Live data from Hacker News

Google’s not-so-secret new OS

techspecs.blog

131–140 of 561 posts

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#131
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that Google is trying to replace JavaScript with dart in any way they possibly can. The reason is simple, JavaScript is an open standard, dart is owned by google. Their reasons that "dart is better" is the typical google koolaid before they attempt a market takeover. As we've seen over and over with Android, chrome, and AMP especially. Google loves to make glass house open source projects you can't touch.…

Give me a break. It's just as accurate to say "Dart is an open standard, Javascript is owned by Mozilla". There may be valid technical, pragmatic or moral reasons to prefer Javascript, but this is just FUD. (See http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm... )

Really? Google's once rosy history with open source project isn't looking too friendly these days.

And yeah ECMA is a totally open standard with committee members from all sorts of companies and backgrounds. Dart is not. I don't care if JS is slightly worse, as least I know that for now and the foreseeable future I won't be paying a google tax to use it.

After the open source community "stole" mapreduce and hbase google has begun offering maglev and spanner as "services" rather than giving them to the OSS community. Maglev was supposed to be open sourced a while ago, and google now offers DDoS protection service on Google cloud instead, most famously with their Krebs PR stunt. Maybe they forgot about it? Did I mention they removed "don't be evil" as their motto a while back because it was "immature"?

Google has begun down a decidedly different path since the Alphabet transition a while back. It's no longer the brainchild of Sergey and Larry, it's losing its soul and becoming a shareholder cash machine. Maybe the floundering of some of their moonshot projects is taking a toll on the companies' confidence to remain a market leader while maintaining their traditional values of openness and shunning of questionable marketing tactics? I'll admit that's pure speculation but I really wish I knew what happened to the Google I remember.

Since I'm being accused of FUD I might as well throw a bunch more speculation in for the hell of it. Their most recent papers are conspicuously lacking enough detail to make your own implementation, and read more like marketing whitepapers on how to use their services and how great they are. Their tensorflow library was probably released as truly open only because they couldn't hire enough devs with machine learning experience to meet their needs. They needed to introduce the world to enough of the secret sauce to meet their own demand and they remain completely silent on how their real moneymakers work.

My extreme speculation? They started using machine learning for search a few years back and found out just how easily their previous search algorithms, developed and perfected for years, were utterly outclassed within months. A start-up with these techniques could have been their undoing. This oversight cannot be repeated, they cannot offer too much of their technology back to the world anymore lest they risk being beaten to death by their own weapons. Thus google threw away a lot of what made them google, and rebuilt themselves as a semi monopolistic oligarch that's much more in line with traditional too big to fail companies.

They now spend more on political lobbyists than any tech company by far. They like to release nice things for free when a competitor just happens to be a making a decent living charging for the same thing. They engage in a lot of the typical corporate warfare now that doesn't seem natural for a company with a nice playful exterior and an original motto of "don't be evil".

As far as the FUD accusation, does it count that I don't work for or with any company that has anything to do with google or the other tech giants? These are just my opinions based on observations, and a lot of those opinions are backed by verifiable facts.

You're free to put the same data together and make your own conclusions, which would lead to more interesting discussion than dismissing my points just because.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#132
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we do. I want my phone and my laptop to be in total sync, I want to be able to write code on my mobile which I can just continue on my laptop without any hindrance, currently I have a mac and an android phone, I do have Go and Python installed on my mobile, but it isn't that great to code on my mobile, I have to host the repo on an internal version of gogs to get the code synced up and I still have to manually p…

Why stop there? I want to dock my phone to the TV and work with a remote control, I want to dock it to the car and control it with steering wheel buttons.

> I want to dock it to the car and control it with steering wheel buttons.

...about that steering wheel...

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#133
post #83
post #51

If nothing else comes out of this, I hope we end up with an Android OS that works better than the current one. I've been running Android since the Nexus One so I'm no newbie to the platform, but the ease with which iOS manages to get all UI interactions at ~unnoticable FPS and outstanding battery life is staggering when you're used to Android. It feels like some really fundamental choices were made badly on the platf…

As a fellow Nexus user, I've owned the Nexus One, 5, and currently use a 6P, how much of this is due to the OS versus hardware? Will Google ever be able to achieve Apple level battery life or overall UI smoothness, not to mention update support, without having their own custom SoC? I was very happy with the 5, even with the intermittent lags, especially considering it's price at release. I suppose I'm not a very heav…

Google has been hinting at their own soc for the third gen Pixel devices though, so that is something to look forward to.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#134
post #74

It bothers me that Google does not seem particularly interested in doing the one thing that would make their Android platform absolutely dominant: Allow Chrome to run Android apps on Mac and Windows. Google has already done 90% of the necessary work by adding Android apps to ChromeOS. Two and a half years ago it created "App Runtime for Chrome" which demonstrated that Android apps could run on Windows and Mac in a li…

+100

This would have been the way to build Linux into the next great desktop platform. I dont think people mind a 1GB Chrome runtime if it opens up a billion apps for them.

I think apps can be handled well by both browser and mobile phones. Considering that ART runtime also JIT compiles the java code to native, performance should also not be a worry.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On OS X all my stuff syncs between my iDevices

But I don't have an iPhone, I have an android phone, I use syncthing, but this isn't the kind of sync I hope, I want both the OSes to be quite same with inbuilt sync not through the internet but through my LAN

Apple will never outright tell you this but the answer to that is "you're using OSX wrong". I really think for best results you have to be vertically integrated and have Apple gear for all things you want to work together and to do it well. If not I guess rely on someone making a third party app that does what Apple does for its devices.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#136
post #117
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sun tried that, back in the day. Maybe you heard about Java applets, maybe you didn't. They were the slowest thing about the web, insecure even with a sandbox, and just an overall pain. Short of having a jvm always running on your machine, the performance of Android-via-Chrome will completely turn people off the Android ecosystem.

I remember two issues with Java Applets: * Java itself was slow for a long time * The Browser would hang while loading an Applet The first is no longer an issue. They can just use a modern just in time compiler and it wont run slower than Java on Android. Chrome already has one to deal with JavaScript powered Web 2.0 applications. The second was as far as I can tell an API issue. Applets would block everything by def…

You missed the biggest issue: "write once, mediocre everywhere." Windows, Mac, and X were all different, and Java Applets were necessarily bad at emulating all of them. While there are fewer Unices today, there are more GUIs, and cross-platform apps suck at least as much.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the thing is, you really can fork. There's nothing preventing forking. I think you're complaining about merging. But every open source project has standards about what they merge. Try getting a patch into Linux and see what they say; it won't be a rubber stamp.

Yeah, you can fork. Take AMP or Android for example. With AMP, the instant you fork and change a single character of code it becomes incompatible because part of AMP is a verifier that makes sure only the official version is used with Google's cache. Without being able to serve your custom AMP pages from Google's AMP cache the entire point to its existence goes away. The reason? Typical "security". "Tampered" version…

> This was also before the Android kernel heavily diverged from mainline Linux, and before "google play services" grew from a tiny app to a framework that powers half the OS features.

How diverged is it? Would the ever be merged back together?

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the thing is, you really can fork. There's nothing preventing forking. I think you're complaining about merging. But every open source project has standards about what they merge. Try getting a patch into Linux and see what they say; it won't be a rubber stamp.

Yeah, you can fork. Take AMP or Android for example. With AMP, the instant you fork and change a single character of code it becomes incompatible because part of AMP is a verifier that makes sure only the official version is used with Google's cache. Without being able to serve your custom AMP pages from Google's AMP cache the entire point to its existence goes away. The reason? Typical "security". "Tampered" version…

First up - I do not argue with you. Android is not as open as it was in the old days. But I think its not fair to only blame Google here.

Google making Google play services was a natural reaction to manufacturers never updating Android on their phones for years leading to all kinds of vulnerabilities and bugs on Android that kept it far behind iOS in quality and features. Lets face it - Android used to be sneered at, the red-headed problem-child OS that used to the butt of jokes till it grew out of puberty and pimples in Ice Cream Sandwich. If manufacturers had truly honoured OS updates, Play Services may never have been built - it allows Google to update Android without updating the OS. And yes, they will retain full control over Play Services - I completely understand the need to fully possess it and ensure a high level of quality assurance.

Also blaming the fall of CyanogenMod on Google is ridiculous. CM fell because of mistakes made by Kirk Mc Master and several others. He attempted to be a dictator even going to the extent of banning OnePlus phones selling in India - this was fought and resolved in the courts. All goodwill for CM was destroyed. OnePlus ditched CM and moved to Oxygen OS. CM had a stroke and died. Now Lineage is the new shiny OS rising from the cooling corpse of CM.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#139
post #117
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sun tried that, back in the day. Maybe you heard about Java applets, maybe you didn't. They were the slowest thing about the web, insecure even with a sandbox, and just an overall pain. Short of having a jvm always running on your machine, the performance of Android-via-Chrome will completely turn people off the Android ecosystem.

I remember two issues with Java Applets: * Java itself was slow for a long time * The Browser would hang while loading an Applet The first is no longer an issue. They can just use a modern just in time compiler and it wont run slower than Java on Android. Chrome already has one to deal with JavaScript powered Web 2.0 applications. The second was as far as I can tell an API issue. Applets would block everything by def…

They were also completely insecure.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#140

Article author here. Posted this in the notes, but possibly too buried: For anyone interested, I intend to write quite often about consumer technology on this blog. Topics will include hardware, software, design, and more. You can follow via RSS or Twitter, and possibly through other platforms soon. Sorry for the self promotion! Thanks for reading. Please do send any corrections or explanations.

I added an Update section for anyone wondering why it looks like Andromeda really is the same as Fuchsia.
Post reply on HN