It looks like Ars is misinterpreting the reports. What I've read is that Apple is offering $20/device to the music artists/labels - divided up based on actual downloads. Their research says consumers will buy this ability at up to +$100 per device. So, I'd expect the cost to be between $20 and $100 (maybe costing more or less based on the capacity of the device - $25 for a shuffle, $100 for an iPhone? [Assuming the Classic iPod will be discontinued at some point here...])
In this scenario it's justifiable for Apple ask for more of the revenue for themselves because they're assuming years worth of bandwidth obligations.
This would be attractive for the labels because it would be about 30% more revenue than they're getting now from iTunes on a per-device basis, but it's unattractive because it creates a supply glut that virtually guarantees dramatically reduced sales in the other sales channels. (Though, piracy likewise produces a supply glut so maybe they're ready to make peace with an environment awash in easy to acquire music.)
Comcast has said they'll start rolling out service with up to 160 Mbit/s later this year - that's 20 MB/s. Blu-Ray's fastest read is 9 MB/s so you can only watch two of those live off the Internet at once.
It was the big exhibitors that asked for the change in format. E3 was good in some ways - it was certainly beloved by the individuals who got to go - but it was very bad for game companies in a couple of ways. First, it ate up a lot of funds (some companies spent enough each year on E3 to fund an entire new game) and secondly it warped the development schedule --- there are a ton of stories about a schedule that slipped because the team had to take time off to make a special demo for E3 (remember E3 was famous for showing off incomplete projects). Also, because E3 was so far ahead of the big season all the effort didn't directly translate into sales.
From a consumer point of view it looks dumb to cancel E3, but E3 was basically a huge sacrifice for a lot of ineffective marketing. Can you blame them for wanting to stop it?
I know nothing I can say can remove the pain of bad past experiences, but let me clear up your misconceptions.
1. Navigating through a site and I hit back.. leaving the site. Oops, I've been trained from HTML pages to navigate that way. This angers me to no end.
This is really a problem with any single page site, which is what Ajax is - a single page that loads in the different components. The same methods to make the back button work with Ajax can be used for Flash. It's just that not everyone uses these methods with Flash or Ajax.
2. As a programmer, until recently, it was extremely time consuming to do anything that I could do in Ajax quickly. Huge learning curve trying to learn how to use flash.
As someone who has done a lot of Flash and Javascript, I would say that the learning curve is feature-for-feature worse for Javascript because you need to learn about the different browsers, but may be greater overall for Flash because it offers more features. That's a trade off I've been happy to make.
3. Complex Flash Applications generally use much more CPU and are extremely sluggish compared to Ajax apps (in your case the Ajax programmers didn't know how to code well, 30sec to load.. wow, pathetic)
Computation for computation, Flash has better performance than Javascript. At least, I think that's why Mozilla accepted Adobe's donation of the EMCAScript execution engine from Flash. After that's incorporated I would believe that Javascript alone would run faster, but right now that's not true. (Or if it is true, someone better stop Mozilla.)
4. You are more likely to be compatible with javascript/Ajax than flash, since most sites use javascript in the first place to detect if flash plugin is installed.
This is another issue of every site being different, but the fallback for not having Javascript enabled can easily be to show the Flash content. The only reason everyone uses Javascript to embed the files now is because of Microsoft's attempt to screw plug-ins.
5. Forget about getting any real Search Engine traffic from an 'all flash' site. (unless it's an internal corporate thing)
This isn't an issue for me since I usually use Flash for corporate apps that you wouldn't want indexed, but again this isn't something that's inherent to Flash. The issue is that Flash sites often pull in dynamic content. That's what the search engines can't index, and again it's something that's going to be a problem for any Ajax site that does the same. (Google has been indexing Flash for years and Adobe offers a free SDK for developers of search engines. Also, Flash-dependent sites like YouTube are definitely not starving for traffic.
As long as we're talking about pet peeves here are two essential things Javascript/Ajax needs to address that Flash already has.
1) Built in security against cross-domain scripting. 2) Accessibility for the disabled.
"[F]or management trying to impress someone, that's usually important I guess" -- if that someone you're trying to impress is either your boss or your client then there's no guessing about it.
Earlier this year I got pulled into a project that had been done by a team from everyone's favorite subcontinent. They had used both Yahoo and Scriptaculous/Prototype at the same time!
The site would download quickly enough, but then the page would just sit blank and churn for about 30 seconds before displaying anything.
It was hideous, and it was never getting closer to completion, so we replaced their 108 man-months worth of Ajax coding with 2 man-months worth of Flash development and everyone was much much happier. (It loads in less than 1 second and the management thinks it's cool.)
According to Wikipedia, in 1990, when the Channel Tunnel was completed its cost was estimated as 10 billion GBP.
I'm no expert on inflation and exchange rates, but by estimating this tunnel at $10-$12 billion aren't they saying that a tunnel that is twice as long as the Channel Tunnel will actually cost less to build? Is there any reason to believe this will actually be so?
This is much ado about nothing. The reason they can make you watch an ad before the video plays is that the Flash format is a virtual machine, not just a video format. This has been possible for as long as Flash has been around, and if YouTube had wanted to do something like this there has been nothing stopping them. It sounds like this product is just a common API or a new content creation UI that doesn't require Flash or Flex.
Mochi Media has been offering a service for ads like this for the past 5 months, but it's being used mostly for casual games.
Here's a comparison I put together from Wikipedia/Google.
Nintendo DS: 39.8 million (total sales) Gameboy: 69 Million (total sales) Gameboy Advance: 77 million (total sales) iPod: 100 million (total sales) Cellphones: 2,000 million (currently in use)
I think I have a better understanding of why they built the iPhone...
If you're not familiar, everyone who licensed the MP3 patents is now being threatened with a lawsuit by Alcatel-Lucent because they co-own the patent rights, but weren't party to all the licensing that was going on before.
I worked at UNL for a few years, and this strikes me as ironic.
Until somtime in the first half of the decade, UNL used to give everyone real static IP addresses. This let students easily host their own servers, including one server that, rumor had it, had one of the biggest collections of pirated music on the Internet - the server was pre-Napster and survived and thrived post-Napster. (Rumor said it was run by a woman who just loved music and liked to listen to everything that was uploaded... I'm not sure if she went to class much because they said she was in her 6th year or so when I was there.)
This was before the RIAA was very active online, and to my understanding was fairly unaware of servers like this. When UNL went to DHCP everywhere, one of the effects was to make it harder to run servers like that. So, it's funny that a move that a few years ago was percieved as hurting music piracy is now seen as enabling it. (The move to DHCP wasn't done for political reasons, but the students didn't see it that way.)
PS. I never visited the server and don't know who ran it, so don't bother subpoenaing me, RIAA.:p
They do a ton of market analysis to help them make decisions and they do put out original work. Their problem with originality is that when it fails it fails big. (See Superman for the XBox 360 - it's not fun, but it's not fun in part because it's trying something new that didn't work out.)
If they're in a bad spot now, I think it's because they classified everything for the Wii as "high risk" and managed accordingly.
Just a comment about the quote that you started out your post with because it is so often misinterpreted: 'Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away'
Engineers seem be reading this as "use as many of the default values as possible". For example, not specifying a background color for a web page and just letting the browser's default value be used (grey in 1996, white today). Failing to specify visual design is not a minimalist design, it is design by abdication of responsibility. Only by luck would it ever produce the desired result, unless you were intending to convey a lack of consideration.
To be clear, Shockwave was the older technology that Flash originally piggybacked on to get its foot in the door.
Flash has thrived because Macromedia learned their lessons from Shockwave and weren't afraid of destroying their existing market in pursuit of something much better.
The fact that Google spent $1.6 Billion on a site that's dependent on Flash is a strong validation of the technology.
6 months. It was actually 6 months before the PC equivalent of the original XBox's graphics card was released.
This type of delay (which Sony screwed up because they missed their original launch date) + the fact that there's a lag in PC games taking advantage of the latest cards + Standard definition television's free "anti-aliasing" have contributed to consoles always having a minor, switfly overcome, but real advantage to PCs when they launch.
To my knowledge this is true all the way back to the NES and Atari days.
When the PS2 and XBox launched their games did look better than anything on a high end PC. I know, I comapred. That the PS3 is now struggling to look "as good as a PC" is a failure for the console. Even if the only reason we notice is the HD output.
2006 was my Ajax year. I spent the entire year full-time building an Ajax UI, and discovered that Javascript is actually worse than I had remembered it.
I'm not going back again. The only reason I'll use Javascript now is as an interface between Flash and the crap that someone else built.
It is freely available, but may not be used to create Flash players, only Flash creators.
Which is why Microsoft hasn't embraced and extended Flash.
Being completly open makes you vulnerable to things like that when there's a monoploy in the house. Please reference Microsoft's treatment of Java, HTML,and Javascript.
Most of the posts seem to indicate that people are unaware of Disney's history in the field. They've been running the well regarded Toontown online since 2003.
Also, you can thank this group for the Nintendo Friends code system. To my knowledge Disney designed and developed the first implementation a friends code system with a Barbie diary product years ago. It's the best way developed to prevent young kids from interacting with strangers online, and they shared what they learned with the rest of the industry. (And, yes, it's a pain to everyone else.)
I'm confident that Disney will do well with their next product, even if it isn't as big as World of Warcraft.
1. They are not being paid to have the bias they have
This is nothing against any of the organizations that are mentioned, but just a note about non-profits in general. Having worked at a non-profit I know that the people who work at them are better off (financially and social status-wise) the more people agree with them. Thus, they do have a vested self-interest in promoting their point of view. These days non-profit only really means "without shareholders" - it's naive to assume that non-profit status implies anything beyond that.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like Ars is misinterpreting the reports. What I've read is that Apple is offering $20/device to the music artists/labels - divided up based on actual downloads. Their research says consumers will buy this ability at up to +$100 per device. So, I'd expect the cost to be between $20 and $100 (maybe costing more or less based on the capacity of the device - $25 for a shuffle, $100 for an iPhone? [Assuming the Classic iPod will be discontinued at some point here...])
In this scenario it's justifiable for Apple ask for more of the revenue for themselves because they're assuming years worth of bandwidth obligations.
This would be attractive for the labels because it would be about 30% more revenue than they're getting now from iTunes on a per-device basis, but it's unattractive because it creates a supply glut that virtually guarantees dramatically reduced sales in the other sales channels. (Though, piracy likewise produces a supply glut so maybe they're ready to make peace with an environment awash in easy to acquire music.)
Comcast has said they'll start rolling out service with up to 160 Mbit/s later this year - that's 20 MB/s. Blu-Ray's fastest read is 9 MB/s so you can only watch two of those live off the Internet at once.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/01/08/ces.comcast.ap/index.html
Having been on both sides of a "fuck you" many many times, I accept that as just going with the territory...
Earl Hickey, is that you?
It was the big exhibitors that asked for the change in format. E3 was good in some ways - it was certainly beloved by the individuals who got to go - but it was very bad for game companies in a couple of ways. First, it ate up a lot of funds (some companies spent enough each year on E3 to fund an entire new game) and secondly it warped the development schedule --- there are a ton of stories about a schedule that slipped because the team had to take time off to make a special demo for E3 (remember E3 was famous for showing off incomplete projects). Also, because E3 was so far ahead of the big season all the effort didn't directly translate into sales.
From a consumer point of view it looks dumb to cancel E3, but E3 was basically a huge sacrifice for a lot of ineffective marketing. Can you blame them for wanting to stop it?
Math credentials worked for the last guy up to a point....
I know nothing I can say can remove the pain of bad past experiences, but let me clear up your misconceptions.
.. leaving the site. Oops, I've been trained from HTML pages to navigate that way. This angers me to no end.
.. wow, pathetic)
1. Navigating through a site and I hit back
This is really a problem with any single page site, which is what Ajax is - a single page that loads in the different components. The same methods to make the back button work with Ajax can be used for Flash. It's just that not everyone uses these methods with Flash or Ajax.
2. As a programmer, until recently, it was extremely time consuming to do anything that I could do in Ajax quickly. Huge learning curve trying to learn how to use flash.
As someone who has done a lot of Flash and Javascript, I would say that the learning curve is feature-for-feature worse for Javascript because you need to learn about the different browsers, but may be greater overall for Flash because it offers more features. That's a trade off I've been happy to make.
3. Complex Flash Applications generally use much more CPU and are extremely sluggish compared to Ajax apps (in your case the Ajax programmers didn't know how to code well, 30sec to load
Computation for computation, Flash has better performance than Javascript. At least, I think that's why Mozilla accepted Adobe's donation of the EMCAScript execution engine from Flash. After that's incorporated I would believe that Javascript alone would run faster, but right now that's not true. (Or if it is true, someone better stop Mozilla.)
4. You are more likely to be compatible with javascript/Ajax than flash, since most sites use javascript in the first place to detect if flash plugin is installed.
This is another issue of every site being different, but the fallback for not having Javascript enabled can easily be to show the Flash content. The only reason everyone uses Javascript to embed the files now is because of Microsoft's attempt to screw plug-ins.
5. Forget about getting any real Search Engine traffic from an 'all flash' site. (unless it's an internal corporate thing)
This isn't an issue for me since I usually use Flash for corporate apps that you wouldn't want indexed, but again this isn't something that's inherent to Flash. The issue is that Flash sites often pull in dynamic content. That's what the search engines can't index, and again it's something that's going to be a problem for any Ajax site that does the same. (Google has been indexing Flash for years and Adobe offers a free SDK for developers of search engines. Also, Flash-dependent sites like YouTube are definitely not starving for traffic.
As long as we're talking about pet peeves here are two essential things Javascript/Ajax needs to address that Flash already has.
1) Built in security against cross-domain scripting.
2) Accessibility for the disabled.
"[F]or management trying to impress someone, that's usually important I guess" -- if that someone you're trying to impress is either your boss or your client then there's no guessing about it.
Earlier this year I got pulled into a project that had been done by a team from everyone's favorite subcontinent. They had used both Yahoo and Scriptaculous /Prototype at the same time!
The site would download quickly enough, but then the page would just sit blank and churn for about 30 seconds before displaying anything.
It was hideous, and it was never getting closer to completion, so we replaced their 108 man-months worth of Ajax coding with 2 man-months worth of Flash development and everyone was much much happier. (It loads in less than 1 second and the management thinks it's cool.)
According to Wikipedia, in 1990, when the Channel Tunnel was completed its cost was estimated as 10 billion GBP.
I'm no expert on inflation and exchange rates, but by estimating this tunnel at $10-$12 billion aren't they saying that a tunnel that is twice as long as the Channel Tunnel will actually cost less to build? Is there any reason to believe this will actually be so?
This is much ado about nothing. The reason they can make you watch an ad before the video plays is that the Flash format is a virtual machine, not just a video format. This has been possible for as long as Flash has been around, and if YouTube had wanted to do something like this there has been nothing stopping them. It sounds like this product is just a common API or a new content creation UI that doesn't require Flash or Flex.
Mochi Media has been offering a service for ads like this for the past 5 months, but it's being used mostly for casual games.
Here's a comparison I put together from Wikipedia/Google.
Nintendo DS: 39.8 million (total sales)
Gameboy: 69 Million (total sales)
Gameboy Advance: 77 million (total sales)
iPod: 100 million (total sales)
Cellphones: 2,000 million (currently in use)
I think I have a better understanding of why they built the iPhone...
Subsidising the cost of hardware in the hopes of making up the money on content has worked wonders for the profits of the XBox division...
I know, this is a different business model, but it looks like J Allard just trying to do what's "worked" in the past.
Lucent's recent assertion to MP3 patent rights ( http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/technology/23pat ent.html?ex=1329973200&en=6a3c7d2b220acec5&ei=5124 &partner=digg&exprod=digg ) combined with this move by Apple and EMI probably have doomed MP3 to an also-ran status.
If you're not familiar, everyone who licensed the MP3 patents is now being threatened with a lawsuit by Alcatel-Lucent because they co-own the patent rights, but weren't party to all the licensing that was going on before.
I don't think we had enough uses for oil yet.
I worked at UNL for a few years, and this strikes me as ironic.
:p
Until somtime in the first half of the decade, UNL used to give everyone real static IP addresses. This let students easily host their own servers, including one server that, rumor had it, had one of the biggest collections of pirated music on the Internet - the server was pre-Napster and survived and thrived post-Napster. (Rumor said it was run by a woman who just loved music and liked to listen to everything that was uploaded... I'm not sure if she went to class much because they said she was in her 6th year or so when I was there.)
This was before the RIAA was very active online, and to my understanding was fairly unaware of servers like this. When UNL went to DHCP everywhere, one of the effects was to make it harder to run servers like that. So, it's funny that a move that a few years ago was percieved as hurting music piracy is now seen as enabling it. (The move to DHCP wasn't done for political reasons, but the students didn't see it that way.)
PS. I never visited the server and don't know who ran it, so don't bother subpoenaing me, RIAA.
That's actually how they manage it now.
They do a ton of market analysis to help them make decisions and they do put out original work. Their problem with originality is that when it fails it fails big. (See Superman for the XBox 360 - it's not fun, but it's not fun in part because it's trying something new that didn't work out.)
If they're in a bad spot now, I think it's because they classified everything for the Wii as "high risk" and managed accordingly.
Just a comment about the quote that you started out your post with because it is so often misinterpreted: 'Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away'
Engineers seem be reading this as "use as many of the default values as possible". For example, not specifying a background color for a web page and just letting the browser's default value be used (grey in 1996, white today). Failing to specify visual design is not a minimalist design, it is design by abdication of responsibility. Only by luck would it ever produce the desired result, unless you were intending to convey a lack of consideration.
Jobs has said that doing a mixed store with some DRM and some non-DRM isn't something he's interested in doing.
It would be similar to the Zune where you can squirt some songs, but not others. Confusing.
It's not astroturf if someone is open about who they work for.
Anyway, Adobe still has Java products. ColdFusion runs on Java, and they still sell JRun.
I don't think there's anyone disputing the fact that Java applets failed on the web. When was the last time you went to a site with a Java applet?
To be clear, Shockwave was the older technology that Flash originally piggybacked on to get its foot in the door.
Flash has thrived because Macromedia learned their lessons from Shockwave and weren't afraid of destroying their existing market in pursuit of something much better.
The fact that Google spent $1.6 Billion on a site that's dependent on Flash is a strong validation of the technology.
6 months. It was actually 6 months before the PC equivalent of the original XBox's graphics card was released.
This type of delay (which Sony screwed up because they missed their original launch date) + the fact that there's a lag in PC games taking advantage of the latest cards + Standard definition television's free "anti-aliasing" have contributed to consoles always having a minor, switfly overcome, but real advantage to PCs when they launch.
To my knowledge this is true all the way back to the NES and Atari days.
When the PS2 and XBox launched their games did look better than anything on a high end PC. I know, I comapred. That the PS3 is now struggling to look "as good as a PC" is a failure for the console. Even if the only reason we notice is the HD output.
A simple LED display of a cartoon character.
Just use Flash.
2006 was my Ajax year. I spent the entire year full-time building an Ajax UI, and discovered that Javascript is actually worse than I had remembered it.
I'm not going back again. The only reason I'll use Javascript now is as an interface between Flash and the crap that someone else built.
If you love wasting time, Ajax is for you.
It is freely available, but may not be used to create Flash players, only Flash creators.
Which is why Microsoft hasn't embraced and extended Flash.
Being completly open makes you vulnerable to things like that when there's a monoploy in the house. Please reference Microsoft's treatment of Java, HTML,and Javascript.
Most of the posts seem to indicate that people are unaware of Disney's history in the field. They've been running the well regarded Toontown online since 2003.
Also, you can thank this group for the Nintendo Friends code system. To my knowledge Disney designed and developed the first implementation a friends code system with a Barbie diary product years ago. It's the best way developed to prevent young kids from interacting with strangers online, and they shared what they learned with the rest of the industry. (And, yes, it's a pain to everyone else.)
I'm confident that Disney will do well with their next product, even if it isn't as big as World of Warcraft.
1. They are not being paid to have the bias they have
This is nothing against any of the organizations that are mentioned, but just a note about non-profits in general. Having worked at a non-profit I know that the people who work at them are better off (financially and social status-wise) the more people agree with them. Thus, they do have a vested self-interest in promoting their point of view. These days non-profit only really means "without shareholders" - it's naive to assume that non-profit status implies anything beyond that.
See also, Charity is Selfish