WebOS and the vitality of Android
This post is a follow-up to WebOS and the death of Android !
There's no contradiction, and I still think that WebOS is still the best designed OS for smartphones : their Javascript/HTML framework is amazing, and native development on WebOS is perfect with their support of libSDL and SDL/OpenGL. Incredible 3D games are being ported to WebOS.
But Palm marketing is lame (it has always been in the past 20 years), and nobody wants to buy a WebOS device. Their market share is ridiculous.
So...I just bought a Motorola Cliq/Dext running Android to replace my old Zaurus :-) There are now thousands of high quality apps on Android, and I bet that the iPhone will have a hard time soon (the lawsuit they brought is a sign of this !!!).
WebOS and the death of Android
The battle of Linux based smartphones has begun, and I bet that WebOS, used for the new Palm Pre, will kill Android based phones.
Why ? Because Android is not so open as it seems, it's based on Linux but it has nothing to do with Linux. Apps cannot be ported easily to the Dalvik VM ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalvik_virtual_machine ).
WebOS applications are written in Javascript/CSS/HTML, and lots of people know Javascript ! Moreover, all standard WebOS applications (Contacts, Calendar, etc) are also written in Javascript, so people begun to customize them easily.
Do you know lots of people which started to customize their KDE or Gnome desktop when they installed their first Linux distribution ? No. The entry fee is too high.
Just take a look at unofficial Pre dev forums to see how people are excited about WebOS: forums.precentral.net/web-os-development/
WebOS is open source for the masses, and that's the first time I see such a revolution happening in the FOSS world.
Palm WebOS rootfs now available !
As the webmaster of www.palmopensource.com , I try to find more details about the new Palm(tm) Linux based OS: WebOS.
Right now, the WebOS SDK is not available to everybody, it should be available in a few weeks, but something interesting has happened:
The Palm Pre root filesystem can be downloaded here: palm.cdnetworks.net/rom/pre_p100eww/webosdoctorp100ewwsprint.jar
An interesting thread about that has started here: forums.precentral.net/web-os-development/184378-ok-rom-comes.html
Now I think it's a matter of days before this rootfs can be booted with QEmu and free/open apps start to be written for WebOS !
NEWS: And now the Mojo SDK has leaked also ! forums.precentral.net/web-os-development/189062-mojo-sdk-download.html
Gandi Hosting vs Amazon EC2 computing power
I'm currently playing with Amazon Web Services and EC2, Amazon's highly flexible VPS hosting service.
Gandi Hosting is providing a similar Xen based hosting service, and last day I saw that they benchmarked their basic "one share" server with Unixbench and got a score of 40.
I was curious to see the score I could get with a small Amazon EC2 server, so I quickly started an instance and the same Unixbench release. The score I got for a small EC2 instance was 34.5 :
BYTE UNIX Benchmarks (Version 4.1-wht.2)
System -- Linux ip- 2.6.21.7-2.fc8xen #1 SMP Fri Feb 15 12:39:36 EST 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
/dev/sda1 10321208 578372 9218548 6% /
INDEX VALUES
TEST BASELINE RESULT INDEX
Dhrystone 2 using register variables 376783.7 2016468.0 53.5
Double-Precision Whetstone 83.1 1267.8 152.6
Execl Throughput 188.3 835.7 44.4
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks 2672.0 11164.0 41.8
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks 1077.0 3059.0 28.4
File Read 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks 15382.0 74927.0 48.7
Pipe-based Context Switching 15448.6 21771.7 14.1
Pipe Throughput 111814.6 58972.3 5.3
Process Creation 569.3 1361.2 23.9
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent) 44.8 171.8 38.3
System Call Overhead 114433.5 670336.1 58.6
=========
FINAL SCORE 34.5
So if we believe Gandi.net, basic Amazon EC2 and Gandi instances have roughly the same power.
But later I found the following Gandi benchmark, which shows much lower results that Amazon's:
TEST BASELINE RESULT INDEX
Dhrystone 2 using register variables 376783.7 571267.5 15.2
Double-Precision Whetstone 83.1 1185.4 142.6
Execl Throughput 188.3 274.2 14.6
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks 2672.0 10814.0 40.5
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks 1077.0 4200.0 39.0
File Read 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks 15382.0 43346.0 28.2
Pipe Throughput 111814.6 110113.0 9.8
Pipe-based Context Switching 15448.6 15650.0 10.1
Process Creation 569.3 479.3 8.4
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent) 44.8 59.9 13.4
System Call Overhead 114433.5 183354.8 16.0
=========
FINAL SCORE 20.4
But I didn't want to test myself Gandi Hosting because I would have needed to create an account and pay an initial fee of 14 Euros, just for playing 30 minutes with one server.
With Amazon Web Services, running this benchmark cost me only $0.10 ! That's what I really find interesting with AWS: everything you use (CPU, Storage, ...) is billed on an hourly basis so it's very cheap for quick tests.
And if tomorrow I want to run this benchmark on a "Medium High CPU" (5 times more CPU than a "small" instance) it will only cost me $0.20. But I admit that the big plus for Gandi Hosting is that bandwidth is free whereas you'll be billed up to $0.17 for each GB transferred on AWS.
If someone has more Gandi Hosting benchmarks, please tell me. (I compiled the benchmark with the default Makefile, without gcc optimizations).
New abstract photography gallery !
My abstract photography gallery is now opened !
Theses photos were not modified in any way. I did not use any digital effects on the camera or on my PC. Only photons captured by a CCD.
And of course, if you want a hi-res, poster sized, printed version of some shots, feel free to contact me !
ZK vs. GWT: Server-Centric Matters !
ZK is my favorite Web 2.0 toolkit. In fact, it's so powerful
that I'd call it, a Web 3.0 toolkit. A true Web 3.0 toolkit where you do not have to write a
single line of Javascript, which is compatible with all major Web browsers, and which allows you
to write glue code in major scripting languages (Ruby, Python, Groovy, etc) even if the framework
is based on Java.
In this nice article, you'll find a nice comparison between GWT and ZK. It's worth a read !
P.S.: ZK is also in the Top 10 most active projects on Sourceforge since 18 months !
The Future is Solar
Here is a link to an excellent short article published in theoildrum.com, one of my favorite sites.
Read it, I'm sure it will convince you that our future is solar, and that other pseudo-alternatives like bio-diesel should be forgotten ASAP !
PolkaDot installed !
PolkaDot is a simple blogging system which does not need a database. So it has been installed in five minutes, and I will start using it to provide fresh news about this site.
If you have no time to waste, use Polkadot !
