I would've thought the capacitive touchscreen *is* the specific feature the computer doesn't have. Which facilitate the apps, a novel and exciting method of input via finger.
I'd agree with you if the trend wasn't towards Apple regaining the desktop in terms of redefining it away from the traditional WIMP interface they popularized way back in 1984.
The 'OS X app store' is the adoption of a successful business model by OS X and eventual fusion the two operating system cousins. Rather than being merely a repackaging of existing desktop software, it's a gradual blurring of the distinction between phone and desktop OSes.
Soon any iOS title will run natively on OSX, from the same app store, from the same download. OS X then just becomes a beefed up environment to run additional software titles such as Photoshop.
The same touchscreen 'apps' on iOS will conquer the OS X desktop, via mouse and touchpad. If Apple can supply 9.7" capacitive tablets in 2010, it's only a matter of time before we'll see that as standard in their desktop displays too.
Any wonder HP is keen to deploy webOS on every piece of hardware they ship?
Maybe so. Language evolves; current usage centres on pocket touchscreen programs, a trend you would acknowledge?
Semantics aside, my point being that as the phone OS successfully scales up to XGA screens (iPad, Android 3), the distinction between a tablet OS and a desktop becomes greyer. If a phone OS can seamlessly add support for hosting 'desktop' applications such as gimp, lyx, gnumeric, supertuxkart, Eclipse etc then at what point do we need a Gnome or KDE 'desktop' exactly?
GNOME shell is too late, and doing it their own way, going further away from what most people want in a desktop, and Unity is already outdated when you compare it to what's happening in the tablet world.
I tend to agree in that phones and tablets will see a general erosion of the relevance of a desktop OS. 'Apps' are in vogue, whether they be html5-based (webOS), embedded java (Android), objective-c (iOS) or Qt (Meego)
In the case of Meego and, to a lesser extent, webOS the prevailing use of standard Linux components under the hood raises the question of whether we need a traditional Desktop Environment. These phone environments are set to make a splash on tablets. Does the addition of a keyboard and mouse disqualify there use in a desktop setting if they've been shown to scale up at least to XGA resolution? e.g. If webOS can host Qt and Gtk+ programs via the addition of X11, who needs a fancy 'shell', when the same card-based UI on one's palm pre becomes just as applicable on a 1080p screen?
Gnome weren't interested? If it matters to Canonical so much, why not just contribute the necessary support into the core libs? Refactor the gnome library so it supports both the gnome way of doing things and this new-fangled KDE/unity way and can be pluggable. Strict Gnome implementations can do it their way or link your lib.
If Ubuntu Gnome desktop (even running gnome-shell) is nicer that official Gnome, your fork will be adopted by other distros and thus 'win'.
12 months is the standard warranty. 24 months is the standard contract. On the plan I signed up for (in AUS), it was cheaper to buy a phone on contract than buy one outright and go SIM-only. Of course the phone I bought was obsolete within 6 months!
At the end of 2 years, they generally throw in a free phone to roll your contract over. I dare say it's normally a low end phone they'd soon EOL.
I have about a year to run so I just hope an HTC phone with at least an 800Ghz CPU is low end by then - at least I'll be able to Cyanogen mod it for the following 2 years!
Indeed. It was a killer feature my first manager swore by.
What would be really valuable in the online era would be a pluggable code generation option for HTML&CSS/Docbook/TeX etc. Though I'm sure Lyx offers an option to enter raw LaTeX.
Well the big test of software patents ATM is Oracle vs Android. MS will be keenly watching too.
But I have to ask, how is implementing Direct3D support in Gallium3D any worse than Wine? Or ReactOS? Or Mono? These established projects already re-implement vast portions of Windows. Though RMS does recommend against the use of Mono for that reason.
I suppose you as an independent game publisher steer clear of those options too...
For those thinking that Direct3D 10/11 on Linux will be sub-par, "Finally, a mature Direct3D 10/11 implementation is intrinsically going to be faster and more reliable than an OpenGL implementation, thanks to the dramatically smaller API and the segregation of all nontrivial work to object creation that the application must perform ahead of time."
With all this bickering of rival interests, here's proof it wouldn't be the 'year of the Linux desktop' any decade soon. It certainly could be the 'year of the Linux phone', with Android steadily encroaching on other platforms.
And what's all this bickering over? Gnome and KDE (bring back kicker!) weren't fancy enough it seems, so now we have this meaningless 3D eye-candy that the average user doesn't give a flying crap about. }// end rant
There was a discussion yesterday on webOS. A functional linux environment with an intuitive touch screen interface. I'm not sure if HP is pitching for world domination here but its plan to upscale webOS to desktops could actually succeed if they can pair the card-based UI with X11. As I understand it, webOS uses directfb on phones - primarily as a technical constraint that no ARM SoC has a working gallium3D-acclerated Xorg driver. Target an X11/Wayland backend on nvidia/ati/intel and instantly you gain the entire Linux back-catalogue.:) Any 'native' app on webOS uses SDL/OpenGL for rendering, so should be trivially portable, i'd guess.
Maybe it's just me but I'd gladly take a semi-proprietary UI deployed on millions of actual devices over some over-polished hotchpotch of ideas. One consistent minimalist but intuitive interface that runs on phones, tablets and desktops sounds like a great advance.. Oh darn, I think I just described the Apple vision.:) Long live Meego!
not that apple is worse than any other corp but new generations of disgruntled 'fanbois' seem to think this is a new phenomenon. Planned obsolence is nothing new when Apple continued to ship 68000 machines when 030 machines had been on the market some time - 20 years ago. No java 6 for ppc. No 10.7 for 32 bit etc. Upgrade cycles for software upgrades are nothing new - a mac fan friend used to time selling old stock on ebay with os releases - no need for an upgrade cd. Just trade up! Lifetime upgrades and infinite configurability is a phenomenon peculiar to non-profit foundations such as debian.:-)
ok, maybe not *every* benchmark.:)Still, ibm's g3 boasted fair battery life compared to moto and intel offerings at the time eg ibook g3 had better battery life than powerbook g4. It was when they married altivec onto a server chip for the g5 that mobility was sacrificed.
Early netbooks had a performance perhaps comparable to a g3? I suspect if someone released today a multicore powerpc soc it would spank atom in meego performance.
no, i meant even back then. Riscos had a scientific niche - a friend bought one for math computation but as a general cpu apple needed more. Powerpc was desigmed explicitly for the AIM alliance to deliver a high performance desktop chip for running photoshop. I'm sure Apple would've evaluated arm back then as a replacement for 68k.
my 7yro desktop has a gig of ram so for light tasks would be sifficient.. I'd expect it to be faster for 2 reasons (1) MS has had nearly a decade of research in tweaking the OS kernel. (2) Aggressive optimizations on low-end hardware to support Atom. Vosta was laughed at for being sluggish in netbooks. W7 addresses this. Strip out the bloat, tune windows services and yes old hardware should fly with sufficient ram.
I'm pretty sure a powerpc would spank an ARM on every benchmark so was never a consideration for PowerMacs.
Re:I think my first ARM device was a Gameboy Advan
on
Pocket Wars and Cores
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· Score: 1
I hated that 'save dialog'. finding a folder in the filesystem and having to drag just seemed slow and clunky in the days of mice with balls that got clogged and before the days of accelerated graphics. The Mac System 6 file chooser was primitive by comparison but did its job.
Keyboard or no keyboard. Hmmm, this indicates the whole flaw in the nokia strategy. Meego's division should NOT be producing hardware in the first place. Rather, we've seen a number of S^3 devices in recent months which reviewers have praised as having nice hardware but a tired OS. The solution would have been to draft a hardware roadmap that was both symbian and linux friendly. Nokia could ship their current locked down Symbian phones but provide a rom flasher to launch semi-functional meego handsets. The community would fill in the gaps with device drivers from android. This could still happen in the wp7 era if meego isn't to be completely abandoned. I'm sure maemo/meego would have broader hacker community appeal if current S^3 handets, numerous on contract (at least in Aus) could be unofficially supported. Instead there's only 1 single device from 2009 and they're proposing to neuter its successor sans keyboard if it ever ships at all.
Apple have certainly framed the tablet market as a keyboard-less 9.7" XGA screen. I'm more interested in the slide-out keyboard models, which in atom based devices will have standard keys for Windows compat.
I realise this is a gamer discussion but I'm holding out for a Quad-Core ARM CortexA15, personally. That'll be standard on ARM-based Windows8 tablets by 2013. By that time we'll have open source drivers for embedded GPUs and hopefully these things will ship with 4GB RAM. Webos will hopefully be fully open source and self hosting meaning one can have a mobile tablet / development machine that self-deploys Android and other mobile OS apps and yet is powerful enough to run eclipse & java ee containers like jboss or glassfish with all the trimmings and a relational database to boot. All with a full 10 hour+ battery life.
I'm sure most slashdotters could recommend numerous virtualization uses, for not particularly IT-savvy family members. Are we not consumers?
Legacy games, free specialized software easily installable on ubuntu but not windows etc. This would call for a dual-boot or a second machine in days past. Explaining to Auntie just to click the icon marked Virtualbox is way easier.
they 'hope' to continue selling Qt-capable symbian devices by the truckload until their wp7 offering is ready. With an already declining market share they'll have to cut into margins. i.e. Superior hardware against android oems. In short, nokia have 9 months, not 2 years. WP7 phones must be shipping in xmas stockings or they're doomed. iPhone5 will be out...
with the convergence of ios and osx and android 3.0 for tablets, the future is largely 'single ecosystem'. Unfortunately for intel i can't see meego gaining much traction against those 2. A 3rd player needs a mini-Apple zeal in producing a focussed product delivery. HP? Their roadmap for webos looks promising and unlike nokia have concrete timeframes. Solution? Partner hp-intel. Webos dumps qualcomm and directfb for wayland and a powervr based soc like omap4. Powervr is also embedded in atom! So both companies benefit if said gpu gets the full freedesktop makeover. It's a chip earmarked by the fsf for fully open drivers. Webos gets Qt support (exiled devs from Nokia!) and upscaling to desktops running x86 chips from intel. Palm has a shipping n900 successor with a touchscreen ui where nokia's Qt efforts tanked. HP just need to assist in integrating legacy Gtk+ maemo apps, which if they use wayland becomes a piece of cake! the n900/palm pre ecosystems joining forces becomes a reality. Using omap even might woo a few beagleboarders.
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I would've thought the capacitive touchscreen *is* the specific feature the computer doesn't have. Which facilitate the apps, a novel and exciting method of input via finger.
I'd agree with you if the trend wasn't towards Apple regaining the desktop in terms of redefining it away from the traditional WIMP interface they popularized way back in 1984.
The 'OS X app store' is the adoption of a successful business model by OS X and eventual fusion the two operating system cousins. Rather than being merely a repackaging of existing desktop software, it's a gradual blurring of the distinction between phone and desktop OSes.
Soon any iOS title will run natively on OSX, from the same app store, from the same download. OS X then just becomes a beefed up environment to run additional software titles such as Photoshop.
The same touchscreen 'apps' on iOS will conquer the OS X desktop, via mouse and touchpad. If Apple can supply 9.7" capacitive tablets in 2010, it's only a matter of time before we'll see that as standard in their desktop displays too.
Any wonder HP is keen to deploy webOS on every piece of hardware they ship?
Maybe so. Language evolves; current usage centres on pocket touchscreen programs, a trend you would acknowledge?
Semantics aside, my point being that as the phone OS successfully scales up to XGA screens (iPad, Android 3), the distinction between a tablet OS and a desktop becomes greyer. If a phone OS can seamlessly add support for hosting 'desktop' applications such as gimp, lyx, gnumeric, supertuxkart, Eclipse etc then at what point do we need a Gnome or KDE 'desktop' exactly?
I tend to agree in that phones and tablets will see a general erosion of the relevance of a desktop OS. 'Apps' are in vogue, whether they be html5-based (webOS), embedded java (Android), objective-c (iOS) or Qt (Meego)
In the case of Meego and, to a lesser extent, webOS the prevailing use of standard Linux components under the hood raises the question of whether we need a traditional Desktop Environment. These phone environments are set to make a splash on tablets. Does the addition of a keyboard and mouse disqualify there use in a desktop setting if they've been shown to scale up at least to XGA resolution? e.g. If webOS can host Qt and Gtk+ programs via the addition of X11, who needs a fancy 'shell', when the same card-based UI on one's palm pre becomes just as applicable on a 1080p screen?
Gnome weren't interested? If it matters to Canonical so much, why not just contribute the necessary support into the core libs? Refactor the gnome library so it supports both the gnome way of doing things and this new-fangled KDE/unity way and can be pluggable. Strict Gnome implementations can do it their way or link your lib.
If Ubuntu Gnome desktop (even running gnome-shell) is nicer that official Gnome, your fork will be adopted by other distros and thus 'win'.
Indiana Jones has his own timezone? Oh, wait, that was Chuck Norris. ;-)
12 months is the standard warranty. 24 months is the standard contract. On the plan I signed up for (in AUS), it was cheaper to buy a phone on contract than buy one outright and go SIM-only. Of course the phone I bought was obsolete within 6 months!
At the end of 2 years, they generally throw in a free phone to roll your contract over. I dare say it's normally a low end phone they'd soon EOL.
I have about a year to run so I just hope an HTC phone with at least an 800Ghz CPU is low end by then - at least I'll be able to Cyanogen mod it for the following 2 years!
Indeed. It was a killer feature my first manager swore by.
What would be really valuable in the online era would be a pluggable code generation option for HTML&CSS/Docbook/TeX etc. Though I'm sure Lyx offers an option to enter raw LaTeX.
Well the big test of software patents ATM is Oracle vs Android. MS will be keenly watching too.
But I have to ask, how is implementing Direct3D support in Gallium3D any worse than Wine? Or ReactOS? Or Mono? These established projects already re-implement vast portions of Windows. Though RMS does recommend against the use of Mono for that reason.
I suppose you as an independent game publisher steer clear of those options too...
I hope you don't greet all your potential customers with such a potty-mouth. Just saying... :)
But Linux shall. Yes, native Direct3D.
With all this bickering of rival interests, here's proof it wouldn't be the 'year of the Linux desktop' any decade soon. It certainly could be the 'year of the Linux phone', with Android steadily encroaching on other platforms.
And what's all this bickering over? Gnome and KDE (bring back kicker!) weren't fancy enough it seems, so now we have this meaningless 3D eye-candy that the average user doesn't give a flying crap about. // end rant
}
There was a discussion yesterday on webOS. A functional linux environment with an intuitive touch screen interface. I'm not sure if HP is pitching for world domination here but its plan to upscale webOS to desktops could actually succeed if they can pair the card-based UI with X11. As I understand it, webOS uses directfb on phones - primarily as a technical constraint that no ARM SoC has a working gallium3D-acclerated Xorg driver. Target an X11/Wayland backend on nvidia/ati/intel and instantly you gain the entire Linux back-catalogue. :) Any 'native' app on webOS uses SDL/OpenGL for rendering, so should be trivially portable, i'd guess.
Maybe it's just me but I'd gladly take a semi-proprietary UI deployed on millions of actual devices over some over-polished hotchpotch of ideas. One consistent minimalist but intuitive interface that runs on phones, tablets and desktops sounds like a great advance.. Oh darn, I think I just described the Apple vision. :) Long live Meego!
Hmmm, the rest of the world calls your 'gasoline' petroleum or petrol for short.
not that apple is worse than any other corp but new generations of disgruntled 'fanbois' seem to think this is a new phenomenon. Planned obsolence is nothing new when Apple continued to ship 68000 machines when 030 machines had been on the market some time - 20 years ago. No java 6 for ppc. No 10.7 for 32 bit etc. :-)
Upgrade cycles for software upgrades are nothing new - a mac fan friend used to time selling old stock on ebay with os releases - no need for an upgrade cd. Just trade up!
Lifetime upgrades and infinite configurability is a phenomenon peculiar to non-profit foundations such as debian.
ok, maybe not *every* benchmark. :)Still, ibm's g3 boasted fair battery life compared to moto and intel offerings at the time eg ibook g3 had better battery life than powerbook g4. It was when they married altivec onto a server chip for the g5 that mobility was sacrificed.
Early netbooks had a performance perhaps comparable to a g3? I suspect if someone released today a multicore powerpc soc it would spank atom in meego performance.
no, i meant even back then. Riscos had a scientific niche - a friend bought one for math computation but as a general cpu apple needed more. Powerpc was desigmed explicitly for the AIM alliance to deliver a high performance desktop chip for running photoshop. I'm sure Apple would've evaluated arm back then as a replacement for 68k.
my 7yro desktop has a gig of ram so for light tasks would be sifficient.. I'd expect it to be faster for 2 reasons (1) MS has had nearly a decade of research in tweaking the OS kernel. (2) Aggressive optimizations on low-end hardware to support Atom. Vosta was laughed at for being sluggish in netbooks. W7 addresses this. Strip out the bloat, tune windows services and yes old hardware should fly with sufficient ram.
I'm pretty sure a powerpc would spank an ARM on every benchmark so was never a consideration for PowerMacs.
I hated that 'save dialog'. finding a folder in the filesystem and having to drag just seemed slow and clunky in the days of mice with balls that got clogged and before the days of accelerated graphics. The Mac System 6 file chooser was primitive by comparison but did its job.
Keyboard or no keyboard. Hmmm, this indicates the whole flaw in the nokia strategy. Meego's division should NOT be producing hardware in the first place. Rather, we've seen a number of S^3 devices in recent months which reviewers have praised as having nice hardware but a tired OS. The solution would have been to draft a hardware roadmap that was both symbian and linux friendly. Nokia could ship their current locked down Symbian phones but provide a rom flasher to launch semi-functional meego handsets. The community would fill in the gaps with device drivers from android. This could still happen in the wp7 era if meego isn't to be completely abandoned.
I'm sure maemo/meego would have broader hacker community appeal if current S^3 handets, numerous on contract (at least in Aus) could be unofficially supported. Instead there's only 1 single device from 2009 and they're proposing to neuter its successor sans keyboard if it ever ships at all.
Apple have certainly framed the tablet market as a keyboard-less 9.7" XGA screen. I'm more interested in the slide-out keyboard models, which in atom based devices will have standard keys for Windows compat.
How soon do you need it?
I realise this is a gamer discussion but I'm holding out for a Quad-Core ARM CortexA15, personally. That'll be standard on ARM-based Windows8 tablets by 2013. By that time we'll have open source drivers for embedded GPUs and hopefully these things will ship with 4GB RAM. Webos will hopefully be fully open source and self hosting meaning one can have a mobile tablet / development machine that self-deploys Android and other mobile OS apps and yet is powerful enough to run eclipse & java ee containers like jboss or glassfish with all the trimmings and a relational database to boot. All with a full 10 hour+ battery life.
I'm sure most slashdotters could recommend numerous virtualization uses, for not particularly IT-savvy family members. Are we not consumers?
Legacy games, free specialized software easily installable on ubuntu but not windows etc. This would call for a dual-boot or a second machine in days past. Explaining to Auntie just to click the icon marked Virtualbox is way easier.
they 'hope' to continue selling Qt-capable symbian devices by the truckload until their wp7 offering is ready. With an already declining market share they'll have to cut into margins. i.e. Superior hardware against android oems.
In short, nokia have 9 months, not 2 years. WP7 phones must be shipping in xmas stockings or they're doomed. iPhone5 will be out...
with the convergence of ios and osx and android 3.0 for tablets, the future is largely 'single ecosystem'.
Unfortunately for intel i can't see meego gaining much traction against those 2.
A 3rd player needs a mini-Apple zeal in producing a focussed product delivery. HP? Their roadmap for webos looks promising and unlike nokia have concrete timeframes.
Solution? Partner hp-intel. Webos dumps qualcomm and directfb for wayland and a powervr based soc like omap4. Powervr is also embedded in atom! So both companies benefit if said gpu gets the full freedesktop makeover. It's a chip earmarked by the fsf for fully open drivers.
Webos gets Qt support (exiled devs from Nokia!) and upscaling to desktops running x86 chips from intel.
Palm has a shipping n900 successor with a touchscreen ui where nokia's Qt efforts tanked. HP just need to assist in integrating legacy Gtk+ maemo apps, which if they use wayland becomes a piece of cake! the n900/palm pre ecosystems joining forces becomes a reality. Using omap even might woo a few beagleboarders.