There were no applications for Android when they started of either, nor for (the now maybe defunct?) WebOS. Besides realistically, none of the existing FOSS apps are going to be ported straight over to modern type tablets (ie. no stylus, etc) because they aren't built from the ground up around a touch based metaphor. I also think there will be some enduring benefits for lightweight OS's yet on tablets, like better battery life for one. The hardware will no doubt get faster but tablets are very constrained by their physical form factor, they are only going to get thinner so power use will continue to be a factor.
For a fascinating look at this. Check out this blogpost where they take a 60 year old cafeteria employee who has never used a computer and put him in front of a browser:
"I give him the same task: find a local restaurant. He stares at the screen for awhile with his hand off the mouse, looking confused. I ask what he’s looking for. “I don’t know, anything that looks like it will help!” he says. Finally, he reads the Apple context menu at the top of the screen, and his gaze falls on the word Help.
“Help, that’s what I need!” says Joe. He clicks on Help, but looks disappointed at what he sees in the menu. “None of these can help me,” he says."
"There are still some hangups to getting the first bootstrap build going. It would be really helpful if someone could figure out the issues between haiku and gcc such that gcc could be built with the java support, so we could use it for bootstrapping."
There's a Gnash port too, though personally I think they'd be better off focussing on a good HTML5 capable browser, Flash is a dead man walking.
There has been some ARM porting work done but as you say they are working with limited resources. I think if a company were to want to develop a new tablet OS from scratch, they could do worse than basing it on Haiku which is released under the very permissive MIT license. Hell, if Apple could cut OSX down to tablet size it could surely be done with the much leaner Haiku.
There is some support for skinning, as one of the devs explains here. But the whole project is very much focussed on getting the R1 done, which is as close to the original BeOS, which is an 90's OS even though it was ahead of its time in many ways, as they can get. There are discussions on where to after that in the glass elevator project though.
I felt compelled to throw it in there. People are always complaining that there's no explanation in the summary of project names and such and I don't know how much of the current Slashdot readership actually remembers the BeOS, it has been a long time.
Margins are small and competition is fierce, apple rules supreme on the tablet front, but that part of HP's business is even tinier, hence why would the link bother to mention apple?
Because HP says the fact people are increasingly ditching PC's for tablets (read: iPads) factored in their decision :
"The tablet effect is real, and sales of the TouchPad are not meeting our expectations," Apotheker says, explaining the movement of consumers from PCs to tablets as one of the problems with the PC division. So H-P is exploring options for its unit that "may include separation through spinoff or other transactions."
Basically they're saying iPads are where the money and future growth are and they failed to create even a beachhead in that market so they're getting out.
Also, Dell and Lenovo may take HP's share of the corporate workstation market and Acer the low-to-mid range laptop but Apple will probably take a healthy bite out of the more profitable high end laptop share (what HP had left of it) and high end PC. The volume isn't really important, the fact that there isn't any money left in being top dog volume-wise is the whole reason they are getting out.
There used to be a site out on the internets that connected people from different countries that want to learn foreign through videochat so they could learn by chatting with native speakers. I forget what it's called. Not really suited for shy though.
“First of all, let’s clarify what the NASA budget is. Do you realize that the $850 billion dollar bailout, that sum of money is greater than the entire 50-year running budget of NASA?"
"NASA's FY 2008 budget of $17.318 billion represents about 0.6% of the $2.9 trillion United States federal budget during the year, or about 35% of total spending on academic scientific research in the United States.
According to the Office of Management and Budget and the Air Force Almanac, when measured in real terms (adjusted for inflation), the figure is $790.0 billion, or an average of $15.818 billion dollars per year over its fifty year history (NASA's 2011 budget is on a continuing resolution of the 2010 budget at $18.724 billion)."
If you like thinking about this kind of stuff, I recommend reading "Fooled by Randomness" by N. Taleb where he talks about stuff like survivorship bias among rich traders :
"Say we have a collection of traders whose strategies do no better than random: they will have a good year half the time, a bad year the other half. Half of them will have a good year. A quarter will have two good years in a row, and so on. One in 32 will do well five years running. Of course, it never occurs to them that their success is random: they attribute it to their superior strategy, and imagine they are in the top 3% of traders."
Cool, the mods changed the summary. Since the error was in TFA this means we are in the historically nearly unprecedented situation of having a summary that's more correct than TFA;-) (What I meant to say is, good job.)
That's about... oh... 20 minutes using NSA equipment.
The equipment in question being the large wrench they use to knock the password out of you. Well to be fair it's actually more like 12 hours to whisk you away to an undisclosed middle eastern location, then 20 minutes of "cracking", but still.
I think it's unfair to pin this on Apple, everyone is suing everyone else because all major players realize this is a large part of the future of computing and they need to be contenders. I'm not saying Apple won't pull some dirty tricks, but they very painfully learned back in the early 90's when similar lawsuits were exploding around GUI based systems that being the runner up doesn't pay (they almost went out of business following their unsuccessful battle with Microsoft.) But then again, the other companies won't be holding back either, as has been proven time and again now, and most fighting will be done in the courts through patent litigation because that's how the game is played these days.
I disagree, to me it sounds like you are projecting your own feelings onto the matter. Corporations aren't concerned with showing one another how immature they are being. They did it because, to stay with my boxing metaphor, you keep jabbing until you find an opening to land a real punch.
You do know that that was in response to what Apple did, right?
That's like arguing who threw the first punch in a boxing match. All companies in mobile computing are slugging it out for hundreds of millions in profits per year, no one will be pulling any punches on this one.
No one is saying that. This is a boxing match, all parties are exchanging blows and we're only in the second round. So why does everyone start crying foul whenever one of the Android camp takes one on the nose ? Why gloating when Samsung asks to block the sale of iPads and iPhones but outrage when Apple retaliates ?
Hah, for some reason I envisaged them taking him into a room on the Google campus where he could browse the code on a workstation with no outside connection and a legal pad for taking notes. If they just sent him a tarball of the code why even include the secrets part Microsoft would have to ask permission to view ?
Slashdot Mirror
There were no applications for Android when they started of either, nor for (the now maybe defunct?) WebOS. Besides realistically, none of the existing FOSS apps are going to be ported straight over to modern type tablets (ie. no stylus, etc) because they aren't built from the ground up around a touch based metaphor. I also think there will be some enduring benefits for lightweight OS's yet on tablets, like better battery life for one. The hardware will no doubt get faster but tablets are very constrained by their physical form factor, they are only going to get thinner so power use will continue to be a factor.
Yeah sorry, I messed up my tenses. What I meant was: "If Apple can do it with OSX, then surely it could be done with Haiku."
They used to be hardware keys. Frankly I don't miss them and I don't think giving newbies more keys to press is going to put them at ease.
Create a "copy as plaintext" service. Services: one of the many oft overlooked power-user features of OSX :-)
For a fascinating look at this. Check out this blogpost where they take a 60 year old cafeteria employee who has never used a computer and put him in front of a browser:
"I give him the same task: find a local restaurant. He stares at the screen for awhile with his hand off the mouse, looking confused. I ask what he’s looking for. “I don’t know, anything that looks like it will help!” he says. Finally, he reads the Apple context menu at the top of the screen, and his gaze falls on the word Help.
“Help, that’s what I need!” says Joe. He clicks on Help, but looks disappointed at what he sees in the menu.
“None of these can help me,” he says."
It is being ported, but :
"There are still some hangups to getting the first bootstrap build
going. It would be really helpful if someone could figure out the
issues between haiku and gcc such that gcc could be built with the
java support, so we could use it for bootstrapping."
There's a Gnash port too, though personally I think they'd be better off focussing on a good HTML5 capable browser, Flash is a dead man walking.
There has been some ARM porting work done but as you say they are working with limited resources. I think if a company were to want to develop a new tablet OS from scratch, they could do worse than basing it on Haiku which is released under the very permissive MIT license. Hell, if Apple could cut OSX down to tablet size it could surely be done with the much leaner Haiku.
There is some support for skinning, as one of the devs explains here. But the whole project is very much focussed on getting the R1 done, which is as close to the original BeOS, which is an 90's OS even though it was ahead of its time in many ways, as they can get. There are discussions on where to after that in the glass elevator project though.
I felt compelled to throw it in there. People are always complaining that there's no explanation in the summary of project names and such and I don't know how much of the current Slashdot readership actually remembers the BeOS, it has been a long time.
Margins are small and competition is fierce, apple rules supreme on the tablet front, but that part of HP's business is even tinier, hence why would the link bother to mention apple?
Because HP says the fact people are increasingly ditching PC's for tablets (read: iPads) factored in their decision :
"The tablet effect is real, and sales of the TouchPad are not meeting our expectations," Apotheker says, explaining the movement of consumers from PCs to tablets as one of the problems with the PC division. So H-P is exploring options for its unit that "may include separation through spinoff or other transactions."
Basically they're saying iPads are where the money and future growth are and they failed to create even a beachhead in that market so they're getting out.
Also, Dell and Lenovo may take HP's share of the corporate workstation market and Acer the low-to-mid range laptop but Apple will probably take a healthy bite out of the more profitable high end laptop share (what HP had left of it) and high end PC. The volume isn't really important, the fact that there isn't any money left in being top dog volume-wise is the whole reason they are getting out.
There used to be a site out on the internets that connected people from different countries that want to learn foreign through videochat so they could learn by chatting with native speakers. I forget what it's called. Not really suited for shy though.
It's a volunteer program (and a PR stunt.) TFA: "People with various personal experiences have already agreed to volunteer, she said."
Neil deGrasse Tyson :
“First of all, let’s clarify what the NASA budget is. Do you realize that the $850 billion dollar bailout, that sum of money is greater than the entire 50-year running budget of NASA?"
Wikipedia says :
"NASA's FY 2008 budget of $17.318 billion represents about 0.6% of the $2.9 trillion United States federal budget during the year, or about 35% of total spending on academic scientific research in the United States.
According to the Office of Management and Budget and the Air Force Almanac, when measured in real terms (adjusted for inflation), the figure is $790.0 billion, or an average of $15.818 billion dollars per year over its fifty year history (NASA's 2011 budget is on a continuing resolution of the 2010 budget at $18.724 billion)."
Yeah, that's what I meant. Got my nomenclature mixed up.
If you like thinking about this kind of stuff, I recommend reading "Fooled by Randomness" by N. Taleb where he talks about stuff like survivorship bias among rich traders :
"Say we have a collection of traders whose strategies do no better than random: they will have a good year half the time, a bad year the other half. Half of them will have a good year. A quarter will have two good years in a row, and so on. One in 32 will do well five years running. Of course, it never occurs to them that their success is random: they attribute it to their superior strategy, and imagine they are in the top 3% of traders."
Cool, the mods changed the summary. Since the error was in TFA this means we are in the historically nearly unprecedented situation of having a summary that's more correct than TFA ;-)
(What I meant to say is, good job.)
That's about... oh... 20 minutes using NSA equipment.
The equipment in question being the large wrench they use to knock the password out of you.
Well to be fair it's actually more like 12 hours to whisk you away to an undisclosed middle eastern location, then 20 minutes of "cracking", but still.
The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL) is a Belgian, specifically Flemish, university not Dutch.
I think it's unfair to pin this on Apple, everyone is suing everyone else because all major players realize this is a large part of the future of computing and they need to be contenders. I'm not saying Apple won't pull some dirty tricks, but they very painfully learned back in the early 90's when similar lawsuits were exploding around GUI based systems that being the runner up doesn't pay (they almost went out of business following their unsuccessful battle with Microsoft.) But then again, the other companies won't be holding back either, as has been proven time and again now, and most fighting will be done in the courts through patent litigation because that's how the game is played these days.
I disagree, to me it sounds like you are projecting your own feelings onto the matter. Corporations aren't concerned with showing one another how immature they are being. They did it because, to stay with my boxing metaphor, you keep jabbing until you find an opening to land a real punch.
You do know that that was in response to what Apple did, right?
That's like arguing who threw the first punch in a boxing match. All companies in mobile computing are slugging it out for hundreds of millions in profits per year, no one will be pulling any punches on this one.
So now Google's going to know what I'm watching on TV too ? One step closer to the Google opt-out village I guess.
iPad and iPhone : so good Samsung tried to ban them in order to be able to get a foothold in the market. See how that knife cuts both ways ?
No one is saying that. This is a boxing match, all parties are exchanging blows and we're only in the second round. So why does everyone start crying foul whenever one of the Android camp takes one on the nose ? Why gloating when Samsung asks to block the sale of iPads and iPhones but outrage when Apple retaliates ?
Hah, for some reason I envisaged them taking him into a room on the Google campus where he could browse the code on a workstation with no outside connection and a legal pad for taking notes. If they just sent him a tarball of the code why even include the secrets part Microsoft would have to ask permission to view ?