The ability to use a single codebase, in any language, to run on your desktop AND on your phone?
I think you misunderstood. He asked what *Ubuntu* brings to the smartphone table.
Or if you are unaware, your UI on Ubuntu phone will need to be in QML to be usable. So you don't get a choice.
And before you claim "you can still use other blah blah blah", you can on Android as well. I can write C++/QT and have it run on desktop and Android today (or python, or perl, or scala, or javascript, or whatever). It just sucks on Android, just like all those desktop apps are going to suck on Ubuntu Smartphone.
No, dev mode lets you do whatever you want. It's full access. It doesn't give you a BIOS because there isn't a fucking BIOS on ARM.
There is not a single possible way you can call a chrome book "locked down". That's just horseshit. I agree locked down hardware is wrong - good thing Google isn't doing it with *any* of their devices. Their Android phones aren't locked down, their tablets aren't locked down, and their laptops aren't locked down. Hell, their failed experiments such as the Nexus Q aren't locked down.
And FYI dev mode very explicitly supports running other OSes.
Not to mention with the ChromeBook all you are doing is trading the openness of X86 for a system that is as locked down as a cellphone.
Go educate yourself, seriously. All chromebooks come with a dev mode switch that unlocks the bootloader and lets you do *whatever you want* to the hardware. Such as installing Ubuntu.
Only on Slashdot can such an ignorant, and *factually wrong* post get modded "insightful"
The specs quoted for these devices are 2010 era Android specs - single core 1GHz, 512GB. Any (decent) Android phone released in 2013 and beyond will come with a quad core Cortex A15 with 2GB RAM.
2010 era Android phones ran Android just fine as well. Modern high end Android phones are pushing 14x more pixels, so that comparison is rather stupid and pointless. Or if we do take into account the number of pixels, it's glaringly obvious that modern Android phones do not have 14x faster hardware, yet run smoother & faster than Firefox OS. Why? Because web technologies are goddamn slow. Mozilla is 5 years too early with Firefox OS - the hardware just doesn't have the spare cycles needed to pull off slow, inefficient software stacks.
That phone will run faster with Android than it will with Firefox OS, and it'll do so by a landslide.
JIT-compiled dalvik bytecodes should run no better or worse than JIT-compiled JS running on IonMonkey. They both use a FFI to C/C++ dynamic libraries.
That doesn't matter in the least, not even remotely. Android is not bottlenecked by Java no more than web apps are bottlenecked by JavaScript. Which is to say, not at all. The entire web stack parsing/rendering pipeline is damn slow, and that's not changing. If anything it's getting worse as more and more devs are using more and more CSS features that are slow to render. Not to mention the complete lack of ability to optimize on the web. You can't control invalidates, draws, etc...
Too bad Firefox OS doesn't have a chance in hell at competing in the low-end market. It requires higher specs than Android does to run (surprise, surprise HTML5 is slower than native - a *lot* slower), and Android is also free and open source. So cost, features, *and* performance all go to Android as a result.
A bad experience/feature set compared to high end phones, and is too slow for low-end phones. So what market, exactly, is Firefox OS hoping to compete in?
Just because that's how a human brain works doesn't mean it's optimal or the best approach. Personally I think an AI that had as bad a memory as I do would be a pretty shitty personal assistant. So I'm rather glad they aren't listening to your "advice", otherwise my computer would become very useless very quickly.
He made a media spectacle about it being a business related trip.
So explain to us, how you can have a business trip without engaging in any sort of negotiation? Even if all you do is talk... that is considered negotiation.
No, he made it excruciatingly clear that it was *NOT* a business trip.
Gross misrepresentation of the facts is a gross misrepresentation. They had a problem nobody else did, and didn't notice it, and that's why they're incompetent. Especially when people have been reporting this problem to them for years.
By "nobody else" I assume you mean Nvidia, as that's the only other driver that was tested.
And by Nvidia's own admission, they only noticed and started optimizing this about 2 years ago. Interestingly that's right around the time they started working on mobile platforms, which measure in time-per-frame and not framerate.
Are you the butt-hurt fanboi who rounded up a posse to go mod down five of my comments? I've been experiencing windows crashes due to shitty ATI drivers since Windows fucking 3.1, so while I may go fuck myself later, it has nothing to do with you or ATI. Your internet bravery is pathetic.
I didn't round up anyone, and your crashes aren't coming from ATI's drivers. But by all means, switch to Nvidia and experience the joys of their driver issues.
But in the interest of full disclosure since you call me a "butt-hurt fanboi" (are you 12?), I'm currently running a GTX 680, which replaced a 5870. I'm well aware of both sides' drivers.
No, they built and tested their drivers internally to match the expectations of the public. The public was testing min/avg/max FPS, so that's what ATI built. In other words, shitty benchmarks result in shitty drivers.
And to call ATI incompetent because they didn't notice an issue almost nobody else did is quite arrogant. Especially since once the issue was discovered, they promptly fixed it. That's not even remotely incompetent, that's fantastic support and I'd love it if most companies were that responsive and that aware of what their target audience wants.
Oh, and the part where you claim ATI can't make a driver or that they are doing it wrong is flat out not true, not even close. Kindly go fuck yourself
No, other way around. The computer authorizes it, the human is the one that actually does it. As in, the computer has no way to fire the gun by itself.
The problem is when you search for a "banned" word you basically get kicked off the internet for a short period of time (and usually not just you, but your whole apartment or whatever). So your search for "tuna" would simply never return, it's too late at that point.
Thus Google added the prediction thing because it looks to users like Google kept going down when in reality it was the Great Firewall. But China fought back, and if it was still ineffective as a result it makes sense to abandon it.
None of that has anything to do with being or not being evil. Your tangent is entirely pointless.
And if Exxon behave the same way Google does I would also believe they too were not being evil. But they don't, they behave in an evil way. Google does not. Name != actions.
As a developer there's really only two platforms - Android and iOS. Perhaps 3 platforms: Android 2.x, Android 4.x+, and iOS 5+. Tizen is dead. Ubuntu is over a year out and will be DOA. Firefox OS is stupid and will never ship in any meaningful quantity. Windows Phone has not impressed consumers. RIM and Symbian are both about to die off entirely.
I love that companies are willing to try and bring competition to the phone space, but so far they aren't very successful.
I believe they gave Acer shit and Acer weren't even calling their phone Android.
They were, actually. Or rather, Alibaba was claiming Android compatibility but was *NOT* actually fully compatible. Google offered to help bring them to full compatibility ( https://plus.google.com/112599748506977857728/posts/hRcCi5xgayg ), but afaik they opted to throw a hissy fit instead because it's easier.
It says it uses the Android kernel and drivers to be compatible with the hardware, so will OEM(s) shipping devices with this OSes fall foul of Google's anti-fork rules[1] for Android? Or does that apply only to the Android SDK/Dalvik VM?
No, because Ubuntu isn't claiming Android compatibility. Google's "anti-fork" rules are limited specifically to Android's public API and app compatibility. You can fork Android all day long and Google won't care so long as you don't claim Android app compatibility. You can even fork Android *and* claim compatibility so long as you pass the CDD & CTS tests (which alibaba doesn't). What you can't do is fork Android, tell devs you are Android compatible, have them use the official Android SDK, and not pass the compatibility suite.
I have an iPad 2. It's really not that different from an iPhone. The 3rd party apps make great use of the larger screen - iOS itself, however, doesn't do shit with the extra space. Hell, the contacts app isn't even full screen! And I'm not sure what your bullshit about "unlike with Android" is supposed to mean, unless you've never used an Android tablet.
The argument that Android is copying from iOS sounds increasingly ridiculous as time goes by, seeing as if anyone is copying it is without a doubt *APPLE* that is copying from Android for at least the last year. Or rather, Apple has been playing catch up since at least iOS 4, with Android being the one innovating and pushing forward.
Not that the iPad actually provided anything to even copy as it was just a blown up version of iOS - not really any different from the initial batch of Gingerbread-based Android tablets.
How, exactly, is Google supposed to know that the videos in the "full movie" search are, in fact, infringing on copyrights? You are looking at the results and making a judgement call (granted, a likely true call - but still a guess) - that is not something Google should be doing. That is well outside the realm of their responsibility. YouTube's copyright process is already *well* ahead of what anybody else offers - they not only promptly respond to DMCA complaints but also have the ContentID system which makes it super painless for copyright owners to have videos removed, monitored, or to collect a portion of the ad revenue from them: http://www.youtube.com/t/contentid
This is most certainly fair to rights holders and is far, far beyond what Google is legally required to do, and indeed is far, far beyond what anybody else is doing.
So yes, you should be modded -1 Flamebait as you are factually wrong on a number of key points. Google *doesn't* make "hundreds of millions on infringing material". Infringing materially typically *costs* them money as pirates don't usually opt to have ads shown, so Google is footing the server and bandwidth bills for nothing in return - but even still, 10,000+ views doesn't come remotely close to even $10k in revenue much less millions. Second, Google *does* let content owners get a part of the cut on infringing material. A third, most crucially, the system is incredibly easy to use as a rightsholder. Upload your video to ContentID, pick which option you want when an infringing video is found (remove, monitor, or ad split), and you're done. And finally, YouTube started as an independent web site, so clearly your claim that without lawyers they would have been shut down for "conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement" is hilariously wrong not to mention just plain stupid. Especially when the other side has even *more* lawyers than Google does, yet so far no battle has been waged in court.
Android is open in theory, *open in practice*. AOSP exists, it's real. Community development exists, it's real (both community-contributed patches to AOSP *and* community maintained "distros"/"forks" - such as CyanogenMod). Hardware with built in support for custom ROMs exist, it's real (hint, look for the "Nexus" brand)
Are *all* Android devices open? No. Does that make it closed? Of course it doesn't, don't be such a drama queen.
Clearly you haven't paid any attention to Google's hardware. From the factory their devices, specifically the Nexus phones/tablets and Chromebooks, have a secure, encrypted bootloader. Yet *all* of them can be user unlocked, and most even have the source, binary blobs, and recovery images to go along with them. Never before has hardware been this open, this cheaply.
Or you could, *gasp*, read their privacy policy (which is really simple and easy to read) instead of stocking up on unnecessary tinfoil.
Also, you vastly overestimate how much data Google uses for ads (and you are ignoring that Google will happily let you turn *off* targeted advertising if you so choose: https://www.google.com/settings/privacy?hl=en -> ads -> opt out)
Slashdot Mirror
"long in the tooth", "ride the cutting edge", "show it's age"
Those phrases are not compatible with each other.
The ability to use a single codebase, in any language, to run on your desktop AND on your phone?
I think you misunderstood. He asked what *Ubuntu* brings to the smartphone table.
Or if you are unaware, your UI on Ubuntu phone will need to be in QML to be usable. So you don't get a choice.
And before you claim "you can still use other blah blah blah", you can on Android as well. I can write C++/QT and have it run on desktop and Android today (or python, or perl, or scala, or javascript, or whatever). It just sucks on Android, just like all those desktop apps are going to suck on Ubuntu Smartphone.
No, dev mode lets you do whatever you want. It's full access. It doesn't give you a BIOS because there isn't a fucking BIOS on ARM.
There is not a single possible way you can call a chrome book "locked down". That's just horseshit. I agree locked down hardware is wrong - good thing Google isn't doing it with *any* of their devices. Their Android phones aren't locked down, their tablets aren't locked down, and their laptops aren't locked down. Hell, their failed experiments such as the Nexus Q aren't locked down.
And FYI dev mode very explicitly supports running other OSes.
Not to mention with the ChromeBook all you are doing is trading the openness of X86 for a system that is as locked down as a cellphone.
Go educate yourself, seriously. All chromebooks come with a dev mode switch that unlocks the bootloader and lets you do *whatever you want* to the hardware. Such as installing Ubuntu.
Only on Slashdot can such an ignorant, and *factually wrong* post get modded "insightful"
The specs quoted for these devices are 2010 era Android specs - single core 1GHz, 512GB. Any (decent) Android phone released in 2013 and beyond will come with a quad core Cortex A15 with 2GB RAM.
2010 era Android phones ran Android just fine as well. Modern high end Android phones are pushing 14x more pixels, so that comparison is rather stupid and pointless. Or if we do take into account the number of pixels, it's glaringly obvious that modern Android phones do not have 14x faster hardware, yet run smoother & faster than Firefox OS. Why? Because web technologies are goddamn slow. Mozilla is 5 years too early with Firefox OS - the hardware just doesn't have the spare cycles needed to pull off slow, inefficient software stacks.
That phone will run faster with Android than it will with Firefox OS, and it'll do so by a landslide.
JIT-compiled dalvik bytecodes should run no better or worse than JIT-compiled JS running on IonMonkey. They both use a FFI to C/C++ dynamic libraries.
That doesn't matter in the least, not even remotely. Android is not bottlenecked by Java no more than web apps are bottlenecked by JavaScript. Which is to say, not at all. The entire web stack parsing/rendering pipeline is damn slow, and that's not changing. If anything it's getting worse as more and more devs are using more and more CSS features that are slow to render. Not to mention the complete lack of ability to optimize on the web. You can't control invalidates, draws, etc...
Too bad Firefox OS doesn't have a chance in hell at competing in the low-end market. It requires higher specs than Android does to run (surprise, surprise HTML5 is slower than native - a *lot* slower), and Android is also free and open source. So cost, features, *and* performance all go to Android as a result.
A bad experience/feature set compared to high end phones, and is too slow for low-end phones. So what market, exactly, is Firefox OS hoping to compete in?
Just because that's how a human brain works doesn't mean it's optimal or the best approach. Personally I think an AI that had as bad a memory as I do would be a pretty shitty personal assistant. So I'm rather glad they aren't listening to your "advice", otherwise my computer would become very useless very quickly.
He made a media spectacle about it being a business related trip.
So explain to us, how you can have a business trip without engaging in any sort of negotiation? Even if all you do is talk ... that is considered negotiation.
No, he made it excruciatingly clear that it was *NOT* a business trip.
He went as a private citizen, nothing more.
Gross misrepresentation of the facts is a gross misrepresentation. They had a problem nobody else did, and didn't notice it, and that's why they're incompetent. Especially when people have been reporting this problem to them for years.
By "nobody else" I assume you mean Nvidia, as that's the only other driver that was tested.
And by Nvidia's own admission, they only noticed and started optimizing this about 2 years ago. Interestingly that's right around the time they started working on mobile platforms, which measure in time-per-frame and not framerate.
Are you the butt-hurt fanboi who rounded up a posse to go mod down five of my comments? I've been experiencing windows crashes due to shitty ATI drivers since Windows fucking 3.1, so while I may go fuck myself later, it has nothing to do with you or ATI. Your internet bravery is pathetic.
I didn't round up anyone, and your crashes aren't coming from ATI's drivers. But by all means, switch to Nvidia and experience the joys of their driver issues.
But in the interest of full disclosure since you call me a "butt-hurt fanboi" (are you 12?), I'm currently running a GTX 680, which replaced a 5870. I'm well aware of both sides' drivers.
No, they built and tested their drivers internally to match the expectations of the public. The public was testing min/avg/max FPS, so that's what ATI built. In other words, shitty benchmarks result in shitty drivers.
And to call ATI incompetent because they didn't notice an issue almost nobody else did is quite arrogant. Especially since once the issue was discovered, they promptly fixed it. That's not even remotely incompetent, that's fantastic support and I'd love it if most companies were that responsive and that aware of what their target audience wants.
Oh, and the part where you claim ATI can't make a driver or that they are doing it wrong is flat out not true, not even close. Kindly go fuck yourself
No, other way around. The computer authorizes it, the human is the one that actually does it. As in, the computer has no way to fire the gun by itself.
Yes, but they also said this ended up being ineffective. Why continue with a strategy that isn't working?
The problem is when you search for a "banned" word you basically get kicked off the internet for a short period of time (and usually not just you, but your whole apartment or whatever). So your search for "tuna" would simply never return, it's too late at that point.
Thus Google added the prediction thing because it looks to users like Google kept going down when in reality it was the Great Firewall. But China fought back, and if it was still ineffective as a result it makes sense to abandon it.
What anti-competitive practices? You mean all the ones that Microsoft made up that the FTC found no evidence of?
And no, this wasn't evil because the terms didn't change. They are the same that they've always been.
None of that has anything to do with being or not being evil. Your tangent is entirely pointless.
And if Exxon behave the same way Google does I would also believe they too were not being evil. But they don't, they behave in an evil way. Google does not. Name != actions.
Correct, Android is open source, and is entirely unaffected by this change.
If you don't like Google's SDK, go download the Android source and build your own SDK.
As a developer there's really only two platforms - Android and iOS. Perhaps 3 platforms: Android 2.x, Android 4.x+, and iOS 5+. Tizen is dead. Ubuntu is over a year out and will be DOA. Firefox OS is stupid and will never ship in any meaningful quantity. Windows Phone has not impressed consumers. RIM and Symbian are both about to die off entirely.
I love that companies are willing to try and bring competition to the phone space, but so far they aren't very successful.
I believe they gave Acer shit and Acer weren't even calling their phone Android.
They were, actually. Or rather, Alibaba was claiming Android compatibility but was *NOT* actually fully compatible. Google offered to help bring them to full compatibility ( https://plus.google.com/112599748506977857728/posts/hRcCi5xgayg ), but afaik they opted to throw a hissy fit instead because it's easier.
It says it uses the Android kernel and drivers to be compatible with the hardware, so will OEM(s) shipping devices with this OSes fall foul of Google's anti-fork rules[1] for Android? Or does that apply only to the Android SDK/Dalvik VM?
No, because Ubuntu isn't claiming Android compatibility. Google's "anti-fork" rules are limited specifically to Android's public API and app compatibility. You can fork Android all day long and Google won't care so long as you don't claim Android app compatibility. You can even fork Android *and* claim compatibility so long as you pass the CDD & CTS tests (which alibaba doesn't). What you can't do is fork Android, tell devs you are Android compatible, have them use the official Android SDK, and not pass the compatibility suite.
I have an iPad 2. It's really not that different from an iPhone. The 3rd party apps make great use of the larger screen - iOS itself, however, doesn't do shit with the extra space. Hell, the contacts app isn't even full screen! And I'm not sure what your bullshit about "unlike with Android" is supposed to mean, unless you've never used an Android tablet.
The argument that Android is copying from iOS sounds increasingly ridiculous as time goes by, seeing as if anyone is copying it is without a doubt *APPLE* that is copying from Android for at least the last year. Or rather, Apple has been playing catch up since at least iOS 4, with Android being the one innovating and pushing forward.
Not that the iPad actually provided anything to even copy as it was just a blown up version of iOS - not really any different from the initial batch of Gingerbread-based Android tablets.
How, exactly, is Google supposed to know that the videos in the "full movie" search are, in fact, infringing on copyrights? You are looking at the results and making a judgement call (granted, a likely true call - but still a guess) - that is not something Google should be doing. That is well outside the realm of their responsibility. YouTube's copyright process is already *well* ahead of what anybody else offers - they not only promptly respond to DMCA complaints but also have the ContentID system which makes it super painless for copyright owners to have videos removed, monitored, or to collect a portion of the ad revenue from them: http://www.youtube.com/t/contentid
This is most certainly fair to rights holders and is far, far beyond what Google is legally required to do, and indeed is far, far beyond what anybody else is doing.
So yes, you should be modded -1 Flamebait as you are factually wrong on a number of key points. Google *doesn't* make "hundreds of millions on infringing material". Infringing materially typically *costs* them money as pirates don't usually opt to have ads shown, so Google is footing the server and bandwidth bills for nothing in return - but even still, 10,000+ views doesn't come remotely close to even $10k in revenue much less millions. Second, Google *does* let content owners get a part of the cut on infringing material. A third, most crucially, the system is incredibly easy to use as a rightsholder. Upload your video to ContentID, pick which option you want when an infringing video is found (remove, monitor, or ad split), and you're done. And finally, YouTube started as an independent web site, so clearly your claim that without lawyers they would have been shut down for "conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement" is hilariously wrong not to mention just plain stupid. Especially when the other side has even *more* lawyers than Google does, yet so far no battle has been waged in court.
The Google variant.
Open in theory, closed in practice.
Bull. Fucking. Shit.
Android is open in theory, *open in practice*. AOSP exists, it's real. Community development exists, it's real (both community-contributed patches to AOSP *and* community maintained "distros"/"forks" - such as CyanogenMod). Hardware with built in support for custom ROMs exist, it's real (hint, look for the "Nexus" brand)
Are *all* Android devices open? No. Does that make it closed? Of course it doesn't, don't be such a drama queen.
Clearly you haven't paid any attention to Google's hardware. From the factory their devices, specifically the Nexus phones/tablets and Chromebooks, have a secure, encrypted bootloader. Yet *all* of them can be user unlocked, and most even have the source, binary blobs, and recovery images to go along with them. Never before has hardware been this open, this cheaply.
Or you could, *gasp*, read their privacy policy (which is really simple and easy to read) instead of stocking up on unnecessary tinfoil.
Also, you vastly overestimate how much data Google uses for ads (and you are ignoring that Google will happily let you turn *off* targeted advertising if you so choose: https://www.google.com/settings/privacy?hl=en -> ads -> opt out)