Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich [LWN.net]

Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich

Posted May 16, 2012 15:02 UTC (Wed) by ewan (subscriber, #5533)
In reply to: Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich by drag
Parent article: Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich

"Each application has a restricted set of APIs that they use"

Which is fine when all of your devices are phones or tablets (i.e. big phones) and you can require the hardware to be fitted to the requirements of the OS. If you want to run general purpose computing on general purpose computers you just can't do that.

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Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich

Posted May 17, 2012 6:46 UTC (Thu) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]

That doesn't really make any sense today. Phones are more or less general purpose computing now. Tablets even more so.

CapDesk

Posted May 17, 2012 7:13 UTC (Thu) by gmatht (guest, #58961) [Link]

Even for Android some popular programs need root. Most desktop applications should be easy to implement in a CapDesk like environment, where e.g. documents cannot be opened except via a trusted file open dialog box. Even some existing GTK applications may be able to be partially limited this way by Plash. For those rare applications that really do require bypassing these security measures, maybe requiring them to either be packaged by engineers with 2+ years experience, or only be run on devices that have been explicitly "rooted", isn't such a bad thing.

Also, when I think of "general computation" I usually think of Turing completeness. Running a Turing machine is as safe or safer than loading a webpage.