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Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

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Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#101

Post by Produce »

wavephorm wrote: post #38
cageface wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This most certainly is not what I, or a lot of people want in a computing device Most people don't even understand what a filesystem is, nevermind whether it's open or not. I agree with you that data is moving online but that's orthogonal to the native vs web app question.

I want a "cloud filesystem", but want it controlled by ME, not Apple, and not iCloud. That's the problem. Apple wants to control the filesystem, and I, and others are not willing to accept this horrific scenario.

I want a cloud everything. Docs, spreadsheets, filesystem, email, todo list, media player - everything. There's a niche in the OSS field for these kinds of applications at the moment.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#102

Post by Produce »

roel_v wrote: post #90
ekianjo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and in 2 years desktop computers will be gone, people will only use tablets, and Linux will have completely disappeared as a desktop environment (together with the fore-mentioned gone desktop computers, probably?). I always like people who over-simplify things to the extreme. They don't seem to understand that different solutions exist because there are different needs. Ever thought about doing video editing of…

"and Linux will have completely disappeared as a desktop environment" Of course not! 2014 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, just like every other year for the last 15 years!

The year of Linux on the desktop already happened a few years ago. I recently fixed a friend's PC by installing Ubuntu on it. Everything worked out of the box - sound, flash, games. All I had to do was adjust the audio input levels. The only reason everyone else isn't using it is politics (in particular, shoddy marketing by companies like Ubuntu, Microsoft's constant attacks on organisations which use OSS, Microsoft's deals with OEM's).

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#103

Post by slowpoke »

fragsworth wrote: post #81
ghshephard wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great concept - your timeline is way off. Wireless network connectivity is unlikely to be where it needs to be for at least another 20 years for people who work with larger documents. Hell, I have a tough enough time in our corporate offices in São Paulo, Brazil accessing 100 MB Slide Decks in our Redwood City offices over _wired_ connections - I don't want to think how long before places like Belém get half decent _…

"Cloud devices" can still use local hardware acceleration, storage, and memory for client-side things. Nothing is really preventing us from developing cloud-based video and photo editing software. Some work might have to be done to minimize the amount of data that gets transferred when saving and loading, but that's about it. I'm sure if you compress your 100MB Slide Decks file you'll find it much easier to send over…

Why jump through hoops to make a suboptimal solution half-viable, if we got a solution that just works and works well: native apps.

Seriously, all that cloud stuff is overrated nonsense. There's some areas where it might sense, but stop trying to put every fucking thing on the cloud. It just doesn't work. End of story.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#104

Post by roel_v »

Produce wrote: post #102
roel_v wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"and Linux will have completely disappeared as a desktop environment" Of course not! 2014 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, just like every other year for the last 15 years!

The year of Linux on the desktop already happened a few years ago. I recently fixed a friend's PC by installing Ubuntu on it. Everything worked out of the box - sound, flash, games. All I had to do was adjust the audio input levels. The only reason everyone else isn't using it is politics (in particular, shoddy marketing by companies like Ubuntu, Microsoft's constant attacks on organisations which use OSS, Microsoft'…

"the year of Linux on the desktop" is not the year in which installing Linux actually works for the first time (gasp). I installed Redhat on machines in 2002 where things worked, too. "Linux on the desktop" is about Linux taking a significant market share of desktop installations. The fact of the matter is that Linux is confusing to users ('distributions'? 'desktop environments'? and that's just the start), there is very little software for it (relative to what is available for Windows), a moving target (both for users and developers - radical changes in UI from one year to the next, libraries that aren't ABI stable for a year let alone 2 decades) and because it's too hard (approaching impossible) to make real money from Linux software.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#105

Post by Flenser »

wavephorm wrote: post #35
kristopolous wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you were 100% correct, hard drives aren't going anywhere. Browser cache is around 1GB and web developers are itching for vast landscapes of local storage systems. And where do you expect the operating system and marvelous web stack where all these things are created to reside? Burned in EEPROM? I think the consumer already can't really differentiate between what is local or over the internet, they don't know…

Browser cache is around 1GB and web developers are itching for vast landscapes of local storage systems. We're moving toward a computing world where hard drives don't even exist. Within 3 years we may see devices that have only persistent RAM. And for large files, I bet we'll see some nice competition between Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, and others which may eventually lead to making hard drives obsolete. Nah, don't t…

You're conflating two different things: Local Storage/caching, and the medium it is stored on, spinning disks.

The data may live in the cloud, but it will be heavily cached locally. We'll still need several GB or TB of local storage, be it spinning disks, SSDs or permanent RAM.

Grandparents won't want to be without the home video of their grandchildren just because their WiFi router stopped working or their ISP is having problems. And it will be a long time before mobile coverage reaches everywhere you might take your computer: communications black spots, rural areas, Planes, Tunnels etc.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#106

Post by FooBarWidget »

kristopolous wrote: post #55
wavephorm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browser cache is around 1GB and web developers are itching for vast landscapes of local storage systems. We're moving toward a computing world where hard drives don't even exist. Within 3 years we may see devices that have only persistent RAM. And for large files, I bet we'll see some nice competition between Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, and others which may eventually lead to making hard drives obsolete. Nah, don't t…

No. Even if we assume a magical device that stores nothing, cloud storage is still backed by guess what? hard disks. And this time, heavily redundant to ensure low latency and high availability. So no, moving everything to the cloud, tomorrow, would vastly increase hard drive sales permanently. Oompff! http://allthingsd.com/20111005/it%E2%80%99s-all-about-conten... Here's an example. I upload a video to youtube. yout…

> Even if we assume a magical device that stores nothing, cloud storage is still backed by guess what?

You store that in the cloud too, of course! It's turtles all the way down.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#107

Post by RyanMcGreal »

wavephorm wrote: post #8

The "All-Web" paradigm is coming, folks. And it really doesn't matter how much you love your iPhone, or your Android, or Windows phone. Native apps are toast, in the long run. Your data is moving to the cloud -- your pictures, your music, your movies, and every document you write. It's all going up there, and local hard drives will be history within 3 years. And what that means is ALL software is heading there too. N…

I think it's a bit binary to suggest that everything's going to the cloud and nothing will be local any more. I rather expect we're heading toward the more robust, resilient approach of local storage with seamless cloud synchronization, dropbox-style.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#108

Post by octotoad »

mark_integerdsv wrote: post #79
wavephorm wrote: post #8

The "All-Web" paradigm is coming, folks. And it really doesn't matter how much you love your iPhone, or your Android, or Windows phone. Native apps are toast, in the long run. Your data is moving to the cloud -- your pictures, your music, your movies, and every document you write. It's all going up there, and local hard drives will be history within 3 years. And what that means is ALL software is heading there too. N…

Written like someone who has never experienced 3rd world Internet.

Exactly. It's easy to tout this 'cloud' based world as a looming, common-place utopia when you're an uber nerd who is completely detached from everyday 'normal' people who barely understand the basic concepts of the internet/web, or who have severely lacking bandwidth and data usage quotas.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#109

Post by icebraining »

jodrellblank wrote: post #64
wavephorm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile apps, especially iOS apps, are hobbled by their curators. iPhone's don't even have an open file system and the platform was purposely designed so that apps are isolated, and funneled through a strict paradigm. This most certainly is not what I, or a lot of people want in a computing device -- it will not work, simply because a majority of innovators do not want to be locked into that universe. Apple has design…

And what open file system is there for "web apps"? Dropbox and a cobbled together flash uploader / email attachment / webapp specific API which probably only goes to FaceBook? Aren't webapps isolated? Funneled through a strict paradigm? And also at the other end of a comparatively slow link? The idea of a general purpose computer as it exists in the current desktop form must be put aside. We can't head to a future of…

And what open file system is there for "web apps"? Dropbox and a cobbled together flash uploader / email attachment / webapp specific API which probably only goes to FaceBook?

Playing Devil's advocate, Google Drive has an API for webapps to access the user's files (with permissions only to files created by the app itself or that the user specifically opens). The webapp chooses the MIMEtypes it can open and then the user can just do Open With → App.

Sure, it's GDrive specific for now, but the API is fairly generic and if it's successful, I can see other online drives implementing it themselves. Well, assuming Oracle loses this lawsuit, I guess :)

Aren't webapps isolated? Funneled through a strict paradigm? And also at the other end of a comparatively slow link?

APIs de-isolate them. Both the proprietary ones that already exist and open, distributed ones like http://webintents.org/

And besides, aren't native apps on mobile isolated too?

And the link between the user and the app may be slow, but it only needs to carry the UI. The data will flow from "cloud to cloud" at very high speed.

We can't head to a future of everything we do in one portable device and from there to ubiquitous life integration when every app can read all your data and send it to anyone for any purpose, Android is falling fowl of that right now, we have to have isolation and sandboxing, different trust levels, restricted access to more important data (contacts, for example), to make a solid and trustable future platform.

Uh, Android does have sandboxing and isolation, and apps can only access your data if you specifically allow them to. iOS was the one which didn't require permission to access your contacts (though Apple has said it will).

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#110

Post by icebraining »

ryanhuff wrote: post #33
wavephorm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile apps, especially iOS apps, are hobbled by their curators. iPhone's don't even have an open file system and the platform was purposely designed so that apps are isolated, and funneled through a strict paradigm. This most certainly is not what I, or a lot of people want in a computing device -- it will not work, simply because a majority of innovators do not want to be locked into that universe. Apple has design…

Your reasons, while important and meaningful from a developers perspective, mean little to the consumer choosing between a native app and a mobile web app. What's in it for the consumer?

Why would a consumer even know or care about that? They'll use whatever is easy to find, "install" (even if it means just a button that links to an URL), use and looks nice. They don't give a fuck if it's written JS or Java/ObjC or if it's HTML or XML or code rendering the UI.
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