My experience of J2ME phones (as someone living in India pre-iPhone) was that the Java functionality went unused, except as far as it was used to implement vendor-written apps.
ChromeOS benefits from the fact that it is just a web browser - if you want just a web browser rather than a generic operating system, Fuschia is of course unnecessary.
Nobody targets webOS, and I suspect people’s choice of TV has more to do with how it looks on the in-store display or how cheap it is than what apps you can run on it.
FreeRTOS, mbed and IncludeOS are not generic operating systems in the first place.
There are essentially no “pure” ISO C or ISO C++ programs - everybody uses system-specific libraries at some level.
Basically, Fuschia suffers from the fact that a large amount of userland will need to be rewritten for it, depending on what market segment it targets. (“Just” being an alternate Android runtime for phones, as an example, wouldn’t require this.) This is an obstacle - not an insurmountable one, but being non-POSIX is an obstacle for any OS, that the people behind it need a strategy to tackle. Whether or not people will code apps for Fuschia will depend on how excited developers get about it at first, and then how many people use it.
Of course it is. It’s not a good thing - it’s essentially killed any possibility of a capability-oriented desktop OS for a number of years, for a start. But it’s the state of things - if someone can’t run at least most of their software on a new system, it’s a massive barrier to adoption.
The reason Android and iOS got away with it was that nobody was really running important software on their phones in the first place, so it was a brand new capability that didn’t need to be compatible with anything.
Mostly because being POSIX compliant makes it far easier to port a lot of command-line and server-side software quickly. Most new operating system projects don’t have the manpower to rewrite the world - I think the last major one was probably Android.
> Why don't we have have sandbox execution environments in the OS itself?
Well, if you try, you wind up with something that looks an awful lot like a web browser - especially once WebAssembly is a thing. The API that many desktop operating systems provide is not designed for the security model that you're looking for, so you wind up building a new one on top of it - see WinRT when Microsoft needed a sandbox.
We used to have things like Java Web Start (still do in some enterprise systems), and, well, it's not exactly any better than a web browser except that it has a better view layer for applications than HTML/CSS. It's also not supported on mobile platforms.
Really, only on HN and other "startup forums". Anywhere else... well, do you think even an ice cream stand is immediately a viable, profitable business? Usually not. The space between "having a registered company" and "actually in the black and stable" is a startup.
> If customers choose to buy ebooks for a significant mark-up because they like the way Apple delivers them, I don't see how the price fixing harms the market
From some reading, I think the issue is basically that as a result of Apple's collusion with the publishers, Amazon could no longer sell without significant markup - thus price-fixing. I could be wrong.
I'd argue that whether the majority of participants would happily be involved in a transaction is irrelevant to whether that transaction is good - often, either that transaction has externalities or the result of nearly everyone agreeing to a certain type of transaction is that a minority is left out of something important.
For example, for the moment, Uber are running a version of their service for people with physical disabilities - this is probably solely in response to the argument that lack of regulation would result in no such service existing. If there were no threat of regulation, would they run it? Probably not, it's probably not very cost-effective.
The majority would probably happily use cheap, dirty energy for as long as they can, but what externalities does that have? If it were possible, would it be OK to run such a power station against the law?
It's generally well-supported enough so long as you don't need the latest and greatest packages within about a month of their release. They're having issues with their continuous integration system (the box it's running on isn't powerful enough and the project doesn't have money to get a new one), and there's occasionally breaking errors in important packages meaning a new version of the package repository doesn't get rolled out for a while, even if you're not using those packages.
Note that building from source is exactly the same process as building from binary - i.e. "nix-env -i firefox" will try to install from "cache" (the output of the continuous integration system's build process) and if it can't find something, build from source. Most important things are in the cache, some things aren't (mostly obscure packages and things with no-redistribution licenses), but in general it works out well.
And if they're not using 4 spaces, they're not following one of the more important documents there is for coding in Python in a way that other people can easily read - PEP8.
I'm sure Firefox can do the same thing (allow you to create a shortcut to open a Firefox window in chromeless mode to a website), but I'm not sure how - hence only mentioning Chrome.
Chrome lets you create apps that open in separate windows.[0] Then it's precisely as bad as any other IM app.
> you need to keep an eye on that tab in case something comes up
If your team members don't @ you when something might be relevant to you, sure. However, if they don't, you can just check every hour or so and get back to them. That's the beauty of Slack - it sits somewhere between IM and email, not everything has to be instant (because everything's saved and you can read it at your pace) but it has the ability to be used as such when enough people are around.
Eleven Giants, the team working on repairing Tiny Speck's previous game, uses Slack like this. Nobody's ever all going to be on at the same time, but everyone can join discussions.
> the 'notifications' don't work all the time (Archlinux + Firefox)
Never had this issue - I'd blame you using a "bleeding edge" distro.
Google had a single sign-on system before G+. I still use it, refusing to sign up for G+. What it didn't have was a single identity system; you didn't have one public identity across all services, although you did have one account.