Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“Smartphone” is the wrong name

loup-vaillant.fr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 117 posts

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#101

Post by danjayh »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #99
loup-vaillant wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is to own up to this reality, and stop designing instruction sets as if they were meant run directly. x86 in particular has a legacy of simple CPUs that didn't have much of a decoding unit. But now it has gone too far in the other direction: it takes a significant amount of chip surface and energy to decode, making it unsuitable for low power situations. ARM on the other hand is probably lacking in the SIMD…

When I make a long comment, I like to see explanations about what warranted a downvote. So I can learn…

I didn't personally downvote you, but I'll give you my best guesses:

1) The percentage of die used for decoding is actually already quite low. Per Anandtech 2014, it was at 10% for x86 and decreasing:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8776/arm-challinging-intel-in-...

Since there is a floor to the number of transistors needed for decoding, there might not be a whole lot to gain there.

2) Progress has already been made towards updating instruction sets to reflect what CPUs do quickly, well etc. It started with MMX back in the stone age, and has progressed through a plethora of SIMD and media acceleration instructions.

3) Instruction sets are already not designed as if they were supposed to be run directly. Quite to the contrary, they are abstracted -- the instruction set is the API, and the microoperations are the instructions. Designing them as if they were to run directly would mean exposing the micro-ops, which would require backwards compatibility breaking changes to the CPU each generation when there were changes to the micro ops.

4) The current system already pretty well levels energy consumption between competing ISAs. See: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa-show...

You're describing something that sounds like a bytecode VM, but in essence, that's what modern processors already are. Unfortunately, x86 (at least 32 bit) assembly is pretty unpleasant as an 'API', but ARM and PowerPC are both pretty good.

As far as pointer tagging, that's something that's probably mostly limited by memory bandwidth (it's not a particularly compute heavy thing to do), so unless the HW support came in the form of a dedicated on-chip cache, it probably wouldn't get you very much ... and then, if you're going to the expense of adding a dedicated on-chip cache, it's probably going to be more effective as a general purpose cache -- if the code is accessing the pointer metadata often, it will be in cache, and therefore accelerated.

Not trying to rain on your parade, I like seeing creative ideas, and I have no idea why people are downvoting you. Have an upvote on me :).

EDIT: Also, ARM has NEON.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#102

Post by khedoros »

coldtea wrote: post #96
khedoros wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember trying to get to the 10th track of the 4th folder in your "physical" CD mp3 player or minidisk? Setting anything more advanced than zoom level and picture mode on a typical 2002-2005 compact camera? I remember putting my music on MP3 players for the last 12 years, having non-MP3 CDs before that, and being able to perform basic operations on them blind and one-handed. I remember using my non-touch camera be…

>* I remember putting my music on MP3 players for the last 12 years, having non-MP3 CDs before that, and being able to perform basic operations on them blind and one-handed. I remember using my non-touch camera being much quicker to adjust than the app in my phone, especially when I'm adjusting the more advanced settings.* You remember through rose colored glasses then. Try using that non-touch early 00's compact cam…

> Try using that non-touch early 00's compact camera again

I don't have a touch camera at all. The one that I do have isn't a DSLR, but includes various dials. That's my point: dedicated controls will always be better. A camera that primarily relies on a direction pad and menus is only slightly better than using a touchscreen (but it is better).

> As for the "blind and one-handed" operation with the non-mp3 CDs, did that include changing through 200+ albums and 2000+ tracks?

For the CDs? Of course not. I'm not going to claim that a single CD could hold that many, whether or not they were in MP3 format. As for the MP3 player, I tend to set playback to a particular artist or setting the player to randomly play song from the whole library (by sight, of course), then throw it in my pocket. From that point, basic playback control doesn't require me to take it out of my pocket, while I'd have to at least take out my phone and wake up the screen to start doing the same thing.

I've got to assume that the way we tend to use our devices differs enough that something that feels like a huge improvement to me is a piddling detail in your use-case. On the other hand, some of the ways that I liked using my devices have disappeared, or at least been de-emphasized in more recent models, and that's what I'm frustrated with.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#103

Post by khedoros »

oxplot wrote: post #98
khedoros wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often do you take a picture without needing to set the focus, or at least watching the screen to see when the app has finished its autofocus? More generally, beyond changing the volume or initiating a voice query, how much can you really do without pulling the device out to use the screen? Lack of hardware buttons and tactile feedback can't be fixed in software.

Even with a purpose built DSLR, you still have to frame your shot. I meant I don't need to look at the screen to make the phone ready to shoot. I believe the software can go a long way. It will never be as UX friendly as a camera, sure.

I agree that there's room for UX improvement in the software, and as a software guy myself, it's the first place I'm inclined to look at as a source of improvement. It's just that not all the problems have a software fix, in my opinion.

Thank you for the double-tap tip, though. It works in Marshmallow too, apparently.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#104

Post by carapace »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #100
carapace wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sad that this is getting downvotes, it's one of the most important points about this vast machine we are building around ourselves: You cannot secure [people who suffer from] ignorance. "No uneducated user is safe." Very much so. Personally, I feel that this is a disgraceful failing on the part of the global computer industry et. al., but that is beside the main issue of, "What the heck are we going to do about this!…

My take on it is, the computer industry, because they're capitalists like any industry, care about money. The engineers working there often care about the users of course, but the shareholders don't give a damn. They just want money. Ultimately, that greed determines the output of the engineers far more effectively than the ideals of the engineers themselves. (This could be generalised to basically any public company…

Yes, all of the above. This wasn't so bad when our reach was less, but today with Siri-like things being built into Barbie dolls it seems we should be spending more time thinking deeply before we chase that dollar, eh?

(P.S. I'm a fan of your Earley Parser Explained post. Kudos, great job!)

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#105

Post by deciplex »

Freak_NL wrote: post #28
wodenokoto wrote: post #11

Japanese cellphones had a lot of the same use-cases that modern smartphones have. You could buy stuff online, use GPS, surf the mobile web, send pictures via email and purchase stuff and movies (disney even produced direct to featurephone cartoons in Japan!). This is usually used as an argument for why the Japanese decided to colloquially shorten 携帯電話 ("keitai denwa", hand-held telephone) into just 携帯(hand-held, or h…

In that respect, I miss the word 携帯. スマホ ( sumaho , ugh!) feels so uncultivated in such a pleasant language. It was a predictable outcome though. Japanese has a tendency to abbreviate common words, and the term smartphone (the unwieldy スマートフォン/sumātofon) was imported with the first generations of smartphones. The German Handy on the other hand (as ccozan mentions)… What a lovely word.

You don't need to miss it, as 携帯 is still an acceptable term to describe a smartphone, and frankly I'm not sure スマホ is on track to being a fixture of the Japanese language. Adoption of the term seems a bit spotty. Which I think is nice, because I agree with you that スマホ is a distinctly stupid word.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#106

Post by jpindar »

robbrown451 wrote: post #14

I doubt anyone is going to change what they call them (other than dropping the "smart" now that such features are becoming the default), but the point about not being able to install apps except though an app store with a monopoly is very true. Of course it tends to be true with tablets as well. Maybe when we start to see more android devices that are in a laptop configuration we'll start to struggle more with that i…

Why? Are you under the impression that you can't install Android apps except through an app store?

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#107

Post by jpindar »

khedoros wrote: post #90
fit2rule wrote: post #29

In my opinion, it'd only be a truly smart phone if it shipped with a compiler onboard so you could build apps for it ..

DroidDevelop and AIDE are available on Android devices. As far as I know, no portable devices ship with a compiler installed, but since it's easily available in the app store, I'm not convinced that it matters.

There's also QPython and, while I haven't tried them, there appear to be various IDES/compilers/interpreters for javascript, BASIC, C++ compilers, Go, etc.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#108

Post by kruczek »

Razengan wrote: post #97
stillsut wrote: post #54

The average adult is required to be available by phone. Not by snapchat, not by skype, not even by text message. By. Phone. In tech-land and teen-land you can specify platforms to each of your relationships. But in the average American's day, doctors, daycare providers, clients, etc are all going to be contacting you by phone. Without being required to carry around the phone part, a pocket-sized tablet would have 10x…

Not to mention that you can have multiple accounts on any social network, and switch between them at any time, but you can have only one phone number on that mobile device, whatever you want to call it. So if that device is uniquely identifiable by a phone number, and only you can be the only user of that number at any time (again unlike social network accounts), might as well call it a phone.

> but you can have only one phone number on that mobile device

Not necessarily. There are phones which can hold two SIM cards.

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#109

Post by [deleted] »

gjm11 wrote: post #46

I have for some time had a crackpot theory that language will actually evolve the other way. We have these things we carry around with us, called "phones"; they are actually general-purpose computing devices and making (what we still call) phone calls is a small part of their purpose. And to an increasing extent these can fulfill almost all our computing needs. So, fast-forward a couple of decades, assuming no huge t…

[deleted]

Re: “Smartphone” is the wrong name

#110

Post by duaneb »

gjm11 wrote: post #46

I have for some time had a crackpot theory that language will actually evolve the other way. We have these things we carry around with us, called "phones"; they are actually general-purpose computing devices and making (what we still call) phone calls is a small part of their purpose. And to an increasing extent these can fulfill almost all our computing needs. So, fast-forward a couple of decades, assuming no huge t…

> Everyone is used to having one of these things that they carry around in their pocket, and scarcely anyone really needs any other general-purpose computing device.

Unless they want to read something, or type more than a paragraph, or do anything collaborative. Because it still feels a niche role, not a general computing one, the ability to connect to service providers is the dominating characteristic.

If anything, I see "phone" moving to be a description of service, and devices are just named device-specific things. People have already started dropping the "smart" part and just assume that a "phone" at LEAST can call. I now distinguish between "phones", "flip phones", and "land lines". If I don't need to talk, why not just get an ipod and a laptop? Each device is much better when giving up the domain of the other.

Post reply on HN