Marketing people, however, quickly realized that adding "smartphone" to a product's description helped push units so a whole bunch of feature phones running Android have been labeled as smartphones.
It's a meaningless distinction, defined by marketing people in the first place.
From wikipedia:
"While a feature phone is a low-end device and smartphone a high-end one, there is no standard way of distinguishing them. Smartphone and feature phone are not mutually exclusive categories.[emphasis mine] A complication in distinguishing between smartphones and feature phones is that over time the capabilities of new models of feature phones can increase to exceed those of phones that had been promoted as smartphones in the past."
So, what are you blathering about? Is the original iPhone a smartphone or a featurephone? Is my n900 a smartphone? The line you draw is completely arbitrary.
Smartphones (no, not feature phones disguised as smartphones - I'm talking actual smartphones)? That's debatable and hard to accurately measure (since so many Android manufacturers sell "smartphones" that are really feature phones running a smartphone OS). Entirely likely this one is pretty much a draw.
You don't need a Safari extension to banish them.
Social Fixer does this, and more. You can also use it to filter out the "SomebodyI'veNeverHeardOf is posting about SomeThingILiked" crap. It supports Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Greasemonkey. It's pretty neat.
There's no technical bar here - it just seems to be a mindset thing. Tablet / PC / console / HTPC - why not have the tablet be the core of all of that, and just switch UI "experience" depending on what input devices and display I'm using at the moment? Let the software developers choose to support whichever of those "experiences" they care about for their products.
Industry goons keep saying "nobody wants this". For some reason, people believe them.
Don't fret. Ubuntu Touch will be here soon. The KDE devs are working on switching between Plasma Active and Plasma Desktop on-the-fly.
You're right about there being no technical hurdle. Heck, I was doing this two years ago in my N900, switching between Hildon-Desktop and IceWM. I never bothered to script automatic switching, but it would be trivial.
The N900 hardware wasn't really up to snuff, I just did it to prove a point. The biggest issue wasn't CPU performance, but being limited to 800x480 over composite video. With modern hardware and HDMI, this should be a no-brainer.
The trick is providing something that is truly useful without cannibalizing Laptop/Desktop sales.
That would be a good trick! If it's truly useful, it will cannibalize Laptop/Desktop sales. Unless it's intentionally crippled, then it wouldn't be truly useful.
Waitaminute -- Mobile devices are crippled. And they're already eating Laptop/Desktop sales.
I have no problem using my Nexus 7 with a mouse. It works well enough. But why would I want windows management on a 7" screen?
For the same reason you would want it on a 20 inch screen. To view the output of multiple programs simultaneously. Is a 10 inch tablet too small for window management? A 10 inch netbook? The only difference between a 10-inch tablet with a keyboard plugged in and a laptop should be the hinge. If you don't want it, don't use it.
If nobody wants it, why did Samsung implement it (badly)?
If nobody wants it, why is ParanoidAndroid implementing it?
Like I said, It's coming. Eventually, this feature will be in stock Android. I hope this doesn't upset you.
(BONUS ROUND!) Android's default task switcher sucks really bad on my tablet too. It just shows all the open applications in one long row or column that you have to scroll through, ignoring all the empty space on the screen. It wastes time and screen space and it's really easy to close stuff by accident if there's a little bit of angle to your stroke when you're scrolling through the list. (EXTRA BONUS ROUND!) Then you get to go back to the home screen first, and into the app tray because there's no way to get to the app tray directly from the task switcher, then hunt through a long uncategorized alphabetical list of all the programs installed on your tablet spanning multiple pages. Fun!
Compared to Maemo, WebOS, Plasma Active, and SailfishOS, That really sucks!
And Microsoft keeps demonstrating that they just don't get it, that no one seriously expect a tablet to be a PC...
That's only because Apple and Google have lowered expectations. I run Lubuntu+Kwin on my HP Touchpad, and I'm much happier with it than Android or WebOS. With slightly-oversized buttons and fat scrollbars, everything is fine. I have oodles of useful free software, and my tablet isn't slathered in advertising. I can run pretty much whatever software I please, LibreOffice, real Firefox, etc.. Even with my fat fingers, I never feel hobbled by the interface, because it's easily customized.
... no one wants their PC to be a tablet.
You're right about that. That's because today's mobile operating systems are so god-awful that they barely even useful on tablets. Nobody wants to take that suck-frenzy back home to their desktop.
Really, there should be no reason to distinguish between the two. Why shouldn't I get a normal desktop interface when I plug in a mouse and Keyboard? Why can't I switch back-and-forth between some sort of mobile and desktop mode at will? Should a computer really be neutered just because I can carry it around? Should it be gelded if I can fit it in my pocket?
Microsoft was almost one-third-right. Shamefully, they're not any worse than the other major players in that regard. Their solution was to shoehorn their moblie interface onto the desktop. That was really fscking stupid. They also ripped out the desktop interface entirely from WinRT. That was also pretty stupid. Which interface is presented should be a matter of context, based on available inputs/outputs.
It's really not that hard, or at least, it wouldn't be if the mobile vendors hadn't intentionally crippled our operating systems. A couple years ago, I compiled IceWM on my n900, and made a script to switch between IceWM and Hildon. When I connected my bluetooth mouse and keyboard and plugged it into the TV, I would switch from Hildon to IceWM. My apps would remain running. I could then enjoy my apps side-by-side. I could fire up Debian applications out of the chroot, and use them with my native window manager. Disconnect from TV: go back to Hildon. Everything stays running. While I never got around to it, it would be trivial to write a script that listens on D-Bus and switches automatically when connecting or disconnecting a mouse.
Of course, there were a few minor issues, and the 2009-era hardware wasn't quite there yet for the most pleasurable experience (800x480 resolution, 600Mhz Cortex A8 with 256MB RAM), but it was still useful. I thought I was looking at the future. The real deal couldn't be more than a year away, right?
I'm just one guy, and I'm far from an expert developer. If I could could get this close to Post-PC Nirvana in an afternoon, why has the industry failed to deliver? On modern mobile hardware with gigs of RAM quad-core processors and HDMI 1080p output this would fly! Why has the industry failed to deliver, when the technology has existed for YEARS?
Android is getting better. HID support is there, and we all know some sort of improved window management is coming (Is android about to become as good at window management as Windows 1.0?). Unfortunately, it still sucks pretty bad. The OS doesn't respond at all to the change in context. It doesn't care that I connected a mouse, It still wants to be touched. It doesn't care if I'm connected to 1080p output, everything's always still full screen. Maybe in a few years it won't suck so bad.
Ubuntu touch is aiming for the experience, but they seem hell-bent on breaking everything in the process. What makes ubuntu (and other GNU/Linux distros) great are their vast repositories of fresh software and the flexibility to run whatever DE you desire.
I'm not really sure what their plans are, but there's a lot of ways they can screw this up:
"Stewardesses" is a fun word to type. In QWERTY layout, it's all on the left hand.
"We saw a sex crazed bastard grab a great ass as 3 bare breasted stewardesses traversed Westwater street! We bet vexed stewardesses bagged extra bras ever after!"
Really, if you're not encrypting your email, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. If your communications are in plaintext, being passed around from server to server in plaintext, it would be absolutely stupid to expect that would be in any way private. It's about as private as a postcard: no envelope, all information plainly visible to anyone that handles it..
All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor letters written by all the enlisted-men patients, who were kept in residence in wards of their own. It was a monotonous job, and Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers. After the first day he had no curiosity at all. To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the. That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal. Soon he was proscribing parts of salutations and signatures and leaving the text untouched. One time he blacked out all but the salutation "Dear Mary" from a letter, and at the bottom he wrote, "I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army." A. T. Tappman was the group chaplain's name.
When he had exhausted all possibilities in the letters, he began attacking the names and addresses on the envelopes, obliterating whole homes and streets, annihilating entire metropolises with careless flicks of his wrist as though he were God. Catch-22 required that each censored letter bear the censoring officer's name. Most letters he didn't read at all. On those he didn't read at all he wrote his own name. On those he did read he wrote, "Washington Irving." When that grew monotonous he wrote, "Irving Washington." Censoring the envelopes had serious repercussions, produced a ripple of anxiety on some ethereal military echelon that floated a C.I.D. man back into the ward posing as a patient. They all knew he was a C.I.D. man because he kept inquiring about an officer named Irving or Washington and because after his first day there he wouldn't censor letters. He found them too monotonous.
They say that X11 is too heavy for a mobile device (which arguably it is),
No, it's not. X11 is just fine in Maemo 5 on my N900 from 2009 (Cortex-A8 @600 Mhz, 256 MB RAM).
It's currently using 4.8% of my CPU. It can use up to about 15% when doing maemo's fancy window switching.
It's also just fine in Raspbian on my Raspberry Pi. I find it eating up 0.3% of my CPU right now. If I grab a terminal window and shake it back and forth as fast as I can, it gets up to about 70%.
This isn't about a making a better display server for the users. It's about control. It's about making a better display server for Canonical.
Chromium and VLC have been working just fine on Ubuntu ARM for years (as well as Ubuntu PPC). No need for virtualized processor. They're compiled for ARM. Dropbox and Jungledisk should also compile just fine if the source is available. That's the beauty of free software.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet the Schwinn guy kicks harder.
Marketing people, however, quickly realized that adding "smartphone" to a product's description helped push units so a whole bunch of feature phones running Android have been labeled as smartphones.
It's a meaningless distinction, defined by marketing people in the first place. From wikipedia:
"While a feature phone is a low-end device and smartphone a high-end one, there is no standard way of distinguishing them. Smartphone and feature phone are not mutually exclusive categories.[emphasis mine] A complication in distinguishing between smartphones and feature phones is that over time the capabilities of new models of feature phones can increase to exceed those of phones that had been promoted as smartphones in the past."
So, what are you blathering about? Is the original iPhone a smartphone or a featurephone? Is my n900 a smartphone? The line you draw is completely arbitrary.
Smartphones (no, not feature phones disguised as smartphones - I'm talking actual smartphones)? That's debatable and hard to accurately measure (since so many Android manufacturers sell "smartphones" that are really feature phones running a smartphone OS). Entirely likely this one is pretty much a draw.
What on earth are you blathering about?
Actually you don't even need particles in English:
"why just strip out all punctuation who needs commas full stops capital letters anyway everything still perfectly readable"
You stripped a conjunction and a copula, but you left the particle in place.
"why just strip all punctuation who needs commas full stops capital letters anyway everything still perfectly readable."
D'oh. Wrong link.
Bryan Lunduke published some screenshots and analysis of the core features of the Ubuntu OS for smartphones and tablets.
Did the submitter even read TFA? I clicked the link. No screenshots. No analysis.
Snowden spills his guts then dies.
Until Chrome gets a solid NoScript-ish plugin, I'm sticking with Firefox.
ScriptSafe is a solid NoScript-ish plugin.
In many ways, I actually prefer it over NoScript.
You don't need a Safari extension to banish them. Social Fixer does this, and more. You can also use it to filter out the "SomebodyI'veNeverHeardOf is posting about SomeThingILiked" crap. It supports Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Greasemonkey. It's pretty neat.
There's no technical bar here - it just seems to be a mindset thing. Tablet / PC / console / HTPC - why not have the tablet be the core of all of that, and just switch UI "experience" depending on what input devices and display I'm using at the moment? Let the software developers choose to support whichever of those "experiences" they care about for their products.
Industry goons keep saying "nobody wants this". For some reason, people believe them.
Don't fret. Ubuntu Touch will be here soon. The KDE devs are working on switching between Plasma Active and Plasma Desktop on-the-fly.
You're right about there being no technical hurdle. Heck, I was doing this two years ago in my N900, switching between Hildon-Desktop and IceWM. I never bothered to script automatic switching, but it would be trivial. The N900 hardware wasn't really up to snuff, I just did it to prove a point. The biggest issue wasn't CPU performance, but being limited to 800x480 over composite video. With modern hardware and HDMI, this should be a no-brainer.
The trick is providing something that is truly useful without cannibalizing Laptop/Desktop sales.
That would be a good trick! If it's truly useful, it will cannibalize Laptop/Desktop sales. Unless it's intentionally crippled, then it wouldn't be truly useful.
Waitaminute -- Mobile devices are crippled. And they're already eating Laptop/Desktop sales.
I have no problem using my Nexus 7 with a mouse. It works well enough. But why would I want windows management on a 7" screen?
For the same reason you would want it on a 20 inch screen. To view the output of multiple programs simultaneously. Is a 10 inch tablet too small for window management? A 10 inch netbook? The only difference between a 10-inch tablet with a keyboard plugged in and a laptop should be the hinge. If you don't want it, don't use it.
If nobody wants it, why did Samsung implement it (badly)?
If nobody wants it, why is ParanoidAndroid implementing it?
Like I said, It's coming. Eventually, this feature will be in stock Android. I hope this doesn't upset you.
(BONUS ROUND!) Android's default task switcher sucks really bad on my tablet too. It just shows all the open applications in one long row or column that you have to scroll through, ignoring all the empty space on the screen. It wastes time and screen space and it's really easy to close stuff by accident if there's a little bit of angle to your stroke when you're scrolling through the list. (EXTRA BONUS ROUND!) Then you get to go back to the home screen first, and into the app tray because there's no way to get to the app tray directly from the task switcher, then hunt through a long uncategorized alphabetical list of all the programs installed on your tablet spanning multiple pages. Fun!
Compared to Maemo, WebOS, Plasma Active, and SailfishOS, That really sucks!
Android is a bad joke. The punchline is iOS.
And Microsoft keeps demonstrating that they just don't get it, that no one seriously expect a tablet to be a PC...
That's only because Apple and Google have lowered expectations. I run Lubuntu+Kwin on my HP Touchpad, and I'm much happier with it than Android or WebOS. With slightly-oversized buttons and fat scrollbars, everything is fine. I have oodles of useful free software, and my tablet isn't slathered in advertising. I can run pretty much whatever software I please, LibreOffice, real Firefox, etc.. Even with my fat fingers, I never feel hobbled by the interface, because it's easily customized.
... no one wants their PC to be a tablet.
You're right about that. That's because today's mobile operating systems are so god-awful that they barely even useful on tablets. Nobody wants to take that suck-frenzy back home to their desktop.
Really, there should be no reason to distinguish between the two. Why shouldn't I get a normal desktop interface when I plug in a mouse and Keyboard? Why can't I switch back-and-forth between some sort of mobile and desktop mode at will? Should a computer really be neutered just because I can carry it around? Should it be gelded if I can fit it in my pocket?
Microsoft was almost one-third-right. Shamefully, they're not any worse than the other major players in that regard. Their solution was to shoehorn their moblie interface onto the desktop. That was really fscking stupid. They also ripped out the desktop interface entirely from WinRT. That was also pretty stupid. Which interface is presented should be a matter of context, based on available inputs/outputs.
It's really not that hard, or at least, it wouldn't be if the mobile vendors hadn't intentionally crippled our operating systems. A couple years ago, I compiled IceWM on my n900, and made a script to switch between IceWM and Hildon. When I connected my bluetooth mouse and keyboard and plugged it into the TV, I would switch from Hildon to IceWM. My apps would remain running. I could then enjoy my apps side-by-side. I could fire up Debian applications out of the chroot, and use them with my native window manager. Disconnect from TV: go back to Hildon. Everything stays running. While I never got around to it, it would be trivial to write a script that listens on D-Bus and switches automatically when connecting or disconnecting a mouse.
Of course, there were a few minor issues, and the 2009-era hardware wasn't quite there yet for the most pleasurable experience (800x480 resolution, 600Mhz Cortex A8 with 256MB RAM), but it was still useful. I thought I was looking at the future. The real deal couldn't be more than a year away, right?
I'm just one guy, and I'm far from an expert developer. If I could could get this close to Post-PC Nirvana in an afternoon, why has the industry failed to deliver? On modern mobile hardware with gigs of RAM quad-core processors and HDMI 1080p output this would fly! Why has the industry failed to deliver, when the technology has existed for YEARS?
Android is getting better. HID support is there, and we all know some sort of improved window management is coming (Is android about to become as good at window management as Windows 1.0?). Unfortunately, it still sucks pretty bad. The OS doesn't respond at all to the change in context. It doesn't care that I connected a mouse, It still wants to be touched. It doesn't care if I'm connected to 1080p output, everything's always still full screen. Maybe in a few years it won't suck so bad.
Ubuntu touch is aiming for the experience, but they seem hell-bent on breaking everything in the process. What makes ubuntu (and other GNU/Linux distros) great are their vast repositories of fresh software and the flexibility to run whatever DE you desire.
I'm not really sure what their plans are, but there's a lot of ways they can screw this up:
If the device refuses to allow
... but we know the older ones had a "better" correlation with goo bee health.
That "goo" is called honey. Most folks call them "honey bees."
"Stewardesses" is a fun word to type. In QWERTY layout, it's all on the left hand.
"We saw a sex crazed bastard grab a great ass as 3 bare breasted stewardesses traversed Westwater street! We bet vexed stewardesses bagged extra bras ever after!"
No, Sailfish does run android apps.. IIRC, they licensed Alien Dalvik.
Really, if you're not encrypting your email, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. If your communications are in plaintext, being passed around from server to server in plaintext, it would be absolutely stupid to expect that would be in any way private. It's about as private as a postcard: no envelope, all information plainly visible to anyone that handles it..
All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor letters written by all the enlisted-men patients, who were kept in residence in wards of their own. It was a monotonous job, and Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers. After the first day he had no curiosity at all. To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the. That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal. Soon he was proscribing parts of salutations and signatures and leaving the text untouched. One time he blacked out all but the salutation "Dear Mary" from a letter, and at the bottom he wrote, "I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army." A. T. Tappman was the group chaplain's name.
When he had exhausted all possibilities in the letters, he began attacking the names and addresses on the envelopes, obliterating whole homes and streets, annihilating entire metropolises with careless flicks of his wrist as though he were God. Catch-22 required that each censored letter bear the censoring officer's name. Most letters he didn't read at all. On those he didn't read at all he wrote his own name. On those he did read he wrote, "Washington Irving." When that grew monotonous he wrote, "Irving Washington." Censoring the envelopes had serious repercussions, produced a ripple of anxiety on some ethereal military echelon that floated a C.I.D. man back into the ward posing as a patient. They all knew he was a C.I.D. man because he kept inquiring about an officer named Irving or Washington and because after his first day there he wouldn't censor letters. He found them too monotonous.
--Joseph Heller, Catch-22*
It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta' do it.
The problem is that you're using LVM. ZFS can do this just fine (unless you're using windows).
You didn't say what you're using, but the Ubuntu PPA is here.
Generic source at http://zfsonlinux.org/
Is Wayland somehow being encumbered by a problem they won't have (i.e. closed-source hardware driver support).
Yep.
That's why they're using CyanogenMod as the base with libhybris.
The idea is that they only need working Android drivers. They can get those.
They say that X11 is too heavy for a mobile device (which arguably it is),
No, it's not. X11 is just fine in Maemo 5 on my N900 from 2009 (Cortex-A8 @600 Mhz, 256 MB RAM).
It's currently using 4.8% of my CPU. It can use up to about 15% when doing maemo's fancy window switching.
It's also just fine in Raspbian on my Raspberry Pi. I find it eating up 0.3% of my CPU right now. If I grab a terminal window and shake it back and forth as fast as I can, it gets up to about 70%.
This isn't about a making a better display server for the users. It's about control. It's about making a better display server for Canonical.
... Power failure corrupts absolutely.
'those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it'
Those who misquote George Santayana are condemned to paraphrase him.
Such things havarti happened many times in history, like when Maasdam Hussein bombed the Curds.
Hogwash.
Chromium and VLC have been working just fine on Ubuntu ARM for years (as well as Ubuntu PPC). No need for virtualized processor. They're compiled for ARM. Dropbox and Jungledisk should also compile just fine if the source is available. That's the beauty of free software.
There's a source tarball for Dropbox here.
Jungledisk (never heard of it before) appears to be propretary, so fsck 'em.