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Gmail Creator Says Chrome OS Is As Good As Dead
An anonymous reader writes "Former Google employee, Gmail creator, and FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit has come right out and said what many people are thinking (or hoping for). On his FriendFeed page, Buchheit made a post titled 'Prediction: ChromeOS will be killed next year (or "merged" with Android).' In it, he bluntly says that Google's netbook-centric Chrome OS is as good as dead. 'Yeah, I was thinking, "is this too obvious to even state?", but then I see people taking ChromeOS seriously, and Google is even shipping devices for some reason,' Buchheit writes. 'Because ChromeOS has no purpose that isn't better served by Android (perhaps with a few mods to support a non-touch display).'"
They have said that Chromeos and Android would probably converge for a year or so at least.
With ChromeOS, us First Post trolls will always win!
Oh no... it's the future.
ChromeOS powered by Android!
I'm working on Android right now. Is it seriously worse than Android? How?
Google would be far better served focusing on defragmentation of the Android eco-system rather than trying to cloudify everything. Adding standardized extensions for tablets would be a good use of their time too.
Whatever the heck ChromeOS is (never heard of it), I can tell you one thing for sure: this guy Paul Buchheit might be right, but he sounds more like he has an axe to grind with the ChromeOS team than anything else.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The problem with ChromeOS is it is trying to solve a problem them doesn't exist. Why upload data into the cloud if you don't need to share it or have access to it on the move?
You don't want to need to upload all your data to the cloud before you can do anything with it.
Cloud computing makes sense for people who want to rent computer processing power on an adhoc basis to solve computational problems.
Computing needs to gradually move to new technologies, it rarely makes huge leaps. ChromeOS would be better being a full Linux desktop for now with cloud services instead of being fully cloud based.
...maybe no. Surely the point is that Chrome OS allows Google and other devs to push the boundaries of what functionality can be contained within a web browser i.e. Chrome. If they can demonstrate that hey, you can do facetube/music/pics etc quite happily within a browser then a Google user could get a very similar experience across multiple devices with the same access to their data.
I'd see the natural home of Chrome OS as more on embedded devices - TVs, etc - rather than anything else.
With the ARM notebooks coming, and the fact that it' is rumored to support virtual machines, the cloud, and many other features, ChromeOS is far from dead. As soon as the ARM based notebooks are powerful enough, and the cost is in the $200-300 range, I'll buy one.
And I predict many others will buy it as well. Saying ChromeOS is dead is like saying Kindle is dead because of the Ipad.
The only way I believe that ChromeOS will work is if the devices which use it are free (as in beer) or you can get one by mailing in some cereal box top or something.
They are web-only devices which are nice for having sitting around the living room for guests to use and for quickly checking your email.
Based on my experience, Chrome is a solution in search of a problem. I've had it running in a VM on my laptop. Seriously, if you're going to be springing for a low end notebook anyway, there's not much of a cost advantage to buying a ChromeOS machine and one that can run a full-featured OS. This might have made sense a few years ago when prices were higher, but a quick look around tells me I can get a refurbed notebook for around $200 that'll run Windows or Linux adequately to do anything Chrome does, and quite a bit more besides.
As a business tool, it's all but useless. Google provides no mechanism for installing even standard Linux VPN software which most companies provide for their remote employees. Or any other software, for that matter. Also, no company with a brain in their head is going to allow employees to be storing internal data on another company's servers. This might be a little more useful if a company could customize it to use internal servers rather than Google's, but as far as I've been able to tell, that option just doesn't exist.
As a striped down Linux distro, it isn't bad, but the lack of a mechanism for loading 3rd party software negates even that benefit. So you have to ask - who would use this, and why? There isn't even a cost advantage for the software. You can download a standard Linux distro that has all the features of Chrome, and a wealth of standard productivity tools to boot for the same price as Chrome - free.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
I think convergence between Android and ChromeOS is the most insignificant part of this.
The most important thing to note is that people are getting fed up with the so-called "cloud". That approach has been hyped for a few years now, and while many of us realized it's a bad approach from the very start, the rest are finding this out the hard way. After so much failure and hardship, people want nothing to do with it.
It's basically the same situation that happened with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. They were "new" and "trendy" technologies that got a lot of hype. Smart people saw that Ruby was basically Perl with a slightly more readable (but less powerful) syntax, and that Rails was nothing but yet another web development framework. A lot of non-technical people who just wanted to sell books and host conferences built up a massive hype storm. Given that this foundation was not based on merit of any sort, Ruby and Rails were never able to prove themselves as being solutions to real problems. People soon got fed up with them, and went back to proven technologies.
People want to use real, locally-running applications that help get work done, where their data can be kept local and safe. They don't want to dick around with half-assed web "apps" that just make life miserable, and makes data retrieval damn near impossible.
Maybe this fad of "lets put a browser window around everything just because we can" fad is finally coming to an end.
Maybe because doing everything you use your computer for over HTTP using some company's server just because its modern and being touted as the inevitable future way of doing things is no longer enough of a reason for people to actually do things that way.
He's right. But Google haven't spent 2 years and millions of dollars in a dead project just for fun.
Chrome was announced 2 years ago, when the tablet market was just a speculation, even the iPad was just a rumor at that time. But now, after millions iPads sold and the rise of competitor's tablets struggling for this new market, the netbooks -- the real Chrome OS target -- became irrelevant, or predicted to be dead in a 2-3 years from now.
The advent of the tablets killed the netbooks. So there will be no place for Chrome OS in a near future.
For the love of god, can we just stop calling him the "Gmail creator" at this point? It's pathetic. Good to see it's his only claim to fame. Wait, you mean he created an online email system? Shocking! Gmail isn't exactly rocket science guys ...don't get too impressed when he talks about anything else.
Who, exacly, is fed up with the "cloud" besides we, the average slashdotters? People are using "cloud" services more and more, like Facebook, Flickr, Gmail, etc. Companies, Universities and even public organizations are moving to Gmail and other Google services (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/three-million-businesses-have-gone.html).
Where are this people moving from the "cloud" to locally based applications and services?
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ChromeOS if far from dead, but probably a bit ahead of its time. Soon everything will be in the cloud. Already services like Spotify and Netflix are taking over from DVD's and MP3's and as soon as web applications get a bit better we will be using those in the cloud as well. Just imagine no more updates you log on and you will always be using the latest version. The chromeOS will be very light and less prone to bugs and the days of having to spend time to fix your system will be over giving you more time to actually use a computer for what you bought if for. Also the fact that you can access all of your data, music, videos and anything else is great. I say that all this is a bit ahead of its time as there are still many places in the world that do not have the bandwidth to cope with everything being on the cloud but someday they will. Long live the cloud.
This premise echos MacWord's comments on the relevance of Apples's OS X in these days where iOS proliferates.
Why should a technology company develop two OS's when they would be better served to make one OS better and universal across several devices?
Didn't a number of people say this about Android when it (seemly) went no where its first year and a half after release? Either way I'm sure friendfeed being bought by faceobok had zero influence over his comments.
Why pay beta testers, when people will pay to beta test your product?
ChromeOS is Google's Kin. It might have seemed like a good idea on its own, but it's sharing the nest with a more viable and more successful sibling. It should have died a long time ago or become part of whatever tablet / netbook profile Google are coming up with for Android. I can't think of many reasons that the chrome app couldn't be running over Android when all is said and down and the Native Client (which is LLVM + APIs) could come too and would probably complement the existing Dalvik framework.
Ah, the ever expanding definition of "Cloud computer". FYI, the internet is not the cloud.
People will be using the "cloud" when these and other companies start hosting on the cloud rather than self-hosting.
And that won't happen until the cloud actually lives up to what it's advertised as. Google Apps is actually the closest. All of the others, like Amazon (You predefine your server, hard to dynamically grow (automatically)), are just the same of the likes of Rackspace... Virtual hosting.
I, for one, welcome our cloud-based overlords!
America, Home of the Brave.
Where are this people moving from the "cloud" to locally based applications and services?
While I agree with your basic premise that average people aren't sitting around raging about cloud services, I do disagree somewhat with the above. Speaking for myself, I very often choose to use the Amazon or eBay apps on my iPad rather than using the web sites. Let's face it, web sites SUCK compared to traditional applications. We tolerate it because we were drunk with the mass variety of web sites, but when you come right down to usability and responsiveness, HTML (yes, even 5) is a crude, crude, CRUDE tool.
Using a local binary app on the iPad is just so much better than using the respective web site. Maybe we'll see better web technology in the future, but it's hard to compete with a locally running application for responsiveness.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
i was going to link this to FB from this site then changed my mind. i copy pasted it this is the story that link comes up with, Job's And Ellison Prank - Slashdot http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/12/16/ here is a screenie on fb http://awesomescreenshot.com/09a4rpo9f
You actually thought only that iphone have version numbers
Every iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPod touch 2, and iPod touch 3 can upgrade to iOS 4. The same can't be said of most Android phones and Android media players.
Meh, most people said similar things about smart phones until Apple came out with a consumer/user friendly iphone. Will Chrome-OS be the iPhone of "cloud computing" systems? IMO probably not, but I wouldn't call the idea dead just yet. I personally don't own a document processor anymore and use Google Apps exclusively. As long as they got the "offline" mode working fine with local synching I think it could be a real winner. Do I want my entire OS to be that way? Not really, but that would fit for all the purposes of my current netbook. I browse the web, IM, and occasionally do some light documents through Google Apps.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
I guess a more readable syntax is no reason to prefer one language over another then? If language power is all you want then you probably should be using a Lisp anyway.
Also I doubt most developers turned to Perl when Rails "failed", more likely they turned to .Net or J2EE.
People want to use real, locally-running applications that help get work done, where their data can be kept local and safe. They don't want to dick around with half-assed web "apps" that just make life miserable, and makes data retrieval damn near impossible.
I'm writing this in the safe mode of my windows laptop. Why? Because it crashes constantly. It didn't do that a week ago, it hasn't been physically damaged and it doesn't do that in the safe mode so I doubt that it is a hardware issue. Rather, some process has gone nuts and Windows can't handle it. Perhaps updater to some application I have has corrupted or began interacting poorly with my firewall or whatever... God knows. I, on the other hand, have been trying to stop all unnecessary processes from autostarting and constantly booting between safe mode and normal mode in order to find the culprit... But haven't succeeded yet. It is made more difficult by the fact that there is no way of knowing which processes are essential to the system and which are not.
I, for one, would love to use "half-assed web apps" instead of going through the hell that is managing all the applications on your computer. You can say "Haha, it sounds like you suck" or "Haha, Windows sucks". Well, perhaps. Let's assume that I, a third year software engineering student, don't have the basic skills required to maintain the computer. Or that the world's most used OS is a horrible piece of crap. Even if either of those is true, it's also a symptom of the underlying problem: Computers have became so complex that even if it is possible to understand everything that you desktop is doing at any given time, it's a shitload of work and there are very few people who really do understand that all (No, I don't believe that all Linux users do, even if they technically could). That being the case, there are rather obvious benefits for Joe Average (or even tech savvier people) for not having to deal with it. Oh, just think of the web apps: Little more than a group of bookmarks. No registry entries, no hidden processes... What you see is what you get. The things can be clearly divided to two categories: Simple things on your end, and the the cloud, details of which won't bother you. (IE: The original meaning of the cloud)
Sure, there are some problems but I don't know if they're all that serious. At least not for everyone. It's a rare condition that I don't have internet access. It's a lot more common condition that I have other minor computer woes. The problems with the cloud are different than the ones without it, but it's a stretch to call them greater and a massive stretch to say that people specifically want the old/current way. Also, your point about difficult data retrieval baffles me... I would say 9 times out of ten, the data in the datacenters, is better backed up, is less likely to get lost/stolen/etc. If you refer to a situation where you permanently deleted something and a regular hard drive would still let you recover it but you can't do it through the cloud apps... That's a feature that hasn't been implemented in cloud apps but not an inherent problem with the cloud.
Only Apple and their fans complain about Android's supposed fragmentation.
And anyone who wants to sell apps to people who happen not to have a smartphone. With Apple, one can carry a dumbphone for calls and an iPod touch for App Store apps and save money by not having to pay AT&T for 24 months of $70/mo voice and data. Google, on the other hand, requires a device to have most of the features of a phone, including a camera and a GPS, before Google will let the device onto its Market. This fragments the platform into Android Market (for phones) and the much smaller AppsLib (for Wi-Fi tablets and media players), unlike iOS where the iPhone and the iPod touch share one app store.
Why upload data into the cloud if you don't need to share it or have access to it on the move?
So perhaps the target market for ChromeOS devices, when they actually hit the market, will be people who need to share data and have access to it on the move?
I'd see it as a product for the corporate market, where keeping central control of all your users data, banishing CDs and memory sticks and preventing the serfs from installing games and fart apps on their devices would be a selling point. Someone leaves their ChromePad on a train? No worries - just lock their account and check the log to see if anybody has used the account in the meantime.
Of course, all this has happened again (with Sun's plans for Java-based thin client network computers back in the 90s, but a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. For one thing, the proliferation of mobile devices, laptops, working on the move, hot desking has made maintaining a "fleet" of computers with local storage an even bigger headache than it was back then. Secondly, the 90s was the peak of the MS monoculture, and people might now be more open to a non-MS solution.
Its hard to judge based on "development machines" and people trying out ChromeOS on VMs. If Google finally launches this as part of a corporate-friendly "IT Outsourcing" package then it might just work.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
That ChromeOS is not necessarily going on to the brightest of futures; but that it serves a number of valuable purposes to Google:
1. Serious 'dogfooding': Google's business is pushing 'web' and 'webapps' and whatnot, both to sell adsense impressions and to steal MS's lunch money to keep them from subsidizing their search arm until it becomes a real threat. Building an OS around this exclusively allows them to bundle in a few neat features(widespread single sign on without a corporate IT team, some interesting security/sandboxing stuff, easy restoration/backup) and also forces them to think carefully about how all common user use cases can be addressed in a 'web' way. Does HTML5 need something else? Do we have to get serious about NaCl? Is Flash still necessary, etc. Assuming the program doesn't rack up serious losses, it makes sense as an R&D project.
2. Possible basis for moving Android applications/features into larger form factors: I can imagine two possibilities: 1. ChromeOS, as noted above, is an R&D project about what a web browser needs to be able to do to fulfill the desired use cases. Android has a web browser. Therefore, roll what you've learned into Android's web browser and call it a day. 2. Android, in effect, consists of a java-esque(but don't call it Java(tm)) bunch of applications running in a VM on top of a relatively spare linux base. ChromeOS consists of a browser running on top of a fairly spare linux base. It would not exactly be rocket surgery to use the browser/HTML as a "windowing environment" in which dalvik VM applications from Android can be embedded, just like the Java applets of old. Throw in a way for the user to full-screen an embed, if it is designed for a larger screen, integrate Android's notifications into the system(given the R&D about sandboxing and security in the browser, in point #1, you could conceivably allow the Dalvik embeds to interact with the DOM of the page, present Android system notifications/address book, etc. as JS accessible elements, etc.)
3. The "big business IT for small business" pitch: With a competent IT team, and some investments in servers and AD and stuff, an enterprise IT department can already to centralized data storage, remote application access, single sign on, etc. If you have enough users, the cost/user isn't bad; but it isn't trivial, and there some costs that are fixed enough that things get more expensive in $/user, as you get smaller. So, a lot of small outfits basically make do either with painfully expensive consultant setups-and-pray-it-doesn't-break-so-we-don't-have-to-call-him-back or seriously ghastly "just a bunch of computers and some good luck, plus sneakernet". So, Google says: "Hey, subscribe to Google Apps for business for $/person/year and get all Google apps, a Gmail storage and interface for mail from your own domain, and seamless single sign on and backup on any "ChromeOS" device on the market! Since the hardware requirements are low, our numerous hardware partners have netbooks, laptops, desktops, even virtualized option cards for full laptops(analogous to Dell's "Latitude ON" card). If one breaks, just toss it and get another one, you'll be back up and running in 10 minutes just by opening the box and typing in your username and password. No IT guy!(except to keep your network up...)"
It's a good idea to have an "aimed to browsing and nothing else" device, just like the Network Computers envisioned by Sun 15 years ago (the computer is the network), but anything more expensive than an iPad touch is a worthless effort. It must beat sexyness, efficency and the lot of things it also does besides price.
I thought "the cloud" was "the cluster", but with a billing model based on disk/cpu[/memory] used in a given timeframe, and these values being easily dynamically allocable during a given time frame.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Okay, Anonymous, what's your Facebook page?
ChromeOS isn't targeted to the average /.er - it's targeted to the average computer user. You know, the ones that call you to come fix their computer because they click yes to every question that pops up while surfing the interwebs? Most people really only need the internet and have no use for native apps - or at least really shouldn't be installing native apps. Honestly, I would recommend a product like ChromeOS to at least 3/4 of the non-techy people I know as I don't think a full-blown OS suits their use case well.
Secondly, saying ChromeOS and Android fit the same market is really, really dumb and misses the point completely. One is intended for the touchscreen only, while the other is geared for the traditional mouse and keyboard. These are significantly different UI approaches, targeting significantly different markets, and require more than just simple patching and hacking to go from one to the other. Even patching the OS's UI elements leaves all of the 3rd party applications with a disarray of usability between types of UI. Just look at Windows on the tablet as an example.
It's strange that no one seems to complain about Apple using iOS on its mobile devices, while using OS X on its computers, or that Microsoft uses Windows 7 on the computer and Windows Phone 7 on mobile devices. Instead, this is clearly the preferred approach. Yeah, Google is going the opposite direction, but I think it still applies - you are going between two radically different use cases and trying to go with a one-size-fits-all approach usually yields a one-size-sucks-for-all result. Granted, I'm sure we'll see a gradual merging of the code bases between ChromeOS and Android, but for either to remain a usable product, they need to be tailored for their specific uses.
I feel like a lot of the apps could be implemented in html though. All you have to realize is that 100% wide clickable areas (like the lists in an android app) are just fine, even though they look weird on a monitor.
I predict that after people get disillusioned with "the cloud", there'll be a strong push towards moving your data back onto devices you physically own.
See, I can make predictions, too.
Uh, the link I posted was about 3 million business moving to Google Apps, so I don't see how is my definition any different from yours.
Or do you mean Google App Engine, which is different from Google Apps? But even if you do, Google Apps runs on the Google cloud like any App Engine application, so I don't see the difference.
And Amazon EC2 is cloud computing, just at a lower level of abstraction. How could you do auto scaling otherwise?
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I think it depends on the level of abstraction. EC2 is similar to that, but something like Google Apps (_not_ App Engine) is cloud too, just on a higher level (application instead of disk/cpu/memory).
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I, for one, welcome our cloud-based overlords!
You're very late to that party.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
where their data can be kept local and safe.
Hmm, I'm gonna assume you probably have used the phrase "get off my lawn" more than once. In fact I think it's the exact opposite. More people want it online so when their HDD crashes it's quickly backed up and available from any computer where they log in.
That or you need to define "safe".
Seems it isn't so bad that I didn't bother with RoR and all that other new stuff when I started writing web apps 4-5 years ago. I decided to use Perl. It's fine for web apps, and also handy when you need to do local scripts too. It's also standard on most Linux installs which is nice. Though probably if I learned a bit of bash scripting I could do the same batch processing stuff with even less effort using standard UNIXy utilities.
Sounds like I should have a look at Lisp sometime :) though really the days when I coded just for fun in my spare time are gone now, and there's no point rewriting the code base I've built up in some other language (yet).
which is totally what she said
STEP 1: Boot loader STEP 2: Micro linux kernel with network, display, keyboard, mouse, and network drivers. STEP 3: (nx client OR vnc client OR Terminal client, or web browser) rigged as primary graphical environment on top of X. STEP 4: Call it (thin client OR chrome os) STEP 5: ??? STEP 6: Profit Seriously does anyone else see Chrome OS as nothing but a thin client? Wtf is the point in this silly system?
Whats the harm in yelling 'Computer, end program!'? You could be living in Star Trek! Go on.. give it a try.
But you're still relying heavily on cloud based services to host and process the data - the app is just a frontend to a webservice. I don't think it's the language the UI is written or the way you download the code the difference between the "cloud" or locally-running apps.
In fact, moving towards cloud hosted webservices means you can have multiple UI frontends in any language and for any platform with much less porting effort.
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Who, exacly, is fed up with the "cloud" besides we, the average slashdotters? People are using "cloud" services more and more, like Facebook, Flickr, Gmail, etc. Companies, Universities and even public organizations are moving to Gmail and other Google services (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/three-million-businesses-have-gone.html).
Where are this people moving from the "cloud" to locally based applications and services?
Meaning... lotsa businesses. You think that those businesses (trying to save a buck by moving into the "cloud") are going to buy new ChromeOS-powered netbooks for their employees to continue working?
I'm sort-of seeing the netbooks and the "cloud for businesses" as two separated market segments (and the very definition of a market segment says that what happens with the prices/sale-volumes in one won't influence what happens in others: if not so, the market segmentation is faulty).
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I'm not making any predictions, I'm saying people are *already* moving, and posted a link about 3 million companies which have already moved.
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its just a matter of reliability and speed. there is going to be a time when internet will be completely ubiquitous, high speed all over, and have an insignificant downtime percentage. as we move toward that ideal state, web apps will continue to inch toward 'good enough' for most people. the fact is that people won't need this powerful machines, they just need fast, always-there network access. what is it that you think can't be done over the internet? and please don't list research and other fringe cases.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
How can people be fed up with 'the cloud' when most people don't even know what it is? You really think those MS commercials are enough to make people understand what the cloud does?
Like most techies you're completely focusing on the wrong thing. Most people don't care about clouds, rails, ruby, or any other tool. They care about solved problems. They care about storing their pictures in a way that they can access them from anywhere and never lose them. If it's the cloud and RoR that makes this happen they are happy. If it's duct tape and bubble gum (more likely :) ) they are still happy.
To most people (other than techies) the end result is what matters, and not the tools you use to get there.
You are failing to miss the point.
Freudian slip much? ;-)
You still NEED TO CHECK if the device is running the correct VERSION
I agree. On both iOS and Android, an app needs to make sure that needed services are present and working. The difference comes in what message to display after the app has checked. On an iDevice, you check the iOS version, and if it is not new enough, say "Connect this device to iTunes to upgrade the system software." On an Android device, on the other hand, you check the version and then show "Wait until your contract runs out and buy a new Android device."
apple fanboy
I don't want iOS to win. I want Android to beat iOS yet am disappointed in the Android ecosystem.
Your experience doesn't match mine.
People want the responsiveness of local and the mobility of cloud. Privacy and security can both be handled via cloud computing or local; they are orthogonal to the infrastructure choice.
Meaning... lotsa businesses. You think that those businesses (trying to save a buck by moving into the "cloud") are going to buy new ChromeOS-powered netbooks for their employees to continue working?
Netbooks, probably not, but ChromeOS powered workstations, I don't see why not. When most of their employees are already using browser based apps anyway (some cloud hosted, others self-hosted), and if they're cheaper, why not?
I'm sort-of seeing the netbooks and the "cloud for businesses" as two separated market segments (and the very definition of a market segment says that what happens with the prices/sale-volumes in one won't influence what happens in others: if not so, the market segmentation is faulty).
I agree that netbooks and business clouds are separate market segments, but you can have ARM-based workstations running ChromeOS, and I don't think /that/ market is separate from clouds for business.
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I don't think it's the language the UI is written or the way you download the code the difference between the "cloud" or locally-running apps.
The platform does matter. JS is a horrible language to do sophisticated things in. A binary with full access to the native API is going to typically be much more responsive than an application running in a browser.
Who knows, maybe we'll see browser-based web sites get better as we get better tools that can take advantage of HTML 5 (which I still maintain is a crude, horrible platform compared to native APIs). But at this point, a native app is far and away better than a browser app.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
My point is not that it matters in general, it's that it's not relevant to assess if $application is cloud based or not.
A native application that relies on the "cloud" to store and process data is still a cloud application, regardless of its language.
Dilbert RSS feed
I've been listening to this "we can do EVERYTHING from ANYWHERE via a web connection and a browser!" debate since 1997, and it's always proved to be a beautiful theory slain by a slew of ugly facts. Anyone remember NC's? I saw several efforts at a Really Big Company everyone here knows to build this kind of system, basically a terminal and mainframe but with the ability to run a lot of code on the client to maximize performance.
In its current form, Chrome OS is a non-starter. The real mystery here is whether Google will compromise the initial vision of the platform and do what's needed to make it useful enough to succeed. Google appears to be full of very smart but very stubborn people, which causes one hell of an internal conflict that we'll see play out very publicly. (Just look at the online help forums for Google Docs or Chrome (the browser) and check out all the basic complaints people have been talking about for years that Google refuses to address or even acknowledge.)
It's the revenge of the Applet: you load an application over the net (only from the Appstore instead of directly from a website) and you use it to manipulate remote data. It'll never be truly cloud though until the processing is also done remotely and that'll never happen for most applications. It's cheaper, faster and easier for all involved to do the processing locally.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
To begin with, I'll acknowledge that I'm not a serious coder or kernel geek. I'm just an all-around techie who has been around the block more than once. While I understand both the hype for Chrome OS and the arguments against it, I think there's one area where a browser-as-the-OS device can make a superior claim: its attack surface.
If running a browser on top of a general use OS--any OS--you have an attack surface against the browser, against the OS, and against any and all other apps that run on the OS. If you run a browser as the OS, you've taken away a significant amount of attack surface. Sure, the browser code itself can be attacked, and the apps that run in the cloud can be attacked, but those risks are still present everywhere else. By combining the OS and the browser (not in the way MS intertwined IE and Windows), you prevent attacks from above and below at the same time.
To me, that's a significant reason why the Chrome OS concept warrants serious consideration. True, it may not fly in the current marketplace--it may be too far ahead of its time--but I believe it is a concept that will come of age. In some regards, Google is hoping to do for the software environment what Apple did with its OSes (by limiting hardware choices)--control and limit the variables, and you find it much easier to limit and mitigate any bugs that do show up.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Meh, most people said similar things about smart phones until Apple came out with a consumer/user friendly iphone. Will Chrome-OS be the iPhone of "cloud computing" systems?
I think it will become the iPhone of dumb terminals. A low cost device that can run 'web apps' (either hosted locally on an in house server, over the internet or even this 'cloud' thing) would be a welcome solution for many businesses. They would be cheaper and more secure than a regular PC. They wouldn't need any individual configuration. They could even have a similar physical configuration to an 'all-in-one' device like an iMac (or the other PC equivalents). Touch screen support would allow them to be used in many POS & kiosk configurations.
I'm not sure if ChromeOS is a solution for consumers but it certainly has a lot of possibilities in the business world.
I think that if you know enough about computers to talk about Ruby on Rails, you cannot possibly be representative of humanity as a whole.
I on the other hand look forward eagerly to the day when ChromeOS almost entirely invalidates the "nontechnicals user who screw up windows while surfing the net" portion of humanity. Plus if ChromeOS is hard to screw up (because it doesn't trust the user or apps -- in spite of the vitriol about that before) it means that machine is never going to be part of any botnets. Which, frankly, is worth maintaining a thin OS wrapped around a web browser that you're continuing to develop anyway, all on its own.
What part of your complaints applies to granny-who-just-shares-photos? What part applies to mom-who-plays-facebook-games? Dad-who-watches-hulu-while-working-out? Sister-who-thinks-being-a-computer-person-isn't-cool-but-likes-cheezburger-sites?
Not all white-collar jobs use a computer for heavy duty work, and of those that do, not all of them use their home computers for similar tasks; a no-nonsense web browser at home might be pretty darn good. Blue-collar jobs... even if they use a computer at home, if they're a nontechnical user (vulnerable to getting rooted) they probably don't need a full PC anyway, and if they're a technical user, they can make their own damn minds up. Blue-collar jobs outweigh white collar by a fair margin, unless I miss my guess.
And all Google needs to succeed is enough users to justify continuing. If all computer grannies were given ChromeOS, that'd probably be enough of a user base to justify it. However, as long as it's properly marketed and makes it into the hands of people that need it, it's not going to stop at just the grannies. There are plenty of people that need it.
I agree that netbooks and business clouds are separate market segments, but you can have ARM-based workstations running ChromeOS, and I don't think /that/ market is separate from clouds for business.
Juts don't hold your breath, man.
Speaking of businesses, if something can run on ARM, it will also run on a 4 years old workstation. No reason to replace them until these wrks don't die, especially if you moved into the cloud to save a buck.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I don't think thats an HTC issue is it? Doesn't the vendor dictate what goes on the phone? my HTC G1 fro T-Mobile didn't have any crapware. I wouldn't buy a phone that had crapware on it. And I can add or remove whatever I like.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Facebook, Flickr, Gmail, etc are *websites*, not *clouds*.
So another article on Slashdot from techies confidently asserting that a new product will be a failure. Considering the record of similar attacks on iPod, iPhone, and iPad, this strikes me as the best evidence that it will succeed. Of course, the open system purists are inevitably up in arms over anything that is not general purpose or completely open to customization, and seem innately unable to comprehend just how small is the market segment for which this is a significant consideration.
So let's look at why it might succeed:
1. Cheap. It should work very well on very low end processors that chug when loaded down with a general purpose OS trying to multitask multiple applications. Power applications will run in the cloud. This could well become the dominant platform for the 3rd world as internet connectivity continues to rise.
2. Secure. I commonly have people coming to me complaining about their computer being "slow," and when I look it over, I find that it has been colonized by viruses and spyware. There is a large group of people who just want to browse the web, and don't feel like they should need to be computer security experts to keep their systems running smoothly. These may also be favored by businesses that don't want to deal with the potential security leaks due to people installing unapproved software on their PCs
3. Uniform. Every ChromeOS platform will be running essentially the same software, based upon the same browser. A company that delivers services through this platform will be relieved of a lot of support headaches arising from differences in user hardware or the presence of "nonstandard" software (see 2)
They are clouds with websites on top.
When you use a native smartphone app which uses the Facebook API to send and receive updates, which website are you using? None. You're using the Facebook cloud through a native app.
When you use Camera Plus Pro to take pictures and upload them to your Flickr account, you're not using any website either; you're using the Flickr cloud.
And even for Gmail, the same happens when you sync Android contacts with your Gmail contacts.
You could say it's simply client-server, but it's not, since you have no idea in what physical machines they're running, nor does that matter. It's a collection of shared servers abstracted away as a simple webservice. It's a cloud.
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My company has been in the cloud for a long time. They have build their business model around "being in the cloud" and having their head up their ass. I don't see where anyone can say this old technology is bad...My paycheck is usually deposited in my account within 7 days of when it should be.
I first heard about "consumerization" from our tech guy a little while ago, because I ended up being an "early adopter".
When companies want to play the "Economy Stinks - IT Freeze", users will say "well shoot, I'll bring in my own".
Yes, there are some technical issues to solve, but I like to focus on "the real reason" of things. So if someone says "___ costs too much", "voila - cost is now zero. Next objection?"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
"That isn't better served by Android"?
What purpose is that? Spying on and monetizing the minutia of your personal and professional life - then selling these off to third parties?
Google==Ministry of Truthiness
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
On terms of responsiveness i can only tell: it depends on your computer.
if your computer is well configured - yes it will beat the hell out of a cloud app with html.
But cloud computing enables you do a lot of shit behind the sense that improves responsiveness.
For example:
usually it is faster for me to start chrome type gmail and check my e-mail, than it is start thunderbird / apple mail and check my e-mail.
so for my crappy computer: cloud computing is faster !
e-mail search is also better. I actually disabled e-mail indexing for my e-mail desktop app, because it slows down my computer big time.
Gmail indexes don't eat any performance on my end. Cloud computing is again faster.
And if I switch my computer, it will take me at least an hour to setup all my e-mail accounts. With gmail i can just start.
And i can check my e-mail on my mom computer.
And that is just the e-mail use case for me as single e-mail user. And I'm actually not a computer noob .
Now, think about a systems administrator. With cloud computing he can safe himself a lot of headaches.
Of course, cloud computing will not come free of problems, but any problem you solve you solve for the entire user base of your business.
That's why cloud computing is so important for a lot of people. It is hardly new. For example, mainframes are similar to cloud computing.
So this general concept of moving stuff to the big fat ass server is not new. However, the implementation and several other details make it useful for this generation of computer users.
Though probably if I learned a bit of bash scripting I could do the same batch processing stuff with even less effort using standard UNIXy utilities.
a) Bash != Bourne Shell. Bash is commonly available on Linux and AIX. Generally, other platforms require you to install it yourself.
b) I did years of shell scripting before moving to Perl. I dispute the "less effort" bit. There are many things I do in Perl that simply cannot be done with standard UNIXy utilities, or that require huge amounts of effort. (I wrote a nawk/gawk-based .ini-file editor once because I wasn't allowed to use perl by my manager... oh the pain.) Some things take more code in perl than shell (grep through a file, for example), but offer far more flexibility. And, of course, perl's re's are more powerful than grep's, so I have more flexibility this way.
Why do you think Android devices can't be upgraded or patched?
Because Google hasn't managed to coax Android phone makers, even those in OHA, to make Android upgrades available. Carriers and device makers have been less than forthcoming in pushing out operating system upgrades for existing devices, instead preferring to treat the new operating system's features as bullet points to sell replacement hardware.
In fact, if it couldn't be upgraded that would be better from a corporate standpoint because it would be a consistent platform.
Every iDevice sold since the App Store began operation in the iPhone 3G/iPod touch 2 days can be upgraded to iOS 4. For this reason, app developers can more or less safely assume that anyone who bought an iDevice since the "there's an app for that" campaign either has or can get iOS 4 and can buy apps. Android, on the other hand, has a large proportion of handsets stuck at 1.6, and plenty of non-phone devices with no official access to Android Market. Google gives no information beyond "If you don't have access to Android Market, please contact your mobile service provider or device manufacturer for more information."
People will be using the "cloud" when these and other companies start hosting on the cloud rather than self-hosting.
The companies mentioned - Facebook, Flickr, Gmail - along with Amazon - run their own clouds. There's no formal definition, but my own is that there's vast clusters of servers with tasks distributed among them with mapreduce or something similar, such that node failures are routed around, and scaling is just a matter of adding more hardware.
So if you're using GMail, or Google Docs, you're using "the cloud". Or at least "a cloud".
Let's face it, web sites SUCK compared to traditional applications.
That's exactly what I've been saying and I'm glad to hear someone else saying it too. It drives me nuts that we have to give up so much to get to this more interconnected world.
Responsiveness and performance are among the most important features I look for but web services seem have given up on them.
They are clouds with websites on top.
More: they are websites hosted on clouds.
Whether you use a browser to go to the Facebook homepage, or an http library to make REST queries to the Facebook API, by the time you've been through Geolocation-aware DNS lookup and their load balancers, you've no way of knowing which of their thousands of hosts is handling your request. And that's what makes it a cloud.
So if someone says "___ costs too much", "voila - cost is now zero. Next objection?"
Um... we just don't have the manpower to support any device at the drop of a pin, and even if we got the money to hire or subcontract them, we'd run into other problems (finding the right skills, keeping the organization manageable, predicting popular devices before the fit hits the shan). Sorry if I misapprehend your point, but I just don't see how you can handwave those costs away. It's not just a question of savings: it's a question of where we can get the best value for time and money spent.
My prediction for what it's worth: company IT departments insisting on controlling exactly what devices are used to deal with company business will find themselves sidelined and either restructured or outsourced, in favour of alternate solution providers focusing on the real issues. The problem isn't what exact hardware people are using. The problem is ensuring they are able to use it (with reasonable IT support costs) to access company information (with reasonable guarantees of confidentiality). Speccing the model numbers they are allowed to purchase was the only viable answer ten or even five years back, but isn't enough when demand and technology keeps changing rapidly.
Nah. That would get you sent to jail by the current witch hunt crew.
Real men embed their data in the spatial planning of real objects.
(Best scene ever in Ironman 2. "Dammit, Dad's been dead for 20 years and he still schooled me again today.")
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
If they can't use a computer without fucking shit up they shouldn't have one in the first place, how about that.
Yup, my workplace is working at removing data from local machines and keeping it available from any approved system. Sure, it's not hosted on Amazon or Google's servers but the concept's the same.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Definitely Perl is more flexible, but I remember writing a script to do something before, then discovering I could have done the same thing with a couple of standard utilities. Though I found using xargs to try to do some batch processing really awkward before. I think I ended up just finding an app that had some better options for batch processing of images rather than trying to use a script that piped a whole set of results into an image processing app one at a time..
which is totally what she said
or via third party projects
Does upgrading via third party projects preserve Android Market access? If so, do you mean CyanogenMod or something else?
(and as Android is open source this is a reasonable option)
Unless the device is so locked down that even rooting it won't allow installation of and booting to a free operating system.
The "cloud" the latest in a long line of names for remote computing, is indeed overhyped and recklessly used, and more and more people are realizing it. But on any given day more people are jumping on board than getting off for now, and it's likely to be that way for a while. Sadly this fad isn't near the end yet, it's probably just beginning. The end won't be near until the first big inevitable Cloud Disaster.
Clouds make rain. Rain is bad for computers.
The Data localy stored on some noobs virus ridden harddisk is not exactly what I'd call "safe".
bickerdyke
Because RMS already condemned it. And everything condemned by RMS has been proved to actually do the predicted damage. So chrome OS will probably live and thrive, and lure a lot of gullible users to trust their info and data in the cloud, and come back to bite them.
> Ruby and Rails were never able to prove themselves as being solutions to real problems. People soon got fed up with them, and went back to proven technologies. Methinks you are talking out of your ass. Aside from Twitter (which still uses RoR AFAIK for some things), please provide other examples to backup your flame bait.
So.. I get to keep the CM-48 right?
Nevertheless they may need or want at least email, and probably access to photos, etc.
Amazingly, the internet is huge as far as enabling people to socialize, even if it's a foreign concept to you.
Companies, Universities and even public organizations are moving to Gmail and other Google services (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/three-million-businesses-have-gone.html).
And those organizations have terrible security policies. Plenty move, but ones with real security policies don't. In order to host data for LA County, everyone that has access to a computer that has data(including the janitor at the data center) needs an FBI level background check. The "cloud" doesn't play nice with that, since that data is distributed all over the States/world
I thought "the cloud" was "the cluster"
If you refer to "The Cluster" from the Lexx SciFi series (under-appreciated in the US due to sequencing fuckups by SyFy channel), I fear you may be correct.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Divine_Shadow
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
>> So if you're using GMail, or Google Docs, you're using "the cloud". Or at least "a cloud".
So, by that definition, we've been using "the cloud" for a while now! We had Hotmail, Geocities, and all those "cloud services" way back then.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
I would actually question the effectiveness of using XML or JSON over HTTP as an RPC mechanism. In my experience I get much better performance rolling my own protocol with sockets. All of these layers of serializing and de-serializing to and from text-based formats and shoe-horning it into a very verbose, text-based request mechanism seems to do nothing but add overhead on both the client and server.
I'm all for network-enabled services, but I slightly cringe at a word like "webservice" (and you've written this as one word!) because it highlights how much people have grown accustomed to these ugly layers.
I would not want to lend a netbook running Windows, Ubuntu, or Android to my hacker friend because he might install a keylogger or some kind of proxy, just for fun. Or to my grandmother, who might install malware by accident.
With a regular laptop, there's a mental cost in remembering to delete all my personal data before I stop using it. ChromeOS guarantees that your user state can't be accessed by the next person who uses the device.
There is value to having a computing device that you can use without worrying about its health and your data.
When Web 1.0 (or indeed web. 0.1) came out I didn't jump on the bandwagon. Hey, yea, it cost me my share of the easy cash from the first bubble. But I didn't jump because "The Web" wasn't, and isn't, "an interesting technology".
The Web(TM) is a display surface. It is no different than X or curses or any number of other display surface technologies, except for the part where it is slow, annoying, lame, and awkward to use. Granted, it fills that whole "putting a relatively static display up in front of someone very far away" niche pretty darn well. "Well" but not so much for the "easy", "subtee", nor "magical".
For each incremental piece of magic involved in "The Web(TM)" someone has to make a piece of incremental magic for "a local machine" and then port that magic to all the "local machines", by type, that they want to support, then get people to install that local magic, and then "magically" the web works. Think about it. Flash, Silverlight, MP3 players, HTML5, Netflix Player, PDF reader, eBook reader, PNG support, GIF support, JPG support, etc, etc, etc.
Even this slashdot web site thing does all the work anterior to the actual web part.
The Web is really "http" and maybe "html" and a whole bunch of very concrete and specific wholly-local technologies at each/either/every end of one verbose pipeline.
So it is no surprise that "Cloud Computing" is bunk. Its just Web 3.0. It is a term in search of a concrete meaning. They(TM) want your data Out There Somewhere(TM), but the business and marketing people pushing the concept don't get that there is no magical somewhere called The Cloud(TM). So since Chrome OS would have to be backed by a bunch of Chrome OS servers running normal databases and whatnot the technology starts to fall apart just as thoroughly as LanManager Networking for Windows. If _everyone_ has a my-documents folder, then that part of the name is meaningless. If everyone is in the same pile of databases, then the location of that data isn't terribly cloudy at all and the "adjacency graph" looks exactly like "hey everybody get a gmail account."
Then let the marketroids and the "one-environment visionaries" who imagine the entire Internet is about a complicated as the 40-person hot-house they used to do their proof of concept coding and you end up with "the cloud" where, if no device was ever turned off, and every device was within the same communication cell, then it wouldn't matter where your document was last stored.
The problem with "you'll be somewhere and your documents will be 'where-ever'" is that to someone else you are 'where-ever'"
So the dream of _everybody_ having cheap devices that leverage all the unused device time out there, a priori means that everyone is going to be wearing down _your_ battery/storage/whatever faster than you could wear it down yourself.
Now the _opposite_ of cloud computing, where you carry around your mesh-available storage device and any computer you walk up to would see it and let you use your stuff by magic is pretty interesting. But then again you have to trust every computer you walk up to whether you intend to use it or not in that scenario. Or you would need an encryption key technology, but then you don't get "any computer you walk up to" you get "any computer you plug into" and again, you need to trust it not to have been compromised by the last guy to use it. etc.
So "the cloud" has no meaning, and the technologies like it are like Communism. Communism would be the _perfect_ form of government if there were _no_ _humans_ involved in the process. But humans are not universally fair, trustworthy, and interested solely in the common good, so no communism for you comrade.
There just isn't anyplace in a "cloud" to store anything if nobody buys any local storage etc.
That only leaves deluded idealists, and people who want to throw themselves on your data "for your own good".
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
-1 Troll
Rails is dead? Ruby is "just perl with less powerful syntax"? I think we have someone here who has never learned Rails (or any other new language or framework, for that matter.) The thing Rails did was brought together MVC, ORM and "meta-programming" into a well integrated framework. I've written or been on teams writing several commercial frameworks. I've used nearly all of the open source frameworks and CMS products in my development career. Including the Rails rip-offs like CakePHP. Nothing is as good as Rails. There's a reason why Rails drives people into Ruby development, it's wonderfully elegant, effective and allows for flexibility and nearly instant development. Normally you can have one or the other.
I know it's a pain to keep up with the constantly moving world of web development. However, it is necessary. I started with Perl CGI (in 1998), then moved to PHP and LAMP and now I've moved to Ruby. The improvement is really just as big as the move from Perl/CGI.pm to PHP. This video demonstrates the improvement I'm talking about, he doesn't pick Rails as his choice. I disagree with him of course. But it does show just how big the imporvement is.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
Sometimes I think Slashdotters live under a rock and shove their heads into the sand when they don't want to hear something they don't like.
P.S. - Linux Desktop still sucks and its gonna take a corporation to accomplish it like Google, the community have their heads up their ass to come together on something for the end user.
The latest rehash of the dumb terminal/mainframe model of computing; its two main innovations being the use of platforms and the hosting of applications which are equally ill-suited for the model.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
...and thin client is a good thing (where it works well).
The web browser is just the latest implementation of a thin client. It's a pretty nice and flexible one too. It doesn't matter whether your data's on the internet or a corporate server. If it's available via a web app, that's 'the cloud' in this new context.
So if all your needs can be met by web-style applications (with the browser as your GUI), then 'cloud computing' works for you. And I don't think Google is even suggesting that such typical desktop-centric things as video editing, etc can be moved to the cloud. If you need to do that kind of stuff, then Chrome OS is not for you. In that case, load the Chrome browser on your (whatever system) box, and you've got 'the cloud' for when you want it, and the traditional desktop for when you want that.
I for one want ChromeOS to succeed to bring the Netbook back to its roots. A cheap, quick starting, long battery lived device for internet browsing. There's still a market for that, and if nothing else, that market enables you to buy a 'cheaper than Windows' box that you can then load the Linux OS of your choice onto.
Android (and other mobiles - and for that matter, the iPad) are a funny hybrid. They're mostly network centric devices, but with some limited local storage and support for some limited local apps for when you're not connected. And that's probably an even more useful combination than the pure cloud ChromeOS. I.e. there's proven to be a huge market for that combination. The only differences have to do with form factor. Touch screen, GPS, tilt sensors, cameras, etc that smartphones have and that notebooks tend not to have. So some Android apps would work on both kinds of devices, and some wouldn't.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
People want to use real, locally-running applications that help get work done, where their data can be kept local and safe.
Define "safe". The vast majority of data loss scenarios involve theft, hardware failure, and/or user error. For individuals especially, "the cloud" can trivially and transparently protect against these, far more efficiently than any "local" device can.
That's before even getting into the whole "access from anywhere" aspect, which most people consider to be the single biggest feature of "the cloud".
The cloud services you point out as growing in popularity with the masses are largely FREE services for their user-bases, and on top of that, primarily used for entertainment or convenience, rather than necessity.
Last time I checked, free handouts were ALWAYS really popular.
When you start talking about paid subscription services offered over the Internet? Popularity and satisfaction rates fall off a cliff. I have a number of clients who were sold Internet-based backup solutions (such as Carbonite or Mozy Pro) and even for that one specific purpose, they fail to please. Mozy users complain constantly of sluggish performance and stalls in the middle of any sizable restore operation. Mozy's official response? "That's why we can MAIL you the data on physical CDs or DVDs!" Carbonite and others are known for their software glitches and other performance problems. People I encounter who paid to use "Google Apps" constantly fail to get the whole business transitioned over to it. There's always something or other that Office/Outlook does that it can't do, or do as well, that makes it a "deal breaker" for somebody in charge of things. So what about just going with Microsoft's cloud computing options then? I barely know anyone too excited by that prospect either. "Let's see... You're telling me I can just BUY Office up-front, one time, and then I can use the thing forever if I like, OR I can keep paying month after month to use it via the "cloud" and have NO licensing rights left whatsoever, as soon as I quit paying? AND, I get the added "benefit" that if I have no Internet connectivity someplace, I'm unable to use it at all? Where do I sign up!?!"
If that was all they saw, I would not exactly call them "smart"... While I am not a RoR fanboy, it actually acted much like a cult band, influencing development on many other platforms, especially ones that were more static like Java server-side development. Specifically, convention-over-configuration became mainstream, when observation was made along the lines of "gee, maybe having to name my methods certain way is less painful than writing tons of XML configuration files".
As to Ruby being "just like Perl", it's like saying that USA is just like India, just slightly different. They ain't. Ruby is not less powerful than Perl, nor is it syntax its strongest points (description might fit Python better, although even for Python it'd be rather inaccurate).
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
I think you're missing the point.
The Cloud in most cases, is usually a set of service endpoints hosted on a massive web farm. Amazon's cloud services allow you to stand up virtual machines. Microsoft's appears to revolve primarily around storage. Facebook's is for content delivery.
The front end is just a thin client to the cloud, be it through HTML/CSS/AJAX in some web browser, a thin client "app" sitting on an iphone / android, a windows service running in the background, or whatever. All of those clients utilize a set of services that are hosted in... the Cloud.
People that are "fed up" with the cloud are mostly ignorant of what cloud computing actually offers.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
You assume that people, never mind actual businesses know how to back up their data better than microsoft or google. They don't... Can you honestly say that your data is safer locally than it is in google's data center? I've built data centers at co-locations in nuclear proof buildings and I would never make that statement - they've invested more in their infrastructure than any company or even government I've ever seen.
Besides its not like I cannot get my data to my local machine from google's cloud. They have api's I can use to interact with that data directly, or I can simply replicate it locally - nothing is stuck there - not even email.
On my Android phone its really brilliant - I'm on my 3rd device, none of these devices have ever been connected to a PC physically and they all have the exact same contact databases/urls and even apps - thanks to cloud computing.
Performance isn't everything. Openness and allowing others to easily use and extend your service is often much more important.
There's a difference between a single application with server components, and a real service to be used by multiple applications, including ones that don't have access to raw sockets or development time to implement such protocol.
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Exactly. No matter what language you are using, if you are working on a website that is free of legacy code, the codebase will almost certainly have received inspiration from Rails. You cannot successfully hype any product unless that product has real value behind it.
It seems to me that you are trying to be sarcastic, but that is a valid statement. Unless you have a meaningful definition of cloud which excludes Email and Web Hosting (i.e. Apache/IIS).
He effected a bored affect.
That is only one definition of "the cloud." The context here is ChromeOS, which specifically eschews native apps, and wants all applications running in the browser. Yes, in either case, the data is hosted on a remote server, but this discussion thread is the idea that native applications have no place in a browser-based world, and that's the view I'm taking issue with.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Says the java dev who just got his project dropped in favor of rails. The "cloud" and rails for that matter aren't going away. Case in point, just this past week "enterprise" giant sales force buys out rails hosting startup heroku for 200 mill and change.
The maintenance on 4 year old workstations tends to be higher than on new workstations. An older workstation will most likely use more power than a new workstation. From there it's just ROI analysis. An alternate would be to drop any maintenance on old workstations, and purchase new ones as replacement, so that over time the company would move to new workstations (with the exception of the one guy whose workstation will never die even after 20 years, but you'll be able to get rid of it once he retires).
He effected a bored affect.
Why does Goofle need two operating systems?
I just don't see the appeal.
Android makes some sense (save for Java, which fortunately came to bite Goofle in the ass, so maybe it will teach them something). It works, it runs on mobile devices and can scale to bigger machines and runs crap integrated with Goofle cloud.
At least Goofle is not afraid to kill products (see Wave). So maybe they will get rid of it.
You can't "view source" on a App, it's not re-flowable, reconfigurable, hackable, scriptable, and you can't make on yourself and learn how to do it by just looking at the code to see how it's done. You also can't block parts of it, or even do something as simple as change fonts so you have a chance of reading it. It bothers me how much App stores are reinventing the web in a curated censored closed ecosystem. It's absolutley everything Tim Berners-Lee did not want to happen and the very antitheis of what made the WWW an explosive success. Apple and Google also get to track your activities on a computing platform in a way that must be making Microsoft extremely jealous - for all we criticise MS they have a much higher standard of privacy in this regard. In Cloud computing you cannot do a damn thing without these companies watching your every move. Jolicloud is rather brashly open about showing you the enormous history of activities it has all the way back to when you joined.
If everybody ends up spending all their time in totalitarian App-land, eventually the only thing left on the web will be pirates, wikileaks, and CP, and this will push the case for censoring and eventualy perhaps outlawing the WWW and monitoring cicumvention will be made illegal by DMCA. There's already a big push for this kind of tracking (reccent Australian and UK laws as an example), coninciding with a huge push towards cloud computing - where you pretty much sign over your digital life to a corporation.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I'm posting this from the Google CR-48 ChromeOS notebook I just received today. It's pretty neat.
I agree with you about there being a market for cloud based computing. Some people will be happy with just the services they can receive from the cloud and not need a really powerful computer.
I haven't had a chance to really play with it but I've been thinking a lot about it since I was invited to get one. Just as WebTV and thin clients have a market, so will this, although it doesn't sound like it will stay in this current form. For some people what they can do with their smart phones and other advanced internet devices will be more than enough.
Wow, slashdot is still around? Is that where the crazy haters are coming from?
- Paul Buchheit (TeamFrank)
It's the same basic principles as the IBM System/360, only now with more marketing and TCP/IP.
The most important thing to note is that people are getting fed up with the so-called "cloud". That approach has been hyped for a few years now, and while many of us realized it's a bad approach from the very start, the rest are finding this out the hard way. After so much failure and hardship, people want nothing to do with it..
My god I thought I was the only one, thank you sir.
And thus the re-branding of distributed computing to "the cloud". Because before Facebook and Gmail we had no servers that distributed tasks and could scale.
The cloud is a business model where you sell bytes and flops like they're a utility.
Your javascript prejudice has nothing to do with reality. Sort of ironic, given your name.
Android is for a phone, chrome OS is for a PC. If i were to run a company I'd run it off of Chrome OS for the sole purpose of redundancy, it would allow me eliminate the "i forgot my presentation at home/the office." it's a good idea. Just i want my personal stuff at home, i want it available to only me, and not Google or the web. It's a great idea and all, just for business not individuals.
Your still just trading one bottleneck (disk, OS startup,etc) for another (network connection, latency).
Who's to say what kind of connection you get at any one time either via cell or WIFI? One goes down the whole machine goes dead. There has to be a balance because it will just bring back the method of staring at the hour glass. So now you start up your brand new cloud pc/portable and you have to pay a cell provider each month just to use it? That sucks. Or maybe you start it up and get a weak signal and it times out all over the place and you can't even load solitaire? That sucks too.
While cloud based processing can be cool for heavy editing of video or rendering it's not going to help in any meaning full way for the 99% of tasks most people do anyway (web surfing, word processing, office centric apps, light games, etc). The whole basic idea of technological advancements since the 70's was to have a machine that responds as close to instantaneously as possible and now that dual core mobile CPU's and pretty decent mobile GPU's are becoming mainstream why bother waiting on a server? To make matters worse we are trading performance in terms of MHz/GHz to MB/s and $/MB/s. All of your data usage for the month rides directly on your ability to use your computer. Now if you buy a 100MB/month plan and you hit that limit you either have to pay more at a penalty to the point you are now paying $0.20-$0.50 each time to check your email. You'll be counting the bits.
There definitely needs to be a balance, maybe something a long the lines of being able to dynamically offload currently running tasks to the "cloud" for a small fee or subscription or whatever but solely relying on a service to be fast and available at all times is still way out of reach.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
The usage pattern for this buzzword seems to be to simply replace "Internet" with "cloud." Accordingly, people using Hotmail and uploading websites to Geocities in the 90s were apparently "cloud computing." That this buzzword has grown to encompass common things like web-based email and online social profiles is embarrassing.
And you're 100% correct. The sad thing is they don't keep people around anymore long enough to pass history down in this industry, so every few years the latest crop of 20 year olds thinks they've discovered centralization, and then every few years one of them "discovers" decentralization. It's an endless cycle of insanity.
The best has got to be the guys who think they discovered life without SQL. Who knew you could compute without a relational database?
Performance isn't everything. The protocol performance is usually dwarfed by application performance. Using standard data formats over HTTP has some huge advantages: all the pre-existing tools work. For example, you can test your services from the command line using curl, and use other existing tools to parse the data. Debugging a custom protocol and data format over raw sockets is much more difficult. You also get all the existing servers, load balancers, caches, clients, security tools, etc.
Well, except in the real world where cloud-based solutions continue to increase in penetration.
The continued march of organizations that are adopting cloud-based solutions, such as the ones that have "Gone Google", suggest that this is true only for an unreasonably restrictive definition of "people".
There is a similarity in that initial hype spiked and faded, while actual use continues to grow.
People generally want to use applications that help get work done, and want data to be kept safe, to be sure.
The "locally-run" and "local" parts, though, seem to be far from universal preferences. There are tradeoffs between local (both for code and date) and remote hosting that effect decisions there, and from all evidence, though, the perceived balance is, over time, becoming more favorable for remote hosting.
Its really as simple as that. Watch any unexperienced user on their computer, they will go straight for the browser, they don't care what else the system can do. Even if they're not in the browser, they are using a messenger service or something else related to conversation. Compare something like liveGO to any native messenger and the superior interface is liveGO, win for the browser. There are apps that are at least comparable to Windows MovieMaker and whatever the Mac has for basic video editing in JayCut - again a great app that shows off web capabilities. Not to mention Photoshop and MS Office both have web based versions. We have already seen demoes of 3D games that look great in the browser, and without having to remember what platform runs what games, that experience becomes vastly simplified. Sure "power users" won't like it, but what percentage of computer users do you honestly believe fit that bill? I had used Linux exclusively for 12+ years, I have 3 quite powerful desktop machines in this house, and yet I'm writing this from the relatively mediocre hardware of the Cr-48 simply because it is more convenient. I don't have to wait at all to get to what I want, I don't have a bunch of useless crap running in the background managing the interface and os services I don't wish to use when I'm on the computer. For me, I think Android will eventually drop "native" apps, and entirely use webapps, with things like NaCl, it gives the developer more choice, simple as that. I believe the lawsuit with Oracle is only going to speed that process along. As web technology gets better and better, it will simply be inevitable that the web becomes the platform. No more porting apps from one platform to another wasting developer resources, and a lot of development already goes on in the cloud via Google Code and GitHub/Gitorious etc. I don't have to worry about losing data cuz my system crashed, I don't have to reconfigure settings cuz I changed computers, it is honestly a joy. For me, the only downside currently is speed, the web still isn't quite powerful enough to make some of the apps I've listed feel as smooth as their native grandparents. It is only a matter of time until even this isn't an issue, however. People insisting on sticking with native apps are simply stuck in the past. If you want to continue being locked into Microsoft software because that's where your apps run, cool. If you want to continue being stuck with the lame excuse for an alternative offered by Linux, cool. If you want to continue purchasing Apple hardware at outrageous prices to get their software, cool. Personally, I want them each to compete on an even playing field, and I don't want to have to consider the multitude of application frameworks from one system to another. I do not care about whether apps match each other in look and feel provided they look awesome, and do the job I want. Everyone in this thread complaining about their preference for native apps really ought to look into what the web developers are already offering, and get on board with moving this platform forward.
I can live with my data on the cloud, I am online 95% of the time anyway.
It is harder to cope with an application that is not there when you are offline.
But for the love of god, somebody please enforce some human interface guidlines on the cloud!
FCKGW 09F9 42
Why use chrome when there is android-x86. Granted the project is in it's early stages, but it is shaping up nicely and I have froyo installed already on a desktop, with mouse and keyboard and no touch screen.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
I must say that the fact that users do not really understand anymore what a file is, and where their data is located, scares me a lot.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
The needs of people are quite diametrically opposed to those of business.
People love to share, businesses hate to share.
People hate secrecy, business thrive on secrecy.
People live without counting every bean in a jar, business are run by bean-counters.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
>> So if you're using GMail, or Google Docs, you're using "the cloud". Or at least "a cloud".
So, by that definition, we've been using "the cloud" for a while now! We had Hotmail, Geocities, and all those "cloud services" way back then.
-dZ.
exactly.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
Where did you get that from?
I'd bet that it was your rectum.
Bollocks.
You can develop against the Android emulator that comes with the Android SDK. You dont even need a device to test GPS, the emulator will simulate it for you (although an actual device is advised for testing).
You fanboys are terrible. Please learn about Android development before commenting on Android development. Unlike Apple you aren't required to own a Google computer and Google phone before being granted access to the SDK.
Google does not vet applications. It's a simple process of:
1. Paid US$25 fee.
2. Get listed.
The GP was right, only Apple fanboys care, talk about or even notice Android fragmentation.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
According to the link I posted, three million businesses disagree.
While I'm not an expert in any way, I don't find it hard to believe that most small to medium businesses are willing to use "cloud services" as long as they have the perception that the provider won't go around sharing their data around.
Dilbert RSS feed
Google does not vet applications.
I never meant to imply that. Google vets devices. I haven't seen a single Android device that 1. has a size and price similar to that of Apple's iPod touch (like Archos 43) and 2. comes with the Android Market application (unlike Archos 43). See this article citing this article, in which a Google representative claims that Android Market isn't ready for tablets.
Anyone with a laptop.
Have you tried timing battery life of, say, MS Office vs Google Docs? Even w/o turning off wifi, MSO still wins.
There's nothing that says you can't document a binary protocol and make that document public. Or, even if you don't, if a talented developer is interested enough in connecting people will reverse engineer it. Look at IM networks with binary protocols, for example. There exist lots of open source clients.
Those are some pretty strong words to use without backup, specifically with regards to Rails. Last I checked, Rails was more popular than ever, with loads of high-profile web apps and increasing enterprise adoption rates. If you'd like to provide some evidence of people "going back to proven technologies" in significant numbers, I would love to see it.
On an Android device, if you specify the required version of the OS correctly in your app, it will simply not show up for the user with old OS in the Market.
As I understand Android Market packaging, a package specifies the API level. It does not specify specific point releases. The difference becomes important if you want to avoid Android versions that have, say, an SSL vulnerability.
Besides, there are still a lot of Android devices that support loading APKs from "Unknown sources" but don't support Android Market. These include most of the Chinese tablets, as well as every Archos product.