Unless I have the ability to inspect source code of "Meta Horizon OS". No way in hell am I touching anything from this company.
I wonder what types of telemetry garbage is embedded into the OS.
Meta Horizon OS
641–650 of 813 posts
Re: Meta Horizon OS
#642Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what exactly is the right analogy for this, but two other points of context which make me discredit this line of thinking. 1. Feature/smart 'Phones' were around before the iPhone *and* were already pretty much ubiquitous. VR headsets don't do much but sit on shelfs (either in people's houses or in distribution centres not being sold). 2. VR has arguably existed in some ways before the Quest, Nintendo Vir…
> VR headsets don't do much but sit on shelfs (sic) Quest has 6+ million monthly active users. Steam 2-3 million. Sony doesn't publish numbers but a good guess is 3-4 million active players. If you allow for some overlap, that's roughly ten million monthly users, and in sales VR is already more successful than a lot of computer platforms of the past.
> Quest has 6+ million monthly active users. Steam 2-3 million.
There is no way that those numbers are right.
EDIT: Yeah, Steam has 120 million active users per month. And the 6+ million users for Quest is from 2022, during the pandemic and metaverse bubble. Would be curious to know the trends for 2023 and 2024 thought.
Re: Meta Horizon OS
#643While good, Meta is likely to attempt to form a walled-garden in the vein of IOS and even Android to an extent. What I’d really hope for is a general-purpose computing platform with root access for the user, As I believe that mixed reality headsets have the potential to overtake both the smartphone and the PC as the default compute device of choice.
likely this. I fell for Apple once. I definitely won't fall for a Apple clone with one of the most untrustworthy companies since the turn of the century.
Re: Meta Horizon OS
#644Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's a particularly sad hill to die on – Meta has proven themselves to be exploitative, invasive, and downright malicious time and time again.
I feel very sorry for people who feel that way and have their identity tied to hating Facebook/Meta
I don't get your point -- you're allowed to not like an invasive company and you're allowed to refuse to use their products if you don't like what they're doing. I don't think anyone in this conversation is making it their personality.
Re: Meta Horizon OS
#645Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one is dead on a hill. If anything, not using VR makes you much more "alive". A real misapplication of this metaphor.
once again, I feel very sorry for people who haven't enriched their lives with VR experiences and skills building. No different than people who poo-pooed computers and internet
I've used the Valve Index before, it's a great experience but not something that I found to be groundbreaking or life-changing.
Re: Meta Horizon OS
#646Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the point though. Manufacturing, logistics, payroll, research, advertising, legal services, ... -- outsourcing certain functions to specialist, often (but not always) cheaper or more efficient companies is a typical business practice. The term is broadly applicable and used where ever this is the case. Since there are well-known business and organizational risks associated with outsourcing, it is conspicuous t…
Migrate to the cloud has specific meanings. How would you even adequately define it using "outsourcing"? That's just one part of it.
We outsourced our CRM system last year to a certain company. Or you could say we migrated it to the cloud. Either way we had to audit data policies, establish contracts with them, transfer data to them, ensure the same functionality and workflows were replicated, look at the quality and reliability of their system, assign points of contact, make redundant some roles within our company, etc... Many of the things you allude to are implied by either term.
Time-sharing and remote job entry were also reasonable back in the day. You bought time on a computer to run workloads. I don't think they fit so well with the "cloud computing" model in a modern sense technically, but I do envy them for being descriptive, logical terms that describe what is going on. We got the cloud from Google CEO Eric Schmidt who said to a conference in 2006
> What’s interesting is that there is an emergent new model. I don’t think people have really understood how big this opportunity really is. It starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing — they should be in a “cloud” somewhere. . . . And so what's interesting is that the two – "cloud computing and advertising – go hand-in-hand. There is a new business model that's funding all of the software innovation to allow people to have platform choice, client choice, data architectures that are interesting, solutions that are new – and that's being driven by advertising.
- https://www.google.com/press/podium/ses2006.html
It's strange to me that as engineers we accept and even promote marketing language such as this.
Re: Meta Horizon OS
#647Shades of Apple licensing the Mac OS to clone hardware vendors in 1995 - 1997. It seems like Meta will be controlling the software experience quite closely, just like Apple did back in the day. There’s an important difference though: Apple made all their money on Mac hardware margins which the nimble clone vendors could undercut. Whereas for Meta, the Quest hardware has always been sold at breakeven or even as a loss…
> So there’s no kind of existential danger to Quest here, but it remains to be seen if the hardware licensees can bring anything relevant to the table either. Why would I, as a potential hardware maker, wish to compete in a market where the existing main producer is a mega wealthy entity that is already dumping product below cost and is capable of doing so indefinitely?
PCVR maybe. There are latency optimizations to be made (preferably, for me, by adding DisplayLink)
Re: Meta Horizon OS
#648Shades of Apple licensing the Mac OS to clone hardware vendors in 1995 - 1997. It seems like Meta will be controlling the software experience quite closely, just like Apple did back in the day. There’s an important difference though: Apple made all their money on Mac hardware margins which the nimble clone vendors could undercut. Whereas for Meta, the Quest hardware has always been sold at breakeven or even as a loss…
> So there’s no kind of existential danger to Quest here, but it remains to be seen if the hardware licensees can bring anything relevant to the table either. Why would I, as a potential hardware maker, wish to compete in a market where the existing main producer is a mega wealthy entity that is already dumping product below cost and is capable of doing so indefinitely?
Because Meta will be focused on the consumer market.
Which leaves a huge opportunity for professionals and businesses.
Re: Meta Horizon OS
#649Earlier quoted context omitted.
The low end of the market is taken - but (from an outsider perspective) the high end appears free. The people who want to buy a Honda aren't the same people who want to buy an Acura, even though it's (essentially) the same parts. Let's say that, tomorrow, Gucci or Dolce and Gabanna (or however you spell that) want to make a VR headset (why? who knows?). They don't have the tech acumen to compete with Facebook on expe…
I feel like this is a bit off. There have been things like Porsche phones, but those are so niche that I don't think they're really worth considering. They happened, but they haven't been a long-standing product. They were a cash grab where they licensed a brand. Now, Hondas and Acuras are different products. You can say "oh, they're essentially the same" and if you truly believe that, I'll sell you a Core i3 process…
The previous company that gave up hardware and only focused on software is called SEGA.
Re: Meta Horizon OS
#650If hardware manufacturers actually wanted this, Meta would be announcing a licensing deal. This is a threat to Apple: if Apple doesn't relent on advertising/privacy in VisionOS, then Meta will do to VR what Google did for smartphone's: sell the market to maintain advertising access. Meta doesn't care about money or mindshare on VR. They just want ad access.
Apple and to a lesser extent Google have high trust. Nobody trusts Meta at all. So who would adopt their OS?
Not sure why you wouldn't put Google and Meta in the same basket.
Both are advertising companies with a history of working to undermine pro-privacy initiatives.