Many OSes don't even bother naming their kernel anything particular. Of those that do bother, you never see the kernel as a centerpiece of their branding/marketing endeavor.
OSes based on Linux are unique in bothering to emphasize, specifically, the nature of the kernel they make use of. It does have significant under-the-covers implications, but the vast majority of the common user experience is more directly influenced by system libraries, GUI toolkits, and so on and so fourth.
It's not that "Linux" is a liability, but frankly it's mostly 'just another component'. If you started naming a distro to accurately give credit to all the components comprising the core experience, it might be called GNU/Linux/D-bus/Systemd/X/Gnome/GTK
First, if the system presents the DIMM as a contiguous chunk of 'RAM', then this move would be about higher apparent memory capacity at lower cost, and the non-volatile aspect is just a side-effect.
I am also aware of firmware/system design in the enterprise space that would distinctly recognize the non-volatile portion of similarly designed DIMMs and not put it in the memory map, but instead describe it in a block storage sort of way complete with UEFI drivers to make it a boot volume. Basically, SSDs without having to go out to the chipset at all and without having to worry about the current throughput limitations of SAS or SATA.
Does this allow per-application forwarding? (All sorts of people blasting that Microsoft can do it, not many people speaking to whether *this* specific implementation can).
Does this allow remote applications to cleanly appear in things like notification areas? That was one problem I had with NX, even the rootless mode failed to properly incorporate that.
Does Wayland+FreeRDP provide a more unified approach to audio+video being grouped together? That's a large gap in X, where audio is consider just completely unrelated to the remoting...
I don't even think it's really doing much to displace PCs. People shortsighted enough to think solely in terms of new sales certainly feel that way, but it ignores reality.
Basically, PC market with or without tablets was destined to plateau. PC sales for a couple of decades were driven by more demanding applications and use cases. Now, the products have, largely, caught up to the applications people use. A new purchase was formerly driven mostly by the current owned product being 'too slow'. Now a new purchase is driven more and more by when the thing wears out beyond warranty rather than new capability not previously available.
Tablet and mobile are really a distinct market that PC didn't really penetrate. Sure, occasionally you'd see someone pretty dedicated lug around a laptop out and about, but those were pretty rare. Most everyone that had a PC 3 years ago still uses their PC, even if they have no need to buy a new one.
because of concerns with the way the list is calculated
Read: because it won't look as nice as throwing the Rpeak of 11.6 Petaflops out there, and the ration of Rmax to Rpeak will look poor as well.
I know the Top500 is a BS, single dimensional metric. It is valid to call it out on that. However, to do so while also trumpeting '11.6 Petaflops' is disengenious since it is also a BS single dimensional metric that in many ways can be pulled completely out of ones ass, which is even worse than a measured value. HPC Challenge Benchmark has the noble goal of measuring the character of an HPC system in a more holistic manner, but no one pays as much attention to it. When occasionally a supercomputer installation does skip a Top500 submission, people tend not to think about that installation so much.
Of course, it's completely bizarre that placement in any such global list is a factor in purchasing and design at all. It really should be about the specific needs of the group funding it and how they are met, not some penis measuring contest.
If they do demand this, they should provide some online framework. Buyers address and total gets sent in a standardized format to respective state ran sales tax servers, and the server spits out the correct amount. If the state gets the tax wrong, the seller should never be responsible for the mistake.
Even docs and drive aren't guaranteed. That's the whole thing with hosting services, they could disappear and there would be nothing you can do about it. So anything on cloud storage provider better be backed up by you, and applications to manage the content should either be free or you should have a persistent license and ability to run not tied to the continued whims and welfare of the vendor.
What people *should* take away from this is that the fad of software as a service carries an extreme risk. Sure, for things highly contingent upon networking effects (e.g. mail), SaS doesn't really change the dynamic. However, for things like RSS reading, document editing, photo editing, and so on and so fourth, with all other things being equal, it's better to pick the offline capable model where you still have capability no matter what the vendor decides to do or if the vendor fails completely.
One, are there really 'analog masters' anymore? I assume the recording studios nowadays go straight to digital as a matter of course and any products like vinyl are analog capture of the digital content.
I'm not saying analog is inherently 'better', I'm just saying that any transfer from analog to anything else (including another analog) is not going to be a perfect reproduction. Therefore, you can play numbers with some rational basis to say 'CD loses data from the master', even if the statement is completely irrelevant to the intended audience.
*Maybe* I could hypothetically buy the argument that the psychoacoustic models of lossy compression fail to preserve data that could be perceived in a concert stadium setting.
However, to broadly say that vinyl is better at scaling up than digital period is silly. It captures all waveforms that the human ear can distinguish. Whether it's 10 watt or 25,000 watt system, the frequencies preserved and available are the same.
There is no such thing as a perfect reproduction of any analog master. There is, however, a such thing as close enough to be impossible to tell. Mathematically, you can play all sorts of funny games.
Let's say that the master was digital and was 48-bit and 96 khz (to pull almost reasonable sounding numbers out of my ass). CD at 16-bit and 44.1 khz would be about 15% of the data because 85% of the data is impossible for a human to recognize.
This isn't to say the master is captured at a meaninglessly high sampling rate, considering the post-processing involved the overhead may be important to preserve things until the final product is produced. However to take those numbers and imply the listener is deprived of anything is silly. To use those numbers to imply remixers are deprived might be defensible.
I know in imaging that having better than the human eye can see is important in intermediate products as visual manipulation on low fidelity content could produce visible artifacts. Is it the case for audio as well? If someone is going to resample audio for a remix, is there risk of the decreased fidelity ultimately manifesting in the final product?
The 'no sales tax' scenario is generally enticement to commit tax fraud.
Usually, a 'no sales tax' purchase has an obligation to pay a 'use tax' equal to the amount the sales tax would have been. People saving money due to sales tax are almost always committing tax fraud.
So this isn't levelling by force, it's correcting a 'loophole'. In my mind, abolish use tax, if you *must* enact sales tax to do that, oh well, it's easier than sales tax to keep track of.
The problem is that for the specific niche you describe, a glorified wireless receiver for phone content to splat onto screens and speakers, $250 is a lot of money. It incurred a high cost in part due to the baked in amplifier that would almost certainly be redundant with either a better or cheaper amplifier already connected to your setup (hypothetically you could've bought bookshelf speakers without a system to connect to the beast, but why?)'. If all they intended to do was what you explained, they very badly overengineered it. Frankly, even though a few fans find it an enticing concept, I'd daresay the vast majority of people would shrug and plug in a headphone jack or MHL if Bluetooth or miracast was not present and still not see the point of such a device even if relatively cheap.
Google had to explain things in a way to highlight ability to host apps and content analagous to apple tv or google tv or roku, or else no one could've found it applicable at all. When they did describe it, people rightfully noted that all the competing devices were between a third to a sixth of the price.
So in the way it resembles competitors, it did less for more money. It the way it was unique, it was solving a problem most people don't have at a price way beyond the value people would get for it.
Currently, EC2 pretty well dominates and stifle the small providers without any help at all.
In fact, Google, Azure, VMware, IBM, HP and any other large providers coming into prominence may help the small providers. Currently, a lot of people beileve that hosting==EC2. If large competitors change the mindset to have customers realize there is a choice, that realization may have benefits. E.g. if a CIO directs a team to 'take everything to EC2', that's pretty much a guaranteed loss for the small provider. If CIO directs instead 'take everything to a hosting provider', that team then is empowered to allow more providers to compete for the business, even if the CIO mindset was changed only because of the big players.
google is a company. Companies don't really intrinsicaly about value provided to users as a rule. They care about the revenue they can get from their user activity. Reader porvides value, but Google seemingly doesn't see it as a revenue stream.
Google isn't doing things out of the goodness of their hearts. A lot of companies give that impression as they ramp up, but inevitably a company will show it's capitalist nature, fail as a business, or both.
So I see two sorts of things being mentioned: -Desktop/Phone applications that have no idea what you have read/not read on other devices -Hosted RSS readers that do not have that problem, but could just as easily be shut down at the whim of the operator.
What about self-hosted alternatives internet accessible? Install something on my own http server and go to town (e.g. like roundcube or squirrelmail for email). RSS reading is sufficiently low load that even most home internet connections suffice to serve it up to you personally.
The plain and simple truth is that Facebook style usage is more valuable or at least perceived as more valuable. RSS consumption is too passive by nature. Even when it did have the ability to 'share' items with friends (before trying to force those people over to Google plus), comments and notes were rare and an existing article was pretty much required before any discussion would happen (yes, you could create a note and share without an article attached, but the UI design didn't really encourage that usage. Now with even that removed, Google doesn't extract a lot of value from the users. It is a respectable implementation, but not a profitable one.
I personally plan to explore self-hosted solutions. I intended to when google reader dropped the share feature, but was too lazy and it still worked fine as a standalone reader.
I'm saying that people seem to be eager to throw the baby out with the bathwater. You don't need the X primitives or the x font handling or a dozen other aspects that are technically required for a compliant X implementation that are laregly irrelevant to the modern X based desktop. You don't need to replicate a number of the behaviors that cause X to have a lot more round trips than necessary. In other words, feel free to break from the specific tradtion of an 'X' server.
However, while doing so, consider the obviously desirable behavior that was there and consider how to properly accommodate the capability. Invert the 'client' and 'server' relationship, allow for transition to headless application running in case of session loss or disconnect, provide more meangful and sophisticated primitives so you are doing something better than pushing pixmaps across the wire. All the while provide a mechanism for application elements to advertise aspects about themselves to assure meaningful decoration and placement (e.g. notification area, borderless versus bordered, etc.
Do not consider the network transparency feature an inherent liability and instead say everyone could just have some scraping VNC implementation.
For low demand applications, sure you can. No one expects that X forwarded half life would be really usable. However if I need to open up some stupid GUI only management application forwarded from a linux system that can actually talk to the manged device, it can behave so close as to be quite serviceable.
Having my local system do the compositing, locally execute GPU intensive programs, *and* accomodate seamless operation of remote applications never developed to directly provide remote access capability isn't an unreasonable goal.
We don't need it to be X specifically or support all the Xlib drawing primitives that are never used. Ideally we have some ability for application content to be efficiently described in a way that trivially translates to a local framebuffer or a remote renderer or nothing at all (e.g. detached while no one is looking). RDP and SPICE show what's possible with more sophisticated primitives and detached rendering, but fail to deliver on the per application scenario with 'client' managed decoration, management, and composition.
Stop saying VNC is flawless, it isn't. RDP is closer, SPICE is closer, VNC is so far away from being flawless it's crazy. X without tricks is also far from flawless, but the remote application forwarding model isn't imitated by any of the alternatives either.
RDP, VNC, and Teamviewer all present whole desktops. This is infuriating. I want the application windows to be seamlessly navigable among my local applications.
That's not to say X is perfect either. X is highly latency sensitive, particularly for things like Java GUI applications. If network flakes out, the X client dies rather than 'detaching' for someone to later reconnect. X has no concept of audio streams.
I don't necessarily want X, but I want something that recognizes the core value of application level remote display (including things like the NETWM stuff to let 'tray' icons live in the right place.) and enhance it through better audio integration, detachable operation, and better network usage (e.g. Xlib primitives are rarely used anymore, having primitives more relevant to modern usage like RDP has would be a large improvement)
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Many OSes don't even bother naming their kernel anything particular. Of those that do bother, you never see the kernel as a centerpiece of their branding/marketing endeavor.
OSes based on Linux are unique in bothering to emphasize, specifically, the nature of the kernel they make use of. It does have significant under-the-covers implications, but the vast majority of the common user experience is more directly influenced by system libraries, GUI toolkits, and so on and so fourth.
It's not that "Linux" is a liability, but frankly it's mostly 'just another component'. If you started naming a distro to accurately give credit to all the components comprising the core experience, it might be called GNU/Linux/D-bus/Systemd/X/Gnome/GTK
Of course, considering the selection of coreboot applicable hardware is extremely limited and mostly ancient...
First, if the system presents the DIMM as a contiguous chunk of 'RAM', then this move would be about higher apparent memory capacity at lower cost, and the non-volatile aspect is just a side-effect.
I am also aware of firmware/system design in the enterprise space that would distinctly recognize the non-volatile portion of similarly designed DIMMs and not put it in the memory map, but instead describe it in a block storage sort of way complete with UEFI drivers to make it a boot volume. Basically, SSDs without having to go out to the chipset at all and without having to worry about the current throughput limitations of SAS or SATA.
Does this allow per-application forwarding? (All sorts of people blasting that Microsoft can do it, not many people speaking to whether *this* specific implementation can).
Does this allow remote applications to cleanly appear in things like notification areas? That was one problem I had with NX, even the rootless mode failed to properly incorporate that.
Does Wayland+FreeRDP provide a more unified approach to audio+video being grouped together? That's a large gap in X, where audio is consider just completely unrelated to the remoting...
I don't even think it's really doing much to displace PCs. People shortsighted enough to think solely in terms of new sales certainly feel that way, but it ignores reality.
Basically, PC market with or without tablets was destined to plateau. PC sales for a couple of decades were driven by more demanding applications and use cases. Now, the products have, largely, caught up to the applications people use. A new purchase was formerly driven mostly by the current owned product being 'too slow'. Now a new purchase is driven more and more by when the thing wears out beyond warranty rather than new capability not previously available.
Tablet and mobile are really a distinct market that PC didn't really penetrate. Sure, occasionally you'd see someone pretty dedicated lug around a laptop out and about, but those were pretty rare. Most everyone that had a PC 3 years ago still uses their PC, even if they have no need to buy a new one.
because of concerns with the way the list is calculated
Read: because it won't look as nice as throwing the Rpeak of 11.6 Petaflops out there, and the ration of Rmax to Rpeak will look poor as well.
I know the Top500 is a BS, single dimensional metric. It is valid to call it out on that. However, to do so while also trumpeting '11.6 Petaflops' is disengenious since it is also a BS single dimensional metric that in many ways can be pulled completely out of ones ass, which is even worse than a measured value. HPC Challenge Benchmark has the noble goal of measuring the character of an HPC system in a more holistic manner, but no one pays as much attention to it. When occasionally a supercomputer installation does skip a Top500 submission, people tend not to think about that installation so much.
Of course, it's completely bizarre that placement in any such global list is a factor in purchasing and design at all. It really should be about the specific needs of the group funding it and how they are met, not some penis measuring contest.
If I have a Toyota car and Toyota decides to get out of the business or collapses, my car doesn't vanish.
If they do demand this, they should provide some online framework. Buyers address and total gets sent in a standardized format to respective state ran sales tax servers, and the server spits out the correct amount. If the state gets the tax wrong, the seller should never be responsible for the mistake.
Even docs and drive aren't guaranteed. That's the whole thing with hosting services, they could disappear and there would be nothing you can do about it. So anything on cloud storage provider better be backed up by you, and applications to manage the content should either be free or you should have a persistent license and ability to run not tied to the continued whims and welfare of the vendor.
What people *should* take away from this is that the fad of software as a service carries an extreme risk. Sure, for things highly contingent upon networking effects (e.g. mail), SaS doesn't really change the dynamic. However, for things like RSS reading, document editing, photo editing, and so on and so fourth, with all other things being equal, it's better to pick the offline capable model where you still have capability no matter what the vendor decides to do or if the vendor fails completely.
One, are there really 'analog masters' anymore? I assume the recording studios nowadays go straight to digital as a matter of course and any products like vinyl are analog capture of the digital content.
I'm not saying analog is inherently 'better', I'm just saying that any transfer from analog to anything else (including another analog) is not going to be a perfect reproduction. Therefore, you can play numbers with some rational basis to say 'CD loses data from the master', even if the statement is completely irrelevant to the intended audience.
*Maybe* I could hypothetically buy the argument that the psychoacoustic models of lossy compression fail to preserve data that could be perceived in a concert stadium setting.
However, to broadly say that vinyl is better at scaling up than digital period is silly. It captures all waveforms that the human ear can distinguish. Whether it's 10 watt or 25,000 watt system, the frequencies preserved and available are the same.
There is no such thing as a perfect reproduction of any analog master. There is, however, a such thing as close enough to be impossible to tell. Mathematically, you can play all sorts of funny games.
Let's say that the master was digital and was 48-bit and 96 khz (to pull almost reasonable sounding numbers out of my ass). CD at 16-bit and 44.1 khz would be about 15% of the data because 85% of the data is impossible for a human to recognize.
This isn't to say the master is captured at a meaninglessly high sampling rate, considering the post-processing involved the overhead may be important to preserve things until the final product is produced. However to take those numbers and imply the listener is deprived of anything is silly. To use those numbers to imply remixers are deprived might be defensible.
I know in imaging that having better than the human eye can see is important in intermediate products as visual manipulation on low fidelity content could produce visible artifacts. Is it the case for audio as well? If someone is going to resample audio for a remix, is there risk of the decreased fidelity ultimately manifesting in the final product?
The 'no sales tax' scenario is generally enticement to commit tax fraud.
Usually, a 'no sales tax' purchase has an obligation to pay a 'use tax' equal to the amount the sales tax would have been. People saving money due to sales tax are almost always committing tax fraud.
So this isn't levelling by force, it's correcting a 'loophole'. In my mind, abolish use tax, if you *must* enact sales tax to do that, oh well, it's easier than sales tax to keep track of.
You mean like they did, right in the article? It comes up just shy of iPhone 5.
The problem is that for the specific niche you describe, a glorified wireless receiver for phone content to splat onto screens and speakers, $250 is a lot of money. It incurred a high cost in part due to the baked in amplifier that would almost certainly be redundant with either a better or cheaper amplifier already connected to your setup (hypothetically you could've bought bookshelf speakers without a system to connect to the beast, but why?)'. If all they intended to do was what you explained, they very badly overengineered it. Frankly, even though a few fans find it an enticing concept, I'd daresay the vast majority of people would shrug and plug in a headphone jack or MHL if Bluetooth or miracast was not present and still not see the point of such a device even if relatively cheap.
Google had to explain things in a way to highlight ability to host apps and content analagous to apple tv or google tv or roku, or else no one could've found it applicable at all. When they did describe it, people rightfully noted that all the competing devices were between a third to a sixth of the price.
So in the way it resembles competitors, it did less for more money. It the way it was unique, it was solving a problem most people don't have at a price way beyond the value people would get for it.
Currently, EC2 pretty well dominates and stifle the small providers without any help at all.
In fact, Google, Azure, VMware, IBM, HP and any other large providers coming into prominence may help the small providers. Currently, a lot of people beileve that hosting==EC2. If large competitors change the mindset to have customers realize there is a choice, that realization may have benefits. E.g. if a CIO directs a team to 'take everything to EC2', that's pretty much a guaranteed loss for the small provider. If CIO directs instead 'take everything to a hosting provider', that team then is empowered to allow more providers to compete for the business, even if the CIO mindset was changed only because of the big players.
google is a company. Companies don't really intrinsicaly about value provided to users as a rule. They care about the revenue they can get from their user activity. Reader porvides value, but Google seemingly doesn't see it as a revenue stream.
Google isn't doing things out of the goodness of their hearts. A lot of companies give that impression as they ramp up, but inevitably a company will show it's capitalist nature, fail as a business, or both.
So I see two sorts of things being mentioned:
-Desktop/Phone applications that have no idea what you have read/not read on other devices
-Hosted RSS readers that do not have that problem, but could just as easily be shut down at the whim of the operator.
What about self-hosted alternatives internet accessible? Install something on my own http server and go to town (e.g. like roundcube or squirrelmail for email). RSS reading is sufficiently low load that even most home internet connections suffice to serve it up to you personally.
The plain and simple truth is that Facebook style usage is more valuable or at least perceived as more valuable. RSS consumption is too passive by nature. Even when it did have the ability to 'share' items with friends (before trying to force those people over to Google plus), comments and notes were rare and an existing article was pretty much required before any discussion would happen (yes, you could create a note and share without an article attached, but the UI design didn't really encourage that usage. Now with even that removed, Google doesn't extract a lot of value from the users. It is a respectable implementation, but not a profitable one.
I personally plan to explore self-hosted solutions. I intended to when google reader dropped the share feature, but was too lazy and it still worked fine as a standalone reader.
I'm saying that people seem to be eager to throw the baby out with the bathwater. You don't need the X primitives or the x font handling or a dozen other aspects that are technically required for a compliant X implementation that are laregly irrelevant to the modern X based desktop. You don't need to replicate a number of the behaviors that cause X to have a lot more round trips than necessary. In other words, feel free to break from the specific tradtion of an 'X' server.
However, while doing so, consider the obviously desirable behavior that was there and consider how to properly accommodate the capability. Invert the 'client' and 'server' relationship, allow for transition to headless application running in case of session loss or disconnect, provide more meangful and sophisticated primitives so you are doing something better than pushing pixmaps across the wire. All the while provide a mechanism for application elements to advertise aspects about themselves to assure meaningful decoration and placement (e.g. notification area, borderless versus bordered, etc.
Do not consider the network transparency feature an inherent liability and instead say everyone could just have some scraping VNC implementation.
For low demand applications, sure you can. No one expects that X forwarded half life would be really usable. However if I need to open up some stupid GUI only management application forwarded from a linux system that can actually talk to the manged device, it can behave so close as to be quite serviceable.
Having my local system do the compositing, locally execute GPU intensive programs, *and* accomodate seamless operation of remote applications never developed to directly provide remote access capability isn't an unreasonable goal.
We don't need it to be X specifically or support all the Xlib drawing primitives that are never used. Ideally we have some ability for application content to be efficiently described in a way that trivially translates to a local framebuffer or a remote renderer or nothing at all (e.g. detached while no one is looking). RDP and SPICE show what's possible with more sophisticated primitives and detached rendering, but fail to deliver on the per application scenario with 'client' managed decoration, management, and composition.
Stop saying VNC is flawless, it isn't. RDP is closer, SPICE is closer, VNC is so far away from being flawless it's crazy. X without tricks is also far from flawless, but the remote application forwarding model isn't imitated by any of the alternatives either.
RDP, VNC, and Teamviewer all present whole desktops. This is infuriating. I want the application windows to be seamlessly navigable among my local applications.
That's not to say X is perfect either. X is highly latency sensitive, particularly for things like Java GUI applications. If network flakes out, the X client dies rather than 'detaching' for someone to later reconnect. X has no concept of audio streams.
I don't necessarily want X, but I want something that recognizes the core value of application level remote display (including things like the NETWM stuff to let 'tray' icons live in the right place.) and enhance it through better audio integration, detachable operation, and better network usage (e.g. Xlib primitives are rarely used anymore, having primitives more relevant to modern usage like RDP has would be a large improvement)