A question for you IT and such folks who are business learned....

[Gray_Area]

So, let's say there was no online advertising of any kind (which would probably mean there'd be no advertising anywhere, but I'm here concerned with software). How would net software, protocols, etc and all be affected/different by this?

[Howard_Casto]

I'm not sure what question you are asking to be honest. 

Ads don't really effect the inner workings of the internet or websites in any way.  Usually you have either internal ads (hosted by the parent website) that are just regular old images and links on the webpage or external ones that require a bit of scripting in the html itself to display the ads (or random set of ads) in the space provided.  It's really no more complex than embedding a youtube video on a post in this forum. 

Now of course if you are a shadier website and use shadier sponsors you might have to monitor which external ads are shown on your site, but I haven't been involved on the admin side of things, in....  well.... never really...

[Gray_Area]

The question came to mind after reading about HTML5. It said there were all kinds of new options with it, so without the need for those things, would HTML5 have been necessary? Or, perhaps more poignantly, what is the incentive to continue development of HTML?...or another similar language?

[Howard_Casto]

Ahh ok, that is another thing entirely.  Ads certainly benefit from html5, but they are trying to push it along for another reason. 

Javascript, flash and flash/java video and audio are the norm on websites today and at home, you can view these sites perfectly.  The problem is the fact that everything from your tv, to you game console to your frikkin cell phone has a web-browser now.  Those browsers simply don't have access to these sorts of plugins. 

Html5 is an attempt to remove dependancy on these plugins and just make these sorts of media part of the html standard.  Currently plugins aren't needed to do text and images, the html document simply describes said text and images and the browser is coded to render them.  With html5 they are attempting to expand that to video, audio, flash animations, ect... I noticed that the Wii U's browser, for example, supports a good bit of html5 to cmpensate for it's lack of plugins. 

So basically html has always been a language to create a universal, "bare bones" website without the need for external dependancies.  The only problem is our definition of "bare bones" is constantly expanding, so it's trying to keep up. 

[MonMotha]

Think Youtube without needing Flash.  We're getting there.

Actually, it almost works now.  Funnily, the only videos that don't usually work without Flash are the ones with ads.  There's no good way to "force" you to watch the ads with the HTML5 video tag, so they seem to have stuck with Flash for them.  There was something of a "format war" in the early days of standard development between h.264 and WebM for video, but the consensus seems to be "support both and we'll probably all move to h.264 in the future" at this point.

Anyway, that's the primary motivation for HTML5.  The ad content guys seem perfectly content to screw around with excessive scripting and plugins i.e. make it work with what they've commonly got available.  Figure most people won't adopt something new if the only real use for it is to shove ads in their face.  Though it's amazing how much dreck just not having Flash gets rid of...

[Howard_Casto]

Well that's true.  I guess if you look at it that way ads have made the internet a lot worse off.  With straight html it's a lot easier to have a browser bypass video embedded ads, popup's ect so a lot of commerical sites hang on to the old scripting/plugin way of doing things. 

I know the escapist makes you pay a subscription to get access to their html5 site, which is dumb, but it certainly is a way to not worry about the lack of ads hurting your revenue stream. 

Youtube is actually pretty good about support.  They have an android plugin a, IOS plugin and even a plugin for each of the consoles.  Basically the "mobile" browsers simply launch a youtube app whenever you click on a video in the browser.  It sucks for embedded video, but works pretty well anyway. 

Adobe and Sun are the two that cause all the issues.  They seem to be off in their own little worlds, refusing to release the source for their plugins and only supporting whatever random device they feel like.  I understand that they are trying to take advantage of the fact that their plugin's are so popular by charging browser developers for support, but in this climate they are just going to get swept away if they don't add support for all the major mobile platforms.

[Gray_Area]

Mmmm. Okay.

So....without treading near PnRnN territory.....or ridiculous discussion on utopia......let's say that society was self-sufficient. Would only the obvious thing happen - ads would completely disappear?

[ark_ader]

I think ads are just opportunities.

[wp34]

I don't see ads ever going away.  It costs $10 to see a movie and there are still product placements everywhere.  I actually wished ads worked better on the Internet.  I have several newspapers I read on-line that are moving to a subscription model because the ads are not bringing in enough revenue.

[lilshawn]

e had a bit of a discussion regarding ads in the console area with regards to the Xbox update to the dashboard that basically tuned it into a giant ad delivery system.

You paid for the system, You pay for the games, you pay for the on-line aspect of the system, yet, you continue to be bombarded with ads with nothing in return for them doing so...and M$ makes a buck. (like they need it)

ads aren't going to go away... it makes companies too much money.

I would imagine if there where no ads, companies would seek other areas to make additional money. (getting back to your original question) I believe companies would probably pad their income with a pay per use system. Many companies that don't advertise or anything like that have software models where you have to purchase the use of their software and once it's "used up" you must purchase more uses. or it's good for X amont of time then expires, and you have to purchase another slot of time. (think Antivirus but all software would operate like that.)

[Howard_Casto]

e had a bit of a discussion regarding ads in the console area with regards to the Xbox update to the dashboard that basically tuned it into a giant ad delivery system.

You paid for the system, You pay for the games, you pay for the on-line aspect of the system, yet, you continue to be bombarded with ads with nothing in return for them doing so...and M$ makes a buck. (like they need it)

ads aren't going to go away... it makes companies too much money.

I don't think we can use Microsoft as an example... they've got balls the size of watermelons considering the kind of rip-off artists they've become with xbl.  There's no excuse for a service you pay 60 bucks a year for to have ads of any kind.  Even if you can accept that aspect of it, there's no excuse for services like netflix and internet explorer, which connect to the internet and not their private servers, to require a gold subscription.  There are ads and then there's just ripping people off. 

In the UK, from what I understand you don't have ads on ANY of the cable networks, much like it is here for HBO. The thought there is that you paid for the shows so ads aren't going to fly.  Then again, the quality of most British shows (no offense to anyone) is pretty awful. 

The Wii U, even though it has a pretty extensive FREE network is completely ad free unless you go into the shop channel.  This makes perfect sense to me, afterall it's when the consumer is ready to actually buy something.  Even then, it's more like featured products than ads.  Their home menu actually gives free advertisments to popular titles.  The 8 most talked about games/whatever on the MiiVerse have huge icons in the plaza.  That's certainly a way to do it. 

Ads aren't going away on the net.... that's basically the only means of revenue for sites unless they sell a physical product.  We could certainly do with better ad plugins though. 

[Drnick]

Unfortunately we do have ad's on a majority of our cable stations, Even a lot of those that are paid for at a huge premium have adverts.  The only good thing is that there are not as many as on US tv and they appear half way through and not just after the start credits and then what seems like every 5 minutes. Paid for Movie channels don't show adverts during a movie though as that would just be wrong.

Whereas the BBC which is paid for via a tax known as a TV Licence has no advertisements at all,  At the same time other then a few programs it never has anything worth watching

[ark_ader]

Whereas the BBC which is paid for via a tax known as a TV Licence has no advertisements at all,  At the same time other then a few programs it never has anything worth watching

Yet the BBC still has product placements on their popular TV shows.

SKY Player gets adverts on shows like Broadwalk Empire, which is a rip off as the cost of the  SKY subscription costs more than the US dish network or Cox.

[lilshawn]

there is a reason they call the show "this hour has 22 minutes"  "22 Minutes" refers to the fact that a half-hour television program in Canada and the U.S. is typically 22 minutes long with 8 minutes of commercials.

[Gray_Area]

there is a reason they call the show "this hour has 22 minutes"  "22 Minutes" refers to the fact that a half-hour television program in Canada and the U.S. is typically 22 minutes long with 8 minutes of commercials.

That's been the case at least since the late 80s, early 90s. Not that I care for anything outside of film these days anyways, and then relatively sparingly so.  Except M.A.S.H.  That show is god.

Anyways, I don't care about that stuff. I'm curious about the functionality of the languages and necessary development directions, or lack thereof, if there were no need for ads of any kind.  I'm asking because it's seemed like there are people here who might have experience and insight to answer these questions.

[lilshawn]

I'd assume companies would be more in tune with the customer and be more diligent in creating products and services that are that which the customer wants.

[RayB]

I'm going to sum up the original question as briefly as I can:
Non-profits like Mozilla (Firefox) are pushing to build up HTML5 and its successors as an open standard so that no one company has any control over such a vital part of an open web. Anything that requires JAVA (owned by Sun), or Flash (owned by Adobe), or non-standard html tags (*cough*damn-you-microsoft!*cough*) for example will eventually see some sort of standardized support via HTML. It's how you keep any one entity from "controlling" parts of the internet experience and requiring pricey patent license fees for example.

[MonMotha]

To be clear, Java the LANGUAGE is a free to implement, relatively open standard.  Android uses it (mostly) with a different compiler, VM, and some fairly drastic class library changes.  For something roughly compatible with the "official" Java implementation (Sun's, now owned by Oracle), see also OpenJDK.

The reference implementation, which is the only thing many (usually somewhat poorly coded) applications and web applets are compatible with, is indeed owned by Sun/Oracle.  Much of it was actually released as GPL, though, which makes those portions "true open source".

This is somewhat like the situation with .NET.  The languages (C#, VB.NET, etc.) are free to implement, semi-open standards (the standard is published but controlled largely by a single entity, in this case Microsoft), as is the spec for the virtual machine in which the outputs run.  The reference implementation (".NET CLR") is of course closed and owned by Microsoft, but open source implementations exist (Mono).  The Java situation is perhaps a little nicer in that Sun GPL'd substantial parts of Java before being acquired by Oracle.

Note also that it has now been determined that you cannot copyright an API (see Oracle vs. Google).  Hence any "clean" implementation of the Java API, such as Android, is legit, barring possible patents.  I'm not sure whether this would also cover the ABI (which would extend then to the VM), and IANAL anyway.  Note that this wasn't directly addressed in Oracle vs. Google since Android uses the Java language and API on a from-scratch VM (Dalvik).

[Howard_Casto]

Well of course, but that's still fairly useless.  I would give this example:

A compiled pc executable can be ran on anything, technically.... there isn't any liscense preventing it from running on linux, mac, or whatever.  The problem is you'd have to completely emulate the closed source OS windows to do so.  This has never actually been done with any measure of success before due to the extreme complexity.  Even vmware runs a legit copy of windows virtually... it's simply too complex to do the whole thing from scratch. 

Now yeah, java reference isn't nearly as complex, but it's still an issue, particularly on special purpose devices where a brand new implementation would have to be made from scratch due to extreme changes in the OS and special purpose hardware (see game consoles). 

Android's java api will never be 100% complete for the simple fact that some of the code is still exclusive to Sun, and people who code in java go by the official version, not the crippled version released by android or whoever.  I would equate this practice to when mame had multiple unofficial builds running around.  Yeah some of them had cool features and for the most part they were identical, but if you were a driver developer, you wrote new drivers for the official build.  Weather your favorite custom build got updated to include the driver depended a lot about who was maintaining it, and that's the problem.

That's the whole point of html5... to unify everything and say "this is what is going to be supported....deal with it".   

[MonMotha]

Well of course, but that's still fairly useless.  I would give this example:

A compiled pc executable can be ran on anything, technically.... there isn't any liscense preventing it from running on linux, mac, or whatever.  The problem is you'd have to completely emulate the closed source OS windows to do so.  This has never actually been done with any measure of success before due to the extreme complexity.  Even vmware runs a legit copy of windows virtually... it's simply too complex to do the whole thing from scratch. 

Have you looked at WINE recently?  It's a surprisingly complete implementation of WIN32 on POSIX (which means Linux, BSD, commercial UNIX, etc.).  Aside from stuff that's deliberately designed to bypass much of the OS and touch hardware directly (DRM systems for games are the most common culprits), most stuff works in it these days.  Apparently my big honking ECAD package works, though I've not actually tried it myself.  It does require that you install IE8 from MS, which is questionable license-wise.

Now yeah, java reference isn't nearly as complex, but it's still an issue, particularly on special purpose devices where a brand new implementation would have to be made from scratch due to extreme changes in the OS and special purpose hardware (see game consoles). 

Android's java api will never be 100% complete for the simple fact that some of the code is still exclusive to Sun, and people who code in java go by the official version, not the crippled version released by android or whoever.  I would equate this practice to when mame had multiple unofficial builds running around.  Yeah some of them had cool features and for the most part they were identical, but if you were a driver developer, you wrote new drivers for the official build.  Weather your favorite custom build got updated to include the driver depended a lot about who was maintaining it, and that's the problem.

That's the whole point of html5... to unify everything and say "this is what is going to be supported....deal with it".   

Android doesn't really purport to be "Java".  It's "Java like".  But yes, there are some pieces of Java that are closed-source.  Same problem Windows has.  The API is very open and documented, but the Sun/Oracle implementation is not.  With time, other implementations could become "complete".

HTML5 will be similar.  The API (the markup, ECMAscript, etc.) will be open specification, but some closed-source implementations are bound to exist (IE and Opera, at least, as well as the actual retail builds of Chrome and Safari albeit these are mostly open source rendering libraries).  Java's open implementations just haven't matured or achieved the level of wide acceptance that various web browsers have.  What's been weird in the W3/HTML world in the past has been what has been deemed the "reference implementation".  For years, it was IE6 - to most everybody's long-term detriment - and before that Netscape Navigator (you'll note that every browser out there to this day claims to be Netscape in its UA string).  This has obviously changed recently.  With things like Java, there was a very clear reference implementation from the start.

Flash is a mess in this regard.  The only viable implementation is Adobe's.  The standard isn't really open at all, and everybody de-facto assumes that they need to be bug-compatible with the Adobe implementation as it really is the only option in town.  Compare to Java and .NET where I've definitely seen commercial projects with stated requirements that they must run on OpenJDK or Mono.

Mind, I'm all for getting open standards widely adopted with multiple implementations deemed "equally important" and developers ensuring their products work on all of those implementations (ideally by being "strictly standards compliant").  That's a good chunk of why the Internet (underlying protocols, not the WWW) took off so well, and it ensures that we have constant innovation since no one vendor can stall progress.

[Steve248]

In the UK, from what I understand you don't have ads on ANY of the cable networks, much like it is here for HBO. The thought there is that you paid for the shows so ads aren't going to fly.  Then again, the quality of most British shows (no offense to anyone) is pretty awful. 

Err, there are adverts on all cable/satellite channels except the Movie channels during the film but plenty of adverts after/before. You have been mis-informed I am afraid.

The only channels that do not have adverts are on the BBC but this is not a cable/satellite channel.

I know you are not trying to insult anyone, I am not taking offence but you are very wrong about the quality of programmes. I think the quality of most US shows are really dreadful so I guess it comes down to taste and cultural differences.

The UK is the 2nd most successful exporter of TV programmes in the world, second only to the US.

If you want to see how much of your TV is made from British TV have a loo at this list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_television_series_based_on_British_television_series

[DillonFoulds]

have a loo at this list:

That's a great typo coming from a Brit!

Also, UK Top Gear and IT Crowd... Can't really go wrong with most UK shows that got adapted to American versions... Oh, and Flying Circus!

[Howard_Casto]

[I know you are not trying to insult anyone, I am not taking offence but you are very wrong about the quality of programmes. I think the quality of most US shows are really dreadful so I guess it comes down to taste and cultural differences.

The UK is the 2nd most successful exporter of TV programmes in the world, second only to the US.

If you want to see how much of your TV is made from British TV have a loo at this list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_television_series_based_on_British_television_series

I'm aware of this list.  Unfortunately the original versions, 90% of the time, are worse than US versions.  They are usually a totally different show, only the name and situation stay the same.  Usually when a tv show is adapted I get curious and try to watch the original, try is the key word there.  That being said, even the US versions are pretty terrible so it isn't like it's a huge improvment.  Over 75% of what is on that particular list is reality televison, that stuff is garbage and I actually hate the UK for introducing the US to it, ruining half of our networks.  The other 25% are shows that you might think were a big hit here, but most of them werent.  Some got cancelled after only a few episodes, others were in the upper 100s on a cable network most people never watched. 


I mean I watch Dr. Who, but more for a laugh than anything else... it's the worst written Sifi I've seen in ages.  Pretty sure they don't have any NASA consultants on that show like they did on TNG.    The old Dr. Who was pretty good, I loved Max Headroom, and I liked Monty Python and Benny Hill, but those shows are 30 years old.  That's kind of the problem really, UK shows seem really really dated to me.  The special effects and the writing on your typical scifi show looks like something that would have been produced 20 years ago over here.  You still have sitcoms, complete with laugh tracks, ect....  We've just moved on from that stuff over here.  All of our (watchable) tv is hour long dramas, documentary reality shows, like those on the History channel, and some serious high-budget scifi/fantasy, which admittedly is pretty crappy atm, but just 5 years ago it was amazing.  I like the Graham Norton show though... does that count?

And yes just for the record it is the second most successful exporter in the world, but the UK and the US are the only two places with budgets and talents enough to make an exportable show, so that isn't really fair.  Also it's an extreme distant second.  It's like when the first place runner comes in with a time of 1:30 and the second place guy comes in at 5:50.    I'm actually not even sure if the second place thing is accurate anymore.  A lot of syndicated programming comes out of Canada these days. 

I think there indeed is a cultural difference though.  One of my favorite UK imports is Wheeler Dealers, they've even got the guys to do a few American import seasons.  I love the show for the process, BUT some of Ed's fixes would be considered lazy half-assed attempts over here (we don't use a spray can on a restoration, ect...) and lot of times they will be drooling over this 1980's crapbox european car going on and on about how good it looks while I'm sitting there scratching my head over how they love what literally looks like the ugliest car in the world to me.  I feel sorry for poor old Ed as well.  He would be considered an average sized man over here (he's what?  6'5"?  that's only slightly tall), but apparently over there he's a giant and he hits his head on all of your tiny tiny little cars when he gets inside.  Btw, this show is also on one of those no-name cable networks that nobody really watches, so it isn't a hit over here either. 

Again, not trying to start anything, but next time you want to prove me wrong you might want to post a list with more than 5 good shows on it. 

[edekoning]

I think there indeed is a cultural difference though.  One of my favorite UK imports is Wheeler Dealers, they've even got the guys to do a few American import seasons.  I love the show for the process, BUT some of Ed's fixes would be considered lazy half-assed attempts over here (we don't use a spray can on a restoration, ect...) and lot of times they will be drooling over this 1980's crapbox european car going on and on about how good it looks while I'm sitting there scratching my head over how they love what literally looks like the ugliest car in the world to me.

Yes there is a cultural difference. I mean just look at how completely different british and american humor is (one is actually funny ) Regading the crapbox european cars: that's probably because those are THE cars he grew up with. The same applies to music and games.

[Gray_Area]

Everything on american tv blows. What hasn't been storied and acted out?

That said, every time I happen upon something British at my parents' house, there is an immediate, obvious class in the scenes, sets, and acting. Of course, they're mostly Masterpiece Theatre type stuff, so the settings are at least 80 years old.....