Do you also remember what a pain it was when some browsers (IE) didn't support PNG while others (Firefox, etc) had good support. That made no-one happy.
Now imagine if IE only supported GIF and Firefox only support PNG, with no universal fallback that they both could view. That is the situation with audio and video in HTML5.
Yes, you can re-encode the files you want to serve multiple times (I do this for the audio files on my site) but this is a real pain in the neck. It's bad enough doing it twice - are we going to have to re-encode everything three times now? Even worse is if you do not have access to the original raw file - if you only have an h264 encoded file, re-encoding it to theora or VP8 is going to look terrible.
Put it this way: back in the day before Flash video became popular some sites used Quicktime for video, some used Real, and some used WMV. Only a few sites bothered to encode multiple versions, even though it would be possible to have automatic fallback using scripting (I never saw a site that would do this, they all made the user chose manually). Once Flash came along with its single condec, it only took months for the major sites to switch even though the quality of FLV at the time was not as good as Quicktime (for instance). It was better to have a single universal codec even if it was not quite head of the pack - the advantage of ubiquity outweighed the technical limitations.
If you were creating a site today, what would you do? Encode multiple versions of your videos or just use Flash? The iPad (and similar devices) may change the game but it is not certain how much impact they will have.
So now instead of two incompatible codecs for HTML5 video, we will have three? Great!
The only way this will really take off is if Google starts serving up youtube in VP8 to clients that request it. I am not saying that options are bad, and its nice the Google has released this code, but HTML5 video is already hampered by competing standards and this doesn't help.
As far as HTML5 video goes, it doesn't matter so much if the technically "best" codec gets used, so long as a single format is standardised to a large degree. There are better ways of storing photos than JPG, but that's what browsers use and nobody complains. There are better ways of storing video than Theora and everybody bitches about it. I hope it gets sorted out soon one way or another - HTML5 audio is in the same boat.
I have also wondered about the $75 million budget - Battlefield Earth just looks cheap. If you compare it with an ambitious episode of something like StarGate SG1 (for instance) made about the same time, the TV episode made for 1/20th of the cost looks much more competent.
I agree, and make the additional point that typosquatters exploiting adsense is actually a huge improvement on how things used to be!
For those with short memories, in the late 1990s when the Internet really got going with the general public but before adsense, the only way typosquatters could make money was by offering ads to porn sites or serving up malware (or both). Getting a single letter wrong in a URL usually meant getting a face full of porn (and not good porn either) or long hours reinstalling your OS. As soon as adsense came along the scammers realised they could make more money with legit ads and quit with the porn.
Don't get me wrong, the scammers still suck. They just suck less they they used to.
The video sites I will give you (although if they really wanted to be on the iPhone they would just make the original h264 files available) but people bemoaning the lack of flash games on the iPhone are missing an important point - none of the existing flash games would work anyway!
The iPhone doesn't have a keyboard and (even worse) has no mouse. These two facts alone mean that the vast majority of game would not work. Even games that use the mouse purely for pointing would run into problems, since tapping with your finger is much less precise than using a mouse pointer. In addition, on the iPhone you effectively have multiple pointing devices - how would current Flash apps handle that?
For a quick demo of why sites like newsgrounds will never work on the iPhone, resize your browser window to 480*320 (or 320*480 since that is more usual) and visit your favourite gaming site. Now set your mouse pointer to a big white blob instead of an arrow to similar tapping with a large figertip. Remember to stop playing after 45 minutes to simulate the battery drain. See how much fun you have.
Ummm, what happens when you need to deallocate objects?
The advantage Java has over C/C++ is that it can do pretty much what you describe while maintaining the ability to reclaim memory when objects are no longer needed. An old style heap requires extra accounting overhead to allow for deallocations - something your example doesn't include.
It makes sense for every type of application, except MMOs. For every one person who can't play your game, you may lose 5 other sales that you would have made from friends.
To take another example: imagine what Facebook (or slashdot for that matter) would be like if it only worked on IE. Sure it would get a lot of sign ups, but a large minority would use something else and pull their friends with them.
I am shocked that in 2010 WOW is still the only major MMO that seems to understand this.
The real surprise is why more companies develop Windows only MMOs. For a single player game, or even an online FPS I can understand a company wanting to save money by targeting only the largest market, but the economics for MMOs are different. For an MMO you want a group of people to all go out and buy a copy each - that's how MMOs get successful. Right now there are established groups in (for example) WOW who are looking at different MMOs to play. Even if only a small fraction of their users are on Macs, STOnline is not going to be an option for them since they would have to leave people behind.
I can't understand it myself. MMOs seldom push any graphical boundaries and have modest system requirements - you would think that making a cross-platform client would be easy enough. WOW is still fantastically successful, and part of that is due to their forethought in development.
The first two "modern" 3D movies I saw (Beowulf and Journey to the Center of the Earth) both gave me intense headaches, but Avatar seems to use a different process (at least the glasses were different) and gave me no problems. I don't know how the 3D televisions work, but it is certainly possible to have 3D with pain.
I certainly didn't mean to pee in the cornflakes of anybody. The Amiga was an amazing machine for its time, but the original comment took the line that certain design features were better than today's machines. I was merely refuting those points.
I had an Amiga and it was great, however the world has moved on since then. To answer your points:
1. To shutdown the Amiga, you turned it off. There was no delay, no Start->Shutdown...wait possibly forever...
No, you waited for the disk light to stop flashing and then turned it off, hoping that all applications had flushed out all of their data. The Amiga got away with it (mostly) by not really having a lot of long lived service-type applications.
2. Sliding screens. Why not give each application its own full screen and allow the user to pull down the top menu to slide between these screens.
I do miss this - having each application on its own screen (with its own screen mode) was very useful. Now that we are all running high-res desktops with 24 bit colour, the different screen modes aren't so important, and software like "Spaces" on MacOSX fills much the same need.
3. Simple speech device. What could be easier than "LIST > speak:" to say a directory listing?
That was cool, but fairly niche. I am disappointed that computer generated speech as not come further, the MacOSX voices sound only marginally better than the old Amiga voice from 25 years ago.
4. Bidirectional linked list filesystem. If you lose a sector or sector link, most of the file could be rebuilt by following links from both ends towards the bad sector. (Disk doctor)
This was very useful on unreliable floppies, but used precious space on the disk and made updating files slower. Now that removable storage is more reliable the trade-off doesn't seem worth it.
5. The keyboard garage. The 1985 Amiga 1000 keyboard tucked neatly under the computer where it didn't take up desk space, was hidden from children's fingers and was spill-proof.
6. Tight integration of hardware with O.S. O.k. this works against everything we've been taught about abstracting everything but since the PC world has boiled down to little more than an O.S. monopoly, a hardware monopoly and a graphics card monopoly, why not eliminate some of the levels of abstraction that will never be used and make my 2Ghz PC perform every day tasks at least as well as my 7Mhz Amiga did?
What you are basically wishing for is MacOSX, where one company controls both the hardware and the software, and it does (suck it, haters) produce better computers. However, even MacOSX has abstraction layers and drivers because Amiga-style direct hardware intergration turned out to be a terrible long-term plan. The clever hardware tricks that made the Amiga1000/500 so cheap and fast back in the early 80s ended up holding back Amiga development 5 years later.
To sum up, while the Amiga was (in a lot of ways) ahead of its time, modern computers (and I am including Windows in this as well) do more and operate in a different environment than in the 80s. Although the Amiga was fast and amazingly inexpensive for the time, for the equivalent money today you could buy a high-spec iMac that is better in every way. Those who pine after the lost Amiga are living in the past.
Many people would be happy to see anti-trust law applied in any case where they thought that a company was acting in a way that benefited the company more than the customers of the company.
1) All companies act in their own interests - that is the whole point! If those interests happen to coincide with the customer's then that is just a bonus. If I want a quick burger, McDonalds is going to sell be a quick burger. If I want a roast turkey dinner with all the trappings, McDonalds is going to sell a quick burger.
2) People with hackitoshes are, by definition, not Apple customers. OK, some people may go out a buy a copy of MacOSX, but I bet most people just "obtain" it or already have it.
According to my Google Analytics page, only 4.5% of Safari users were using the Windows version. In some ways I think that is a shame - I like the way Safari renders pages, it does a much better job of smoothing fonts and graphics than the other browsers. Plus it is very quick (although Chrome starts up faster) and the web inspector tools incredibly useful.
But you are right, the first few versions were terrible.
The Ars Technica stats broadly mirrors my own humble blog, I would guess that the techie crowd breaks down 5::2::2::1 Firefox::Safari::IE::Chrome across the board. If this assumption is true, I find it strange that Chrome is not as popular as Safari among the technical people whereas in the general stats they are almost neck-and-neck although less popular overall.
Personally I think that having 4 browsers with significant share (or 6 if you count IE6 and IE7 as separate, incompatible browsers) is very healthy. For a while it looked like it was going to be IE6 stamping on the face of the web forever, but now the population is fragmented web sites have to designed with proper standards in mind.
There are failure modes where mirroring makes it impossible to determine which drive is correct.
No there arent. There's always a primary, and unless it fails, its the correct one, by definition.
Errors when writing sectors are not always reported,
This is not a failure mode RAID1 is intended to protect against.
hmmm, sounds a little like you are agreeing with me there. Failing to protect against write failure sounds like a pretty big deal.
Look, the whole point of any RAID is to provide continued availability in the event of component drive failure. RAID1 fails to do this reliably for the reasons I outlined. Read speed is the only reason to use it.
You also get some concomitant improvement in read speeds...
I don't trust this logic. There are failure modes where mirroring makes it impossible to determine which drive is correct. Errors when writing sectors are not always reported, quite apart from the case where the power goes off and one drive has flushed its cache and the other drive hasn't. If one drive says X and the other says Y, which do you believe?
Even if you know which drive to replace, rebuilding the mirror with a replacement drive does a read on every sector of one disk and a write to every sector of the other. What do you think the chances of that operation completing successfully with today's large drives is? Hint: the rate of errors/sector hasn't improved much in the last ten years while the sector count has increase massively.
RAID1 is useless for protecting against hardware errors - people use it for the stellar read-performance and for no other reason.
I would expect this - modern drives (when I say modern I mean any drive made in the last 15 years) is effectively a black-box to the computer. The OS has absolutely no idea where the heads are, or even how the sectors are actually laid out on disk. Any attempt to be "clever" in ordering reads is doomed.
The allure of limitless energy from beneath the surface of the earth is enticing, but we have such short memories. Do nobody behind this project remember the ill-fated British INFERNO project from the 70s?
The video tag is great, but it has a fatal flaw (actually two fatal flaws, but one is much more important.) The attempt to standardize on a single codec was correct, but now that it has failed the video tag becomes much less useful. At least with flash you can host a video and be sure that most of your audience will be able to view it. With the video tag, even when browsers that support it become widely available, which codec do you encode the video in? Already the browsers are going in different directions, with Safari using Quicktime to play h.264.
Hopefully it gets sorted out soon. Personally I would like to see h.264 adopted if the licensing issues can be sorted out.
(The other fatal flaw is that the video tag makes it easy for people to download the original video file - something none of the big content providers want. Yes, everyone knows how to do this with Flash videos, but the illusion of content protection is there.)
You are right - I just ran sunspider (on Windows) with the latest nightly of Firefox: Chrome is 1.66 times as fast. On the other hand, Safari 4 even faster still.
I don't mean to dump on V8, all I am saying is that it has some competition for the crown. It is great that we have the choice between so many capable browsers.
On my (low traffic site) Safari handily beats Chrome, but Chrome is rising.
I like Chrome (and eagerly await the MacOSX version), but I am disappointed in a few areas. It has good support for web standards, but is missing a few things from webkit(like @font-face support) which I use on my site. The font and graphics rendering is also low-quality compared to Safari - jaggies everywhere.
The much ballyhooed V8 engine is much better than current production browsers, but there does not seem to be much difference between FireFox3.5beta, Chrome (still beta), and Safari 4beta in speed.
It does start up quicker than any other browser, but I don't see too much difference once loaded.
What is really needed is a high-level format for storing 3D models, with easy software for content creation and importing models from existing 3D modelers. There have been attempts to do this before, VRML and Adobe's acrobat reader both support 3D. Nobody really uses it outside of a few specialized fields.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you also remember what a pain it was when some browsers (IE) didn't support PNG while others (Firefox, etc) had good support. That made no-one happy.
Now imagine if IE only supported GIF and Firefox only support PNG, with no universal fallback that they both could view. That is the situation with audio and video in HTML5.
Yes, you can re-encode the files you want to serve multiple times (I do this for the audio files on my site) but this is a real pain in the neck. It's bad enough doing it twice - are we going to have to re-encode everything three times now? Even worse is if you do not have access to the original raw file - if you only have an h264 encoded file, re-encoding it to theora or VP8 is going to look terrible.
Put it this way: back in the day before Flash video became popular some sites used Quicktime for video, some used Real, and some used WMV. Only a few sites bothered to encode multiple versions, even though it would be possible to have automatic fallback using scripting (I never saw a site that would do this, they all made the user chose manually). Once Flash came along with its single condec, it only took months for the major sites to switch even though the quality of FLV at the time was not as good as Quicktime (for instance). It was better to have a single universal codec even if it was not quite head of the pack - the advantage of ubiquity outweighed the technical limitations.
If you were creating a site today, what would you do? Encode multiple versions of your videos or just use Flash? The iPad (and similar devices) may change the game but it is not certain how much impact they will have.
So now instead of two incompatible codecs for HTML5 video, we will have three? Great!
The only way this will really take off is if Google starts serving up youtube in VP8 to clients that request it. I am not saying that options are bad, and its nice the Google has released this code, but HTML5 video is already hampered by competing standards and this doesn't help.
As far as HTML5 video goes, it doesn't matter so much if the technically "best" codec gets used, so long as a single format is standardised to a large degree. There are better ways of storing photos than JPG, but that's what browsers use and nobody complains. There are better ways of storing video than Theora and everybody bitches about it. I hope it gets sorted out soon one way or another - HTML5 audio is in the same boat.
I have also wondered about the $75 million budget - Battlefield Earth just looks cheap. If you compare it with an ambitious episode of something like StarGate SG1 (for instance) made about the same time, the TV episode made for 1/20th of the cost looks much more competent.
I agree, and make the additional point that typosquatters exploiting adsense is actually a huge improvement on how things used to be!
For those with short memories, in the late 1990s when the Internet really got going with the general public but before adsense, the only way typosquatters could make money was by offering ads to porn sites or serving up malware (or both). Getting a single letter wrong in a URL usually meant getting a face full of porn (and not good porn either) or long hours reinstalling your OS. As soon as adsense came along the scammers realised they could make more money with legit ads and quit with the porn.
Don't get me wrong, the scammers still suck. They just suck less they they used to.
The video sites I will give you (although if they really wanted to be on the iPhone they would just make the original h264 files available) but people bemoaning the lack of flash games on the iPhone are missing an important point - none of the existing flash games would work anyway!
The iPhone doesn't have a keyboard and (even worse) has no mouse. These two facts alone mean that the vast majority of game would not work. Even games that use the mouse purely for pointing would run into problems, since tapping with your finger is much less precise than using a mouse pointer. In addition, on the iPhone you effectively have multiple pointing devices - how would current Flash apps handle that?
For a quick demo of why sites like newsgrounds will never work on the iPhone, resize your browser window to 480*320 (or 320*480 since that is more usual) and visit your favourite gaming site. Now set your mouse pointer to a big white blob instead of an arrow to similar tapping with a large figertip. Remember to stop playing after 45 minutes to simulate the battery drain. See how much fun you have.
Ummm, what happens when you need to deallocate objects?
The advantage Java has over C/C++ is that it can do pretty much what you describe while maintaining the ability to reclaim memory when objects are no longer needed. An old style heap requires extra accounting overhead to allow for deallocations - something your example doesn't include.
It makes sense for every type of application, except MMOs. For every one person who can't play your game, you may lose 5 other sales that you would have made from friends.
To take another example: imagine what Facebook (or slashdot for that matter) would be like if it only worked on IE. Sure it would get a lot of sign ups, but a large minority would use something else and pull their friends with them.
I am shocked that in 2010 WOW is still the only major MMO that seems to understand this.
The real surprise is why more companies develop Windows only MMOs. For a single player game, or even an online FPS I can understand a company wanting to save money by targeting only the largest market, but the economics for MMOs are different. For an MMO you want a group of people to all go out and buy a copy each - that's how MMOs get successful. Right now there are established groups in (for example) WOW who are looking at different MMOs to play. Even if only a small fraction of their users are on Macs, STOnline is not going to be an option for them since they would have to leave people behind.
I can't understand it myself. MMOs seldom push any graphical boundaries and have modest system requirements - you would think that making a cross-platform client would be easy enough. WOW is still fantastically successful, and part of that is due to their forethought in development.
The first two "modern" 3D movies I saw (Beowulf and Journey to the Center of the Earth) both gave me intense headaches, but Avatar seems to use a different process (at least the glasses were different) and gave me no problems. I don't know how the 3D televisions work, but it is certainly possible to have 3D with pain.
I certainly didn't mean to pee in the cornflakes of anybody. The Amiga was an amazing machine for its time, but the original comment took the line that certain design features were better than today's machines. I was merely refuting those points.
I had an Amiga and it was great, however the world has moved on since then. To answer your points:
No, you waited for the disk light to stop flashing and then turned it off, hoping that all applications had flushed out all of their data. The Amiga got away with it (mostly) by not really having a lot of long lived service-type applications.
I do miss this - having each application on its own screen (with its own screen mode) was very useful. Now that we are all running high-res desktops with 24 bit colour, the different screen modes aren't so important, and software like "Spaces" on MacOSX fills much the same need.
That was cool, but fairly niche. I am disappointed that computer generated speech as not come further, the MacOSX voices sound only marginally better than the old Amiga voice from 25 years ago.
This was very useful on unreliable floppies, but used precious space on the disk and made updating files slower. Now that removable storage is more reliable the trade-off doesn't seem worth it.
What you are basically wishing for is MacOSX, where one company controls both the hardware and the software, and it does (suck it, haters) produce better computers. However, even MacOSX has abstraction layers and drivers because Amiga-style direct hardware intergration turned out to be a terrible long-term plan. The clever hardware tricks that made the Amiga1000/500 so cheap and fast back in the early 80s ended up holding back Amiga development 5 years later.
To sum up, while the Amiga was (in a lot of ways) ahead of its time, modern computers (and I am including Windows in this as well) do more and operate in a different environment than in the 80s. Although the Amiga was fast and amazingly inexpensive for the time, for the equivalent money today you could buy a high-spec iMac that is better in every way. Those who pine after the lost Amiga are living in the past.
Many people would be happy to see anti-trust law applied in any case where they thought that a company was acting in a way that benefited the company more than the customers of the company.
1) All companies act in their own interests - that is the whole point! If those interests happen to coincide with the customer's then that is just a bonus. If I want a quick burger, McDonalds is going to sell be a quick burger. If I want a roast turkey dinner with all the trappings, McDonalds is going to sell a quick burger.
2) People with hackitoshes are, by definition, not Apple customers. OK, some people may go out a buy a copy of MacOSX, but I bet most people just "obtain" it or already have it.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Indeed
According to my Google Analytics page, only 4.5% of Safari users were using the Windows version. In some ways I think that is a shame - I like the way Safari renders pages, it does a much better job of smoothing fonts and graphics than the other browsers. Plus it is very quick (although Chrome starts up faster) and the web inspector tools incredibly useful.
But you are right, the first few versions were terrible.
The Ars Technica stats broadly mirrors my own humble blog, I would guess that the techie crowd breaks down 5::2::2::1 Firefox::Safari::IE::Chrome across the board. If this assumption is true, I find it strange that Chrome is not as popular as Safari among the technical people whereas in the general stats they are almost neck-and-neck although less popular overall.
Personally I think that having 4 browsers with significant share (or 6 if you count IE6 and IE7 as separate, incompatible browsers) is very healthy. For a while it looked like it was going to be IE6 stamping on the face of the web forever, but now the population is fragmented web sites have to designed with proper standards in mind.
hmmm, sounds a little like you are agreeing with me there. Failing to protect against write failure sounds like a pretty big deal.
Look, the whole point of any RAID is to provide continued availability in the event of component drive failure. RAID1 fails to do this reliably for the reasons I outlined. Read speed is the only reason to use it.
However, you have just taught me a new word.
I don't trust this logic. There are failure modes where mirroring makes it impossible to determine which drive is correct. Errors when writing sectors are not always reported, quite apart from the case where the power goes off and one drive has flushed its cache and the other drive hasn't. If one drive says X and the other says Y, which do you believe?
Even if you know which drive to replace, rebuilding the mirror with a replacement drive does a read on every sector of one disk and a write to every sector of the other. What do you think the chances of that operation completing successfully with today's large drives is? Hint: the rate of errors/sector hasn't improved much in the last ten years while the sector count has increase massively.
RAID1 is useless for protecting against hardware errors - people use it for the stellar read-performance and for no other reason.
I would expect this - modern drives (when I say modern I mean any drive made in the last 15 years) is effectively a black-box to the computer. The OS has absolutely no idea where the heads are, or even how the sectors are actually laid out on disk. Any attempt to be "clever" in ordering reads is doomed.
I can't believe a Dr Who reference on Slashdot only got a single reply. What is the world coming to?
Young people these days - no appreciation for the classics!
The allure of limitless energy from beneath the surface of the earth is enticing, but we have such short memories. Do nobody behind this project remember the ill-fated British INFERNO project from the 70s?
The video tag is great, but it has a fatal flaw (actually two fatal flaws, but one is much more important.) The attempt to standardize on a single codec was correct, but now that it has failed the video tag becomes much less useful. At least with flash you can host a video and be sure that most of your audience will be able to view it. With the video tag, even when browsers that support it become widely available, which codec do you encode the video in? Already the browsers are going in different directions, with Safari using Quicktime to play h.264.
Hopefully it gets sorted out soon. Personally I would like to see h.264 adopted if the licensing issues can be sorted out.
I blogged about this issue a couple of days ago, if anyone is interested in a longer version of this comment.
(The other fatal flaw is that the video tag makes it easy for people to download the original video file - something none of the big content providers want. Yes, everyone knows how to do this with Flash videos, but the illusion of content protection is there.)
I hope not. I just increased the limit on my credit card to $6000 with a view to purchasing Yahoo in the near future.
You are right - I just ran sunspider (on Windows) with the latest nightly of Firefox: Chrome is 1.66 times as fast. On the other hand, Safari 4 even faster still.
I don't mean to dump on V8, all I am saying is that it has some competition for the crown. It is great that we have the choice between so many capable browsers.
On my (low traffic site) Safari handily beats Chrome, but Chrome is rising.
I like Chrome (and eagerly await the MacOSX version), but I am disappointed in a few areas. It has good support for web standards, but is missing a few things from webkit(like @font-face support) which I use on my site. The font and graphics rendering is also low-quality compared to Safari - jaggies everywhere.
The much ballyhooed V8 engine is much better than current production browsers, but there does not seem to be much difference between FireFox3.5beta, Chrome (still beta), and Safari 4beta in speed.
It does start up quicker than any other browser, but I don't see too much difference once loaded.
Its not clear to me from the press release how this differs from Opera's experimental "opera-3d" canvas context.
What is really needed is a high-level format for storing 3D models, with easy software for content creation and importing models from existing 3D modelers. There have been attempts to do this before, VRML and Adobe's acrobat reader both support 3D. Nobody really uses it outside of a few specialized fields.