Posts by DrXym

Intel: Microsoft's ARM-on-Windows deal no threat

The problem is

The problem is not the CPU performance but the software or lack thereof for it. A trivial example - I can fire up Lord of the Rings Online on my Atom based Netbook. It's no speed demon and all the settings are at their lowest but it runs.

I couldn't even install the thing on ARM. Why can't I install the thing on ARM? Because MS say Windows on ARM won'emulate t x86 instructions and the chances of Turbine producing native binaries are likely to be 0.0001%. It's too much hassle to port software and maintain it on an ongoing basis.

That's stupid game amongst millions of programs past and present which will never run on ARM. Sure there might be some very prominent native ports but it certainly doesn't justify any consumer buying or using the device as a Windows device. I expect Windows on ARM has more practical use in servers, or perhaps in tablets but ONLY where Windows is acting as a glorified shell for some touch interface and users have low expectations of its practicality as a replacement for an x86 netbook.

Personally I think MS would get a lot further pitching the idea if it had some x86 emulation either assisted with hardware or not.

The advantage of Linux

Linux is blessed in that most of the software users need everyday are available as source code. So whether Linux is running on x86 or ARM is largely academic to the end user. Even so it can still bite, e.g. WINE doesn't work on ARM, neither does Flash, or some proprietary drivers.

Even so Linux is vastly more ready to power low power ARM based netbooks than Windows is. The danger is that just like Linux powered the first netbooks, MS may catch up in time, providing emulation or whatever to ease the transition. I also think MS would be better positioned for tablets. Ubuntu or whoever had better make a damned good first impression to get the OEMs on board and maintain the momentum to keep them.

Hardware acceleration is a side issue

The x86 is needed to run the vast, uncountable number of Windows apps in existence. Games, productivity apps, utilities, databases, web servers etc. If Windows on ARM doesn't support them through emulation, it immediately consigns itself to a very small niche of uses where MS can persuade a company to port their code to a new hardware architecture. Easier said than done but for the most trivial of apps.

The Atom might be power hungry by comparison but the reason it's popular is because it *does* support those apps. If you don't need that support you may as well not even bother running WIndows at all.

Besides, I think Apple would be better positioned to go to ARM than MS and even they haven't tried it yet. Just as they jumped ship from PowerPC to x86, they could do the same to ARM. Linux is better poised again by virtue that most of the code is clean and portable to begin with and recompiling is part and parcel of building a new dist.

As for video, crypto etc. it's a side issue. Intel are moving their GPU into the same silicon as their CPU and I expect it's the least of their concerns compared to CPU power consumption.

@Def

.NET apps are frequently polluted by calls to unmanaged DLLs. They'll use an ActiveX control, or some COM component, or some legacy DLL, or call some esoteric Win32 API, or one of their dependencies will and that's that. I expect most real world .NET apps are unclean and stuck to x86 in some manner.

Without emulation it's kind of pointless

I can see the point of Windows on ARM that has an x86 emulation layer. At least with emulation you can run x86 apps even if they are slow. Perhaps with some hardware assistance, emulation might run acceptably enough to tolerate. There would still be an incentive for "core" apps like browsers, office etc. to be recompiled and the rest could limp along on emulation. Even .NET apps would need emulation because most of them make "unsafe" calls to native DLLs.

But if there is no emulation, what is the end goal? Look at what happened when MS ported Windows to other architectures - complete and abject failure. MS straddled the fence and devs largely ignored rival architectures because of the miniscule install base. Apple got away with it because they moved from one architecture, burning bridges to the old world in the process, they also made the transition relatively pain free to devs given the circumstances. None of those things are true for Windows.

Devs are hard pressed to support one platform let alone two. They are NOT going to support an ARM windows unless it is financially worth their time to do it. For example if ARM are going into racks then perhaps we might see web servers, databases etc. getting ported. I certainly don't expect many other kinds of apps to receive attention.

It doesn't make much sense for tablets either without emulation. Okay so I get a Windows desktop, now what the hell am I meant to do with no apps to run on it?

CES wrap: let the battle of the tablets commence

Ridiculous

Your apologetics are as ridiculous as someone claiming that since a Mini is quite a nice car that nobody should have any reason whatsoever to want a car with features or functions that a Mini lacks.

In response to your frankly silly excuses:

* Media support. Many people have media in a variety of formats and want to be able to watch it without caring too much what format it's in. Just because YOU always buy your movies from the Apple store doesn't mean others have. e.g. some people might have purchased DIVX / Amazon movies or ripped their own or transferred movies from a PVR or downloaded them. Regardless, a device which has better media support and an open media framework to support new formats or services is better than one which doesn't for many people.

* HDMI, USB support. What? The $29 Apple dock supports VGA output and USB purely for charging and syncing with a PC. The VGA output also requires another adapter costing another $29. And of course cables for splitting the audio. All of which gets you precisely nowhere close to the quality or convenience of playing movies through HDMI if a device just had a built in port.

* Memory expansion. Pure bollocks. There are many reasons someone might wish to plug in an SD card, such as transferring pictures, music or other files around. e.g. I might wish to use a tablet to edit a photo on an SD card from my camera before plugging the SD into a photo processing machine. Perhaps you should suggest we should all buy a $29 camera kit to work around this artificial restriction?

* Keyboard or other built-in peripherals. Again you appear to think that just because you want to haul around a separate $69 keyboard (mutually incompatible with the $29 dock, and $29 camera kit which need the same port) that everyone does. Some people may prefer a keyboard which folds neatly and flat with the tablet.

* Removable battery. Your rationalizations are getting ludicrous. Virtually every non-Apple phone in existence manages to feature a removable battery. My HTC desire manages it by the mind crushing concept of pop clips in the back cover. Others do it through sliding backs. Some backs are made of plastic, others steel or whatever. Some people appreciate being able to replace one battery for another without invalidating their warranty or spending a small fortune sending their phone / tablet off and receiving a mystery replacement with none of their files or settings a week later.

* Form factors. So says you, other people can and do have different requirements. Some might appreciate a tablet with a different aspect ratio for multimedia playback, or a smaller size for traveling, or a few more hard buttons, or a rubberized back for easy grip, or a smaller bezel, or a built in stand, or a folding cover or the multitude of different features a tablet might offer. Claiming the iPad is perfect for everyone is absurd. People have different tastes and requirements.

* Different price points. Again, some people might question why they have to fork out $600+ for a device and then a small fortune for a carrier bag full of docks, cables and other accessories when one selling for half the price meets their requirements. And it's quite clear that there will be tablets selling for half the price. Some devices like the Archos 101 already do and as CES demonstrates there are going to be many, many tablets to suit all tastes and budgets in the next year.

Nope

Read your news MobileVLC got yanked from the Apple store just recently so that Apple wouldn't have to make their DRM compatible with the GPL.

As for your other points I've more or less rebutted them elsewhere. A summary being that people have different needs and requirements and claiming that a single, expensive device meets them all when it plainly doesn't (e.g. lack of HDMI, USB, SD etc) and other tablets do is kind of silly. One size does not fit all etc.

I wonder about Pixel Qi

Notion Ink models with Pixel Qi are far too expensive. I realise economies of scale or other issues may be playing a part, but the entire purpose of Pixel Qi was cheap LCDs and it seems to be the exact opposite at the moment. It's too bad because it would be hugely advantageous if more tablets offered a high contrast low power mode.

Netbooks were a lesson

Giving away the OS for free only gets you so far, especially if manufacturers find themselves having to extensively modify & support it on their devices. Linux dists for netbooks were pretty horrible, poorly maintained and users quite understandably wanted to be running Windows anyway. I had an Eee 701 PC and the Linux on it was execrable. The Vista debacle was the perfect moment for Linux to make inroads and it screwed up.

I doubt most manufacturers put up resistance to Microsoft's "bribe" for Windows 7 when it addressed their concerns, made customers happy and ran so well.

It is easy to see the same happening on tablets and it explains why MS is porting Windows to ARM. While Android is vastly more better and vibrant than the average netbook Linux, it's still not perfect. Manufacturers still have to modify and maintain it too much, and I doubt Google compensates them from the money it makes through advertising revenues or apps.

People may perceive the benefit of a tablet which can fall back to a Windows desktop. Manufacturers certainly would if MS cuts them in for a slice of the revenues from advertising and / or apps. Perhaps the tablet features a shell (much like media center) where users spend most of their lives and which has a touch centric experience with downloadable apps etc. The user could live in that shell, but still be able to drop out into Windows desktop, e.g. from a button or by plugging the tablet into a dock. Then the tablet transforms for all intents and purposes from a touch screen into a PC which is pretty awesome.

The enormous fly in the ointment is how an Windows seamlessly supports both modes, how it supports x86 apps and what performance is like. It's no damned good being able to drop to a desktop if no apps exist to run on it, or run so badly as to not bother.

If MS do pull it off then Google & Android should be worried. They might find themselves in the same boat as netbooks & Linux before them.

Rubbish

You can do a great deal with the source code. There are numerous non-blessed phone, tablet, stb devices running Android and even replacement dists for phones such as CyanogenMod.

Some drivers are open source some are closed. Not surprising as they are the IP of numerous companies to do with as they see fit. The situation is kittle different from what happens in vanilla Linux and certainly doesn't stop someone reverse engineering popular chipsets.

As for Google apps, they are what the name suggests, apps. While it would be nice if they were open sourced, they are not the OS. Alternates exist in most cases, even open source ones.

The only feature the iPad lacks is Flash?

It seems a little disingenuous to claim Flash is the only differentiating factor when I've read of devices which have touted such things as:

* Full multimedia support for codecs and containers - full H264, VC1, MP4 ASP, MKV etc.

* Outputs such as HDMI, USB

* Memory expansion slots

* Other peripherals not found in an iPad, e.g. slide out keyboard

* Removable battery

* Different form factors

* Different price points

* All the differences implicit to running another OS such as Android / Windows Phone / Windows

What I do think "other" tablets lack is certainty since they only exist in prototypes, announcements, etc. not in retail. For example there is no Android 3.0 ecosystem so how far do these Android devices fall from the tree in terms of compatibility with each other or existing marketplace apps? How will Windows on ARM do backwards compatibility and support for "legacy" apps like games? etc.

I think when such devices appear in retail we'll have a better idea and I'm sure it will work out but at the moment it's the vaporous nature of these devices which is the biggest uncertainty.

Android's Gingerbread finagled onto iPhone

3.0 probably isn't only tablet centric

I expect the gameplan is 2.3 for smart phones to tide them over for 6 months, 3.0 primarily for tablets and then some subsequent 3.x release sees a combined release schedule again. Doesn't mean existing phones will get an upgrade of course since system requirements might be jacked up for the 3.x series.

How long until the reverse happens?

iOS apps are virtualized so in theory an app could be running on a desktop or a tablet or even a rival phone provided there was a LLVM and APIs there to support it.

I wonder if anyone is developing a compatibility layer for Android. Aside from the amusing apoplexy it would provoke in Apple, it would have a practical benefit. It would hugely useful for app developers who want to port a mass of iPhone code over to Android or other platforms.

PlayStation 3 code signing cracked

Bollocks

Stop rewriting history. The reason OtherOS was removed was precisely because someone was developing a crack on the hypervisor. Do you really think Sony was going to leave OtherOS there and lose potentially billions to pirates?

And all the exploits after the removal have been nothing to do with making Linux run (expect as a vector to launch further attacks) and all about playing unsigned or cracked games.

No it hasn't

What an utterly absurd suggestion. Crackers / hackers would have used Linux to obtain the same information that they're after now. Removing Linux has "backfired". It was prudent in the circumstances and hackers would probably gotten further on with it being there than from it being absent. So Sony were right to do it even if their other protections contain goofs of their own.

Anonymous hacktivists fire ion cannons at Zimbabwe

@Paul 4

Most sites that need to be "up and running" already have measures in place to shrug off DDOS attacks. They might suffer minor disruption while failovers kick in and that's about at all. If that. Anonymous is probably going for softer and more reviled targets to save face after it's dismal attempts to attack Amazon and other sites.

Apple slapped with iOS privacy lawsuit

There is little reason apps need the same UUID

The UUID is just a random large number, usually expressed as a string of hex. I think for privacy's sake all smart phones assigns apps a random number as an id which stays with the app until it's uninstalled. It could also prevent different apps from sharing their cookies or other files which can be used to associate ids together. Nothing would be perfect of course - single sign on could still tie ids together, but it should at least by default it stops apps robbing useful info.

Mozilla takes on web data miners with privacy icon release

What is needed but it wouldn't be perfect

Is for someone to sign up to as many sites as possible with some pseudos with unique ids and then measure the volume and origin of any spam they can receive. Compare the amounts of spams to the site T&C and name & shame the offenders. That info could certainly be encapsulated into some kind of add-on that browsers could reference.

Skype makes wobbly return, offers compo to paying punters

Because it isn't peer to peer?

Most Skype users are behind firewalls or NAT routers. The software CANNOT connect directly to another node because there is nothing to connect with. How does it even know the IP of the other person or if they're on/offline unless its registered on a central place? Instead both endpoints connect to a server which will play matchmaker and route messages from one to the other, or if possible provide a direct P2P path.

I expect traffic is encrypted to and fro, but if you were worried about backdoors then double encrypt your traffic or don't use Skype at all. For example use Jabber. Jabber also requires you connect to a server (for much the same reasons as Skype) but you may if you wish set up your own private Jabber server and even encrypt the traffic if you like. Wikileaks uses Jabber for example although I expect they far more reason to be paranoid than you do.

As for NSA helping secure windows, why wouldn't they help with that. If you haven't noticed Chinese, Russian, North Korean, Iranian hackers have a very strong motive to attack US systems. It's in the US governments national interest to make its computing infrastructure as secure as possible.

Sony buys PS3 chip plant back off Toshiba

OpenCL, GPUGPU & Cell

It's hard to shake the missed opportunity Cell represented. While the proof of concept was with PowerPC processors, it could have been applied to x86. Imagine an x86 with 4 or 6 SPUs on the same die. It would scream at doing video decoding, physics etc.

I wonder if Sony / Toshiba / IBM tried to pitch it to VIA or Intel or AMD or let the opportunity be squandered. Whatever the reason, AMD & NVidia have basically turned their graphics cards into proxy versions of the cell. GPUs could already execute code through shaders and the concept has been extended to be more general purpose, hence it's known as GPGPU

It's still possible that Cell could live on and do so in a way compatible with GPGPU efforts - OpenCL. OpenCL is device neutral abstraction layer for compute intensive code and there is already an impl for Cell. So someone could write a physics engine against OpenCL and in theory it could use Cell or AMD or NVidia or CPU to run it on, whichever was installed. I can well imagine that if OpenCL took off that we might see a son-of-cell appearing in some future x86 chipset. It might make most sense in mobile chipsets which don't have the luxury of a powerful graphics card to make use of.

Mind your own: Scotland unveils privacy principles

Sounds very sensible

The more data you store, the more of a headache it is to secure and maintain it. Obviously though if you ask for less ID, or accept alternate forms of ID then it has to be accompanied by some form of training to spot fraudulent applications, counterfeit documents and so forth.

Mozilla betas facelifted open source license

Most of the code is triple licenced anyway

The source code says the licencing at the top in a comment block and most will say MPL 1.1/GPL 2.0/LGPL 2.1 which means you can choose which if any licence you wish to use for derived works.

ICO waves stick at climate boffins over FoI compliance

@DavCrav

The intent of asking for correspondence was to enable critics to quote mine, cherry pick and otherwise shout "CONSPIRACY!" even if there wasn't one. The requests were basically someone asking another person for a stick with which to beat them with and its clear from the leaked emails that scientists were pissed about it.

I wonder if biologists & paleontologists have to deal with similarly intrusive FOI requests from creationist flakes.

@Phil

It seems there are a lot of Reg readers who'd lap it up to. I wasn't expecting the parade of ignorance from the likes of MrCheese that has gone on in this thread.

Wow some people are idiots

Look at all the thumbs down I got! Here is an impartial summary of "climategate" for those who can be bothered to read the facts.

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/climategate/

No conspiracy, no coverup. Just a bunch of scientists' chitchat which occasionally got a bit bitchy especially when dealing with some of their critics frivolous demands.

As for "raw data" placating FOIA requests, go read this email to see what they were dealing with. The raw data was already available.

http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=936&filename=1226500291.txt

The requests merely wanted to "audit" the scientists including reading their email correspondence and other arbitrary and intrusive demands. It's no wonder they were getting pissed. A human failing to be sure, but not evidence of some vast conspiracy, because there isn't one.

The leaked emails showed no fraud

Absolutely nothing in the emails suggested fraud, conspiracy or any of the other wild eyed allegations that anti global warmers imagined the emails said.

The emails do show however frustration by individual scientists that they had to waste time supplying data on demand to anti global warming bloggers and so forth. Completely understable really.

Double-clicking patent takes on world

onDblClick

Netscape Navigator 4 and IE 4 both supported onDblClick DOM event handlers. This is in 1997. There is absolutely nothing unique about double click event in a web content. It was supported 5 years before this patent was even lodged. Indeed it's hard to see how someone could even submit a patent for double click in browsers if the browsers themselves didn't already support the function.

Furthermore, I'm sure a thorough trawl through the early days of the web would find lots of experiments with UI design which toyed with double click. e.g. Microsoft went pretty overboard with web integration in its "Active" desktop and doubtless double click was used there.

Skype goes titsup across globe

@cornz

Skype probably does what you say because it has to work with a myriad of network configurations and has failovers where it tries various things. It's not trying to be stealthy, it's just trying to save users the grief of figuring out how to get Skype working.

Anyway if you're in an org and you don't want Skype, then I suggest you lock your PCs down and run audits on them. Chances are if you don't like Skype then there is a whole raft of other apps you don't like either - ICQ, AIM, Jabber, Twitter etc. etc.

World+Dog says 'no thanks' to 3D TV

World + dog will get 3D whether they like it or not

The problem at the moment is the mistaken assumption that people will pay good money for 3D. Some might but most people recognize that it's still largely a gimmick and there isn't much content either.

However 3D is going to be a standard feature of midrange TVs before long. Just like features such as 1080p, 24fps, 100-200Hz etc. it'll end up on the list of supported modes. 3D is a largely incremental feature that most modern SoCs used by TVs would support anyway.

At some point things will tip where 3D is a demanded feature but I think it will be largely driven by games consoles.

Make your iPhone patriotic - for free

The perfect response

If you see any idiot taking pictures with their "PatriotApp", denounce them to the authorities. They're probably taking pictures to plot a terrorist attack or something.

Senior Guardian hacks turn on Assange

I think he's better served keeping his mouth shut

Assange put himself in the spotlight. Either he should receive proper media training or he should pick and choose who he is interviewed by (i.e. definitely not Paxo & chums) , or he should keep his mouth shut and confine interviews to email. The latter is probably more in keeping with his character anyway. While there are some people who can't or won't accept it, everytime he opens his yap in the non-specialist media he is undermining himself and wikileaks.

The Times can provide invaluable help

The Times will show Wikileaks how to put their secrets behind a paywall so that nobody will be arsed to read them anymore.

The Kirsty Wark interview did it for me

I seriously thought he was autistic or something the way he kept trying to talk over her questions as if she wasn't even speaking. He was very articulate but there was something very odd about it

Mozilla to unload Firefox 4 spit and polish beta

Shouldn't need to be an add-on

I don't understand why Firefox ditched the function in the first place. By all means encourage people to use status in the address bar, but to remove it completely is annoying. The status bar conveyed a lot of information which is readily useful any more.

BTW, the status bar lives on as the add ons bar but there is no status widget to customize it with. It would be incredibly trivial to implement such a widget and it should ship with Firefox, not be an add-on.

'Porn lock' heralds death of WikiLeaks, internet, democracy, universe

Here is a simpler proposal

Mandate that all ISPs should state in a clear way if they supply parental controls and let consumers decide if they want nanny ISP to hide their ickle wickle eyes from lady bits. If they do then and filtering is done server side thing then it should be disabled by default and accessible from an account management page. Simple.

Apple iPad vs... the rest

I'm sure some will provide it

The problem at the moment is Google have something called the CDD which is their compliance document. If you want the marketplace app your device must be compliant with the CDD. It says devices MUST implement GPS. And a 2+ megapixel camera. And an accelerometer. And a compass. And bluetooth etc.

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/source.android.com/en//compatibility/android-2.2-cdd.pdf

While these things make sense in phones, they don't always make sense in tablets and should be optional. If someone wants a tablet for reading books, then GPS and the other junk should be optional. Their absence makes the device cheaper and smaller.

I am hoping that when Honeycomb turns up they revise the CDD into a bunch of profiles rather than one size fits all, e.g. core tablet profile, PMP tablet profile, ereader tablet profile, 3G profile etc.

Android will do better when it officially supports tablets

Android works on tablets but there is no definition of what a compatible tablet device is. So every tablet, PMP etc. does things different. Some like the Galaxy Tab pretend to be giant phones. Others dump superfluous features like camera, GPS etc. and run afoul of compatibility requirements to get the marketplace app. So the market seems to be split between expensive giant phone like devices and cheap and cheerful incompatible generic devices.

Once Honeycomb turns up I expect things will rapidly turn around for android on tablets but it's a mess at the moment.

Scientologist overlord declares victory over Anonymous

Read this website

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Cowen/warhero/

If you believed the Scientology blurb he would be one of the most highly decorated officers in the Navy, with aircraft carriers named after him. As it was he was absolute failure as a naval officer, completely unfit for command with a dismal record that included almost starting a war with Mexico.

Scientology is all front groups

As a general rule, any semi-official sounding organisation which says anything remotely positive about scientology is a front group.

I recall walking past an anti-drugs event that Dublin City council foolishly permitted at the top of Grafton Street a few years back. A jazz band was playing in front an impressive wall of "sponsors". Virtually every single "sponsor" was just a scientology front organisation. CCHR, Narconon etc.

The alien is for Xenu, possibly the most laughably awful cult "secret" ever.

Assange: Text messages show rape allegations were 'set up'

I doubt he's a flight risk

If he fled he would be caught virtually instantly and would swap a stately home with internet for a prison cell. I suspect his best option by a mile is to stay put and watch the extradition or subsequent trial fall apart completely. Which it probably will. Of course if the US try to indite him, then it might be a different kettle of fish, but get the rape thing out of the way first.

As an aside I was struck how odd he was when interviewed by Kirsty Wark. He was articulate but I couldn't escape the impression he was autistic or something. He was constantly trying to talk over her, and rambling in an expressionless monotone which was really weird.

Struggling MySpace inks new Google deal

Poor old News Corp

On the one hand they're ranting against Google for having the temerity of sending them visitors through news aggregation and on the other they're begging cap in hand for search and ad revenues. It's kind of sad really. I might even feel sorry if it weren't News Corp. The Times and MySpace are sinking beneath the waves and they really don't have anyone to blame but themselves.

Apple Mac App Store to go live January

@James

You think Valve hasn't got money? They must be worth billions by now.

Anyway if Apple were foolhardy enough to aggressively push an app store onto Mac owners e.g. preinstalling it on new devices, or by pushing it through mandatory or autochecked updates to the OS or iTunes, then I do predict a lawsuit. If they make the app store an optional download they'll probably be safe.

As for Steve not giving a damn, he sure as hell should. I hear he likes money and having his precious app store enjoindered or having a very expensive antitrust lawsuit dragging on for years runs counter to that.

No obstacle to running iOS apps on OS X

iPhone apps are compiled to a low level virtual machine bytecode. There would be nothing to stop Apple implementing a runtime over OS X which exposes the appropriate APIs for the app to run. Of course some apps would expect hardware like GPS and others wouldn't be suited or useful for a mouse, but theoretically it's perfectly possible.

I'd add that its theoretically possible to implement the LLVM and APIs over *any* OS. Even Android. The LLVM is an abstract after all and there must be enough documentation in the public domain to implement the major libs that apps expect. I'm sure Apple would blow their lids and let the lawsuits fly if it happened but it's technically feasible.

So how long before Valve's lawsuit?

Steam is an established download service which is likely to see its sales plummet on the Mac platform if Apple ships a store out of the box, or tries to slip it in with an iTunes update (like they did with Safari on Windows), or otherwise has it appear on a user's machine except by an explicit manual download. I can see Valve suing for a lot of money and threatening antitrust suits.

Google Maps for Droid phones becomes a LOT better

Wish I could cache directions

I like the Google Directions satnav-like feature. It works fantastically well when you have a network but it's virtually useless without an internet connection.

It would be great if it could cache a route and function in offline mode. Perhaps users could specify how large a cache to allocate then it would use it to storing maps of the primary route, and perhaps some roads either side.

On a more mundane point, Google Maps seems to have wonky pinch to zoom which only works in the zoom out direction which is pretty annoying. Hope that gets fixed.

Froyo snuggles into cosy Nook

It can't have marketplace

Google have really screwed up with their preparedness for tablet android devices. The only way to get the marketplace app is to pass the CDD and the only way to be compliant with the CDD is to basically be a giant smart phone. This automatically means devices like personal media players, ereaders, in fact most tablets are non-compliant. The only tablets which meet the CDD do so by implementing completely superfluous functionality such as GPS, compass, camera etc.

I hope Google come out with honeycomb pronto and change their CDD to reflect the new reality. If they don't then android cohesion is going to fall apart in front of everyone's eyes.

Google Chrome OS mauled by Richard Stallman

Furthermore

Google are loath to ever delete anything and probably couldn't even if they wanted to. Even if they had an explicit Delete that actually removed a row of data from a database, there is invariable going to be a backup of your data somewhere which won't be affected. And it's not like online services even offer a delete function - more often it just hides the data but its still there on a server somewhere.

For most people this probably doesn't matter. But I imagine there are times when someone actually does want to erase data or withold for reasons which are not necessarily illegal. For example, I expect it will become common for Google to be served during divorce proceedings, and of course if everyone is online using the same service it becomes trivial for Google to cooperate with law enforcement, profiling people, snooping their email and so forth.

Of course someone could go overboard and be overly paranoid, but the bottom line is you are relinquishing control of your own data to an unaccountable corporation. You should exercise some healthy paranoia about the possible consequences.

Gmail's daddy predicts Chrome OS assassination

They are not that different

Android is being used in Google TV, in set top boxes, in PMPs, it even runs on PCs (http://www.androidx86.org/) . There is no doubt that some of the apps would benefit from enhancements to support mice, keyboards and the larger screen but the OS is a fundamentally sound basis to use in other form factors. Even Google realise this.

The OS in ChromeOS is largely irrelevant. They've cut the OS to its bare minimum to support the app and improve boot times, but otherwise it's just a stump over which the app runs. The app is a glorified shell that could be running over any OS for all the difference it makes to the end user. It could certainly run in Android which is Linux based (just like ChromeOS). The native client functionality (which is LLVM based similar to iOS) could also run in android. It could and it should. Then users can mix and match Dalvik and LLVM apps and use an enhanced Chrome browser which could work pretty much how it works in ChromeOS.

Pushing two operating systems is just nuts. It confuses consumers, it divides developers. As for MS & Apple having multiple operating systems, that's a debate in itself but there are obvious legacy reasons which do not apply in Google's case.

If it's been discuessed since day 1

Why are we still talking about ChromeOS and a Cr-48 laptop that runs it nearly a year after it was publicly announced?

Google Cr-48: Inside the Chrome OS 'unstable isotope'

I don't have huge VMWare images

But I do have movies I want to play. I do want to play games from Steam etc. I do have times where I am offline. Completely limiting the device so it ONLY works from the cloud is just stupid. I wouldn't put up with a phone like that let alone a netbook.