Oh, and the reason I use a PC for/.? Because the bloated nightmare interface SUX ARSE on a small device. Uses half the battery to render the front page.
That's configurable, to a degree. Check your account preferences. The default index includes options for "Simple Design" and "Low Bandwidth," while the dynamic index includes one called "Small Screen."
I am very sceptical with regards to a "not named" author claims...;-)
Before everyone starts putting down the author for being anonymous, please observe that this is The Economist. For those of you not familiar with that particular publication, one of its distinguishing traits is that it does not publish bylines. Ever. Editorials in The Economist are backed by the reputation of the editorial staff of The Economist, not of any individual writer.
If the Chrome OS developers theorizing in the forum threads about why it might run faster doesn't convince you, if the official Google announcements stating that Chrome OS will not run X11 don't convince you, if the fact that Chrome OS is open source and you can download the source code and look for yourself doesn't convince you, then I don't know what I can say that will convince you.
Approaches like this are pretty direct attacks on why free markets work. Almost all classical and neoclassical economic theory assume things like the existence of a supply/demand price curve, availability of pricing information, etc. If you have some nutty system where price curves aren't really defined beyond an individual level, prices aren't widely available, etc., all the usual pricing signals, resource allocation by the "invisible hand", etc., get a lot more muddled, and probably begin to break down.
What... you mean like in the software market?
Where there isn't a true supply/demand curve because the supplier can make as many copies of the product as it wants, practically for free?
Where suppliers regularly negotiate pricing contracts with large customers with the understanding that the customers won't disclose the prices they paid?
Note the part where TFPA [patent application] specifies:
3. The method of claim 1, wherein the product is a digital product of which additional copies can be produced at a nominal cost.
Is Richard Stallman paranoid when they're really out to get us?
Nothing in that discussion suggests Google optimized Chrome for X11. It just runs faster -- and the fact that it does so without really trying is what had everyone puzzled.
But prior art isn't the only standard that applies here. Microsoft's "Community Promise" may in fact be legally binding. Not much point in saying more, since IANAjudge, but given how much the legal status of Mono has been discussed already, it may actually turn out to be much easier to defend Mono than other open source software.
The small internet appliance market sort of started in Japan, so it might be worthwhile to look at what's happened to the trend there. The same application and comfort level issues existed there and yet the netbook and appliance market has continued to grow, and continued to poach traditional PC and laptop sales.
That's true, but the Japanese technology market doesn't really run parallel to that of the United States. Products with small form factors have always been more popular with the Japanese than with Americans. Personally, I love small laptops. The idea that you'd go out and buy a "portable" with a 17" screen seems ridiculous to me. But prior to the advent of netbooks, I would have to seek out a Japanese supplier to find something in the form factor I liked (Fujitsu, Sony) and I would have to pay a premium for it.
On the other hand, I am told mobile phones are now pretty much the primary means of casual Internet access in Japan. That includes not just Web browsing, but if you told someone you needed to send an e-mail and asked if they had a PC you could use, they would look at you strangely. "E-mail" means those little electronic messages you get on your phone. PCs are for games.
That attitude doesn't sound crazy to me, but my hunch says it will be a long time before Americans give up gMail in favor of doing all their messaging on their phones. Maybe Japanese are just more amenable to working with tiny devices because the high cost of real estate in Japanese cities means they don't have a lot of space store computers, but there might be cultural reasons, too. I was once told that American mobile phone suppliers could make phones as small, thin, and light as the ones you can get in Japan, but those models always test marketed poorly with Americans. Most Americans seem to equate "small, thin, and light" with "flimsy, cheap, and hard to handle."
I've noticed over the years that price and efficiency eventually win out. Every time Linux netbooks break a price barrier, $150 then $100, you'll see more people take an interest.
Here I agree completely. And price is what they keep buzzing about. But when the products are finally released, the manufacturers can't deliver. (See JooJoo/CrunchPad.)
My hunch? While yes, you can get an ARM CPU for a couple bucks, I'm betting the cost of engineering and manufacturing an ultraportable, ultra-micronized electronic device to the quality standards demanded by the U.S. market costs a decent chunk of change. Big manufacturers (as opposed to TechCrunch) have the best chance of success, not just because they are recognized brands, but they have the infrastructure in place to pass UL certification, FCC certification, etc., etc., and still make sure that every fifth device that rolls off the assembly line won't fail QA. It all comes down to economies of scale -- but there's the rub, because it's yet to be proven that there's even a market for these devices. Chicken, ponder egg.
My understanding is that Asia accounts for the largest portion of the netbook market. Due to price constraints, Linux comes pre-installed on more netbooks there than in the U.S. and Europe, and that's the source of the 30 percent figures you hear.
Of course, nobody is bothering to track how many of those Linux installs get wiped and replaced with a pirated copy of Windows five minutes after the boxes are opened.
I'd be too happy Gnome could shed non-free software (like Tomboy notes - based on Mono)
Please explain to me how Tombody and/or Mono are "non-free software."
The only complaint I know of is that Microsoft (or some other company) may or may not, at some point in the future, exert patents or other intellectual property rights in a way that could make it difficult to distribute Tomboy and/or Mono under an open source license.
I've got news for you: That's true for all open source software.
Linux is expected to dominate ARM-based netbooks because Windows doesn't run on ARM, full stop. That math's not hard.
The question is whether ARM-based netbooks will sell at all. It doesn't really matter what OS a netbook is running. Nobody buys any kind of computer to run an OS. They buy computers to run apps. You can argue all you want that Mac OS X is more elegant than Windows, or whatever -- but if you couldn't get a word processor for it, nobody would use it.
Chrome OS runs on a Linux kernel, but it offers exactly one app: a Web browser. If an inexpensive device that does nothing except access the Web is attractive to people, they will buy them. I don't really see how that will "shake up the Intel and Microsoft consumer PC/laptop monopoly in its boots," (sic) though. A Chrome OS device is not competitive with consumer PCs or laptops.
So sure, we can expect market share gains for Linux in the future -- in the same sense that Linux has dominated the market for home wireless routers, a market where Windows is a total failure. As single-use embedded systems, Chrome OS devices seem like a natural opportunity for Linux, which is already gaining popularity in the embedded systems market.
I'd be more impressed if Android (which also runs on the Linux kernel) made real inroads into the smartphone market. I keep hearing how many models of Android phones are coming, at the same time I keep hearing how disappointed developers are with the Android software market (in other words, nobody's buying).
Adobe just provides a platform; it's up to the producers to decide what protection (if any) to place on the documents.
Sort of true. But if you get in bed with Adobe because it has the best software for rendering professionally produced documents, then decide that you want some form of DRM for those documents, you're sort of stuck. Adobe might say "we have this method of doing DRM," and maybe it isn't exactly what you had in mind, but the reality is it's their way or the highway; you don't really get a vote. So you go along with it.
Really? I've never found the screens to be "print-like." The contrast is kinda poor, for starters. And at 167ppi, though grayscale, the resolution doesn't seem to match that of a laser printer, yet alone professional printing presses.
My Nokia 770, on the other hand -- the predecessor of the aforementioned N810 -- has a backlit, full-color 4.25" screen at a whopping 225ppi. Text on this thing is razor-sharp. The battery life ain't great, but like I said: I don't really see the problem.
You forgot about the fact that the slow-refreshing screen uses basically no static power. The end result is that such devices have INCREDIBLE battery life.
Over and over I hear how important this is. Why is it important?
Just how many two-week-long vacations on desert islands do you take in a year? Otherwise, how hard is it to plug in your e-book reader overnight? Surely a lot of people read books in bed and would have no trouble putting their reader into a cradle before rolling over and going to sleep?
Yeah, but e-book readers are apparently the hot item for the Holidays this year. If you can sell a device with a slow-refreshing screen that only does 16 levels of grayscale and supports no applications except a document viewer and (maybe) a stripped-down Web browser for $260, why wouldn't people be willing to buy a more fully-featured device for a similar price? I've been in the market for some kind of tablet as a secondary computing device for a long time, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
Note I said "similar price," though. At $500 this thing is definitely too expensive to succeed. Spending more than a few hundred dollars on a device that will never be more than a satellite client seems more than a little prodigal -- but something like a Nokia n810 with an 8" screen would be welcome if the price was right.
You're mixing two different sources there, and one of them is based on counting ads served to various platforms. Why not just stick with all the numbers from Canalys (the source for your figures on Symbian, BlackBerry, and iPhone)?
I believe that's included under the heading of "Linux/Other," along with Palm WebOS.
. . . and WinMo accounts for more then 15% of the mobile market
Care to back that up? No respectable figure I've seen puts it that high, and Gartner's latest figures suggest it's about half that. (And if you can't trust Gartner to inflate figures in Microsoft's favor, whom can you trust?)
It's the top 85 percent in the sense that the OSes with the largest market share are Symbian, BlackBerry, and iPhone, in that order. Windows Mobile, Android, and Linux combined barely rival iPhone's third-place market share.
VMware's software doesn't just run on also-rans; it only runs on also-rans.
With Microsoft's OS lagging way behind the others in the mobile market, does VMware plan to convince Steve Ballmer that running other companies' OSes side-by-side with Windows Mobile will be a good way to regain market share?
VMware says virtualization can separate personal data and apps from work ones. But if the trend is for smartphone apps to be essentially browser-based, or at least built with Web standards, isn't running a hypervisor and multiple OS instances on a phone the very definition of overkill?
Equally important, if Apple is unwilling to allow even the Flash player onto iPhones, how does VMware figure it's going to convince Apple to run a hypervisor?
Oh wait, the last one is actually easy: VMware's release doesn't even mention Apple. Doesn't mention BlackBerry either. Or Symbian. Funny how this revolutionary, much-in-demand technology specifically excludes the top 85 percent of the smartphone market.
Supposedly, it's to support the growing trend (seriously?) of companies requiring employees to provide their own phones/PCs/whatever. Virtualization will allow them to run a "work phone" environment on their personal phone. Reported advantage is that it eliminates the need to carry two phones while still firewalling off work data from the "personal phone" environment.
One of the more overlooked features of Gears is its JavaScript parser, which allows apps to execute JavaScript in a separate thread from the rest of the page to improve performance. Now that Google has released Chrome, it makes less sense for it to keep working on a hack to allow Firefox and IE to run JavaScript more efficiently. Chrome is incentive enough for Mozilla and Microsoft to start doing that for themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and the reason I use a PC for /.? Because the bloated nightmare interface SUX ARSE on a small device. Uses half the battery to render the front page.
That's configurable, to a degree. Check your account preferences. The default index includes options for "Simple Design" and "Low Bandwidth," while the dynamic index includes one called "Small Screen."
I am very sceptical with regards to a "not named" author claims... ;-)
Before everyone starts putting down the author for being anonymous, please observe that this is The Economist. For those of you not familiar with that particular publication, one of its distinguishing traits is that it does not publish bylines. Ever. Editorials in The Economist are backed by the reputation of the editorial staff of The Economist, not of any individual writer.
If the Chrome OS developers theorizing in the forum threads about why it might run faster doesn't convince you, if the official Google announcements stating that Chrome OS will not run X11 don't convince you, if the fact that Chrome OS is open source and you can download the source code and look for yourself doesn't convince you, then I don't know what I can say that will convince you.
Approaches like this are pretty direct attacks on why free markets work. Almost all classical and neoclassical economic theory assume things like the existence of a supply/demand price curve, availability of pricing information, etc. If you have some nutty system where price curves aren't really defined beyond an individual level, prices aren't widely available, etc., all the usual pricing signals, resource allocation by the "invisible hand", etc., get a lot more muddled, and probably begin to break down.
What ... you mean like in the software market?
Note the part where TFPA [patent application] specifies:
3. The method of claim 1, wherein the product is a digital product of which additional copies can be produced at a nominal cost.
Is Richard Stallman paranoid when they're really out to get us?
Nothing in that discussion suggests Google optimized Chrome for X11. It just runs faster -- and the fact that it does so without really trying is what had everyone puzzled.
It does have X11. It's just that the only interface is the Chrome browser.
I think that's only meant to be true of the development builds. You shouldn't expect Chrome OS devices to be running X11 on actual hardware.
But prior art isn't the only standard that applies here. Microsoft's "Community Promise" may in fact be legally binding. Not much point in saying more, since IANAjudge, but given how much the legal status of Mono has been discussed already, it may actually turn out to be much easier to defend Mono than other open source software.
The small internet appliance market sort of started in Japan, so it might be worthwhile to look at what's happened to the trend there. The same application and comfort level issues existed there and yet the netbook and appliance market has continued to grow, and continued to poach traditional PC and laptop sales.
That's true, but the Japanese technology market doesn't really run parallel to that of the United States. Products with small form factors have always been more popular with the Japanese than with Americans. Personally, I love small laptops. The idea that you'd go out and buy a "portable" with a 17" screen seems ridiculous to me. But prior to the advent of netbooks, I would have to seek out a Japanese supplier to find something in the form factor I liked (Fujitsu, Sony) and I would have to pay a premium for it.
On the other hand, I am told mobile phones are now pretty much the primary means of casual Internet access in Japan. That includes not just Web browsing, but if you told someone you needed to send an e-mail and asked if they had a PC you could use, they would look at you strangely. "E-mail" means those little electronic messages you get on your phone. PCs are for games.
That attitude doesn't sound crazy to me, but my hunch says it will be a long time before Americans give up gMail in favor of doing all their messaging on their phones. Maybe Japanese are just more amenable to working with tiny devices because the high cost of real estate in Japanese cities means they don't have a lot of space store computers, but there might be cultural reasons, too. I was once told that American mobile phone suppliers could make phones as small, thin, and light as the ones you can get in Japan, but those models always test marketed poorly with Americans. Most Americans seem to equate "small, thin, and light" with "flimsy, cheap, and hard to handle."
I've noticed over the years that price and efficiency eventually win out. Every time Linux netbooks break a price barrier, $150 then $100, you'll see more people take an interest.
Here I agree completely. And price is what they keep buzzing about. But when the products are finally released, the manufacturers can't deliver. (See JooJoo/CrunchPad.)
My hunch? While yes, you can get an ARM CPU for a couple bucks, I'm betting the cost of engineering and manufacturing an ultraportable, ultra-micronized electronic device to the quality standards demanded by the U.S. market costs a decent chunk of change. Big manufacturers (as opposed to TechCrunch) have the best chance of success, not just because they are recognized brands, but they have the infrastructure in place to pass UL certification, FCC certification, etc., etc., and still make sure that every fifth device that rolls off the assembly line won't fail QA. It all comes down to economies of scale -- but there's the rub, because it's yet to be proven that there's even a market for these devices. Chicken, ponder egg.
FWIW, Chrome OS draws code from Ubuntu, among other projects.
My understanding is that Asia accounts for the largest portion of the netbook market. Due to price constraints, Linux comes pre-installed on more netbooks there than in the U.S. and Europe, and that's the source of the 30 percent figures you hear.
Of course, nobody is bothering to track how many of those Linux installs get wiped and replaced with a pirated copy of Windows five minutes after the boxes are opened.
I'd be too happy Gnome could shed non-free software (like Tomboy notes - based on Mono)
Please explain to me how Tombody and/or Mono are "non-free software."
The only complaint I know of is that Microsoft (or some other company) may or may not, at some point in the future, exert patents or other intellectual property rights in a way that could make it difficult to distribute Tomboy and/or Mono under an open source license.
I've got news for you: That's true for all open source software.
Linux is expected to dominate ARM-based netbooks because Windows doesn't run on ARM, full stop. That math's not hard.
The question is whether ARM-based netbooks will sell at all. It doesn't really matter what OS a netbook is running. Nobody buys any kind of computer to run an OS. They buy computers to run apps. You can argue all you want that Mac OS X is more elegant than Windows, or whatever -- but if you couldn't get a word processor for it, nobody would use it.
Chrome OS runs on a Linux kernel, but it offers exactly one app: a Web browser. If an inexpensive device that does nothing except access the Web is attractive to people, they will buy them. I don't really see how that will "shake up the Intel and Microsoft consumer PC/laptop monopoly in its boots," (sic) though. A Chrome OS device is not competitive with consumer PCs or laptops.
So sure, we can expect market share gains for Linux in the future -- in the same sense that Linux has dominated the market for home wireless routers, a market where Windows is a total failure. As single-use embedded systems, Chrome OS devices seem like a natural opportunity for Linux, which is already gaining popularity in the embedded systems market.
I'd be more impressed if Android (which also runs on the Linux kernel) made real inroads into the smartphone market. I keep hearing how many models of Android phones are coming, at the same time I keep hearing how disappointed developers are with the Android software market (in other words, nobody's buying).
Adobe just provides a platform; it's up to the producers to decide what protection (if any) to place on the documents.
Sort of true. But if you get in bed with Adobe because it has the best software for rendering professionally produced documents, then decide that you want some form of DRM for those documents, you're sort of stuck. Adobe might say "we have this method of doing DRM," and maybe it isn't exactly what you had in mind, but the reality is it's their way or the highway; you don't really get a vote. So you go along with it.
You've never used one so I understand that it's difficult for you to comprehend.
Thanks for the assumption and especially the condescension, they really helped drive your point home.
Really? I've never found the screens to be "print-like." The contrast is kinda poor, for starters. And at 167ppi, though grayscale, the resolution doesn't seem to match that of a laser printer, yet alone professional printing presses.
My Nokia 770, on the other hand -- the predecessor of the aforementioned N810 -- has a backlit, full-color 4.25" screen at a whopping 225ppi. Text on this thing is razor-sharp. The battery life ain't great, but like I said: I don't really see the problem.
You forgot about the fact that the slow-refreshing screen uses basically no static power. The end result is that such devices have INCREDIBLE battery life.
Over and over I hear how important this is. Why is it important?
Just how many two-week-long vacations on desert islands do you take in a year? Otherwise, how hard is it to plug in your e-book reader overnight? Surely a lot of people read books in bed and would have no trouble putting their reader into a cradle before rolling over and going to sleep?
Yeah, but e-book readers are apparently the hot item for the Holidays this year. If you can sell a device with a slow-refreshing screen that only does 16 levels of grayscale and supports no applications except a document viewer and (maybe) a stripped-down Web browser for $260, why wouldn't people be willing to buy a more fully-featured device for a similar price? I've been in the market for some kind of tablet as a secondary computing device for a long time, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
Note I said "similar price," though. At $500 this thing is definitely too expensive to succeed. Spending more than a few hundred dollars on a device that will never be more than a satellite client seems more than a little prodigal -- but something like a Nokia n810 with an 8" screen would be welcome if the price was right.
"Smartphone" is illdefined, and it's debatable that the Iphone counts anyway, unless you use a broad definition that would include all feature phones
How's that? The iPhone is a vastly more capable device than any feature phone by almost any measure.
You're mixing two different sources there, and one of them is based on counting ads served to various platforms. Why not just stick with all the numbers from Canalys (the source for your figures on Symbian, BlackBerry, and iPhone)?
Symbian: 46.2%
BlackBerry: 20.6%
iPhone: 17.8%
Microsoft: 8.8%
Android: 3.5%
Others: 3.2%
As such, my earlier statement stands: VMware's product addresses less than 16 percent of the total smartphone market.
There's also Maemo . . .
I believe that's included under the heading of "Linux/Other," along with Palm WebOS.
. . . and WinMo accounts for more then 15% of the mobile market
Care to back that up? No respectable figure I've seen puts it that high, and Gartner's latest figures suggest it's about half that. (And if you can't trust Gartner to inflate figures in Microsoft's favor, whom can you trust?)
It's the top 85 percent in the sense that the OSes with the largest market share are Symbian, BlackBerry, and iPhone, in that order. Windows Mobile, Android, and Linux combined barely rival iPhone's third-place market share.
VMware's software doesn't just run on also-rans; it only runs on also-rans.
With Microsoft's OS lagging way behind the others in the mobile market, does VMware plan to convince Steve Ballmer that running other companies' OSes side-by-side with Windows Mobile will be a good way to regain market share?
VMware says virtualization can separate personal data and apps from work ones. But if the trend is for smartphone apps to be essentially browser-based, or at least built with Web standards, isn't running a hypervisor and multiple OS instances on a phone the very definition of overkill?
Equally important, if Apple is unwilling to allow even the Flash player onto iPhones, how does VMware figure it's going to convince Apple to run a hypervisor?
Oh wait, the last one is actually easy: VMware's release doesn't even mention Apple. Doesn't mention BlackBerry either. Or Symbian. Funny how this revolutionary, much-in-demand technology specifically excludes the top 85 percent of the smartphone market.
Supposedly, it's to support the growing trend (seriously?) of companies requiring employees to provide their own phones/PCs/whatever. Virtualization will allow them to run a "work phone" environment on their personal phone. Reported advantage is that it eliminates the need to carry two phones while still firewalling off work data from the "personal phone" environment.
Sounds great, huh?
One of the more overlooked features of Gears is its JavaScript parser, which allows apps to execute JavaScript in a separate thread from the rest of the page to improve performance. Now that Google has released Chrome, it makes less sense for it to keep working on a hack to allow Firefox and IE to run JavaScript more efficiently. Chrome is incentive enough for Mozilla and Microsoft to start doing that for themselves.
Abandoning gears has been obvious for some time - for instance, there's no support in the linux version of Chrome.
That's hardly a fair complaint, considering Chrome for Linux is not supported, either (yet).