Can Android Without Dalvik Avoid Oracle's Wrath?

jfruhlinger writes "Despite the fact that Oracle is suing Google over claims that Android violates Java IP, Android is roaring ahead in the marketplace. Still, some groups are wondering if they can implement Android without incurring Oracle's current or future wrath by avoiding the Dalvik VM. A project called IcedRobot aims to create a GNU-compatible version of Android, and rumors abound that RIM is planning on putting an OpenJDK-version of Android on its upcoming PlayBook tablets."

Comments

Moot

[symbolset]

Android is sweet. It's a great transitional phase - it lets us do a lot of stuff. But cellphones are about to be as powerful as desktop PCs and laptops. Soon what will matter will not be the user interface, the OS or the apps, but the utility to the end user: the opportunities it enables, the potentials it creates. The company that converges the mobile experience with the desktop experience in a way that transparently lets people do what they want to do will win.

What people want to do, mostly, is connect with the people they care about so they can share their experiences. That's why Facebook is such a huge thing right now. We're people, and we want to share.

Re:Moot

[eln]

I agree that integrating the desktop with the mobile more completely will be key to future success in the industry, and the line will begin to blur more between mobile and desktop operating systems. I think concentrating on the social networking aspect of things is thinking too narrowly, though. Social networks are already pretty well integrated into most smart phones by now, and moving between form factors on them, dependent as they are on centralized servers, is already pretty seamless.

The real interesting thing will be when we can get real productivity apps to seamlessly move from mobile to laptop to desktop and back. Sun had their SunRay systems where you could seamlessly move your entire desktop session, including open apps and work in progress, from one desktop computer to another, and even transfer phone calls seamlessly between phones as you moved, say from your office phone to a conference room phone. Imagine being able to do that, except between your smart phone and your laptop or desktop, even for things like full-featured word processor and spreadsheet programs or Visio or whatever other productivity apps you use. Now imagine being able to do that seamlessly without a central server or even without the little cards the SunRay depends on. You could couple all of your devices together and they could be in constant contact with each other so switching between them would be completely seamless and near-instantaneous.

We can do some of that already of course, but insufficient software and hardware on mobile devices, as well as deficiencies in disk and network speed (especially cellular network speed) make it impossible to really accomplish all of it now. I do think this is where we're headed though, and I can't wait.

Re:Moot

[ozmanjusri]

Soon what will matter will not be the user interface, the OS or the apps, but the utility to the end user:

I'd like to see it work that way, but I suspect end users will be subject to the same lock in as we're used to on the desktop.

There's too much vested interest in trapping consumers for the big players to allow the open formats, protocols and APIs that are needed for real competition. Oracle attempting to kill Davilik is just the tip of the that rather nasty iceberg.

Re:Moot

[RudyHartmann]

I think another thing this will also mean is the end of X86 CPU dominance.

Re:Moot

[Anthony Mouse]

But cellphones are about to be as powerful as desktop PCs and laptops.

Not really. They're already as powerful as desktop PCs were in, I don't know, 2002. But by the time they're as powerful as today's desktop PCs, desktop PCs will be faster too -- if only because you can stuff a lot more cores in a PC with a 200W power budget than you can into a phone with a 1W power budget.

But I agree on the convergence. Somebody needs to come up with a docking station-like thing with a ~50W CPU, several gigs of RAM, a TB of disk, GigE and a 22"+ screen which will transition the OS instance from the phone to the dock, server VM style, when you plug them together.

Then the 'dock' can stay connected to the internet even while they're not together and act as a 1TB+ remote storage and backup device and home server which the phone can access (e.g. over an ssh tunnel) using the internet or 802.11. The storage on the phone becomes essentially a local fast-access cache of the most recently used data in the larger data collection at home. This is probably how the wheel of reincarnation is ultimately going to kill off cloud computing in this iteration -- people will start using their own PC remotely instead of somebody else's server, then as phones get more powerful they start to take on more of the load as between the phone and the PC because local is always faster, until the remote PC is pretty much just a remote backup device which allows you to play high end video games and have a bigger screen and full size keyboard when you dock with it.

Re:Moot

[WATist]

Security Nightmare is all I have to say.

Re:Moot

[rtb61]

Mobile phones can never be as powerful as desktops. Power and capability are dependent upon the full experience. So screen real estate 24 inch screen versus, well, what ever and input devices, full size keyboard, joystick, mouse and of course mass storage.

Mobile phones can not even match net books, for the same reason.

Mobile is stuck until you have a virtual overlay, via glasses over reality and input devices to match and, those glasses are treated in much the same manner as shoes today, protection and comfort as well as interaction.

Trusting that to modern corporations is of course another matter, their greed far outweighs their concerns about our safety, in fact our safety is considered a cost burden forced upon the by big government, psychopathic insanity.

Re:Moot

[the linux geek]

More like 2000. A fast A9 is similar to an entry level Pentium 4 machine. That isn't enough to be on PC-replacement level just yet.

Give it another two generations, and see whether MIPS gets any traction. At least on paper, the 1074k core has equivalent performance and lower power than an A9 at the same speed. I think the next four years will be exciting for processor design.

Re:Moot

[flowwolf]

Not true in the least way. You can have very complex programs running behind very simple GUI's. The power of software is not limited to the size of the UI. The user experience of course has to be tailored to each device, but screen size is not a cap on how powerful software can be.

Re:Moot

[MichaelSmith]

The real interesting thing will be when we can get real productivity apps to seamlessly move from mobile to laptop to desktop and back.

Yes I agree. HP were hinting at WebOS on the desktop as well as tablets and phones. I hoped that they could implement "minority report" style integration between all three so you could drag unsaved work in progress from one device to another.

Re:Moot

[symbolset]

The mark of a good salesman is that he can make people want what he has. The mark of a great salesman is that he chooses to sell what people want already. Great salesmen are lazy, and know that there are enough things that are great that they need not push the crud.

How do you know the difference? The great salesman listens closely to you, asks pointed questions about your need, and delivers a solution that solves it. The good salesman bores you with powerpoints, doesn't want to hear about your special needs, and tries to sell you what he has rather than what you need.

Re:Moot

[aztracker1]

IIRC x86 (Pentium4) carries a wider instruction set with more bang per CPU cycle than ARM/MIPS do, so even then isn't a 1:1 comparison... though it is "good enough" for most people's needs.

Re:Moot

[symbolset]

Oxmanjusri : There's a new day dawning. Things have become chaotic. The old ways don't seem to hold.

I'm with you that the old way is a block to progress and sad. But it looks like we're turning the corner on that to me.

Re:Moot

[Macrat]

The real interesting thing will be when we can get real productivity apps to seamlessly move from mobile to laptop to desktop and back. Sun had their SunRay systems where you could seamlessly move your entire desktop session, including open apps and work in progress, from one desktop computer to another, and even transfer phone calls seamlessly between phones as you moved, say from your office phone to a conference room phone.

The session was running on the server. Nothing "moved." It was just being viewed from a different terminal.

Re:Moot

[Macrat]

Mobile phones can never be as powerful as desktops.

Even compared to a 1990 PC x86 running DOS?

Re:Moot

[FSWKU]

A fast A9 is similar to an entry level Pentium 4 machine. That isn't enough to be on PC-replacement level just yet.

In what universe is that not enough? When I first started college, I pieced together a system with a Pentium III, half a gig of RAM, and a GeForce 2. In addition to the obscene amounts of Q3A and Counter-Strike I played, it was also more than capable of handling Windows 2000, Apache, VisualStudio, Mathematica, NetWare (stupid math dept. network drop-boxes for assignments), an FTP server, Photoshop, Premiere, and even (*gasp*) play movies! That ACTUAL PC handled my workload nicely, so something on a P4 level would be MORE than enough for the vast majority of people who just want email and internet out of a computer. It's amazing how well older hardware runs when you aren't saddling it with Aero/Compiz/Finder/Whatever.

My current Android phone has enough power to enable 3D graphics on a similar scale as Q3 or CS, it plays any movie format I throw at it, has an office suite, and even runs Photoshop, Skype, and TeamViewer. So how again are modern phones not powerful enough to replace PC's? When you answer, please remember that we're talking about the kind of PC required by the overwhelming majority of society (email, facebook, word processing, pictures, etc).

Bottom line, a modern phone is a handheld computer that you can call people with. And if you want to think back to the "glory days", the AGC used on the Apollo missions was considered a "real computer", and today's phones could emulate that entire system without breaking a sweat...

Re:Moot

[symbolset]

I'm on a project installing several thousand dual-core W7 desktops today. Not a one has the processor power or video performance of the NGP. This battle is over.

The latest ARM processors go up to 16 cores SMP. They include up to 32 cores of video processing offload thanks to Imagination Technologies. They conserve Watts like the precious commodity that Watts are.

Part of what makes the hardware work well is the software. The Linux based platforms like WebOS, Android and others are very efficient and very portable. If they had to support Windows of course they would be slow, buggy, and burn those precious Watts.

Never say never. You'll lose that bet every time. Forever is a long time.

Re:Moot

[symbolset]

You might be right. I could save it, but I doubt Intel has anybody on staff who can.

Re:Moot

[Billly Gates]

x86 is dead at the cpu.

A modern cpu will just translate the x86 instructions into risc internally. If you program under assembly you never touch the hardware directly. WIth that, x86 is not a problem like it once was.

Re:Moot

[symbolset]

The "Minority Report" interface is an OS thing. Intel doesn't do that. They do hardware. The hardware they sell now is more than capable of doing that right now, if you've got the software.

Re:Moot

[MichaelSmith]

The "Minority Report" interface is an OS thing. Intel doesn't do that. They do hardware. The hardware they sell now is more than capable of doing that right now, if you've got the software.

Yes but I don't know why you think we were talking about Intel.

Re:Moot

[Asic Eng]

"Sun had their SunRay systems where you could seamlessly move your entire desktop session, [...] from one desktop computer to another"

Well seamlessy only if you were using the same screen resolution on both machines. Otherwise you'd end up with a session which didn't take advantage of your screen or one which didn't fit on it. Any other machine running VNC would be able to give you the same feature - albeit with the same limitations as the SunRay.

Re:Moot

[davester666]

Isn't this pretty much already done in hardware within the CPU now? You just don't have direct access to the RISC instructions.

Re:Moot

[toejam13]

It is. The x86 introduced micro-ops with the Pentium. The m68k introduced it with the 68060.

The whole idea is that more simplistic instructions allow for better pipelines. John Hennessy over at Stanford really pushed this while developing the MIPS architecture. RISC processors that use load/store instruction sets already meet this criteria. CISC processors retrofitted themselves by using complex instruction decoders that converted opcodes and their operands into micro-ops. At the cost of extra circuit complexity, you get the pipeline benefits of a RISC processor while keeping the more compact instructions of a CISC processor.

Re:Moot

[Anonymous Coward]

I really want to post a jerk comment like "Aaaahahahahahaha" and just leave it at that, but I'll bite. What superpowers would you use to save Intel, if only they were willing to put their fate in your hands? The same ones you use to see the future, perhaps?

Re:Moot

[blackest_k]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9401921.stm

might interest you around the 30 second mark they start to talk about motorola's atrix. It's an android phone which switches to linux when docked with what looks like a slim laptop.

Re:Moot

[steeleyeball]

Not "The Cloud" but "Your Cloud"!

Re:Moot

[blarkon]

It will drive Slashdotters a little nuts, but here is a video that Microsoft Research put out a few years ago showing this very functionality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHVjPCMEtts&feature=related

Re:Moot

[Anonymous Coward]

Android is roaring ahead in the marketplace.

Haha. Slashdot is so biased.

Re:Moot

[t2t10]

Why would it drive anybody nuts? Microsoft made a nice video, but they didn't come up with any of the ideas in that video.

Re:Moot

[sosume]

> Sun had their SunRay systems where you could seamlessly move your entire desktop session, including open apps
> and work in progress, from one desktop computer to another, and even transfer phone calls seamlessly between
> phones as you moved, say from your office phone to a conference room phone. Imagine being able to do that,

Wow! oh wait ... we already have RDP and a PBX in the office .. Steve, is that you distorting my reality again?

Re:Moot

[neokushan]

He'd post about it on slashdot saying how great it is and everyone would listen.

Re:Moot

[t2t10]

Imagine being able to do that, except between your smart phone and your laptop or desktop,

You mean like I do every day?

(A lot of that functionality has been around in other forms at least since the 1980's.)

We can do some of that already of course, but insufficient software and hardware on mobile devices, as well as deficiencies in disk and network speed (especially cellular network speed) make it impossible to really accomplish all of it now.

Hardware is more than powerful enough. However, the software doesn't work exactly the way Sun or Microsoft showed it in their videos because their "vision" doesn't make a lot of sense. What we're actually getting today is driven by how people use devices and desktops, not by slavishly sticking to some slick video.

Sometimes, you get simultaneous editing (Google Docs), sometimes remote access to a desktop session is better (VNC, RDP). Sometimes you want remote file access or automatic file synchronization (Android) with a local app. For voice, you have a choice between the forwarding and call transfer methods of Google Voice, Skype, and the cell phone network.

Of course, if you're trying to do this with MS Office Apps, you're kind of SOL, but that's just a limitation of Windows and MS Office.

Re:Moot

[amorsen]

A modern cpu will just translate the x86 instructions into risc internally.

That is what microcoded CPU's have been doing all the time. The main point of RISC is to avoid that translation layer.

Re:Moot

[KiloByte]

Not till DosBox gets mouse reporting right :p
Also, it allows you to remap physical keys only, and both n900 and droids with keyboards have less than 101 keys, You can't double-click the right "mouse" button, too. You can't use that era's ISA cards or similar hardware extensions, but this applies to modern PCs as well.

These are the only kinks I can think of that keep DosBox on phones from being strictly more powerful than the 1990 x86 PC you're talking about.

Re:Moot

[hitmark]

It seems that HP is backpedaling a bit (could there have been a angry call from Redmond?), and now it seems that they will either be using webos as a quickboot system or provide some kind of touchstone integrating with windows rather then go whole hog webos as primary desktop.

Re:Moot

[hitmark]

To some degree, this is what Morotola is gunning for with Atrix.

When docked at either the desktop or laptop dock, the android ui takes second stage to a desktop ui. Android is still accessible via a window, and the desktop will remember its state on undock.

Not sure if they included openoffice or similar tho.

Re:Moot

[hitmark]

HDMI out takes care of the screen as needed, bluetooth for input. Mass storage may be the sticking point, unless your ok with cloud storage.

now if your talking about sitting down on a random park bench with a phone in pocket and accessing those things, dream on. Even a laptop can not give you that unless your willing to risk back injury.

Re:Moot

[clang_jangle]

It's a common trick OEMs and manufacturers have used for years. The idea behind these announcements (such as "WebOS everywhere") is not to preview coming technology, rather it's about putting the squeeze on microsoft for a more lucrative volumes license deal.

Re:Moot

[hitmark]

If the compiler used can make use of the instruction set in the first place. And hell, its been long since x86 designs processed the x86 instruction set directly. These days it gets translated into "micro-ops" that behave pretty much like the ARM instruction set.

Basically, the x86 instruction set is a holdover from earlier times, where each clock cycle where slow. Back then it was more beneficial to have a group of transistors that handled a specialized piece of math in a single cycle then use the generics to spell it out in several. End result was a instruction set with a long list of special case instructions, easy to make use of as one was writing assembly anyways.

But as cycles became faster, and programming became more abstracted from the hardware, the benefits fades. I wonder how much x86 binary in use today is still compiled to use something like the 386 rather then more recent stuff.

Re:Moot

[hitmark]

Yep, RAM (and the address range to make full use of it) seems more a issue these days then CPU. When things choke it is in dealing with HD content and similar large data amounts, not your home spreadsheet or book critique.

Re:Moot

[hitmark]

yep, been thinking that this is why Intel is taking their sweet time demoing Moblin/Meego without claiming when products will show up on market. Gives Microsoft a reason to slim down and expand the reach of Windows. Funny tho that MS should start talking about Windows on ARM. A war of words between old lovers?

Re:Moot

[clang_jangle]

In what universe is that not enough?

Today's universe?

When I first started college, I pieced together a system with a Pentium III, half a gig of RAM, and a GeForce 2.

I think the point is you wouldn't find that setup very usable today because modern software is more resource-hungry. Back in my day a 68k processor running at 8MHz with 4MB of RAM was the Hot Stuff, and a 250MB HDD was [trump]*huuuge*[/trump].

Re:Moot

[jonbryce]

If Apple has shown anything, it is that you don't want to converge the mobile experience with the desktop experience. Mobiles and desktops are used in different ways and require different interfaces.

Re:Moot

[jonbryce]

A 1990 PC had a 12" monitor, a keyboard and an optional mouse. A phone has a 4" touch screen and an optional slide-out keyboard.

Re:Moot

[TheRaven64]

No, that's exactly the problem with x86. Well, half the problem - the other thing is that it lacks things like predicated instructions, so you can't avoid branching and other tricks that simplify the execution unit design.

An x86 chip needs a complex instruction decoder tacked onto the front of the pipeline. Something like ARM has a decoder that is about as complex as the micro-op decoder on a typical Intel chip. This complex decoder is taking up die space, which is why it was a problem at the start of the RISC era - RISC chips could have a lot more execution units for the same total transistor cost than CISC chips. Now, much more importantly, it's constantly drawing power. The instruction decoder is a complex bit of digital electronics which an Intel chip can't power down most of the time. The only time that it can power it down is when it's running cached micro-ops - and then it's still got to run a decoder that is as power-expensive as the ARM decoder to decode the micro-ops.

Oh, and the variable-length nature of the x86 instruction set doesn't give you anything in terms of instruction density compared to ARM + Thumb2 (it's significantly worse in some common cases), so x86 doesn't even have the advantage of needing smaller instruction caches that it has over something like SPARC or Alpha (or, to an even larger degree, Itanium).

Re:Moot

[Miamicanes]

> In what universe is that not enough?

Any universe where Netbeans, Visual Studio, Eclipse, Microsoft Word (for anything more complicated than a single-page business letter that could be done via email), video editing, video encoding (something that can bring even the mightiest i7 to its knees; try multipass h.264 sometime...), or 3D rendering occurs. In other words, the desktop of anybody who's a content creator instead of a mere content consumer.

Back when you first started college, "video editing" involved 720x480 or 720x540 interlaced 50 or 60hz video. Now it involves 1920x1080 progressive video. Today, you could literally fill a terrabyte hard drive with an hour or two of raw, pre-encoded video. Modern DSLRs with HDR take pictures that are individually bigger (in bytes) than most CF cards that existed prior to ~7 years ago. Try editing a 12 megapixel HDR image on a PC using Photoshop on a PC with only a gig or two of ram. It's not fun.

As for people who "just want email and internet", well... Flash. Enough said.

The most high-end, hacked and rooted Android phones existing today can *barely* handle Flash in its raw, undigested, real PC form without gagging. "Works" is not the same as "runs well". Hardware-wise, a current top of the line Android phone is roughly comparable to a 500MHz Pentium 3 with 512mb, Windows 2000, and a $12 piece of shit videocard that somehow managed to have onboard MPEG-2 video acceleration anyway.

> the AGC used on the Apollo missions was considered a "real computer", and today's phones could emulate that entire system without breaking a sweat...

The difference is, the AGC made use of lots of ballistics data that was precomputed offline by mainframes and carried onboard via Hopi-woven core memory -- more megabits on a single mission, in one place at one time, than the sum total that had ever previously existed on earth. An i7 could calculate it on the fly. Had Apollo run into really, truly novel problems requiring realtime navigation that deviated significantly from the original plan (assuming it had enough fuel to allow it), the astronauts would have been fucked, because their computers wouldn't have been able to handle that use case at all.

Re:Moot

[TheRaven64]

Moblin / Meego slowness is not Intel's fault. Intel is not a device manufacturer, they produce a reference platform and device manufacturers actually build the things that consumers see. Another good example is Marvell's iMX515 - they demoed some netbooks with this CPU, Linux, and even Flash some time last year. They sell the components to anyone who is interested in shipping it, but I don't know of any company that's brought a netbook based on their hardware to market yet.

It's not the same situation as Nokia, a company that actually does produce consumer hardware, only ever shipping four device running Maemo / Meego.

Re:Moot

[TheRaven64]

Motorola is docking the phone, not migrating the software. Samsung had a really nice demo back in 2007 using Xen, where they were live migrating your entire phone stack between different ARM devices using a customised hypervisor. The idea was that you'd have a relatively low powered CPU in your phone (limited by the battery), but a much more powerful - probably multicore - CPU in your HD TV. When you got home, your environment would live migrate to the TV, and you could use it as a desktop. When you were leaving, you'd migrate it back. They also had some really interesting modes where they were doing partial migration, so your OS saw a single NUMA system, with some cores in the TV, some in the phone, some memory and input / output devices in each and could move processes around between them.

Re:Moot

[nkh]

Apple is actually merging both interfaces in Mac OS 10.7 (Lion) with the Launchpad. They want to converge the 2 experiences for some reasons.

Re:Moot

[TheRaven64]

The fact that you're writing ARM/MIPS as if ARM and MIPS have even remotely similar instruction densities makes it safe for anyone reading to disregard your views. Some things you might like to look up: the ARM barrel shifter, and predicated instructions.

Re:Moot

[TheRaven64]

Looked at your CPU usage graph recently? I'm currently using a four-year-old laptop, with a 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo. My CPU usage, in normal operation, peaks at about 20%. The bottleneck most often is disk access. A machine with half the CPU power but an SSD would be significantly faster, subjectively. The most common thing that I do that does tax the CPU is play back H.264, but on an ARM chip this is offloaded to dedicated hardware. The second most common thing I do is compile large amounts of code, but that's not exactly a common requirement.

Re:Moot

[maxume]

The point is that the hardware on the phone can, with the addition of an external screen and keyboard, support both.

Re:Moot

[jbolden]

I don't know. All these extremely complex websites with tons of javascript or flash running in dozens of tabs updating themselves seems to be burning out my CPU. That used to always be the case that CPU doesn't matter. I always make sure to buy lots of ram. Since switching to laptops I've had disk space problems. And frankly CPU has been a cause of my upgrade needs. The only problem is now I can't get a CPU that is 5x faster than what I currently have. Those days are over. I've even considered going back to desktop just to be able to get some more CPU because I can't meaningfully upgrade.

Re:Moot

[mswhippingboy]

This is not as far off as you might think. I'm running the Android-x86 (an x86 port of Android) right now on my desktop within a VirtualBox VM. Android-x86 is still in it's early stages, but is pretty stable and impressive already. Currently it supports Froyo (2.2) and Gingerbread (2.3) is in beta.

All that's really needed is a set of VirtualBox guest additions like those available for Windows and Linux guests to enable "seamless mode", and Android apps would appear on the desktop as (nearly) native desktop applications.

Re:Moot

[RudyHartmann]

It seems that Samsung, HTC, Motorola, or whoever are running 95% ARM chips with Android on their smartphones. Heck, even Apple is running iOS4 on ARM chips. Since the conversation is all about how the next generation of smartphones will supplant the PC, then it is fair to assume this will impact Microsoft and Intel. Also, you can get a license to make you own ARM chips. Not Atom or any other X86 CPU though. ARM uses less power than any X86 too. Also, Windows 7 costs money. Android is FREE. Starting to look bad for Wintel I think.

Re:Moot

[TheRaven64]

And the relevance of any of that to my post was?

Re:Moot

[eln]

I know, I was using the SunRay more as a means of attempting to illustrate what it would look like to the end user, not how it would really work on the back end. Ideally I would like to see technology get to the point where these things actually *could* move over the wire instantaneously so there would be no need for a central server. That's probably many years away, though.

Re:Moot

[hitmark]

I suspect Motorola is the way to go for the time being. What happens if you get to work one day and find you forgot to migrate your desktop? Connect home and migrate over the net?

Re:Moot

[TheRaven64]

The obvious solution is to do it via a dock, so you can't remove the phone without migrating the OS back onto it.

Re:Moot

[hitmark]

Have we not come full circle then?

Re:Moot

[Paul Jakma]

The translation requires extra circuitry, which requires extra power, which means the x86 CPU will require a bigger battery to achieve same useage times, or will have lower useage time than the pure RISC CPU. The marginal cost of that extra power usage relative to non-translating CPUs will of course fall over time as technology improvements allow for more transistors, but that cost appears still to be appreciable today. (Compare Atom to A8 Cortex in power usage, say).

Re:Moot

[TheRaven64]

No, because you are moving the VM to a machine with more RAM and CPU when you move it. You can then move it around the local network - e.g. between HD TVs in different rooms - without moving the mobile phone.

Re:Moot

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea because people carry around external screens and keyboards with their phones.

Re:Moot

[hitmark]

the cpu part i can accept, but unless the VM is something very special would not the system inside it balk at suddenly gaining a couple of gigs of ram?

Re:Moot

[netsharc]

Hopefully NFC will enable this... 2 devices with WiFi, they brush up and exchange ad-hoc WiFi configuration (1 will create the network, set password to xyz, assign itself IP x, the other can have IP y), they pair up over that network connection, and transfer files over a protocol that they've also agreed upon.

I vaguely recall a demo of someone using a pen to "click" on a file on one computer screen, and moving that pen to another screen, "clicking" on that, and the file appeared on the desktop region where the pen touched that screen...

Re:Moot

[UnknowingFool]

The problem with MS has never been that they don't have good ideas or that they don't hire smart people. The problem for them is that any ideas have to be implemented so that it doesn't threaten either Windows or Office.

Re:Moot

[TheRaven64]

No, Xen VMs have supported dynamic allocation of RAM for years (not sure how many - at least five or six, maybe longer). Typically this is done via the balloon driver, which allows VMs to request and return pages for bust usage when you have multiple VMs on one machine, but there's no reason why it couldn't be used to simply provide more RAM when more physical RAM is available.

Re:Moot

[ChunderDownunder]

yes but the point is you're still running an application vm (dalvik) inside a platform vm (virtualbox). Fine for desktop class machines but not suitable for webos/bada/meego phones (At least until the cortex a15 brings hardware assisted virtualization) The ultimate goal is just to run android apps within the native desktop atop standard java (hotspot), with gpu accelerated backends for win32, x11, osx, directfb (webos). i.e. like any ordinary swing/swt application.
Mono (ikvm - which targets openjdk) might be a good single vm for webos et al to run both android and wp7 apps - pity about the lawyers (google, ms, oracle all unhappy!)

Re:Moot

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

That's why Facebook is such a huge thing right now. We're people, and we want to share.

But somehow "I, for one, welcome our new human overlords" doesn't have quite the right ring to it, ya know?

Re:Moot

[freak132]

With relation to the i.MX515 based net/smartbooks there's one available from Genesi http://www.genesi-usa.com/products and it's according to the company blog it's up for a price drop next week along with the smarttop. They're a developer friendly bunch who've been a big help to the debian ARM project and many other devs. They're working on an i.MX535 based netbook with a Pixel Qi screen but it's unclear how long we'll have to wait for that product.

Re:Moot

[exomondo]

Since the conversation is all about how the next generation of smartphones will supplant the PC, then it is fair to assume this will impact Microsoft and Intel.

MS have already shown Windows 8 running on ARM.

Re:Moot

[Arashi256]

"Today's universe" my sweet behind. I've got a hacked copy of Quake 3 running on the Nexus S just fine. It's actually faster than it was on the original PC I played it on.

Re:Moot

[bluefoxlucid]

In other words, you get the pipeline benefits of the RISC processor at the cost of loading, decoding, and storing CISC instructions into more on-dye cache, shrinking effective cache size and proving to the world that ARM was better anyway.

Re:Moot

[symbolset]

* A fake fortuneteller can be tolerated. But an authentic soothsayer should be shot on sight. Cassandra did not get half the kicking around she deserved. - RAH

Consistent Enforcement

[Prysorra]

There are what seems to be a countless army of people and companies using Java, and I have never heard of anyone being sued for "Java IP anything". Something smells fishy.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[PCM2]

Consistent enforcement is not a requirement of copyright claims, which are among the IP claims Oracle has brought against Google.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[WrongSizeGlass]

Embedded/Mobile Java requires licensing that regular Java does not. Basically, Oracle claims that the Dalvik VM violates their IP because it is used on mobile devices.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[phantomfive]

The details of the Sun (now Oracle, I guess) patent grant can be found here. Basically:

you are free to use, copy, distribute, or compile, the Java SE system and Sun/Oracle promises not to use its patents against you. So the countless army of people using Java are fine. However, if you break the Java specification, or your JRE only implements a subset of the specification, then suddenly the entire weight of the Java patents are free to be used against you. Most people do not break the Java specification.

Google, or at least the AOSP, did. The full Java is too big to implement on a phone (presumably), so they only implemented a subset, and thus they opened themselves up for patent damages.

Note that this is not a copyright dispute: Google still has the full right to use the Java source code, since it is under GPL* (see caveat), it is their non-java virtual machine that is violating patents. Google couldn't have avoided this by using a different language, like C#, because the patents cover most modern virtual machines. Microsoft has already licensed these patents for their 'managed' code.


*Caveat: There were some small bits of code that were not directly part of the Java source code, and not under the GPL, that Google was distributing. They've since stopped.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[Tumbleweed]

*Caveat: There were some small bits of code that were not directly part of the Java source code, and not under the GPL, that Google was distributing. They've since stopped.

Last I read, it was found that they never actually distributed even that much, unless I'm mistaken.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun sued Microsoft (and won) over Java twice.
Besides MS and Google most companies have actually played nice with Sun/Oracle's terms.

Both MS cases were rather high profile, the second one was what killed off Microsoft's JVM (for the opposite reason Google is being sued over Dalvik; the MS JVM was being called Java, but had all kinds of hooks to the underlying OS which made it and applications written for it incompatible with Java - whereas Dalvik looks like Java, smells like Java, tastes like Java and even acts like Java,a and for all intents and purposes IS Java, but Google isn't calling it Java, and worse they're insisting that it isn't Java, presumably to get around having to license Java ME, which unlike Java SE and EE is NOT open.

I agree that something smells fishy, but it's coming from Google's end. They could have avoided all of this by either simply licensing Java Mobile or using something OpenJDK-based (with the caveat being that while JME is designed for mobile devices, the JDK is not).

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[magus_melchior]

It could be a test-case, so that if Oracle can take down Google here, they can then use this case as a precedent to file C&D letters.

Plus they're looking at damages and legal fees if they win, and they can potentially demand a cut of every Android-related sale.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[shutdown -p now]

If I understand correctly, any Java or Java-like VM running on a mobile device would run afoul of the same patents, so e.g. using OpenJDK won't help, nor would rewriting the whole thing from scratch as FOSS. You'd need a different VM (and then you wouldn't be able to run any existing Android apps).

I actually wonder just how different you'd have to make it, in fact. There have been claims that Microsoft has been paying licensing fees to Sun, ostensibly for those same patents as related to .NET. And .NET VM (on low level) is fairly different in both design and implementation from Sun JVM.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[JanneM]

Since the Dalvik VM is nothing like the Java VM, anything that applies for it is not unlikely to apply for any VM-based dynamical language.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[toriver]

Well, they are not calling it Java-the-VM (which Dalvik isn't), but they DO refer to Java-the-language, since that is what they use.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[ensignyu]

OpenJDK is supposedly safe because it's licensed under the GPL, which prevents Oracle from suing over patents as long as OpenJDK is available under the GPL. They could stop distributing it under the GPL for future versions of Java, but revoking the license retroactively wouldn't go over well in courts due to the principle of estoppel.

On the other hand, non-OpenJDK implementations of Java don't carry the same promise.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[blackest_k]

If you want to call your product java then it needs to be able to run java applications which dalvik doesn't do becouse it isn't java.

There are similar if not identical concepts so a lot of what you are familiar with coding wise is going to work the same way in dalvik much like c and c++ or driving a diesel car instead of a petrol or an electric car or even windows linux or osx.

Even java is not unique in its reuse of concepts from c and c++

You see the difference between microsoft's version of java and sun java was in answer to the question can I run this java program using either version? The answer was maybe or if it was developed to run in sun java it would but if it used microsoft extensions it wouldn't.

There is no confusion with dalvik and java you cannot run a dalvik apk on a java run time.
and you can't run a java app on dalvik.

the only thing that is similar is the source code and that a programmer that knows how to write in java will be feeling comfortable writing for dalvik in short order.

The problem with java on mobile platforms was it wasn't really universal. There were some phones where java was available and others where it was not. pretty much you had to develop for a particular handset. Which is where android gives plenty of choice you can move between handsets and be pretty much assured that the same applications will be able to run on your new phone that ran on your old phone and dalvik largely solves that java problem.

Of course handset manufacturers need to get hit on the head with a clue stick to realise that they need to support their handsets a lot more than they are used to. Motorola and Samsung are very slow to update their older phones. HTC seem to do a lot better in that department. If Samsung don't get their finger out my next phone will not be a Samsung it will probably be a HTC.it could have been nokia had they not been sold up the river by the CEO.

People will want a shiny new phone every couple of years or so once the screens scratched the handset is worn and the battery life is less than half what it was new. However being locked into a contract means they can't just buy the new shiny when they feel like it and looking at the next version for 18 months while getting ignored by their current network provider and handset provider is just going to send them to the competition when they do upgrade.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[hb79]

> and I have never heard of anyone being sued for "Java IP anything".

Memory lagging a bit after a boozing weekend? I'll help you out:
sun sues microsoft over java

That was 2002, when Microsoft tried to push their incompatible version of Java through IE. Eventually, they had to withdraw, which at the time, was seen as a win for the good guys. Why Google should get away with bastardizing Java now, is beyond me. Just because they are still the "cool kid on the block"?

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[harlows_monkeys]

Google is being sued for not using Java.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[harlows_monkeys]

Most people do not break the Java specification.

Google, or at least the AOSP, did. The full Java is too big to implement on a phone (presumably), so they only implemented a subset, and thus they opened themselves up for patent damages.

That's not quite correct, as Dalvik is not an implementation of Java. It is a completely different virtual machine, with a different set of instructions and a fundamentally different architecture (register based rather than stack based). Google provides tools that can convert JVM machine code to Dalvik machine code.

Oracle is claiming patents on things that could easily be infringed by nearly any language and runtime that involves compiling the language to bytecode for a VM, such as Ruby, Python, Lua, and many others.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw em all, switch to C#/Mono. I'm sure Microsoft would "love" that.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[Anonymous Coward]

Which Java though - Java is used for both the 'platform/framework' and the language.
Just because something is written in Java (the language) doesn't mean it uses Java (the platform).

I hate saying this, but at least Microsoft had the decency to call their framework (.Net) & language (C#) different things.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[mswhippingboy]

Why Google should get away with bastardizing Java now, is beyond me. Just because they are still the "cool kid on the block"?

The difference is that Google is not calling their system Java. When Microsoft lost their case, all they had to do was change the name of their version of Java to J++ and voila, no trademark violation. However, the market didn't buy this strategy which is why Microsoft "embraced and extended" Java and introduced C# and .Net as it's answer to Java.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[hb79]

> The difference is that Google is not calling their system Java.

Really? Android docs and source beg to differ:
http://source.android.com/source/code-style.html
http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/packages/apps/Calendar.git;a=tree;f=src/com/android/calendar;hb=HEAD

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[Anonymous Coward]

The language is Java. The VM is not, it's called Dalvik, not Java.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[Anonymous Coward]

If the translation layer was moved inside Dalvik then for all intents and purposes Dalvik would be a Java VM.

Here's what likely happened: a Google employee implemented a register-based Java VM as their 20% project. Google's strategy called for a fast interpreted language and they chose Java because they couldn't choose .NET. They didn't want to license the faster and more mature Java Embedded VM, so in a stupendous combination of NIH and IANAL they took their internal Java VM, ripped part of the implementation details out in the open, gave it a name that has nothing to do with coffee and called it done.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[devman]

Ah, but you forget OpenJDK is released under GPL2 which comes with a patent grant. http://openjdk.java.net/legal/gplv2+ce.html

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[Anonymous Coward]

It has nothing to do with it being mobile and has everything to do with it being partial. Google didn't implement the entire Java environment, which is a requirement in the Java license. The reason it's a requirement is that Sun (and now Oracle) didn't want parts of Java to become unusable because developers needed to target the lowest common denominator of all Java systems. So the license says that if you want to distribute a Java environment, you have to implement the entire thing.

Oracle's motivation may be because J2ME license fees make them a lot of money, but it has nothing to do with what Google did wrong. If Google had implemented 100% of the Java specification, Oracle wouldn't have a case regardless of the fact that it runs on mobile devices.

Re:Consistent Enforcement

[gig]

> I have never heard of anyone being sued for "Java IP anything". Something smells fishy.

You never heard of Microsoft being sued over Java? Microsoft lost.

Ditch Java

[Anonymous Coward]

How about they stop making moble phones that rely on java in the first place.

Re:Ditch Java

[eln]

Java is easy to use and highly portable. There are also legions of very low-cost Java programmers available in any number of countries like India and China. Moving to a different language would be highly painful for most companies, especially in the highly competitive world of mobile software where speed to market and cost are key, and 99.9% of your users don't give a damn what language you're using or what Oracle thinks about it.

Re:Ditch Java

[FrankDrebin]

You're right that end users don't care about the language used for apps, but Apple has demonstrated that in practice Java doesn't matter on smart phones.

Re:Ditch Java

[WATist]

I have to wonder how many of those cheap programmers are worth what their pay.

Re:Ditch Java

[phantomfive]

If the users are there to buy the software, then the programmers will learn the new language to build it. There are tons of iPhone apps, more than Android, and it is a completely different dev environment. Not only that you likely need to buy a new computer to build for it. Sucko.

The biggest point is that even if they don't use Java, as long as they are using a language with a virtual machine or managed code that is at all efficient, then they will fall under these patents.

Re:Ditch Java

[Anonymous Coward]

C++ as the main programming language of Android would be an absolute disaster, what with the widely differing hardware, poor x86 and ARM security, lackluster STL support, inefficient C++ compiler, bad/inefficient exception handling, bad memory management (RAII works well on PCs; it's not always so on mobiles), unsafe pointers/arithmetic, small standard library (though it's far more thoughtfully designed than Java's), bad file I/O (IOStreams fucking sucks), cryptic locale support, underdeveloped libraries (not even Boost would make up for it, and Boost wouldn't be available), and so on and so on....

Re:Ditch Java

[Anonymous Coward]

iPhone has relatively uniform hardware. On Android, just the differences between Qualcomm, TI, and Samsung CPUs means that apps using the highly-portable NDK are often incompatible, broken, or just buggy on non-targeted CPUs.

Re:Ditch Java

[Anonymous Coward]

Dalvik and Android doesn't have a Java language requirement. And C++ programmers hardly have to learn anything at all to begin programming in Java; it would be more accurate to say you need to unlearn certain practices.

Re:Ditch Java

[codepunk]

Java is also the achilles heal of the android platform. It is the very reason that it is and will remain a second rate gaming platform. In such small devices execution speed is critical to the users experience. Apples insistence on native code execution is spot on, it is the only way to take maximum advantage of such underpowered devices. There is a never ending of complaints of poor game performance on android devices.

Re:Ditch Java

[TyFoN]

The games are written in C using native code most often using the NDK API. Only the UI is written in java.
Of course if you buy a low-end phone without hardware accelerated opengl you will see lower performance.

Re:Ditch Java

[hairyfeet]

Then here is a thought if Java is so great obey the fricking license Google! is that REALLY so damned hard? Would anybody here have bought the bullshit if MSFT said "No really MS "coffee" isn't Java, we swear! Sure all you Java code runs but it really really isn't Java, promise!"

Lets be honest guys if MSFT would have pulled this shit the crowd here would have laughed them right out of the building. Are you REALLY so in love with Google you'll let them get away with this weasel worded BS? if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, guess what? It is probably a duck!

So lets call a spade a spade folks, this is just Google trying to screw Java while getting away with not paying the mobile fees. Is this REALLY a company you are gonna trust? Mark my words all you guys that are "Android is FOSS yay!" this will NOT be the last time you see Google pull some weasel worded BS. Don't forget this is the same company that is making damned sure to avoid GPL V3 like the clap! Why do you think that is? I'll tell you why, it is so they can "TiVo trick" android at any time and there ain't a damned thing you can do about it.

So the FOSS guys better watch their back and not get too comfy around Google. if they will pull this weasel worded BS even when faced with a company like Oracle that has the money to fight back, why would they not screw FOSS that doesn't have the money to fight squat?

Re:Ditch Java

[gilesjuk]

Except that programming for Android is only using Java style syntax. Many Java coders will look at Android, realise much of the standard packages are missing and then have to rewrite any code they have to work on it.

Users do care about how well things run, how long their battery lasts. Your phone's CPU will be working a lot harder with a compiled interpreted language.

What you're saying is it's better for companies to write poor, bland generic software quickly than write software that is good and takes advantage of the full capabilities of the device? I think end users care about that!

I don't get this inherent laziness in mobile software development, they are generally small applications that won't take many man hours to create.

Have a look at NanoStudio on iOS. That took many man hours and it is a brilliant example of a mobile music studio. If one guy can write that in native code then why can't big companies do similar? especially given many applications like Facebook are just calling webservices, so much of the complexity is on the server. It should be very trivial to write such apps.

Re:Ditch Java

[Anonymous Coward]

If I write a post-compiler tool to convert .NET's CIL bytecode to Python bytecode, does that mean Python is based on .NET?

That's the correlation you are making, by stating that .class -> .dex transformation automatically makes it Java-based.

Re:Ditch Java

[Miamicanes]

> It is the very reason that it is and will remain a second rate gaming platform.

No, Dalvik's shitty garbage collection mechanism is. More Java developers writing Android apps get nailed by the fact that its GC stumbles over things that have been a total non-issue with desktop Java since 1.4 or 1.5 than anything else. Well, that, and the fact that as far as Eclipse is concerned, Dalvik Isn't Java (so things developers subconsciously expect to work, because they Just Work transparently for Java, don't work with Dalvik).

Re:Ditch Java

[icebraining]

Don't forget this is the same company that is making damned sure to avoid GPL V3 like the clap! Why do you think that is? I'll tell you why, it is so they can "TiVo trick" android at any time and there ain't a damned thing you can do about it.

To be fair, I doubt they would have any shot at convincing the hardware manufacturers if Android was GPLv3.

You can distribute GPLv3 licensed apps in the Android Market, though, unlike the Apple's and Microsoft's.

Re:Ditch Java

[mswhippingboy]

Lets be honest guys if MSFT would have pulled this shit the crowd here would have laughed them right out of the building.

What the hell are you talking about? MSFT did exactly this. Ever heard of J++?

When Microsoft lost the case against Sun, they simply renamed their Java implementation J++ and they were in compliance. No problem. Google never called their product Java, so they never infringed on the trademark in the first place.

It was only have the market rejected J++ that MSFT "embraced and extended" Java and came out with C# and .Net.

Get your history straight.

Re:Ditch Java

[Stevecrox]

There are chips designed to run Java Byte code as the instruction set, I've been waiting for a company to do the same for Davlik. That way you get the performance advantages of native code with none of the disadvantages.

Re:Ditch Java

[Anonymous Coward]

C++ as the main programming language of Android would be an absolute disaster, what with the widely differing hardware

Fat binaries. Works on the Mac OS and iOS with no problems.

, poor x86 and ARM security, lackluster STL support, inefficient C++ compiler,

Java has all the same problems. Even worse because you have to run in an inefficient WM.

bad/inefficient exception handling,

Correct code should never ever throw any exceptions. They do nothing but make thinks slow and make code unread able. Exceptions should be eliminated.

bad memory management (RAII works well on PCs; it's not always so on mobiles),

Garbage Collection has no place on a moble phone. If a programmer understand how to handle memory then they have no business programing.

unsafe pointers/arithmetic,

Java has the same problems. java.lang.NullPointerException
Again if you can't handle pointers you have no business programming. Plus no control over when you want something to pass by copy or pass by reference.

small standard library (though it's far more thoughtfully designed than Java's), bad file I/O (IOStreams fucking sucks), cryptic locale support, underdeveloped libraries (not even Boost would make up for it, and Boost wouldn't be available), and so on and so on....

You program for an API not the language. Plus Java's file io is worse. Why the hell does closing a file throw an exception? Just close the damn file especially if there are any errors. Any why wouldn't boost be available? Boost works where ever you have a C++ compiler.

Worts of java.
No support of unsigned types makes it hard to interface with other programing languages. If I write a client in some programing language that sends a uint64_t to a server written in java I can't read it back.

Enum's can't be compared to an integer or are backed by some kind of integer type. So I can't do something simple that makes code readable like
switch (in.readByte()) {
        case LabelA: return new A();
        case LabelB: return new B();
        case LabelC: return new C();
}
I'm forced to do this less readable version.
switch (in.readByte()) {
        case 0: return new A();
        case 1: return new B();
        case 2: return new C();
}

File io throws exceptions in places it shouldn't

FileInputStream in = null;
try {
        in = new FileInputStream(file); // write stuff
catch (Exception e) { // Handel exception
}
finally {
        try {
                if (in != null)
                        in.close();
        }
        catch { // Handel exception I shouldn't need to.
        }
}

Not to mention they way you set up file io in the first place. Who the hell thought this was good idea in the first place?
try {
        file = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(new File(name));
        try {
                number = file.readDouble();
        catch(Exception e) {
        }
        finally {
                file.close;
        }
}
Who thinks that is simpler than
std::ifstream in(name);
in >> number;
in.close;

Re:Ditch Java

[gtall]

You cannot patent a language. Oracle believes you can. So they are using their patents to encumber Java, a language. All Google did was use the language and provide their own interpreter. Google owes Oracle nothing.

I'm split on both of these...

[atari2600a]

GNU/Linux Android would be FUCKING AWESOME, but OpenJDK Android would retain a good amount of compatibility!

Re:I'm split on both of these...

[gtall]

Awesome? Errr...an asteroid impacting the Earth would be awesome. Think of people standing around slackjawed. Jesus rising from the dead would be awesome.

GNU/Linux Android would be a neat system.

Now get fuck off my lawn and stop using "awesome" to label anything you cannot think of doing yourself.

Re:I'm split on both of these...

[Eunuchswear]

Yeah, we could call it MeeGo. Or Maemo if you prefer.

What part of it would be Android? Oh, I know, the tokenised dead mice.

Why Support Java At All?

[FrankDrebin]

WIth Oracle getting all pissy, and with alternate first-class platform-neutral languages like Python up-and-coming as first-class on Android, it may be attractive for Google to skip the Java language entirely.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Anonymous Coward]

Compatibility.

How are they supposed to dump the vast majority of their application base? It would be suicide.

Python is not even close to a substitute for Java. It's good, but not that good.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the compatibility issue is true.

But Python is not just good, it's damn good. I completely disagree that Python isn't as good as Java partially because I don't think it's true and partially because the statement is absurdly subjective. Saying it isn't as good as Java would definitely need some supporting arguments and a concrete definition of good.

If Android had used Python from the start, it would have resulted in a very strong API.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[AvitarX]

Aren't they allegedly running afoul of virtual machine patents too?
A system built on python could have similar issues.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[phantomfive]

Going to Python won't automatically solve Google's problems. The issue is patents, not copyright, and the patents in question are about how to make a virtual machine environment run quickly. If the Python interpreter does things like Just-in-time compiling or whatever, then it could still fall under the patents, and Google could still get sued. Microsoft had to pay sun a lot of money to license the patents for C#.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where to start....

Python is magnitude slower than Java. Python "compiled" code is not remotely close to Java's execution time. Python doesn't have real multithreading (see GIL blocking multiple threads from executing). Python is good for scripting small apps. But if there is a choice between Java and Python for basic API, Java wins today and yesterday. What tomorrow will bring is of course unknown, but GIL and current much slower execution are huge problems.

Java at similar speed to native C/C++, or at least comparable.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is no plan. Sure, people could program python. But python code(r)s tend to be excessively good at using processing power inefficiently (even in the standard libs) and producing obscure or crazy problems in code. Enjoy a byte that is supposed to be interpreted as string but that isn't listed in the current codepage crashing your program even in logging facilities or simple string output? Maybe you like some obscure mis-interpretations of dynamically typed code?

Besides, it does not have the libraries required.

No, if at all possible Google needs to keep Dalvik or alternatively improve OpenJDK to have the remaining missing qualities like Dalvik. The only viable alternative would be c/c++, but that would lead to many quite phone-specific applications.
 

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Anonymous Coward]

Python is a communist plot to rob us of our precious bodily brackets! Our young men and women are being lured into a world in which their blocks have no brackets at ALL! Don't you see the danger? We must take action!

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[ADRA]

Java the language is not being sued about, so lets move on from this shall we? The patents are regarding Virtual Machines that most likely affect any language using dynamic code optimization. The copyright claims are regarding apparent line by line copying which if true is just a big fck up by Google, and not a slant against the language.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Anonymous Coward]

Java at similar speed to native C/C++, or at least comparable.

I wouldn't say that to a C/C++ proponent.

def quick_sort(unsorted,pred = (lambda x,y: x < y)):
        if len(unsorted) > 1:
                pivot = unsorted.pop(randrange(len(unsorted)))
                left = quick_sort([ v for v in unsorted if pred(v,pivot) ],pred)
                right = quick_sort([ v for v in unsorted if not pred(v,pivot) ],pred)
                return left + [pivot] + right
        else:
                return unsorted

Can't do that in Java.

Not to mention, considering Android doesn't actually use Java, but rather the syntax and an unrelated VM. Everything you mention could easily have been implemented.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[mabinogi]

All those issues are VM issues.
Given that android uses a from-scratch VM which isn't the JVM, why is it impossible to consider that it could have been a VM designed to work with Python?

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[MichaelSmith]

Not to mention, considering Android doesn't actually use Java, but rather the syntax and an unrelated VM.

The standard android SDK requires a Java SDK. It post processes .class files to generate its own binaries.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Anonymous Coward]

Java the language is not being sued about, so lets move on from this shall we? The patents are regarding Virtual Machines that most likely affect any language using dynamic code optimization.

Which really serves to highlight the fact that software patents are garbage and need to die in very short order.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no reason why they couldn't compile the Java syntax directly to Dalvik bytecode. The current setup is just a shortcut. If you can write a VM for a CPU and memory restricted environment, you can probably write a good compiler. And technically speaking, the post-processing of Java bytecode to Dalvik bytecode is compiling, albeit much easier. It's not as if Google is strapped for resources or talented developers.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a Java programmer (and I'm also not the GP) but if quicksort was showing up while profiling Java, and it couldn't be fixed in Java, it would simply be written in C++ and called via JNI.

Although this also counteracts most of the argument against Python: time-critical code is typically a very small percentage of the codebase.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[toriver]

They had the "option" of skipping it (and focus on a different language) from day one, but the lure of exploiting the vast developer base was too strong.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Stevecrox]

Why would I want to do that in Java? I'd just use a TreeSet and have the objects implement the Comparable interface.

C/C++ is faster than Java but having to re-invent the wheel all the time is what makes me prefer Java. Another good example is loading a configuration file. In Java I just create Properties object with a file path and I've got access to a configuration file. In C++ you have to mess about with streams, write your own string parser and then create a map to store everything.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[msclrhd]

Some options in C/C++:

1. Using Qt, you have a QSettings class with QSettings::IniFormat
2. Using Boost, you have the configuration file parser of the Boost program options library.
3. The SimpleIni library can parse configuration files

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Anonymous Coward]

Removing the randomness, it takes over 8 seconds for Python, while 1 second for Java's younger sister, Scala. And the Scala version isn't optimized.
I love Python's syntax like no other, but even disregarding how performance-challenged Python is, I would never choose it for anything over a couple thousand lines of code, because of its lack of static type checking.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I only have the old Scala 2.7 without default arguments, but in 2.8 you can add a predicate function without adding a single line of code.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[AtlantaSteve]

Exactly. Every week or two, some variant of this "story" is cut-n-pasted by an editor who either doesn't know any better... or who does know better and posts it anyway to attract ignorant eyeballs. Clueless people love reading and ranting on this issue... because it involves:

1. 1) A company that everyone hates (Oracle)
2. 2) A subject that almost everyone here hates and almost no one here understands (patents)
3. 3) A language (Java) that most people here never quite trusted in the first place, either because:
   1. a) They're C/C++ old farts, and think it's for young whipper-snappers
   2. 2) They're PHP/Ruby whipper-snappers, and think it's for old farts, or
   3. 3) They're Richard Stallman

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

I'd like to see them come up with a python->dalvik converter analogous to the current java->dalvik one.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Anonymous Coward]

[because] they're PHP[..] whipper-snappers

PHP has been around for years now. Isn't it more likely to be used by people who never managed to learn a half-decent language, with the whipper-snappers using the latest language-du-jour and considering the PHP guys old farts anyway? ;-)

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[jameson]

For the needs of a modern VM, Python would be a step back from Java. To jit a language efficiently, you want to have as much information about the programs as you can get, particularly static types. Python as a dynamically typed language is about as hard to jit as Javascript is-- we're only just beginning to see adaptive compilation systems (i.e., composed baseline/optimising-compilers or composed interpreter/compilers) for that.

Python has its niche, but it's not "a platform for competing on equal terms with native-code apps for iOS".

You could pick a different statically typed language (e.g. something based on Modula-3 or Eiffel), but even if you provide a re-engineering tool to translate from the old code to the new code, you are going to alienate many of your coders, especially inexperienced ones who have trouble seeing beyond syntax. And those are in the majority, in my experience.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Anonymous Coward]

Python is first-class? You're joking, right?

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[mswhippingboy]

For the umpteenth time, Oracle's patent issues are not with the Java language, they are with the Dalvik VM. It doesn't matter if you write your program in brainf*ck, if it runs within a VM on a mobile device, it's likely to run afoul of Oracle's fairly broad patents. Can we please stop the "switch from Java to {insert language of choice}" blather. The source language is not the issue.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Anonymous Coward]

My point in originally posting the code snippet was about the expressive power of the Python syntax. In an actual script, I'd just use Python's built in Timsort since it's a lot faster than the quicksort above. But the discussion of Python vs. Java re: performance isn't really relevant since Android doesn't use HotSpot and thus the performance of Android apps has nothing to do with it. It's not as if Google (in the hypothetical situation of using the Python syntax) would just slap the mainline Python VM into Android.

Of course, all of this is dancing around the real issue which is Oracle is just patent trolling. Which is not to say they are patent trolls since they do actual work in the IT.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[hey!]

As others have pointed out, this has nothing to do with the source language, and everything to do with the runtime operating system relying on a virtual machine. Just to underscore the point, remember that Gnu's CCJ compiles to native code. Suppose Google chose to make Android more like a regular Linux distro, running native code. They could have kept the Java language and their Java based APIs by using GCJ in the SDK. The Android SDK would then compile to ARM object code rather than Dalvik bytecodes, and as a developer you'd probably never notice.

On the other hand, there are Python implementations than run on virtual machines, notably Jython for Java and IronPython for dotNet. Neither of Jython or IronPython could reasonably be ported to Dalvik, since Dalvik is a register machine and JVM and CLR are stack machines, but it is demonstrably practical to run a dynamic language on a VM.

So the issue here is one of runtime architecture, not source language or libraries. Why did they decide to go with a new VM instead of making android more like a regular Linux distro, running native code? I don't know. I suspect relying heavily on a VM simplifies porting the OS to new hardware (as we've seen in early half baked attempts at Android tablets). Architecture neutral object code makes it easier to get the support of companies like Intel, who don't have a significant presence in the current, ARM dominated mobile market. An Atom based tablet would be a first class citizen in the Android tablet world; you wouldn't have to convince developers to provide and support different binaries for different processors.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Anonymous Coward]

Me again. I just remembered. The introduction of the predicate incurred a significant performance penalty.

The same thing except with hard coded comparisons:

def quick_sort(unsorted):
        if len(unsorted) > 1:
                pivot = unsorted.pop(randrange(len(unsorted)))
                left = quick_sort([ v for v in unsorted if v < pivot ])
                right = quick_sort([ v for v in unsorted if v >= pivot ])
                return left + [pivot] + right
        else:
                return unsorted

A comparison on my system sorting a million values between -999,999,999,999 and 999,999,999,999 gave the following:

with predicate: 17.386 seconds
without predicate: 10.387 seconds

It would seem they haven't put a lot of work into optimizing lambda functions. I would think a simple comparison like that would get inlined by the compiler. It would be interesting to see if Scala suffers a performance penalty.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[ChunderDownunder]

further sensationalist headlines undermine the motivation for the icedrobot project which is to liberate android not from Oracle but from smartphones. i.e. to run android apps on any touchscreen enabled OS

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[gtall]

Those tricks for JITS have been around since the 80's. If the US Patent Office didn't patent any piece of toilet paper that walks in the door and punt their job to the legal system, there would be no software patents.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[phantomfive]

I don't know, I didn't read the patents well enough to understand if there is good prior art or not. I don't like reading and understanding patents when I don't have to because it's a pain. It might be that they found some small thing that had never been done before.

Google seems to agree with you. It will be very funny if they are right, because that will mean Microsoft paid hundreds of billions of dollars to Sun to license some invalid patents.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[sjames]

Personally I find that python is much BETTER all around. But yeah, the existing app base can't just be dumped without consequences.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[internettoughguy]

Python with static types sounds a lot like Cython to me, which can compile/generate (most) python code into C. You can also specify static types as you feel comfortable, and gain performance when you do.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Xest]

But why?

If the patents issues aren't to do with the syntax, and when Java is far and away the most used language in the world and has been for around a decade now, then why go for a niche syntax that relatively few people are comfortable with when you can use one that pretty much every programmer can work with immediately, because even if they're not Java programmers, then so what, who isn't comfortable with C++ style syntax?

Sure they could've used Python, but they could also have used PHP, they could've used Perl, they could've used Visual Basic or any less common syntax. Why use these when there's a more popular, more commonly used, perfectly good syntax out there already?

Any number of people can argue the merits of their pet language, but it's often stupid and petty, easier to just use the language that is demonstrably more popular and uses a syntax that most people are more familiar with.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[mabinogi]

I wasn't advocating Python as such - if I was to push a pet language, it'd be Smalltalk - I was just rebutting a specific point.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the fuck are they using a virtual machine anyway...it's not that mobile phones are so superfast that it would make any technical sense to run a VM or use a JIT compiler. Why can't these morons just use a compiler to cross-compile to the target platforms? Why don't the use a microkernel OS with a rich set if dynamic, precompiler libraries?

Sorry, this Java VM idea was crap and doomed forever already in the 90s and it hasn't become better since then.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[Xest]

Fair enough, then I agree, really, the language just doesn't matter technically as you say, and presumably was chosen purely for pragmatic reasons- i.e. the existing massive skillset.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[krischik]

That won't help as dalvik and JavaVM are the problem and not Java-the-Language. And if the language where the problem we would go for Scala which is a dam side better then Python and is much better integrated into JavaVM.

Re:Why Support Java At All?

[gig]

The existing app base can be dumped right now with much less consequence than in a few years when a court impounds and destroys Dalvik. Google could just refund the extremely small amount of money that users have paid for Android apps thus far and start over. That would be much less time and money wasted than letting this court case hang over Android development for the next few years and then kill a future version of the Dalvik platform.

Google very clearly was relying on Sun being a pushover. Sun foiled that plan by selling itself to Oracle, who are not a pushover. Google gambled, and they lost. Time to move on.

What language should they use? C. Duh. 80% of the mobile app market is C. More than 80% of the PC app market is C.

Android without Java...

[Microlith]

Might as well use MeeGo. At least then contributions from the community and improvements to various parts of the operating system would benefit more than just one platform.

Re:Android without Java...

[kangsterizer]

I'd like to mod this +25 unfortunately it's not possible.
Meego might or might not be "the best" but it's the only completely free and truly open platform.

and it's therefore the one we should promote if we don' wanna end up all locked up one day.. not only that but it guarantees long term updates on one's phone since we can just update and compile it.

even with android, first the development model is closed, and second many parts end up being proprietary or out of the mainline trees (eg the Android kernel) and are thus a pain to update

finally, it's a different model than the dalkvik/android model where you have almost just one process forking away more processes -not exactly proper unix model - android is very non-standard, and non-standard makes things harder.

Re:Android without Java...

[rsborg]

Who's to say there aren't submarine patent issue with MeeGo as well?
Given that *patent grants* are the problem, then maybe it's best if Google doesn't go run behind another rock and stand up and fight.
Oracle has the patents and unless they're invalidated, Android will always be in their sights.

On another note, is this the reason why Apple is so against Java and other VM-based code running on their system?

Re:Android without Java...

[slashgrim]

Hopefully MeeGo doesn't go the way of the dodo (aka Maemo)...I was a huge Maemo fan on my n800 until that debacle. Now I'll only consider a full open source stack (like Ubuntu Netbook edition...hoping for a phone edition). Maybe, just maybe, WebOS since HTML5 skills easily translate to desktops.

Re:Android without Java...

[gig]

> On another note, is this the reason why Apple is so against Java and other VM-based code running on their system?

I think Apple's position is that whatever you are doing in client-side Java is better done either in Cocoa or HTML5, which are Apple's yin yang of app platforms. The HTML5 app could include running Java on a server of course. On Apple platforms, both Cocoa and HTML5 have 1-click installs and everything just works. Client-side Java essentially cannot compete with the user experience of Cocoa or the cross-platform experience of HTML5. Actually, client-side Java can't even compete with the user experience of HTML5. Apple is all about user experience because their customers are users, not developers, or carriers, or hardware makers, or advertisers. And either Cocoa or HTML5 has more apps by itself than Java.

Take that Microsoft,

[Anonymous Coward]

IN YOUR FACE!

Ugh! Oracle

[RudyHartmann]

I am really starting to totally loathe Oracle. I know I am not the only person that feels this way also. Oracle's PR is going to only make more people avoid any of their products. Can you say, "slow decline"? There's another big software company that is almost irrelevant on mobile phones that I think will also experience this. Guess who they might be.

Re:Ugh! Oracle

[jonwil]

Oracle knows they are going to get negative flack from programmers and stuff.

But the people who make the decision to use Oracle technologies (Oracle database, Oracle J2EE and all the other technologies) are usually not programmers, its PHBs who like the fact that some guy in a suit is saying good things about this "Oracle" thing and are duped into buying it (and the fact that in many cases there is no comparable alternative that is as good as the Oracle product unless you are willing to sign your soul to Microsoft or IBM)

Re:Ugh! Oracle

[CynicTheHedgehog]

But the people who make the decision to use Oracle technologies (Oracle database, Oracle J2EE and all the other technologies) are usually not programmers, its PHBs who like the fact that some guy in a suit is saying good things about this "Oracle" thing and are duped into buying it (and the fact that in many cases there is no comparable alternative that is as good as the Oracle product unless you are willing to sign your soul to Microsoft or IBM)

In my experience this is not true. I happen to love Java as a language and a JEE because of its openness and support and innovation within the community. I choose JEE as a platform when developing large business applications because of the built-in support for the features I need -- clustering/failover, high availability JNDI, XA transaction support, messaging, connection pooling, servlets, AJAX, etc. Java also makes sense in many situations because the applications that are being integrated with are also JEE based, especially in the enterprise.

As far as I know, Java is also the only platform with freely available tools like Maven, Hudson (now Jenkins), JUnit, Sonar, FindBugs, etc. that automate dependency management, continuous build, and code analysis. (All of these are free, community-supported tools, by the way.)

In fact, for what I do, I can't think of a reason *not* to use Java. I've been in countless mergers, and every other company we've merged with had a Java shop.

The JEE stack I prefer is RedHat/JBoss, but I've used others, including Oracle. Oracle's is terrible, and one hopes that they will make use of Glassfish and NetBeans to improve their commercial offering. (I love NetBeans.) With Oracle's licensing terms and cost it would definitely be a management decision to use that particular suite of applications, but that should not reflect on Java or JEE in general.

Knowing Oracle...

[drb226]

I'm pretty sure Oracle would just attack IcedRobot if it ever got big..."GNU-compatible" or not.

wrong choice of vm

[cfriedt]

JamVM puts OpenJDK to shame on ARM in terms of both size and speed.

Re:wrong choice of vm

[phantomfive]

The point isn't how fast it is, it isn't how large it is; it's whether the virtual machine in question violates the Oracle patents or not. If it is a fast virtual machine, it probably does.

Re:wrong choice of vm

[cfriedt]

I guess that might matter in the (insert single-digit number here) country / countries that actually recognize (these) software patents. The rest of us are free to do what we want with / for free software ;-)

Why mobile OS is not needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do we need a mobile OS for machines that have GHz CPUs, +512MB RAM and several GB of flash ? I can get a beagleboard and run Debian or Ubuntu on it. Qt could be used to design a UI for a smaller screen. A few telephone daemons would be needed. Why do I need an iPhone OS, Symbian, Windoes Mobile OS or Android apart from enabling companies to reap the benefits of creating a platform ?

Re:Why mobile OS is not needed

[asm2750]

Because there is something called a battery and its charge is finite. Having a lightweight OS that is built from day one to sip mAh is a better way to go about it.

Re:Why mobile OS is not needed

[Anonymous Coward]

High End smartphones (e.g. HTC Desire) don't last more than a day. So does my Thinkpad.

Re:Why mobile OS is not needed

[Anthony Mouse]

I can get a beagleboard and run Debian or Ubuntu on it. Qt could be used to design a UI for a smaller screen.

It's not as simple as that. You have to modify more than the UI framework, you pretty much have to rewrite the UI for all the individual applications too, and if you have to do that you might as well create a UI framework which is actually designed for phones. By which point you end up with something like Android.

I suspect your complaint is more that typically when you get an Android phone, the phone company acts like they own it and fills it full of crapware and lockdown fail. But you can always get the crapware-resistant Google version.

Re:Why mobile OS is not needed

[the linux geek]

Such a framework already exists in Maemo. It's called Hildon, and unlike Android, it runs on Real Linux.

Re:Why mobile OS is not needed

[MichaelSmith]

See QtMoko but getting an OS to work cleanly on a mobile is very hard. You have to deal with some many corner cases which will really annoy the user if you get them wrong.

Re:Why mobile OS is not needed

[Stevecrox]

Considering Symbian is such an OS and was open sourced I've always wondered why Google didn't take Symbian scrap the Series 60 UI and put their own in.

As said in times of yore,

[asm2750]

ORACLE = One Rich Asshole Larry Ellison.

Re:As said in times of yore,

[asm2750]

Nertz I meant, One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison. Blah

Re:As said in times of yore,

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Well. That sure added a lot to the conversation.

Why should they?

[drolli]

There is no way oracle can win the fight against all the companies which would be hurt if this goes trough. They will settle and make some patent agreement in the end.

Re:Why should they?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why's that? What are they going to counter sue Oracle over?

Re:Why should they?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are not going to counter-sue. They will sue about completely unrelated things.

Re:Why should they?

[gig]

That's not how it works. The fact that many companies have benefited from Google's wrongdoing does not make what Google did any less evil. There is no Robin Hood clause that says it's OK that you stole something from Oracle because you gave it away to a bunch of companies that are smaller than Oracle. Especially not when Google did it for their own selfish reasons. Especially not when the thing they stole was available to license for a small fee.

Re:Why should they?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. But i honestly ask: So oracle is licensing software (java) for mobile phones which contains phone access apis, multimedia apis etc? Does oracle really want that Samsung, Sony-Ericsson, Creative, HTC and so on examine their own patent stacks in order to look which of their patents are violated? As much as i hate it, i am sure that java when installed on mobile phones touches quite a few old patents (in they eyes of a lawyer).

Is it just me...

[Anonymous Coward]

... or is there something terribly awkward about this headline? It took me a good minute to confirm that it was a sentence for some reason.

Re:Is it just me...

[Tumbleweed]

It's not just you. It IS awkward. It's also the title of the next Star Wars movie. It's a prequel to the prequels, and concentrates mainly on the last Sith out of which Sidious became the only survivor. They include Darth Ellison, as well as the kinda-retarded Sith, Darths Fiorina and Whitman.

As an aside, Retarded Sith would be a great name for a band. Just sayin'.

Re:Is it just me...

[msclrhd]

StarTrek 12 : The Wrath of Oracle where Data goes in search of his lost friend Dalvik.

Google can use GPL java on GPL ... not Apache

[Anonymous Coward]

Google can only use GPL java code legally on GPL products. Since Android is Apache 2.0, no matter how you want to look at it, the fact is that they are in violation of the license of any Java code they use.

Re:Google can use GPL java on GPL ... not Apache

[Anonymous Coward]

that is not true.

The GPL (at least, the sane, v2.0 version) only requires that the license you use for derivative works is no more restrictive than the GPL.
Apache is less restrictive than the GPL, so there's no problem there.

Re:Google can use GPL java on GPL ... not Apache

[lindi]

Says who? ;-) http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html specifically says that apache2 has some requirements that are not in gpl2: "Please note that this license is not compatible with GPL version 2, because it has some requirements that are not in the older version. These include certain patent termination and indemnification provisions."

They don't have too

[Anonymous Coward]

All they need is ONE legal precedence. That will force everybody else to either settle or face an almost immediate summary judgement.

meatspace implications

[Tumbleweed]

>> But cellphones are about to be as powerful as desktop PCs and laptops.

> Not really. They're already as powerful as desktop PCs were in, I don't know, 2002. But by the time they're as powerful as today's desktop PCs, desktop PCs will be faster too -- if only because you can stuff a lot more cores in a PC with a 200W power budget than you can into a phone with a 1W power budget.

You're correct on the hardware end, but you're missing the meatspace implications.

Most people don't need a computer any more powerful than a 2002-era machine that has hardware accelerated video (unless you're a gamer, of course, or someone with a hobby or profession that requires something more). This is why so many people CAN still get things done with old machines. Stick a modern browser on a Windows 2000 box, and you can do basically everything most people need, as long as the video stuff is offloaded into a modern video card.

Cellphones are approaching that stage _rapidly_, and will most likely be there with the upcoming quad core SoCs coming out by the end of this year. The implementation as a desktop for the masses is a trivial exercise. A dock that lets you use your cellphone AS your primary Websurfing/emailing machine is all most people need at home. Game on your console or have a gaming rig set up if you need something more, but we're just about to the point of having all the computing power non-specialists need, all in a cellphone.

The new quad-core SoCs can drive 2560x1600 panels (and more), full Blu-Ray level 1080p HD video (multiple streams, even), etc. There's honestly just not that much LEFT that people need, from a practical standpoint.

Do you hear that? That is the sound of inevitability.

Re:meatspace implications

[Tumbleweed]

Jesus, but the new /. is a fucked-up mess. *sigh*

Re:meatspace implications

[gad_zuki!]

>Most people don't need a computer any more powerful than a 2002-era machine that has hardware accelerated video

  Most people want a fast and capable machine that won't limit them. They may not see themselves as gamers but they may have kids who want to play a Sims game. They want want to mess around in Second Life or watch full screen HD video.

The argument that most people just need a basic browser capable computer has been debunked for a long time and is one of the main reasons we see linux fail in the desktop marketplace. Jane User not only needs capable machine but a fast one and she has 5 facebook pages open, outlook 2010 running, and all sorts of bloatware to run her multifunction printer and Darwin knows what else. She may also run XP mode for some old application or occasionally edit the videos and photos from her camera.

A modern multicore machine is in a whole different ballpark than a Windows 2000 circa machine. Your antivirus is locking up your browser. Flash doesn't beat up your computer. Heck, right now we're looking at affordable 128 megabyte SSDs coming into the mainstream. Jane User will want that level of performance. She'll see her friends computer that wakes from hibernation or boots up in 6 or 7 seconds and wonder why her machine takes 30 seconds.

Every so often someone makes your prediction "640k is all anyone will need" and they're always wrong. Turns out both developers and users will make use of faster hardware and the market will continue to demand it. No cell phone with a docking station will replace that unless we have some incredible mobile CPU breakthrough and people stop seeing their mobile devices as borderline disposable. Laptops and desktops will be here for quite some time.

Re:meatspace implications

[Tumbleweed]

Way to go in not knowing anything about what this year's crop of SoCs is capable of. Full-screen hardware accelerated video and flash is already here. The quad-core ones coming out later this year are capable of WAY more than that - MULTIPLE streams of hardware accelerated HD video, resolutions up to 2560x1600 and more. Sims and Second Life and full screen HD video are all very easy to accomplish on mobile SoCs by the end of this year. Get with the program.

Re:meatspace implications

[Anthony Mouse]

Cellphones are approaching that stage _rapidly_, and will most likely be there with the upcoming quad core SoCs coming out by the end of this year. The implementation as a desktop for the masses is a trivial exercise. A dock that lets you use your cellphone AS your primary Websurfing/emailing machine is all most people need at home. Game on your console or have a gaming rig set up if you need something more, but we're just about to the point of having all the computing power non-specialists need, all in a cellphone.

Certainly phones will get fast enough for most things, but for the things they're not good at -- playing high end video games, having a full size keyboard -- you still need a PC-like thing, and then you'll want them to talk to each other. Especially because the big problem phones have, and likely will continue to have for at least a few more years, is low storage availability. You can't fit 1000 hours of HD video of little Johnny learning to ride his bicycle and birthday parties and whatever on a 16GB flash drive, but you do want all that video to be immediately accessible when you're at Aunt Jenny's house and she spontaneously wants to see it. And you don't want it all on YouTube because it's private.

But the real interesting thing with a powerful phone is going to be that all that computing power is energy-efficient and therefore always-on, with an always-on network connection. The idea of a phone as a personal server is something that apparently hasn't much caught on yet, but it could be huge, especially once you start having them directly communicate with other phones. Distributed cloud FTW.

Re:meatspace implications

[Anonymous Coward]

They may not see themselves as gamers but they may have kids who want to play a Sims game. They want want to mess around in Second Life or watch full screen HD video.

Android phones play HD video (and some even have HDMI ports to send it to your TV) and also have The Sims 3 available for them.

Sounds like someone needs to lose their prejudices...

Re:meatspace implications

[Anonymous Coward]

After having read a page full of 'first 1 and a half sentences' of replies which all then mysteriously cut off, I'm inclined to agree, though I'm not sure if I'm replying to the right post or not.

I'm finding it harder and harder to get any sense out of /., and finding less and less inclination to try.

P.S. Captcha was 'cryptic'! I think that there might be something in there for all of us.

Re:meatspace implications

[hitmark]

Funny thing is, more and more "high end" games are console ports that still make use of 5+ year old hardware.

As for keyboards, look up bluetooth HID. Even the iphone can make use of a external keyboard these days.

Re:meatspace implications

[Anonymous Coward]

How many kinds of clueless can one be?

Most people want a fast and capable machine that won't limit them. They may not see themselves as gamers but they may have kids who want to play a Sims game. They want want to mess around in Second Life or watch full screen HD video.

So, you let your kids play around with your cellphone? I bet for most people a cellphone is a personal device.

The argument that most people just need a basic browser capable computer has been debunked for a long time and is one of the main reasons we see linux fail in the desktop marketplace.

O'RLY? That's first of all a non sequitur, and secondly completely unrelated and thirdly nothing but a lame troll.

Jane User not only needs capable machine but a fast one and she has 5 facebook pages open, outlook 2010 running, and all sorts of bloatware to run her multifunction printer and Darwin knows what else. She may also run XP mode for some old application or occasionally edit the videos and photos from her camera.

Now, that's your definition of a "capable machine", one that obviously per definition runs Windows Bloat 7, and runs on an Intel CPU. That's not only a total B.S definition, but also shows the magnitude of your ignorance and narrow-mindedness, as does the rest of your post, but I'll stop here, as the rest is just more of the same. Get back when you've come back to earth and met some real people rather than the rest of the MS-drones in the cubicles around you.

Re:meatspace implications

[JamesP]

The argument that most people just need a basic browser capable computer has been debunked for a long time and is one of the main reasons we see linux fail in the desktop marketplace.

Being a basic browser capable computer is about 80% of the iPad's success. Same with Android

Linux has been failing in the PC world because manufacturers can't come up with a linux distro that doesn't stink. Ubuntu is one of the best, and still sucks.

Re:meatspace implications

[gbjbaanb]

what you forget is that CPU power requirements are going to be a limiting factor even on desktops - no-one wants a huge electricity bill especially as costs of electricity is going up and up. So all CPUs are being designed with low-power-when-not-stressed modes that ensure your PC doesn't suck up juice when you're just staring at the next /. post thinking "what a numpty!"

So, if *all* CPUs are designed to work low-power, and enhance them to be capped on the power they consume at peak demand, you can put them in a mobile device, tell it 10% peak only, and use the same CPU for the desktop at 100% peak use. Then you can tell that same CPU in the mobile device that it can use 100% peak power use when docked.

Suddenly, your mobile device is as powerful as your desktop, when its plugged into the mains and connected to your monitor/TV via HDMI. Suddenly no-one needs desktops anymore.

Sure, there's heat issues I've ignored here, but this approach has been used in laptops for years.

Well, all that's slightly futuristic, but not massively so. I can imagine desktops being relegated to a niche area as everyone turns to the convenience (and better OSes) of mobile devices.

Re:meatspace implications

[Anonymous Coward]

....and most people does not play "high end video games" on their computers. Neither does full size keyboard make much of a problem, as seen below, bluetooth keyboard are available, not to mention that most phones have an usb connection you could utilize, if you for some reason would prefer not to take the obvious route which is using a dock. As for storage, what's wrong with using one of those "NAS" things DLINK and friends sell quite cheaply? I'm amazed people aren't catching up with this, I guess vendors are just too scared of Microsoft.

Re:meatspace implications

[Anonymous Coward]

>Jane User not only needs capable machine but a fast one and she has 5 facebook pages open, outlook 2010 running, and all sorts of bloatware to run her multifunction printer and Darwin knows what else.

My Palm Pre - 2 years old
5 Facebook pages. Check
Outlook 2010. Well Gmail.
Printer. Who needs a printer when I carry ALL my documents in my pocket?
What else. Youtube, Google Talk, Skype.

For £5 a month I get 500Mb on my pay as you go phone (no contract). I got this phone as other friends got smart phones and switched from traditional mobile stuff like texts and calls to instant messages and Skype (on their phones). Now if I'm at home I Skype on my wireless and when away I instant message and email, I could call but that costs money.

My friends Nexus One - 1 year old
She downloads Bittorrent music and video on her fucking phone. She doesn't even have a computer, she borrows my laptop for an afternoon to write her CV, gets me to save it as PDF and then emails it out from her phone.

>They may not see themselves as gamers but they may have kids who want to play a Sims game. They want want to mess around in Second Life or watch full screen HD video.
That's the long tail now AND new phones have HDMI 1080p outputs. The only thing that's missing from is a keyboard you can use all day and new phones are starting to come with USB ports. Also my friend has a Wii and a 360, like normal people who want to play games...

Re:meatspace implications

[tepples]

manufacturers can't come up with a linux distro that doesn't stink. Ubuntu is one of the best, and still sucks.

In which three ways does Ubuntu+Wine outsuck Windows? For example, where's the equivalent on Windows to the huge library of free, Free apps on Ubuntu Software Center?

Re:meatspace implications

[tepples]

Printer. Who needs a printer when I carry ALL my documents in my pocket?

Good luck sending one of these documents to somebody who doesn't carry a phone or somebody who has chosen to carry a dumbphone in order to save 90% off monthly service costs. (Compare 7 USD/mo for dumbphone at Virgin Mobile USA to 70 USD/mo for smartphone at the big four.)

For £5 a month I get 500Mb on my pay as you go phone (no contract).

Most people living in a country that uses the $ don't have the money to move to a country that uses the £. Pay as you go data plans and the phones are nowhere near that cheap in the United States market.

and when away I instant message and email, I could call but that costs money.

When away, how do you keep in touch with people who don't stay available on IM and e-mail all the time? I use my dumbphone primarily to arrange rides to and from places where or during times when the city buses do not go. Family members who would give me a ride aren't very computer literate, and they largely stick to land lines.

she borrows my laptop for an afternoon to write her CV, gets me to save it as PDF and then emails it out from her phone.

That doesn't help if an employer prefers that a cover letter and CV be on paper instead of an e-mailed PDF.

The only thing that's missing from is a keyboard you can use all day

Which a laptop includes at no additional cost.

and new phones are starting to come with USB ports.

As a device, not necessarily as a host. Even those that can act as a host often need an expensive proprietary cable.

Also my friend has a Wii and a 360, like normal people who want to play games...

Are you trying to imply that "normal people" don't want to play indie games? Console makers have in general been hostile to micro-ISVs.

Re:meatspace implications

[cynyr]

if judging by angry birds and my current phone(my touch 4g), I'd say that multiple HD streams and the sims games will reduce my battery life from 1.5hours of gaming to 30 minutes or less. Unless these new SoCs also come with new battery tech it won't matter that my phone can do that. Even the iPhone doesn't have enough battery IMO. Needs to be on playing music(10-12 hours per day), checking the news, and say 30 minutes of angry birds a day for at least 5 days between charges. charges should take 10-15 minutes for a full charge, and batteries need to take 350-400 charge cycles without degrading or they need to be cheep and user replaceable.

Re:meatspace implications

[cynyr]

My android phone, a my touch 4g, can't do my h264 lvl4.1 high profile dvd rips, the bit rates are too high, and i'm using the advanced features of h264. Most phones also will not play a simple streamrip of a blueray movie. granted i can't do it on my desktop without the help of my gpu.

Re:meatspace implications

[Kjella]

In which three ways does Ubuntu+Wine outsuck Windows? For example, where's the equivalent on Windows to the huge library of free, Free apps on Ubuntu Software Center?

1. If you're going to bring WINE into it, you've kind of lost already. Windows is vastly superior to WINE for running the vast, vast library of closed source software out there on top of having the most important open source apps like OpenOffice, Firefox and so on - if it doesn't exist for Windows nobody saw the value in porting it. Many people have this one "speciality" app that there's no good open source replacement for, it adds up. And you can be almost certain that if your needs change, there is some niche app that'll run on Windows. You have more choice from free/Free to cheap to expensive software depending on your needs.

2. Stability and quality on equivalent parts to Windows 7. The kernel is rock stable, because all servers critically depend on it. X, Gnome/KDE and the menus/panels are not. The equivalent of basic tools like the Explorer (not IE, the file explorer) are not. The system applets like network/printer/bluetooth etc. are not. My impression that they're all aiming for the social media semantic desktop 2.0 when the traditional "support and manage my hardware, launch my apps" desktop still needs work. True you can have more than one thought at once, but it's a bit like tweaking the car seat controls when the engine/brakes/transmission/steeing needs work.

3. If I report a bug, there's no support department, if nobody picks it up your report is dropped on the floor. Fix it yourself, you got what you paid for, keep testing and re-reporting that it's still a problem otherwise it's "solved" by attrition. Same goes for release testing, developers work on master and catching regressions and breakage is up to the beta testers aka users. In short, that on Windows it's your bug and nobody expects me to dig through a foreign source code in a language I barely know in search of a fix. True there are some issues with lock-in, forced obsolescence and featuritis, but closed source companies tend to fix the bugs and deliver the features most users want, as opposed to hobbyists that do what the developers want.

Re:meatspace implications

[tepples]

if it doesn't exist for Windows nobody saw the value in porting it.

Not necessarily. Under 64-bit Windows, if you are using one-off or low-volume hardware, it might not have a 64-bit driver. And as I understand the digital signature requirements of 64-bit Windows and the code signing certificate issuance policies of companies like VeriSign, only an established company can obtain the certificate to digitally sign a driver for public distribution, not an individual enthusiast. Most people aren't going to accept a solution that requires pressing a button at every startup and putting always-on-top "Test Mode" in all four corners of the screen.

If I report a bug [on Ubuntu], there's no support department [unlike on Windows]

For anything in main (not universe), Canonical is the support department. The stuff in universe is stuff that wouldn't come with Windows anyway. Windows doesn't even have a public bug database.

Re:meatspace implications

[deathguppie]

Most people will use whatever is convenient and easiest to use. The reason Linux hasn't made it on to the mainstream desktop is because there is a small learning curve with a non familiar interface and all new applications they have never heard of. This is one of the main reasons I won't switch back to windows. I have to much time invested in learning and understanding my Linux systems and I don't want to re-learn it the windows way (and pay good money for the privilege).

This schema fails with IOS, or even android. There is now a large enough user base to support desktop usage based on those two phone OS's and applications. The Ipad is a good example of that. As time and processing ability increases so will the abilities of the apps. It is a perfect incubator. The current phone UI is limited by screen space and power, lowering the barrier of entry for new developers and their applications. As the ability of the phone expands so will the applications ability. The user is already there.

Re:meatspace implications

[JamesP]

1 - try to install a printer on Ubuntu (really, try), try sharing it with other machines
2 - OpenOffice
3 - music players (not to mention the mp3 issue) Rhythmbox? really???

the list goes on

Re:meatspace implications

[Tumbleweed]

Yeah, you can't judge battery life of the new quad-core SoCs by any current tech. The new dual-core ones have much better power management, as well as being built on a new process which makes them inherently more power-efficient as well. The quad-cores go even further with both. Dropping from a 45nm process to a 32 or 28nm process will drop power usage _significantly_, and the power usage in the new SoCs is WAY smarter than before. The new ones can vary the amount of power used PER core significantly, and can also power down individual cores entirely. The current single-core SoCs can vary the amount of power used a little bit, and that's about it. The chipsets are also shrinking their power usage, and new display technologies also help with this.

One of the new quad-core SoCs (can't remember which one) was claimed to be able to play like 4-5 hours of full HD video.

Something that would help these new phones get much better battery life would be a better network of cell towers, so they're not always hunting for a signal - that's a real drain on a cellphone. :(

Re:meatspace implications

[m50d]

Five years ago you could've made the same argument that people would always need the power of a desktop and laptops were never going to displace them. But it turns out they have.

Re-examination

[Lorien_the_first_one]

I see that Google is asking the PTO to re-examine 4 of the patents in question and will probably ask for a stay of the proceedings until that is done. That should be good for a delay of 3-4 years, ten years tops. And there are 3 more in the wings that Google is likely to throw into the re-examination bin. If the PTO says yes, Oracle is going to have find some other way to expedite things if they want to see any money soon.

'tis true

[symbolset]

Madam, I swear I use no art at all

That he's mad, 'tis true, 'tis true 'tis pity,

And pity 'tis 'tis true—a foolish figure,

But farewell it, for I will use no art.

- Hamlet, Act 2 Scene 2, Wm Shakespear.

Oops.

[symbolset]

Good point. Sorry. Lost the topic. I do that now and then.

Well done. good P.R.

[unity100]

I just decided to get a new IDE for web development. im a web professional, you see. and, while viewing IDEs, i had had dwelt on Eclipse.

i decided not to use it, in order not to put my beans and time on something that is that intertwined with Java, only because of Oracle's bad reputation with this control freak/closed ip business.

see. bad reputation hampers something that runs on your platform. in turn, that hampers your platform. reputation counts a lot.

Re:Well done. good P.R.

[Billly Gates]

Eclipse is owned by IBM. They have their own Java development environment including compilers free of Oracle. If I owned a java shop I would rather switch to them than to use Oracle and my guess is Oracle is trying to act like IBM.

Netbeans is what I use and it is unfortunately owned by Oracle. :-( I want to gradually free myself from it soon if I make time to learn Eclipse. Both Eclipse and Netbeans are great for php, C++, and even python. You do not have to use them to develop Java software.

Re:Well done. good P.R.

[mswhippingboy]

Eclipse is not owned by IBM. It is open-source licensed under the EPL, which is an OSI approved open source license. True, Eclipse was originally developed by IBM, but is now managed by the Eclipse Foundation.

NetBeans is not owned by Oracle. It is open-source, but with a clusterf*ck of different licenses (some portions licensed under the LGPL, some under GPLv2 and some under GPLv2 with classpath exception (OpenJDK components), some under CDDL, and a couple others dealing with JavaME, JavaCard and JavaFX).

Both of these are considered open-source, although Oracle's handling of OpenJDK, it's insistence on enforcing the classpath exception, and it's current litigation with regard to Android does give one pause as to it's commitment to open-source (understatement acknowledged).

Re:Well done. good P.R.

[unity100]

basically, is any part of what eclipse runs on, owned by oracle or not ?

Re:Well done. good P.R.

[mswhippingboy]

In short, no. Eclipse runs on the standard JVM, so it is granted the right to Oracle's patents since the standard JVM has passed the TCK.

Re:Well done. good P.R.

[unity100]

is there any possibility of oracle closing down or limiting JVM ?

Re:Well done. good P.R.

[mswhippingboy]

IANAL, but I don't see how they can since it is under a GPLv2 license, but with enough money and lawyers I suppose anything is possible. It's not likely however since that would probably cause a massive rejection by the user base. Right now, the user base seems willing to accept the status quo since Oracle seems to be moving Java in a good direction technically. Still, I'm hopeful that Google will prevail and maybe even invalidate some of Oracle's patents.

Re:Well done. good P.R.

[Billly Gates]

I looked into IBM's Java SDK.

The link is here and was mentioned on slashdot 7 or 8 years ago. I played with it on Gentoo as it gave me the option to use the one from Sun or IBM. I found the IBM to use less ram than the Sun one on my system when running early versions of eclipse.

Unfortunately, it looks like it is Unix only right now unless you have an iBM server lying around that runs Windows.

Long story short, Oracle mentioned they wont go after IBM. It is safe because they have a licensing agreement with IBM from SUN protecting them from any liabilities. If you want to be oracle free and you run Linux you can run eclipse with the IBM sdk. It was free when I used it last but that was awhile back.

Re:Well done. good P.R.

[Billly Gates]

"NetBeans is not owned by Oracle"

Sun bought Netbeans up a while back. They tried to make a commercial version of it called ForteCE or something dumb like that before trying to rebundle it as a SunOne stack. I download Netbeans from Oracle's website today.

Re:Well done. good P.R.

[mswhippingboy]

All true, and the trademark "NetBeans" is owned by Oracle. However in 2000, Sun released the software as open-source. You can still download it from Oracle, but their main website is http://netbeans.org/ (emphasis org).

Any questions related to the license can be found at http://wiki.netbeans.org/NetBeansUserFAQ#License_and_Legal_Questions

Re:Well done. good P.R.

[gig]

Yet I bet you would be the first one to complain if Google launched a free clone of your website.

Go with Qt, native C++

[Anonymous Coward]

Google should make and advertise a well supported port of Qt for android.
This would attract most of the developers that Nokia abandoned
with the decision to go with M$ and C#. Qt is native C++, no
VM patent worries.

Go language

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has an easy, fast, garbage collected, and typesafe language in the making called Go. It runs on ARM, so it is the ideal candidate for Android.

If I were Google I would get rid of Java asap and start investing in Go a little bit more. It still lacks a few things such as a nice IDE and lots of libraries.

Re:Go language

[nkh]

I've said this a thousand times. Android would be the perfect testbed for golang. It's statically typed, small, and its syntax is easy to learn and to use.

Re:Go language

[mswhippingboy]

Oracle's main complaint regarding Android is it's alleged patent infringements in the JVM. These patents are broad enough that they could apply to the Go VM as well, so changing languages would not solve the problem. A simpler solution would be for the Dalvik VM to change the way it works internally to sidestep the patent issues. This would nullify Oracle's patent claims and yet still allow already developed Android apps to run unchanged. However, given the "broad scope" of the Oracle patents, this may not be possible.

Can Android Without Dalvik Avoid Oracle's Wrath?

[WSOGMM]

Can Slashdot Without Avoid Grammar Wrong Titles?

Might as well use MeeGo....

[Anonymous Coward]

.....just as soon as it becomes a debian packaged OS.

Mod parent up.

[sproketboy]

I wish I had mod points.

I thought Java was Open Source?

[bl8n8r]

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/06/11/13/0724252/Sun-Open-Sources-Java-Under-GPL

Sooooooo..... what's the problem? If there are 447 patent infringement problems in Java itself, it seems like the issue is going to affect more than just Google.

Re:I thought Java was Open Source?

[mswhippingboy]

Java is "technically" open-source under GPLv2 (OpenJDK), but it's license contains an extra clause (classpath exception) designed to prevent someone from forking it. In order to fork Java and be granted protection from enforcement of Oracle's patents, the fork must pass Oracle's TCK (compatibility test). However, the catch-22 here is that Oracle will not license the TCK, so no fork can pass the TCK, so no fork can be granted patent protection, so, as in the case of Google, they would get sued for patent infringement.

Perhaps this is a bit "Get off my lawn!", but...

[AtlantaSteve]

... what are you kids TALKING about? It seems like most of the replies on this branch of the thread are about convergence between phones and PC's, and eventually using productivity apps on your phone. Who on earth wants to use a 3-inch phone to manipulate a spreadsheet, type in a word processor, or anything beyond the most specialized niche of data-entry for any extended period of time? Even tablet devices are poorly-suited for such tasks.

The intended purpose of a smart phone is not content generation or productivity. Their purpose is to read stuff (e.g. important email, directions to the restaurant, etc), and to play Angry Birds... until you've finished your car trip or boring meeting, and can return to your PC. You might tap a one-sentence reply to an email (with crappy grammar and capitalization), or enter the name of the restaurant, but that's about it for productive data-entry.

The limitation behind this is not the number of CPU cores in the device, nor its power budget. The limitation is the form factor! Duh! You can cram a supercomputer into the thing... yet even with the most clever swipey-typing system, it will still suck compared to a keyboard and full-sized monitor screen. Now, the idea of docking stations for your phone (or perhaps a standard docking port for phones on your PC) does sound like it could be useful in some circumstances... but I'm highly skeptical of full-blown "convergence".

Dear Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you ditch Android in favor of Meego, which is Open Source, safe from those lawsuits and much faster than any Android VM implementation? Nokia just shot itself in the foot by going the Microsoft way, so take the chance for a deep change: Because of Java, Android will never be able to compete performance-wise with iOS or Windows Mobile phones, don't even think about that. Why don't you embrace the Meego platform and give us a better platform with no ties to other greedy corporations?

Before Android fanboys jump at my neck: I have two Android phones and no intention to swap them with Apple or Windows devices. Still Meego is much much faster, better, free and... yes, I was considering switching to Meego phones, then Nokia went the dark side. Damnit!...

Re:Dear Google

[mswhippingboy]

A better solution would be to "uncripple" the Linux already contained within Android and allow applications to be deployed directly on Linux. They could keep the Dalvik VM and the Android APIs in place. That way the 150,000+ Android apps would continue to work as well as native Linux apps. Best of both worlds.

To Google: Just buy the rights to Java from Oracle

[jasonla]

Seriously, Google uses Java prolifically enough across multiple platforms --- why not just buy the rights to Java and open source it. The company has tons of money, and I'm pretty sure Google would be a better steward. I mean, how long has Java 7 been in the works? Even Google's own Java architect thinks the language has fallen behind. Google could fix what's wrong with Java and in record time.

Re:Perhaps this is a bit "Get off my lawn!", but..

[White Shade]

If all the phones supported the same docking station standard, and the docking stations were available everywhere, then it would be badass.

Loss of economies of scale

[tepples]

In what universe is [a P4 equivalent] not enough?

In the universe of Adobe Flash Player, for one.

So how again are modern phones not powerful enough to replace PC's? When you answer, please remember that we're talking about the kind of PC required by the overwhelming majority of society

If "the overwhelming majority of society" switch to tablets and phones, the economies of scale might disappear from the PC market. Loss of economies of scale could make PCs unaffordable to individuals like me who have a good reason to need one, such as people who work from home or students. This has already happened to video games: the retail consoles are affordable but the devkits definitely aren't.

(email, word processing

I've tried typing on the on-screen keyboard of an Android-powered device, and it's a chore, especially compared to on my Dell netbook. E-mail (anything longer than SMS) and word processing definitely need a hardware keyboard.

facebook

Full disclosure: I can't speak to Facebook because I'm not a member.

pictures, etc).

Pictures has more than one meaning. Do you mean only coarse manipulations (e.g. color correction, rotation, cropping) to a photograph taken with a camera, or do you also mean drawing a picture? If the latter, what are the best free apps for creating sketches on an Android-powered device?

Devil's advocate

[tepples]

In other words, the desktop of anybody who's a content creator instead of a mere content consumer.

Devil's advocate: The general public appear happy to be "content consumers" (let's call them "audience" instead for now). If "content creators" (I prefer "authors") want to create, then they can seek venture capital, establish a business, and lease an office in order to qualify to buy a computer capable of doing so. At least this is what video game console makers such as Nintendo think.

Modern DSLRs with HDR take pictures that are individually bigger

The general public who have graduated from smartphone cameras appear happy with subcompact cameras. "DSLR? What's that? Those stupid Oreo cookie commercials I've seen?"

Hurm

[ErikZ]

Hey, doesn't Google know a thing or two about Databases?

Boy, it sure would be nice to have them enter the same market that Oracle is in, but at a drastically lower price.

I mean, it's not like they would *depend* on the money their new Database division wold bring in.

Re:Hurm

[mswhippingboy]

Interesting idea, however, if you think the patent waters around Android is thick with sharks, can you image the patent clusterf*ck surrounding the database arena with Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Sybase and a myriad of other vendors all staking claims to anything that remotely resembles storing information in a way that it can be retrieved?

Re:To Google: Just buy the rights to Java from Ora

[mswhippingboy]

why not just buy the rights to Java and open source it.

Ummm, that would require Oracle agreeing to give it up. Not likely to happen until pigs begin to fly.

Abbreviated comments

[tepples]

First 1 and a half sentence? You're seeing "abbreviated" comments, each of whose score is below a threshold that you can change. Click the subject to expand it, or at the top of the page, drag sliders to the right to expand all.

Re:Abbreviated comments

[Anonymous Coward]

And after moving the slider all the way to the right why do I need to click 'Get more comments' multiple times to see all the replies? Never mind, no need to answer, I'm never going to come back to this comment to see any answers.

Wait out your cellular contract first

[tepples]

Way to go in not knowing anything about what this year's crop of SoCs is capable of.

It's too bad people won't get to try this year's crop of SoCs without waiting for a 24-month cellular contract to run out. Most of these are priced not for up-front sale, as PDAs once were, but instead to be sold on an installment payment plan built into the monthly price of a voice and data service plan. T-Mobile even makes this explicit with its Even More Plus plan, which itemizes the service separately from the payment for the handset. Some people don't make nearly enough cell phone calls to justify switching from a dumbphone on a $5 per month plan* to the minimum required $40 per month voice plan that carriers require to activate a midrange to high-end smartphone. Nor do U.S. CDMA2000 carriers (VZW and Sprint) use CSIM cards, so you pretty much have to buy from the carrier.

* Virgin Mobile USA by Sprint, $15 per quarter top-up offered to customers who enroll in automatic top-ups.

Re:Wait out your cellular contract first

[Tumbleweed]

Yeah, it's annoying, but it's also true that most people in the U.S. would balk at paying the real price of those high-end smartphones up front. We like to buy everything on credit and pay through the nose with installment plans. That's even how we pay for our military. :)

I'm wondering if the Sony NGP will be usable as a cellphone through Google Voice or Skype or something, and be available without the voice part of a plan. That would be enough for me, and for a lot of others, I suspect.

Laches

[tepples]

Unlike trademarks, consistent enforcement is not a requirement of copyright claims or patent claims. However, these claims are still subject to estoppel by laches if the alleged infringer can show that the owner of the exclusive right delayed legal action with intent to harm.

Re:Perhaps this is a bit "Get off my lawn!", but..

[cynyr]

I'll need a pile more storage space in my cell phone to make that work. Have to seen the space requirements of Autodesk Inventor these days? not to mention the piles of custom parts that go along with it. Heck, we've got i7 machines with 12GB ram, an nvidia workstation cards, a raid 1 for storage, and an SSD as the "scratch"/OS drive and i still have files that bring it to it's knees. These files are fairly simple as far as the industry goes. Try running CFD on your phone sometimes.... some of these simulations take overnight on the above machine. 4 days later a phone will be 50% done...

Lose the VM...

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm... how about just dumping the whole VM idea and compiling direct to machine code, the same way we always have done? If necessary, use a fat binary system - but I was under the impression that android only ran on ARM processors at the moment...

At least battery life will improve

[kriston]

At least battery life will improve. Many of these mobile processors have Java accelerators that Dalvik cannot use. Dalvik is an impressive project but I fail to see how its advantages had an aggregate benefit on these processors that could have had stellar performance and battery life had Android used Java instead of Dalvik.

Re:At least battery life will improve

[gig]

WebM has the same problem versus H.264. Nonstandard stuff is not going to show up in hardware.

Hey, Android without Dalvik..

[Anonymous Coward]

is just a Linux system! :D

Re:Perhaps this is a bit "Get off my lawn!", but..

[m50d]

yet even with the most clever swipey-typing system, it will still suck compared to a keyboard and full-sized monitor screen.

I've heard claims that dasher is faster than typing, and screen size is mostly a matter of how close you have it. I don't like it any more than you do, but I think this is the future.

QT seems to be going spare right now

[grepppo]

.. well Nokia doesn't seem to want it any more..