Intel Committed To MeeGo Despite Nokia Defection 228
CWmike writes "Intel put on a brave face Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, insisting that there is continued strong support from it and many companies for MeeGo, the open source software platform that Nokia last week said it would abandon in favor of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7. 'Intel is disappointed at Nokia but life goes on,' said Intel's Renee James. 'Our decision and resolve on MeeGo is only stronger.' She pointed to a long list of companies participating in MeeGo development, including competitors AMD, TI and ST Ericsson; operators including Orange, Telefonica and Sprint; and software companies including Novell and Wind River. Intel expects to see MeeGo tablets shipping this year based on its Atom chip. Handsets will follow, James said. Despite its enthusiasm, however, Intel is sure to be negatively impacted by Nokia's decision."
As an N900 Owner... (Score:4, Insightful)
Thank you Intel!!!!!
Re:As an N900 Owner... (Score:4, Insightful)
Going whole hog for W7 is a disaster for Nokia.
Now if they'd gone for it as a stop-gap until Meego is ready, with promises to Microsoft that if they really make a good job of it then Nokia will continue to promote and sell it, then they've got a fair amount of leverage with the Beast of Redmond. Plus a lifeline if either one of W7 or Meego don't cut it.
It wouldn't have cost Nokia so much to do that, providing that what they said about actually shipping a Meego phone isn't an outright lie - they'll have to bring Meega to some level of readiness to do that anyway.
But instead they seem to have bet the farm on Microsoft, and Microsoft surely knows it. Nokia are going to get shafted.
As well as that, they already seem to have alienated most of their own workforce, and a large chunk of their user community.
(Yes, the N900 is very good - if they'd ported the latest Ovi maps, paid Adobe for the latest hardware-accelerated flash (which was already demonstrated running on it by Adobe), and polished a few of the standard apps, it would be superb. Still, lets see what happens with Meego).
disaster (Score:2)
Going whole hog for W7 is a disaster for Nokia.
And Nokia's stock continues to drop.
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I have never seen the last generation of Ovi maps, but Mappero (that I use on N900) is far superior to the old one in all aspects.
(posted from N900, too)
Re:As an N900 Owner... (Score:4, Insightful)
Does Mappero give you the whole world, offline?
That's the major win for Ovi maps, for me.
I got used to its other quirks, and it guided me around the australian outback for months...
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That's pretty much the only thing keeping the N900 in my pocket at this point. The UI quirks, missing features and outright bugs are just annoying. Even the camera is a step down from the N82.
Speaking of UI quirks/misfeatures, is there a way to get to the end of a list of files other than using the "inertial scrolling" repeatedly? I've got waaaaaay too many pictures to be scrolling through ALL of them when attaching more than one to an email.
Re:As an N900 Owner... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:As an N900 Owner... (Score:4, Insightful)
To be honest I've been impatiently waiting for a ARM-based netbook running Linux, during the last two or three years. Judging from previous /. commenters, I'm by far not the only one. With the latest happenings regarding the negative Nokia-Microsoft agreement and the continued beneficial commitment of Intel in supporting an open platform, I now realize that I'm mobilized to support Intel. I'm looking forward to acquire a Intel-based embedded Linux solution in the future and hopefully motivate myself in related opensource development.
Thanks Gunjan for your words.
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My sources inform me that Intel is dead weight as far as Meego development is concerned.
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I'm a n900 owner too, however, even if Intel keeps meego alive, I think we would need Nokia to have a proper meego adaptation to our n900. I mean, hardware drivers, etc.
I have higher hopes on the new community efforts (like CSSU) and also in Myriad Alien Dalvik, to run Android Apps on my n900.
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Thank you Intel!!!!!
Not so fast, Intel is only working on the Atom port of MeeGo, not the ARM port. So unless your N900 runs on Atom chips, you don't gain anything from Intel's work.
Apps (Score:4, Insightful)
I have no doubt that Intel can complete MeeGo alone if need be, and even find a company or two to release handsets (MS did, after all). The question is: how do they convince application developers to target it? There are already two well-established players, iOS and Android, which have the critical mass. WP7 was late to the party, and consequently struggles hard for developer attention, but it at least has the advantage of being easiest to develop for. And still, only 8k apps so far there, with many big players notably missing. When MeeGo comes in, say, in a year (and I'm being optimistic here), why would mobile developers care to divert resources from existing well-entrenched platforms?
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If it has behaviors that iOS, Android, and Windows 7 Mobile lack, but that consumers will want, it will sell.
If, on the other hand, it's the same old shit in a new, dumber wrapper, it will go the way of Microsoft Bob.
Re:Wrapper (Score:2, Interesting)
"Define dumb". Consumers seem to be enjoying the shiny restrictions on choice lately in mobile op systems.
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There may be restrictions, but the smartness of them is the draw.
But when you take that model that iOS and Android make attractive, and you come out with Win 7 Mobile, you're throwing a big pile of dumb at the smart. The market seems to see it, too.
If MeeGo is Fisher-Price to Android's Gund, it's going to fail no matter who develops it.
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Consumers enjoy having one handy place to buy almost any application they can imagine, on a device with an extremely responsive and nice user interface, running by far the best mobile browser ever made.
Consumers also enjoy the fact that their applications have been vetted for quality even though the process might be a bit flawed from a geek's perspective.
They can fuck all care if there is Unix underneath and can't root the bastard.
With that out of the way, despite the fact that Meego is a Linux based OS, do
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MeeGo, unlike iOS or Android, is a desktop environment rather than a whole operating system. It's no different from Gnome or XFCE. Ie, you can run any regular Linux program on it, at most suffering from it not being well-integrated, just as if you ran a KDE program on Gnome.
And the last time I checked, your average Linux distribution has orders of magnitude more software than either iOS or Android.
Re:Apps (Score:4, Informative)
It's no different from Gnome or XFCE. Ie, you can run any regular Linux program on it, at most suffering from it not being well-integrated, just as if you ran a KDE program on Gnome.
Yeah, right. Try running a typical desktop application on a 4" screen with no mouse (so no right-click etc). People have already tried that on Maemo - sure, you can run OpenOffice if you really want it, but it's borderline unusable in practice. Mobile devices need specialized UI.
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Right click is emulated by holding the stylus/fingernail for a while. This works pretty well. Heck, I hardly ever click on links any other way in Fennec.
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Notice that I didn't say anything about resolutions. The average screen size of a cell phone today is still below 4". Even with "retina displays" and the like, the physical dimensions remain the same, and squeezing desktop-oriented UI there unchanged is not going to give you good user experience.
For a simple demo, install a VNC or RDP client on any smartphone that you own, and try connecting to your desktop and working with it.
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And not a single one of them is designed to be run on a mobile phone. Your argument is flawed.
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Intel doesn't make phone CPUs. They do make Atom, however.
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No. MeeGo is absolutely NOT that.
MeeGo is a defined base operating system. It has no inherent GUI, nor inherent mode of operating. It is expected that vendors (or end users) will find and add their own GUI (nee User Experience) to the system and can be assured that "compliant applications" for their processor will run.
Chances are there will be an openMeeGo or the like that will offer all those things up for end users. As it is, the reference is almost entirely for development purposes.
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iOS is a toy for technically-illiterate people. I do use my n900 as a full-blown small laptop.
After sanitizing the layout[1], its keyboard is just a notch below laptops -- just like laptops, unfit for long-term use but good for doing something quickly. And instead of lugging a huge bag you need a car trunk for, you can carry n900 in your pocket. Heck, last time at a customer, my laptop was sitting in a corner while I ran from place to place, running postgres queries from the n900. In this particular cas
Re:Apps (Score:4, Insightful)
The app developers are already convinced.
MeGo is not just phones. It is in-car entertainment and navigation, set top boxes, smart white goods, home automation and so on. There will be plenty of apps written for those markets. Even if there will be no phones it will live on.
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Perhaps, but I'm interested in MeeGo on phones and tablets (i.e. stuff that I could potentially use). Not appliances where the actual OS does not matter to the end user.
Re:Apps (Score:4, Insightful)
QT could be used to develop common codebases for Symbian, MeeGo, iPhone and Android (via NDK). Developers would be really interested in something like that, but for some reason Nokia doesn't care.
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QT could be used to develop common codebases for Symbian, MeeGo, iPhone and Android (via NDK).
I very much doubt that Android UI framework can be easily reconciled with the way Qt does things. Even then it would be quite an ugly thing, since Android UI is itself written in Java, and so you'd have a C++ framework wrapping Java classes via JNI (which isn't good for performance, either).
All in all, given how different Android and iOS apps look visually, I'm not sure a common framework is even possible outside of some specialized cases such as games (which are already covered). Perhaps some common subset
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http://code.google.com/p/android-lighthouse/ [google.com]
And this is just the work of a single volunteer... Qt apps look pretty damn native on Windows and OSX, I'm sure the Qt guys can figure out a way to make it look integrated into Android as well...
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I guess because of a cross-platform nature of the Qt-based MeeGo development tools. You develop for MeeGo and without much fuss cross compile to MS/Apple/Linux Desktops. Hopefully, Intel will port Qt to Android, then you can compile for it too.
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Desktop and mobile UIs are inherently different - "just recompile" won't work, you actually have to design them separately, unless you want one or the other to be inconvenient.
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Seems to work between Symbian and MeeGo/Maemo, and there's still a few hundred million Symbian devices out there remember, they're not going away overnight...
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I hope that you understand that the compiling step for a mobile application is so insignificant that no developer would care. The real differences between the mobile platforms makes "write once, run anywhere" impossible.
Screen size, aspect ratio, and resolution are just a few of the problems that cross-platform app developers have to take into account, and there's nothing that QT can do for that.
QT is a fine toolkit (I'm a big KDE enthusiast), but what are the real selling points? A comparatively small numb
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With Nokia's departure. the focus changes. Intel isn't concerned about creating a market to compete with handset platforms modelled on app stores such as ios and android.
Rather, they're resting control away from Windows. The best way to do that? Woo free software programmers.There are hundreds, if not thousands, of Qt 'apps' for KDE just waiting to be given a touchscreen makeover.
So courting 'mobile developers' and their $2.99 apps for a 3.6" screen shouldn't hurt Intel's Atom tablets to the extent it would
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How did Apple do it?
After all, Microsoft had been producing smartphones for a long time before the iPhone. Surely they had the market sewn up before Apple came along?
How did Google do it?
After all, the iPhone was an runaway success for Apple. Surely they had the market sewn up before Google came along?
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How did Apple do it? After all, Microsoft had been producing smartphones for a long time before the iPhone. Surely they had the market sewn up before Apple came along?
No, Microsoft did not "have the market sewn". WinMo, in terms of UI design, was more or less desktop Windows scaled down. In most other respects the device worked the same, too - file management, software installation etc. Not to mention endemic out-of-memory conditions, app crashes and lock-ups. Apple fixed all that and brought in app store, and that's what earned them the well-deserved place on the top of the hill.
How did Google do it?
By courting all the other handset manufacturers and mobile operators that didn't have iPhone
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You're helping to make my point, that being that there are ways it can be done.
Take advantage of the weaknesses of the alternatives.
Provide something better.
Compete.
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It's all too vague. There were many points on which iOS could compete with WinMo, which is why it was so easy. There are significantly fewer points on which Android could compete with iOS, which is why it's still struggling to overtake. Ultimately, the more contenders before you - all competing with each other and thus constantly improving - the higher the barrier to entry for new players.
And, so far, apart from "it's real Linux" (which is a major feature for geeks only), I don't see what sets MeeGo apart f
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If it runs native code, I can see one possible advantage over Android: battery life. A VM, no matter how well designed, inherently adds overhead, both in terms of wasting CPU cycles and in terms of requiring a bigger RAM footprint. Extra RAM parts and less CPU idling both translate into greater power consumption.
If using native, CPU-optimiz
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And, so far, apart from "it's real Linux" (which is a major feature for geeks only), I don't see what sets MeeGo apart from existing solutions. Especially from Android.
What sets it apart is that you can reuse existing libraries. Yes, the UI must be different, but I have to write only one core, and then some different graphical shells. If you ever programmed more than a simple app, then you know much complexity is outside of the UI code.
Eg, I have an OSS app. I would love to make a Meego version, and I can, but I don't have the time to reimplement everything in some form of java. Eg: http://gramps.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/gramps/trunk/src/guiQML/grampsqml.py?view=log [sourceforge.net]
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What sets it apart is that you can reuse existing libraries. Yes, the UI must be different, but I have to write only one core, and then some different graphical shells. If you ever programmed more than a simple app, then you know much complexity is outside of the UI code.
That, you can actually do with Android NDK, though it depends on how much your dependencies expect from the environment. If I remember correctly, you get full ANSI C library support, and you can get the full libstdc++, too (though you'll have to distribute it with app). There's no complete POSIX support, but bits and pieces are there.
That said, it's a good point - from developer perspective. I doubt it would be enough, though - it likely wouldn't outweigh the small initial userbase (just look at webOS, whic
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Here's something that may surprise you: Apple doesn't give a fancy flying fuck if Android overtakes iOS in terms of market share. The reason is that Apple owns the whole ecosystem, top to bottom, makes revenue from the phone sale, the contract (so everybody supposes), and application sales. iOS prints money. With Android, on the other hand, it's a race to the bottom that is going on, as all the phone stores on the planet will throw in an Android phone for free with your contract, because they are cheap.
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Let's see... Not necessarily in exact chronological order. A cachet for carry-around electronic devices (iPod). A system for selling people content in little chunks (iTunes). The decision to sell end-user devices, not components, and take responsibility for the end-user experience. A large development budget (reputed to be around $150M).
Intel (and Microsoft) both appear to want to repeat their success in the PC market as "component" companies. Not the right business model for t
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It seems to be working for Google (who, like Microsoft, have released software that other companies bundle with their own hardware), and for ARM/Qualcomm/etc. (who, like Intel, have released harware that other companies utilise in their own devices).
Indeed, our Intel-equivalents (in this instance ARM + Samsung) are the producers of components used in Apple's highly succesful devices. And indeed, our Microsoft-equivalent (Google with Android) is allegedly now outselling Apple's products (an interesting mirro
FTFY (Score:2)
How did Apple do it?
After all, Nokia had been producing smartphones for a long time before the iPhone. Surely they had the market sewn up before Apple came along?
FTFY.
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Apple still has the mobile phone market sewn up. Android phones are indeed increasing in market share, but this is because they are usually thrown in for free with a contract. Hardly anybody actually buys one for several hundred dollars, on top of the cost of the contract.
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How much profit do you think Samsung makes on an Android phone?
It's maybe $25. Apple pulls $200 or more for every iPhone they sell, and they still have over twice as many iPhnes in circulation than all the Android devices combined.
Apple has the phone market all sewn up. Apple owns the phone market like Tyson would own your mom on a first date.
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Part of the beauty of the MeeGo platform is it wouldn't take that much developer attention. Since MeeGo is essentially a Linux desktop, most Linux "apps" that work on a normal desktop and can be compiled for Arm should run. A few UI tweaks should be in order to make them a little more touchscreen friendly, but MeeGo could have a large selection of "apps" quite quickly this way.
Re:Apps (Score:4, Insightful)
Since MeeGo is essentially a Linux desktop, most Linux "apps" that work on a normal desktop and can be compiled for Arm should run. A few UI tweaks should be in order to make them a little more touchscreen friendly, but MeeGo could have a large selection of "apps" quite quickly this way.
This is the same argument as why Windows 7 (desktop one) on tablets is a good idea. It doesn't work in practice. UI "tweaks" are not sufficient - you need a major UI redesign to get the app truly touch-friendly. Furthermore, there is the issue of battery life - the reason why e.g. iOS does so well in that department is due to its severely restricted multitasking. In contrast, if you want to look at a typical battery life of a mobile OS where spawning extra processes and threads and letting them run all the time in background is free for all, look no further than Windows Mobile.
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No, but I've seen comments from people who tried. It generally comes in two parts - the first one is "oh, this is cool". The second one, coming shortly thereafter, "oh, this is so inconvenient".
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That was precisely my point - WinMo was designed with the same mentality as a desktop OS, trivially scaled down to mobile devices. That's why it was bad.
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That doesn't seem to work today, for, say, webOS.
How many can the market support? (Score:4, Interesting)
So we've got several big contenders or those who want to be in the "smart phone" space (an increasingly meaningless term, as even my dumb Symbian phone can do a fair bit). Android and iOS are the biggest, then you've got Blackberry, Win Mobile 7, WebOS, MeeGo, and in the "dumber" category Symbian.
Three of these are Linux-based to one extent or another: Android, WebOS, and MeeGo. WIth the way apps get developed and sold, it's not clear to me that all three can survive on top of their more-closed counterparts (Blackerry and iOS, primarily). I've heard that various platforms are seeking compatibility with Android apps, but I doubt it'll be perfect.
Given that Nokia seems to be giving up on it, MeeGo seems like the obvious candidate to be the one dropped (its technical merits aside). There's plenty of fragmentation within Android alone now. Personally, I think the biggest potential loss is either the dropping or downplaying of Qt by Nokia. It'd be awesome to see Qt become a cross-mobile-platform toolkit to aid developers (on everything but iOS, of course). While I switched away from KDE during the 4.X debacle, it's clear that Qt was superior in many ways. Its commercial underpinnings seemed to really bolster its quality.
Yeah yeah, we heard this before (Score:3)
Oh nozers! The people might have to choose! How can they possibly!
But the people have always been doing that. Really, do you also wonder just how many fast food joints people can handle? That another McD new burger is just going to fragment the market?
How many car makers are there? TV makers? Cloth makers? Drills makers? Lots! And nobody is confused.
But oh nozers, computers/mobile phones are different hence Apple might as well give up and stop selling OSX because nobody wants to have a choice... meanwhile J
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No other mobile OS runs as far as I know on X86.
Yeah, not like Android [androidx86.org] or Symbian [arstechnica.com] runs on X86.
A man with more than 80 belongings becomes a slave to what he owns
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I think you don't understand the problem. It's not that having a choice of products is confusing (there are, after all, many PC makers, too), it's that the developer pool can only develop for a limited number of OSes. OSes are very different from TVs, cloth, drills, and cars, because they need developers to make applications, to make them appealing to the consumer. There is a reason why so few OSes exist for
Re:How many can the market support? (Score:4, Interesting)
Cell-phone form factor can run full-blown GNU/Linux today. N900 was doing it in 2009. There are no more legitimate, hardware-related excuses for OS fragmentation: it exists solely because it pays to lock your customer into a proprietary platform. (This strategy pays off because a lot of otherwise smart people go stupid when they enter a store, and the reason for the latter is ads, but that's besides the point.) Don't be confused by Android being open-source: every Android-based phone on the market today is a proprietary platform. If official kernel security updates can brick your phone just because you dared to gain root, it's a proprietary platform. If your phone cannot work without proprietary drivers in the kernel, it's a proprietary platform.
If cell-phone makers wanted to express good will towards their customers, they would throw some cash at improving Linux graphics and sound and released a lean, feature-full, and completely free cell-phone OS. We already have Wayland and Pulse Audio. Sans a few kinks, Linux is ready to go as an entertainment platform. They could still lock it up and sell it to idiots, and the idiots would still buy the locked-up versions (it's 2011 and people still buy Windows and OS X to fill spreadsheets, case closed). This would be cheaper for everyone, there would be no fragmentation outside of gaming, and everyone would have the productivity apps like PDF reader, ODT editor, Web browser. All these apps are already written. They are free, stable, and they were running for years in GNU/Linux and *BSD.
I am disappointed in Nokia. I really, really like N900 but now I feel like I voted with my wallet and got bitch-slapped. I am seriously thinking about getting a tiny laptop with no Windows tax, a USB 3g (4g if later) adapter with open-source Linux drivers provided by manufacturer (yes, there are a bunch of them on the market), and ditching this whole cell-phone mess. And if you ever need to contact me, be it emergency, work, or leisure, write me a frigging email or join my XMPP server.
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I am seriously thinking about getting a tiny laptop with no Windows tax
Good luck with that. When I went shopping for such a device a year or so ago, the cheapest option available was a netbook with Windows. It was near impossible to get anything comparable without it.
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Do you really think that taking desktop apps and shoving the on a phone will make for a good user experience?
Yes. When I run LibreOffice on my phone, 800x480 screen, I find it quite usable. Which means that UI—in this case, the default LO UI designed for a big screen and a mouse—is not a problem. Hiding the menu and leaving a single toolbar will produce an office suite that is a pleasure to use on a small screen, as long as you have a real keyboard. I know why Word would be suboptimal: the ribbon would take half of the screen while keeping 75% of its buttons hidden. But it's hard for me to take your ba
How many API? (Score:2)
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"I think the biggest potential loss is either the dropping or downplaying of Qt by Nokia"
Well Intel certainly has the resources to fork it, if it's important to them.
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As I heard it best put, Android is a "black hole" of open source. WebOS isn't completely open, using a proprietary IPC and framebuffer system.
Perhaps if Android were more fluid in its development process and didn't require such invasive kernel changes that they won't be accepted into the kernel, there wouldn't be the problem of "fragmentation" that is seen today, what with the sloppy development practices companies are encouraged to undertake.
Not sure why anyone would expect different (Score:3)
Is there anyone out there that really expected Intel to publicly say "Well, we lost Nokia--so we've decided to fold up MeeGo"?
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I did. I expected them to walk away from it and leave it to the open-source community. But then, Nokia isn't all that big a deal any more. It's not small, but it's no longer the pac-man portion of the pie chart in handheld sales. So not having Nokia simply isn't as big a difference to Intel's plans as perhaps we were thinking.
There could still be plan B for Nokia.. (Score:2, Interesting)
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From their site:
# Our website is getting hammered with traffic. You can also read the Nokia Plan B in our Facebook page http://on.fb.me/ee01ml [on.fb.me] #NokiaPlanB
MeeGo win (Score:2)
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It would be interesting to know how successful N900 was financially. It truly was a niche phone for geeks, but whether that niche is worth targeting for a commercial manufacturer is, IMO, unclear.
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I couldn't find any exact figures, but Nokia said "more than 100 000 in the first 5 weeks".. I'd say that's pretty decent considering the complete absence of marketing...
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That doesn't exactly sound like a barn burner, although your point about "absence of marketing" stands. Of course, if Nokia had marketed it heavily, it would be to their detriment, since the N900 is a total glitch-fest. PR1.3 fixes many long-standing issues, and yet there's still basic functionality that is either missing or broken.
The N900 might manage to come close to breaking even. If you look over the longer arc of Maemo's existence, though, I think you'll see a "strategic investment" that didn't rea
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Then get into Android. It's the only viable option at this point that gets close to your goals. The world isn't perfect so waiting for perfect is just wasting precious years off your life, and missing opportunities.
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What's an "ecosystem"?
I just want one with wifies and bigger geebees.
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your data won't be captive to an "ecosystem".
That phrase barely makes sense to programmers here. It will make no sense at all to non-geeks.
To most people out there, an "ecosystem" is something like they have seen on Discovery. It is sunny,hot, green and has a lot of insects. WTF has that got to do with a phone?
I know the difference, but I work/play/dream in IT...
You could try "your stuff won't be held by a large corporation". That might get some reaction, but mostly from people who have android already. The rest don't even care about that. T
Defection? Nobody told me. (Score:5, Informative)
Nokia has lost its shit. (Score:2)
The board member who said Nokia using Android was like a finish boy pissing in his pants proved that they have no concept of what is going on in the business considering MeeGo is hard to distinguish from Android from a board level view. Then they find religion, realize they are producing last generation crap, and then proceed to stick their head completely up their own ass by adopting a Windows platform. Following the pee in the pants logic somehow it is better to have Balmer piss in your mouth for a licen
Wintelkia (Score:2)
Can three turkeys make and eagle?
I will not be surprised that in few months from now a triumvirate of Microsoft, Intel and Nokia emerge as a consortium to push Nokia made mobile devices with Intel mobile chips running MS software. Entirely possible...
Intel CPUs not in the mobile space because... (Score:4, Interesting)
[the original article wonders why intel hasn't broken into the mobile space, successfully]
Intel's flagship CPU design consumes far too much power, and that really is the end of the matter. I really don't understand why people don't understand this.
The entire x86 architecture is optimised for speed and low latency, whereas ARM processors are optimised for low power, trading that low power for higher latency.
The interesting thing is that the latency trade-offs made in ARM (and MIPS) processor designs becomes... very much less relevant as the CPU geometries go down. 28nm means that ARM CPUs can easily run at 2.5ghz, and MIPS CPUs at somewhere around 2ghz. Combine these CPUs with modern 1066 DDR3 RAM i find it difficult to see how Intel and AMD, with their highly speed-optimised - and bloated - CISC architectures can beat the price-performance and performance-per-watt metrics in the all-important "good enough for most people" bracket.
Sure Intel and AMD's offerings will always be "fastest", but do you really need a Six or Eight Core 4ghz CPU costing $1000 to do a few emails, when a $7 750mhz Dual-Core MIPS will do the exact same job?
So right now, we're witnessing a series of "ship-jumping" moves - the blind leading the blind - in desperate bids to stay afloat, where the sensible companies are sticking with Free Software OSes, based around the Linux Kernel, because it's Free Software and the Linux Kernel that can run on absolutely any platform, and Windows simply can't.
Microsoft cut off the DEC Alpha, PowerPC and MIPS platforms, over 15 years ago in order for Windows NT to compete internally with Windows 95; now they're paying the price and they're going to take down with them anyone else who clings to their coat-tails.
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SMP, Power Management, Work Queues and managing applications so the dont/cant kill the battery is hard, isolating the network and telephony is also easy.
As usual M$ will not be held back by basics but by sloth, lack of ins
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Your comments about "just checking e-mail" is a bit of a canard when discussing CPU power, it no longer means what you imply it to mean. For me "just checking my e-mail" means downloading several megabytes of data from an IMAP server, sorting it into appropriate folders, and then updating some form of in-memory list of messages that my Smart Mailbox rules sort further to display some items on screen. When I select one of those messages a whole window on an accelerated surface is created, sometimes an HTML D
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I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
And a pervert, but who's keeping track?
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They didn't adopt a reduced instruction set, but they engineered their chips beyond the polarized RISC/CISC world of the 1990s and earlier.
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True enough. In fact, that applies to pretty much the whole market. The DSP architecture I work with (the TI C6000 family) has gone from RISC-like VLIW instruction set (the C62x/C67x) with basic load, store, multiply, add, shift type instructions to a much CISCier set of instructions, with complex multiply and round, dot product, vector adds and the like. But, we kept the fully-pipelined aspect and a fairly clean VLIW scheduling model, which were the important parts.
The main distinctions between ARM and
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Doesn't matter, the MS Windows software ecosystem nearly entirely consists of x86 binaries. Linux software for the most part is open source. A transition to a new instruction set would only make sense if MS Windows was a superior OS by itself. The things that keep people on Windows will not exist on ARM.
not just a bad decision... it's an implosion. (Score:5, Insightful)
The news is sad. I was stunned at what an amazingly powerful-yet-friendly platform Maemo is, and had high hopes for new Nokia N900-like devices running MeeGo in 2011-12. Instead, it looks like Nokia will be shoveling out devices running some zune-based drm-laden insecure crapware from Redmond. They're not getting my money to be sure, but the big picture is sad.
Let's see the sequence:
- Nokia picks up some executive deadweight cast off from Microsoft.
- He steers Nokia to buying shiny-but-slow crap from his former employer.
- He also dumps Nokia's Linux-based collaboration projects. (Maybe Elop's just a mole, and this was his main task?)
- Nokia commits to releasing the massively-processor-heavy WinMo7 OS on cheaper hardware for developing markets. (**HTC snickers and says "Good luck with that, sucker!!! **)
- Nokia investors recoil. The stock price drops... and keeps dropping.
- Customers shrug.
- Nokia employees assume this is a tacit admission that the company is going bankrupt.
- The employees' Union asks about severance packages.
- Nokia runs more ads for Symbian*3 on the N9... as if the higher-end N900 and its OS never existed.
- Nokia can't easily retreat, having crossed/burned/blown up it's Linux/Maemo/MeeGo/Android-related bridges.
Summary: Burned bridges, impossible commitments, angry employees, a doofus CEO, declining revenues, bewildered customers, a weak economy, and it just got in bed with a company that eats its partners after mating.
This isn't just a bad decision, it's an implosion.
-x
Incredible (in the "lacks credibility" sense) (Score:3)
Wow... you planning on starting a garden, or do you really just love tossing manure around?
Zune is one of many parts of WP7, but "zune-based" is completely inaccurate.
WP7 can play streaming music, which for legal reasons MS can only provide DRMed (though you can also download DRM-free MP3s, and play them / copy them between PCs). I suppose you think any system that has any form of DRM at all is "drm-laden" though... I hope you never buy commercial DVDs.
Anything you can point to that justifies calling the ma
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I think you mean for licensing reasons, and that only applies to the major labels with whom Microsoft has negotiated deals. There is no law against streaming DRM free music, and in fact there are numerous providers doing just that. In fact, I think it is more likely to be Microsoft that is pushing their DRM to the labels rather than the other way around, in the misguided hope that they can become the exclusive distributors for th
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"Licensing" for "legal" is a valid argument, although the problem is rooted in historical legal decisions. That was the reason I chose the term I did - not because there's a law against it, but because the MAFIAA have a lot of legal weight to throw around. This is the same reason that WP7 doesn't have customizable ringtones in the GUI, either - the OS fully supports them but the RIAA came unglued at the thought of a device which could stream music licensed for personal listening also being able to *play* mu
You forgot two bullets (Score:2)
Um, you forgot two lines:
- Nokia can't easily retreat, having crossed/burned/blown up it's Linux/Maemo/MeeGo/Android-related bridges.
- ?????
- Profit!!!
Excellent (Score:2)
Now I just hope I can find a phone I can run it on. I'm not sure I like how Android works all that much.
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Re:Can MeeGo run on a PC? (Score:4, Informative)
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I don't need to fill in the details. I only need to point the OP to the right link.
Signed,
MeeGo user, happily running it on an AMD
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Why only atom?
Can it not be compiled for other architectures?
Seems pointless if not.
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If I remember correctly, it only works if you have the latest SSE instructions and an Intel GPU.
Re:what has died is openness (Score:5, Insightful)
I say the opposite. Intel doesn't sell operating systems for a living, it sells chips. It only does software to get people to need more chips. It would be entirely in Intel's interest to make this OS as open and free as possible, to get it into as many hands as possible, to create demand for chips that will run it well.
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And Android is just Linux with a nice UI. And iOS is just BSD with a nice UI. Oh, and the iPod was way too late. That market was already saturated. Same for the iPhone. No way some computer company can enter the well established and populated cell phone market.
You're not late when you bring the good stuff.
I think that's gonna be my new sig.