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| 'There is something magical about Firefox OS' |
| By Thom Holwerda, submitted by MOS6510 on 2012-09-13 20:00:06 |
| "Over the past year and a half I've been spending more and more of my time working with Mozilla's latest project, Firefox OS. During that time I've fallen in love with the project and what it stands for, in ways that I've never experienced with a technology platform before." I'm not convinced just yet. I hope it succeeds, but I just doubt it actually will. |
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| RE[10]: HTML as a toolkit for a mobile OS? |
| By Alfman on 2012-09-16 19:44:52 |
|
Nelson, "You do this really naive thing where you assume you're the moral arbiter of programming and I'm supposed to care about your opinion." You don't have to care about my opinion, but can you read your own post in context and tell me it's not pure arrogance? http://www.osnews.com/thread?535... You allude to principals, however you've failed to lay them out in the course of this discussion. We've highlighted a shortcoming shared by many native platforms, but instead of acknowledging the truth in that, you resorted to Ad Hominem attacks against all web developers. Regardless of what you think of my opinion, you should at least redact that post since it can't possibly be true; some of the best developers in existence will use HTML/JS despite its shortcomings BECAUSE they want to reach the largest audience. "Also, my apps feel more native, perform better, and I achive comparable productivity with just slapping together an alien feeling HTML5 website and calling it a day by stuffing it into an app." Well Nelson, here you are using an HTML news & discussion board, what happened to your principals? You're obviously not a hypocrite, so where's the link to the native version of osnews since I'd like to give it a try! My point being that the web does have it's uses, and even if some of us prefer native apps (including myself btw), we have to admit that they fail to reach as wide an audience as exists on the web. Instead of denying the benefits of portability, we'd be better off making native frameworks MORE portable so that they could run anywhere without regards to OS/platform. Go ahead and disagree with my opinion, but for gods sake drop the more-principled-than-thou talk. Edited 2012-09-16 19:46 UTC |
 - Score: 2 |
| RE[11]: HTML as a toolkit for a mobile OS? |
| By Nelson on 2012-09-16 20:24:11 |
|
> Nelson, You don't have to care about my opinion, but can you read your own post in context and tell me it's not pure arrogance? http://www.osnews.com/thread?535... You allude to principals, however you've failed to lay them out in the course of this discussion. We've highlighted a shortcoming shared by many native platforms, but instead of acknowledging the truth in that, you resorted to Ad Hominem attacks against all web developers. Regardless of what you think of my opinion, you should at least redact that post since it can't possibly be true; some of the best developers in existence will use HTML/JS despite its shortcomings BECAUSE they want to reach the largest audience. My principals are that user experience should never suffer because of a need to reach a wide audience. However, as I've said in earlier comments, this is exclusively talking about when used for APP DEVELOPMENT. I'm fine with using HTML and JS and the WWW as a least common denominator website, just don't stuff it in an app package and pretend its an app. A good example is Facebook. They have apps for the major platforms, and a least common denominator website for everyone else. I've stated this all before, don't confuse your unwillingness or inability to read with me not having stated my position before. > Well Nelson, here you are using an HTML news & discussion board, what happened to your principals? You're obviously not a hypocrite, so where's the link to the native version of osnews since I'd like to give it a try! My point being that the web does have it's uses, and even if some of us prefer native apps (including myself btw), we have to admit that they fail to reach as wide an audience as exists on the web. Again, you mischaracterize my position because you're too busy doing grandstanding to read for comprehension. I think the web is a good idea, on the web. Where I am vehemently against such an atrocity is when it is packaged and advertised as an app. It looks like a duck, and quacks like a dog. > Instead of denying the benefits of portability, we'd be better off making native frameworks MORE portable so that they could run anywhere without regards to OS/platform. Go ahead and disagree with my opinion, but for gods sake drop the more-principled-than-thou talk. You are really the most annoying type of person to talk to. A crucial prerequisite for being a smart ass, is to actually know what you're speaking about. In fact, I've already spoken well of portability, and in fact I employ various measures to ensure a high degree of code sharing every day. Across multiple platforms. Without compromising the user experience or performance. Not with trying to arm wrestle HTML into something it was never meant to do, not with inducing suicidal thoughts by maintaining large gobs of JavaScript, but by writing portable back end C# with a native front end for each of the platforms I support. My principled jab is the people who, when strictly talking about app development, would throw away user experience for the sake of having a write once run anywhere scenario. I don't care if its you, someone else on this board, or really anyone else, it is beneath me as a programmer to pretend to even respect people who cut corners in such an egregious matter. We in the app development tech circles spit on people who pervert programming like this. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[12]: HTML as a toolkit for a mobile OS? |
| By Alfman on 2012-09-17 00:41:32 |
|
"My principals are that user experience should never suffer because of a need to reach a wide audience. However, as I've said in earlier comments, this is exclusively talking about when used for APP DEVELOPMENT." And that's a completely fair opinion, don't assume that I disagree with it. I just think there's more than one right answer and I don't "spit on people" who prefer something different. "You are really the most annoying type of person to talk to. A crucial prerequisite for being a smart ass, is to actually know what you're speaking about." Haha, I may be annoying to you, but that's probably because I do know what I'm talking about. As I've stated already, I don't have a problem with your opinion, but I do have a problem with the flaming way in which you stated it. For example, upon joining the discussion I said "You can dismiss portability for yourself, but it really doesn't make sense to dismiss the utility for others." Do you really think it's appropriate to respond with "It makes perfect sense. I'm not in the business of caring about what lazy developers prefer. Anyone using HTML/JS to write run anywhere app is pretty much the worst kind of developer I know." I was hoping you'd have the dignity to take that back - it was hurtful, untrue, and in poor taste. "My principled jab is the people who, when strictly talking about app development, would throw away user experience for the sake of having a write once run anywhere scenario." There are certainly some cases where I'd agree that native apps are better. But why do you have to "jab" people at all? Just state your opinion without an insult. I may not always be agreeable, but I do try to stay friendly. It may have been naive, but I only got involved in this thread to try and disarm the tension that had built up. If you cannot agree, then simply agree to disagree. Don't interpret this condescendingly, but I plead you, for the sake of osnews, next time try to respond in a pleasant tone. I'm serious about that, fighting over HTML/native apps is really silly, I don't care who's "right", I just want to have fun discussing it. Edit: This applies to everybody! (said the self-proclaimed blog nanny :) ) Seems like osnews has too many regular flamewars going on, which frequently overcrowd the purposeful discussions. It's more fun when people are friendly. Edited 2012-09-17 00:55 UTC |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[9]: Another fallen mobile OS. |
| By Alfman on 2012-09-17 01:24:25 |
|
galvanash, "So all in all I would say your original observation was dead on - most of the delta between GCC and JS in your example is purely object access." The question becomes how to optimise it. I think you may have been on the way to this idea before getting sidetracked by my benchmark: in theory the JS compiler might convert the dynamic object into a static structure under the hood. But I see that as being a difficult challenge because in JS we don't know which members to allocate prior to execution. A simple analysis may work for simple scripts, but I can conceive of other cases where the compiler will have to run the entire script before being able to determine what static structure it should be using. We probably ought to revisit this topic on a new article with more time to discuss it. Edited 2012-09-17 01:28 UTC |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[5]: Comment by Luke McCarthy |
| By zima on 2012-09-20 23:59:51 |
|
I'm not convinced. And perhaps I didn't state the opening thought explicitly enough: even if x86-64 never happened, the world would mostly just continue buying x86 (-32...) CPUs even now, because they are largely definitely more optimal than the alternatives - NVM some quirks of their architecture (and some solitary grumbling ~asm coders). Without x86-64, they'd still be better at what they do, with great band-per-buck, just with PAE forced a bit sooner by the dominant operating systems... I don't see any serious competitor to x86-64 that was stifled by it. MIPS, Alpha, SPARC, PA-RISC were killed or out of the performance game due to Itanium (...empty promises) - from which AMD64 saved us - and anyway they would go against the Wintel ecosystem and unlikely to give anything so nice as the inexpensive power of x86 in the last decade, driven by its established economies of scale. PowerPC ...I doubt IBM would be better for us if given, well, power over ~PC market (then there's that "The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children" Linus quote). ARM shows up everywhere now, anyway - but it's unlikely this would happen much sooner (ARM doesn't even have its own 64 bit version out yet... and, before the establishment of "new mobile ecosystem", lack of binary compatibility with x86 would be a major showstopper) But also, don't be so pessimistic ...it will show up, but not in "current" consumer toys (no x64, no SSE2 until 2022 or so, no SSE3 much longer) Edited 2012-09-21 00:19 UTC |
| - Score: 2 |
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