caches have some default maximum file size limits to prevent one user from blowing out the cache. HTTP-based streaming, with its smallish (10-second) chunking, solves that problem.
Except 48 Hz -> 60 Hz is basically the same problem as 24 Hz -> 30 Hz, which is already a mostly solved. So the same pull-up/pull-down/blending solutions (which are admittedly non-ideal) can be used. I think all recent HDMI/LCD based consumer and pro gear is already capable of 1080p48 or can be made so with a simple software update (since the gear already supports 1080p60).
The real reason not to go all the way to 60 Hz has to be associated production costs: that's 25% more storage, bandwidth, encoding time, effects rendering time, etc. with little visible benefit over 48 Hz for theatrical content.
Why is this better than a 12-core Opteron with quad-channel DDR3?
Because each Intel core is a lot faster than each of the 12 cores on the latest Opterons. For many workloads, single-thread performance still matters. Search for "SPECint2006 Rate" results on the latest processors - a latest-gen Intel core is about twice as fast as an AMD Bulldozer core. 2*10 > 12
I personally think this guy is a little bit stupid in his head.
As opposed to "stupid in his ballsack"? Where else can you be stupid besides the head, exactly? Is this "stupid in his head" some newfangled slang you faceplace and twaddler kids use?
>
The people I don't mind. It's the corporations that are the problem. They are single-minded golems that only know how to feed themselves.
Funny, many including myself feel exactly the same way about government. Despite massive failures, ineffciency, gross negligence, and outright harm to the citizenry, government programs continue to grow at rates far exceeding GDP, tax revenue, or inflation. The reasons are many, but the core problem is as P.J. O'Rourke said: "You spend other people's money on other people. And in this case, who gives a shit?"
No, but CS departments are not supposed to be ignoring the real world either. The fact that almost my entire CS degree in the early 1990s was taught via C and Scheme provided me with a good theoretical foundation, which has indeed made me adaptable and served me well over the course of time. But such a focus can made finding that first job quite painful; I was somewhat lucky. When you don't have $LANGUAGE_OF_THE_DAY on your resume, it gets circular-filed before interview, even when you come from a top-15 undergraduate school. It makes me cringe, but I actually find myself doing this circular-filing myself, as my small company cannot absorb the pain and expense of training up a newly minted CS student on the toolchains, languages, and libraries that are actually in use in the business world.
Uhhh.... ever hear of a VPN? Not all military networks are classified. Those that are are air-gapped from the Internet. If the military wasn't using public and commercial networks for unclassified operations, I as a taxpayer would be extremely pissed, as they'd be wasting a shit-ton of money. They already do that well enough (although one can argue they are still the only branch of government that actually accomplishes what it is funded for, regardless of the expense). No need for a gazillion OC-48s running everywhere to exchange unclassified data.
You may be able to encrypt beyond the government's ability to decrypt But how can you handle a court forcing you to reveal the contents?
IANAL, but at least in the USA, the fifth amendment protects you against self-incrimination. I do not think you can be compelled to divulge an encryption key if doing so would provide any evidence you committed a crime. Any decent lawyer and/or the ACLU's could probably prevail with this argument in court.
The trick, of course, is that the prosecution will typically give another party who has access to the encrypted data immunity from prosecution, so the 5th amendment does not apply. Then that party can be compelled to decrypt the messages. This makes getting at encrypted emails easy if the prosecution is only after one of the sender or recipient.
From what I can gather, in civil cases, so long as decryption would not provide evidence of a crime on your behalf, you could be compelled by the court to decrypt the data, even if it harms your arguments in the civil case. But if you're willing to risk perjury, you can always testify you forgot the key and likely get away with it.
Apple hardware is generally superior to other consumer devices.
Quality on Apple hardware is basically shit - it looks pretty, and is designed fairly well (iPhone 4 antenna aside). But the parts and assembly are the same "cheapest China can produce" quality as almost all other consumer electronics. I say this having gone through multiple iPhone 3Gs and 3GSs due to various hardware issues (mostly screens and speakers). I also manage an IT department whose help desk guys are constantly fussing with the hardware on the very few Macs we have. We have had more hardware tickets on the Macs than our HPs in the last two years, despite the fact that we have 15x more HP laptops. Nedless to say, our Mac experiment is over, and this batch is getting replaced with HP/Windows machines during the next upgrade cycle.
Mathematics postgrad. Interest in economics.
So... somebody who has no fucking clue how the real world works? You sit in your little isolated academic ivory tower and cast scorn upon the smart, hardworking, gutsy people who donated the building you work in and pay your salary - because you're too much of a coward to get a real job.
So why aren't we requiring the providers to at least make available what their uptime and average data rate per customer is? They know this number, they know how much data they can move in any area. Yet they protect this information like it is a trade secret, that the average user could not possibly understand that they are offering 20MBps to the entire county while only having 200MBps backbone, and have only had an uptime over the past year of 98%.
Such information could legitimately be considered trade secrets. Oversubscription ratio is a major component of network design, and increasing that ratio has a significant benefit to the bottom line. If a particular topology, peering design, or technology allows a network to increase oversubscription while providing similar QoS to customers, that is a huge competitive advantage.
As for requiring disclosure of specific metrics, that is something that regulation could mandate. But the reality is a lot more complicated, making such simple labels useless. If a provider has only a 200 Mbps backbone, but extensive private peering in all of their POPs, performance could be better than a provider with a 10 Gbps backbone and peering in only two exchanges. I would suggest that an organization such as Consumer Reports might be a better avenue. They (or anyone else) could offer people an incentive to install some sort of monitoring client that reported such metrics as uptime, thoughput to various networks, etc. for each ISP. BroadbandReports and Speedtest.net already do this to some degree, but the focus on one destination makes it too narrow to be generally useful. Keynote, Gomez, and others provide much more robust metrics and methodologies to the business market.
Mod ^^^^this dude^^^^ up please.
Seriously, all the kiddies here who complain about throttling, not getting 100% of advertised speeds, etc. have never dealt with real Internet transit costs. If you want a specific CIR and uptime SLA, you have to pay, and pay dearly. Note that FiOS, "business class" service from most residential ISPs, the cheap 100 Mbps circuits from Cogent, and the "2 TB/month" from your cheap hosting provider might have at least some form of SLA for uptime if you're lucky. But the CIR for such low-cost services is close to or exactly ZERO, and all throughput is best-effort "up to" a specific link speed.
It isn't just this way in the USA either, but worldwide.
So what you're saying is that a format that was only open sourced a few months ago is already within 50% of the quality of one with practically infinite resources behind it, and the best encoder they could find at that.
First of all, x264, the best H.264 encoder, has always been open source. There are hardly infinite resources behind that project.
VP8 quality could potentially improve, but probably not by anything close to 50% while still being VP8. Speed will improve a lot, but quality will likely not improve by a huge margin with the current bitstream. As a point of reference, x264 bitrate/quality ratio has improved by only ~15% in the past four years, after leaping ~25% during the first year of its development. VP8 has been around for much more than a year, and has probably already made its big leaps. A similar development path can likely be traced for other AV codecs, such as MP3, MPEG2, etc.
I thought Red Hat and Canonical weren't paying this $0.02 for Fedora and Ubuntu because it went against their licensing policy. When did this change?
Ubuntu Advantage already includes patent licensing and indemnification from Canonical. They distribute MP3, H.264, and other patented technoliges from their repositories.
Red Hat also has a framework for the inclusion of patented technologies in RHEL..
I'm not saying Canonical and Red Hat include H.264 by default today with their distributions, but they easily can in the future for paying cusotmers. They currently skirt the issue by distributing codecs and other clearly patented stuff from restricted repositories and requiring manual steps to install, but that can change. We're talking a very minor percentage of the video eyeballs using one of these OS in any case.
So your telling me that now i can't watch if i use Linux? Why should i be forced to apple/windows crap because you want to force me to pay corporations for codecs?
Your principles impress me. I am sure your laptop/desktop was made by hand by the native peoples of your homeland, and contains no patented technologies. And of course you generate your own electricity, and grow your own food, and spin and weave your own clothing, in order to prevent paying corporations for anything. But how exactly are you connecting to the internet?
I've seen tests that rank VP8 as tied with AVC baseline, not inferior by any wide margin.
Nobody uses AVC baseline except for targeting of old-generation iPhones; everything H.264 usually targets high profile level 4.1. And WebM requires 1.5x the bitrate of the best H.264 High Profile encoders for the same quality.
Are you willing to buy everyone in the developed world a licensed encoder and a licensed decoder?
No, everyone will buy their own, by paying an extra US$.02 when they buy stuff from Microsoft, Red Hat, Oracle, Canonical, Sony, Panasonic and firends. Or it will be subsidized by advertising (as YouTube, the most frequent user of H.264 in the world, does today.)
WebM is technically inferior to H.264 by a wide margin, and it is not yet widely deployed. The toolchain for WebM currently sucks. If Vorbis couldn't beat MP3 in the market while being both free-as-in-beer and techincally better, WebM doesn't stand a chance.
Windows Explorer once had a bug which could execute arbitrary code via JPEG preview.
Of course, most Linux and BSD systems had vulnerabilites just as bad, where a simple view or preview would trigger an exploit.
Vulneabilities with PNG, gzip, TIFF, PDF, and many others. This happens when everything from your browser to the desktop manager's icon system uses the same vulnerable libary. OSX and Linux systems are simply a more obscure target, and not somehow immune from file parsing vulnerabilities. And before you go off on a "but the user isn't running as root" rant, recognize that Microsoft locked down user privileges by default starting with Windows NT version 4 in 1996. But only, of course, when those windows machines were part of a Windows domain...
"At Microsoft we respect that Windows customers want the best experience of the web"
Ohhh, right, that's why Ogg Theora isn't natively supported in Internet Explorer. Maybe you could concentrate on improving the support, capabilities and experience in your own browser before bothering to extend other browsers?
Because Ogg Theora is a peice of shit, techincally speaking, when compared with H.264 (or even when compared with WebM). There's no point in supporing an obscure, inefficient format which nobody uses or wants.
Right, but I haven't read (and probably could no longer understand now that I am 15 years out from my CS degree) the proof that 3-SAT was NP at all to begin with. Did Levin and Cook assume that 3-SAT was NP based on some prior work? Could that proof have been in error?
Couldn't the existence of this working polynomial-time algorithm mean that the previous work which showed the 3-SAT problem to be NP-Complete was in error? That seems more likely than P==NP.
Also since FF cannot include H.264 that means encoding your video in H.264 instead of WebM costs you nearly 40% of users.
Except all (well, 99+% anyway) of those FIrefox users will have Flash installed, or Microsoft's H.264 plug-in. The only thing this move will do is increase the prevalence of Flash. Vorbis was technically better than MP3, and free and open, yet could not supplant MP3 as the standard digital audio format. VP8 is technically inferior to H.264, and the licensing terms and scheme for H.264 are far more reasonable than those for MP3. In short, WebM is going nowhere fast.
If Google was truly interested in an openly specified and freely implementable video standard, they could have simply bought all the H.264 patents from MPEG-LA and freed them. This may not have cost them much more than On2 plus the inevitable patent lawsuits (VP8 may not actually infringe on any H.264 patents, but it is certainly close enough in many respects that there will be more than a few lawsuits.)