I wish I could recall the URL of the video I saw. It shows a kid telling his teacher in the 1980s that he wants to start a business and give away all his products. At which point the business teacher faints.

Google Android is being "side jacked" quite a bit lately, now that IT IS #1, the numerically predominate OS system on the planet.

The Chinese for example do not like stock Google Android any more, and have cooked up versions of their own.   And yes Virginia, Chinese "Android" tablets do contain spywares and trackers and back doors and who knows what else built right into the hardware itself.   Cyanogen (used to be Cyanogen Mod) is now building a custom Android version for major Chinese phone bullders, as is Rockchip, the RK-3188 chipmaker company.

Samsung has now moved completely away from using plain Jane vanilla Google Android, and they have started shipping a forked Android with their own home grown replacements for all the non-free Google support softwares that Google retains the sole ownership of.   This is significant as Samsung sells more phones than anybody else, more TVs and more forms of appliances than anybody else right now.

All of these custom Android modifier folks are putting in the resizable windows and other "real work" capabilities into their Android experience.  Whether Google does it or not, Android will soon be a full functional OS experience capable of content creation, not just viewing/consuming.

And don't forget good old Amazon, the internet sales folks who have totally forked their Kindle Fire OS completely away from its open source roots into a totally non-free closed source conglomeration of their very own bits and pieces.   Ditto to a lesser degree for Barnes and Noble, who has decided to go yet another year losing money putting out slightly substandard customized Nook hardware and software.

Firefox OS and Sailfish OS are actually shipping now with Tisen OS about ready to come out and go for it as well.  Of these 3 new OS systems Firefox is one that is totally new, original and open source -- with no entanglements to Android at this time at all.

(but this may change with the next version or two into the future)  

Why?   Because Sailfish and Tisen both can use their own custom apps out of their own app store AND YOU CAN ALSO GET INTO THE GOOGLE PLAY STORE WITH THEM TO LOAD UP ALL THOSE 400,000,000 ANDROID APPS AND GAMES AND STUFF.   Yup, Sailfish and Tisen are Android app compatible ....


========    So, put your world view glasses on and take a look around the globe  =======

Remember please, that more new phones and tablets will be sold this year and next year than ever even had existed PERIOD before this past year -- the rate of "trade up" and all the brand new markets opening up to smart phones is simply HUGELY BIG, much much bigger than most folks can readily realize.

Right now we have four complete A9, A12, A15 and A57 ARM generations of processors from at least a dozen suppliers, all of them running balls to the walls on all of their old original production lines and original nanometer levels located all over the world just to make enough chips to make all the new phones and tablets and smart TVs and this and thats that will be sold this year and next.

More folks will compute for the very first time in the next 2 years than all of the folks who had ever computed before in the history of the world up until right now -- with all these new folks hitting in the next 24 months.

And when the production numbers get rolled up for the next few years, it will be Mediatek and Rockchip holding down the first two "highest number of phone/tablet SOCs sold" slots, with Qualcomm mebbe inching one of them out or else coming in third place with Samsung coming in 4th place.

Unless they can change some stuff up Allwinner isn't going to place very well in this ranking, as they are currently stuck at the 40nm lithography level right now and unless they can get down into the 16-20nm production space race they are doomed to slide yet further down into the pack.

Mediatek does have a plan for a whole lot of new low nanometer chipsets, so one must assume they have invested in production space at one of the new 16-20nm foundry plants being built as we speak.   Note please that Samsung is starting to use Mediatek SOCs in their own low end products rather than their own lesser processors (cost is the reason for this).

=======================

Now, are ARM chipsets powerful enough to do a laptop now?   Can you really do real work on an ARM device like you use to do on a PC?

You take a look and you tell me.    

This dude was simply just trying to see if he could load all of his cores up 100% using stock Ubuntu on an Odroid XU development board, so he simply lit up everything he had and THEN HAD TO GO SCHEDULE A COMPLETE RECOMPILE JOB OF HIS LINUX OPERATING KERNEL JUST SO HE COULD FINALLY GET A 100% LOAD ON ALL 4 OF HIS ARM A15 CORES.  

This is a real concern, the "dummbie" USA kiddies thing.

UK has recognized that their public schools were teaching NOTHING USEFUL about computing technology to their kids at all, the Raspberry Pi Foundation was started to combat that phenomenon with some small success, getting some basic practical programming into the kid's educational mix.    Nuts and bolts type stuff, very useful to know.

What they really did succeed at was putting a little bitty Linux PC into the kids hands for them to carry home with them.   And they did.   At 1.75 million total devices sold at this point in time.  The default Raspberry Pi operating system, Raspian, is a complete Debian OS system that allows the kid internet access, etc etc etc. so they actually took home their first PC, thanks to the public school system.

Kids here in the USA are not stupid, they do have a phone on them (so Mommy can find them when she wants to) and it is amazing how far they can stretch that one single device into a relatively complete kids texting/blogging culture type thing.

However, they like all Americans see Windows as "real computers" and everything else as consumption devices.

Asia does not see it this way.  Android, totally tuned to their own language is their OS of choice, always has been their OS of choice.   Phones and tablets, and the big screen home TV for a base station.

Work boxes (Windows or Linux) are owned by work and stay there .... personally owned stuff is Android all the way.


===========


Speaking of Windows, Microsoft has been kinda quiet lately.  

Still no CEO hired ....   They have put out Win 8.1 and it is making no ripples in the pond for very much .....

Microsoft has renamed all the flopped RT devices and are still trying to sell them off again, this time around with a new software set -- all the software and all the advertising this time around making no claims for anything at all for working with anything but just what is found in their own app store.

Looks like MS is just treading water, finishing out all Ballmer's old screw ups and just waiting for that new CEO to come on board and offer them some new directions.


(this is new, MS is just telling the truth this time)

Yes, but some of your public school basic programming language classmates went on to be programmers -- in England they realized that nobody was going into the programming field because they had never been exposed to it, ever, period.  

Broadcom England realized they could not hire any British programmers because there were none coming up through the schools .... thus they realized they had a serious problem.

Does everybody need to be able to program?   No, but you need to have enough programmers to write the apps that everybody else will run.  To do this they need to be exposed to it early enough to pick it as a career path ....

Thus, sometimes during their education every kid needs to be exposed to programming, at least at some small level, so the natural "programmers" can realize they like doing it.

Do you remember being exposed to music while in school?   Exposed to writing?   Taught the scientific method that is used in developing new knowledge?

Same thing, quit exposing kids to music and within 2 generations you won't have very much new music going on.

Oldfeller--FSO wrote on 10/29/13 at 09:16:20:


DO YOU PROMISE?

Waiting for Arteacher to chime in....

 
ttp://venturebeat.com/2013/10/31/android-captures-record-81-global-market-sha...



News flash, the total world of computing grew by 45% just this past quarter.

It is going to grow 2-3x next year alone.   Then again in the next year.

Almost all of this meteoric growth is in the phone/tablet realm.   None of it is in the traditional desktop, very little (nothing much beyond replacement actually) is in the traditional laptop.

As tablets grow keyboard covers and laptops grow touch screens this new class of hybrid input style units are making up a whole new class of machine that is now just being recognized.  Soon sales of these hybrid "do anything" units will become more significant as the super thin laptop slowly blends into this style as well.  

Touch screen will be required, after all.

Lump in the 22" smart monitors and 24" smart TVs (units with android built right into them) and you suddenly have a second new way to compute that didn't really exist a year ago.   I think we will see new BIG touch screen "All in ones" will become more interesting for the desktop space.

Samsung has also come out with mobile resize-able windows on their larger tablets.  This makes 3 sources now for the resize-able Windows functionality in Android. So, right now Rockchip, Ixonos and Samsung will sell you a large tablet with resize-able movable windows.

KitKat is out now.  No new features at all, instead  Google spent time removing a good bit of fat and slow this time around.   KitKat will run well on a dual core processor and with only 512 meg of systems memory.   Count on the next L version to be all trim & slim as well -- this way Android doesn't give up the new third world cheapie smart phone boom over to Firefox completely.

With literally everybody in the world concentrating on cashing in on the cell phone and tablet boom that is going on it will likely be a year or so before anything really really revolutionary gets designed and built (apart from the ongoing phone / tablet wars that is).  

However, the successful companies riding this HUGE HUGE boom will come out at the end flush with money and strong with technical know how -- and in a position to BUY up the lesser companies for any technology they think they need that the little guy owns.

Importance of Linux desktop distros in this Android future world ????   If Android successfully puts together the ease of use of traditional distro with tablet touch controls and gaming -- then Linux distros will be a tiny sliver of the tiny "other" sliver and we will all use the original OS.

And IF it is coming to pass that if Google won't do it right, then Samsung and the other players have shown they can -- even if it means buying up (or creating) a Cyanogen to get what they need.