No, FxOS is instead just a native Android application, compiled against Android's userspace.
I thought it had it's own userspace running on the Android kernel with Android drivers, or are you saying that Gonk wraps up the entire Android system with Gecko and Gaia sitting on top of that?
That doesn't really save you much, given that you can write with the NDK or write web apps you can mostly avoid Dalvik if you want to anyway, but it's still there if you need/want it, limiting to html apps seems pretty silly outside of targeting the extreme low end of devices.
If you use Android apps and a browser, you have two parallel platform stacks --- rendering, compositing, VM, networking, UI, etc both running on a phone at the same time. Getting rid of the Android Java stuff means you can use the Web and local HTML5-based apps at the same time with only one stack. Saves a lot of memory and simplifies the software design considerably.
All that does is limit you to html apps, which is what webOS was trying to do, on Android in the end Google made the NDK available because they realized that the abstracted environment wasn't flexible enough but you can still run HTML apps. Even the first iteration of iOS was supposed to be based around web apps and that idea was abandoned, but you can still run HTML apps. So given that HTML apps can already run on any modern smartphone I still fail to see what the appeal of Firefox OS is supposed to be unless it's about just targeting the really low end.
That is the whole point of FirefoxOS, get rid of all the extra layers and pretty much only run a rendering engine on top of a Linux kernel (exceptions are things like: wpasupplicant).
What's the point of it though? Why not run it like Facebook Home on top of Android and utilise the Firefox browser? At least that's as easy for users to install as any app and underneath is completely compatible with all existing Android functionality. I see no reason this would end up any different than Tizen or webOS or any of those abandoned mobile OSes. So the question is why would somebody choose this over an Android phone?
That may have been the case in the past but these days hardware is superseded so fast that it's no longer an issue. Nobody is going to hire someone to provide continued support for their pc from 12 years ago, even SGI systems costing well over $100,000 were superseded in less time than that and porting applications from irix to linux and running them on a $1000 off-the-shelf PC was much more economical than trying to keep a power-draining SGI dinosaur running.
No I haven't, I didn't mean to come across as though that's the answer, it was more that I see that espoused as the great thing about open source - that it puts control in the hands of the user but all to often - as you rightfully point out in this case - actually exercising that control is impractical anyway.
Nah that's cool, I understand. Certainly i've done the same thing with smaller projects, adapting them to my needs, but for the larger ones like Firefox I certainly agree with you that unless it's something you can do within the provided frameworks (in this case extensions) the job of patching changes into new releases that seem to come out ever more frequently is not practical.
Yeah I agree with you, the whole concept that open source gives control to the user is true in theory but in practice it is mostly completely impractical for solving problems like this anyway.
I have no idea what potential interruption in business you talk about, it certainly is far less common in open source software than in proprietary software.
Espousing the virtues of using a package manager - like aptitude - to update software has nothing to do with proprietary vs open source software, using apt-get update && apt-get upgrade works equally good for open source and proprietary software.
I don't know, check the specs of the receiver against the controller, i'm sure some basic searching will enable you to find similar details about the ps3 controller, or connecting it and debugging it yourself to identify the details.
Being unable to re-sell off of Steam is bad, don't get me wrong, but the punch hurts a little less if I can't sell the $5 Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, as opposed to the $60 copy of HALO 4.
I would think that's the same no matter what platform you're on, unless you're saying you only play cheap games on steam and only more expensive ones on xbox?
Look, we all know how this is going to turn out. The new Xbox will allow game developers to decide whether they want an always on connection. The PS4 will too. This is a tough market, and I doubt either console maker wants to lose a major developer over this. Let the dev make the choice and then answer the complaints.
That's the logical way, that's how it works in every other content market, the content publishers dictate all these terms. Same goes for things like Tivo, (some of) the FOSS community complain about the lack of openness of Tivo but even though it would be trivial to introduce an open competitor they know it would have no content because removing DRM and making it all open and free will drive away content producers. If users do care about this then they should direct that criticism at the publishers, just like they do on PCs, I mean you don't go to Dell and complain that EA requires always-on for SimCity, you go straight to EA. If publishers demand always-on then complaining to Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo isn't going to do anything.
No, with the GPLv2 if you are distributing a derivative work you must make the source code of the derivative work available. Tivo did that with their changes however the argument against their practice was not about source code but about hardware, whilst you could modify the source code you couldn't modify the binaries running on the Tivo hardware. The GPLv3 imposes requirements on the vendor such that in the Tivo situation had the software been under the v3 they would be required to provide the tools and instructions necessary to replace the shipped GPLv3 software with a modified version of it.
This has widely been seen as overly restrictive, particularly when you have an intermediary - like Tivo - that has to balance the demands of content producers with the demands of customers. It's all well and good to say 'open open open', but until major content producers are happy with that it will remain a non-starter for these types of applications.
They a generally shared code-base for the same programs. However, Outlook is not availbale on Mac, and its replacement is not available on Windows. In the end, MS Office for Mac != MS Office for Windows.
You don't appear to be very knowledgeable about this, Outlookis available on Mac.
Presently, may be. However, MS Office for Mac has historically been known to not be very compatible with MS Office for Windows. Word would do things differently on Mac than Windows; etc. They may be doing better, but there's very likely still interoperability issues between the two.
Well assuming you can cite some of those actual problems i'm still not sure what your point is.
2. The iPhone is the right width for the human hand.
Because Steve Jobs told you that? Man he should have gotten into the glove business and we could have gotten rid of the silliness of having different 'sizes' and just make the correct size for the human hand.
But it's not the same MS Office that is on Windows.
So the point you're trying to make is that platform-specific software is specific to the platform for which it was written? And actually it's pretty naive to think they would re-write the whole thing for Mac rather than share all the core code.
The program sets and features are different.
Really? As far as the major components of office go and the features they have it seems pretty much the same to me, that's why there's interoperability between the Windows and Mac versions.
Obviously not, i wouldn't have even been having the discussion otherwise, the reply was directed squarely at the fact that primitives - specifically integers - do not double in size on 64bit architecture. Go back and read the thread, had you done that in the first place you would know that.
Still, the FACT is that with the C compiler used for most open source compiling, 64 bit code is bigger in size
I never disputed that, again read the thread before you reply so you know the context of the discussion before you interject with an irrelevant comment.
Are or are not long and pointer both twice as big in 64 bit?
They are in that instance, which is fine and was never in dispute, why do you think that was in dispute?
Never mind "well it doesn't have to be" and "it's just a chocie" and "has nothing to do with number of bits in the CPU".
That is the topic of the discussion and had you bothered to read you would know that, read here.
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No, FxOS is instead just a native Android application, compiled against Android's userspace.
I thought it had it's own userspace running on the Android kernel with Android drivers, or are you saying that Gonk wraps up the entire Android system with Gecko and Gaia sitting on top of that?
That doesn't really save you much, given that you can write with the NDK or write web apps you can mostly avoid Dalvik if you want to anyway, but it's still there if you need/want it, limiting to html apps seems pretty silly outside of targeting the extreme low end of devices.
If you use Android apps and a browser, you have two parallel platform stacks --- rendering, compositing, VM, networking, UI, etc both running on a phone at the same time. Getting rid of the Android Java stuff means you can use the Web and local HTML5-based apps at the same time with only one stack. Saves a lot of memory and simplifies the software design considerably.
All that does is limit you to html apps, which is what webOS was trying to do, on Android in the end Google made the NDK available because they realized that the abstracted environment wasn't flexible enough but you can still run HTML apps. Even the first iteration of iOS was supposed to be based around web apps and that idea was abandoned, but you can still run HTML apps. So given that HTML apps can already run on any modern smartphone I still fail to see what the appeal of Firefox OS is supposed to be unless it's about just targeting the really low end.
That is the whole point of FirefoxOS, get rid of all the extra layers and pretty much only run a rendering engine on top of a Linux kernel (exceptions are things like: wpasupplicant).
What extra layers?
What's the point of it though? Why not run it like Facebook Home on top of Android and utilise the Firefox browser? At least that's as easy for users to install as any app and underneath is completely compatible with all existing Android functionality. I see no reason this would end up any different than Tizen or webOS or any of those abandoned mobile OSes. So the question is why would somebody choose this over an Android phone?
That may have been the case in the past but these days hardware is superseded so fast that it's no longer an issue. Nobody is going to hire someone to provide continued support for their pc from 12 years ago, even SGI systems costing well over $100,000 were superseded in less time than that and porting applications from irix to linux and running them on a $1000 off-the-shelf PC was much more economical than trying to keep a power-draining SGI dinosaur running.
No I haven't, I didn't mean to come across as though that's the answer, it was more that I see that espoused as the great thing about open source - that it puts control in the hands of the user but all to often - as you rightfully point out in this case - actually exercising that control is impractical anyway.
Nah that's cool, I understand. Certainly i've done the same thing with smaller projects, adapting them to my needs, but for the larger ones like Firefox I certainly agree with you that unless it's something you can do within the provided frameworks (in this case extensions) the job of patching changes into new releases that seem to come out ever more frequently is not practical.
Yeah I agree with you, the whole concept that open source gives control to the user is true in theory but in practice it is mostly completely impractical for solving problems like this anyway.
So they've now taken control away from the annoyed user who is going to cop entire page loads of crap.
You can download the source, change it back if you don't like it, isn't that the whole selling point of free software?
I have no idea what potential interruption in business you talk about, it certainly is far less common in open source software than in proprietary software.
Espousing the virtues of using a package manager - like aptitude - to update software has nothing to do with proprietary vs open source software, using apt-get update && apt-get upgrade works equally good for open source and proprietary software.
With free software, you can still buy support even after the original publisher has discontinued support.
And unless you're a business it's probably going to be prohibitively expensive.
Overheard in front of MS Surface display at local MediaMarkt:
"Varför finns det ingen skärm på den här skärmen, bara ikoner? Hur fan kan man hitta något på det här sättet?"
("Why is there no screen on this screen, only icons? How the hell do you find anything this way?")
I suppose he's never seen an ipad then.
What happens when the console breaks?
Same thing that happens with the xbox now, or with steam?
I don't know, check the specs of the receiver against the controller, i'm sure some basic searching will enable you to find similar details about the ps3 controller, or connecting it and debugging it yourself to identify the details.
PS3 and Wii are just bluetooth.
Being unable to re-sell off of Steam is bad, don't get me wrong, but the punch hurts a little less if I can't sell the $5 Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, as opposed to the $60 copy of HALO 4.
I would think that's the same no matter what platform you're on, unless you're saying you only play cheap games on steam and only more expensive ones on xbox?
Look, we all know how this is going to turn out. The new Xbox will allow game developers to decide whether they want an always on connection. The PS4 will too. This is a tough market, and I doubt either console maker wants to lose a major developer over this. Let the dev make the choice and then answer the complaints.
That's the logical way, that's how it works in every other content market, the content publishers dictate all these terms. Same goes for things like Tivo, (some of) the FOSS community complain about the lack of openness of Tivo but even though it would be trivial to introduce an open competitor they know it would have no content because removing DRM and making it all open and free will drive away content producers. If users do care about this then they should direct that criticism at the publishers, just like they do on PCs, I mean you don't go to Dell and complain that EA requires always-on for SimCity, you go straight to EA. If publishers demand always-on then complaining to Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo isn't going to do anything.
No, with the GPLv2 if you are distributing a derivative work you must make the source code of the derivative work available. Tivo did that with their changes however the argument against their practice was not about source code but about hardware, whilst you could modify the source code you couldn't modify the binaries running on the Tivo hardware. The GPLv3 imposes requirements on the vendor such that in the Tivo situation had the software been under the v3 they would be required to provide the tools and instructions necessary to replace the shipped GPLv3 software with a modified version of it.
This has widely been seen as overly restrictive, particularly when you have an intermediary - like Tivo - that has to balance the demands of content producers with the demands of customers. It's all well and good to say 'open open open', but until major content producers are happy with that it will remain a non-starter for these types of applications.
I thought Linux was GPL 2, not 3, and it wasn't required, but I may be mistaken.
Yes, Linux is GPL v2, but it is still required, v3 just prevents Tivoization.
isn't anyone interested in the fact that they open-sourced the code?
Well it's hardly surprising, they are legally required to do so under the license.
They a generally shared code-base for the same programs. However, Outlook is not availbale on Mac, and its replacement is not available on Windows. In the end, MS Office for Mac != MS Office for Windows.
You don't appear to be very knowledgeable about this, Outlook is available on Mac.
Presently, may be. However, MS Office for Mac has historically been known to not be very compatible with MS Office for Windows. Word would do things differently on Mac than Windows; etc. They may be doing better, but there's very likely still interoperability issues between the two.
Well assuming you can cite some of those actual problems i'm still not sure what your point is.
2. The iPhone is the right width for the human hand.
Because Steve Jobs told you that? Man he should have gotten into the glove business and we could have gotten rid of the silliness of having different 'sizes' and just make the correct size for the human hand.
But it's not the same MS Office that is on Windows.
So the point you're trying to make is that platform-specific software is specific to the platform for which it was written? And actually it's pretty naive to think they would re-write the whole thing for Mac rather than share all the core code.
The program sets and features are different.
Really? As far as the major components of office go and the features they have it seems pretty much the same to me, that's why there's interoperability between the Windows and Mac versions.
Everybody knows all that.
Obviously not, i wouldn't have even been having the discussion otherwise, the reply was directed squarely at the fact that primitives - specifically integers - do not double in size on 64bit architecture. Go back and read the thread, had you done that in the first place you would know that.
Still, the FACT is that with the C compiler used for most open source compiling, 64 bit code is bigger in size
I never disputed that, again read the thread before you reply so you know the context of the discussion before you interject with an irrelevant comment.
Are or are not long and pointer both twice as big in 64 bit?
They are in that instance, which is fine and was never in dispute, why do you think that was in dispute?
Never mind "well it doesn't have to be" and "it's just a chocie" and "has nothing to do with number of bits in the CPU".
That is the topic of the discussion and had you bothered to read you would know that, read here.