fails to handle installation from Web sites or disks well.
That couldn't be further from the truth. When I go to a website, say frostwire.com, and click on the Ubuntu download button for an application, the app downloads and the installer automatically opens. I click "Install" and if there are any necessary dependencies, the installer (it's called gdebi-gtk for the curious) automatically fetches them for me and installs them too. It actually couldn't be easier. Even OSX requires an extra step or two beyond that. I perssonally find the installation process of $RANDOM_UBUNTU_PACKAGE from $RANDOM_WEBSITE easier than on OSX or Windows. In fact, it's scary easy as this could be a good vector for malware for a neophyte user.
It cannot run application off a flash drive easily and reliably, and frankly it sucks for installation of commercial software.
Just what exactly are you trying to run off of your flash drive? Obviously software in Windows that is designed to run without having to actually be installed is designed that way. If the author of a program for Ubuntu wants their program to run without being installed, all they have to do is, again, design it that way. You know what libraries and software come with Ubuntu out of the box. Design your flash program with that in mind and it'll work. You don't see this because the demand just isn't there. And as for commercial programs, what's hard to install? VMWare installs great, World of Goo installed great, Crossover installed great, Google Earth, etc. etc. I have not had a problem yet installing commercial programs.
Like it or not, regardless of the platform I'm running, when I want new software I usually turn to Google. I read Web pages and reviews and comparisons and look at the developer's Web site. It follows then that an easier workflow is to directly install from a Web site by clicking a link in the Web browser.
That's fine and that's your choice. However, like you said, this functionality is integrated into Ubuntu so there isn't really an argument there. Admittedly, package management could be friendlier. Canonical is taking this task very seriously, the first phase being the Software Store in version 9.10. Package management should be iPhone easy. I imagine it will be.
If you are targeting a particular platform, say Ubuntu x86/AMD64/ARM, I don't see how any of this can't be seamlessly automated. In much the same way that many programs you install in Windows automatically download and install.net or java or the VisualC redistributable. Just because it is installing compilers, etc. doesn't make it that big of a deal. Hell, in Debian, and it's derivatives, it could be a simple "apt-get install build-essential" somewhere in the fat-binary installation script to get most or all of everything the user would need.
You will always find some people who are happy to give their creations and time away with no cost to someone who will simply package that thing and re-sell it at a profit.
These people are useful idiots
Let me clarify exactly what you are driving at here but if you are trying to say that people that contribute to any open source projects are "useful idiots" just because somebody might sell it, then you are just spouting pure nonsense and flamebait.
People donate time and energy to FLOSS for many reasons. I am personally on the list of contributors for several projects. These applications are very useful to me and either have no feature analogous proprietary counterparts or none that run on my preferred platform. I have neither the time nor the inclination to either start nor maintain clones of these apps. Sometimes, I find a bug or I discover I would like some useful feature to be added to the app, so I just write the patch and send it in. If it's accepted, then I don't have to maintain a fork that I have to rejigger every time upstream updates. The developer maintains the app and my patch for me. His/her app is better so he/she wins. I win because I now have an app that more perfectly suits my needs.
I know that my patches have shown up in commercial distro's. So much the better! The more users of the application, the more interest and development it gets. I hope Red Hat, et al makes billions. If I want some, I'll buy some stock. Does this make me an idiot? Of course not.
I am sure that if Linux had the market share that Windows does, it would have many more security problems.
Seeing as you like devil's advocacy, let's examine this for a statement for a minute. It seems reasonable to me that many hackers would prefer to compromise a server rather than a desktop seeing as servers are always on so they're great for a bot-net node and many of them have more interesting things going through them like e-commerce, banking, etc. Let's think about this in light of the fact that according to this article Steve Ballmer himself recently thought Linux has a 60 percent share of the server market.
If that's even remotely close to being true, then it doesn't stand to reason that hackers aren't trying to exploit it. I'd posit that they are. For some reason they just aren't succeeding very well. Hmmm.
I don't know what the problem is or isn't with Symbian but as for Android, I see the variety of handsets and the openness having a very interesting side effect if it is exploited properly by the handset makers. Think about it. Android is open source so as opposed to WinMo, for example, where although you can pretty up the interface some, what you're left with underneath is essentially the same thing as what all of your other umpteen competitors have. Contrast this with Android, where you can actually work on the internals of the OS itself to differentiate it from everybody else. Things like an improved scheduler, apps to SD out of the box, built in Debian bootstrap, root OOTB, the possibilities are practically endless. Hopefully, the handset makers will use this to one up each other more and more and since it is open source, when the OEM's release their code, upstream can take patches and make vanilla even better. They are already taking stuff from amateurs like Cyanogen and adding it to the main tree. I know, I know, citation needed.
As far as the detrimental effects of possible balkanization goes, I don't see it. Manufacturers will be compelled to maintain application compatibility as what good is the phone for many normal users if they can't download cool stuff from Market. It's kind of akin to a far off post-human future where humans and machines converge, most of us are still going to be physically recognizable as not too far removed from plain old homo sapien sapiens as nobody is going to want to have sex with you if you look like a crock pot.
I'm using CyanogenMod on my G1 with all of my apps on a class 6 sdcard and the CPU clocked to 528 MHz. The phone is blazing fast. It compares very favorably to an iPhone 3GS. Like my sibling poster mentioned, there are certain apps that either use a lot of the phones resources like the Weather app and there are other apps that wake the phone up a lot to check things on the net, etc. that will hammer your battery. Try experimenting with uninstalling some of your apps and you might be surprised on how fast your phone can be.
I've met genuine geniuses, and you can tell when you talk to them how smart they are.
You mean the kind of people that casually say things that just melt your face with sheer intellect to the point of stopping you in your tracks and the only reply you can muster is a weak "I never thought about it like that."? No, never met anyone like that in my life:)
No, seriously, I don't expect hollywood to be able to handle characters like that competently much less an entire civilization of that times ten. But come on, at least they can attempt not to insult me. Take the recent Bruce Willis movie. of course I went and saw it. and maybe I just missed the point but, how do they expect me to swallow taking a technology that would take decades to perfect at our current rate of development and dropping it into the middle of 2009 and people just carrying on as before only now with robot bodies. The whole premise was just ridiculous and it couldn't have been handled more clumsily. Seriously, what is this, Harry Potter in New York? My apologies to anyone who hasn't seen it yet so I won't say anymore. I'll leave it alone but I just wish a little more thought would go into these things
Exactly, also there are a lot of extremely compelling extrapolations of present technology that don't show up in most big budget pop sci-fi. Take for example the inevitable intimate merger of biology and technology. When the technology becomes available to broaden your intellectual and emotional horizons to the point that today's most celebrated geniuses are mere children in comparison, you'd better believe that people are going to go for it and the sociological changes will be utterly profound. And any sci-fi universe set more than a century hence that doesn't take this into consideration had better present a damn good reason why not.
Respectfully, I'm not sure if I am understanding you correctly but if you are saying that Debian is running in the Dalvik VM, that would be incorrect. It is running just like it would run bootstrapped on any Linux box. And according to my benchmarks, it runs as fast as you would expect it to given the particulars of the hardware. It just runs out of RAM and gets puked out by the Android runtime life cycle.
Fair enough. I don't have time to follow your link now so I'll take your word for it and stand corrected. However, how come if there are no binary modules holding them back, why is it that all of the mods like Cyanogen, etc. always use the default 2.6.29? I really am curious.
I understand what you are saying and all but as far as Android goes, it is open source. You can go right now and download the source code, compile it for the device of your choice, sell millions of them with a high quality OS and not pay a dime in licensing costs. You can't say that for WinMo or whatever else. Maybe Symbian, I haven't looked. People like Cyanogen, Hikaru, etc., can go and get it, tweak it out the wazoo and as long as they aren't distributing closed source apps with it, can release it to anybody they want with root, tethering, multi-touch, and everything else. So, that works for me. That's seems pretty open to me.
To me the real issue is the proprietary hardware and binary blob kernel modules that the handset manufacturers are releasing to make the handsets work. That's really what keeps you in lockstep with the officially blessed Android releases more than anything else. What if I don't want the 2.6.29 kernel that came on my G1. What if I want to use the 2.6.31 that just dropped. What if in 10 years I pick my G1 off the shelf and want to put the 3.6.31 kernel on it. I can't because if I do the touchscreen won't work. The wlan won't work. Who knows what else won't work. And Nokia does the same thing with their Maemo tablets. I have a 770 that I'd love to actually be able to do cool stuff with. I would like to put stock debian on it but, last I checked, half the hardware doesn't work. In fact, the only open phone I know is the Openmoko and we all know how that is working (worked) out. We just read a big story a couple of days ago about routers with dd-wrt, et al, that appear open until you realize you are stuck with the 2.4 blessed kernel because anything else and sure enough, the damn things don't work.
Anyway, I'm rambling but for the tl;dr folks, to me these "open" phones are not really open if I can't get open drivers for all of the useful hardware.
Here's the issue with the RAM on my G1 and of course I'm running Cyanogenmod. I have Debian on it in a bootstrap environment. In order really use it, I need to first start it up in the terminal, start some Window manager inside of debian and get vncserver going. Then I start the vncviewer on Android to be able to see the desktop. About the time I start a program in debian, the phone runs out of RAM and the terminal gets killed. There goes debian, et al. More ram would cure that problem. Also, Opera gets closed a lot and since it doesn't implement best practices correctly, i.e. when it is restarted, it goes to the default home page instead of resuming on the page it left off like any good Android program should. I'd also like to at least have the option of running some fatter binaries.
Of course, I have a swapfile but this only takes you so far in Android. If the swap file is too big, the OS starts swapping itself into it. Consequently, it slows down to a crawl. So, yes, Android devices do need more RAM. And the more the better.
When I'm working on someone's computer and they are having problems with IE that I know Firefox would solve, I usually first just ask them if they've heard of Firefox. About half the time they have, usually having used it on a friend's computer. Then I ask them what sites they usually visit. My mom's an avid Craigslist fan so I installed Firefox and added Greasemonkey with the Craigslist image script. The script automatically pulls the images from the ads and inserts them on the main page under each heading. Needless to say I made an instant believer out of my mother and she uses Firefox to this day.
No amount of whining or explaining is going to make most people switch browsers. Just show the strengths (adblock being a good standby) of the alternatives and they sell themselves.
The difference is with Wine, the idea typically is to run programs you already have on windows that aren't available on Linux whereas with Mono, there is active encouragement to write new programs with it. Big difference.
I noticed my girlfriend had one of the tip calculators on her Android phone and I was all like, what's so hard about just taking a bill like $26.43 and moving the decimal place over to get 2.64 then multiplying that by 2 in your head for 5.28. And if the service wasn't worthy of 20 percent, just knock off the appropriate amount.
Her response? "That's all fine and good until you've had a couple drinks in you. Then out comes the tip calculator."
I have to wonder who at Microsoft even comes up with this stuff. And who do they think is stupid enough to actually swallow it? Taken to its logical extreme, we shouldn't install any software or even own a computer as that will obviously increase your "attack vector". Ridiculous.
I'm not going to go into the security implications of it, but you could always use this to script the the website and bulldoze through all of the javascript, flash, etc. You can write a script that will take you all the way through logging in, clicking on the "pay my bill" button, fill in your credit card info, everything. Of course, you shouldn't do this.
Indeed, the system I'm posting this on now has a Core2Duo e7400 proc at 2.8 GHz, 4 GB of RAM, a 500 GB HDD, and integrated nVidia graphics. While running Ubuntu 9.10, with compiz effects on, according to my Kill-A-Watt meter, it pulls a cool 46 watts at the plug just browsing around. I can't complain.
hardly any more of a "real distro" than Android is.
While an argument can certainly be made that loading Android onto a device isn't quite the same as putting something like Ubuntu on it, do give it its due.
I've written several useful little programs in python with this. Also, while you do have to jump through a few hoops, you can always do this and use any programming language you want. It works pretty good on my phone and the lack of an X server is taken care with the handy vnc client found in the market.
Not saying that Android deserves to be spoken in the same breath as what's usually considered a full distro but, after a little work, it doesn't have to remain as gimped as some people seem to think it is.
I'm late to this discussion and haven't read many of the replies below so the points I'm about to make may have been already stated. Selling GPL'ed software, IMHO should be applauded and I would hope any open source developer to make millions, however, in this case, there is one small fly in thie ointment. Here is my take on it:
On a more open platform, like Android, for example, one could simply download the source, compile it, run it, and everything would be great. However, we are talking about the iphone. My understanding is that, short of jailbreaking, there is no way to compile and run your source code on a user's phone. And most ordinary people are not going to have jailbroken iphones.
Had you released the source for any of the more open systems like Android, Symbian, etc., and charged for the compiled app, I'm completely on board. In fact, I would applaude you. However, unless my understanding of how the App store and running apps on the iphone is lacking, I can't say that ethically, you should charge as the source code is next to useless for most users of that platform.
Worst case scenario, like my sibling post said, you can virtualize. Just use a usb wi-fi dongle and attach it to the virtual machine. There's probably some way to share the connection out to the host OS. Unfortunately, I don't know what that is.
At the risk of sounding redundant, I agree with you too. I always thought it absurd when people use some movie they saw as the basis for fearing intelligent machines. The only reason we humans do what we do including having the desire for self preservation is for the mechanism of evolution to work, we had to be this way. There is no reason to ascribe human emotion to machines. Actually, I'd say that any scientist that suggests we should stop research in this area because of some fear like this either hasn't thought it all the way through or is just a crank.
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fails to handle installation from Web sites or disks well.
That couldn't be further from the truth. When I go to a website, say frostwire.com, and click on the Ubuntu download button for an application, the app downloads and the installer automatically opens. I click "Install" and if there are any necessary dependencies, the installer (it's called gdebi-gtk for the curious) automatically fetches them for me and installs them too. It actually couldn't be easier. Even OSX requires an extra step or two beyond that. I perssonally find the installation process of $RANDOM_UBUNTU_PACKAGE from $RANDOM_WEBSITE easier than on OSX or Windows. In fact, it's scary easy as this could be a good vector for malware for a neophyte user.
It cannot run application off a flash drive easily and reliably, and frankly it sucks for installation of commercial software.
Just what exactly are you trying to run off of your flash drive? Obviously software in Windows that is designed to run without having to actually be installed is designed that way. If the author of a program for Ubuntu wants their program to run without being installed, all they have to do is, again, design it that way. You know what libraries and software come with Ubuntu out of the box. Design your flash program with that in mind and it'll work. You don't see this because the demand just isn't there. And as for commercial programs, what's hard to install? VMWare installs great, World of Goo installed great, Crossover installed great, Google Earth, etc. etc. I have not had a problem yet installing commercial programs.
Like it or not, regardless of the platform I'm running, when I want new software I usually turn to Google. I read Web pages and reviews and comparisons and look at the developer's Web site. It follows then that an easier workflow is to directly install from a Web site by clicking a link in the Web browser.
That's fine and that's your choice. However, like you said, this functionality is integrated into Ubuntu so there isn't really an argument there. Admittedly, package management could be friendlier. Canonical is taking this task very seriously, the first phase being the Software Store in version 9.10. Package management should be iPhone easy. I imagine it will be.
If you are targeting a particular platform, say Ubuntu x86/AMD64/ARM, I don't see how any of this can't be seamlessly automated. In much the same way that many programs you install in Windows automatically download and install .net or java or the VisualC redistributable. Just because it is installing compilers, etc. doesn't make it that big of a deal. Hell, in Debian, and it's derivatives, it could be a simple "apt-get install build-essential" somewhere in the fat-binary installation script to get most or all of everything the user would need.
You will always find some people who are happy to give their creations and time away with no cost to someone who will simply package that thing and re-sell it at a profit.
These people are useful idiots
Let me clarify exactly what you are driving at here but if you are trying to say that people that contribute to any open source projects are "useful idiots" just because somebody might sell it, then you are just spouting pure nonsense and flamebait.
People donate time and energy to FLOSS for many reasons. I am personally on the list of contributors for several projects. These applications are very useful to me and either have no feature analogous proprietary counterparts or none that run on my preferred platform. I have neither the time nor the inclination to either start nor maintain clones of these apps. Sometimes, I find a bug or I discover I would like some useful feature to be added to the app, so I just write the patch and send it in. If it's accepted, then I don't have to maintain a fork that I have to rejigger every time upstream updates. The developer maintains the app and my patch for me. His/her app is better so he/she wins. I win because I now have an app that more perfectly suits my needs.
I know that my patches have shown up in commercial distro's. So much the better! The more users of the application, the more interest and development it gets. I hope Red Hat, et al makes billions. If I want some, I'll buy some stock. Does this make me an idiot? Of course not.
I am sure that if Linux had the market share that Windows does, it would have many more security problems.
Seeing as you like devil's advocacy, let's examine this for a statement for a minute. It seems reasonable to me that many hackers would prefer to compromise a server rather than a desktop seeing as servers are always on so they're great for a bot-net node and many of them have more interesting things going through them like e-commerce, banking, etc. Let's think about this in light of the fact that according to this article Steve Ballmer himself recently thought Linux has a 60 percent share of the server market.
If that's even remotely close to being true, then it doesn't stand to reason that hackers aren't trying to exploit it. I'd posit that they are. For some reason they just aren't succeeding very well. Hmmm.
I don't know what the problem is or isn't with Symbian but as for Android, I see the variety of handsets and the openness having a very interesting side effect if it is exploited properly by the handset makers. Think about it. Android is open source so as opposed to WinMo, for example, where although you can pretty up the interface some, what you're left with underneath is essentially the same thing as what all of your other umpteen competitors have. Contrast this with Android, where you can actually work on the internals of the OS itself to differentiate it from everybody else. Things like an improved scheduler, apps to SD out of the box, built in Debian bootstrap, root OOTB, the possibilities are practically endless. Hopefully, the handset makers will use this to one up each other more and more and since it is open source, when the OEM's release their code, upstream can take patches and make vanilla even better. They are already taking stuff from amateurs like Cyanogen and adding it to the main tree. I know, I know, citation needed.
As far as the detrimental effects of possible balkanization goes, I don't see it. Manufacturers will be compelled to maintain application compatibility as what good is the phone for many normal users if they can't download cool stuff from Market. It's kind of akin to a far off post-human future where humans and machines converge, most of us are still going to be physically recognizable as not too far removed from plain old homo sapien sapiens as nobody is going to want to have sex with you if you look like a crock pot.
I think we're in for some exciting times.
I'm using CyanogenMod on my G1 with all of my apps on a class 6 sdcard and the CPU clocked to 528 MHz. The phone is blazing fast. It compares very favorably to an iPhone 3GS. Like my sibling poster mentioned, there are certain apps that either use a lot of the phones resources like the Weather app and there are other apps that wake the phone up a lot to check things on the net, etc. that will hammer your battery. Try experimenting with uninstalling some of your apps and you might be surprised on how fast your phone can be.
James Earl Jones' voice no less
Test the line and get welcomed by Darth Vader. Now that's epic.
I've met genuine geniuses, and you can tell when you talk to them how smart they are.
You mean the kind of people that casually say things that just melt your face with sheer intellect to the point of stopping you in your tracks and the only reply you can muster is a weak "I never thought about it like that."? No, never met anyone like that in my life:)
No, seriously, I don't expect hollywood to be able to handle characters like that competently much less an entire civilization of that times ten. But come on, at least they can attempt not to insult me. Take the recent Bruce Willis movie. of course I went and saw it. and maybe I just missed the point but, how do they expect me to swallow taking a technology that would take decades to perfect at our current rate of development and dropping it into the middle of 2009 and people just carrying on as before only now with robot bodies. The whole premise was just ridiculous and it couldn't have been handled more clumsily. Seriously, what is this, Harry Potter in New York? My apologies to anyone who hasn't seen it yet so I won't say anymore. I'll leave it alone but I just wish a little more thought would go into these things
I still re-read the original Dune novels on a regular basis. Herbert was peerless.
Exactly, also there are a lot of extremely compelling extrapolations of present technology that don't show up in most big budget pop sci-fi. Take for example the inevitable intimate merger of biology and technology. When the technology becomes available to broaden your intellectual and emotional horizons to the point that today's most celebrated geniuses are mere children in comparison, you'd better believe that people are going to go for it and the sociological changes will be utterly profound. And any sci-fi universe set more than a century hence that doesn't take this into consideration had better present a damn good reason why not.
Respectfully, I'm not sure if I am understanding you correctly but if you are saying that Debian is running in the Dalvik VM, that would be incorrect. It is running just like it would run bootstrapped on any Linux box. And according to my benchmarks, it runs as fast as you would expect it to given the particulars of the hardware. It just runs out of RAM and gets puked out by the Android runtime life cycle.
Fair enough. I don't have time to follow your link now so I'll take your word for it and stand corrected. However, how come if there are no binary modules holding them back, why is it that all of the mods like Cyanogen, etc. always use the default 2.6.29? I really am curious.
I understand what you are saying and all but as far as Android goes, it is open source. You can go right now and download the source code, compile it for the device of your choice, sell millions of them with a high quality OS and not pay a dime in licensing costs. You can't say that for WinMo or whatever else. Maybe Symbian, I haven't looked. People like Cyanogen, Hikaru, etc., can go and get it, tweak it out the wazoo and as long as they aren't distributing closed source apps with it, can release it to anybody they want with root, tethering, multi-touch, and everything else. So, that works for me. That's seems pretty open to me.
To me the real issue is the proprietary hardware and binary blob kernel modules that the handset manufacturers are releasing to make the handsets work. That's really what keeps you in lockstep with the officially blessed Android releases more than anything else. What if I don't want the 2.6.29 kernel that came on my G1. What if I want to use the 2.6.31 that just dropped. What if in 10 years I pick my G1 off the shelf and want to put the 3.6.31 kernel on it. I can't because if I do the touchscreen won't work. The wlan won't work. Who knows what else won't work. And Nokia does the same thing with their Maemo tablets. I have a 770 that I'd love to actually be able to do cool stuff with. I would like to put stock debian on it but, last I checked, half the hardware doesn't work. In fact, the only open phone I know is the Openmoko and we all know how that is working (worked) out. We just read a big story a couple of days ago about routers with dd-wrt, et al, that appear open until you realize you are stuck with the 2.4 blessed kernel because anything else and sure enough, the damn things don't work.
Anyway, I'm rambling but for the tl;dr folks, to me these "open" phones are not really open if I can't get open drivers for all of the useful hardware.
Here's the issue with the RAM on my G1 and of course I'm running Cyanogenmod. I have Debian on it in a bootstrap environment. In order really use it, I need to first start it up in the terminal, start some Window manager inside of debian and get vncserver going. Then I start the vncviewer on Android to be able to see the desktop. About the time I start a program in debian, the phone runs out of RAM and the terminal gets killed. There goes debian, et al. More ram would cure that problem. Also, Opera gets closed a lot and since it doesn't implement best practices correctly, i.e. when it is restarted, it goes to the default home page instead of resuming on the page it left off like any good Android program should. I'd also like to at least have the option of running some fatter binaries.
Of course, I have a swapfile but this only takes you so far in Android. If the swap file is too big, the OS starts swapping itself into it. Consequently, it slows down to a crawl. So, yes, Android devices do need more RAM. And the more the better.
When I'm working on someone's computer and they are having problems with IE that I know Firefox would solve, I usually first just ask them if they've heard of Firefox. About half the time they have, usually having used it on a friend's computer. Then I ask them what sites they usually visit. My mom's an avid Craigslist fan so I installed Firefox and added Greasemonkey with the Craigslist image script. The script automatically pulls the images from the ads and inserts them on the main page under each heading. Needless to say I made an instant believer out of my mother and she uses Firefox to this day.
No amount of whining or explaining is going to make most people switch browsers. Just show the strengths (adblock being a good standby) of the alternatives and they sell themselves.
The difference is with Wine, the idea typically is to run programs you already have on windows that aren't available on Linux whereas with Mono, there is active encouragement to write new programs with it. Big difference.
I noticed my girlfriend had one of the tip calculators on her Android phone and I was all like, what's so hard about just taking a bill like $26.43 and moving the decimal place over to get 2.64 then multiplying that by 2 in your head for 5.28. And if the service wasn't worthy of 20 percent, just knock off the appropriate amount.
Her response? "That's all fine and good until you've had a couple drinks in you. Then out comes the tip calculator."
I have to wonder who at Microsoft even comes up with this stuff. And who do they think is stupid enough to actually swallow it? Taken to its logical extreme, we shouldn't install any software or even own a computer as that will obviously increase your "attack vector". Ridiculous.
I'm not going to go into the security implications of it, but you could always use this to script the the website and bulldoze through all of the javascript, flash, etc. You can write a script that will take you all the way through logging in, clicking on the "pay my bill" button, fill in your credit card info, everything. Of course, you shouldn't do this.
But you can.
Indeed, the system I'm posting this on now has a Core2Duo e7400 proc at 2.8 GHz, 4 GB of RAM, a 500 GB HDD, and integrated nVidia graphics. While running Ubuntu 9.10, with compiz effects on, according to my Kill-A-Watt meter, it pulls a cool 46 watts at the plug just browsing around. I can't complain.
Also, while you do have to jump through a few hoops, you can always do this and use any programming language you want.
Second sentence in my second paragraph should have had the link in it. Yay for previewing.
hardly any more of a "real distro" than Android is.
While an argument can certainly be made that loading Android onto a device isn't quite the same as putting something like Ubuntu on it, do give it its due.
I've written several useful little programs in python with this. Also, while you do have to jump through a few hoops, you can always do this and use any programming language you want. It works pretty good on my phone and the lack of an X server is taken care with the handy vnc client found in the market.
Not saying that Android deserves to be spoken in the same breath as what's usually considered a full distro but, after a little work, it doesn't have to remain as gimped as some people seem to think it is.
I'm late to this discussion and haven't read many of the replies below so the points I'm about to make may have been already stated. Selling GPL'ed software, IMHO should be applauded and I would hope any open source developer to make millions, however, in this case, there is one small fly in thie ointment. Here is my take on it:
On a more open platform, like Android, for example, one could simply download the source, compile it, run it, and everything would be great. However, we are talking about the iphone. My understanding is that, short of jailbreaking, there is no way to compile and run your source code on a user's phone. And most ordinary people are not going to have jailbroken iphones.
Had you released the source for any of the more open systems like Android, Symbian, etc., and charged for the compiled app, I'm completely on board. In fact, I would applaude you. However, unless my understanding of how the App store and running apps on the iphone is lacking, I can't say that ethically, you should charge as the source code is next to useless for most users of that platform.
Just my 2 cents.
Worst case scenario, like my sibling post said, you can virtualize. Just use a usb wi-fi dongle and attach it to the virtual machine. There's probably some way to share the connection out to the host OS. Unfortunately, I don't know what that is.
At the risk of sounding redundant, I agree with you too. I always thought it absurd when people use some movie they saw as the basis for fearing intelligent machines. The only reason we humans do what we do including having the desire for self preservation is for the mechanism of evolution to work, we had to be this way. There is no reason to ascribe human emotion to machines. Actually, I'd say that any scientist that suggests we should stop research in this area because of some fear like this either hasn't thought it all the way through or is just a crank.