241–250 of 299 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CPU choice is restricted by their ability to disable Intel ME. If you don't care about that, you probably don't care about what Purism is trying to achieve, so it's not for you.
If that was true, they would be using AMD or ARM. Seems to be a matter or price/stock only.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I cannot imagine how you get anything done. I’ve tried doing programming on my phone, but the time from my head to being able to execute my changes is just too long. I need a real screen, with a real keyboard to be any kind of efficient.
I can't speak for you, but for me the limiting factor for programming has never been how fast I can type, but how dumb my brain is. That said, I actually think that Vim translates surprisingly well to a mobile setting. You don't have to do any awkward hand motions for doing elaborate keyboard chording (except for capitalization). The screen is small, but high enough resolution (720p I think?) to where I can make most…
Not the OP, but isn’t that one of the things that a fast input->result cycle helps with? Thoughts come and thoughts go, and if I don’t get it on the page before it goes, it better be simple enough to think of again immediately. With any complex idea, the struggle to not lose it before getting it written down is real.
The exciting part of this to me is not the ability to run the same software on two devices, but the potential to run two 'kinds' of software on one single device. This unlocks what is for me the most appealing computing fantasy: I have exactly one device to compute with. At home or work, I plug it into my dock, where it pairs to an eGPU/monitor, external storage, keyboard, and mouse, and is my desktop computer. There…
I completely agree with your goal definition of convergence. The ability to have one device for all your computing needs. I don't expect to be able to do everything on a 5-6" phone screen, but I should be able to connect my phone to a monitor (or dock) and be able to do everything. The closest thing to this on the market is Samsung DeX but it's still incredibly limited.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can live that dream in clojure land! Clojurescript on the front end, Clojure on the backend, and datalog/honeysql for the database if you'd like. And it is awesome! After using a stack like this I'm spoiled for the slog that is developing in separate languages for each of those things. I think that dream is possible with OS usecases as well, it's just that nobody has made it work yet. And I can't think of a bette…
It never works out that way though. Clojure for the frontend? What about native APIs that you need to use on, say, iOS or Android? What about graphics libraries and APIs? What about browser APIs? I'm sure you can write your own wrapper or bindings for whatever you need, but it's an ongoing effort/pain that isn't worth it for most people. Every platform, backend or frontend, supports specific languages that are suitab…
Clojure for the frontend is the best-in-class frontend dev environment that I've worked with. Instant hot code reloading, a browser-connected repl, great debugging tools, and a really nice collection of libraries for getting stuff done. I've never had to use native APIs for iOS and Android, so I can't speak to that from experience, but I know that there's some really nice machine learning work that's done in Clojure[0]. One of the main bits of Clojure philosophy is to just embrace the host platform, and our company has done that very successfully.
I think I agree that there are compromises, but on the whole I've come out pretty far ahead with the tools I get to use. My point, though, wasn't to proselytize for Clojure (even though I do love it!), but to point out that there are ecosystems that have made significant progress towards this idea of convergence, and that some people (me in particular) are very happy to be moving in that direction. I'm excited to see progress on the OS front.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can live that dream in clojure land! Clojurescript on the front end, Clojure on the backend, and datalog/honeysql for the database if you'd like. And it is awesome! After using a stack like this I'm spoiled for the slog that is developing in separate languages for each of those things. I think that dream is possible with OS usecases as well, it's just that nobody has made it work yet. And I can't think of a bette…
You can live that dream in clojure land! Spending 70% of your time doing tedious interop doesn't sound like living the dream ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have the GPD Win that I bought a couple years ago, which is more or a less a Nintendo-DS-Sized computer running "real" Windows, and I love it. I can do programming on the train, even while standing up, as well as use all the tooling that I like, including Vim actually. The only limitation for me has honestly been Windows, since I'm more of a Unixey guy. Something that has always bothered me is that smartphones are…
> Something that has always bothered me is that smartphones are basically supercomputers They're only comparable to 90s supercomputers in the sense of compute power. But when it comes to productivity they are fundamentally limited by their physical size and limited input/output real estate vs a desktop or laptop, or even 90s supercomputer with a 25" CRT and big clicky keyboard. Even laptop keyboards use nearly full s…
I am typing this on an old iPad, and productivity level on it could be at least on par with my 1995 rig. Phone, not so much, without a larger display.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like the only computer user in the world who wants his computers to act like computers and mobile devices to act like mobile devices and to maintain a firm line in the sand between them. "Convergence" is a pipe dream because of the differing and mutually exclusive expectations of those different user types, and "one size fits all" programming ends up underserving both segments. The only thing I would change is…
> "one size fits all" programming ends up underserving both segments citation needed. The majority of applications I need would work just fine on a powerful smartphone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A 10” screen has a twentieth the screen estate of my workstation screens, and is the difference of a narrow point of attention and spanning my view. It’s bordering on absurdism to try and utilize the same UI between them, and simply doesn’t match the reality of human perception or tool use. There are certainly uses where it makes sense — people who use just a phone and laptop for the internet and documents, for insta…
A 10" screen is 71 inches square. A square foot is 144 inches square. You are saying your working area is about 10 square feet and ergo nobody could possibly want the same applications on a machine with 2 27" monitors as one 10" or even 6" screen despite many tasks being useful on both because SOME tasks are not. An absolute ton of people use actual computers with 12" - 14" screens including for complex tasks they ju…
My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. There are some applications that have a very dense UI because there's simply alot of functionality that the program handles (think of a video editor, an IDE, etc). Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just s…
Some folks, myself included, reel at the conventional wisdom that a small screen necessarily means reduced functionality. While I agree that it can be difficult to design information-dense UIs for small displays or provide navigability to a large feature set, I strongly applaud efforts to unify computing and work through these challenges. I very much want all of my computing devices to be unified. In fact, I want a m…
The exciting part of this to me is not the ability to run the same software on two devices, but the potential to run two 'kinds' of software on one single device. This unlocks what is for me the most appealing computing fantasy: I have exactly one device to compute with. At home or work, I plug it into my dock, where it pairs to an eGPU/monitor, external storage, keyboard, and mouse, and is my desktop computer. There…
If you look at the bill of materials for a smartphone, the SoC is like... $20? Making the sort of interconnects you'd need and making them reliable enough probably costs about that much. For most people this need can be solved with software (Dropbox/OneDrive/iCloud), not hardware.
Also, these sync services sound great, until you're losing data due to bad sync. I tried to use Google Drive for this and lost data. So, I'd rather have one machine, well backed-up.