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“Smartphone” is the wrong name

loup-vaillant.fr

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Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#81

Post by lfowles »

stillsut wrote: post #54

The average adult is required to be available by phone. Not by snapchat, not by skype, not even by text message. By. Phone. In tech-land and teen-land you can specify platforms to each of your relationships. But in the average American's day, doctors, daycare providers, clients, etc are all going to be contacting you by phone. Without being required to carry around the phone part, a pocket-sized tablet would have 10x…

> But in the average American's day, doctors, daycare providers, clients, etc are all going to be contacting you by phone.

Heh. My eye doctor just confirmed my upcoming appointment via text message. I'm sure they would be calling if anything outside of the most common case needed resolved, however.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#82

Post by loup-vaillant »

mamon wrote: post #73
loup-vaillant wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No uneducated user is safe. And I believe malware on smartphones are not unheard of. Short term, sure, give in to the walled garden. Long term though? Learning what a computer is might be a good idea.

Do you decompile every Android app you install? Are you doing anti-malware analysis of their code or binaries? If not then being "educated user" doesn't really help you much. And in iPhone's case Apple is doing that security threat scan for you.

I don't, and I don't. On the other hand, I do know what I am clicking on, and I don't execute a program I have not explicitly trusted. (Mostly. The OS itself trusts many programs, which trust programs…)

When I download stuff from the Debian repository, I trust the Debian team to do the security scanning for me. When I download The Witness, I trust Jonathan Blow, his team, and the distribution channel not to put malware in there. When I download a crack for some game I might or might not have bough, I trust the popularity of the corresponding torrent to correlate with a lack of malware.

And when a pop-up bugs me, I just close it.

I won't deny my computer is at risk. It is. Unlike most people however, I can use Windows for 2 years and have almost zero malware on it. Many people on the other hand let enough malware in to lag their computer to a crawl after a few months.

Education doesn't solve all problems, but it does solve many —maybe even most.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#83

Post by astrocat »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #45
icebraining wrote: post #7

I agree that naming is important, yet I don't think calling them "palmtops" would have changed anything. Tablets were and often are still called "tablet computers", yet they usually have the same limitations.

True. On the other hand, the name make it a bit easier to protest: they can't say those things are not computers, since can't do anything else. Alas, we often just say "tablet", so it's still possible to make an artificial distinction between them and "real" computers such as laptops and desktops. The idea behind "palmtop" is to appeal to the intuitions behind laptops and desktops, and suggest it should be subjected…

I can't be the only one who has made a habit of casually referring to them as "space computers." Whenever my wife asks some easily google-able question I reply "well just ask you pocket space computer."

I want to hang on to the sense of awe and amazement at the reality of having a powerful computer and all of the internet at our disposal at all times.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#84

Post by SFjulie1 »

jerf wrote: post #79
tremon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the time MS was sued IE was the best browser by pretty much every measure Meh. IE was the browser with the best website compatibility, because Microsoft went out of its way to reimplement half of the HTML standard in its own way, and could use the prevalence of IE to make webdevelopers follow "their" flavour of HTML. Mozilla's first Firefox release came with the slogan "take back the web". That motto had nothing t…

IE4 was head and shoulders above Netscape 4. IE4 is recognizably a modern browser (by introducing .innerHTML), if a very poor one by modern standards; Netscape 4 was hackery on an engine taken way beyond what it could sustain. Netscape require a long time to catch up, and the helping hand Microsoft gave by slowing down dev on IE round about IE6. There was a long window where IE was the best browser by pretty much eve…

You mean mosaic by Spyglass Inc which was rebranded IE? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_%28web_browser%29

MS has been massively rebranding external products since the beginning and owe part of its excellency to their dominant self enforcing position using smartly the invention of Bill Gates: proprietary software and smart use of Intellectual Monopoly.

A little strings will also show you quite a few "Berkeley source/MIT" licensed code.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#86

Post by agumonkey »

Zigurd wrote: post #41
agumonkey wrote: post #5

Not even phones they're not handheld devices anymore. The lack of physical interface is very sad. Taking pictures, listening to music, even calling someone, all require high attention interaction over an unfit touchscreen. It's a small slate computer.

Your not going to find a lot of people agreeing with this point of view. First, touch UI is generally agreed to be a step forward in simplicity vs pointing devices and keyboards. Babies, old people, and others flummoxed by the mouse seem to agree. Second, the results show that mobility and immediate 24/7 availabaility is valued over any productivty and flexibility advantage of other form factors. Lastly, it looks lik…

Indeed this is a niche rant. For a kid playing at home a tablet is very convenient and I'm not a UI fetishist. I don't think mouse or keyboards are that important. But for out of home, on the go, computer-secondary interactions they are subpar. If I may, it's like the old analog appliances that start right away versus smart TV that takes a minute to load an OS.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#87

Post by loup-vaillant »

Animats wrote: post #70

This article is from France. What's the French term? Has the Académie Française decided on one yet? (Unlike English, French has an official standards body.)

The most common term here is "portable", or "téléphone portable", or just "téléphone". "Portable" means what you think it means: you can carry it. Sometimes, (especially in the commercials), we see "mobile" instead of "portable". It also means what you think it means: you can move it.

I think one reason behind the word "mobile" is because "ordinateur portable" (or "portable" for short) is already used to talk about laptops. Destkops are in rare cases called "ordinateur de bureau". Generally, we just say "PC" —unless it's from Apple.

I am not aware of what the Académie Française may or may not have decided.

What I love about the English language here, is that we have 3 words that neatly apply to the three form factors: desktop, laptop, and palmtop. It's a bit of a bummer we can't exploit such regularity in French. If I had to settle on a term, I'd probably try "ordinateur mobile", or "mobile" for short. Unlike "palmtop", it wouldn't scream "computer", so the best I can hope for is that we just stop using "téléphone" to describe those things.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#88

Post by ask5 »

clumsysmurf wrote: post #58
api wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are some people who, because of their unusual needs, have a bigger more powerful one. Unusual needs like being able to see a lot of text at once, type things longer than a paragraph, multitask, use more than one app in a work flow, and run real software? I doubt it... unless phones develop dockable desktop capability in which case they are now dual-purpose converged devices. Right now to believe that mobile i…

> I doubt it... unless phones develop dockable desktop capability in which case they are now dual-purpose converged devices. Already here, its only going to get better. http://bgr.com/2016/02/21/hp-elite-x3-review-pt-1-preview/

Someone has already predicted that it will fail ...

http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/21/hp-announces-yet-another-mo...

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#89

Post by loup-vaillant »

danjayh wrote: post #65

> Personally, I have more faith in a third alternative: a virtual instruction set. Like bytecode, though not managed like Java, and not meant to be interpreted or JIT compiled either. It could run on the bare metal, or be translated into something that is —like the Mill CPU. That way you can keep the illusion of having a single instruction set, while sacrificing virtually nothing. Moreover, future CPUs don't even nee…

The idea is to own up to this reality, and stop designing instruction sets as if they were meant run directly. x86 in particular has a legacy of simple CPUs that didn't have much of a decoding unit. But now it has gone too far in the other direction: it takes a significant amount of chip surface and energy to decode, making it unsuitable for low power situations. ARM on the other hand is probably lacking in the SIMD department (I haven't checked).

We need to go back and overhaul the CPU instruction set like Vulkan, Dx12 and Mantle overhauled the GPU APIs. We need to reflect on what CPUs can do, what they can do fast, and what they can do with low power. Then we need an instruction set that would act as an API to these subsystems. Something orthogonal, that doesn't take too much energy to decode, and could be decoded in parallel if need be (for crazy desktop speed ups).

While we're at it, it might be nice to have explicit support for things like pointer tags, to speed up dynamic stuff like garbage collection and runtime type information.

You're right, I don't really get how CPUs work. But I did pick up a few things that lead me to trust instruction set design is not over. We can do better.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#90

Post by khedoros »

fit2rule wrote: post #29

In my opinion, it'd only be a truly smart phone if it shipped with a compiler onboard so you could build apps for it ..

DroidDevelop and AIDE are available on Android devices. As far as I know, no portable devices ship with a compiler installed, but since it's easily available in the app store, I'm not convinced that it matters.
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