Google Glass gets 2GB of RAM. Think about this. Two gigs of RAM Just ahead of its annual I/O developer conference, Google has announced some changes to its Glass Explorer program. It's not clear who will reap the benefits, though. Most notably, Google announced via the Glass team's official Google+ page that future headsets will ship with 2GB of RAM, up from the 1GB they've been shipping …
Not down south - they'd still pronounce it "glarse" when spelt glass.
Up here in the north nobody really cares, you can carry on with Glassholes. :)
Personally I'd rather have the upcoming round watch from Motorola than the glass anyway, but since I no longer own an android phone that won't be happening. :(
"But I want it to be. Glassholes are some of the most abhorrent people on this earth.
It I was an employer I wouldnt employ a Glasshole. Unless I was in the Stockmarket biz or marketing. You know, those areas that produce nothing."
Well I'm a fireman and I'm looking at ways to use the Glass display to show data from thermal imagers to both firefighters working inside, and Chiefs monitoring outside.
You know, useful stuff.
I may be a Glasshole, but with your attitude you resemble a manky armpit mate.
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"only 682MB of free RAM after it boots the Android OS"
So the OS to run a pair of glasses has a 300+MB footprint before it does anything useful. How depressing.
Icon: (Actually not so...) old fart who can remember when 300MB was a large hard drive, used by an OS with a footprint two orders of magnitude smaller, which did essentially the same job.
When the glasses are pretty much a fully-fledged computer on your face, 300MB isn't so depressing.
Jesus, how much of an old fart do I feel when someone describing themselves as an "old fart" thinks 300MB was a large hard drive.
Your 300MB hard drive computer with an OS taking up just 3MB; did it have a 5MP camera capable of 720P recording, 1.2GHz processor, Wifi, Bluetooth, gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, ambient light sensor, proximity sensor, and all the drivers, stacks and APIs to support the above and more?
Oh yes, reminded me too - way back when I upgraded my brothers PC motherboard...needed to make some veroboard adapters for the SIP > SIL sockets. One edge of the Vero strips sat in the SIL socket carefully crafted ends to fit the clips, soldered a row of DIP pcb sockets (cut in half to make SIL) to the other edge sort of surface mount for compactness....
>>>> I remember when a 40 (yup, four-zero) meg HDD was considered huge... and a luxury.
When I ordered my first pc I paid for a 20 meg hdd but it arrived with a 30 meg.
I remember thinking "this is great, but it's pointless as no one will ever need so much space".
I guess that's my "640k" moment..
"Your 300MB hard drive computer with an OS taking up just 3MB; did it have a 5MP camera capable of 720P recording, 1.2GHz processor, Wifi, Bluetooth, gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, ambient light sensor, proximity sensor, and all the drivers, stacks and APIs to support the above and more?"
"5MP camera capable of 720P recording" -- Capable of all that, but apparently not capable of being switching off when you aren't using it. (That's unless you count the 21st century definition of "off", as in "still on but not talking to you".)
"Wifi, Bluetooth" -- ooh network drivers. Yes, we had those back then.
"gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, ambient light sensor, proximity sensor" -- external devices don't cost footprint per se and these ones only deliver handfuls of bytes of data in response to the moral equivalent of serial commands. We had those back then as well.
"1.2GHz processor" -- riiight, coz the extra Hertz consume RAM, don't they...er.
"and all the drivers, stacks and APIs to support the above" -- for the above, that would probably be just a few internal busses and an IP stack, and I think the answer was probably again "yes". You might quibble with the speed of the internal bus, but like I said earlier, sheer Hertz don't actually cost RAM.
"and more" -- well the "more" is pretty much what I was complaining about. The fifty background daemons started by default, each pre-allocating gobs of page-locked RAM so that in the unlikely event that they are used they can be sure of starting up Reeaally Fast, the whole system written in some many-layered bloat-fest of HTML-on-bytecodes-on-JITted-something-or-other, ...
Let's face it. This is 300MB because it was cheaper for Google to up the hardware spec than it would have been to trim down the stock Android that they run on it. I accept the economics, but still reckon it smacks of laziness and a lack of professional pride on the part of the developers.
More worrying is that given an entire OS only needs 300MB, that the application developers can't fit their offerings into twice as much!
TBH I think all developers should be given half the spec of the devices delivered to end users. That way they might cut down on the bloat!
(And before I catch too much flame, I'm a developer!).
""only 682MB of free RAM after it boots the Android OS"
So the OS to run a pair of glasses has a 300+MB footprint before it does anything useful. How depressing."
Don't forget the memory to the graphics card. It is shared, and subtracted from the 1GiB.
Same thing with mobiles. They tout the memory - but forget to say it is shared with the graphics card.
Privacy etc has surely been covered to death elsewhere
But there's no way i'd be able to say "ok glass, ..." like i'm some indecisive prick who can't think ahead of his command and is deferring to glass by posting something into his audio suggestion box
I hope the command is redefinable
"ok glass... this may sound weird but hear me out and this just might work..."
Engage!
Hasta la vista, baby!
Don't panic!
Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
I'll be back. (This works because it's both an instruction to activate Google Glass, and an advisory to whoever you're with that you'll be distracted for a moment by what you're looking at on the display).
But, perhaps most suitable, and again serving as both an instruction to Glass and an advisory to people you're with: Smile, you're on candid camera!
Edit: Or a slightly misquoted Denis Leary songtitle: I'm a glasshole!
I'm liking 'go-go gadget' and 'by the power of greyskull' as options. And I guess other TV references like HAL, Slave, Zen and KITT should be options too. Then you can pick your favourite.
I also quite like, 'Brain Butler'. As in, "Brain Butler, where can I get a G&T?" Or, "Brain Butler photograph these oiks and email to the police."
Then, rather than pairing them to a phone, we could have a drone to do our bidding. So that instead of giving me directions to the nearest pub, my quadrocopter can fly off to the pub for me, purchase my G&T with pay-by-bonk, and bring it back to my outstretched hand.
As drone technology improves I should be able to simultaneously watch an outdoor concert, napalm the band on the second stage who's overloud bass is distracting me, while having a picnic delivered to me, instead of having to queue and pay for the overpriced food/drink available inside the venue.
Universal recording activation command should be
Oops
But only if it includes the ability to delete recording assuming one survives the moment. Other expletives are available. Just beware apps that link iWatch biomonitors to Glassholes, especially if sponsored by insurance companies or accident lawyers.
I love the idea of Glass but have never understood why it needs so much hardware. It's never going to replace the phone (at least not in it's current iteration) so it's essentially a remote screen, mic, speakers and camera. It should really be trying to hand the meaty stuff off to the phone it is inevitably connected to.
That way we can have long battery life, simple APIs and possibly a great reduction in cost too.
Is the only way to activate and interface with these things by voice command? In which case, I can't see how they will ever displace a phone, as they will be effectively useless in:
Quiet offices
Restaurants
Trains
Buses
Any quiet public spaces
Theatres
Presentations
Churches/Mosques etc
Lifts
Toilets
Anywhere it is not socially acceptable to randomly start talking, without making people around you feel very uncomfortable, I can't see how these will work.
Since the less well-mannered use their cellphones in these places anyway, why would you think they would Glass any different? Will the RAM upgrade increase their intelligence or situational awareness?
I went to a funeral recently and the minister had to ask everyone to turn off their cellphones. A couple of idiots were texting away and ignored him. Meh....
It's never too late to reenact the the last war. Fifteen years from now (like Star Trek lovers), bar owners and others will hold Glasshole reenactments in dark places: saving electricity and protecting their quaint point of view from public exposure.
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