"Over the past year and a half I've been spending more and more of my time working with Mozilla's latest project, Firefox OS. During that time I've fallen in love with the project and what it stands for, in ways that I've never experienced with a technology platform before." I'm not convinced just yet. I hope it succeeds, but I just doubt it actually will.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2007-04-25
Suboptimal tech usually wins, unfortunately. Firefox was an anomaly, based on historical precedent we should all still be stuck in IE.
I still prefer a native Qt environment like MeeGo, but I'll sacrifice that for true freedom in Firefox OS. If lightning strikes twice, I'm a potential customer.
Member since:2005-07-07
I wouldn't want the stagnation that is happening in the x86 platform to extend to ARM SoCs. If it weren't for AMD, we would all be stuck with a 32-bit ISA on x86, with an overly costly and less than optimal upgrade path to Itanium. Unfortunately we've lost the 3rd party chipset market on x86 due to having too few CPU players.
I hope the ARM SoC market stays the way it is with even more competition and SoC options coming into it.
Member since:2011-01-28
adkilla,
"I wouldn't want the stagnation that is happening in the x86 platform to extend to ARM SoCs. If it weren't for AMD, we would all be stuck with a 32-bit ISA on x86, with an overly costly and less than optimal upgrade path to Itanium. Unfortunately we've lost the 3rd party chipset market on x86 due to having too few CPU players."
Haha, I was actually very disappointed with AMD when they told the world they were going to extend the life of x86 with a 64bit variant of it. I sincerely thought that we would be migrated to better architectures by now if AMD hadn't anchored us right back to the x86 platform (albeit with some improvements). The AMD64 ISA still suffers from a lack of GP registers compared to alternatives, which necessitates complex hacks like register renaming. The opcodes are still highly inconsistent, increasing the amount of logic needed to parse them. The whole architecture is shrouded in subtle legacy designs.
I guess we have to wait for a newcomer to replace x86-64, but now that x86 is 64bit that could take a while (x86-64 could conceivably last a few decades like the x86 did).
Member since:2005-07-06
I guess MS would just save the day by forcing PAE in Vista/7, in that alternative reality (if Intel wouldn't wise up sooner) ...overall, probably not much of a difference to us.
And 3rd party chipsets were likely going out anyway, due to increasing integration of x86 platforms (so not exactly stagnation, and even similar in spirit to ARM SoCs). Anyway, if there would be more x86 chipsets thanks to there being more x86 CPU players ...those chipsets wouldn't really be 3rd party, wouldn't they :p (plus, while we might despair the loss of ULi or SiS, I won't miss VIA chipsets; but BTW SiS, x86, and SoCs... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex86 )
Edited 2012-09-16 14:23 UTC
The third and final WWDC product I want to talk about is - of course - OS X 10.9 Mavericks. While iOS 7 was clearly the focus of this year's WWDC, its venerable desktop counterpart certainly wasn't left behind. Apple announced OS X 10.9 Mavericks, the first OS X release not to carry the name of a big cat.
We already talked about iOS 7 yesterday (after a night of sleep, it's only looking worse and worse - look at this, for Fiona's sake!), so now it's time to talk about the downright stunning and belly flutters-inducing new Mac Pro. As former owner and huge, huge, huge fan of the PowerMac G4 Cube - I haven't been this excited about an Apple product since, well, I would say the iMac G4. This is the Apple I used to love.
Apple held its big keynote event thing at WWDC earlier this evening, but since I was away with friends I've had to read up on it later in the evening. The company announced iOS 7, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, and they gave a preview of the new Mac Pro. Especially the Mac Pro impressed me, and while iOS 7's new Holo/Metro-inspired theme looks messy and garish to me, I do commend Apple for finally breaking the mold. This news item will focus on iOS 7 - I'll dive into the Mac Pro and OS X 10.9 tomorrow (it's late here now).
And yes, the PRISM scandal is far, far from over. More and more information keeps leaking out, and the more gets out, the worse it gets. The companies involved have sent out official statements - often by mouth of their CEOs - and what's interesting is that not only are these official statements eerily similar to each other, using the same terms clearly designed by lawyers, they also directly contradict new reports from The New York Times. So, who is lying?This story is getting bigger and bigger. Even though most Americans probably already knew, it is now official: the United States government, through its National Security Agency, is collecting the communications and data of all American citizens, and of non-Americans using American services, through a wide collaboration with the large companies in technology, like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and so on. Interestingly enough, the NSA itself, as well as the US government, have repeatedly and firmly denied this massive spying on Americans and non-Americans took place at all.Ah, patents - the never-ending scourge of the technology industry. Whether wielded by companies who don't actually make any products, or large corporations who abuse them because they can't compete in the market place or because they're simply jerks, they do the industry a huge disservice and are simply plain dangerous. According to The Wall Street Journal (circumvention link), president Obama is about to take several executive actions to address patent trolls - which may seem like a good idea, but I am very worried that all this will do is strengthen the positions of notorious patent system abusers such as Apple and Microsoft.
With version 13.05, the developers of the Genode OS Framework take measures to ensure that Genode continues to scale well with a growing number of users and the steadily broadening platform coverage. Further highlights are the improved SoC support for Exynos 5, OMAP4, Raspberry Pi, i.MX, and new components for realizing headless systems.At the D11 conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook once again took the stage to be interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. While most of the interview can be replicated by picking and reading 10 random Apple fanblog stories - there were still a number of very interesting things that warrant some closer scrutiny.
So, the Xbox One disaster continues. Microsoft's policy for dealing with the used games market has reportedly leaked - and it's a clear and direct attack to destroy the used games market. Prices for used games will be set at the retail value of a new game, and retailers have to hook into Microsoft's computer systems and comply with Microsoft's terms and conditions.At an event earlier today, Microsoft unveiled the next Xbox - the third model, but confusingly named Xbox One. The big focus was TV, integrated Kinect, and all the other stuff we all expected to be forced down our throats. I think it took them 25 minutes to actually come to what should be the core of the story: gaming. Nothing groundbreaking in the gaming department, except for how Microsoft intends to handle the used games market and borrowing games from friends: pay up, buddy!
Member since:
2005-07-06
I welcome alternative and open OSes for mobile, but I'm not a fan of the "do everything with web technologies" approach. Despite the claims of this article, such an approach is always suboptimal. And the programming environment sucks in my opinion, I hate when I have to program anything for web browsers. I don't see how JavaScript applications are supposed to run faster than Android's Java apps. I would much prefer a system that runs native-compiled applications... like Moblin/Tizen/whatever. If and when Wayland is viable it would be a pretty nice base for a phone UI (since all phones have accelerated OpenGL ES now).
I would really like to see smartphones that are actually fully-fledged PCs that can be docked to a base station (like the Motorola Atrix) and run a full desktop... but not like that tacked-on system that runs inside Android, but the same exact system that runs on the phone (just a different UI on a different screen). Now add multi-monitor support and you have something very special.
ARM is missing a unified system-level platform like the PC/x86 enjoys, due to various different non-standard SoC implementations. ARM need to get their act together and create a common platform that SoC vendors can implement. Hopefully that's what HSA will lead to. Otherwise I fear Intel will catch up to them in power efficiency and beat them on flexibility, platform standardisation and openness.