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Google’s not-so-secret new OS

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Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#251

Post by trollsonson »

flukus wrote: post #137
throwawaydbfif wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The Qualcomm diff is something like 1.5 million lines. They even have their own scheduler.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#252

Post by Inconel »

scott_karana wrote: post #145
Inconel wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Apple has had fluid UIs since the start, despite off-the-shelf, low resource Samsung SoCs. They only started making custom ones after with the 4S, as I recall.

Good point, Apple's A series SoCs are so well regarded I sometimes forget they've only been around for half of the iPhone's existence.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#253

Post by michaelmrose »

bitL wrote: post #247

Seems like Free Software that propelled early Internet pioneers served its purpose and those companies are turning their backs on it - first with Apple, GCC->LLVM, now with Google, Linux->Fuchsia :( I am getting afraid of another dark age on the horizon... I guess it's going to be inevitable as 90% of SW developers will find themselves redundant when inferring AI capable of composing code blocks and listening to/read…

This is either fantastic satire or hopelessly optimistic. What you are describing is a human level artificial general intelligence. Probably more than 10 years out.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#254

Post by matthewmacleod »

grizzles wrote: post #81
bitmapbrother wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The status quo right now among android hardware vendors is to violate the GPL No it's not the status quo. The major OEM's do release their code. Yes, there are some Chinese OEM violators, but that's typical of China.

You can release code and still violate the GPL in other ways. For example, there are binary blobs out there and the GPL is pretty unequivocal on this point: "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."

Releasing binary blobs is definitionally not releasing the source, though.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#255

Post by bb101 »

untog wrote: 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…

I wonder how much of the performance issues are related to Android being Java vs iOS being C? The old Blackberry OS was also implemented in Java and I remember well the spinning hourglass and the odd pauses in its UI.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#256

Post by michaelmrose »

taneq wrote: post #181
mark242 wrote: 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.

Maybe you somehow haven't noticed that even mobile devices now are an order of magnitude faster than desktop computers were back in the days of applets. Desktop computers can run Java applications with no significant overhead.

This outlook is why lots of people have to go to work and deal with absurdly slow trash software written to run on absurdly fast hardware.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#257

Post by spullara »

mark242 wrote: post #87
MarkMc wrote: 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…

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.

Java should have focused on manipulating the DOM rather than creating their own canvas. Was not obvious at the time though.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#258

Post by ianai »

RyanZAG wrote: post #239
ianai wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not really enterprise apps. They're just betting odds displays. But I hear you on the criticism of enterprise software still. I just don't think it's the thing here.

Why would betting odds displays escape from Enterprise Java? Seems like the kind of thing that would get it in spades for regulatory and CYA reasons.

They could still be enterprise apps. From what I've seen of them, they appear to be little more than what you'd get off espn if espn were 100% betting. My point is it's not the system that they use to sync up lines and whatever...I think.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#259

Post by bashtoni »

bitL wrote: post #247

Seems like Free Software that propelled early Internet pioneers served its purpose and those companies are turning their backs on it - first with Apple, GCC->LLVM, now with Google, Linux->Fuchsia :( I am getting afraid of another dark age on the horizon... I guess it's going to be inevitable as 90% of SW developers will find themselves redundant when inferring AI capable of composing code blocks and listening to/read…

I think Google is probably the most Free Software friendly of the the new big three (Amazon, Google, Microsoft). They haven't disappointed with Fuschia which appears to be entirely copyleft:

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/magenta/+/master/LICENSE https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fonts/+/master/LICENSE

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#260

Post by Synaesthesia »

throwawaydbfif wrote: post #131
cwp wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goo…

One addition I would like to make, every corporation is a shareholder cash machine, and Google has always been one, it didn't suddenly become one. The problem is in the institution of corporations itself, which has a lot of flaws.
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