Daala is specifically trying to be better than H.265 both on technical merit and patent avoidance. The most popular codecs out there are not free, and previous attempts to inject patent unencumbered codecs only added choices, not solutions. The same will most likely happen again here with Daala. I think the XKCD comic is apt because it sounds like the Daala project is saying "look at all these non-free codecs currently in use. We'll make a better codec that isn't encumbered by patents, and that everyone will want to use instead" - sounds familiar.
You can continue to go on about the march of time, but Daala appears to be getting much inspiration from current gen codecs via the x264 project and WebM.
As far a character encoding, I think you're viewing that problem too simplistically.
"...most Japanese emails are in JIS encoding and web pages in Shift-JIS and yet mobile phones in Japan usually use some form of Extended Unix Code. If a program fails to determine the encoding scheme employed, it can cause [garbled characters]...", that doesn't mention ISO standard character encodings or Unicode, and that's for Japan alone.
While you may not feel that they are directlycompeting, the fact that they exist mean that are vying for attention from developers and content creators. Legacy cruft will often result in old defunct standards living longer than the people who were creating the new standard expected.
Also the XKCD is meant to be tongue-in-cheek and funny, poking fun at the naivety of the thought process regarding the pursuit of efficiency or improvement. I don't think it's really meant to discourage people.
“You can continue to go on about the march of time, but Daala appears to be getting much inspiration from current gen codecs via the x264 project and WebM.”
It distracts from your point that you're comparing a codec to an encoder and a bundle of codecs and container. But either way, why shouldn't a next-gen whatever, learn from the previous gen? Isn't that part of the point?
No it does not distract. Perhaps you should go tell the Daala people it distracts from their project to mention other such video technology projects on their website. If you're going to nitpick at me about it, then you should also bug them about it. I see nothing odd about mentioning those technologies in relation to a video codec project.
There is nothing wrong with taking inspiration, and I never said there was anything wrong with it. I mentioned it to note that Dylan16807's suggestion of H265/Daala having no similar use cases or relation to current generation video technology was not really correct.
Well I'll just hope that Daala manages to reach that goal of technical merit and not be obsolete out the gate.. and Japan is too focused on tradition and afraid to update anything. Fax machines and incomplete character sets for all!
You can continue to go on about the march of time, but Daala appears to be getting much inspiration from current gen codecs via the x264 project and WebM.
As far a character encoding, I think you're viewing that problem too simplistically.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language_and_computers
"...most Japanese emails are in JIS encoding and web pages in Shift-JIS and yet mobile phones in Japan usually use some form of Extended Unix Code. If a program fails to determine the encoding scheme employed, it can cause [garbled characters]...", that doesn't mention ISO standard character encodings or Unicode, and that's for Japan alone.
While you may not feel that they are directlycompeting, the fact that they exist mean that are vying for attention from developers and content creators. Legacy cruft will often result in old defunct standards living longer than the people who were creating the new standard expected.
Also the XKCD is meant to be tongue-in-cheek and funny, poking fun at the naivety of the thought process regarding the pursuit of efficiency or improvement. I don't think it's really meant to discourage people.