Clearly, "thin client" was hyped and fizzled out, because it isn't quite what people want. They don't want a "thin client" to the cloud. A pure thin client is pretty dead when there's no network or the server's down. A "Fat Cache" would retain all of its functionality and the user's most used data. It would also have most of the advantages of thin client, namely invisible centralized administration. It would also ameliorate all of the disadvantages.

iCloud, Chromebook, and Kindle Fire/Silk Browser are all moves in this direction.

The focus of a computer user should be their data. This includes apps. The apps should also live in the cloud and just appear on all the user's devices. In fact, the user's application "session" should be in the cloud too. I should be able to start a session on a recipe app on my smartphone in the living room, then walk to the kitchen and just seamlessly continue my session on my tablet. No reopening the tablet version of the app, no repeating a search for the same recipe. At most, just one user operation to "open in tablet."

All these form factors should just be seen as interfaces to our data, just instances of a "fat cache."

The idea of migrating an app session between devices is going to be pretty difficult in most cases because people use different apps on different devices to access the same data; Twitter is an extreme example but there are plenty of others.

They do right now because they have to. Different apps/methods are best on different devices, and there's not enough thought to moving interfaces between devices. But if users didn't have to, and the mechanism worked well, they'd love it.

Frankly, I've only had about 10 minutes of total, unexpected and unavoidable network downtime in the last few years of my life. With a home internet connection and a smartphone in my pocket, if my power goes out I can work away online for hours and hours. Power outages and network outages happen so infrequently that if we have reasonably good offline apps and Fat Caches, we're good to go. And not only that, but we're approaching a place where can continue working almost uninterrupted if both the main power and the network go down.

If my session and my app are in the cloud and the cloud is unavailable, my session and app are not available.

And what happens to my apps if I stop subscribing to the cloud for a few months? I still run Quickbooks 2004, ADT 2004, and VW 2008 for my business - will there be that kind of application persistence? [PS: I also use Sketchup 6 because of .dwg support and the ability to import into VW 2008]

In other words, my business processes work, and moving crap to the cloud is an unnecessary expense. I don't need some jackass MBA deciding how I should work based on a survey of iPad users.

Actually, that transparency is exactly what will make or break this scheme. If know you can't make it transparent, then you shouldn't try. But the companies that succeed (probably Apple and Google) would make billions.

At some point, old data is going to have to be pushed out of that cache, and if you don't make it clear to users they're never going to know what they can and can't run.

That's why it's a >fat< cache, as opposed to a thin client. If you have a big enough cache, then it won't happen too often. It doesn't work absolutely all the time, but if it works almost all of the time, customers will be happy.

And if it doesn't work, and your company also makes the hardware, then when the customer comes to the store, you tell them they need to buy a machine with more memory. Cha-ching.

Bullshit. When stuff doesn't work people are often unhappy as hell. And a computer that just deletes old stuff, it will really piss them off.

You've just demonstrated you don't understand what's being discusses here.

I don't think so. You seem pretty attached to the idea of the behavior of CPU caches, while steadfastly refusing to extend your own metaphor to persistent storage. Odd.

And if one has a Terabyte of data, how is putting it in the cloud and accessing it at web speeds better than a hard disk at bus speeds?

With a processor cache, populating the cache predicatively is far easier due to the limited ___domain of alternatives, the logical structure of instructions, and trillions of cycles per core per hour available for testing alternative predictive schemes.

On the other hand, a user may ask for a rarely requested file once every ten to thirty fortnights, or never. And predicting that request would require parsing a joke told on WJMZ's morning show fourteen minutes ago.

The point is that a cache, even if it is a fat cache, will remove files eventually. Files the user may be expecting to find.

Of course, if someone offered a service where the ultimate storage backup lost data, it would be idiotic. However, this as certainly not my suggestion. Rather, you selectively applied the functionality of hardware caches to the "Fat Cache" idea, while fabricating ridiculous semantics that go against your own hardware analogy. (Where the cloud would be the hard drive.)

This, as the comment to which I responded proposes, creates an issue because the state of the device is unknown to the user and any particular piece of data or particular program may or may not be available at any time.

Perhaps I am just dense, but I do not see how this is advantageous compared to local storage. In other words, just because you feed it a case of Krispy Creames, a thin client is still a thin client.

For a given amount of storage, a Fat Cache may beat a thin client. But it's turtles all the way down, if the amount digital information people store keeps increasing, i.e. the first box of ten 720k floppies lasted me the better part of a year.

Reorient your thinking. The central thing is no longer the "device" it's the user's account and sessions in the cloud. The user's data never goes away, it's just that access to it is sometimes good and sometimes not so good. Mostly, it's good.

Nowadays, if a user's mobile broadband is broken, they just think of going somewhere with better reception. In a few years, when a seldom used piece of data has fallen out of the cache, they'll just think, oh well, I'll get back to it in a bit. (Or, if it's really important, they can select "Keep Available" so it'll be there next time.)

However, if you go back to a time before mobile broadband was commonplace, and you tried to introduce someone to it in a bad reception zone, they would've been very "meh." That seems to be where you are.

A strong case can be made that having access to mobile broadband intermittently is an improvement for the user over the way things worked before.

I haven't seen anyone even attempt to make a case that intermittent access to one's data and apps is an improvement over the current systems.

In other words, why would anyone willingly switch to this model? And among the unwilling, how does it better meet the needs of business than a thin client or other conventional solutions?

Having to select "Keep Available" requires the user to accurately predict the future value of access, cache space for it, and adds another step to the process of saving stuff for later use.

It's not availability for next time that's the issue. It's availability now, when I need it that matters.

A better analogy is a allen wrench sitting in a toolbox out in the garage. It's not at hand when the disposal is stuck, but access is predictable. What you are proposing is that someone comes by once a week and swaps out the tools in the toolbox based on which one's you have been using most recently.

Again, where is the advantage to the user?

If the "fat cache" still lets you work in a disconnected state (such as iCloud would let you), I don't see this as a problem.

The Lumia 900 is a very big step in a very good direction. MS needs to double-down on this and stop kowtowing to Samsung et al, who are pushing out half-assed turds of phones that do a disservice to the brand.

The "free OS" segment of the market is taken by Android, and I think it'll take an act of god to unseat it at this point. WinPhone's only hope is to compete at the higher end with the likes of iPhone and Galaxy phones.

And marketing. God, the marketing. Where is it?

MS is betting the company on WinPhone, but where is the marketing message? Why aren't bus sheltered swimming in these ads? Why aren't they all over TV like Android and iOS is? Why are WinPhones still hiding in the darkest corners of the AT&T stores?

This is the biggest failing of WinPhone IMO - it's a fine platform and a fine product, but nobody knows about it.

I disagree with that. Android does dominate cheap smartphones right now, but by and large they are terrible devices, and I (anecdotally) know plenty of people who regret their purchase. Compare to the Lumia 710, which is a very, very decent phone, and WP7, which is a very "put together" OS.

I absolutely think that MS could dominate the low to mid range smartphone market if they do it properly.

Inside the US where carrier phones are dumbphones, iPhones, Google-branded official-partner Android phones, or outliers, you're totally right - Windows Phone has a great shot at taking over the low-end to mid-range cheap-but-still-branded Android phones from LG, Samsung, and Motorola.

Overseas, where "free OS smartphone" is a market niche occupied by 500 Chinese things people in the US have never heard of with no Google branding whatsoever (and no or hacked Android Market access), Windows Phone doesn't stand a chance, because it can't be downloaded and hacked together.

What percentage of highly successful, heavily used Android apps rely on native code? It seems that 99% of the dev community is fine writing Java.

Hell, why are WP7 devs clamoring for native code anyways? It's because the .NET performance is terrible. The failure IMO is in .NET, not the lack of C++. The capitulation and addition of C++ support isn't a strict win either - devs now have access to performance, at a substantial engineering effort cost. Doing things that would have been simple on other platforms now requires C++ hackery.

Wrong. It's not because of .Net performance. They're asking for native support, mainly to make much easier to port games and other apps from Android and iOS to WP, being able to actually reuse code, instead of a complete rewrite. Nobody wants to write the entire app several times, when targeting to multiple platforms.

It could, in fact, be easier to mechanically translate between Java and C# than going C++.

In contrary, Microsoft have a great native toolchain (years of work in IDE, debugger, compiler) there but decided developers should not use it. And this is why it is so stupid.

For those that are unaware, WP7 and WP8 are built off of different kernels.

So... where's the marketing? Why haven't MS even mentioned them?

On carphonewarehouse (UK), the only way to find them is to search - they have an Apple section, an Android section, but no Windows section. The front page has Apple, Android, even Blackberry, but no hint of Windows...

How can you forget to market your product?

(I am being sarcastic... yes, $500million was spent and no, marketing was non existent... on the upside, most of the marketing team got made redundant yesterday)

But there's another market to consider here, as well: Android can be a free OS overseas because it's freely downloadable and the source can be quickly ported to a random device made in a random Chinese factory, which Microsoft will probably never see or care about (and hence never demand patent licensing fees for).

This is a market niche that shouldn't be underestimated - ever looked at the "Phones" section on DealExtreme or had a friend come back from China with some kind of weird dual-SIM concoction? These are immensely popular in China and India, and now instead of paying contractors to write horrid proprietary dumbphone OSes, their manufacturers can pay contractors to quickly bake together an Android port (often with hacked Market access).

As a platform I have been very impressed by Win Phone 7, and I hope they continue to execute as well as they have.

Since the Build conference I have been hoping that they would make WinRT available on WP8.

Also, I can't help but think that Microsft will take the whole "homogenization" of platforms between mouse-driven PC, touch-driven tablet, and phones, a little too far. Some form factors do need optimized UI's and code for that form factor or device type. You can't just use a one-size-fits-all for everything. It would be like Google using the phone UI for Google TV. It would be a mess.

I can see how:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544522

Close integration with the OS is not one of them.

Standard graphics libraries which meet contemporary expectations is also unfortunately missing.

There's nothing wrong with Java as a development environment, but the cost of "getting Java on the phone" is at best comparable to support for Windows (and at worst you're dealing with Oracle).

We're at the point now, where OS and language should merge. There should be a user data-centric design, with abstractions for the underlying hardware, so that most applications can be written across all of a user's devices, with "skins" for different particular form factors.

JavaFX 2, with rumored support for iOS and Android (likely WP8 if it has native code)

And it is unlikely that WP8 will have a JVM.

And iOS doesn't have a CLI VM but it still runs C#. Same thing for WP8, JVM can be packed with the app and AOT compiled to native code, maybe even JIT-ed if WP8 kernel allows it.

I suspect there isn't any easy solution to this one- same as there's no easy way to make OS X/iOS apps without running OS X yourself.

This means you can dock your Win 8 x86 tablet with a keyboard/mouse and be using the power of full Windows. You can write code for the tablet and debug it from the very same tablet using Visual Studio. You can't really do that with iPads and Android tablets which are relegated to being consumption devices only.

http://www.touchdevelop.com/help/api

There appears to be a vision of a commodity phone running Windows Phone as the "computer on every desk" for the developing world - it's probably no accident that Microsoft teamed up with Nokia.

If I can make a Metro app for Windows 8 and hit all desktop and Win8-tablet users and get WP8 users for free or very little cost... I see the number of applications for Windows Phone increasing very quickly compared to their slow start thus far.

I have an Android phone and the only time I've had to connect it to my PC is to download photos. And then it looks just like another other USB drive w/ the top-level DCIM that my digital camera's SD card has. Just drag-and-drop.

On the other hand my in-laws bought iPhones and copying photos and MP3s to them via iTunes was confusing and very, very slow.

Consider too that for most people in the developing world, a mobile phone is the only "computer" they will own. Requiring integration with a desktop PC effectively cuts Apple and Microsoft off from a market of billions of people.

Based on your two examples it seems as if you feel this way because you've only experienced light integration or poor integration, and don't have the imagination to see past that.

If Microsoft can make it work, and offer something polished in the process then it could be something special. Remember they're counting the "desktop OS" of Windows as their tablet OS as well now. There exists untold numbers of opportunities for nice little integrations done well.

Consider too that for most people in the developing world, a mobile phone is the only "computer" they will own. Requiring integration with a desktop PC effectively cuts Apple and Microsoft off from a market of billions of people.

That's why you don't make it mandatory like you're suggesting.

Here are two I posted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3541271

http://www.winsupersite.com/blog/supersite-blog-39/android/7...

The story about the Gmail Man and privacy concerns was down around number 70 (page 3) at two hours old and 59 points. That's a lot of flagging.

And Android is far more vulnerable to Microsoft than iOS because the major manufacturers all have licensing agreements in place with Microsoft because of patents.

Stories about BN's claims of patent abuse being thrown out by the ITC magistrate on Monday have been flagged down, including this excellent article:

http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2012/01/itc-throws-out-barne...

That doesn't explain the scale of the flagging.

It was just a news article that a lot of people found interesting, it wasn't really commenting on the merits of the video itself. A lot of people thought it was newsworthy so it was upvoted.

But some overly sensitive folks seem to have the idea that it must be buried from more people seeing it, even if there was interest.

>ome on... Excellent and Florian Mueller in the same sentence? The only thing I never saw with his name is a criticism of Microsoft. I have to wonder why...

And there is never anything postive from Groklaw about Microsoft, I wonder why....

Also, do you realize that flagging articles like that can cause the account to be hell banned unjustly just for thinking such news might be interesting and submitting something that's obviously not spam or otherwise bannable content?

For ad context/relavancy, Hotmail does NOT parse your emails for keywords.

That pretty much describes every system.

> It implies Gmail-man is a sentient entity..

It's a corny parody for internal use.

And for all the bullshit that Google spinned towards Bing in public, I consider this fair play. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3536110

Though sometimes downvotes are used to express disagreement, downvotes should be considered editorial feedback - either you didn't make your point clearly, or your comment is considered likely to derail the discussion.

Use the "edit" and "delete" links, respectively if you are concerned about the karma score of a particular comment.

It is bad form on HN to complain about down votes.

As for your assessment, the two features upon which your sarcasm was centered were obviously among the most trivial mentioned. Therefore, there was little invitation to respond to your argument based upon its merits.

Sometimes of course, one just makes a snarky comment and lets the karma fall where it may. Maybe if you had a few hundred karma points, it would be an option.

As for the flagging, on most of the internet it has long been socially acceptable to praise Apple and disparage Microsoft in public forums - Apple of course encouraged this sort of thing with their long running "I am a Mac/PC" advertising campaign.

This social norm is actually one of the issues which got me interested in Apple and their advertising and the way in which people who like their products feel free to act in public - seriously, every time the Macbooks get a new case or port or processor upgrade, there's been a front page story here on HN.

Google of course doesn't have that luxury of a huge consumer following - people use them by default e.g. as their standard search engine or as the free touchscreen smartphone. And they are smart enough to know what that may mean over the long term - particularly when handset manufacturers now have agreements in place with Microsoft in all probability due to their rush to ship Android.

Is there a concerted effort to flag Microsoft stories? The killing of stories from WinSuperSite is consistent with it. The killing of the "Gmail Man" story is consistent with it as well - particularly given the quality of the discussion which was taking place.

I think you got it. I imagine many people flag topics when the discussions in them reach a certain low.

As for the features I mentioned, they are, certainly, the most trivial. But it's also surprising (baffling, actually) Microsoft allowed WP7 to reach the market without them and I'd be ashamed to list such basic features as improvements. It's like saying "now makes calls". And a more constructive approach would be to point out those are the least relevant features and that the others are much more interesting (and why).

When I got the Nokia, I went out and bought an 8GB card for it. It peaked at about 1GB of usage - I could have stored all that on the phone's memory instead.

My WP7 phone has about 10GB free (more than half). It's not an issue. My wife has an 8GB iPhone, memory is not an issue (are you baffled that iPhones don't have removable storage?)

Data plan usage has never been an issue for the people I am around - even though I imagine it is for some people. And if I cared, the data usage available from my carrier via my phone.

The way I see it, those are listed just so that there is something that everyone can get their head around when comparing specs.

I want to respect Microsoft, I really do. But when they launch updates that are still playing catchup to Android and iOS and simultaneous attack Android as an inferior product, I have to shake my head. When they attack Google's privacy policy consolidation when they offer no transparency about user data, offer no removal tools or liberation tools as Google does, I shake my head. When they hype IE9 and dog on Chrome for lacking features that Chrome has, in reality, had for years, I shake my head.

Build something awesome and I'll happily come back. Live.com gives Microsoft an opportunity to KILL iCloud and beat Goog/Android to the punch with a really good platform for syncing between devices and making your data ubiquitous across all form factors. But instead they're attacking people on Twitter and trying to convince me that their products are something they're not.