Remember 2008, when the future was supposedly going to be Web Apps? Back then, we were to believe that native development was going to die and the future was applications programmed in HTML5, running on JIT-based JavaScript interpreters inside the web browser.
Since then, App Stores materialized and proven to be highly successful. Developers have again and again refused to develop their apps in HTML5 and clearly preferred to go native.
Apple, added an App Store to OSX, Android and Blackberry did the same and Microsoft is also going the same way with Windows 8.
So, ChromeOS is based on a premise that didn't really catch on. I can't blame Google for insisting on this since the web is their main source of revenue, but at this point they should just adapt the highly successful Android OS to handle the Desktop metaphor and forget about Web Apps. It didn't work.
Same should apply to Firefox and their Firefox OS..
1.) Great hardware partner. Nokia here, along with HTC and other little players.
Nokia is selling its assets and would have been long gone if not for the MS Cash infusion. It's more like a zombie partner at this point.
2.) Great developer tools. We got Visual Studio covered here, along with things like Microsoft's XNA for games and easy, yet powerful languages like C#.
Everybody is making games and apps for mobile (iOS and Android) using Java/ObjC/C++. None of such are what you mention and OpenGL isn't available either. So why would developers making apps for more profitable platforms rewrite their entire codebases for an irrelevant player? They are waaay too late to the game impose developers their own languages, APIs and tools.
Software patents suck, but even if the patent system can't be changed and even if their patents are found valid, the patents Apple is using to litigate are extremely easy to work around or have already been worked around in the latest versions of stock Android. Then what will they do?
So, in the end, Apple is spending a lot of money in lawyers, in counter-lawsuits and damaging it's own image and brand (even if only in vocal minorities) trying to fight a situation that will obviously be impossible to revert (Android overtaking the market and becoming the leader in innovation), and Google is coming out as the clear winner because of all the free press where it appears as a victim.
I'm pretty sure that Apple has realized this and is trying to negotiate behind the scenes, but for companies like Samsung or Google it will end up being cheaper to pay Apple whathever the courts say than negotiating an agreement where they give Apple access to patents or pay them fees for them.
Either Gnome 3 developers are delusional, or being paid by Apple to screw the open source desktops on purpuse. How, otherwise, did Gnome and Ubuntu fall from the top, while on the peak of success?
Also, I can understand Ubuntu because the leader drops a lot of $$ on it, but Gnome? I would have thought Gnome was a community project influenced by the community, but if delusional people (and I mean delusional because they state they target laptops, yet make an OS for tablets) is running the project, something must have gone wrong somewhere.
Not anymore! DirectInput, DirectSound, DirectPlay, etc have all become obsolete and are there only for compatibility. The only real difference is D3DX, which includes a little more functionality for loading shaders and models, but "DirectX" is pretty much obsolete, save for D3D.
One of the advantages of OpenGL vs DirectX is that it doesn't force the underlying hardware to comply as strictly in areas such as memory management, command batching, shader assembly, etc. This allows implementers more freedom to optimize and usually results in much higher performance. Even if a full backwards compatible OpenGL context is huge.
This approach was proven again very succesful with mobile hardware, where vendors such as Qualcomm, PowerVR or Tegra or ARM (Mali) produce graphics chips that comply with OpenGL but at the same time use the higher level abstaction of the API to their advantage, by supplying very different backends each (Immediate Rendering, Deferred and Tile Based Deferred) as means to improve performance (per watt and silicon space) to levels much higher than the desktop counterparts.
Added to that, programming games under Linux is a joy for those used to it, as the tools are fantastic (command line scripting, gdb with hardware watchpoints, valgrind, strace, etc) and the fact the OS manages the heavy load of games much better. Many companies I worked with, and even big ones such as Naughty Dog (makers of Uncharted) develop their games primarily under Linux, even if the final versions are released for Windows, Mac and Consoles.
Apple is too much of a newbie at playing the evil monopolist game. Software patents suck, but at some point, Apple will run out of patents to assert, specially now that the competition is getting ahead of them in innovation and features. Google has learned that they only have to remove existing features and reimplement them differently. Microsoft, on the other hand, is a true veteran at being evil and forces Android manufacturers to sign up for expensive and shady "IP" licensing schemes.
I don't know about Mexico, but I live in South America and stuff like this simply doesn't happen (except for maybe, Columbia). You get the ocassional murders for robbery (if attempting to resist robbery with weapons) or revenge but people going into random killing sprees? Nope, that's news we hear mostly from the US.
Manufacturers should be free to do whathever they want with the devices they create. If they want to lock them, fine. If they want to lock them because a carrier asks? fine, lock it for that carrier or ignore the carrier. It's still their choice
I also can understand hardware requirements for a licensed OS, such a certain button layout, screen resolution, etc. Those make sense and ensure it runs as intended. The same way, Microsoft can make their own devices and lock them and it's their choice.
But manufacturers being forced by to lock the devices by the mobile OS supplier? That's abuse!. It's Microsoft abusing their desktop PC monopoly power, patents, etc. against the OEMs. What is MS afraid of, people installing Android or Ubuntu on their newly acquired devices?
Exactly my thoughts. To be more specific, writing non-retardedly simple games is a feat with html5 due to slow performance and huge memory consumption.
Even in Android Java is often bypassed in favor of NDK for complex projects and portability reasons, where you want to use C/C++ or your own, more fittin, scripting language such as Lua or Python.
Mozilla developers seem to have very strong ideals of a world where the only programming language is HTML5 and the only platform is the web, and I remember there was a lot of hype about that philosophy a few years ago, but app stores with native apps have clearly shown the future is somewhere else. Even Google has aknolwedged that in Chrome by allowing Native Client..
Given that it seems all Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony will be going with AMD for their next-gen graphics hardware, nVidia will likely be the one to supply graphics hardware for the Steam box (as their Linux drivers are by far the most mature).
As a backer, I'm not really sure if i'm interested in purchasing a product like this. Yet I'm very eager to see what happens with it.
Despite fragmentation, android as a platform is somewhat of a standard, and I'm sure that, after seeing this, other manufacturers will attempt to launch similar and compatible devices.
So, at the end of the day, if just an interesting enough library of console-style games is created for Android, this could as well be a revolution.
I think, at this point, it has been shown that most developers prefer not to write apps in HTML5 and would instead rather write native. The whole idea of an operating system that runs HTML5 applications sounded great a few years ago, but "app stores" clearly have won the battle in every platform they exist. Same reason why ChromeOS also never catched on.
It's hard to believe that a country as rich, so advanced technologically, with such brilliant and creative minds can pass laws like this.
Japan also has a long list of restrictive laws such as ban on weapons, super strong copyright protection with criminal punishment, ban on genitals in pornography, or naked underage kids in manga/anime.
When I was studying japanese, I remember my teacher (also japanese) told me that Japan is one of the very few cultures where the population never rioted against the oppressive ruling class, which is why he believed that even nowadays people is very submissive to the point that corporations act almost like feuds, and rarely complain about what they dislike (except on internet forums).
Instead of a single-bias publication which is solved behind closed doors, we get plenty of people with different biases arguing and trying to make their points stand. How is not that a huge improvement?
And this screenshot illustrates it: http://www.kde.org/images/screenshots/gwenview.png
KDE Still pretends it's 1999 and pack applications with plenty of visible features and redundant ways to do the same task to make them look more impressive.
However, the world has changed and people don't want to be bothered having to learn about stuff they don't care about, so the look and usability of KDE helps detract more users than it attracts.
University of Buenos Aires is a free, public university recognized as one of the best in the world. Anyone can attend and it's also filled with students from other South American countries that travel to Buenos Aires to study. Courses are usually huge, with ~200 students each, and anyone is free to attend them as a listener, even if you are not a student. Teachers, by tradition, are expected to be professionals that excelled in their respective fields and for them it is an honor to be able to be there, all this in the spirit of having the best public education.
This much freedom has the obvious drawback that, as no one checks your student ID at the entrance, anyone can go in including thieves, which often mix up with other students to steal stuff. I've seen this happening several times myself so you have to watch out for strange people and your belongings all the time.
As pro human rights groups are so strong here (product of opposition to US-Sponsored dictatorships during most of the past century), law is lax and stronger security measures are often seen in a negative light, as the population don't know anymore where to draw the line.
How is it that tablets are replacing PCs?
Let's get the facts, historically.
1) Microsoft and others made tablets, no one cared about it.
2) Apple released a tablet, it sold very well..
3) Android-based tablets also did well..
4) Netbook sales are down , while tablet sales grow, this makes some sense, as both were meant as accessory devices.
5) Notebook sales also down, but is it really because of tablets or because current hardware is good enough?.
6) Microsoft releases Windows 7, a 100% Desktop OS, people is happy with it..
7) Gnome 3, Ubutunu decide to ditch traditional desktop paradigm.
8) Despite the success of Windows 7, Microsoft decides to deprecate desktop paradigm and move to tablet-like in Windows 8..
9) Apple announces their OS is called "Lion", potentially meaning a big change is near, next one is Mountain Lion though.. .
So, all of sudden, the entire tech world has decided that tablets are the future and desktop & mobile UIs will converge, even though historically it is the fact that they ended up being fundamentally different what made them succeed..
I must be stupid, but I truly and honestly still don't see why this wll happen, so I'd very much appreciate someone more tech-literate than me to explain the future.
Despite fanatism for a lot of languages, I believe languages catch on when they are easy to understand by others and have an easy to understand syntax or interfaces. Plenty of times you see announcements of new languages which claim experimental or higher level syntax abstractions or constructions that allow the programmer to write less code, or claim to resemble human language more.
Yet in practice, I don't think programmers spend most of their time actually writing the code but thinking what to write, so making an algorithm or behavior as clear as possible should be preferred to writing unnecesarily shorter code that does the same.
Even though it's lacking a little in some areas (like accessing resources from different threads), OpenGL 3.3 and OpenCL are more than enough for running the most hardware stressing games currently coming out for the PC and consoles, and nowadays driver support for it is excellent in both AMD and NVidia. Given that Macs now support OpenGL 3 with Lion, and that mobile world is almost exclusively OpenGL ES 2.0 (which is mostly forward compatible to OpenGL 3), I'm still puzzled that PC developers almost exclusively use DirectX any more. I can understand the need to develop lower end titles for DirectX9 because it's the only API that works on the Intel GMAs (shipped in most of the low end notebooks), but Steam hardware survely clearly shows that most of their users have DirectX10 / OpenGL 3 compatible hardware installed.
For C++ development, ease of use, portability and tools, Qt Creator is both a lightweight and feature packed IDE. It has about the same feature set as Visual Studio and similar usage, plus it's much easier to use and configure for custom build systems. It can be used with both MSVC compiler and Mingw. It's well mantained and has some killer features such as the locator. As a plus, it works identically everywhere, so I can get my favorite development environment no matter if i'm at work (Windows), at home (Linux) or on my laptop (OSX).
In my view, the biggest problem it has is it's name, "Qt-Creator", which i wish developers would change. Even if Qt is hands down the best library and toolit i've ever used for mobile and desktop development, it works perfectly fine for non Qt related development too, so plenty of developers writing non-Qt are missing the best opensource C++ IDE.
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Remember 2008, when the future was supposedly going to be Web Apps? Back then, we were to believe that native development was going to die and the future was applications programmed in HTML5, running on JIT-based JavaScript interpreters inside the web browser.
Since then, App Stores materialized and proven to be highly successful. Developers have again and again refused to develop their apps in HTML5 and clearly preferred to go native.
Apple, added an App Store to OSX, Android and Blackberry did the same and Microsoft is also going the same way with Windows 8.
So, ChromeOS is based on a premise that didn't really catch on. I can't blame Google for insisting on this since the web is their main source of revenue, but at this point they should just adapt the highly successful Android OS to handle the Desktop metaphor and forget about Web Apps. It didn't work.
Same should apply to Firefox and their Firefox OS..
For C++, Creator is awesome, has even the same feature set as visual assist , and it works everywhere (Win, X11 and OSX).
1.) Great hardware partner. Nokia here, along with HTC and other little players.
Nokia is selling its assets and would have been long gone if not for the MS Cash infusion. It's more like a zombie partner at this point.
2.) Great developer tools. We got Visual Studio covered here, along with things like Microsoft's XNA for games and easy, yet powerful languages like C#.
Everybody is making games and apps for mobile (iOS and Android) using Java/ObjC/C++. None of such are what you mention and OpenGL isn't available either. So why would developers making apps for more profitable platforms rewrite their entire codebases for an irrelevant player? They are waaay too late to the game impose developers their own languages, APIs and tools.
Software patents suck, but even if the patent system can't be changed and even if their patents are found valid, the patents Apple is using to litigate are extremely easy to work around or have already been worked around in the latest versions of stock Android. Then what will they do?
So, in the end, Apple is spending a lot of money in lawyers, in counter-lawsuits and damaging it's own image and brand (even if only in vocal minorities) trying to fight a situation that will obviously be impossible to revert (Android overtaking the market and becoming the leader in innovation), and Google is coming out as the clear winner because of all the free press where it appears as a victim.
I'm pretty sure that Apple has realized this and is trying to negotiate behind the scenes, but for companies like Samsung or Google it will end up being cheaper to pay Apple whathever the courts say than negotiating an agreement where they give Apple access to patents or pay them fees for them.
The Yen is strong and it depends on the region, so it will likely be 250/299usd and 250/299eur. It's the same with the 3DS.
Either Gnome 3 developers are delusional, or being paid by Apple to screw the open source desktops on purpuse. How, otherwise, did Gnome and Ubuntu fall from the top, while on the peak of success?
Also, I can understand Ubuntu because the leader drops a lot of $$ on it, but Gnome? I would have thought Gnome was a community project influenced by the community, but if delusional people (and I mean delusional because they state they target laptops, yet make an OS for tablets) is running the project, something must have gone wrong somewhere.
Not anymore! DirectInput, DirectSound, DirectPlay, etc have all become obsolete and are there only for compatibility. The only real difference is D3DX, which includes a little more functionality for loading shaders and models, but "DirectX" is pretty much obsolete, save for D3D.
One of the advantages of OpenGL vs DirectX is that it doesn't force the underlying hardware to comply as strictly in areas such as memory management, command batching, shader assembly, etc. This allows implementers more freedom to optimize and usually results in much higher performance. Even if a full backwards compatible OpenGL context is huge.
This approach was proven again very succesful with mobile hardware, where vendors such as Qualcomm, PowerVR or Tegra or ARM (Mali) produce graphics chips that comply with OpenGL but at the same time use the higher level abstaction of the API to their advantage, by supplying very different backends each (Immediate Rendering, Deferred and Tile Based Deferred) as means to improve performance (per watt and silicon space) to levels much higher than the desktop counterparts.
Added to that, programming games under Linux is a joy for those used to it, as the tools are fantastic (command line scripting, gdb with hardware watchpoints, valgrind, strace, etc) and the fact the OS manages the heavy load of games much better. Many companies I worked with, and even big ones such as Naughty Dog (makers of Uncharted) develop their games primarily under Linux, even if the final versions are released for Windows, Mac and Consoles.
And integrates it to Android, NaCL, ChromeOS, etc. It would make developing and porting large applications to their platforms much, much easier.
Apple is too much of a newbie at playing the evil monopolist game. Software patents suck, but at some point, Apple will run out of patents to assert, specially now that the competition is getting ahead of them in innovation and features. Google has learned that they only have to remove existing features and reimplement them differently. Microsoft, on the other hand, is a true veteran at being evil and forces Android manufacturers to sign up for expensive and shady "IP" licensing schemes.
I don't know about Mexico, but I live in South America and stuff like this simply doesn't happen (except for maybe, Columbia). You get the ocassional murders for robbery (if attempting to resist robbery with weapons) or revenge but people going into random killing sprees? Nope, that's news we hear mostly from the US.
Announcing the removal of the global menu?
Manufacturers should be free to do whathever they want with the devices they create. If they want to lock them, fine. If they want to lock them because a carrier asks? fine, lock it for that carrier or ignore the carrier. It's still their choice
I also can understand hardware requirements for a licensed OS, such a certain button layout, screen resolution, etc. Those make sense and ensure it runs as intended. The same way, Microsoft can make their own devices and lock them and it's their choice.
But manufacturers being forced by to lock the devices by the mobile OS supplier? That's abuse!. It's Microsoft abusing their desktop PC monopoly power, patents, etc. against the OEMs. What is MS afraid of, people installing Android or Ubuntu on their newly acquired devices?
Exactly my thoughts. To be more specific, writing non-retardedly simple games is a feat with html5 due to slow performance and huge memory consumption.
Even in Android Java is often bypassed in favor of NDK for complex projects and portability reasons, where you want to use C/C++ or your own, more fittin, scripting language such as Lua or Python.
Mozilla developers seem to have very strong ideals of a world where the only programming language is HTML5 and the only platform is the web, and I remember there was a lot of hype about that philosophy a few years ago, but app stores with native apps have clearly shown the future is somewhere else. Even Google has aknolwedged that in Chrome by allowing Native Client..
Given that it seems all Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony will be going with AMD for their next-gen graphics hardware, nVidia will likely be the one to supply graphics hardware for the Steam box (as their Linux drivers are by far the most mature).
As a backer, I'm not really sure if i'm interested in purchasing a product like this. Yet I'm very eager to see what happens with it. Despite fragmentation, android as a platform is somewhat of a standard, and I'm sure that, after seeing this, other manufacturers will attempt to launch similar and compatible devices. So, at the end of the day, if just an interesting enough library of console-style games is created for Android, this could as well be a revolution.
I think, at this point, it has been shown that most developers prefer not to write apps in HTML5 and would instead rather write native. The whole idea of an operating system that runs HTML5 applications sounded great a few years ago, but "app stores" clearly have won the battle in every platform they exist. Same reason why ChromeOS also never catched on.
It's hard to believe that a country as rich, so advanced technologically, with such brilliant and creative minds can pass laws like this. Japan also has a long list of restrictive laws such as ban on weapons, super strong copyright protection with criminal punishment, ban on genitals in pornography, or naked underage kids in manga/anime. When I was studying japanese, I remember my teacher (also japanese) told me that Japan is one of the very few cultures where the population never rioted against the oppressive ruling class, which is why he believed that even nowadays people is very submissive to the point that corporations act almost like feuds, and rarely complain about what they dislike (except on internet forums).
Instead of a single-bias publication which is solved behind closed doors, we get plenty of people with different biases arguing and trying to make their points stand. How is not that a huge improvement?
And this screenshot illustrates it:
http://www.kde.org/images/screenshots/gwenview.png
KDE Still pretends it's 1999 and pack applications with plenty of visible features and redundant ways to do the same task to make them look more impressive.
However, the world has changed and people don't want to be bothered having to learn about stuff they don't care about, so the look and usability of KDE helps detract more users than it attracts.
University of Buenos Aires is a free, public university recognized as one of the best in the world. Anyone can attend and it's also filled with students from other South American countries that travel to Buenos Aires to study. Courses are usually huge, with ~200 students each, and anyone is free to attend them as a listener, even if you are not a student. Teachers, by tradition, are expected to be professionals that excelled in their respective fields and for them it is an honor to be able to be there, all this in the spirit of having the best public education.
This much freedom has the obvious drawback that, as no one checks your student ID at the entrance, anyone can go in including thieves, which often mix up with other students to steal stuff. I've seen this happening several times myself so you have to watch out for strange people and your belongings all the time.
As pro human rights groups are so strong here (product of opposition to US-Sponsored dictatorships during most of the past century), law is lax and stronger security measures are often seen in a negative light, as the population don't know anymore where to draw the line.
How is it that tablets are replacing PCs?
.
Let's get the facts, historically.
1) Microsoft and others made tablets, no one cared about it.
2) Apple released a tablet, it sold very well..
3) Android-based tablets also did well..
4) Netbook sales are down , while tablet sales grow, this makes some sense, as both were meant as accessory devices.
5) Notebook sales also down, but is it really because of tablets or because current hardware is good enough?.
6) Microsoft releases Windows 7, a 100% Desktop OS, people is happy with it..
7) Gnome 3, Ubutunu decide to ditch traditional desktop paradigm.
8) Despite the success of Windows 7, Microsoft decides to deprecate desktop paradigm and move to tablet-like in Windows 8..
9) Apple announces their OS is called "Lion", potentially meaning a big change is near, next one is Mountain Lion though..
So, all of sudden, the entire tech world has decided that tablets are the future and desktop & mobile UIs will converge, even though historically it is the fact that they ended up being fundamentally different what made them succeed..
I must be stupid, but I truly and honestly still don't see why this wll happen, so I'd very much appreciate someone more tech-literate than me to explain the future.
Despite fanatism for a lot of languages, I believe languages catch on when they are easy to understand by others and have an easy to understand syntax or interfaces. Plenty of times you see announcements of new languages which claim experimental or higher level syntax abstractions or constructions that allow the programmer to write less code, or claim to resemble human language more.
Yet in practice, I don't think programmers spend most of their time actually writing the code but thinking what to write, so making an algorithm or behavior as clear as possible should be preferred to writing unnecesarily shorter code that does the same.
Even though it's lacking a little in some areas (like accessing resources from different threads), OpenGL 3.3 and OpenCL are more than enough for running the most hardware stressing games currently coming out for the PC and consoles, and nowadays driver support for it is excellent in both AMD and NVidia.
Given that Macs now support OpenGL 3 with Lion, and that mobile world is almost exclusively OpenGL ES 2.0 (which is mostly forward compatible to OpenGL 3), I'm still puzzled that PC developers almost exclusively use DirectX any more.
I can understand the need to develop lower end titles for DirectX9 because it's the only API that works on the Intel GMAs (shipped in most of the low end notebooks), but Steam hardware survely clearly shows that most of their users have DirectX10 / OpenGL 3 compatible hardware installed.
For C++ development, ease of use, portability and tools, Qt Creator is both a lightweight and feature packed IDE. It has about the same feature set as Visual Studio and similar usage, plus it's much easier to use and configure for custom build systems. It can be used with both MSVC compiler and Mingw. It's well mantained and has some killer features such as the locator. As a plus, it works identically everywhere, so I can get my favorite development environment no matter if i'm at work (Windows), at home (Linux) or on my laptop (OSX).
In my view, the biggest problem it has is it's name, "Qt-Creator", which i wish developers would change. Even if Qt is hands down the best library and toolit i've ever used for mobile and desktop development, it works perfectly fine for non Qt related development too, so plenty of developers writing non-Qt are missing the best opensource C++ IDE.