After a few months of relative silence and vagueness, we're finally getting something tangible from Jolla, the promising mobile phone company which came forth from former Nokia employees. It's ambitious - they're not just going to create a mobile operating system, not just a mobile phone, but an entire ecosystem, including cloud services and data centres. At its heart? The beautiful city of Hong Kong. The prime target market? China.
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Member since:2006-01-10
Well, the problem with all of these "Open" platforms is that they can't ever truly say it's an Open platform, just like most Linux installations aren't 100% open source. Drivers are the main issue. A lot of the drivers for mobile devices simply can't be open sourced (for example, GSM stuff that doesn't really belong to the manufacturers.)
I don't have a problem with closed source drivers. My problem is from closed source applications. I think for the most part all of the default apps should be open source. At least then if you lose support from the manufacturer, you can still update the base OS of the device, by which I mean the base install, not necessarily things like the kernel, etc.
Jolla has some awesome potential, but I think at this point the pick up rate for it will be slower than if Nokia hadn't been idiotic and let Elop's memo and announcement slip out... All but killing a project that had immense potential and tons of big corporate backing.
The problem is the same issue that 'Desktop Linux' has. People can't really say "it's so hard to use" anymore. Hell Windows 7 looks like and functions like a KDE4 clone (which is funny since earlier versions of KDE were an attempt at cloning Windows, but it started to look / act much better). The real reason 'Desktop Linux' hasn't had it's 'year' is because of the applications.
Way too many people already have a large library of software that doesn't work in Linux, or if they even have a native version, most companies make a person repurchase it. It's going to be the same with a new mobile platform, so many people have already sunk some cabbage into the mobile OS that they use most. People aren't going to want to repay for their fart apps!
Some sort of way to hook into the various app stores would be awesome. Unfortunately I don't see that happening...
I do think there needs to be a third major player though (I don't and probably never will count WPx).
Go, Jolla go!
Member since:2008-06-03
We probably won't see a mobile OS with the same "open-ness" as your regular Linux distro for quite a few years. At least until the market gets saturated enough that handsets stop evolving at the current rate. A fully open-source OS (think something like OpenBSD) is probably impossible outside niche sectors (think Geeksphone).
Edited 2012-10-02 22:26 UTC
Member since:2010-06-08
Member since:2010-03-08
Perhaps we can expect an Android-like development model, where the core project is open-source (though not necessarily under open governance) but all drivers and other hardware abstraction layers are closed-source.
That would seem like a necessity on ARM anyway, since the architecture is largely nonstandard and few SoC manufacturers if any publicly disclose their chipset's specs. At best you get something like Ti's OMAPs where TRMs are publicly distributed, but some parts of them (typically GPU specs) are lacunar or missing as they are licensed from someone else. At worst it's something like Qualcomm where hardware projects like Raspberry Pi have to put community pressure on the chip manufacturer if they want even such a lacking TRM.
Edited 2012-10-03 02:51 UTC
Member since:2010-06-08
Member since:2005-09-01
Quallcomm is quite aggressive patent wise. The hell will freeze before their legal department passes releasing specs that reveal implementation techniques, that would expose them.
Nevertheless I hope that nouveau like project will spring out sooner or later. That will of course require one SoC generation to live longer than a couple of months.
Member since:2009-09-22
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight.""And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.
Member since:
2012-01-13
What I read, the OS will only be partly open...bummer. bndustry. "Licensed to industry" indicates closed source, open to community participation indicates some sort if openness. We'll see !