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Foxconn Betting Big On Firefox OS
jfruh writes "Foxconn is firmly identified in the public mind as the company that manufactures iPhones and iPads. But the company is looking to forge its own identity, and sees Firefox OS as the means to do so. To that end, Foxconn is hiring thousands of developers to help work on the open source phone OS and Foxconn's own suite of cloud services."
I hope they succeed!
-Sent from my iPhone
that had (at least on paper) thousands of devs that didn't go anywhere. funded by people like Intel, too.
actual devices to shops or gtfo.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Anything that puts android and the iphone into the ground is good by me.
Its hard enough getting 3 developers working together to produce quality software, let alone 3 THOUSAND. How exactly do they plan to manage this?
How about a Cloud OS? A VM OS that lives in the cloud and sends screens (instead of data) to your PC, tablet, phone, etc. It will have blazing fast network access, can add cores, RAM, disk space with a click. If you are a geek, you can probably do this, but there are so many details to work out and it violates the terms of service for many hosting places. Make it cheap and easy for the masses. The tech is there, but it isn't mainstream.
Who they outsourcing this to?
I wonder how many will kill themselves.
where the employees jump out windows.
Maybe foxconn needs to clean up *that* image first.
Firefox OS: made in China.
Good-bye security and trust.
So, how does that work if you are a low-level developer in a technical initiative that is going to fail? I mean, you're not going to put it on your resume anyway, so why not just shoot them a res' to see if they'll pay you a couple of drachma's a week for some crappy code? I mean, hell, I can write crappy code just as good as the next guy, why not get paid in the mean time?
Mozilla has such a (well-deserved) squeaky clean image. Considering the slight damage the Foxconn fiasco did to Apple's brand, I pray nothing happens to tarnish Mozilla's good name. Considering this is a partnership, it may prove difficult, if not, impossible to pull out if things start to go wrong. I wish them all the best.
[Rent This Space]
Because the world really needs another mobile phone operating system.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
The day may come when Apple is just the distribution arm of Foxconn. Apple needs Foxconn more than Foxconn needs Apple.
It would be great to see Mozilla's name on my machine, I look forward to seeing what they come up with.
The world is now on auto-pilot.
So, Firefox OS wirr be rereased in Engrish?
It will have blazing fast network access
The only thing "blazing fast" about a mobile operating system built around access to an application server through VNC or OnLive is how fast it'd eat up your monthly data cap.
"Foxconn Betting Big On Firefox OS"
Should read:
Foxconn Betting Big On using F/OSS to make their clone their own "proprietary" OS and basically a Android clone/competitor. It happens everyday with open source hardware.
Otherwise, Foxconn is becoming the open source version of Lenovo.
With 3000 devs going nuts on this OS, they'll be up to version 21 in a few weeks - oh wait!
The Mozilla folks dont seem tohave their head in the game at all on the computer, and frankly I am not sure they ever did. When really basic stuff like this goes untouched for well over 10 years while the developers busy themselves adding 'features' no one wants or needs and redesigning the UI over and over again, you have to wonder what is going on. Apparently, what Mozilla really wanted to do all this time is make a toy OS for smart phones so all their 'designers' can keep themselves busy dragging bitmaps around all day without being expected to code.
So if that is where their head is at then I guess this is for the best. But it leaves a real need for someone else to step up and make a decent web browser.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
From TFA:
"the company is increasing investments in research, including developing robots for manufacturing. In March, the company said it wanted to hire 5,000 people in Taiwan with skills in hardware, automation, and robotics.
On Thursday, Foxconn said it was looking to hire between 2,000 and 3,000 people in order to bolster its research into software. It's looking for software engineers with skills in HTML5 operating systems, HTML5 apps, and cloud computing, the company said.
It intends to design Firefox OS reference models that will cover smartphones, tablets, laptops and TVs.
Taken together, Foxconn is gearing to build what it hopes will be the next iPhone replacement. After all, why settle for a scrap of the profits when you can have it all?
Firstly, I think they got Nokia to do most of the heavy lifting making apps for Win 8.
They also offered developers US$100 for every app in their store
They could have of course taken it one step further and hired them to make the apps, but that would have been monumentally expensive and I think they underestimated the lack of developer interest in Win8.
As somebody that has had some contact with the new FFOS SDK, user's might be interested to know it as yet, has no secure storage (think Keychain), where apps can store your passwords. On top of that, apps are written in HTML and Javascript so potentially, malware could scrape your email and passwords from insecure storage if an app stores your username and password for subsequent logins, and, even if the app developer attempts some level of security with encryption keys embedded in the app code, it's JS, which the malware could also grab (it's just a file on the device afterall), and relatively easily scrape out the encryption key and algorithm used.
Given how, at least as was the opinion of two month's ago, China is taking all trade secrets on a scale that America under King George could not have imagined, perhaps the parallel to China is America, side stepped off a century or so. What does that mean for the relationship between Apple and Foxconn? Your turn. By the way, when the USSR stole American trade secrets down to the blueprints for factories, Russian engineers were not allowed to be creative. They were so stifled it must have made them numb-er than mudbloods.
/.is against patents.
It was pretty much inevitable that after being taught how to make world class devices by Apple, Foxconn would eventually question why a bunch of foriegners living off in the States should get a cut of their hard work. This means that Apple's big advantages will be:
1. Hardware patents: How easy it will be for Foxconn to get around these to sell to the US and Europe I'm not sure, since I'm no lawyer. If they have to do their own redesigns or are even completely stymied by overbroad patents they may have a limited market for their devices.
2. Software (and Software patents): Foxconn can now make world class hardware, no mistake about that. However, I don't know how well they will do with software, since that isn't part of their core competencies. Also, they'll have the same software patent issues that Android devices have.
I'm not a fan of Foxconn's horrible labor practices, but it will be interesting to watch this develop.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Don't underestimate the impact of how the news of the NSA-Big American Tech orgy is playing out abroad. The Snowden leak has confirmed the most cynical suspicions of most mainland Chinese, and the pressure in that billion+ market for products unstained by NSA influence will become a major tech driver in the near future. In fact, for most people in the world, the only spying they dislike more than being spied on by their own governments is being spied on by the USA. Unless Microsoft, Google, and Apple can put together a successful Hail Mary marketing campaign to salvage their images, alternatives like Firefox OS are very likely to see surprising growth in their market share.
In other words, what Foxconn is doing may not be Open Source altruism. More likely, they are positioning themselves to ride an anti-NSA wave, particularly in mainland China.
i like iphone,but when iphone 6 come?
For chip production agreement between the two companies rumors have been circulating for several years, and this time, we finally see some concrete details. The news comes from Digitimes, TSMC and its integrated service partner GUC (Global UniChip) reportedly will be based on 20nm, 16nm and 10nm process nodes to produce the A-series chips. Reported that TSMC will begin in July this year, 20nm A8 chip limited trial production, and volume production is expected to start in September this year. The so-called A8 chip equipped Apple device is expected to come out in 2014.easybuybest.com