“Imad Sousou is the director of Intel’s Open Source Technology Centre, which is behind the Moblin project aimed at providing optimized Linux technology for netbooks and mobile Internet devices. ZDNet Asia’s sister site ZDNet UK caught up with Sousou at the Open Source In Mobile 09 event in Amsterdam last month to discuss the nature of Moblin and the hardware on which it will run.” The interview also covers Intel’s views on the netbook and MID market, Windows 7, ARM as a competitor, and Google’s Chrome OS and how Intel is working with Google.
From the article:
Yeah, right.
Except crap like Flash, “the internet” works quite fine on my Sparc64, thank you. And it surely was not designed for your precious x86. Nor was it designed for PCs, for that matter.
Go away and take your Moblin with you.
Edited 2009-10-11 06:04 UTC
This is especially bullshit considering that Flash on ARM has been out for years now. And HD video runs as smooth as butter too on pretty much all the new ARM chips from every manufacturer (nVidia, Qualcomm, TI). So saying ESPN and MTV only work on x86 is just blatant FUD.
Fundamentally, this guy doesn’t have a clue in the world.
I think the point that was trying to be made is that the Internet, at least since the early 90’s, has had ever increasing requirements. The “web” has had an ever increasing need for speed to display its contents. The early “pure text” Internet didn’t require much of a computer, but if you tried to use an old Commodore 64 to browse the web today you’d be very disappointed, for instance.
While I’m sure Intel would love people to think exclusively “Intel x86” when they think PC, those days are over. These days, a PC refers to just about any sufficiently powerful, general purpose personal computer. Phones, PDA’s, even MP3 players and other devices, are all becoming more and more like general purpose PC’s.
Interesting viewpoint, but he literally says “PC-compatible” etc. If he meant a general purpose personal computer with “PC” he wouldn’t say “PC-compatible” as that’d be guaranteed; a personal computer is a personal computer, there is no standard to be compatible with.
Anyways, I do disagree with him. Sure, browsing the web nowadays requires a browser with Javascript, several kinds of plugins etc if you do anything more than just read text. And even if you did just read text you could still be required to have Javascript and Flash enabled (poor web page design, but it does happen).
Still, there is nothing platform-specific about HTML, Javascript etc, only the plugins themselves. That is a limitation caused by the plugin developers, not web itself, and it’s a limitation easily overcome if any new platform suddenly gains enough audience.
I think he just wanted to promote the image of Intel as being the leading manufacturer of some kind of miracle CPU architecture that can perform tasks popular with Joe public better than any other architecture.
The reality of this is bullshit as:
* CPUs only crunch numbers thus it’s the OS + user space tools that performs said tasks. Thus the only limitation of the Internet is what user space tools are installed.
* The Internet was intentionally built to be platform-independent. So the whole argument about it being tied into one OS with wrong – and, further more, the idea of the Internet being developed for one specific CPU architecture is absurd.
To expand on this point (and using your example), you CAN surf the net on a Commodore 64. In fact, there’s a twitter client for the C64: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/06/14/0218212
Theres a web browser and even a web server for the C64:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiki#Features
The ironic thing is, if you want to talk about overall compatibility on your typical Intel-powered PC, then they’re actually behind the market:
* Your typical Intel powered PC will run Windows, which only has a fraction of the Internet-dependant user-space tools pre-installed compared with Linux/BSD (eg whois command)
* Your typical Windows user will be running Internet Explorer, which is still lacking support for many HTML5 features (SVG anyone? Better install webkit then!)
In fact, you couldn’t even argue that media-rich Internet we originally designed for PCs given the 1st graphical web-browser was written for NeXTStep and wasn’t running on x86 CPUs.
So, in short, Imad Sousou’s comments have about as much basis on reality as Lord of the Rings.
My point wasn’t that it couldn’t be done, it was that the experience would be, well, less than desirable. This post screen is roughly 12KB without any of the graphics. So, at best, you’d have an early Lynx style text-only browser, which means you wouldn’t see things the way they were intended to be seen.
And that is where all of this is headed. The vast majority of web sites are made with “full featured” browsers in mind. In a very distant second place are the web sites made specifically for the mobile market (read: fewer features). So, until relatively recently, you pretty much had to deal with poorly formatted and/or incomplete web sites or surf from a device capable of displaying all of the content. The mobile devices (I’m referring to non-laptops, of course) are just now starting to catch up to a PC with full browsing capabilities.
We could argue all day whether that guy interviewed is really disillusioned enough to believe that using the Internet in any way requires an Intel PC. I do not believe he is that stupid. So I read his comments as a generalization that the bulk of Internet traffic is designed for “higher class” machines, full-featured PC’s being included in this, regardless of which company made their CPU, chip set, or graphics card.
Contiki actually does support graphics (although they will be low res)
SymbOS (for Amstrad CPC models) can support graphics at a much improved resolutions, but you’d need 128KB to boot
So yes, you can have a functional web browser on a retro system.
The internet is far more than just webpages.
For example, many people mainly use the internet to play video games.
Some use it just to send e-mails and others might keep their connection alive just to chat to friends over their IM of choice while watching TV.
Myself – I stream lots of music and TV on my media centre.
And to say that phones have only recently been able to view webpages is also a little unfair as there were hundreds of phone models around that were capable of viewing WAP pages long before mobile-optimised HTML sites existed.
So in reality:
* HTTP/HTML is only one small slice of the bigger internet pie.
* x86 PCs are only one section of devices that make use of the internet. (you can even buy internet-ready fridges!)
I don’t believe he was stupid.
I believe he is intentionally misleading people to promote the image of his products.
Not so long ago, a lot of these “higher class” machines were downloading the data from even more “higher class” machines – many of which were not running x86 (such as Google).
These days this is less of the case – but only because x86 offers the best power per price (ie old x86 chips are cheap as, erm, chips)
I understand that the Internet is far more than web browsing. I’ve been using it since 1990 on a regular basis (excluding my trips to BBS’s prior to that time). One of my first experiences with the Internet was using Gopher, not HTTP. I “grew up”, in the Internet sense, playing games via telnet (MUD’s and the like). My first experience with web browsing was with Lynx and I thought it sucked compared to what Gopher offered. Times change and so did my opinion.
Recreationally, I use the Internet mostly for MMO gaming and to a much lesser extent, surfing. Web pages just happen to be, arguably, the most popular choice for interfaces to web technology. Anymore, when people say Internet, I just think of the distribution layer and not the content moving through it. Most people I know, however, think “surfing the world wide web” or something equivalent, which I why I chose the words I did earlier.
I’m not trying to argue with you. I was just trying to present another interpretation of what he said.