Roman Shaposhnik's

I've always known that Charles Babbage had a few good ideas on how to build computing devices. Yet, it was only after a friend of mine had pointed me at Babbage was a true genius post when I realized that Babbage was the sort of a guy who could have turned the world into a different direction had he succeded. For anybody interested in the history of computing -- this is a must read.

Please forgive me this bit of a shameless self promotion, but as many of you know in my spare time I do develop a DV codec for the FFmpeg project. Now, according to Stefan Fendt's benchmark my efforts and a lot of quality tuning by Dan Maas (of Maas Digital fame) really did pay off. Of course as a compiler guy by day I should know what elusive thing any kind of benchmarking is, but I just can't help it ;-)