This tweet from Tom Warren made me smile. So, it’s 2012 and tablets are finally able to do what the Amiga did in 1985. Seems like a bit of a stretch to be excited about that, right? Sure, until I caught myself getting excited – only a bit, but still – by this piece of news. Update: removed me being an annoyed child.
On the web, I’ve often heard people ask for multiuser support for their tablets. Especially families with children where the iPad or Android tablet is shared between family members, the desire to have your own little digital corner can be strong. Currently, this is not possible with any tablet, so you’ll have to get all fiddly with multiple email accounts and other things.
To avoid confusion, we’re talking about multiple different user-accessible accounts – Android is, of course, at its core, 100% multiuser, just like iOS.
I’m pretty sure Apple is working on this, but as it turns out, so is Google. With Android being open, we can actually see the first bits of this in action. The first rudimentary bits and pieces to enable multiuser support can be found in Jelly Bean, and with a bit of hacking, they can be enabled, as XDA user zanderman112 discovered. A few commands in a terminal, and you have a second user account with its own homescreen, as well as the ability to switch users from the power button menu.
As explained, the feature is far from ready, and ought to be used at your own risk. Still, it shows Google is working on bringing multiuser to Android, which should be a boon for families sharing a tablet. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if this is something we’ll see in iOS 7 or 8, too. It just makes sense.
It’s strange to realise that very basic and elementary things, which we’ve taken for granted for eons, are heralded as revolutionary new features that get everyone all excited. Windows 8 allows multiple windows side-by-side on a tablet? The future has arrived! Google is working on multiuser for Android? The progress we make!
Since I know a few ex-Be engineers work at Google, I will be sorely disappointed if they don’t shoehorn Baron in there somewhere.
So for multi-user operating systems you choose… Amiga?
Really? You make it seem like those dudes in 1969 that came up with UNIX used the Delorean (before it was built) to jump forward in time to 1985 to rip off Amiga… oh and Multics, which was already multi-user and over-the-hill when Unix copied some of its parts, must have had a *second* Delorean to go forward in time to 1969 to rip off Unix’s copy of the ripped off Amiga multi-user support! Wow.. that’s a lot of Deloreans!
Oh.. P.S. –> In addition to me questioning your dubious references… your reference to Amiga is also factually inaccurate since Amiga in 1985 did *not* support multiple users (in fact, much much newer versions of Amiga still don’t support multiple users).
Don’t believe me? Here’s a quote from an article detailing the Fast File system that was not even available in the earlier versions of Amiga:
“There are many bright design ideas making the AmigaOS a very special thing, but the file system was not exactly part of it. It is prone to invalidation, holds redundant data, and its directory structure is comparatively slow to traverse. It also lacks any concept of multi-user environments.” See: http://wiki.osdev.org/FFS_%28Amiga%29
If your filesystem doesn’t support multi-user access control, then you don’t have a multi-user OS, even if there is a stupid login screen for multiple users (which there wasn’t BTW).
You seem to have confused *multi-tasking* with *multi-user*. While Amiga did have multi-tasking, that ain’t the same thing as a multi-user environment. Oh, and multi-tasking wasn’t all that unique since real Unix flavours had already gotten pre-emptive multi-tasking by 1985 anyway.
If you are going to pine for the fjords, why not whine about SkyOS or HURD or some other dead OS that was *really* out there. Amiga was a corporate sellout compared to those guys.
Edited 2012-08-04 02:43 UTC
The Amiga in 1985 also didn’t have usb support,an integrated display,ect,ect,ect.
It’s really funny to see these Amiga and Beos fan boys running around acting like the Amiga and Be machines were the machines that most people wanted. They weren’t.
In fact they were far from it. In fact if I remember right the Commodore 64 outsold the Amiga during the Amiga’s production run.
True. As much as I loved my Amiga, the damn thing didn’t have memory protection! At least I don’t have to reboot my iPhone when Mobile Safari crashes.
Yeah, because USB was a killer feature on the C64
</sarcasm >
There weren’t any USB devices, so it would have been a Useless Serial Bus I guess.
hence the </sarcasm > part of my post
I thought I’d made the context pretty obvious but I guess some people really need everything categorically spelt out for them….
Edited 2012-08-04 23:53 UTC
I know and I spend some time thinking of a funny meaning for USB in a world without USB devices!
Granted the original post was wrong, Amiga still doesn’t have Multi-User support. But 1985? USB? You do realize that USB wasn’t even around in 1985? The only ones who had integrated displays were the piece of crap Macs that weren’t even color in 1985.
USB wasn’t even widely adopted until version 1.1 came out in ’98, which is 4 years after Commodore imploded.
For what it’s worth, I could get a USB card in my Amiga 4000, and eventually will so I can use an optical mouse with a wheel (probably the one thing that REALLY kills on usability.)
The fact that Amiga and Be both died before their time, and that they still have a decent amount of fans after all this time, goes to show that they are extremely usable operating systems and the light weight approach does have advantages. I’d like to see anything Microsoft has made in the last ten years run with as little resources. Or even software written for a Microsoft operating system that isn’t heavily bloated and requires at least 512MB of RAM within the last 10 years.
512MB of RAM is a crapload for AmigaOS, even for AmigaOS4.
I surely miss the days when programmers actually had to optimize their software, because they didn’t have Gigabytes of memory to work with. Hell, the company I work for now… there have been rumors that their software is going to start recommending 8GB of RAM to run! That’s just insane.
Not the only ones, there were some other machines. Though yeah, none as prominent as Macs (OTOH there’s also Commodore PET – from an earlier era, but still certainly used in quite large numbers in 1985).
But TBH I kinda preferred B&W in the machines from those times – 16 shades of grey (on a small B&W TV that was only mine, in my room) ultimately looked much better, more “refined” than the 16 colours of C64 (on the TV in a living room), IMHO.
Windows Mobile, Windows Fundamentals. And there is quite a lot of such light software.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if Windows 3.x or, particularly, Windows 95 have much more active users than BeOS and ~Amiga operating systems combined… does that mean you argue the worth of 3.x and 95 even more?
Anyway, requirements of Amiga OS or BeOS were also insane at some point. I certainly don’t miss the software from the old days, much more craptastic than is the case now (sure, there’s still a lot of crap around – but the point is, you have much greater chances of finding something decent at all, in a given software category; back then, that was less likely)
Edited 2012-08-07 07:47 UTC
I hear they are up to 50 shades now… <,<
Reading comprehension is your friend, you should really try harder. He wasn’t talking about multi-user on the Amiga, he was talking about multi-tasking, an entirely different thing. This was a lead-in to the discussion of multi-user environments on Android and iOS.
My reading comprehension is just fine, but the writing quality of the posters on this site leaves much to be desired. Any rational person who reads the actual words posted in the article in this site would come to the conclusion that Thom is saying that ancient Amiga’s had multi-user support that is just now being implemented for the first time ever in a mobile device… which is wrong but not the point.
Thom also posted a link to some random guy’s twitter account showing two windows on a Windows 8 tablet… So what….
1. Some idiot “twittering” that he managed to use Windows doesn’t mean that earlier mobile devices couldn’t multitask since they have been doing it for decades (yes, much much longer than Android or iOS have been around, and yes iOS *does* support pre-emptive multitasking even if Apple prevents garden variety apps from taking full advantage of it),
and
2. The useless Twitter post (aren’t they all useless?) that is not part of the text of this story is a logical non-sequitur to the remainder of the story… it looks like you could use some work on reading comprehension and logical reasoning instead of me.
P.S. –> To everyone still holding irrational nostalgia for Amiga, please direct me to all the multi-touch-enabled Amiga devices that had high-speed wireless data connectivity, OpenGL acclerated graphics, and support for 1080p H.264 playback. Amiga was a completely proprietary platform that only worked because Commodore exerted a level of control that makes Apple look like a hippy open-source startup.
The Amiga platform was doomed from the start because it assumed that no improvements to hardware or software were physically possible after 1985, while the “primitive” PC was designed from day 1 with the understanding that technology would progress forward.
Edited 2012-08-04 05:14 UTC
Uhm, you failed utterly and completely at reading comprehension. My god, this must be me some sort of new record.
It’s not a matter of reading comprehension when the material in question doesn’t actually state its meaning. You only referred to a tweet obliquely, you didn’t actually mention what the tweet was about.
I read that bit about the Amiga the same way. You can’t expect everyone to click on every link you post. If people did that, anyone who visited Wikipedia would die of exhaustion after spending 5 days at their computers reading every article that branched off the first one.
When one writes as casually as you do (let’s face it, your writing is a far cry from any sort of journalistic standard), their readers are bound to misinterpret something every now and then.
Reading the links is expected on OSAlert. This isn’t Engadget. When a link is in a story, it’s part of the story. Don’t complain if you don’t understand what a story is about if you only read half of it. That’s no my fault – it’s yours. I’m not going to spell everything out.
Edited 2012-08-04 09:36 UTC
Don’t be so hostile, not everything is meant as an insult or an attack on you. The fact is that many people just look at the title and the intro and then proceed to follow the comments — something that I do, too — for various reasons, so it might behoove to keep that in mind in the future, aye? Instead of only looking at the article as a whole why not also look at just the title and the intro as a separate entity and check that it conveys enough information about what’s going on.
I am not complaining, don’t really know about the other commenters, but there’s no need to get terribly worked over my comment. I am actually fairly certain I would’ve made the same mistake, something that one should just take as a learning experience and move on; mistakes and failures and the acceptance of those is the way we grow and improve ourselves.
The thing is – it does. However, if you don’t click the links – which, on the web, are an integral part of reading – then my responsibilities really end. I’m willing to put some effort into making sure that those who only read the intros get everything, but when people aren’t even going to click the links and want to have everything spelled out in the limited 5-6 lines of an intro, then I’m out. It’s ridiculous to expect that of me.
It’s basic netiquette to read the entire article before commenting. I’m already pretty cool and all by always making sure all the important links (to the actual news) are in the intro so people aren’t forced to read my drivel, but when people aren’t even willing to read the links in the first 5-6 lines (!) and just jump straight to commenting, I really have no sympathy if you misunderstood the article. That’s not my fault – it’s yours for not reading properly.
If you miss the first 15 minutes of a movie, you don’t get to complain at the director that the movie sucked because you didn’t understand it.
We did read the entire article. We just didn’t read every link. As I said before, if every person read every link in every (for example) Wikipedia article they read, they would never leave their computers.
It’s not like you would have had to spend three paragraphs explaining something, it would have taken but seven words: “… tweet about multi-tasking on the Surface tablet …”
Would you expect to have to read every source cited in an academic paper just to understand the paper itself? No. If you wanted more detail and explanation and data on the paper, you would dig into the sources. This is no different when writing on a blog or a news site.
Your condescending attitude is getting a bit offensive.
That’s fine – just don’t blame that on me. If you misunderstood what was going on in this case, the proper response is: “Oh, I misunderstood because *I* didn’t read the links. Could you elaborate on this please, next time? Thanks!”
You don’t do as the original poster did and just launch an all-out attack.
Comparing this to an academic paper is a bit silly, by the way. Thanks for the vote of confidence, but that’s like comparing a toddler’s doodle of a house to the Mona Lisa.
Edited 2012-08-04 11:13 UTC
I wouldn’t call the OP’s post an all-out attack, though he did seem to relish pointing out flaws a bit too much. For the record, I’ve been a lurker here for years. I only registered today because I thought the responses you and Morgan posted were dickish and condescending to an extreme. Of all the interesting, enraging and though-provoking things that have been posted over the years, the only thing that drove me to respond was the way you handled an obvious troll. Please keep that in mind.
Only comparing formats, not content. The medium is the message, my friend
Please go to this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bZKEhgieoc
The Tweet was literally 85 characters long. You’re seriously complaining about people not bothering to check a link to a tweet when you couldn’t bother to just add that tweet as-is?
85 characters. That’s all I need to say. Alas, you’ve made your mind and my comment was only a suggestion, so I’ll just leave this at that.
It would’ve taken 1.2 seconds to click the link.
Hey Thom, I’m not normally one to criticize, but this article is rather… well yeah.
Here’s why. The article is about Multi-User support on Android, then you mention the Amiga could do that in 1985, while the actual Tweets were talking about Windows 8 on the tablet.
You see why people were confused, angered, etc?
I don’t know if you’ve ever read any of those ‘which way’ or ‘choose your own adventure’ books as a kid, but I always thought it’d be cool to have a hyperlinked version (mind you I was thinking that before the WWW was out there, around 1993 or so when I found a program on my Atari ST where you could create documents with hyperlinks). In case you haven’t, the books were like so;
You see a road ahead that branches off to the left and right, if you’d like to go right, see page 36, if you’d like to go left, see page 49.
You basically did this;
If you’d like to read about Android’s soon to be available Multi-User options, please read this tweet about Windows 8 and how the Amiga supported multitasking in 1985 and Windows 8 users are excited they can attempt at using something that is almost 30 years old! If you’d really like to discuss Android’s new Multi-User options, please click play on the video below.
That’s the equivalent of reading “The Sword of Mysterious Power” and it having a reference to a page number on “The Amulet of Stinking Wealth.”
No, the introduction is about how we all get excited about tablets gaining features that we take for granted on regular machines – the article ends with this, too, coming full circle.
I’m deeply sorry that I mistakenly assumed that clicking links – three total – is something that’s very cumbersome to do.
Edited 2012-08-04 16:41 UTC
I honestly don’t understand why you are getting very butt hurt over people having a hard time understanding your intro. You should take it as a learning experience, try to make your intros more consistant with your titles. IMO the tweet had nothing to do with your title and it probably should have been added into its own paragraph in the read more section.
I’m getting annoyed not because of people misreading – shit happens with language – but because of how some people choose to express it. Instead of being constructive, like WereCat and a few others, we get people attacking me personally and OSAlert as a whole merely because of a language-related misunderstanding.
THAT pisses me off. OSAlert is not a one-way street where I just have to sit and be pretty, smile, and accept whatever verbal abuse is being flung my or OSAlert’ way.
Remember how I said you’re condescending and being dickish. You’re doing it again. I can’t believe you edited the post to include such childish comments. That’s shameful and unprofessional. It’s been five years since I started reading OSAlert daily but I can’t come back after seeing how poorly you reacted to a little criticism. No one called you names, yet you chose to attack a commenter’s intelligence. The OP was an obvious troll and you should’ve known better. Most other commenters simply pointed out that they were confused as well. One person seemed like they hadn’t read a blog before. The closest I got was saying that you write casually and that’s only because you do. This isn’t like a large newspaper where style guides have to be adhered to. You write about your anecdotal experiences and personal opinions on (often politicized) matters. I mean, after all, it’s a blog. Anyways, I have yet to see any “verbal abuse”. Despite that, you’ve all but called anyone who was confused by the post lazy, ignorant and possibly stupid. It’s honestly a bit shocking to see such a obviously emotional response come from someone who has been blogging consistently for what, seven years now? I think you need to step back and calm down before you start getting into it with commenters.
Edited 2012-08-04 19:18 UTC
If you feel offended just ignore it and read another article. It’s just way Thom is and others have made him aware of his weak points.
He won’t change, but let’s ignore the bad and enjoy the good.
Thom puts in a lot of work and on the outside it seems he’s the only OSAlert “team” member that actually does something. Without him it would be Game Over. So perhaps we should allow him some room to brutally attack us if that what it takes to have him continue putting time in this site.
This is one where I side with Thom: while it is clear he and I disagree on the introductionary part of this article it is still wrong to attack him or OSAlert. OSAlert isn’t one of those large news syndicates, it’s a lot more informal, not to mention that Thom isn’t actually getting paid for what he does; with not getting actually paid for his work and the somewhat informal tone OSAlert has maintained for YEARS there should be no expectancy of similar journalistic quality or objectivity as elsewhere — not to be taken as an insult, Thom.
We’re all supposedly adults here and being an adult means knowing when to stop, among other things. There are several comments now where people have pointed out how they felt and Thom has made it clear that he disagrees; we’re not paying him yet he has heard us, and that’s more-or-less all we should expect from him.
Now, both parties pull up your man-pants and shut the fuck up. This bickering contributes absolutely nothing.
That was class. I’d up-vote you but I already used up my voting powers. As a big fan of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone your comment hit the nail on the head.
Wow, the intro was very misleading, until I clicked the links.
That’s a poor summary period. The links should expand on the summary – but the summary should be accurate and consistent with the links, on it’s own.
I actually find myself agreeing; the title specifically talks about multi-user support and the small excerpt doesn’t mention anything to the contrary, so I , too, thought he was talking about multi-user.
Well, I had an Amiga and know it had multitasking and never saw any multiuser aspects of it, and am ashamed of agreeing with an obvious troll, but still in my first reading of the article I also thought you were talking about multiuser in Amiga.
Perhaps it is due to the title which makes you think about multiuser features, so the intro a slgihtly different subject end seeming out of place? I dunno, but it was easy to be mistaken.
The article has both multiuser and multitasking thrown in in the same paragraph. It’s all mixed in and very confusing. I followed the first twitter link expecting multiuser related stuff and found a picture of two Metro apps running at the same time. There is no coherency between the article and the title.
So I’m irrational because I happened to grok the meaning right away and you didn’t? You blame your lack of comprehension on the writing skills of a language arts major with a master’s degree, who has been writing in English (his second language to my knowledge) for many years, and is far better at it than me and many other native English speakers.
Face it, you misunderstood the article’s segue and are scrambling to blame someone else for what, quite honestly, doesn’t even matter. No one cares that you didn’t catch the meaning right off, except perhaps you.
But just in case you need it for future reference, here is a breakdown of the article flow in layman’s terms, with my explanation in braces:
This tweet from Tom Warren {regarding proper multitasking on a tablet} made me smile. So, it’s 2012 and tablets are finally able to do what the Amiga did in 1985. {the Amiga could multitask in 1985} Seems like a bit of a stretch to be excited about that, right? Sure, until I caught myself getting excited – only a bit, but still – {here’s the segue} by this piece of news. {about multi-user support on Android}
I find it really sad that I had to do that, but I hope it helps you in your future attempts at reading.
When I RTFP, I thought it was all about mutli-user too. After your clarification I now understand. Admittedly, I’m no genius!
No offense or sarcasm or flaming intended.
A language arts major should know how to properly write a sentence, how to separate topics in different paragraphs and how not to push “Submit” without letting the “writing” settle for a bit.
This “article” of his looks more like an amateurish “publish something” post, no different than a tweet, and completely violates the neutral-view policy of professional journalists. IMO, it’s totally out of place for a news site.
Thom, you should take your time to write and review before posting. This is not a blog of yours and I believe all personal opinion on part of the journalists should be in comments, not in the article. State the facts and leave all else to the comments section.
I’m also not a native english speaker, so I apologize if I’m not writing properly.
Nonsense. Anyone was allowed to write apps, games or even OS extensions for the Amiga without any interference from Commodore. No payment or permission was necessary.
If anything, that’s the wrong way around. Everyone knows the original IBM PC was a cobbled-together POS. 640k limit anyone?
Arguably, that’s exactly what killed the Amiga as a platform – it had very console-like dynamics (most people didn’t ever upgrade beyond 500-generation, didn’t see the need …since devs were targeting mostly
500-gen, because that was the fixed baseline everybody had), but without a matching business model: Commodore was expected to sell the largely ~fixed (tech-wise) Amigas at ever lower prices, new models mostly ignored, meanwhile being unable to extract money from dev houses.
Basically just what nearly killed Atari and brought the entire North American market down in the video game crash of 1983 (and C= was largely responsible for this one – it seems they didn’t really realise what happened, didn’t learn from it the way Nintento did)
No, all its tightly-integrated “niceness” is what killed the Amiga. How PC was cobbled-together is exactly the point: it wasn’t so fixed, could improve much more readily. And oh boy it did.
Mixed with economies of scale ( http://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/ and the next 5 …if you squint, you can see the share of Amiga there, I promise), R&D distributed among many PC-companies, there was nothing C= could do against such onslaught (maybe except for releasing, early on, an Amiga-derived gfx & sound PC expansion board, and try to make into a standard – but that would be heresy to many Amigans)
PC just turned out to be the better way of doing things – even the present Macs and Amigas are just PCs, really (only, the latter with some weird CPUs for no good reason)
Context is important, there was no context here. Sorry, I’m with the masses – Thom messed up. What Thom did is the same as this:
“The king was in my home town today. He is an idiot. John is still my friend, no matter what.”
Who is the idiot? John or the king? Sentences that rely on inside knowledge are unhelpful. Sentences that don’t convey enough information are open to misinterpretation.
As another person said miles down a thread, add 3 words:
Let’s also deflate the argument about links – I read the front page news in an RSS feed. There are no links in the body of the RSS feed text, so your argument, and Thom’s, is pretty much moot. No excuses, terse is terse. And misleading is misleading no matter how much Thom thinks we should just understand what is in his head. As someone else mentioned, poor journalism shines through on this site recently. No neutral POV or reporting, no objectivity, and falling in to personal Blog territory. If there was another site that dealt with the OS topics in detail, I’d be off here for good. I’ve been trying to help by submitting as many stories as I can recently (and 3 or so have been featured), but it’s like pissing in the wind sometimes.
Given the overwhelming minority I seem to be in on this issue, I’m inclined to agree at this point. However, I stand behind my replies to CajunArson because instead of asking for clarification or offering his own interpretation, he out and out attacked Thom with a ton of ultimately irrelevant information about just how non-multi-user Amiga was. He basically said “It appears to me that you said the sky is green, so fuck you and by the way here’s five hundred studies saying which exact shade of blue the sky is”. I found that to be rude and offensive and I chose to speak up about it.
And I get it, really I do. I’ve come a long way from the angry nerd I used to be, lashing out at any perceived slight or calling someone stupid because they misspelled a word here or mixed up some terminology there. I was an asshole years ago, but I’ve grown up. Now, to see someone else (and CajunArson isn’t the only one by far) act like the child I used to be, well I chose to educate in my sarcastic way. It turned out that a lot more people were confused by Thom’s summary than I thought possible (again, I got it right away but I had also read the tweets, a habit I’ve always had; it makes reading a Wikipedia article an hours-long adventure sometimes). That is why I haven’t commented again on that particular subject until now.
I’ve also tried submitting a couple of times, but either Thom already had a similar submission lined up that got posted instead, or (I’m assuming) it wasn’t deemed interesting enough to publish. No skin off my nose, I don’t take offense to it. If I did, I’d just start my own tech blog and write to my heart’s content. Thing is, as much as I work and still try to maintain a social life, I just don’t have time to do the heavy lifting. I’m happy with occasionally submitting articles here and at other community-oriented news sites and if something sticks, hey there’s my fifteen minutes of fame.
Sorry, but this is what we get int he RSS feed, exactly this, nothing more:
Where is the clear change of topic or any indication that the entire paragraph, save last line, is unrelated to the title? None. Doesn’t exist. There’s are no links, there is no other contextual information. Therefore it is misleading, end of story.
You may want to send an email to Adam or David about that. It may be the way the OSAlert code formats the RSS or it could be your reader, and it might behoove you to find out for sure. I’m leaning towards OSAlert code myself, since I vaguely remember seeing links but not being able to click on them back when I used RSS readers. I certainly don’t think it is intentionally misleading as you suggest; that would be highly counterproductive to the site’s existence, and quite silly to boot.
There is a difference between a system being multi-user account, [one user at a time], and multi-simultaneous user account [multiple users using system at one time].
Amega a desktop operating system with one keyboard and monitor attached could not be used by two users at the same time, but did have support for multiple user accounts(Exactly like windows 7 Pro Home desktops today).
Tablets should be simular to that, where its unlikely that two people would ever be able to use it at the same time.
No, it didn’t… AmigaOS had no concept of users, and neither did the filesystem…
You had to use a third party addon like MuFS (multi user filesystem) in order to get any concept of users, and even then it was very easy to bypass the permissions system if you wanted.
It was a single user desktop OS, just like windows, dos, macos and tos were at the time.
Oh my god. YOU ARE SUCH A TROLL.
IOS, android, webOS, all had ‘rudimentary’ multi user support. Only the OS itself, but not the GUI.
Still, it had it.
Windows 8 probably right now has the best support for multiuser of the tablet OSes.
And the worse support for computers overall.
You’re so clever. Except you’re not, you’re actually really dumb. You suck and so does your filesystem.
I’m sure some will say they absolutely need this.
I just don’t think it’s very useful at all. A phone is inherently “single-user”. You don’t share a smartphone with many people. As for the whole “work/play” thing … you don’t need multi-user for that. Decently implemented profiles could take care of that.
I just hope they don’t start using ACLs on the filesystem (even if it is just POSIX ACLs) because i see many an opportunity for bugs and weird behavior.
You totally missed the word “tablet” in there, didn’t you? Tablets are often shared among family members, you know.
Even there, it would be of limited use.
I’m sorry, but i just don’t see a compelling case for it.
Well, even if you don’t see the need for that it’s still one of the most-often requested features. Just to throw a few links at you I’ll offer these: http://www.slashgear.com/android-multi-user-support-uncovered-in-je… , http://www.androidannoyances.com/post/84 , http://mobilesyrup.com/2012/07/30/multi-user-support-could-be-comin… , http://www.androidauthority.com/multi-user-support-coming-soon-to-a… , http://androidcommunity.com/multi-user-accounts-coming-to-android-t… and so on. You can find comments from people asking for this dating all the way to 2010.
You seriously think sharing your email and IM accounts with your whole family is a good idea? Put it like this: there’s not a single compelling case for a single user environment on a tablet, it’s harmful and stupid, whereas multi-user is known to actually work.
Of course there’s a compelling case for it.
But don’t you know? They want you to buy a tablet for EVERY user!
<sarcasm>
Hey, Microsoft got away with saying that security was so old on Unix platforms, and that 40+ year old tech is just so outdated. Why can’t they say that about Multi-user support? I mean why on earth would we want that, it’s like wanting everyone to go back to tie-dyed shirts and bell bottoms!
</sarcasm>
Seriously though, there is this weird push for Android to be everywhere (including desktop and laptop) and it really can’t get there without some form of multi-user.
Personally it’ll be a cold day in hell when I have it on my desktop, but on my HP Touchsmart it may not be too bad. Too bad none of the current builds work on that…
One word: schools.
School buys 30 tablets, gives them to the socials teacher, who wants to use them with his 4 socials classes. IOW, 4 separate users will be using the tablets.
In a perfect world, each user would have their own, separate account on the tablet, with separate home folders for storing their files, separate e-mail accounts, etc.
Currently, it is next to impossible for students to propely share tablets. iOS, especially, is inherently single-user, to the point of being locked into a single AppleID and e-mail account. Teachers across our district are discovering that tablets are not ‘extra portable computers’. Instead, they are single-user, unshareable devices.
I also don’t think multi user capabilities on a phone will have widespread use. Its already hard enough for some users to let them use multi-user on a computer, let alone on a phone.
For tablets it does make sense where the tablet is shared.
I would like to point out that while I agree that a cellphone is over 99% personal, it is that what makes control of the remaining 1% extremely important.
Every now and people are forced to lend their device to a coworker/little-daughter/significant-other, for a phone call, or a quick check of the internet, or a pacifying game of Plants vs. Zombies or Cut the Rope. I don’t doubt that your own device is squeaky clean of anything questionable, but maybe I would not like to spoil a surprise present to my significant other by being caught browsing jewellery pages, or letting my 6-year old nephew read a stored watsapp chat revealing that Santa is just a fiction.
Even if your moral fiber can defy Mother Theresa’s, you might not want to let your little son change the backgrounds, shift the icons, delete your pics or read your email.
I find it hard to accept that it has already taken so long to offer a guest mode in every smartphone. Don’t Apple engineers have any concept of privacy? Now, about Google engineers… I won’t bother ask the same question.
Edited 2012-08-06 09:58 UTC
Sharing of mobile phones is quite common in some areas, existing multi-user capabilities of phones are already widely used.
For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone#Use_of_mobile_phones
And if you’d go to conversations.nokia.com and search for (IIRC) Nokia 1280 for example (not the only one, there are “higher” models like that; or search some keywords around mobile phones and developing world, emerging markets, the next billion), you’d see that many phones can have few separate accounts for contacts, messages, call management timers and counters – specifically to be shared.
Yes, it’s not exactly about what we think of as smartphones, but a) what is a smartphone, anyway? (inexpensive, sub-40^a‘not without contract, S40 phones also have apps, are also used for browsing: http://www.opera.com/smw/2011/11/ ) b) Android will trickle down to price brackets in question (and there are still cultural factors)
Edited 2012-08-12 00:19 UTC
Hey! Let’s begin to ask for stupid and unnecessary features on mobile OSes too!! Yeah!!
Ruining PCs and Mac was not enough! We want more shit! xD
IMHO Android guys have to improve the performance of their OS on tablets… even my iPad 1 feels faster and snappier than many 2012 Android tablets.
Multi-user support is hardly a stupid or unnecessary feature, though; many families only buy one tablet that is shared between all the residents, but since there is no proper multi-user support when one makes a change to something it applies to all the aforementioned residents. Similarly, many corporations are forced to supply each and every employee with a tablet instead of allowing them to share one.
Looking at your comment and the ignorance displayed I’m gonna go on a limb here and just assume you’re trying to troll, or you’re just being blinded by rose-tinted glasses. Either way your credibility is rather low.
Well, I think that keeping it simple and fast is way more important than adding dubious features. I’m an old fashioned unix guy you know.
I used an Asus Transformer and I felt it pretty slow compared to my crappy iPad 1. The Asus has 3x or 4x more power than my iPad… It should fly… but It doesn’t.
And I know that saying anything against Android in OSAlert decreases my credibility and turns me into a “troll”, but I don’t care, I’m not a politician. xD
You’re an old-fashioned Unix guy and think multi-user is unnecessary bloat, and that it has any impact whatsoever on speed? Somehow I don’t believe you.
I think that adding multi-user support to a mobile OS is not a priority at all.
Android developers should focus on performance. iOS is way ahead in this particular matter, It feels faster even using slower hardware.
Smoother, not faster. There’s more to OS performance than scrolling and transitions.
I’d think you are right, I don’t know enough about Android internals to tell you why It feels slow. I speak from an end user pov here.
I love the hardware of Android devices, they are way ahead of expensive Apple offerings… but when you actually use the devices they feel much slower than even vintage iOS devices. It’s shocking.
And I fear that multi-user support will increase this slowness, actually… I’m pretty sure of that because I dealt with multiuser issues during my career.
I mean, the device will have to store the state of the session when you switch between users (running apps, configs, connections, ecc)… Android has to keep that state in memory somehow, in RAM or swap it to the flash memory… It’s not a minor concern, It can be very resource hungry.
Then you have the file owner/permission issue. You don’t want that your files can be modified by another user. Android will have to implement that too.
That’s why I think adding multiuser support to a mobile OS is a big fat stupid idea. Good multiuser support is a complex thing. It’s not trivial nor “free”. KISS.
Does your Windows, Mac or Linux device slow down as you add more and more user accounts on it?
Of course the state would be saved in the permanent storage, there would be no benefit from keeping it in RAM at all times except when you switch users, and well, that’s not something you do every few minutes. It doesn’t consume resources after it’s been saved to storage.
ext2/3/4 filesystem already handles that, Google only needs to check that Android itself uses those. It’s not as large an issue as you seem to believe.
Proper multi-user support is mostly a kernel – and filesystem – thing, the layers on top of that are merely an extension of kernel and filesystem functionality.
Proper multi-user support is mostly a kernel – and filesystem – thing, the layers on top of that are merely an extension of kernel and filesystem functionality.
Yeap, the problem is that you have to present it to the user in a friendly and mobile-like way. Use cases for Phone/tablets are totally different than a PC.
For example, every time you lock/unlock your device, you will have to authenticate with your passcode AND your user. It’s minor detail yes, but there’s lots of minor details with you go multiuser.
To name one big technical issue: Android allows user level apps to run as a daemon in the background. If you go multi-user you have to keep running their daemons in the background even if the active user don’t use them. It impacts directly on performance and energy consumption.
As I said before, there’s lots of “details”. Multiuser isn’t trivial at all.
Err, why would you have to do that? You’d unlock the device just as you do now, only that there could be a dropdown-menu in some corner for changing to another user. When logging in to Windows, for example, do you always type your username or do you just click on your avatar? Most people do the latter and there is absolutely no technical reason for why it couldn’t work the same on Android. Similarly, instead of a password one could just use the same methods one uses already: a PIN, face unlock, gestures etc.
Android could just as well kill the daemons when the user is changed and restart them when that previous user logs in the next time.
It’s more trivial than you think. You’re giving a lot of totally bogus “issues” as examples, like e.g. that one must always log in with a username and password, and I don’t know if you are deliberately trying to make it look harder than it actually is or if you just don’t really understand multi-user task – and filesystem – mechanics. If it is the latter I offer to explain things or I can point you to resources if you would like to know more.
You cannot do that. If you kill daemons some notifications and events would never happen. People use phones and tablets as agendas you know.
If you want to be able to lend your tablet/phone for small period of time without compromising your data, the right thing to do is to create a temporal stateless Guest User system like Mac OS X has. You don’t need multiuser to do that. That would be fine.
Multiuser support is too expensive in a mobile device, there’s so much state information to keep… and precious resources like energy that you can’t waste stupidly.
I think you are oversimplifying for the sake or being right, You have no idea about technical implications and I don’t blame you, not everybody is an engineer.
You don’t need to be an engineer for that. I am a software developer, I’ve been playing around with OSes and software ever since I was 12 years old – that is 18 years ago. But really, you stubbornly refuse to listen to anything and cling to your delusions and I can’t be arsed to continue this.
I’m only saying that supporting multiuser is a trade off.
It’s not free, there’s a lot of technical implications, It adds complexity. That’s a fact, not an opinion.
In a personal mobile device, I’m not willing to pay that cost.
I’m afraid that you cannot use iOS or Android, then, as both already have all the low-level stuff in there already and thereby you are “paying” the cost every time you use such a device.
First of all multi-user for a phone is stupid, why would anyone share a phone? Only when your kid wants to play a game.
On a tablet it makes more sense, but there’s no need to have apps of the previous user to keep running. Just save the settings and I’d be happy.
I have an iPad, which my wife, son and sometimes other people use. I don’t want them to mess up my stuff, they may need other apps and not apps I use, put them in another order.
Personally I don’t even need/want authentication. If I didn’t trust my family members they wouldn’t get my iPad anyway. A tablet is for quick and easy use, not for time consuming login systems (a few seconds is already an annoyance).
My phone had a passcode, my tablet hasn’t.
Android already support file permissions, file ownership, and multiple user accounts and groups. Just drop to a shell and look at the output of ‘ls -l’. Just about every app on Android runs under its own UID.
However, that’s all below the GUI. Above the GUI, there’s only 1 real user account, one ‘home’ directory, one set of settings, etc.
All it’s really missing is the GUI layer, and splitting the ‘home’ directory into properly segregated directories with the appropriate permissions in place.
There are several add-on packages that do this, mostly from companies looking to add ‘work’ and ‘play’ profiles to a device. Now, Google is just incorporating similar features into the OS.
You mentioned having tried Transformer Pad but I got the image that it’s been a while ago. If true then that Pad was most likely still running Honeycomb; ICS 4.0 saw quite a large boost to graphics performance and fluidity, and the new Jelly Bean 4.1 improved that even more. Have you, or have you not tried an Android-tablet with similar specs as that iPad running Android 4.0.1 or newer? If not then that is most likely the reason for your experience.
Also, Android developers are improving Android’s performance. You’re just assuming that the developers can only work on one thing at a time which, quite obviously, isn’t true. In fact it’s often detrimental to development efforts to have a really large team all trying to work on the same thing, that’s exactly why e.g. F/OSS developers tend to dedicate certain parts of the software to certain developers instead of all concentrating on only one thing at a time. Ie. you’re complaining about something that is already being worked on and you’re complaining about it as if one cannot work on other things, too, at the same time.
I too got confused about the title and intro. Amiga, multi user, a link to something about Windows 8, multi tasking, Android!? I wasn’t planning on clicking the links, but I was totally confused about the Amiga and multi user support.
But now the chaos has settled I just like to mention I’d like some kind of multi user for the iPad (not a phone). I guess most tablets get shared amongst family members. Right now my son ruins my game progresses, because he plays MY games.
http://www.redmondpie.com/apple-looking-into-multi-user-ipad-suppor… might interest you.
If they’ve been working on it since 2010 I’m not holding my breath.
Well, apparently Google has been working on multi-user support on Android since 2011, so it’s only a year apart. Besides, if Android gets multi-user Apple will feel the push to do the same for iOS; I have no doubt there will be multi-user for you eventually.
I just wonder how old are you Thom?
What was yours first computer? What was your “computer path”? Did you ever had Amiga?…
Beside, title and intro are confusing.
And regarding multiuser suport for tablets – “face login” ability would be perfect for this! It would be fast and simple way for multiuser funcionality on tablets.
What about a finger print reader on the home button?
Well, call me old fashioned but I’m actually not very fond of these face ‘n’ finger identifiers. Give me a login and password and I can log in with a mask on and no fingers. Ehm, well with at least one finger of course.
No fingers necessary, just use your tongue (though not when your significant other is in the room. This is not anecdotal. Really. I mean it!)
I once broke my arm during a basketball game. The temporary bandage allowed me to bend my wrist a little and type. But then the real bandage was put on and I couldn’t type with my right hand. I tried with my nose, but that didn’t work.
Maybe I’ll try your tongue technique next time. Agree with the wife thing.
Though, on capacitive screens, not when there’s some saliva on it. I suppose you have to stick it out some time before use and, uhm, wait it to dry out a bit…
I have some Compaq iPaq with finger print reader
… yea… maybe not best idea. but still – selecting user and typing password seems to complicated for tablets… maybe selecting user and drawing pass like on Androids is winning combination
It’s a bit easy to look over a shoulder and see the “code”, but it is a very convenient way to unlock.
“Nuance’s Nina to enable iOS apps to authenticate users by the sound of their voice”
“my voice is my passport”
Didn’t you see 2001? Learn from mistakes made in the past!
I was very upset when the iPad shipped without multiuser support. As expensive as most good tablets are, it only made sense to share one with my wife. However, after using a kindle fire and her iPad for some time, I think it’s crazy to add multiuser support to a tablet right now.
Storage:
The problem with tablets is the storage space. Sure, in the future where the cloud takes over it won’t matter. Right now it does. In fact, Amazon’s latest downgrade of their cloud player and cloud drive system make my kindle fire less useful because there is less cloud storage available for my content. I can pony up the $25, but it seems silly when I’m mostly in Apple’s ecosystem anyway. Not to mention the average new user would still be mad to lose something they already had. I want my tablet to have 128GB of storage or more. For a family of four, that means 32GB per user which is the current standard I think. That or actually make good cloud services. I still prefer to have my stuff on my devices though.
Quotas:
The next problem with tablets is they need more than just logins, they also need disk quotas. Who wants their kid to fill up their tablet?
Resistance:
Device manufacturers want people to buy four tablets, not give everyone a login. They make more money that way.
Damage:
My boss shared his tablet with his kid and the little guy broke it. Him and a friend decided to sit on it. Now it won’t charge. That’s another problem with multiuser. It’s safer to buy kids a cheaper, more durable tablet that can be easily replaced. You don’t hand them an iPad or the latest samsung android device.
Sharing content:
if you don’t have kids, sharing a tablet could work. I can easily see sharing my wife’s iPad with her. I have loaned her my kindle fire so she can read some books I bought. The key here is that we want to share content with each other. There has to be a way to do that and most DRM schemes are against family members sharing content. My wife has to know my apple password so she can stream my iTunes content on her Mac or if the apple tv gets screwed up again. I can’t permit her access to my music and videos.
Atleast here in Finland most people seem content with 16GB storage, so 64GB would suffice for four people in most cases here. Well, 64GB is actually perfectly reachable, just buy a tablet with microSDHC-slot and you can add quite a lot of space there. These days most of these microSDHC-devices actually support microSDXC-cards up to 128GB even though they don’t advertise this anywhere — even my old Tegra2 – based Iconia Tab A500 supports those.
This I agree with, but, well, there is no technical reason for why quotas couldn’t be implemented. Linux-kernel has had support for quotas for a decade so all Google needs to do is add an utility for settings the limits and a warning in the status bar when you’re about to exceed your quota.
I’d hazard a guess that it’s not much more difficult on iOS, either.
Good thing, then, that device manufacturers have no say over this.
If your children are still very young, yes, but if you’re children are closer to 14 then such stuff is unlikely to happen. Atleast if you’ve raised your children properly.
That problem doesn’t really have anything to do with the OS as it’s all about the content creators themselves, you should complain to them or move to another service.
Its not a good idea to store a lot of content on a tablet anyway. It takes ages to sync, and when the device is lost or hosed, the data is gone too.
Next to cloud there are also local storage alternatives which offer storage capabilities way beyond the internal storage. Modern NAS appliances offer native ways on Post-PC devices for working on centralized storage directly.
The Amiga and Beos are multitasking operating systems.
Not multiuser, you have only one account.
Same as android 4 ics. It can run multiple programs at the same time but you cannot logout so other users can still read your e-mail etc.
Good grief Thom. Here is how I (and probably many others) read the article (and most articles):
1) read the summary before clicking on the links.
2) click on the links (I didn’t do this this time, I headed to the comments).
3) read the comments.
I didn’t do #2 this time because the article was screwed up. Without clicking on the links you are saying that Amiga had multi-user support in 1985.
The summary should at least summarize the intent of the title, which it doesn’t. The reason for that is that you are trying to be sarcastic/belittle things rather than write a coherent article, or at least that is how it comes across.
I am no writer but…
“This tweet about mutli-tasking from Tom Warren made me smile. So, it’s 2012 and tablets are finally able to do what the Amiga did in 1985. Seems like a bit of a stretch to be excited about that, right? Sure, until I caught myself getting excited – only a bit, but still – by this piece of news about mutli-user support. Update: removed me being an annoyed child.”
Just had to add 3 words and the summary is clear.
The video talked about hiding Google+ and messaging.
I understand that you’d want to hide SMS messaging on a phone… because you only have 1 phone number, but shouldn’t things like Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Pandora accounts all be separate?
Hopefully they’re working on this and will be fully supported in Key Lime Pie (if that is what they call it).
Also, are we sure that this is from AOSP Jelly Bean and not something Cyanogenmod added in?
There’s no real multi-user experience without live session switching. And that requires swap memory which is no go on a flash devices. Android alleviates this by app live cycle but that one requires that every app implements this correctly.
So phones and tablets will never reach the level of multi-user prowess that workstations enjoy.
At worst, you can just throw tons of ram at any such problems (something which mobile phones already do; they are basically more powerful than workstations from a decade ago – and I’m sure many people would say, back then, mobiles “will never reach” that; and in contemporary workstations, one might as well turn off swap with the present amounts of RAM …it’s there very just in case)
“The Android platform takes advantage of the Linux user-based protection as a means of identifying and isolating application resources. The Android system assigns a unique user ID (UID) to each Android application and runs it as that user in a separate process. This approach is different from other operating systems (including the traditional Linux configuration), where multiple applications run with the same user permissions.” (http://source.android.com/tech/security/)
So the Android architects decided to exploit Linux’s multi-user support to enhance security in the system itself. I can’t say I like the approach, but that’s the way it is. It *will* be pretty hard to put multiuser support on top of that, I would say.
As for iOS, I’m not an expert, but paper published by Apple (http://images.apple.com/ipad/business/docs/iOS_Security_May12.pdf) suggests that UID and GID are unique for each device. I cannot say if they map to Unix/Darwin UID/GIDs, maybe someone can advise here.
Edited 2012-08-07 19:14 UTC