Google's Fuchsia OS is Taking Over Smart Displays, Now on Its Second Device (arstechnica.com) 23
The kingdom of Google's third major operating system, Fuchsia, is growing a little wider today. ArsTechnica: 9to5Google reports Google completed the rollout of Fuchsia to the Google Nest Hub Max. Along with the original Nest Hub/Google Home Hub, that puts two of Google's three smart displays on the new OS, with the one holdout being the 2nd Gen Nest Hub. The Nest Hub Max is the first device running Fuchsia that Google is currently selling -- the Home Hub only got Fuchsia after it had been discontinued. The Google smart display user interface is written in Flutter, a Google programming language designed for portability, which runs on Android, iOS, Fuchsia, and the weird cast platform Nest Hubs typically use. So it's not right to describe the user interface as "similar" after the OS swap -- it's the exact same code because Flutter runs on nearly everything.
You are getting a slightly newer code version, though, and it comes with a Bluetooth menu. If you dive into the settings and hit "about device," you'll see a "Fuchsia Version" field that will say something like "6.20211109.1.3166243." It's a bit weird to do an entire OS switch to the futuristic, secretive Fuchsia project and then have basically nothing to show (or say) for it in terms of obvious improvements in performance or security. You can dive into the minutia of the Fuchsia source code, but it continues to be a mystery in terms of what practical benefits it offers consumers. Google never talks about Fuchsia, so not much is known about what, exactly, Google is accomplishing here.
You are getting a slightly newer code version, though, and it comes with a Bluetooth menu. If you dive into the settings and hit "about device," you'll see a "Fuchsia Version" field that will say something like "6.20211109.1.3166243." It's a bit weird to do an entire OS switch to the futuristic, secretive Fuchsia project and then have basically nothing to show (or say) for it in terms of obvious improvements in performance or security. You can dive into the minutia of the Fuchsia source code, but it continues to be a mystery in terms of what practical benefits it offers consumers. Google never talks about Fuchsia, so not much is known about what, exactly, Google is accomplishing here.
Exaggeration, surely (Score:5, Insightful)
"is taking over" and "now runs on two devices" seem not to fit together that well.
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And is the Google Home Hub even a 'Smart Display'? Perhaps I'm confusing 'Smart Display' with 'Smart TV'.
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I don't know what any of them are. I did start to do a search to find out but then I realised that I'm never going to buy one so I lost interest.
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That threw me as well. I guess the is googles version of the echo show.
Re:Exaggeration, surely (Score:4, Funny)
That's 100% increase overnight!
And also "secretive". Super impressive.
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Yeah, those crack (addicted) Slashdot editors are at it again!
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If you don't hype up and celebrate these early "wins' you'll get no fun out of it at all.
We've all been there. The company's been using $x technology for years, and it's a bit crusty here and there, but everyone knows how to make it work. Then the young'uns come along and force through making $y. After all that hubris, they'd better make sure $y gets used, so it gets rolled out on their pet project - 100% success, absolutely no problems whatsoever are reported (at least not to the management - the rumour mi
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I suspect they might intend to refer specifically to Google's smart displays, not smart displays in general. If you look at it that way, two out of three is definitely a takeover.
Re: Exaggeration, surely (Score:3)
"it continues to be a mystery in terms of what practical benefits it offers consumers" - this is certainly an interesting marketing strategy.
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"is taking over" and "now runs on two devices" seem not to fit together that well.
Neither does " will say something like "6.20211109.1.3166243.""
I'm sure the version field somehow involves urandom and some fancy foot work to arrive at an answer that's "close enough" instead of exactingly correct information we're use to computers calculating.
without eyeballs most bugs are invisible (Score:5, Informative)
zx_status_t sys_debuglog_create(zx_handle_t rsrc, uint32_t options, user_out_handle* out) { LTRACEF("options 0x%x\n", options);
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That's a little worrying, considering security was one of the primary reasons for building Fuchsia in the first place.
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up of geniuses that write very clever and complex code
Nah, that's just the C++.
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Nah, that's just the C++.
Ha! I don't disagree...
No. (Score:5, Funny)
It seems the growth rate slowed down. First, it went from 0 to 1; that's an infinite growth rate. Now it's just 1 to 2, that's a mere doubling.
Performance (Score:2)
I'd really like to see a performance analysis of Fuchsia. When I looked through the code before, it seemed really inefficient.
What SoCs does Fuchsia support? (Score:2)
Looks like the next max is an Amlogic T931. I wonder if they will be able to port it to a current phone processor?
Because many of the silicon vendors, especially those with names beginning with Q, keep their chips secret. There's no docs. They give you an old kernel that's massively hacked, has a ton of binary firmware blobs, and probably a half dozen or more bootloaders that are binary only too.
Merely trying to port it to a newer version of the Linux kernel is all but impossible. Do Google's flagship ph
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I am pretty sure Google just says to Amlogic "give us the docs or we will not use your chip next time".
It is Google who has the bargaining power here. They can use any chip they want for a device like this and there are tons of options, this is not like a cell phone where you only have a few options.
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Yes, exactly this. Google can do what ever it wants with the code without having to release it, including licensing it with what ever terms it pleases. This whole smart display thing is kind of low key brilliant. They're getting real usage on devices they have complete control over , and people don't really care about them crashing or what not. So when they get to the real hardware they want to run this on ( chrome books, phones, tablets, watches, etc etc), all of the easy bugs will have been found, securi
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Oh and hey Dart wasn't a complete waste of resources, they found a use for it! Some exec was pretty happy about that one after losing the web scripting to Typescript.