matthew john ernisse

Karma is a huge bitch. Long story short, I leave Saturday for a trip to Australia that features a 2000km drive from Sydney to Adelaide via the Great Ocean Road. I pulled the GPS out of my backpack to load the Australia maps onto it... The touch layer is completely destroyed. Amazon 1-day shipping to the rescue for a replacement - matthew john ernisse

Yes, hooray for Amazon, and I didn't blow my Prime trial before so the shipping was only 3.99$ - matthew john ernisse

Let me know how you like the Tom Tom. I've been looking at getting a GPS. - Benjamin Golub

Nope, not really. Thin client style computing is a mistake. We need to stop trying to turn everything into a mainframe. - matthew john ernisse

To be honest I haven't read much about it but I don't consider it a thin client. The browser is your main window to the world but that doesn't mean the browser can't do some computation for you. I think it would be awesome if all applications were run as a local server on the machine. The browser would still be the UI but the data wouldn't necessarily have to live in the cloud. You could build simple media players, FS browsers, etc this way. - Benjamin Golub from email

Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should. How many layers of indirection to the hardware do we need? I mean seriously, look at the Palm Pre -- you have to use JS and <canvas> to do anything useful and that is a really POOR way to get access to the framebuffer. - matthew john ernisse

But, as a developer, I love that indirection. It would take me forever to build a UI that doesn't use HTML and JS; I'm so out of practice and I'm guessing a lot of other people are too. I believe AIR also is just HTML and JS. The trend is moving that way. - Benjamin Golub from email

As a web technology focused developer you may love it, but lower-level less direct languages are a fact of life. As long as computing exists there will be people writing in assembly because that's the only way to get the job done. AIR is in fact a HTML/JS runtime, and it is neat for little appletty type things but someone had to write the runtime and I bet it's not written in JS. The... more... - matthew john ernisse

I always thought the thin client mistake was to perform interactive processing remotely, thus slowing all interaction to the speed of the network (and to zero when there's no network). Matthew, thin clients have nothing to do with indirection to the hardware. Enjoy writing in assembly on Chrome OS -- I'll enjoy running your assembly a lot more since the OS guarantees that I'm not delegating my safety to your code. - Daniel Dulitz