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Chrome OS, Present and Future
Many readers are submitting stories related to Google Chrome OS. ruphus13 points out a GigaOm opinion piece about how, if users end up rejecting its current cloud-only focus, the nascent OS may succeed as a netbook secondary operating system alongside Windows (in company with secondaries based on other Linux flavors, including Android). Engadget reviews a Chrome OS on a USB key setup that is claimed to offer eye-opening performance compared to running under virtualization. And an anonymous reader notes the 0.1 beta release of ChromeShell, which installs a "Chrome OS-like" environment that boots to the Chrome browser in ~3 seconds; users can switch to Windows later as desired.
If you read the linked ChromeShell page, it says it goes from standby to the Chrome browser in 3 seconds.
It actually takes 30 seconds to boot, which isn't much better than Windows. Actually, is that even better?
If 90% of what a user does is web browsing and email, that sounds like a good bet. If you push "on" and have it up and running in a few seconds, who would bother going into Windows? You'd only need to boot to Windows when doing some office work or the like, and that boot option would be a quick-click icon. If you primarily do office work with it, then you'd want a full-blown "regular" laptop anyhow instead of a netbook.
However, I imagine that Microsoft will find some way to sabotage multi-OS-boot options via screwy licensing and pricing games.
Table-ized A.I.
I have the sneaking suspicion that everyone good at Google left a long time ago; with bags of money.
Now, we're left with Adsense and the Marketing department rebranding the concept(s) behind [CompuServe/Prodigy Online/AOL Online] because people don't remember the 90's.
Damn, all my porn is in MS-Excel format. (How else am I going to get infinite combinations of T, A, and P via cell shuffling?)
Table-ized A.I.
An ideal approach is an OS that's *more* focused on the cloud, rather than *entirely* focused. I use many cloud apps with Chrome's current "Web Shortcuts" feature which removes browser elements from view and presents the web app much like a native one. This approach is used in several Linux cloud distributions already. Google is mistaken in their mission to turn every consumer and business class PC into a thin client.
There is much more to Chrome than it's fast boot, most of that is because it's cloud based not inspite of it, most users don't want/need to have control of their data/applications.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
The word you were looking for is "nascent".
sic transit gloria mundi
Why not just use a smart phone if 90% of what you do is web browsing and email? Today's smart phones are capable of providing a good user experience for these tasks and if it's something the phone can't handle, the netbook probably can't either. I suppose the one major alternative is document editing, but who knows what phones will be capable of in the next few years.
For me, netbooks fall into the overly-large phone or underpowered notebook category. If they work for you or your needs, great, but they don't fit the needs of everyone and I think that's something that too many people forget.
Honestly?
Aside from the latest, greatest, shiniest geek toy... this thing isn't even in a beta state, yet somehow it is going to reshape the industry? I think not.
Come out of the basement, folks... the sun here in a real world only hurts for a moment or two.
0100010001101001011001 0100100000011010010110 1110001000000110000100 1000000110011001101001 0111001001100101
There's quite a few places where the Trusted Platform Module and Chromium intersect, which looks like being an interesting approach to certain problems.
From Chrome and Chrome, What is Chrome?: "The most interesting part for me will be Microsoft's response. This strikes at the very heart of Redmond's business success and Microsoft will not take it lying down. Expect thermonuclear warfare."
Sometimes less is more, I know that is exactly why I starting using Google search was its minimalistic approach to its front page. Most people that this would be targeting aren't going to be Linux OS nerds, yet I imagine if anyone can pull off the Year of the Linux Desktop, it would be Google. I just don't think it will be the Linux Desktop most of us had envisioned.
I have Chrome OS running on VirtualBox - works as advertised, and when it is solid I'll probably buy a low cost device running it for travel, web browsing around the house and yard, etc.
I am hoping that it will eventually include a *great* xterm app with SSH support so it can also be used to monitor servers, and light weight admin work.
Simple! Just import it into Google Docs!
But... the future refused to change.
Until it actually comes out Chrome OS is just running the hype machine. It seems to be on par with the iPhone on page hits so there will be many stories hyping it up and some calling out that not having your own data and everything is bad. I wouldn't put any real merit on what is being said about it until the market actually answers whether it's good or not.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
You are essentially getting less than what you would get with a standard distro like Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, etc.
We on /. often forget on there are many people who NEED less.
Christmas is just around the corner, but it's not yet here.
It's possible you're talking about the wizards who gave us Windows NT in 1993. AFAIK all those guys, and everybody who could understand how they did what they did, left long ago. They should have - their options were fully vested and stopped gaining value over a decade ago. I've certainly seen little evidence since that they remain though the business types who think they're the smartest guys in the room seem to remain active to this day.
People at Google keep coming out with this immensely scalable stuff that demonstrates a strong background in hard information theory, and we get to see it only a couple years after they implement it for internal use. Their gnomes appear to still be digging in the goldmine. Android, ChromeOS, Hadoop, and other ongoing projects spring to mind.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It seems if you are aiming to have a very narrow and specific design to your system, a general purpose Unix work-a-like is overkill. Wouldn't a minimal POSIX-ish system with some graphical operations be sufficient. It's great to use something familiar and actively developed like Linux. Just for the device drivers alone it is pretty valuable. But after digging into the Plan9 kernel, I realize that most of these drivers are not really that complicated if you can accept a basic level of functionality and less than optimal level of performance. (like the nvidia drivers in Plan9, it's only one short .c file, and just enough to get 9wm up and going). Even something like L4 is overkill, a lot of the cool abstraction it offers is probably not necessary if you can just wedge it into a library.
Many of us on here have hacked together little pseudo-kernels. Glorified Hello World bootloaders really. If you had a TCP/IP stack, using an existing one like KAME or uIP, or a new implementation (I don't care which) and a filesystem that is more like a simple memory mapped key-value pair database (using critbit, hash table, b+tree, whatever). it seems to me that would be enough to get something like WebKit going.
What value would a custom kernel/OS have over a specialized Linux? Well I think you could focus on implementing abstractions most suitable for a browser instead of trying to fit a filesystem or sqlite library to your design. Mostly I suspect you could optimize the boot of a very primitive system pretty easily. And you could do things where isolation of the browser in memory can be done in a way much finer grain than the Unix scheme of dividing everything into a user process or kernel mode thread.
Perhaps the browser would be more like a root user, but individual tabs would have permissions controlled by a kernel or hypervisor that would be in isolation of one another. One page may not be able to hijack the rest of your browser or access cookies or passwords unless specifically authorized. And it could be done in such a way that is still relatively fast and low overhead, but more secure than current schemes.
Imagine if plug-ins like flash and video codecs had to run through a socket or some fast IPC messaging scheme. where you could just close it to force the process on the end to shut down.
Why don't I implement it you ask? Well assuming I have the skills necessary to do a good job, and the ambition to complete such a task. I'm too old school to accept the idea that a system where the only application is a browser is useful to me personally. Maybe when kernel development becomes browser based?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Doesn't support the Double-Dee-DLL
Table-ized A.I.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
get your 50 yard line seats now...
and its a perfect computer for grandma... no viruses, and you can even configure it to block her from visiting video professor.
Stop! If you keep breaking the hype with facts like that, people might realize Chrome OS is a pointless Google-branded Linux distro that can't run anything but websites in a world where even mobile phones can run native apps.
not 30. Chrome Shell boots in 30. --Sam
Don't you mean infinite repetitions of F, A and P?
Yep, particularly since Netscape had a similar vision of reducing Windows to just "a buggy set of drivers".
It's not infinite as it eventaully results in a buffer overflow.
I hate printers.
If you are using untested drivers on your hardware it might even result in a premature buffer overflow.
which is totally what she said
Your family and friends never want to plug their camera into the computer and download photos? Or upload music to their iPod? Those are two common tasks that, so far, can't be done using just a Web browser.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Note: I am not the grandfather poster.
I would say a good chunk of my friends and family don't actually want to download pictures to their computer, but to upload it to flickr, facebook or e-mail. Which, Chrome OS in theory could support just fine.
In theory, if Chrome OS let you upload from external devices, don't see why it wouldn't let you save to most devices. That said, likely wouldn't work with an iPod because Apple doesn't appear to like making devices where simple features like dragging and dropping files actually work (compared to any other player on the market where it does).
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
"I'm already questioning whether the extremely autocratic "all data in the cloud" model that Google is pursuing will alienate users. I question whether people trust the cloud to that extent, and I know I love many of my local software applications and utilities"
Why not run your apps and your data from a portable USB device.
HP's netbooks are quietly shipping already with what HP calls "QuickWeb". It is essentially a splashtop linux distribution that boots up quickly and launches a browser. I am not sure if it is possible to kill the browser and get to linux or if it is possible to edit the init.rc files and stay in Linux. But a few user comments say that they have used QuickWeb so much they have not booted into full WinXP for quite some time.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Isnt ChromeOS more aimed at replacing thin clients?
With the Cloud replacing the centralized Server.
No more need for expensive Server hardware.
No more need for expensive Server OS Licenses.
No more need for expensive Server Antivirus Licenses.
(No doubt this may cause Ballmer to sob his way to sleep
every night)
For all people that just want to write and surf and such,
COS would Check-Mate all Thin Clients and Ubuntu/XP/Vista/7.
(More sobbing)
People that need faster hardware, gamers and such dont need
to bother with COS.
(Happy Ballmer. For now)
Btw, could Chrome ever run WINE? What _is_ the Cloud? Flash? Java?
I just upgraded my Eee901 to the current eeebuntu standard this weekend and was pretty impressed. They have compositing working on the desktop and it's pretty slick.
Add the Chromium nightly repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list and you have Chrome running as well. With the virtual desktop, it's pretty easy to run it in full screen on one display and slide back and forth to the other desktop apps as well.
I'll have to go home later and time the boot / suspend / resume, though.
I only wish Google Maps Mobile ran on it.
One derivation I found for the word "nacent" was Scottish "na-cent", i.e. "not a cent", i.e. poor.
I don't think the Slashdot article submitter meant to imply that ChromeOS was "poor". Methinks they meant "nascent". That would make a lot more sense (cents?)..