This is something I never understood about Firefox OS. Why did they not package it up in a way that it could be easily installed on someone's existing smartphone. I was eager to give it a try also but there was nowhere to buy the hardware and I never found a way to install it on a spare smartphone.
Not only that, but the number of spare smartphones is steadily increasing. Barring impact damage, the hardware generally lasts longer than the period of time a consumer is satisfied before wanting something newer.
But older devices are also increasingly left out in the cold with software updates. Anything that can't run the latest OS release will miss out on a portion of apps. Anything that's more than one OS release old will miss out on most of the apps. Three OS releases? You'll be able to run what came with the OS and a bare handful of carefully backward compatible (or all but abandoned) apps, maybe.
So... there's an increasing amount of old devices that could really use something else to run on them.
Well it is based on a pared-down Android build system complete with adb and fastboot access.
Maybe crowdfunding? Replicate the Cyanogenmod infrastructure and provide automated releases on every CM12.x device for Fx OS and others (Replicant, LuneOS, sailfish)?
I think Ubuntu Touch is slightly different but they run a bastardised Android inside an lxc container, so could possibly benefit from auto-building each 'inner' image too.
I agree, its totally out of control. Kind of ridiculous when you go to a concert and the majority of people are watching the show on the screen of their phones rather than directly
I doubt that's the rationale. No offense, but you sound like someone who only knew about him because of his show. He's been doing a lot of different things and I would say that arguably his career is doing better than ever.
I'm not sure if it works that way in real life. Dreamweaver made it really simple to create websites but look at the quality of what was produced. Any good developer would not use this tool even though it did make things simpler
That's a quality/ubiquity tradeoff. Dreamweaver converted non-consumers into shitty programmers. It didn't actually reduce the quality of anyone's existing HTML, it just increased the quantity of HTML out there, and of course the marginal machine-generated HTML is going to be worse than that written by experts with 5 years of experience. Average software quality declines, but this is a Simpson's-paradox effect, not a decline in the output of any one person's software.
Ditto PHP, Node.js, Rails, and any other technology aimed at opening up programming to a larger audience.
This trend has a while to go: while there are vastly more programmers out there than when I started programming, there are still vastly more non-programmers than programmers, and I believe that ultimately mastery of machines will become as important as literacy.
This is a taste of the future. More and more people are creating things using tools and frameworks but not really understanding the underlying concepts. When I pick up a bookshelf at IKEA and put it together, I don't start calling myself a carpenter because of it.
In my first programming job, there were a few senior programmers who were then in their 50s, meaning they started programming in the 70s (before microcomputers). In those days, the way you became a programmer was to major in electrical engineering. That's why even now, a number of top universities (MIT, Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Rice) have combined departments of "electrical engineering and computer science".
How many C++ and Java programmers these days know how to work their way around NAND gates, digital logic, and RCI circuits? How many know how a transistor works? How many know how to build a mux in hardware, or an adder, or what's in a RAM cell?
I'm sure there are some, but by and large, I think it's an improvement that we don't think about digital logic and binary representations when we write our program. The cycle of moving up the abstraction hierarchy has been going on since high-level languages were invented in the 50s. Today's tools and frameworks are the low-level building blocks of tomorrow.
I don't think it was dismissive at all. When a post rises to the front page of HN people are going to post comments both agreeing or disagreeing. In my case, I don't see what all the hoopla was about or how this was upvoted to page 1
It has, but look... It's a good example code base and has lots of notes on what technologies are used incase you are interested in doing the same thing...
Does anyone at HN know where I can get a copy of this magazine? I'm willing to pay. The title is linked to the picture of the cover.