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Google’s not-so-secret new OS

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Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#311

Post by dx034 »

bhaavan wrote: post #294
pjmlp wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only way they can get more of your money is to sell you a new phone which they hope to do between 1-2 years from now. The thing is, this only works on countries similar to US where most people are on contracts. In the rest of the world, where people are on pre-paid, we use our phones until they either die or get stolen, which is way more than just 1-2 years.

> until they either die or get stolen or screen cracked or phone soaked in water (but these problems will diminish when IP68 and Gorilla Glass 5 become more mainstream)

They say that for every new Gorilla glass. It'll always be super resistant against anything. Yet, the newest iPhones still scratch if you just have them in the same pocket as your keys for more than a day (personal experience). And it's still very easy to destroy the screen if the phone drops once (even though less of the screen will crack nowadays).

We are very far away from phones that you could use without screen protection and not see damages after 1-2 years. For a device that is supposed to be carried around all the time, modern phones show little resistance against scratches. But maybe that's just not possible to archive.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#312

Post by andybak »

pjmlp wrote: post #290
spullara wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You mean like JavaScript nowadays uses Canvas and WebGL?

It's fairly rare to have web UI's built with canvas and WebGL - usually because they need to do something that is impractical using the DOM. They'll still use the DOM for the more conventional parts of the UI.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#313

Post by throwawaydbfif »

Aloha wrote: post #229
throwawaydbfif wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks so much. I get a lot of downvotes and use throwaways because of comments like this, so it's nice to hear some praise every once in a while. Google's projects all seem very inviting from a distance. Usually it's not until you're ready to implement something that you find out that you're fucked, and how. Serious ranting below but something I never get a chance to say: I'm a born skeptic and avoid the silicon val…

At the risk of down votes, I'll be as blunt and honest as you claim to be - after reading this screed - you mostly come off as a someone with an inflated view of your own importance and abilities. While I might agree with you that the silicon valley mindset is harmful - anyone who would rather keep a friendship and watch a friend go over a cliff in a barrel, isn't really worth keeping around - either as a friend or a…

I'll save somebody but only if it's worth the cost of losing a friend. The better the friend the more I let them learn from their mistakes. The truth is that losing a good friend would hurt us both more than helping them mend the wounds after smaller stuff.

It's not being evil or that I'm always right. The comment was mostly in reference to those that have been calling me a shill the past few days and how they should keep in mind that their opinion is not fact.

I gave up the good fight years ago. The worst was when I helped turn around a failing small business. We all wanted the same goal, the company to be successful. It sucked so bad that I learned that it's better to be nice to your friends than to dedicate yourself to a cause or try to fix all their problems.

If that means letting them fall sometimes that's okay, as long as you don't let them get any deeper than you can reach. If you help pull them out in the end you're still a good friend.

So the company turnaround, it worked in the long run but at great cost. Cutting employees that sucked at their jobs but were friends and helped us with the initial plan. Cutting moochers that I loved but were sucking the company dry with constant unscheduled time off and freebies. Redoing our systems to automate as much as possible made us our first profit in years but a lot of that was from jobs eliminated. Hiring people of a higher caliber than existing employees by raising application requirements above what most of the current employees would meet. Offering our new more qualified people more money than Bob who's been here for 15 years but did our financials on pieces of scrap paper.

By the end of that process a few years later, my lesson was that I made the owners a lot of money at the expense of losing about half my friends. Most of the other half resented me for what I had done and thought I was a traitor, even though I had just helped implement exactly what we had agreed upon a few years back.

We planned to cut dead weight and streamline and automate operations. To add new talent with up to date skills. To cut our benefits slightly to money to invest in the company's future. Everyone wanted this until it was their benefits or their job being automated. I followed through with the cause and at the end I felt like a Judas figure and packed up and left in shame.

You could say it was a pyrrhic victory for sure, but after that I'm very wary to set anything in motion that's too heavy for me to stop on my own

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#314

Post by StreamBright »

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…

LLVM is free software. Google spends huge load of money on Linux security and some of the Linux developers are notably unfriendly against contributions they dont like, especially in the security space. I hope that Google delivers a new kernel using microkernel architecture that will significantly improve on kernel security.

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/59020/why-are-the-gr...

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#315

Post by TeMPOraL »

mercer wrote: post #203
flukus wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are tons of webapps which are very successful, despite being written 'once'. Actually they suffer from most of the same problems, only computers have gotten faster (masking performance issues) and our expectations have lowered. How many of these web apps obey the native OS themeing for instance?

1) The fact that webapps can run relatively well strikes me as hopeful, considering how much more inefficient using HTML/CSS/JS is compared to Java applets. Or is the latter not the case (honest question)? 2) I'm not sure if our expectations have lowered much. Perhaps it's more that mobile interfaces are generally simpler and thus easier to make 'native enough'? Although I think there's more going on in regards to 2.…

> 2) I'm not sure if our expectations have lowered much. Perhaps it's more that mobile interfaces are generally simpler and thus easier to make 'native enough'?

I think people finally called the bluff that users have any expectations. And even if they had, what they don't have is choice. The current market is that everyone is building a walled garden around their selling proposition, so if a company decides to make a web app instead of a native one, then that's all you have. Nobody will make a better one and risk getting sued. If a service doesn't want third party applications, then they won't happen.

As you note in your comment, if one sticks with default, "stock" elements in their web app, things look and behave OK on a given platform. But nobody does that, for some reason everyone has to screw this up with tons of CSS and JavaScript that make the whole thing maybe prettier, but also noticeably slower and without all the native idiosyncrasies.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#316

Post by 72deluxe »

reacweb wrote: post #222
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.

IMHO, the history was different. Java applets were initially secure in a sandbox and faster than what was possible with the "javascript" of that era. Applets have become slow to start many years latter when bloated "enterprise" applications have been produced in abusive ways. The security of applets has started to deteriorate a bit slightly before the death of Sun. It has become a security hell only since it is in th…

I recall loading webpages in IE where the browser would completely stop for 30 seconds while the JVM fired up.

JavaScript at the time was mainly used for snow flakes on the web page or annoying mouse trails on the web page, as I recall. Oh, and maybe rollovers. I remember Microsoft pushing DHTML and seeing IE4 as a leap forward compared to IE3 but I do recall Java being slow. And slow.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#317

Post by 72deluxe »

username223 wrote: post #136
josefx wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought it was "write once, test everywhere" because the ideal of cross-platform software forgot about developers doing system-specific things (eg. file system paths)

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#318

Post by jonathanstrange »

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.

I agree on all counts, but have to say that Java Webstart was cool, it was a pretty neat way of installing and running applications directly from the web. Maybe not very secure, though.

One problem I see with Google's ecosystem is that they've betted on the wrong horse - Java is a pain in the ass and Android's Java foundations are its second largest weakness. (The first one being the Google-Vendor relationship that makes all but the very latest Android devices unpatched and 100% insecure.)

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#319

Post by 72deluxe »

josefx wrote: post #220
username223 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So were Java Applets with AWT. Users hated that, so Sun tried PLAF, a half-assed emulation of each platform. That didn't work either, so Applets died. If Chrome manages to provide better versions of most applications on most platforms, it may win. Otherwise, people who use those applications will hate it with the heat of a thousand Suns, and it will go the way of the Java Applet.

> So were Java Applets with AWT. Users hated that, so Sun tried PLAF Uh, Java AWT was the native toolkit. Swing was the non native UI with the ugly METAL default Look and Feel. There are some nice custom Look and Feel implementations that don't try to emulate a platform, I think Matlab uses one for its UI.

Oddly you see non-native toolkits these days for many apps, and users don't seem as bothered anymore, unless I am mistaken?

For example, look at Windows 10 and the mishmash of controls (are they flat? or do they have a bevel?) available from the control panel, settings app, old COM dialogs, MMC etc. etc.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#320

Post by isoos »

throwawaydbfif wrote: post #281
isoos wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like alternative facts have reached the tech world too? You can take as hard look at Google as you would like, but choosing Microsoft over Google (one for-profit company over another), while not caring how the technology, the licensing or the workflow compares is a bit hypocrite. (e.g.they are both open, and they both have rules of commits). I'm wondering, why do you need a throwaway for such heavily invested F…

Typescript and dart are completely different animals. I can leave typescript for good by compiling to js once and it's designed to output human readable code. The js it produces will be immediately usable as javascript, and I'm totally free from the semi open language that MS controls. Dart is a different language, it has no fallback to something familiar. I don't doubt that it's many years ahead of TS in every way b…

Your worries about being locked in may have been valid 2-3 years ago (1), but things have changed a lot since:

Dart has an ongoing project (Dart Developer Compiler) which has a goal, among others, to produce readable, idiomatic EcmaScript 6. That is as close to your TypeScript fallback as it can get. (2)

Somebody also demonstrated Dart to LLVM compilation is possible. The language has a decent library for parsing the Dart sources, worst case, if you are that heavily invested in your product, you could also write something that does transpile your codebase. I did try to do it on small scale and specific examples, it is actually not _that_ hard to do, if my business relied on it, it would be certainly within reach.

(1) I'm not sure if you can call it lock-in as it is entirely open source, you can fork it, build it for yourself, change it if you have special needs. The same goes for perl, php, python, go, whatever language you prefer. Yeah, most people don't do it. Why? Because most people don't need it. If you become Facebook-size, it may look better to invest in the PHP toolchain and VM than in transpilers. YMMV.

(2) From the pure technical point of view, I wouldn't call it reassuring that the default fallback platform is JavaScript for so many people (even on the server-side). It is sure depressing that we are stuck with "1" == 1 and wrong ordering of "[1, 2, 10].sort()" for as long as we fall back to JS, and TypeScript does not improve on it.

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