Hacker News Reader

Comment by cooldeal | Hacker News Reader

I find it strange how people refer to a Windows RT tablet as an "ARM computer", but the iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook and a zillion other Android tablets(most of which have locked bootloaders, hello "Dangerous Precedent"!) are not referred to as ARM PCs.

It just shows how the terminology is changed to have a higher impact for an argument.

View on HN

I find Android having locked bootloaders to be dangerous in the long term and just very annoying in the short term. The only solution is to only buy Google devices.

iOS is a lost cause, most likely, since it won't even let users run whatever they want.

On the contrary, it seems the big Android manufacturers start to understand the advantages of letting users unlock the bootloader. There are official tools from HTC[1] and Sony[2], Motorola seems to follow suit[3] and Samsung's dragging its feet in the same direction with the Galaxy S3[4].

[1] http://htcdev.com/bootloader

[2] http://unlockbootloader.sonymobile.com/

[3] http://www.motorola.com/blog/2012/07/26/unlock-the-bootloade...

[4] http://www.androidcentral.com/samsung-offer-hacker-friendly-...

I think even HTC still don't unlock all of their phones. Same with Sony.

Motorola have merely promised, my Milestone is exactly as locked as it was before that blog post.

Hopefully things will improve, but I'm not holding my breath. Next phone is a Google device.

I'd attribute it to the software. iOS and Android are clearly meant to coexist with and not supplant a more traditional OS. To me, the dangerous precedent is that this new ARM computer comes loaded with "Windows", a label which connotes a more traditional OS, yet it can only run apps from MS's app store and cannot be booted into Linux. Yes, this is a slippery slope argument given that MS also provides the x86 version which can do all of those things, but I think the distinction will be lost on the general public.

I can't wait to hear all those stories of people who buy a "Windows" RT device and then find out they can't actually run any Windows software on it.

Since everything has to be downloaded from the Windows Store (which can control the experience) and it comes with Office RT, most people probably won't notice. There will be people who will ask where the DVD drive door is...

Microsoft has been through this already with the failed Alpha port of Windows. It should be interesting to see what plans they have to mitigate this.

Actually, x86 software ran fine on NT/Alpha; at one point x86 apps ran faster emulated on Alpha than natively on x86. (And emulated 68K on PPC was sometimes faster than native 68K.)

Was there an x86 emulator that shipped with NT/Alpha? I never heard about this before, and Google isn't being helpful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32

I don't think it is fair to call it a "failed" alpha port. AFAIK WinNT was developed on multiple CPU architectures from the get go to ensure they didn't take any dependencies on one architecture. Alpha was one of those architectures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1 (also courtesy of the fact that Dave Cutler and a whole bunch of other guys from DEC were hired by MS to build NT) and continued to be supported for a while. I think Alpha's lack of success in the marketplace eventually killed NT's support for it.

I meant failed in the sense of a commercial failure, not a project failure.

There is nothing distinguishing Android from a conventional general-purpose computing OS, aside from the fact that it's designed to be used with a finger rather than a mouse. The question you're really asking is whether traditional computing tasks can be performed efficiently with a touch interface.

> There is nothing distinguishing Android from a conventional general-purpose computing OS

Except the expectations of the consumer, which was, you know, the whole point of my post. The touch interface has literally nothing to do with it.

To be totally clear, I agree that Android doesn't carry the same caveats as iOS and Windows RT, but in the eyes of the consumer, Windows and Android mean very different things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com