A tablet running a smartphone-derived operating system runs smartphone applications. A netbook ran desktop applications. If a desktop application is available for a particular task, but an application for a smartphone-derived operating system is not, it's quicker to run an existing desktop application to perform that task than to write a smartphone application from scratch and then perform the same task.
I would have thought that some sort of low-end android tablet or phone with a keyboard case of some kind would make this proposed product redundant.
Not unless it's an Android/x86 tablet or phone. One of the advantages of a GNU/Linux netbook used to be that one could run Wine for the occasional Windows app that doesn't demand performance more than what you'd get out of, say, a Pentium 4. (An Atom from the netbook era had instructions per clock roughly comparable to a P4.)
Netbooks started out cheap because they ran (stripped down) Linux distros that could run on the minimal hardware. Well, Chromebooks do that today - with fewer compromises in performance (for what they can do). And you can load a full Linux distro on them, so the hackers that loved netbooks are also satisfied.
The problem with a Chromebook is that it's too eager to wipe itself once you put it into developer mode. Anybody who turns on your developer-mode Chromebook is prompted to press Space then Enter to erase everything and reenable OS verification.
Or do you really think people are going to bother toting around netbooks instead of phones and tablets?
I do. I carry a phone on a pay-as-you-go plan without a data plan and pay per year what many pay per month. I also carry a now seven-year-old Dell netbook because it works fine for my hobby programming projects while I ride the city bus to and from my day job. On a netbook, I can open two 80-column windows side by side, viewing my source code in one and the output in the other. A tablet, by contrast, tends toward a window management policy of all maximized all the time because of its smartphone-derived GUI. On a netbook, I can run the occasional Windows application in Wine, such as the debugging version of the FCEUX emulator, with acceptable performance. A tablet, by contrast, is more likely to have an ARM CPU that's incompatible with the x86 instruction set for which Win32 applications are compiled, and I imagine the unsupported method of using Wine with QEMU would produce unacceptable performance due to emulation overhead.
If it puts your mind at ease, consider the term 'consumer' in the context of a data flow model, like a DSP filter graph. Some nodes produce, emitting data for others to accept. Some nodes both accept and emit, maybe acting like a filter, splitter, merger or some other function. And finally some nodes represent some output beyond the scope of the filter graph (a screen, a file, a null output required to force data processing) and are consumers of the data.
But that's the problem. The prevailing paradigm for popular culture strongly encourages the vast majority of the general public to act as consumers, not as nodes that both accept and emit cultural works.
You and I are also free to not consume their product
I don't see how. Feature-length motion pictures are advertised to the public using a "trailer", or a short film consisting of excerpts from the motion picture. The trailer is just as copyrighted as the full work. So when I am viewing another motion picture, and its presentation is interrupted by a trailer, I am all but forced to view the first second of the copyrighted trailer.
Despite that I paid nothing for access to this trailer, I pay with being legally deemed to have had "access" to this trailer. Once I have had access, if any of my own works ever end up appearing accidentally similar to the trailer, I could get in trouble for nonliteral copyright infringement. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music.
Then you have the freedom to treat media that was created only because people were paid to make it, by other people who expected people who consumed that media to pay them, as if it never existed.
I don't see how. Many, probably virtually all, high schools and universities require students to view and analyze non-free, paywalled literary works as a requirement for courses that are in turn required to graduate.
For those that do not know what the blessed trinity is, its 1.- Selling services, 2.- Selling hardware, and 3.- e-begging.
What exactly is this "blessed trinity"?
Services, hardware, or donation.
None of these three models have proven viable for, say, single-player video games with production values competitive with current-generation AAA games.
The problem is the speed with which the experiment was mainlined or adopted by the major distributions as the one and only true path to desktop nirvana.
I don't know to which "major distributions" you refer, but Debian descendants still provide the more traditional look and feel of Xfce. To put Xfce on your Ubuntu box, for instance, run sudo apt install xubuntu-desktop
So, in the end, it's another competitor to Java, and the question I have is why is that necessary?
It's necessary because a company with the corporate culture of Oracle Corporation acquired a company with the corporate culture of Sun Microsystems. All four major web browser publishers are expected to contribute independent implementations of the WebAssembly virtual machine to the public. The license for the Java spec, on the other hand, prohibits distribution of incomplete work-in-progress implementations to the public, forcing all reimplementations to be developed in private by a single entity.
In addition, the Java virtual machine has several limits that reportedly keep it from being an efficient target for a C++ compiler.
A web app lives and dies on the whim of the developer, which can go bankrupt or be DDoS'd out of existence overnight
So do some kinds of native app if they can no longer connect to the developer's server that provides user license verification, communication with other users, or communication with your other devices running the same app. Examples include applications in Adobe Creative Cloud (once your subscription expires or once Adobe stops offering a particular application), MSN Messenger (which was shut down in favor of Skype), and the "Copy" file sync client (which was discontinued), respectively. Another example is any game for the original Xbox (2001) that uses Xbox Live.
After all, how many people run an web browser offline?
The goal of things like Service Workers is to make this practical. Google has lately been promoting "Progressive Web Apps".
What might be better is if the OS keeps a whitelist of devices that it's seen and prompts if it sees a new device with some information about what the device actually wants to try and do or be.
When your desktop PC's keyboard breaks, good luck adding the replacement you purchased to its whitelist.
Being able to run code from somewhere on the net and executing it locally (either sandboxed in a virtual machine or directly on the hardware) is something every major operating system has been able to do for many years.
But can you run the same code in all five major end-user operating systems (Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux, iOS, and Android)? Or do you have to beg an application's developer to recompile it for your platform?
Those other things are better suited for local applications. Ya, I know: but, but, but... no buts.
Good luck rewriting said "local applications" from scratch when the available "local applications" are made for a platform other than the one you use. Even with a cross-platform UI toolkit such as Qt, an application's developer still has to make a conscious business decision to compile, test, and ship for each platform.
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A tablet running a smartphone-derived operating system runs smartphone applications. A netbook ran desktop applications. If a desktop application is available for a particular task, but an application for a smartphone-derived operating system is not, it's quicker to run an existing desktop application to perform that task than to write a smartphone application from scratch and then perform the same task.
Asus still makes them. Transformer. I've got 2 of them and love em.
Too bad it's a pain to install GNU/Linux on the Asus T100TA. Suspend is still broken, among other things.
I would have thought that some sort of low-end android tablet or phone with a keyboard case of some kind would make this proposed product redundant.
Not unless it's an Android/x86 tablet or phone. One of the advantages of a GNU/Linux netbook used to be that one could run Wine for the occasional Windows app that doesn't demand performance more than what you'd get out of, say, a Pentium 4. (An Atom from the netbook era had instructions per clock roughly comparable to a P4.)
11.6 inch isn't "small" to people who prefer 10.1 inch for ease of carrying.
Netbooks started out cheap because they ran (stripped down) Linux distros that could run on the minimal hardware. Well, Chromebooks do that today - with fewer compromises in performance (for what they can do). And you can load a full Linux distro on them, so the hackers that loved netbooks are also satisfied.
The problem with a Chromebook is that it's too eager to wipe itself once you put it into developer mode. Anybody who turns on your developer-mode Chromebook is prompted to press Space then Enter to erase everything and reenable OS verification.
Or do you really think people are going to bother toting around netbooks instead of phones and tablets?
I do. I carry a phone on a pay-as-you-go plan without a data plan and pay per year what many pay per month. I also carry a now seven-year-old Dell netbook because it works fine for my hobby programming projects while I ride the city bus to and from my day job. On a netbook, I can open two 80-column windows side by side, viewing my source code in one and the output in the other. A tablet, by contrast, tends toward a window management policy of all maximized all the time because of its smartphone-derived GUI. On a netbook, I can run the occasional Windows application in Wine, such as the debugging version of the FCEUX emulator, with acceptable performance. A tablet, by contrast, is more likely to have an ARM CPU that's incompatible with the x86 instruction set for which Win32 applications are compiled, and I imagine the unsupported method of using Wine with QEMU would produce unacceptable performance due to emulation overhead.
If it puts your mind at ease, consider the term 'consumer' in the context of a data flow model, like a DSP filter graph. Some nodes produce, emitting data for others to accept. Some nodes both accept and emit, maybe acting like a filter, splitter, merger or some other function. And finally some nodes represent some output beyond the scope of the filter graph (a screen, a file, a null output required to force data processing) and are consumers of the data.
But that's the problem. The prevailing paradigm for popular culture strongly encourages the vast majority of the general public to act as consumers, not as nodes that both accept and emit cultural works.
You, or anyone else, can create content and distribute it completely free of charge.
Not if someone else accuses me of accidentally infringing copyright by copying part of his work into my own.
And if you don't like the fact the Bieber copyrights his music, then stop listening to his music for crying out loud.
I don't see how to do that when the grocery store plays Bieber's music over its speaker system.
pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del on the login or lock screen does not cause the password prompt to appear
an admin user, who can log in with the on-screen keyboard
Not if Windows fails to show the login prompt in the first place because it fails to respond to Ctrl+Alt+Del on the on-screen keyboard.
Assuming that by "consume" you mean view:
You and I are also free to not consume their product
I don't see how. Feature-length motion pictures are advertised to the public using a "trailer", or a short film consisting of excerpts from the motion picture. The trailer is just as copyrighted as the full work. So when I am viewing another motion picture, and its presentation is interrupted by a trailer, I am all but forced to view the first second of the copyrighted trailer.
Despite that I paid nothing for access to this trailer, I pay with being legally deemed to have had "access" to this trailer. Once I have had access, if any of my own works ever end up appearing accidentally similar to the trailer, I could get in trouble for nonliteral copyright infringement. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music.
an unnatural monopoly has been imposed by anti-consumer laws bought by media cartels
Why can't the constituents instead choose to outbuy the cartels or choose to elect legislators less vulnerable to such buying?
Then you have the freedom to treat media that was created only because people were paid to make it, by other people who expected people who consumed that media to pay them, as if it never existed.
I don't see how. Many, probably virtually all, high schools and universities require students to view and analyze non-free, paywalled literary works as a requirement for courses that are in turn required to graduate.
I don't see how a user could use the on-screen keyboard to authenticate to Windows when the elevation prompt covers up the on-screen keyboard or when pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del on the login or lock screen does not cause the password prompt to appear.
Nor does it help if the user replaced a broken mouse at the same time.
For those that do not know what the blessed trinity is, its 1.- Selling services, 2.- Selling hardware, and 3.- e-begging.
What exactly is this "blessed trinity"?
Services, hardware, or donation.
None of these three models have proven viable for, say, single-player video games with production values competitive with current-generation AAA games.
The problem is the speed with which the experiment was mainlined or adopted by the major distributions as the one and only true path to desktop nirvana.
I don't know to which "major distributions" you refer, but Debian descendants still provide the more traditional look and feel of Xfce. To put Xfce on your Ubuntu box, for instance, run sudo apt install xubuntu-desktop
So, in the end, it's another competitor to Java, and the question I have is why is that necessary?
It's necessary because a company with the corporate culture of Oracle Corporation acquired a company with the corporate culture of Sun Microsystems. All four major web browser publishers are expected to contribute independent implementations of the WebAssembly virtual machine to the public. The license for the Java spec, on the other hand, prohibits distribution of incomplete work-in-progress implementations to the public, forcing all reimplementations to be developed in private by a single entity.
In addition, the Java virtual machine has several limits that reportedly keep it from being an efficient target for a C++ compiler.
A web app lives and dies on the whim of the developer, which can go bankrupt or be DDoS'd out of existence overnight
So do some kinds of native app if they can no longer connect to the developer's server that provides user license verification, communication with other users, or communication with your other devices running the same app. Examples include applications in Adobe Creative Cloud (once your subscription expires or once Adobe stops offering a particular application), MSN Messenger (which was shut down in favor of Skype), and the "Copy" file sync client (which was discontinued), respectively. Another example is any game for the original Xbox (2001) that uses Xbox Live.
After all, how many people run an web browser offline?
The goal of things like Service Workers is to make this practical. Google has lately been promoting "Progressive Web Apps".
And use what to enter your password so that the OS knows the click on OK is coming from an administrator?
The difference is that old used copies of Flash are presumably affordable to acquire legally, while Adobe Animate is available only by subscription.
What might be better is if the OS keeps a whitelist of devices that it's seen and prompts if it sees a new device with some information about what the device actually wants to try and do or be.
When your desktop PC's keyboard breaks, good luck adding the replacement you purchased to its whitelist.
You run Linux and Mac^W Windows VMs using a Mac OS host. Obviously.
And thus still need to buy the Mac mini to run the macOS host, making the "hobbyist" and "pro" loadouts the same.
No, which is why I'd just release on Windows/Linux/Android and fuck Apple.
At this point, I'm inclined to agree.
Being able to run code from somewhere on the net and executing it locally (either sandboxed in a virtual machine or directly on the hardware) is something every major operating system has been able to do for many years.
But can you run the same code in all five major end-user operating systems (Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux, iOS, and Android)? Or do you have to beg an application's developer to recompile it for your platform?
Then for which operating system should a developer make applications, if not the browser?
Those other things are better suited for local applications. Ya, I know: but, but, but ... no buts.
Good luck rewriting said "local applications" from scratch when the available "local applications" are made for a platform other than the one you use. Even with a cross-platform UI toolkit such as Qt, an application's developer still has to make a conscious business decision to compile, test, and ship for each platform.