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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."
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.
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.
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.
GNU/Linux Android would be FUCKING AWESOME, but OpenJDK Android would retain a good amount of compatibility!
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.
Anybody want a peanut?
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.
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.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
Anybody want a peanut?
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.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
I'm pretty sure Oracle would just attack IcedRobot if it ever got big..."GNU-compatible" or not.
I think another thing this will also mean is the end of X86 CPU dominance.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
JamVM puts OpenJDK to shame on ARM in terms of both size and speed.
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.
ORACLE = One Rich Asshole Larry Ellison.
Security Nightmare is all I have to say.
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.
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.
I have to wonder how many of those cheap programmers are worth what their pay.
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.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
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.
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Such a framework already exists in Maemo. It's called Hildon, and unlike Android, it runs on Real Linux.
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
>> 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.
Mobile phones can never be as powerful as desktops.
Even compared to a 1990 PC x86 running DOS?
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...
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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'.
You might be right. I could save it, but I doubt Intel has anybody on staff who can.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
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.
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
Got Code?
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Good point. Sorry. Lost the topic. I do that now and then.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"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.
Isn't this pretty much already done in hardware within the CPU now? You just don't have direct access to the RISC instructions.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
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.
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?
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.
Read radical news here
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.
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.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Not "The Cloud" but "Your Cloud"!
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
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.
> 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?
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."
He'd post about it on slashdot saying how great it is and everyone would listen.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
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.
You mean like I do every day?
(A lot of that functionality has been around in other forms at least since the 1980's.)
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.
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.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
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.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
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.
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.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
StarTrek 12 : The Wrath of Oracle where Data goes in search of his lost friend Dalvik.
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.
Caveat Utilitor
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.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
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.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
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?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I wish I had mod points.
Today's universe?
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].
Caveat Utilitor
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.
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.
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.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
... 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".
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).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
> 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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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> 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).
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.
If all the phones supported the same docking station standard, and the docking stations were available everywhere, then it would be badass.
ìì!
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?
The point is that the hardware on the phone can, with the addition of an external screen and keyboard, support both.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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?"
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.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
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.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
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.
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.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
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.
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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.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
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.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
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.
And the relevance of any of that to my post was?
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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.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
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...
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
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.
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.
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?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
The obvious solution is to do it via a dock, so you can't remove the phone without migrating the OS back onto it.
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Have we not come full circle then?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
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).
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
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.
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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?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
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...
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
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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.
Kriston
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!)
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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.
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.
I am trolling
.. well Nokia doesn't seem to want it any more..
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.
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