I expect more from them because they tie the hardware and software together, that gives a significant advantage in terms of being able to optimize the software and deliver software features dependent on specific hardware. Sure Android OEMs could do the same but they have to build off the existing Android codebase and it is in their interest not to deviate too much so as to be able to keep it maintainable over time.
It appears we were both on a different track, with the term 'steambox' I was thinking more the console-replacement product targeted at the living room rather than just any desktop PC with SteamOS installed. If you're the average person buying a low-end PC would you really dedicate it to gaming by getting it with SteamOS or just get it with Windows and install Steam? I would think most people would do the latter so it probably wouldn't be worth OEMs to have different SKUs and do hardware testing and driver install/maintenance for low-end boxes that they probably wouldn't sell many of anyway.
They aren't really that useful anymore, in fact I don't even bother with setting mine. It's a beautiful omega and I wear it as a piece of jewelry rather than for any utilitarian value.
The at-a-glance info is neat if it's always available (like e-ink is probably a good idea) but actually interacting with it is mostly less convenient than a phone, the tiny screen makes it awkward but worst of all you need both arms to operate it! Then there's the fact that you can't switch between hands and that you have to take it off if you want somebody to take a photo of you with it or let somebody else use it.
I don't think the device you speak of can conveniently be a watch, maybe glasses but in that case it would need some decent way to interact with it, speech is not good enough and a touchpad on the side of your head obviously sucks too.
A PC in such an enclosure, are these currently available for around that price?
Low risk for OEMs as no dedicated very distinct product line is required.
Well that's the question, what do they already have that is decent that they could just install SteamOS on? Even the crappy (spec-wise) Dell Zino its most barebones configuration and that's with no keyboard/mouse or controller.
I'm kinda envisioning the Steambox being offered at more of a $250-300 price point. If you want a monster rig you can still build it yourself and run SteamOS.
Offered by who though? Sure if Valve were a hardware maker they could make up the profit margin with software sales but I doubt any of the existing OEMs are going to want to go through the process of designing, building and supporting such hardware with virtually no profit.
But it is a PC and everything in that list is already done.
* Choice (and competition) of hardware providers * Upgradeable
Depending on what you're upgrading that can actually be a negative in the long run, while it is nice to be able to upgrade the HDD the ability to upgrade the CPU/GPU/RAM means developers just make that a requirement rather than optimizing their code for the existing hardware. The graphics quality of console titles gets better over time because they get better at optimizing for the concrete set of hardware they are targeting, they know the CPU/GPU clocks, instruction sets, memory size, cache size, bus speeds, latency, shader model, etc... and can rely on those numbers rather than them being unknowns. It's much harder to provide a consistent user experience when you are targeting thousands and thousands of different hardware configurations.
It's because Android users can move on to different manufacturers so when one manufacturer (albeit the biggest of them all in this case) pulls some bullshit stunt like this they can just say "oh when i said Android i didn't mean *Samsung* Android" and many will consider that a benefit, using 'Android' when talking about devices in general is pretty disingenuous since it can mean anything from cheap chinese featurephones up to expensive iPhone competitors and of course this impacts just about every aspect of the operating system, features and user experience.
For some reason the stupidity of arguing over 'Android performance' is lost on many people, anybody defending 'Android' (in terms of performance, and I suppose features dependent on specific hardware too) rather than a particular version on a particular device, is an idiot. For example the performance of my Nexus 7 has been up and down across various versions of Android (it's been well-documented) so it's moronic to make some all-encompassing statement regarding Android performance when even on the flagship devices it isn't consistent, much less all the other parties building official and unofficial (non-OHA members) devices.
If you learn office at a young age, it becomes very unlikely you will switch to anything else.
Rubbish, people adapt if the benefit is there and/or the product is intuitive enough, but of course they are unlikely to change if the alternative is just the same thing with a different user interface, their time is generally more valuable. It's the same reason the world isn't stuck with Nokia featurephones and WinMo/Blackberry smartphones, because Android and iOS came along with compelling features and intuitive UI and people adapted because it added significant value and was disruptive to the market even though most of them cost significantly more.
They will either pay for it or not pay for it. If they don't pay they are committing a crime which can be severely punished if they get caught.
Not if they use MS Office Starter which is free.
If they pay then the school is basically training them to give money to a large corporation.
So? If they use GNU/Linux on an Intel or AMD computer it is the same thing, both are large corporations.
Not only that, a specific corporation, with a partial monopoly in that market.
Whilst they may have a "partial monopoly" (by which I guess you just mean a large marketshare) in office suites on desktop computers running Windows, that category has become just a subset of computing. With people using multiple computing devices of different categories that can all access the same web applications it is only logical that people will start using ad-supported services (Google Docs or Office Live) or paid versions of them so they can use the same applications across devices and ones that they may or may not own. Sure you could host/run/maintain your own office suite of web applications and I don't doubt that eventually - if there isn't already - a free suite will be developed but who could really be bothered with that?
Yes, but since the hood is not welded shut, you can take your car to ANY garage: The dealer, Wal-Mart, Canadian Tire, the old scoundrel down the street... That is the freedom that you get with Free software. You can fix it yourself, or pay someone of your choosing to fix it.
Software isn't like a car. Your software often breaks down after excessive use does it? Do you need to service your software every so often? If you were talking about your computer then that's a different story and you can take it to anybody to clean up and do maintenance on.
One thing the FSF's licences haven't dealt with properly is the problem of Free software being used to TAKE control rather than GIVE it.
Well the idea is that you do your computing on your own computer and you control your own computer. Now if you are doing your computing on somebody elses computer and/or storing your data on somebody elses computer you cannot expect to have control of their computer. Which leaves you a choice, either give them your data and store it on their system which they control, or build and run your own system which you control. Unsurprisingly most people choose the former.
Marketing is powerful stuff; if the large corporations decide something is more profitable for them, that thing will dominate the marketplace for a long time.
You can't ignore the fact that these proprietary things are the status quo and you can't change that without something truly disruptive. Microsoft has thrown billions at marketing Windows Phone and it is still struggling to gain marketshare despite there not really being anything wrong with it, its problem is that it isn't disruptive so why would people change?
Free software has to be competitive without just being open (because incredibly few people care about that) and free of charge but even that isn't enough, it needs to be innovative and disruptive instead of just following what the proprietary industry spits out, being late to the game with a 'me too' product is a recipe for failure whether it is a proprietary product with billions in corporate marketing funding or a free and open product.
There should be some way to stop free software from being exploited like this.
There is, by creating a viable free alternative and licensing it under GPLv3. Of course this would have to be good enough to compete with the likes of iOS and Android.
The problem is that most people will not care about free software or the benefits of it, which is fine, they shouldn't have to. There are many things people arguably should care about yet many don't, take food for example, eating healthy is something that people should care about but it's ok if they don't actually care about it so long as it can prevail as a product in the free market, which in this case means that it tastes good. That means it helps the cause of healthy eating without people actually needing to actively be aware of it, they just choose it because it's better.
This is what free software needs, you can argue the benefits all you want and how proprietary solutions are terrible but in the end people don't care enough about it to do things like dump their existing electronic payments, cell phones, laptops and tablets to replace them with a Lemote Yeelong, browse the web and use email as stallman does, pay for everything with cash and have no mobile communications so you need to create a better product as well, prove that free software can have these benefits and be as good as the current solutions. Not everybody is going to have the same viewpoint on this and they don't have to for free software (and hardware) to succeed, free software just has to prove itself in the free market.
You can't really argue managed code isn't several orders of magnitude slower than native code.
I'd be interested in seeing what makes you so dismissive of even attempting to argue your assertion that managed code is (even at the lowest end definition of 'several') at least 1000 times slower than native code.
Is it safe to assume the bootloader is still locked and I should continue to avoid these?
Really these days the product is the combination of hardware and software so it's about whether that product serves your needs, an unlocked bootloader is just a means to an end, it's nothing on its own so the question really is: what is the task you want to accomplish? If the product isn't capable of that task you have 2 choices:
-Modify it, which in this case would be along the lines of cracking the bootloader, flashing the ROM chip or some other hack
-Buy a product that can help you accomplish the task without modification
No that's what they have in common and a discrete graphics card hasn't been needed for such things for over a decade, moving those things from a PC to a tablet has no impact on discrete graphics cards.
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I expect more from them because they tie the hardware and software together, that gives a significant advantage in terms of being able to optimize the software and deliver software features dependent on specific hardware. Sure Android OEMs could do the same but they have to build off the existing Android codebase and it is in their interest not to deviate too much so as to be able to keep it maintainable over time.
It appears we were both on a different track, with the term 'steambox' I was thinking more the console-replacement product targeted at the living room rather than just any desktop PC with SteamOS installed. If you're the average person buying a low-end PC would you really dedicate it to gaming by getting it with SteamOS or just get it with Windows and install Steam? I would think most people would do the latter so it probably wouldn't be worth OEMs to have different SKUs and do hardware testing and driver install/maintenance for low-end boxes that they probably wouldn't sell many of anyway.
They aren't really that useful anymore, in fact I don't even bother with setting mine. It's a beautiful omega and I wear it as a piece of jewelry rather than for any utilitarian value.
The at-a-glance info is neat if it's always available (like e-ink is probably a good idea) but actually interacting with it is mostly less convenient than a phone, the tiny screen makes it awkward but worst of all you need both arms to operate it! Then there's the fact that you can't switch between hands and that you have to take it off if you want somebody to take a photo of you with it or let somebody else use it.
I don't think the device you speak of can conveniently be a watch, maybe glasses but in that case it would need some decent way to interact with it, speech is not good enough and a touchpad on the side of your head obviously sucks too.
Then what system is for people who like gamepads but also like indie games?
Ouya, which has demonstrated that very few of such people exist.
Few people who prefer to play PC games already own PC-compatible gamepads.
Because people who prefer to play PC games don't want gamepads.
What is there to design?
A PC in such an enclosure, are these currently available for around that price?
Low risk for OEMs as no dedicated very distinct product line is required.
Well that's the question, what do they already have that is decent that they could just install SteamOS on? Even the crappy (spec-wise) Dell Zino its most barebones configuration and that's with no keyboard/mouse or controller.
I'm kinda envisioning the Steambox being offered at more of a $250-300 price point. If you want a monster rig you can still build it yourself and run SteamOS.
Offered by who though? Sure if Valve were a hardware maker they could make up the profit margin with software sales but I doubt any of the existing OEMs are going to want to go through the process of designing, building and supporting such hardware with virtually no profit.
Oh yeah, cool. I thought perhaps you meant they had been working on Nouveau or Intel or AMD's Open Source drivers or something.
as well as a bunch of work on OpenGL drivers.
Which OpenGL drivers did the work on?
Now, don't compare it to your PC.
But it is a PC and everything in that list is already done.
* Choice (and competition) of hardware providers
* Upgradeable
Depending on what you're upgrading that can actually be a negative in the long run, while it is nice to be able to upgrade the HDD the ability to upgrade the CPU/GPU/RAM means developers just make that a requirement rather than optimizing their code for the existing hardware. The graphics quality of console titles gets better over time because they get better at optimizing for the concrete set of hardware they are targeting, they know the CPU/GPU clocks, instruction sets, memory size, cache size, bus speeds, latency, shader model, etc... and can rely on those numbers rather than them being unknowns. It's much harder to provide a consistent user experience when you are targeting thousands and thousands of different hardware configurations.
Who cares who had what before who? If you care about that then you should avoid all tech companies, they all copy eachother.
It's because Android users can move on to different manufacturers so when one manufacturer (albeit the biggest of them all in this case) pulls some bullshit stunt like this they can just say "oh when i said Android i didn't mean *Samsung* Android" and many will consider that a benefit, using 'Android' when talking about devices in general is pretty disingenuous since it can mean anything from cheap chinese featurephones up to expensive iPhone competitors and of course this impacts just about every aspect of the operating system, features and user experience.
For some reason the stupidity of arguing over 'Android performance' is lost on many people, anybody defending 'Android' (in terms of performance, and I suppose features dependent on specific hardware too) rather than a particular version on a particular device, is an idiot. For example the performance of my Nexus 7 has been up and down across various versions of Android (it's been well-documented) so it's moronic to make some all-encompassing statement regarding Android performance when even on the flagship devices it isn't consistent, much less all the other parties building official and unofficial (non-OHA members) devices.
If you learn office at a young age, it becomes very unlikely you will switch to anything else.
Rubbish, people adapt if the benefit is there and/or the product is intuitive enough, but of course they are unlikely to change if the alternative is just the same thing with a different user interface, their time is generally more valuable. It's the same reason the world isn't stuck with Nokia featurephones and WinMo/Blackberry smartphones, because Android and iOS came along with compelling features and intuitive UI and people adapted because it added significant value and was disruptive to the market even though most of them cost significantly more.
They will either pay for it or not pay for it. If they don't pay they are committing a crime which can be severely punished if they get caught.
Not if they use MS Office Starter which is free.
If they pay then the school is basically training them to give money to a large corporation.
So? If they use GNU/Linux on an Intel or AMD computer it is the same thing, both are large corporations.
Not only that, a specific corporation, with a partial monopoly in that market.
Whilst they may have a "partial monopoly" (by which I guess you just mean a large marketshare) in office suites on desktop computers running Windows, that category has become just a subset of computing. With people using multiple computing devices of different categories that can all access the same web applications it is only logical that people will start using ad-supported services (Google Docs or Office Live) or paid versions of them so they can use the same applications across devices and ones that they may or may not own. Sure you could host/run/maintain your own office suite of web applications and I don't doubt that eventually - if there isn't already - a free suite will be developed but who could really be bothered with that?
Yes, but since the hood is not welded shut, you can take your car to ANY garage: The dealer, Wal-Mart, Canadian Tire, the old scoundrel down the street... That is the freedom that you get with Free software. You can fix it yourself, or pay someone of your choosing to fix it.
Software isn't like a car. Your software often breaks down after excessive use does it? Do you need to service your software every so often? If you were talking about your computer then that's a different story and you can take it to anybody to clean up and do maintenance on.
One thing the FSF's licences haven't dealt with properly is the problem of Free software being used to TAKE control rather than GIVE it.
Well the idea is that you do your computing on your own computer and you control your own computer. Now if you are doing your computing on somebody elses computer and/or storing your data on somebody elses computer you cannot expect to have control of their computer. Which leaves you a choice, either give them your data and store it on their system which they control, or build and run your own system which you control. Unsurprisingly most people choose the former.
Marketing is powerful stuff; if the large corporations decide something is more profitable for them, that thing will dominate the marketplace for a long time.
You can't ignore the fact that these proprietary things are the status quo and you can't change that without something truly disruptive. Microsoft has thrown billions at marketing Windows Phone and it is still struggling to gain marketshare despite there not really being anything wrong with it, its problem is that it isn't disruptive so why would people change?
Free software has to be competitive without just being open (because incredibly few people care about that) and free of charge but even that isn't enough, it needs to be innovative and disruptive instead of just following what the proprietary industry spits out, being late to the game with a 'me too' product is a recipe for failure whether it is a proprietary product with billions in corporate marketing funding or a free and open product.
There should be some way to stop free software from being exploited like this.
There is, by creating a viable free alternative and licensing it under GPLv3. Of course this would have to be good enough to compete with the likes of iOS and Android.
The problem is that most people will not care about free software or the benefits of it, which is fine, they shouldn't have to. There are many things people arguably should care about yet many don't, take food for example, eating healthy is something that people should care about but it's ok if they don't actually care about it so long as it can prevail as a product in the free market, which in this case means that it tastes good. That means it helps the cause of healthy eating without people actually needing to actively be aware of it, they just choose it because it's better.
This is what free software needs, you can argue the benefits all you want and how proprietary solutions are terrible but in the end people don't care enough about it to do things like dump their existing electronic payments, cell phones, laptops and tablets to replace them with a Lemote Yeelong, browse the web and use email as stallman does, pay for everything with cash and have no mobile communications so you need to create a better product as well, prove that free software can have these benefits and be as good as the current solutions. Not everybody is going to have the same viewpoint on this and they don't have to for free software (and hardware) to succeed, free software just has to prove itself in the free market.
Free software is controlled by the users because of Freedom 0.
No, in theory software could be controlled by users because of Freedom 0. How many users exercise that freedom?
Try taking a compiler design course at your local university and educate yourself.
I have, but I want to see where you get the idea that native code is at least 1000 times faster than managed code.
Er, not to split hairs but I think you meant to say "Linux kernel".
Isn't the Android kernel the Linux kernel with some modifications, hence making it 'based on Linux' or 'Linux-based'?
You can't really argue managed code isn't several orders of magnitude slower than native code.
I'd be interested in seeing what makes you so dismissive of even attempting to argue your assertion that managed code is (even at the lowest end definition of 'several') at least 1000 times slower than native code.
Is it safe to assume the bootloader is still locked and I should continue to avoid these?
Really these days the product is the combination of hardware and software so it's about whether that product serves your needs, an unlocked bootloader is just a means to an end, it's nothing on its own so the question really is: what is the task you want to accomplish? If the product isn't capable of that task you have 2 choices:
-Modify it, which in this case would be along the lines of cracking the bootloader, flashing the ROM chip or some other hack
-Buy a product that can help you accomplish the task without modification
No that's what they have in common and a discrete graphics card hasn't been needed for such things for over a decade, moving those things from a PC to a tablet has no impact on discrete graphics cards.