Facebook's Sandberg says she had planned to be aboard reportedly fatal flight

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg posts to the social network, saying she was originally planning on taking an Asiana Airlines flight from Seoul, South Korea, that wound up crashing at San Francisco's main airport. Two people have reportedly died as a result of the crash.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said she had planned to be on a flight that crashed on landing at San Francisco's main airport Saturday in an accident that reportedly killed two people. Meanwhile, a Samsung executive who was on board very quickly posted an eyewitness shot to the Web.
Sandberg posted to her page on the social network that she had originally intended to be on board the Asiana Airlines flight from Seoul, South Korea. "Thank you to everyone who is reaching out -- and sorry if we worried anyone," she wrote, explaining that she had switched to a different airline to take advantage of frequent flyer miles.
The shot by Samsung executive David Eun shows the smoking, tailless plane at the side of the runway with its emergency slides deployed and other passengers making their way toward where he is standing.

(Credit: Screenshot by CNET)

"I just crash landed at SFO. Tail ripped off. Most everyone seems fine. I'm ok. Surreal..." reads a tweet Eun sent with a link to the photo.
It's not clear at the time of this writing exactly what happened or precisely what the injury or fatality count might be. A Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman confirmed the crash, of Asiana Flight 214, and local television station KPIX reported that the San Francisco Fire Department had confirmed that two people had been killed and 61 injured.
The airport -- San Francisco's SFO -- has been closed to in-coming and out-bound traffic.
A Facebook representative told CNET that the social network had no official comment to make. "Her post says it all," the rep wrote in an e-mail. "Sheryl and her family are shocked and saddened but thankfully safe."
CBS News has ongoing coverage of the crash here. And here's a video posted by CBS:

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Animated WebP graphics support no shoo-in for Chrome

Google WebP engineers are encountering resistance from Google Chrome engineers about whether it's worth supporting the animated version of the image format.

 

Google introduced WebP in an attempt to speed up the Web, but now the company's engineers are raising concerns that one of the graphics format's features will actually slow it down.
WebP is designed to compress graphics more efficiently than JPEG, GIF, and PNG. Shrinking file sizes more means data arrives faster, though there can be a penalty of longer times to encode and decode image files. One of WebP's newer features is support for animation -- a package of multiple images shown in sequence to display a short movie.
Animated GIFs have risen from obscurity to become an unlikely art form, but now there's the possibility that WebP could take their place. That's just what some WebP fans would like, and they've begun building animated WebP support for Chrome, as detailed in an announcement by Google's Urvang Joshi of a plan to ship the feature in Chrome.
But the announcement triggered a discussion this week about whether animated WebP support is worth messing with, in particular given that in the years since animated GIFs arrived on the scene, Web-based video has arrived, built into the HTML standard used to describe Web pages.
"Animated GIFs are power hogs and really contribute much to slowing down the Web," said Chrome team member Darin Fisher in a response. "I'd imagine that animated WebP is superior, but by how much? How does it compare to the equivalent content packaged up in a video format?"

One response from Alpha (Hin-Chung) Lam, analyzing 63 cat videos from Tumblr, found animated WebP file sizes to be 38 percent of the animated GIF format originals. Videos encoded with Google's VP8 video codec were 53 percent of the animated GIF originals, a notch larger than the animated WebP version but still smaller than the animated GIFs.
Another Google engineer, Peter Kasting, expressed worries that animated WebP would merely continue with problems on the Web that come with animated GIFs.
"If you're not trying to fix GIF, I am opposed to shipping animated WebP at all," Kasting said. "Since you're going to be trying to convince the entire world to change direction anyway [from animated GIF to animated WebP], you should convince them all to switch to <video> and be done with it."
Nonanimated WebP images -- the primary use case for the graphics format -- are a less contentious issue. Google itself has found the format to save dramatically on network bandwidth, and Facebook is a notable WebP ally.

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