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Google’s not-so-secret new OS

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Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#321

Post by jonathanstrange »

MarkMc wrote: post #146
username223 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Write once, mediocre everywhere" was a problem with Sun's implementation, not with the concept of cross platform code. There are tons of webapps which are very successful, despite being written 'once'. In any case, Google doesn't need to be as strict as Sun was. It is free to implement "write 90% of your code once and 10% customised for each platform".

The problem is not technical and never was, it's that Apple and Microsoft would do anything to maintain an 'application barrier' that makes genuine cross-platform coding as hard and inconvenient as possible. It's all about developer lock-in and control over the customer, even more today than it used to be in the 90s.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#322

Post by StreamBright »

thinkloop wrote: post #110

Why can't the pure web replace apps and programs? All the pieces are almost there: hardware acceleration, service workers, notifications, responsive design... I currently "add to home screen" for most things. I edit my images online, and develop code using cloud9 ide, etc. There are few things I need apps/programs for right now, and that's improving day by day. iPhone is dropping heavily in world wide market share, b…

What is pure web? As the current state of web it is everything but pure.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#323

Post by fauigerzigerk »

bitL wrote: post #264
michaelmrose wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really, for simple apps you can use what we already have in place with some meta-programming rules prepared by humans (currently only a few companies posses this capability though). You can use ML like deep learning variations to learn association between your wishes and corresponding code blocks. Initially apps like that would be simple, i.e. "make a web page", done, "change background color to pink gradient", d…

Sounds like something that could be used for customizing a CMS a little bit, but software development is something very different from what you're describing.

Developing software requires understanding of completely open ended natural language. NLP is nowhere near that level of AI and doubt that it will be in the next 30 years.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#324

Post by logicchains »

isoos wrote: post #231
throwawaydbfif wrote: post #56

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.…

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…

>I think it is way ahead of the JS/TS stack in many regards.

In what ways do you consider it ahead of Typescript? Personally as someone who's particularly fond of static type systems (Haskell and the like), Typescript's type system seems way more advanced and powerful than Dart's (union and intersection types, in particular, and non-nullable types). Map types (introduced in Typescript 2.1) also seem pretty interesting.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#325

Post by MarkMc »

pjmlp wrote: post #174
MarkMc wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying that the app would have exactly the same UI on a phone and a desktop computer - the developer is free to customise the UI for the device.

Most of them already fail to do so for tablets, why would that change?

'Most' apps do not get used even once [1] so their user experience doesn't really matter.

Most popular apps are designed for both tablet and phone. The ones that haven't specifically been designed for tablet are usually basic things like Guitar Tuner or Flashlight which don't suffer much from having a phone layout on a tablet.

Sure, you will still sometimes encounter a crappy app which has a horrible user experience on your device - similar to web pages and webapps which assume you have a 24-inch display - but not often enough for users to avoid the platform.

[1] http://www.phonearena.com/news/400000-apps-in-the-App-Store-...

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#326

Post by TeMPOraL »

dx034 wrote: post #311
bhaavan wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Scratches are one thing; you can work around them with disposable screen protectors. But we're talking about a device that's constantly carried around and used (I probably have my phone on me more often than my wallet). Gorilla glass or not, it falls from a meter onto a hard surface, and you have a screen to replace. You accidentally sit on it, and you may have a screen to replace. And given the prices of replacement parts, it often makes sense to just live with the crack[0] until you get a new phone, which is probably why I see so many people with spiderwebs on their phones every day.

--

[0] - Unless you want to take a risk and get someone to replace you just the broken glass, a process which involves some manual fumbling with heatguns and UV-hardened glues. Or, unless you live in Shenzhen, where they'll replace you the whole phone front (with electronics and all) for cheap, if you give them your phone front (which they presumably fix up later and resell to the next person).

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#327

Post by tybit »

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…

How are LLVM and potentially Fuschia anything but great additions to open and free software?

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#328

Post by mikro2nd »

spullara wrote: post #257
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.

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

Java did have an API for accessing and manipulating the DOM since (iirc) JDK1.4 -- org.w3c.dom and sub-packages. It was not at all well known or publicised, though.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#329

Post by throwawaydbfif »

rusk wrote: post #262
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…

I agree with a lot of your sentiments and am only responding to rubbish your psychopath claims. I don't think you need to worry, in particular if you don't exhibit cruel or violent tendencies. You demonstrate concrete moral reasoning, even if at odds with others, so not sociopathic. "Psychotic" perhaps but your reasoning seems lucid enough. The one reservation I would have is about your "omega man" mentality; that yo…

Hahaha psychotic ish ramblings are fun to write sometimes though :). I'm about to retire this throwaway so IDGAF about what I'm writing as much as usual.

Omega Man is an interesting term, never heard of that before. You're totally right that it's how I try to operate but only when I'm doing controversial things. Perhaps I'm doing it right if I seem to be going about it in the most quiet and passive way possible :) .

You don't have to worry about me running any communities online. I'm a productive member on a bunch of online communities including HN and I don't use my throwaways to respond to, upvote, or otherwise sockpuppet my regular account except a couple times I admittedly may have upvoted the same thread on different accounts by mistake. Most of my less opinionated stuff is under my real name

The only reason I respond sometimes is because I disagree. Sometimes my controversial opinions prove to be a lot more popular than I thought. And possibly miraculously, all of my throwaways eventually gather substantial positive karma despite the fire and brimstone rained upon some of my comments :)

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#330

Post by TeMPOraL »

piyush_soni wrote: post #192
username223 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webapps in the sense of "fancy JavaScript" are no better than Applets. Google has the infrastructure, money, and business model to put most of the code on their servers and write native clients. Modulo privacy issues, they have found a solution.

Oh I bet they are! Like, anything is better than those slow, buggy and annoying Java Applets and I'm so thankful to god they're over. Did anyone ever notice how slow they were not only to 'run', but to initiate and start doing just about anything. I always knew it was a java applet even before it started anything because of its characteristic loading behavior.

Webapps today are the same. Their characteristic behaviour is rendering the skeleton of their UI, and then greeting you with a spinner. They take about as much to start up as Java Applets did.

Now, consider the orders of magnitude improvement in computing power over the years, and notice that webapps aren't really doing anything more complicated than old applets did...

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