They're obviously hurting financially. By switching to Webkit (and now Blink) they were able to lay off over 90 developers, some of whom had been with the company for 15 years. This sucks - for the developers, obviously, but I'm sure nobody was happy about making that call; but according to salarylist.com, the average software developer salary is around $81,000/yr which times 90 developers is 7.29 MILLION dollars a year. Not sure if Norway dev pay is equivalent to the US average, but you get the rough picture. That sort of sum could make or break Opera as a company.
I've been a fan of Opera browser for a very long time - I started using it right after it became free. Opera pioneered a great deal of features that are browsing must-haves today, implementing them years before any competitor. They remind me of another company that hailed from their land-mass-sharing-neighbors in Sweden: Saab. A car company that pioneered many innovations that were later incorporated in automobiles across the board. The first to do this, the first to do that - turbochargers on production cars, cabin air filters, very high crash safety standards, active seat belts (okay, that one didn't last long), active head rest restraints, refrigerated glove box (for taking that Chardonnay to the picnic of course), headlight washers, heated seats, the use of computers to automatically monitor and adjust the engine's operations based on the type of fuel used and sensor input, direct ignition, traction control, air conditioned seats, etc, etc, etc. Now compare to this list of Opera 'firsts':
Saab was bought by GM. When that happened, all their cars were mandated to be cross-platform cars. They shared chassis with other cars; some models (and SUV and a hatchback) were blatant rebadges of a GM SUV and a Subaru (nicknamed the Saaburu). Now Saab is no more.
Sounds like what is happening to Opera, unfortunately.
I know 'car metaphors' are a Slashdot tradition, but I find this one particularly apt.
The same is true with physical CDs, too. What's to stop you from ripping your disc to MP3's and then selling the disc?
If I were in the recording/movie business, I would start packaging other stuff with albums/movies to encourage purchase of the physical medium; posters, stickers, t-shirts, etc. All the money they're wasting on lobbying and lawsuits isn't going to do a damn thing to curb piracy.
This is worked on me before. A few years ago I bought the box set of Muse's 'The Resistance' because it came with:
"Multi format box set containing the following: - CD+DVD in foldout softpak including The Making Of The Resistance DVD - 180g Double heavyweight vinyl - Muse USB pre-loaded with WAV, Apple Lossless and MP3 320 files plus bespoke audio player - 12" Art Print"
That's not quite fair. Cinnamon and Gnome forked off in two different directions with different UI philosophies. It's perfectly valid to praise one over the other, as they are two different projects now.
I'm glad Gnome has wised up and brought 'classic mode' back. I know that there's an expectation that you have to keep changing things in order to have a sense of progress, but there's a problem when you break traditional desktop metaphors that have really stood the test of time at this point. If you want progress, keep adding customization, so anyone can optimize their desktop to maximize their own workflow. I wanna make my environment look like Windows? Sure. Mac? OK. Unity? Fine.
That's one of the things I love about Android - all those crazy custom launchers that let you tailor your setup to your own preference.
Unity and Gnome 3 (before this release anyway) took away features and customization in the name of 'simplicity'.
I bet lots of companies throwing out old hardware who are worried about data leakage could actually find use for their old drives in-house. Hell, just keep them in a closet somewhere until one of your in-use drives go bad (and they will).
I used to sell phones for Verizon. There is a 'Block Premium Text Messaging' account option. I selected it for every subscriber I signed up by default unless they indicated otherwise.
Note that blocking premium SMS also blocks some non-evil stuff, like being able to donate to charities like the Red Cross via SMS, which has become popular after a tragedy these days. So while I probably saved a lot of people from billing headaches, I may have inadvertently barred people from making easy charitable donations. C'est la vie.
Software isn't the only reason for slowdowns. The thermal paste on processors also gets old and brittle after a few years, causing the CPUs to overheat. The CPUs then self-throttle in order to keep the heat down, which slows the machine down. This is why even a machine that is well-maintained in software will get slower over the years than it was when it was new. This is especially true for laptops that have desktop-class processors in them. Re-applying thermal paste and cleaning out all the gunk from the cooling system can help.
Your ARM netbooks and mobile devices don't generally have this problem because the processors don't run as hot.
You'll change your tune as soon as your (insert relative or friend here) asks you how to play (insert hot new videogame here) on their Chromebook. What will your advice be - 'Buy an XBox'?
People wanna do stuff on their computers, even the dumb ones...
Well, there's the fact that Chrome only exists (officially) on devices built for/released with it. I'd wager that vulnerabilities would skyrocket if Chrome were turned into a real distro that could run on any hardware, because that would open the door to closed drivers, third-party repositories, etc, etc.
Nothing at all, and there's no reason you shouldn't, if you're buying it just for the hardware. But they're obviously not selling it just for the hardware, otherwise they'd preinstall it with a real OS, or no OS at all. They're selling it as a really fancy Chromebook - that's the sales pitch here - but at this point there's not a lot you can do with a Chromebook that's fancy enough to justify $1300 other than look at media on a really pretty screen.
In short, it's not the $1300 for the hardware that is wacky, it's the fact that such a machine is tremendously underutilized by the glorified web browser of an OS it runs. It also has too little storage for the price, but that's another issue.
In short, if you're spending $1300 for a laptop to put Linux on, you can do better - a MacBook would be a better deal, in terms of what hardware you get for the money.
I have a feeling these things are going to be relying heavily on Google's cloud storage services. I also have a feeling that black market short-range pocket-sized mobile phone frequency jammers are going to become a hot commodity.:)
To anyone who wants to play around with it: there are Chromium OS VM builds out there you can play with in VMWare or Virtualbox (legal, it's all opensource).
I tried it out a few weeks ago. It really *is* just a web browser. I have trouble understanding why someone would spent $1300 for a Pixel unless they planned to install a real OS on it. Yeah, I get that the display is nice, but for that kind of money I should be able to... I dunno... maybe run the aforementioned VMWare, like I do now on the $599 laptop I virtualized Chrome (and Win7 and PC-BSD) on. And played Portal on, etc.
I was an unfortunate victim of the IBM Deathstar. When I pulled the drive apart, the magnetic layer had been scraped clean off the glass platters, which were at that point transparent. It was my first lesson on the importance of backups...
I maintained ~150 Dell Optiplex and Vostro machines for 3 years. Every BSOD I saw was due to bad ram. A few failures due to some machines operating in poorly ventilated cabinets and overheating (no fault of the machine). The cooling fans would grind to a halt eventually and then the CPU would lock. They all chugged happily along once the fans were replaced and cooling ports + exhaust fans were cut in the cabinets - never hard a real hardware failure due to the heat.
Lots of hard drive failures though (almost one a month). All Western Digital. Unrelated to the heat because ventilation didn't seem to matter. Don't know if that's within the average error rate or not. I got lots of shiny platters and neodymium magnets out of that job. Hard drive internals are pretty; all polished and shiny...
The recognition issue could be remedied by partnering with a big name or manufacturer. Nobody's heard of Tizen, either, but say 'Samsung' and and they'll say, 'Oh, right'.
HTC has been struggling with identity issues. They used to lead smartphone manufacturing, now they're becoming just another 'me too' in the increasingly saturated Android/WinMo/iPhone landscape. Hell, they make a Windows phone that's a design ripoff of the N9:
And here's a reason why a company like HTC might want to back someone other than Android:
"Microsoft is demanding that Samsung pay it $15 in royalties for every Android phone it sells, Korea's Maeil Business Newspaper reported on Wednesday. While Samsung is attempting to negotiate the royalty fee lower, it does indicate that Microsoft plans to become more aggressive in pursuing Android manufacturers over use of technologies within Android that it says it has rights to.
The Redmond company is already receiving $5 for every HTC phone sold with the Android operating system, and that has made the company some $150 million, according to reports. With Microsoft asking three times that from Samsung, the potential is there for the company to make much more from this licensing deal."
Keep in mind that the article is 2 years old, and HTC's payout to Microsoft is certainly several times $150 million by now.
Now, add the fact that Sailfish can run any Android application out there, but does not have an equivalent to the Play Store yet. HTC could create their own app store and offer both native and Android apps, and actually see a cut of profits added to their device sales instead of money subtracted for licensing fees.
I want to get HTC and Sailfish in a room together and tell them to kiss. And make me a device.
Slashdot Mirror
They're obviously hurting financially. By switching to Webkit (and now Blink) they were able to lay off over 90 developers, some of whom had been with the company for 15 years. This sucks - for the developers, obviously, but I'm sure nobody was happy about making that call; but according to salarylist.com, the average software developer salary is around $81,000/yr which times 90 developers is 7.29 MILLION dollars a year. Not sure if Norway dev pay is equivalent to the US average, but you get the rough picture. That sort of sum could make or break Opera as a company.
I've been a fan of Opera browser for a very long time - I started using it right after it became free. Opera pioneered a great deal of features that are browsing must-haves today, implementing them years before any competitor. They remind me of another company that hailed from their land-mass-sharing-neighbors in Sweden: Saab. A car company that pioneered many innovations that were later incorporated in automobiles across the board. The first to do this, the first to do that - turbochargers on production cars, cabin air filters, very high crash safety standards, active seat belts (okay, that one didn't last long), active head rest restraints, refrigerated glove box (for taking that Chardonnay to the picnic of course), headlight washers, heated seats, the use of computers to automatically monitor and adjust the engine's operations based on the type of fuel used and sensor input, direct ignition, traction control, air conditioned seats, etc, etc, etc. Now compare to this list of Opera 'firsts':
http://operawiki.info/OperaInnovations
Saab was bought by GM. When that happened, all their cars were mandated to be cross-platform cars. They shared chassis with other cars; some models (and SUV and a hatchback) were blatant rebadges of a GM SUV and a Subaru (nicknamed the Saaburu). Now Saab is no more.
Sounds like what is happening to Opera, unfortunately.
I know 'car metaphors' are a Slashdot tradition, but I find this one particularly apt.
The same is true with physical CDs, too. What's to stop you from ripping your disc to MP3's and then selling the disc?
If I were in the recording/movie business, I would start packaging other stuff with albums/movies to encourage purchase of the physical medium; posters, stickers, t-shirts, etc. All the money they're wasting on lobbying and lawsuits isn't going to do a damn thing to curb piracy.
This is worked on me before. A few years ago I bought the box set of Muse's 'The Resistance' because it came with:
"Multi format box set containing the following:
- CD+DVD in foldout softpak including The Making Of The Resistance DVD
- 180g Double heavyweight vinyl
- Muse USB pre-loaded with WAV, Apple Lossless and MP3 320 files plus bespoke audio player
- 12" Art Print"
That's not quite fair. Cinnamon and Gnome forked off in two different directions with different UI philosophies. It's perfectly valid to praise one over the other, as they are two different projects now.
I'm glad Gnome has wised up and brought 'classic mode' back. I know that there's an expectation that you have to keep changing things in order to have a sense of progress, but there's a problem when you break traditional desktop metaphors that have really stood the test of time at this point. If you want progress, keep adding customization, so anyone can optimize their desktop to maximize their own workflow. I wanna make my environment look like Windows? Sure. Mac? OK. Unity? Fine.
That's one of the things I love about Android - all those crazy custom launchers that let you tailor your setup to your own preference.
Unity and Gnome 3 (before this release anyway) took away features and customization in the name of 'simplicity'.
Every distro I've used allows you to do the same after hitting ALT+F2, regardless of window manager/desktop environment.
...the first line of my above post got eaten somehow, which was: 'Not to mention the fact that destroying non-defective drives is FUCKING WASTEFUL'.
I encourage anyone who has 20 minutes to spare to watch this short Frontline documentary on E-waste:
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/ghana804/video/video_index.html
I bet lots of companies throwing out old hardware who are worried about data leakage could actually find use for their old drives in-house. Hell, just keep them in a closet somewhere until one of your in-use drives go bad (and they will).
I used to sell phones for Verizon. There is a 'Block Premium Text Messaging' account option. I selected it for every subscriber I signed up by default unless they indicated otherwise.
Note that blocking premium SMS also blocks some non-evil stuff, like being able to donate to charities like the Red Cross via SMS, which has become popular after a tragedy these days. So while I probably saved a lot of people from billing headaches, I may have inadvertently barred people from making easy charitable donations. C'est la vie.
Software isn't the only reason for slowdowns. The thermal paste on processors also gets old and brittle after a few years, causing the CPUs to overheat. The CPUs then self-throttle in order to keep the heat down, which slows the machine down. This is why even a machine that is well-maintained in software will get slower over the years than it was when it was new. This is especially true for laptops that have desktop-class processors in them. Re-applying thermal paste and cleaning out all the gunk from the cooling system can help.
Your ARM netbooks and mobile devices don't generally have this problem because the processors don't run as hot.
Interesting, have a link to that?
Anyone reminded of the Laughing Man from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex?
A hacker who was able to hack the cybernetic vision of others in real-time to make himself invisible...
This isn't 2000... plenty of laptops can game these days. Not an ultrabook, of course, but still.
Yeah, I'm one of them. Was just making a hardware/price comparison.
You'll change your tune as soon as your (insert relative or friend here) asks you how to play (insert hot new videogame here) on their Chromebook. What will your advice be - 'Buy an XBox'?
People wanna do stuff on their computers, even the dumb ones...
Well, there's the fact that Chrome only exists (officially) on devices built for/released with it. I'd wager that vulnerabilities would skyrocket if Chrome were turned into a real distro that could run on any hardware, because that would open the door to closed drivers, third-party repositories, etc, etc.
I thought that's what iPads were for!
Nothing at all, and there's no reason you shouldn't, if you're buying it just for the hardware. But they're obviously not selling it just for the hardware, otherwise they'd preinstall it with a real OS, or no OS at all. They're selling it as a really fancy Chromebook - that's the sales pitch here - but at this point there's not a lot you can do with a Chromebook that's fancy enough to justify $1300 other than look at media on a really pretty screen.
In short, it's not the $1300 for the hardware that is wacky, it's the fact that such a machine is tremendously underutilized by the glorified web browser of an OS it runs. It also has too little storage for the price, but that's another issue.
In short, if you're spending $1300 for a laptop to put Linux on, you can do better - a MacBook would be a better deal, in terms of what hardware you get for the money.
I have a feeling these things are going to be relying heavily on Google's cloud storage services. I also have a feeling that black market short-range pocket-sized mobile phone frequency jammers are going to become a hot commodity. :)
To anyone who wants to play around with it: there are Chromium OS VM builds out there you can play with in VMWare or Virtualbox (legal, it's all opensource).
I tried it out a few weeks ago. It really *is* just a web browser. I have trouble understanding why someone would spent $1300 for a Pixel unless they planned to install a real OS on it. Yeah, I get that the display is nice, but for that kind of money I should be able to... I dunno... maybe run the aforementioned VMWare, like I do now on the $599 laptop I virtualized Chrome (and Win7 and PC-BSD) on. And played Portal on, etc.
I was an unfortunate victim of the IBM Deathstar. When I pulled the drive apart, the magnetic layer had been scraped clean off the glass platters, which were at that point transparent. It was my first lesson on the importance of backups...
Agreed... I'm often running several virtual machines at the same time on my desktop. All those cores of the i7 and the 12 gigs of RAM come in handy...
Good job on that diagnosis!
I maintained ~150 Dell Optiplex and Vostro machines for 3 years. Every BSOD I saw was due to bad ram. A few failures due to some machines operating in poorly ventilated cabinets and overheating (no fault of the machine). The cooling fans would grind to a halt eventually and then the CPU would lock. They all chugged happily along once the fans were replaced and cooling ports + exhaust fans were cut in the cabinets - never hard a real hardware failure due to the heat.
Lots of hard drive failures though (almost one a month). All Western Digital. Unrelated to the heat because ventilation didn't seem to matter. Don't know if that's within the average error rate or not. I got lots of shiny platters and neodymium magnets out of that job. Hard drive internals are pretty; all polished and shiny...
So who holds the rights to the architecture, and why hasn't it been licensed?
It makes it almost trivial to port over 'real' Linux apps.
It's not just the UI that's noteworthy; it's the most Linux-y of Linux phones OS's out there.The UI being nice is just a bonus.
The recognition issue could be remedied by partnering with a big name or manufacturer. Nobody's heard of Tizen, either, but say 'Samsung' and and they'll say, 'Oh, right'.
HTC has been struggling with identity issues. They used to lead smartphone manufacturing, now they're becoming just another 'me too' in the increasingly saturated Android/WinMo/iPhone landscape. Hell, they make a Windows phone that's a design ripoff of the N9:
http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=3902
And here's a reason why a company like HTC might want to back someone other than Android:
"Microsoft is demanding that Samsung pay it $15 in royalties for every Android phone it sells, Korea's Maeil Business Newspaper reported on Wednesday. While Samsung is attempting to negotiate the royalty fee lower, it does indicate that Microsoft plans to become more aggressive in pursuing Android manufacturers over use of technologies within Android that it says it has rights to.
The Redmond company is already receiving $5 for every HTC phone sold with the Android operating system, and that has made the company some $150 million, according to reports. With Microsoft asking three times that from Samsung, the potential is there for the company to make much more from this licensing deal."
http://betanews.com/2011/07/06/microsoft-wants-15-for-every-samsung-android-device-sold/
Keep in mind that the article is 2 years old, and HTC's payout to Microsoft is certainly several times $150 million by now.
Now, add the fact that Sailfish can run any Android application out there, but does not have an equivalent to the Play Store yet. HTC could create their own app store and offer both native and Android apps, and actually see a cut of profits added to their device sales instead of money subtracted for licensing fees.
I want to get HTC and Sailfish in a room together and tell them to kiss. And make me a device.