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Keeping Google's Consumer OS Options Straight
According to Engadget, among others, Google is expected to show off the state of the Chrome OS on Tuesday of this week, and perhaps even to show off a netbook running the cloud-centric system. Since many of the things that Chrome OS does are also within the scope of Google's other consumer OS, Android, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has written a guide to the differences, as he sees them, between Android and Chrome OS.
It shouldn't be hard to keep them straighter than the competion. iOS is fa-bu-lous!
As for Android applications, where all the applications are Java-based and depend on Dalvik, I don’t see any way that those applications will run on Chrome OS.
Yes because putting a Java JIT engine in a browser is easy; putting a Dalvik JIT engine in a browser is impossible! Google has NO WAY to leverage the base of tools and programs already created for their first OS, they will have to start from scratch...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Now that Chrome browser renders pdf files ridiculously fast, what else can Chrome OS do that Chrome Browser can't?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"It's a bit odd that we still haven't received an invite to this planned event"
Yeah, seriously Google? Where's MY invite? I want to be there so I can then get paid to blog about it!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Or was the likely convergence prediction premature?
He claims that Android is for the smaller formats, and Chrome OS for the netbooks. It's funny if this is Google's goal, since the netbooks use to have much more flexibility in offering better hardware and performance, not being tied to a small form factor, and then give it the OS that offer only a subset of Android's functionality. Android offers a full OS running native applications, along with the Chrone web browser -- where the latter is the *only* thing Chrome OS offers.
I always found this aspect of Google's new operating systems weird. If Google were serious about Chrome OS, shouldn't that one have been aimed for the phones and tablets, with Android for the netbooks? Chrome OS is at least the OS that does less, and is more simple to the end user. It can basically only run a web browser (and all underlying stuff that's necessary to run that web browser compiled for Linux, of course).
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
IMHO the only way Chrome OS is interesting is if it is released on netbooks that cost 150-200$ less than their Windows counterparts. Sure, it won't do everything a full OS does, but at a $250-300 price point, it would be very compelling for the same reasons netbooks were popular in the first place. If Chrome OS can bring netbooks back to their bare bones, dirt cheap, linux roots, they may have a hit on their hands. If they offer this for about the same price as a Win7 netbook, they shouldn't even bother.
Anyone else have any ideas how this could be an interesting/successful product?
Except that you did not use quotes around "desktop". I long for the days where serious articles were actually cross-checked by somebody. Gasp, perhaps even an "editor".
This baseless flame was partly fueled by: Slashdot and kdawson.
I'm closer to being a Google fan than most probably, but after seeing the video, they intend to abolish the desktop, and nothing (yes none of your own files) will be stored on your own computer. I'm sorry, but ignoring everything else, I dread the amount of lag if everything ran off the internet. Programs such as Photoshop or Visual Studio would download every time instead of run immediately? No thanks.
In a perfect world with infinite bandwidth, and no lag, maybe it's doable.
What would make me truly respect them is if they came up with something like BeOS, or QNX (Haiku), but which also had a metadata/database file system where everything is searched for, and folders become less of an issue (or not needed at all). Encouraging programs to be more self-contained would also be a step forwards too.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
There could be other factors like reduced need for local storage
Chrome OS runs web applications, and web applications that can work offline must make heavy use of CACHE MANIFEST and localStorage, both of which can be big if someone tries to implement photo management (from your Android-powered camera?) as an offline web app.
And yes really how often are you without internet.
There's a reason that Android Market officially works on smartphones and not PDAs or "smart MP3 players". Most of the popular phones can buy apps, but Archos 5 and Archos 43, which are the closest thing to an iPod touch, don't come with the Market app. Though Chrome supports HTML5's proposed offline app mechanisms (CACHE MANIFEST and localStorage), I imagine that Google is trying to target people who pay $$ per month for 3G cellular data. These people are more likely to use other Google services and look at Google ads, and they're more likely to be able to afford to buy something advertised on Google.
If you are buying internet just for your Chrome OS computer, it will be more expensive than local storage, but more likely you already have the connection
In some parts of the world, it's common to have a Wi-Fi connection inside some buildings (which have a public hotspot) but not others (which lack one), or to have a Wi-Fi connection inside buildings but nothing while riding public transit. In the United States, Google's home country, mobile phone service plans allowing tethering are uncommon, so one must purchase separate data plans for a phone and a PC.
Granted the windows 7 it came with ran like a dog, but it runs Ubuntu quite nicely.
Was your $250 laptop warranted to work with a Free operating system? Most laptops I've seen are only warranted to work with the operating system that came on them. You don't want to buy a laptop and install a Free operating system only to find that the video is unaccelerated, the sound doesn't work, the webcam doesn't work, the Wi-Fi doesn't work, etc.
Why would I pay more, for a less functional device?
Because more vs. less functionality is in the eye of the beholder, and functionalities that may not be important to one customer, such as compatibility with free software, may be important to others.
What does this give us except perhaps security in a less is more sense? Moving processing/storage etc to the cloud and eliminating the microsoft tax might allow cut rate hardware though.
This program was made possible by a grant from the Ultra-Humanite, and viewers like you.
while Android will continue to be popular. That is the real difference.
Of *course* ChromeOS will eventually run Android apps. There is no good reason not to. And Dalvik runs on both ARM and x86 today. Also Android phones will be able to use Chrome OS apps because they are HTML5 or Flash.
Anyone know if this thing is going to have even limited support for USB peripherals/drives? With the browser being the OS (at least it sounds like), would you even be able to load up photos from a camera hooked up via a USB cable, to view on the (relatively) larger screen of the netbook? Will you be able to do any sort of printing to a USB or network printer? Will it support reading and writing files from/to USB flash drives, SD cards (i.e. the types used in most cameras and phones)? I wouldn't expect to run a full-blown photoshop-like program, or even Picassa, on ChromeOS, but will it come with some sort of basic photo editing software (e.g. brightness/contrast/color, resizing, remove red-eye, crop, convert file format, sharp/blur, etc)? Will it have a PDF reader and e-book reader? Will it have a media player app (I suppose, if the Chrome browser bundled in to the ChromeOS supports HTML5 and Flash, they could use one of those two technologies to implement a media player, and I would guess ChromeOS will support Flash)?
For a netbook, I wouldn't necessarily expect it to have a full-featured OS, but I would expect ChromeOS to be able to do some of these fairly basic tasks. I suppose it might be possible to implement almost all of those features as web-apps (not sure about photo-editting, but perhaps some javascript + html5 could take care of that). Printing and storage device management would require native OS/driver support, and perhaps extensions to JavaScript APIs to expose that functionality to web-apps.
you can do quite a bit better than a Chrome OS netbook can. The question becomes - how much did it cost to buy the Macbook Pro and then put a 3rd party SSD in it? Is a Chrome OS netbook without such power going to cost less (it certainly going to DO less than your setup so I can't imagine it would be as expensive)?