OSnews Publisher David Adams and I discuss the mobile computing landscape, how the emergence of mobile computing is changing our lives and changing the design and market share of operating systems. Is there room in the market for 7 competing mobile phone platforms? Are we just repeating the 1980s PC market again?
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The intro / intermission and outro music is a Commodore 64 remix “Turrican 2 – The Final Fight†by Daree Rock.
We genuinely hope that you enjoy the show, and that we’ve managed to bring up original points in our discussion. Do follow up what you picked up on in your comments!
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Two Apple users talk about Apple products .. BORING!
Bring Tess back or get a MS fan boy ..
It’s true, we do spend the first few minutes talking about Apple products, but if you keep listening, we spend most of the podcast talking about devices and Android.
Aye, I think we managed to stay clear of Apple pretty well really. We talked about the iPhone a bit, but only as part of the wider topic anyway and then moved onto other things.
Yeah sorry, the end was much better than the beginning. Still it was too focused on Smartphones and especially the iPhone. No Maemo, Qt, Moblin etc. And Bada is a FOSS platform (not an OS, kernel is missing) for feature phones, so it doesn’t really compare.
I liked what you said about ChromeOS, that was insightful and not boring(you have to give credit, where credit is due)
Oops, forgot to add—Tess was going to be on the show but she did not have a headset and only had the internal mic on her laptop which was creating a lot of background noise that would not have been good for a podcast. She said she’ll be back home next week, and hopefully able to attend then.
In the days when phones, media players and similar devices were mainly single use items, a variety of different mobile OSes were sustainable, because people were not very concerned about third party software and adding functionality to the devices.
However, in the modern world where these mobile devices have become full fledged hand-held computers, third party software is essential. Also, there are already established software makers in the computer industry, whose products are incompatible with others, and who have made effectively eliminated the competition. We have already seen this in the OS market, with Windows and Mac dominating, and Linux clinging on because it is free. Another example is the office suite market – MS Office has virtually no (non-free) competition. Who uses WordPerfect or Lotus AmiPro (or MicroPro WordStar :p). Only OO.o survives in the mainstream… because it is free.
Suppose MS makes a full version of Office, but develops it only for Win Mobile and iPhone – will any business user buy a competing product if it cannot work very well with his/her files? If Corel made WordPerfect for Palm Pre and Samsung, would anybody care when you can get a “real” phone that can run MS Office?
In conclusion, I doubt that all these OSes would last; they will either be pushed back to non smartphones or go extinct.
Grammar tip: Do not start any sentence with the word “Me”. It is not always wrong to start a sentence with the word “me”, but in most cases it is. If in doubt, don’t.
Use this construct instead: “OSnews owner David Adams and I discuss the mobile computing landscape”
Doing so makes your text appear to be a great deal more professional.
So right. I made that correction.
You and I, baby
You and I, Baby
Less than Pi,
You and I
Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it
I didn’t listen to the podcast, because I have no sound card. Anyway, podcasts are a waste of bandwidth, are not accessible and are harder to translate. Why don’t you put that in ASCII text?
are not accessible and are harder to translate. Why don’t you put that in ASCII text?
Because podcasts are easier to listen to while doing something else, for example? Some people just like podcasts, some people don’t.
I don’t like podcasts, never listened to a single one and never planning to, but I still don’t see any point in complaining about them.
uh well… complaining is Free and uses a very liberal license so I guess it becomes one of those ‘hey, why not?’ commodities
suggesting != complaining
So true, but you weren’t suggesting, you were complaining. Hint: In English, starting off with “I hate” is typically considered a complaint. Saying something such as: “Could you put these in ASCII text instead of a podcast?” would have been a suggestion or a question.
P.S. Screw ASCII, it’s all about Unicode baby, especially since you’re bringing up translation. Speaking of which, I presume that means you’re volunteering your skills as a translator seeing as how most people don’t speak every language on earth? These people don’t get paid to do this podcast, you know.
Google translates for free you know?
Get paid, they don’t?
Google Translate? Are you serious?
Tools like that are utter jokes. And I can know – I study translation at university. Relying on them for anything more serious than baby sentences is idiotic, at best.
Yes I’m serious. Sometimes it translates word by word and sometimes the sentence is hard to get but it is still used by millions of people. I’ve read countless of articles thanks to google translation. Even if I didn’t get some details, it does a pretty good job at translating. It does get nederlands way better than I do.
BTW, sorry for the first post if it sounded as a complain. I meant to say that plain text has many advantages over podcasts and I wondered why use podcasts at all.
When Kroc mentioned what happends when you add other billion internet users ? I was just thinking: ipv6-deployment.
…your voice is too tinny and way, way too quiet. Unlistenable.
What you said about the new ARM netbooks pushing Microsoft out…
I don’t think that’s going to be true. Microsoft is well-positioned to take advantage of ARM.
The NT kernel is designed to run on many architectures and the .NET platform is designed to run on anything.
I would say it would take Microsoft a year, perhaps two, to release a fully functional ARM Windows 7 with the x86 applications recompiled into .NET CIL for ARM.
For the most part, developers could just recompile their C++ applications into .NET. The Win32 API calls would pass directly into the ARM-arch OS DLLs.
And any applications written in pure .NET or in Java would work just as-is.
Any surge in popularity of ARM netbooks would give Linux a small boost but then MS would be there in the market before it could go far.
I’d predict a surge in Mono and Java use by 3rd party app developers who would be expecting the entry of a MS OS.
Then how come it doesn’t? As a “runs on anything” platform, it seems a bit arthritic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms
They sort of tried. I’ll grant them that.
Edited 2009-11-17 21:01 UTC
Tell me why it should?
The Intel x86 architecture is so dominant that I don’t think any other matters to Microsoft.
NT Server used to run on other systems when the server market was more divided. It still does on IA64 (Itanium).
The XBox 360 runs a very simplified NT and that’s a PPC arch.
I would agree. And consequently, their planning for the emergence of any other architecture has been half-hearted and theoretical, at best. “Designed” to run on anything and actually “does run on anything” are two completely different things. Different worlds. Their best strategy, I think, would be to use their enormous economic and political influence to suppress anything that was non-x86.
Edited 2009-11-17 21:11 UTC
Microsoft’s software, like SQL Server, does run on different architectures: x86, x86-64 and IA64.
Their NT kernel does run on x86, x86-64, IA64 and Xbox-360 PPC.
.NET does have support for x86, x86-64, IA64 and Xbox-360 PPC.
Nice cherry picking. I’ll remember that next time I need to run SQL Server on my IA64 netbook. x86_64? My, isn’t that an impressive leap for a Microsoft controlled x86 server app!
I think we were talking about moving Windows 7, its user space, and enough of Windows 7’s third party user apps over to ARM to be competitive.
Gee mom! You should wipe Linux off that ARM netbook and install Windows 7 so you can run SQL Server!
What’s your point? That x86 and x86-64 are the same? They are NOT the same. The differences are enough to qualify as a new architecture.
IA64 netbooks? SQL Server on netbooks? You deliberately took that out of context and set it up as a straw man so you could ridicule it.
x86-64 and IA64 are examples of current existing Microsoft code that is not x86.
It is proof that if Microsoft can port all of the applications that ship with Windows, all of the support DLLs and .NET to IA64, then they can port it to ARM.
Barely. Yes, I watched for 13 years as DOS, and later, Windows, struggled to make the 16 bit to 32 bit desktop transition. And if you did too, then I can understand why you would see x86_32 -> x86_64 as a huge crevasse. But it was just a little crack in the dirt, really. And the x86_64 jump is microscopic by comparison.
Don’t be so quick to scream “straw man”. You’ve presented no “real man” to discuss. You presented SQL-Server on x86-64, which was presumably the best you could do. And IA64, yes. What other Windows apps run on IA64? If there is one thing that we OS-interested folks have learned over the years, it’s that getting an adequate set of server apps together and accepted is not that hard. Getting an adequate desktop stack together is much harder. And getting that generally accepted is even harder.
I commented upon what you presented, in the context of what we were talking about, which is netbooks, appliances, and other ARM-oriented stuff.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windows_NT
In particular hardware abstraction does not involve abstracting the instruction set, which generally falls under the wider concept of portability. Abstracting the instruction set, when necessary (such as for handling the several revisions to the x86 instruction set, or emulating a missing math coprocessor), is performed by the kernel, or via platform virtualization.
The Windows NT platform has been ported to Alpha, PPC ,MIPS and IA64 successfully. Windows XP IA64 could execute x86 code using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOW64
The poster was commenting that Microsoft has absolutely no problems porting Windows to other instruction sets. So why can’t they port to ARM?
Microsoft seem to removed the “legacy cruft” with Windows XP IA64 edition.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_editions#Windows_XP_Profess…
Windows XP 64-Bit Edition was not marketed as the Itanium version of Microsoft’s other Windows XP editions but was a separate edition made solely for the Itanium processor and its 64-bit instructions. It is mostly analogous to Windows XP Professional, but numerous older technologies such as DAO, Jet database, NTVDM and Windows on Windows are no longer present so support for MS-DOS and Win16 applications is absent. The original version also lacks most media applications such as Windows Media Player, NetMeeting, Windows Movie Maker, and integrated CD burning, although WMP and NetMeeting were added in the 2003 version.
Why couldn’t they do this with ARM?
.NET and all the important APIs that already exist will be included and Microsoft will release a plugin for or a new version of Visual Studio. Any apps that aren’t developed with VS won’t work, but Microsoft can’t be expected to support every third party app, that uses a foreign framework.
I don’t quite understand why everything will be suddently different when Windows will be on the ARM processor, most stuff is abstracted away for developers.
Edited 2009-11-19 01:13 UTC
I know this is off-topic. But could you please shoot me a copy of Photoshop for Windows on MIPS, just so I can take a look?
The reason that it is different (and not suddenly so) is that MS Windows has been a total flop every time it has tried to leave the x86 nest.
NT will run on ARM, sure, no problem.
The Windows user space? Not in a million years. The legacy cruft in Windows would make porting to another platform impossible, not to mention that third party developers are in _no_ way geared up to “just recompile”.
All MS have to offer is the disaster that is WinMo and WinCE.
If Microsoft wanted to badly enough, they could do even 3rd party apps.
Microsoft owns the Virtual PC team. Virtual PC spent a lot of years doing binary recompilation of x86 to PPC. Most of the tricky bits in that are the OS-level weirdnesses of x86. For user application code all that could be ignored as Apple did with Rosetta.
In any case, it would be far easier for 3rd party developers to recompile for .NET using the Win32 API than to rewrite for Linux and the POSIX/(X|GTK|Gnome|Qt|KDE) environment. Switching to .NET keeps the same Win32 API and the same C++ code and is only a switch in the Visual Studio project options. After the switch they can even continue to build and distribute a single package to ARM, x86 and x86-64 Windows users. Possibly even Mono users on Linux if they rewrite enough to use .NET pure. That is something developers cannot do with a Linux version.
I liked what Kroc said about Windows taking over the universe because it was so easy to have illegal copies of their software. That is very true. Back in the days of Windows 3.11, that operating system was just some kind of virus that spread through all of our machines… Microsoft has that phenomenon to thank for their dominance. That and the partnership with Intel and the computer manufacturer’s decision to go for the x86 platform as the one to make inexpensive desktops. Apple on the other hand always did and is still concerned about having a unique hardware.
Today things are changing, we don’t just go on making copies of DOS in 5 1/4” diskettes to carry around and go help a friend who bought new computers. It is getting harder and harder to install OSes, partly because there is more control against the illegal-considered copies, but also because full-sized desktop “production” OSes are really so much larger and more complicated.
Regarding mobiles: someone else already mentioned Maemo on a comment, and I really think you should look for more information about it… You keep talking about how good would it be if the iPhone were more open, and trying to imagine what will happen now that “the lunatics are out” with Android. Hey, the Maemo platform has been quite open already, the lunatics can have the fun of their lives there. And they have been doing it, albeit too much moderately perhaps.
I’m not saying that Maemo has done the revolution we are theorizing that can happen with the introduction of a mobile Internet device that is easy to develop for. I am in fact a little be disappointed with Maemo.
Although Maemo is quite open, there is not so much going on… It’s not the awesome paradise that seems that could happen if all e.g. iPhones were not on a leash. So what is missing? How do we give a cold-water hose shower to the lunatics so they start doing all the crazy life-changing things they were supposed to do? Where are all that apps that are not being developed to the iPhone because it is “too closed”?…
One of the things that attracted me to the N800 was being able to run Emacs. I do feel good because I know it is possible, but the truth is I haven’t been using it. Maybe if I had a N810, with a keyboard…
So, I’m suggesting you to take a look at the Maemo world, and try to see what is missing there that Android could bring us. Instead of just theorizing what will happen when someone make a mobile OS that is not so full of restrictions like the iPhone, look there and tell us what is wrong!… It’s not and hypothetical scenario, it’s happening right now, and we can already analyze mistakes instead of just dream about what could be good about this platform.
Android is not as open, btw. The lunatics will be out, with using GPS collars.
Apart from software, up to the N810 Nokia’s tablets have had larger screens than the iPhone, and with a better resolution that is becoming a standard (and we don know when and how Apple will upgrade). So you don’t have to dream about how good would it be to have a better display, _it is available_!!…
Maybe you were referring strictly to an even larger screen, like in the Kindle, I don’t know, but it’s another sample of how in the show you guys were theorizing about things that are actually already happening. Although Maemo is “open”, and there are devices with larger screens than the iPhone, you talk like something was missing in these devices, so they “don’t count”. Maemo, for example, is dismissed as a mere “geek curiosity”, and I don’t disagree it has that feeling. Other devices with larger screens are also dismissed for other reasons.. because “they are nothe iPhone”? I don’t know… So let’s talk about this! Let’s talk about why devices that have features that the iPhone lacks are not becoming, at least for now, “iPhone killers”.
Don’t speculate about things that already exist, and if these things are not exactly what you are talking about, please mention them anyway but explain why it is not accurate.
Final word: I can’t wait to see the multi-core ARM processors arriving… But more than better processors, what I feel we miss is better developing tools. We must have better and more accessible (free as in beer and or speech) compilers and interpreters and libraries. While the Internet and the Cloud are putting an end to the lock-in of users though file formats, the lock-in of developers is still happening.