A few days ago Opera launched a placeholder website which said they were going to "reinvent" the web, on June 16. Well, it's June 16, and Opera has announced Opera Unite, a technology which allows individual Opera users to connect to one another, turning every machine running Opera Unite into a web server.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2009-03-20
Rejecting the idea before I give it a try? Have you read my post entirely? I've only commented on the parts I *have* tried and I've stated that fact. I'd hope that any group embarking on a project like this would give more thought the user experience before even going to into beta.
The interface as is doesn't strike me as one aimed at power users. Power users can find their way around accomplishing the same goals and usually don't mind (in fact they take pride in being capable of) the extra effort. This seems to me to be a service aimed an unsophisticated users. And to that end, usability is lacking.
I'd imagine that there's a lot riding on this for Opera and the more effort they put into keeping the user captive in their GUI, the stickier the service will be. And that'd be a good thing for them.
All told, what you're sensing from me is actually, disappointment, not prejudice. It doesn't matter to me whether Mozilla or Google released this service. My findings are the same.
But as you aptly point out, it's only a beta and a brand new one at that. Let's see how well they improve it in time.
Member since:2008-01-07
Interface was never a strong point for Opera; if you ask me it's one of the major reasons for its small market share (the other being issues in rendering non-compliant webpages). Nevertheless - like I said; I think it's clear it isn't intended for people serious about hosting a website; as such it doesn't need to be versatile. Nevertheless I can read that you have "tried" it but I'm referring to using it for more than a try with expectations of a different sort. That's what *I* felt because you expected them to be decoupled or so.. Nevertheless, I'm not entirely impressed myself but I admire the idea enough to delay my judgement.
Member since:2007-12-12
It's an alpha, not a beta.
From http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/06/16/
download the new Opera Unite alpha builds
Also;
The initial applications offered by Opera Unite are just simple demos
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance."According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.
Member since:
2008-01-07
The technology is "beta" -- which means that; yes - it's "half-baked". I personally feel a sense of prejudice from you - you're rejecting the idea before you give it a try.
Yes, "Unite is Opera" because it's a technology embedded in the browser - that's the very concept. I wouldn't be surprised if I see a plugin replicating it on Firefox as with any technology you find on other browsers.
I haven't used web-server yet; but as it's obviously intended to be a simple webserver it'd require only the index.html...
Lastly it *does* count as "reinventing the web" cuz the fundamental concept in itself is different; it's not a social network it's a web-server in your browser.