Can Android Without Dalvik Avoid Oracle's Wrath? 264
jfruhlinger writes "Despite the fact that Oracle is suing Google over claims that Android violates Java IP, Android is roaring ahead in the marketplace. Still, some groups are wondering if they can implement Android without incurring Oracle's current or future wrath by avoiding the Dalvik VM. A project called IcedRobot aims to create a GNU-compatible version of Android, and rumors abound that RIM is planning on putting an OpenJDK-version of Android on its upcoming PlayBook tablets."
Consistent Enforcement (Score:4, Interesting)
There are what seems to be a countless army of people and companies using Java, and I have never heard of anyone being sued for "Java IP anything". Something smells fishy.
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Consistent enforcement is not a requirement of copyright claims, which are among the IP claims Oracle has brought against Google.
Re:Consistent Enforcement (Score:5, Informative)
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If I understand correctly, any Java or Java-like VM running on a mobile device would run afoul of the same patents, so e.g. using OpenJDK won't help, nor would rewriting the whole thing from scratch as FOSS. You'd need a different VM (and then you wouldn't be able to run any existing Android apps).
I actually wonder just how different you'd have to make it, in fact. There have been claims that Microsoft has been paying licensing fees to Sun, ostensibly for those same patents as related to .NET. And .NET VM (
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Since the Dalvik VM is nothing like the Java VM, anything that applies for it is not unlikely to apply for any VM-based dynamical language.
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OpenJDK is supposedly safe because it's licensed under the GPL, which prevents Oracle from suing over patents as long as OpenJDK is available under the GPL. They could stop distributing it under the GPL for future versions of Java, but revoking the license retroactively wouldn't go over well in courts due to the principle of estoppel.
On the other hand, non-OpenJDK implementations of Java don't carry the same promise.
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you are free to use, copy, distribute, or compile, the Java SE system and Sun/Oracle promises not to use its patents against you. So the countless army of people using Java are fine. However, if you break the Java specification, or your JRE only implements a subset of the specification, then suddenly the entire weight of the Java patents are free to be used against you. Most people do not break the Java specification.
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*Caveat: There were some small bits of code that were not directly part of the Java source code, and not under the GPL, that Google was distributing. They've since stopped.
Last I read, it was found that they never actually distributed even that much, unless I'm mistaken.
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Sun sued Microsoft (and won) over Java twice.
Besides MS and Google most companies have actually played nice with Sun/Oracle's terms.
Both MS cases were rather high profile, the second one was what killed off Microsoft's JVM (for the opposite reason Google is being sued over Dalvik; the MS JVM was being called Java, but had all kinds of hooks to the underlying OS which made it and applications written for it incompatible with Java - whereas Dalvik looks like Java, smells like Java, tastes like Java and even a
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Well, they are not calling it Java-the-VM (which Dalvik isn't), but they DO refer to Java-the-language, since that is what they use.
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If you want to call your product java then it needs to be able to run java applications which dalvik doesn't do becouse it isn't java.
There are similar if not identical concepts so a lot of what you are familiar with coding wise is going to work the same way in dalvik much like c and c++ or driving a diesel car instead of a petrol or an electric car or even windows linux or osx.
Even java is not unique in its reuse of concepts from c and c++
You see the difference between microsoft's version of java and sun
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Google is being sued for not using Java.
Why Support Java At All? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Compatibility.
How are they supposed to dump the vast majority of their application base? It would be suicide.
Python is not even close to a substitute for Java. It's good, but not that good.
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Where to start....
Python is magnitude slower than Java. Python "compiled" code is not remotely close to Java's execution time. Python doesn't have real multithreading (see GIL blocking multiple threads from executing). Python is good for scripting small apps. But if there is a choice between Java and Python for basic API, Java wins today and yesterday. What tomorrow will bring is of course unknown, but GIL and current much slower execution are huge problems.
Java at similar speed to native C/C++, or at least
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All those issues are VM issues.
Given that android uses a from-scratch VM which isn't the JVM, why is it impossible to consider that it could have been a VM designed to work with Python?
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Not to mention, considering Android doesn't actually use Java, but rather the syntax and an unrelated VM.
The standard android SDK requires a Java SDK. It post processes .class files to generate its own binaries.
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C/C++ is faster than Java but having to re-invent the wheel all the time is what makes me prefer Java. Another good example is loading a configuration file. In Java I just create Properties [oracle.com] object with a file path and I've got access to a configuration file. In C++ you have to mess about with streams, write your own string parser and then create a map to store everything.
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Some options in C/C++:
Re:Why Support Java At All? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re-examination (Score:2)
Re:Why Support Java At All? (Score:5, Interesting)
Java the language is not being sued about, so lets move on from this shall we? The patents are regarding Virtual Machines that most likely affect any language using dynamic code optimization. The copyright claims are regarding apparent line by line copying which if true is just a big fck up by Google, and not a slant against the language.
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They had the "option" of skipping it (and focus on a different language) from day one, but the lure of exploiting the vast developer base was too strong.
Android without Java... (Score:5, Insightful)
Might as well use MeeGo. At least then contributions from the community and improvements to various parts of the operating system would benefit more than just one platform.
Why should they? (Score:2)
There is no way oracle can win the fight against all the companies which would be hurt if this goes trough. They will settle and make some patent agreement in the end.
Well done. good P.R. (Score:2)
i decided not to use it, in order not to put my beans and time on something that is that intertwined with Java, only because of Oracle's bad reputation with this control freak/closed ip business.
see. bad reputation hampers something that runs on your platform. in turn, that hampers your platform. reputation counts a lot.
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Eclipse is owned by IBM. They have their own Java development environment including compilers free of Oracle. If I owned a java shop I would rather switch to them than to use Oracle and my guess is Oracle is trying to act like IBM.
Netbeans is what I use and it is unfortunately owned by Oracle. :-( I want to gradually free myself from it soon if I make time to learn Eclipse. Both Eclipse and Netbeans are great for php, C++, and even python. You do not have to use them to develop Java software.
I thought Java was Open Source? (Score:2)
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/06/11/13/0724252/Sun-Open-Sources-Java-Under-GPL [slashdot.org]
Sooooooo..... what's the problem? If there are 447 patent infringement problems in Java itself, it seems like the issue is going to affect more than just Google.
Re:I thought Java was Open Source? (Score:4, Interesting)
To Google: Just buy the rights to Java from Oracle (Score:2)
Re:Moot (Score:4, Interesting)
The real interesting thing will be when we can get real productivity apps to seamlessly move from mobile to laptop to desktop and back. Sun had their SunRay systems where you could seamlessly move your entire desktop session, including open apps and work in progress, from one desktop computer to another, and even transfer phone calls seamlessly between phones as you moved, say from your office phone to a conference room phone. Imagine being able to do that, except between your smart phone and your laptop or desktop, even for things like full-featured word processor and spreadsheet programs or Visio or whatever other productivity apps you use. Now imagine being able to do that seamlessly without a central server or even without the little cards the SunRay depends on. You could couple all of your devices together and they could be in constant contact with each other so switching between them would be completely seamless and near-instantaneous.
We can do some of that already of course, but insufficient software and hardware on mobile devices, as well as deficiencies in disk and network speed (especially cellular network speed) make it impossible to really accomplish all of it now. I do think this is where we're headed though, and I can't wait.
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The real interesting thing will be when we can get real productivity apps to seamlessly move from mobile to laptop to desktop and back.
Yes I agree. HP were hinting at WebOS on the desktop as well as tablets and phones. I hoped that they could implement "minority report" style integration between all three so you could drag unsaved work in progress from one device to another.
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It seems that HP is backpedaling a bit (could there have been a angry call from Redmond?), and now it seems that they will either be using webos as a quickboot system or provide some kind of touchstone integrating with windows rather then go whole hog webos as primary desktop.
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yep, been thinking that this is why Intel is taking their sweet time demoing Moblin/Meego without claiming when products will show up on market. Gives Microsoft a reason to slim down and expand the reach of Windows. Funny tho that MS should start talking about Windows on ARM. A war of words between old lovers?
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Moblin / Meego slowness is not Intel's fault. Intel is not a device manufacturer, they produce a reference platform and device manufacturers actually build the things that consumers see. Another good example is Marvell's iMX515 - they demoed some netbooks with this CPU, Linux, and even Flash some time last year. They sell the components to anyone who is interested in shipping it, but I don't know of any company that's brought a netbook based on their hardware to market yet.
It's not the same situation
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The "Minority Report" interface is an OS thing. Intel doesn't do that. They do hardware. The hardware they sell now is more than capable of doing that right now, if you've got the software.
Yes but I don't know why you think we were talking about Intel.
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Why would it drive anybody nuts? Microsoft made a nice video, but they didn't come up with any of the ideas in that video.
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The real interesting thing will be when we can get real productivity apps to seamlessly move from mobile to laptop to desktop and back. Sun had their SunRay systems where you could seamlessly move your entire desktop session, including open apps and work in progress, from one desktop computer to another, and even transfer phone calls seamlessly between phones as you moved, say from your office phone to a conference room phone.
The session was running on the server. Nothing "moved." It was just being viewed from a different terminal.
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"Sun had their SunRay systems where you could seamlessly move your entire desktop session, [...] from one desktop computer to another"
Well seamlessy only if you were using the same screen resolution on both machines. Otherwise you'd end up with a session which didn't take advantage of your screen or one which didn't fit on it. Any other machine running VNC would be able to give you the same feature - albeit with the same limitations as the SunRay.
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> Sun had their SunRay systems where you could seamlessly move your entire desktop session, including open apps
> and work in progress, from one desktop computer to another, and even transfer phone calls seamlessly between
> phones as you moved, say from your office phone to a conference room phone. Imagine being able to do that,
Wow! oh wait ... we already have RDP and a PBX in the office .. Steve, is that you distorting my reality again?
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You mean like I do every day?
(A lot of that functionality has been around in other forms at least since the 1980's.)
Hardware is more than powerful enough. However, the software does
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To some degree, this is what Morotola is gunning for with Atrix.
When docked at either the desktop or laptop dock, the android ui takes second stage to a desktop ui. Android is still accessible via a window, and the desktop will remember its state on undock.
Not sure if they included openoffice or similar tho.
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A modern cpu will just translate the x86 instructions into risc internally.
That is what microcoded CPU's have been doing all the time. The main point of RISC is to avoid that translation layer.
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No, that's exactly the problem with x86. Well, half the problem - the other thing is that it lacks things like predicated instructions, so you can't avoid branching and other tricks that simplify the execution unit design.
An x86 chip needs a complex instruction decoder tacked onto the front of the pipeline. Something like ARM has a decoder that is about as complex as the micro-op decoder on a typical Intel chip. This complex decoder is taking up die space, which is why it was a problem at the start of t
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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He'd post about it on slashdot saying how great it is and everyone would listen.
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Soon what will matter will not be the user interface, the OS or the apps, but the utility to the end user:
I'd like to see it work that way, but I suspect end users will be subject to the same lock in as we're used to on the desktop.
There's too much vested interest in trapping consumers for the big players to allow the open formats, protocols and APIs that are needed for real competition. Oracle attempting to kill Davilik is just the tip of the that rather nasty iceberg.
Re:Moot (Score:5, Interesting)
But cellphones are about to be as powerful as desktop PCs and laptops.
Not really. They're already as powerful as desktop PCs were in, I don't know, 2002. But by the time they're as powerful as today's desktop PCs, desktop PCs will be faster too -- if only because you can stuff a lot more cores in a PC with a 200W power budget than you can into a phone with a 1W power budget.
But I agree on the convergence. Somebody needs to come up with a docking station-like thing with a ~50W CPU, several gigs of RAM, a TB of disk, GigE and a 22"+ screen which will transition the OS instance from the phone to the dock, server VM style, when you plug them together.
Then the 'dock' can stay connected to the internet even while they're not together and act as a 1TB+ remote storage and backup device and home server which the phone can access (e.g. over an ssh tunnel) using the internet or 802.11. The storage on the phone becomes essentially a local fast-access cache of the most recently used data in the larger data collection at home. This is probably how the wheel of reincarnation is ultimately going to kill off cloud computing in this iteration -- people will start using their own PC remotely instead of somebody else's server, then as phones get more powerful they start to take on more of the load as between the phone and the PC because local is always faster, until the remote PC is pretty much just a remote backup device which allows you to play high end video games and have a bigger screen and full size keyboard when you dock with it.
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Mobile phones can never be as powerful as desktops. Power and capability are dependent upon the full experience. So screen real estate 24 inch screen versus, well, what ever and input devices, full size keyboard, joystick, mouse and of course mass storage.
Mobile phones can not even match net books, for the same reason.
Mobile is stuck until you have a virtual overlay, via glasses over reality and input devices to match and, those glasses are treated in much the same manner as shoes today, protection and
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Mobile phones can never be as powerful as desktops.
Even compared to a 1990 PC x86 running DOS?
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Not till DosBox gets mouse reporting right :p
Also, it allows you to remap physical keys only, and both n900 and droids with keyboards have less than 101 keys, You can't double-click the right "mouse" button, too. You can't use that era's ISA cards or similar hardware extensions, but this applies to modern PCs as well.
These are the only kinks I can think of that keep DosBox on phones from being strictly more powerful than the 1990 x86 PC you're talking about.
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A 1990 PC had a 12" monitor, a keyboard and an optional mouse. A phone has a 4" touch screen and an optional slide-out keyboard.
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I'm on a project installing several thousand dual-core W7 desktops today. Not a one has the processor power or video performance of the NGP. This battle is over.
The latest ARM processors go up to 16 cores SMP. They include up to 32 cores of video processing offload thanks to Imagination Technologies. They conserve Watts like the precious commodity that Watts are.
Part of what makes the hardware work well is the software. The Linux based platforms like WebOS, Android and others are very efficient and v
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9401921.stm [bbc.co.uk]
might interest you around the 30 second mark they start to talk about motorola's atrix. It's an android phone which switches to linux when docked with what looks like a slim laptop.
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HDMI out takes care of the screen as needed, bluetooth for input. Mass storage may be the sticking point, unless your ok with cloud storage.
now if your talking about sitting down on a random park bench with a phone in pocket and accessing those things, dream on. Even a laptop can not give you that unless your willing to risk back injury.
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Give it another two generations, and see whether MIPS gets any traction. At least on paper, the 1074k core has equivalent performance and lower power than an A9 at the same speed. I think the next four years will be exciting for processor design.
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If the compiler used can make use of the instruction set in the first place. And hell, its been long since x86 designs processed the x86 instruction set directly. These days it gets translated into "micro-ops" that behave pretty much like the ARM instruction set.
Basically, the x86 instruction set is a holdover from earlier times, where each clock cycle where slow. Back then it was more beneficial to have a group of transistors that handled a specialized piece of math in a single cycle then use the generics
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In what universe is that not enough? When I first started college, I pieced together a system with a Pentium III, half a gig of RAM, and a GeForce 2. In addition to the obscene amounts of Q3A and Counter-Strike I played, it was also more than capable of handling Windows 2000, Apache, VisualStudio, Mathematica, NetWare (stupid math dept. network drop-boxes for assignments), an FTP server, Photo
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Yep, RAM (and the address range to make full use of it) seems more a issue these days then CPU. When things choke it is in dealing with HD content and similar large data amounts, not your home spreadsheet or book critique.
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Today's universe?
I think the point is you wouldn't find that setup very usable today because modern software is more resource-hungry. Back in my day a 68k processor running at 8MHz with 4MB of RAM was the Hot Stuff, and a 250MB HDD was [trump]*huuuge*[/trump].
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Re:Moot (Score:4, Informative)
> In what universe is that not enough?
Any universe where Netbeans, Visual Studio, Eclipse, Microsoft Word (for anything more complicated than a single-page business letter that could be done via email), video editing, video encoding (something that can bring even the mightiest i7 to its knees; try multipass h.264 sometime...), or 3D rendering occurs. In other words, the desktop of anybody who's a content creator instead of a mere content consumer.
Back when you first started college, "video editing" involved 720x480 or 720x540 interlaced 50 or 60hz video. Now it involves 1920x1080 progressive video. Today, you could literally fill a terrabyte hard drive with an hour or two of raw, pre-encoded video. Modern DSLRs with HDR take pictures that are individually bigger (in bytes) than most CF cards that existed prior to ~7 years ago. Try editing a 12 megapixel HDR image on a PC using Photoshop on a PC with only a gig or two of ram. It's not fun.
As for people who "just want email and internet", well... Flash. Enough said.
The most high-end, hacked and rooted Android phones existing today can *barely* handle Flash in its raw, undigested, real PC form without gagging. "Works" is not the same as "runs well". Hardware-wise, a current top of the line Android phone is roughly comparable to a 500MHz Pentium 3 with 512mb, Windows 2000, and a $12 piece of shit videocard that somehow managed to have onboard MPEG-2 video acceleration anyway.
> the AGC used on the Apollo missions was considered a "real computer", and today's phones could emulate that entire system without breaking a sweat...
The difference is, the AGC made use of lots of ballistics data that was precomputed offline by mainframes and carried onboard via Hopi-woven core memory -- more megabits on a single mission, in one place at one time, than the sum total that had ever previously existed on earth. An i7 could calculate it on the fly. Had Apollo run into really, truly novel problems requiring realtime navigation that deviated significantly from the original plan (assuming it had enough fuel to allow it), the astronauts would have been fucked, because their computers wouldn't have been able to handle that use case at all.
Devil's advocate (Score:3)
In other words, the desktop of anybody who's a content creator instead of a mere content consumer.
Devil's advocate: The general public appear happy to be "content consumers" (let's call them "audience" instead for now). If "content creators" (I prefer "authors") want to create, then they can seek venture capital, establish a business, and lease an office in order to qualify to buy a computer capable of doing so. At least this is what video game console makers such as Nintendo think [warioworld.com].
Modern DSLRs with HDR take pictures that are individually bigger
The general public who have graduated from smartphone cameras appear happy with subcompact cameras. "DSLR? What's that? Tho
Loss of economies of scale (Score:3)
In what universe is [a P4 equivalent] not enough?
In the universe of Adobe Flash Player, for one.
So how again are modern phones not powerful enough to replace PC's? When you answer, please remember that we're talking about the kind of PC required by the overwhelming majority of society
If "the overwhelming majority of society" switch to tablets and phones, the economies of scale might disappear from the PC market. Loss of economies of scale could make PCs unaffordable to individuals like me who have a good reason to need one, such as people who work from home or students. This has already happened to video games: the retail consoles are affordable but the devkits definitely aren't.
(email, word processing
I've tried typing on the on-screen keyboard of an Android-powe
meatspace implications (Score:5, Interesting)
>> But cellphones are about to be as powerful as desktop PCs and laptops.
> Not really. They're already as powerful as desktop PCs were in, I don't know, 2002. But by the time they're as powerful as today's desktop PCs, desktop PCs will be faster too -- if only because you can stuff a lot more cores in a PC with a 200W power budget than you can into a phone with a 1W power budget.
You're correct on the hardware end, but you're missing the meatspace implications.
Most people don't need a computer any more powerful than a 2002-era machine that has hardware accelerated video (unless you're a gamer, of course, or someone with a hobby or profession that requires something more). This is why so many people CAN still get things done with old machines. Stick a modern browser on a Windows 2000 box, and you can do basically everything most people need, as long as the video stuff is offloaded into a modern video card.
Cellphones are approaching that stage _rapidly_, and will most likely be there with the upcoming quad core SoCs coming out by the end of this year. The implementation as a desktop for the masses is a trivial exercise. A dock that lets you use your cellphone AS your primary Websurfing/emailing machine is all most people need at home. Game on your console or have a gaming rig set up if you need something more, but we're just about to the point of having all the computing power non-specialists need, all in a cellphone.
The new quad-core SoCs can drive 2560x1600 panels (and more), full Blu-Ray level 1080p HD video (multiple streams, even), etc. There's honestly just not that much LEFT that people need, from a practical standpoint.
Do you hear that? That is the sound of inevitability.
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Jesus, but the new /. is a fucked-up mess. *sigh*
Re:meatspace implications (Score:4, Interesting)
>Most people don't need a computer any more powerful than a 2002-era machine that has hardware accelerated video
Most people want a fast and capable machine that won't limit them. They may not see themselves as gamers but they may have kids who want to play a Sims game. They want want to mess around in Second Life or watch full screen HD video.
The argument that most people just need a basic browser capable computer has been debunked for a long time and is one of the main reasons we see linux fail in the desktop marketplace. Jane User not only needs capable machine but a fast one and she has 5 facebook pages open, outlook 2010 running, and all sorts of bloatware to run her multifunction printer and Darwin knows what else. She may also run XP mode for some old application or occasionally edit the videos and photos from her camera.
A modern multicore machine is in a whole different ballpark than a Windows 2000 circa machine. Your antivirus is locking up your browser. Flash doesn't beat up your computer. Heck, right now we're looking at affordable 128 megabyte SSDs coming into the mainstream. Jane User will want that level of performance. She'll see her friends computer that wakes from hibernation or boots up in 6 or 7 seconds and wonder why her machine takes 30 seconds.
Every so often someone makes your prediction "640k is all anyone will need" and they're always wrong. Turns out both developers and users will make use of faster hardware and the market will continue to demand it. No cell phone with a docking station will replace that unless we have some incredible mobile CPU breakthrough and people stop seeing their mobile devices as borderline disposable. Laptops and desktops will be here for quite some time.
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Way to go in not knowing anything about what this year's crop of SoCs is capable of. Full-screen hardware accelerated video and flash is already here. The quad-core ones coming out later this year are capable of WAY more than that - MULTIPLE streams of hardware accelerated HD video, resolutions up to 2560x1600 and more. Sims and Second Life and full screen HD video are all very easy to accomplish on mobile SoCs by the end of this year. Get with the program.
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The argument that most people just need a basic browser capable computer has been debunked for a long time and is one of the main reasons we see linux fail in the desktop marketplace.
Being a basic browser capable computer is about 80% of the iPad's success. Same with Android
Linux has been failing in the PC world because manufacturers can't come up with a linux distro that doesn't stink. Ubuntu is one of the best, and still sucks.
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what you forget is that CPU power requirements are going to be a limiting factor even on desktops - no-one wants a huge electricity bill especially as costs of electricity is going up and up. So all CPUs are being designed with low-power-when-not-stressed modes that ensure your PC doesn't suck up juice when you're just staring at the next /. post thinking "what a numpty!"
So, if *all* CPUs are designed to work low-power, and enhance them to be capped on the power they consume at peak demand, you can put the
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Cellphones are approaching that stage _rapidly_, and will most likely be there with the upcoming quad core SoCs coming out by the end of this year. The implementation as a desktop for the masses is a trivial exercise. A dock that lets you use your cellphone AS your primary Websurfing/emailing machine is all most people need at home. Game on your console or have a gaming rig set up if you need something more, but we're just about to the point of having all the computing power non-specialists need, all in a cellphone.
Certainly phones will get fast enough for most things, but for the things they're not good at -- playing high end video games, having a full size keyboard -- you still need a PC-like thing, and then you'll want them to talk to each other. Especially because the big problem phones have, and likely will continue to have for at least a few more years, is low storage availability. You can't fit 1000 hours of HD video of little Johnny learning to ride his bicycle and birthday parties and whatever on a 16GB flash
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Funny thing is, more and more "high end" games are console ports that still make use of 5+ year old hardware.
As for keyboards, look up bluetooth HID. Even the iphone can make use of a external keyboard these days.
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If Apple has shown anything, it is that you don't want to converge the mobile experience with the desktop experience. Mobiles and desktops are used in different ways and require different interfaces.
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Perhaps this is a bit "Get off my lawn!", but... (Score:4, Insightful)
... what are you kids TALKING about? It seems like most of the replies on this branch of the thread are about convergence between phones and PC's, and eventually using productivity apps on your phone. Who on earth wants to use a 3-inch phone to manipulate a spreadsheet, type in a word processor, or anything beyond the most specialized niche of data-entry for any extended period of time? Even tablet devices are poorly-suited for such tasks.
The intended purpose of a smart phone is not content generation or productivity. Their purpose is to read stuff (e.g. important email, directions to the restaurant, etc), and to play Angry Birds... until you've finished your car trip or boring meeting, and can return to your PC. You might tap a one-sentence reply to an email (with crappy grammar and capitalization), or enter the name of the restaurant, but that's about it for productive data-entry.
The limitation behind this is not the number of CPU cores in the device, nor its power budget. The limitation is the form factor! Duh! You can cram a supercomputer into the thing... yet even with the most clever swipey-typing system, it will still suck compared to a keyboard and full-sized monitor screen. Now, the idea of docking stations for your phone (or perhaps a standard docking port for phones on your PC) does sound like it could be useful in some circumstances... but I'm highly skeptical of full-blown "convergence".
Re:Moot (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not as far off as you might think. I'm running the Android-x86 (an x86 port of Android) right now on my desktop within a VirtualBox VM. Android-x86 is still in it's early stages, but is pretty stable and impressive already. Currently it supports Froyo (2.2) and Gingerbread (2.3) is in beta.
All that's really needed is a set of VirtualBox guest additions like those available for Windows and Linux guests to enable "seamless mode", and Android apps would appear on the desktop as (nearly) native desktop applications.
Re:Ditch Java (Score:5, Insightful)
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The biggest point is that even if they don't use Java, as long as they are using a language with a virtual machine or managed code that is at all efficient, then they will fall under these patents.
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Java is also the achilles heal of the android platform. It is the very reason that it is and will remain a second rate gaming platform. In such small devices execution speed is critical to the users experience. Apples insistence on native code execution is spot on, it is the only way to take maximum advantage of such underpowered devices. There is a never ending of complaints of poor game performance on android devices.
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The games are written in C using native code most often using the NDK API. Only the UI is written in java.
Of course if you buy a low-end phone without hardware accelerated opengl you will see lower performance.
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> It is the very reason that it is and will remain a second rate gaming platform.
No, Dalvik's shitty garbage collection mechanism is. More Java developers writing Android apps get nailed by the fact that its GC stumbles over things that have been a total non-issue with desktop Java since 1.4 or 1.5 than anything else. Well, that, and the fact that as far as Eclipse is concerned, Dalvik Isn't Java (so things developers subconsciously expect to work, because they Just Work transparently for Java, don't wor
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Except that programming for Android is only using Java style syntax. Many Java coders will look at Android, realise much of the standard packages are missing and then have to rewrite any code they have to work on it.
Users do care about how well things run, how long their battery lasts. Your phone's CPU will be working a lot harder with a compiled interpreted language.
What you're saying is it's better for companies to write poor, bland generic software quickly than write software that is good and takes advan
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I can get a beagleboard and run Debian or Ubuntu on it. Qt could be used to design a UI for a smaller screen.
It's not as simple as that. You have to modify more than the UI framework, you pretty much have to rewrite the UI for all the individual applications too, and if you have to do that you might as well create a UI framework which is actually designed for phones. By which point you end up with something like Android.
I suspect your complaint is more that typically when you get an Android phone, the phone company acts like they own it and fills it full of crapware and lockdown fail. But you can always get the cr
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See QtMoko [qtmoko.org] but getting an OS to work cleanly on a mobile is very hard. You have to deal with some many corner cases which will really annoy the user if you get them wrong.
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It's not just you. It IS awkward. It's also the title of the next Star Wars movie. It's a prequel to the prequels, and concentrates mainly on the last Sith out of which Sidious became the only survivor. They include Darth Ellison, as well as the kinda-retarded Sith, Darths Fiorina and Whitman.
As an aside, Retarded Sith would be a great name for a band. Just sayin'.
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StarTrek 12 : The Wrath of Oracle where Data goes in search of his lost friend Dalvik.
Re:Ugh! Oracle (Score:4, Interesting)
Oracle knows they are going to get negative flack from programmers and stuff.
But the people who make the decision to use Oracle technologies (Oracle database, Oracle J2EE and all the other technologies) are usually not programmers, its PHBs who like the fact that some guy in a suit is saying good things about this "Oracle" thing and are duped into buying it (and the fact that in many cases there is no comparable alternative that is as good as the Oracle product unless you are willing to sign your soul to Microsoft or IBM)
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But the people who make the decision to use Oracle technologies (Oracle database, Oracle J2EE and all the other technologies) are usually not programmers, its PHBs who like the fact that some guy in a suit is saying good things about this "Oracle" thing and are duped into buying it (and the fact that in many cases there is no comparable alternative that is as good as the Oracle product unless you are willing to sign your soul to Microsoft or IBM)
In my experience this is not true. I happen to love Java as a language and a JEE because of its openness and support and innovation within the community. I choose JEE as a platform when developing large business applications because of the built-in support for the features I need -- clustering/failover, high availability JNDI, XA transaction support, messaging, connection pooling, servlets, AJAX, etc. Java also makes sense in many situations because the applications that are being integrated with are als
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