[Arm-netbook] fosdem2016

[Paul Boddie]

On Thursday 4. February 2016 19.08.39 GaCuest wrote:
> 
> Well, maybe the problem is that the project initially was too ambitious 
> for a small company.
> 
> I remember when EOMA-68 would be sold in stores and you could 
> put it on any kind of device. It was a very good idea, but very difficult 
> to do (at least without the money of a big company).
> 
> The problem is that people will be reluctant to buy a computer with 
> Allwinner A20. Even the people will be reluctant to buy a computer 
> without Windows or Linux (x86).

I think we may be moving away from the brand-obsessed era of Wintel once 
again, where people can be persuaded that they don't need Windows or "Intel 
Inside". Indeed, on mainstream news sites, any mention of Windows these days 
seems to be accompanied by hordes of angry people complaining about XP being 
"end-of-lifed".

Although I'm not a fan of the way things like Android have been done, one 
thing that it and other mobile systems have achieved is to make people care 
rather less about the brand name and more about what you can do with the 
device, even if the obsession has now shifted to "app stores" and "app 
ecosystems".

I'd really like to see things like EOMA-68 enable "appliances" and devices 
that serve people's needs quite directly, as opposed to selling them a box of 
tricks and indoctrinating them into believing that technological solutions 
have to be complicated and unreliable.

> Perhaps it would be interesting to establish requirements for 
> software and minimum hardware requirements as did 96boards.

I see that Luke has responded quite robustly to this, but with this initiative 
being rather open-ended, the idea of software requirements sounds like big-
company-consortium material where people write criteria like this to look as 
if they have something to do.

It also provokes a lot of squabbling between people about the "official" 
choice, reminding me a bit of initiatives like Linux Standards Base (if I 
remember it right) where Red Hat technologies were chosen, thus alienating 
everyone else and diminishing the importance of the whole thing.

On Thursday 4. February 2016 19.08.39 GaCuest wrote:
> En 4 de febrero de 2016 en 0:47:41, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 
(lkcl at lkcl.net) escrito:
> > On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 10:52 PM, Wookey wrote:
> > >
> > > And ultimately a 2G RAM laptop is 'toy' these days,
> > > because 'browsers'.

I think it's appalling that when you consider the actual information on most 
Web sites, teletext/viewdata pages would get the same job done of 
communicating the information, minus the images, I guess. All of this 
complexity being upheld so that any element in the page can be nudged by one 
pixel at any time for a completely dynamic layout. (Annoyingly, what with the 
"full screen mobile" experience being increasingly the new normal, things like 
needing to reformat the page in real time as windows get gradually resized is 
becoming something of an archaic feature.)

On my 1GB machine, the biggest problems I have, apart from rampant scripts and 
resources needing to be loaded from tens of tracking sites and silos, is the 
depositing of large images that appear to be dynamically scaled in the 
browser, supposedly so that mobile users get the right format served up to 
them, or something. (Responsive design or whatever it is called.)

Anyway, I'll let you get flamed for bringing up the 2GB limit this time. For 
me, it would be easily enough for my needs, which is what I wrote on the topic 
last time for all the good it did me.

Paul