> You're conflating the hardware (Chromebook) with the OS (ChromeOS).
Chrome was created to run on small netbooks. From Wikipedia: "Google developers began coding the operating system in 2009, inspired by the growing popularity and lower power consumption of netbooks and the focus of these small laptops on Internet access." They've also shown it on tablets, but the advantages over Android are unclear, especially with how mature Android has become over the years.
Long story short, I don't see any point to Chrome. What needs does it fill that aren't already met by Android or a locked-down Linux distro?
Mostly because people are idiots, and partly because OS manufacturers haven't figured out how to deal with high density displays.
1) It's easy to see that one CPU is faster than another, or one laptop has more RAM or a bigger HDD than another, or that one screen is larger (in inches) than another, but most people's eyes will glaze over when trying to compare two pairs of numbers in the thousands. (Fun fact: a 20" 4:3 LCD at 1600x1200 has about 10% more pixels than a 20" widescreen LCD at 1680x1050.)
2) Even thought it was obvious that high-res displays would (should) eventually be the norm, MS and Apple both really dragged their feet on resolution independence. We had these gorgeous things (22.2", 200dpi widescreen at 3840x2400) eight years ago but if all of (or most of, or even some of) your UI elements were half the size you needed them to be, life got pretty bad, pretty quick. Ars was hopeful that it would happen SEVEN FREAKING YEARS AGO with OS X 10.4 and then again in 10.5 but... sadly, no.
Even the iPad was launched in 2010 with the same 10", 1024x768 resolution we had on the 10" Compaq TC1100 in 2003. I was really hoping the first iPad would be at least 1400x1050 or, better yet, 1600x1200. The latter would have been 200dpi and would have been awesome. (Not that I'm unhappy we wound up at 2048x1536, but 16x12 would have been very good for quite a while.) I'm not a fan of the original iPad's screen at all.
... and devote the resources to something else. Seriously. The market for "I need a laptop that can run a browser and nothing else" is 1) ridiculously small and 2) can be fulfilled with nothing more than a properly-configured Linux distro. Netbooks, while popular in some areas, were NOT the sales success that many people thought they would be. An even more limited netbook will not likely fare better.*
Laptops are already pretty cheap. The theoretical savings of making a stripped-down laptop that just runs a browser are not offset the costs of such low-volume production.
Tablets are the way to go. The market has spoken. "Simplicity" in computing does not mean "I want to run everything in a browser", it means "I want to click giant icons and run one, fullscreen, sandboxed app at a time." Sorry, Chrome OS team--you went the wrong direction.
In other news, I literally LOLed when some guy at Google was talking about how a Chromebook (that is, one particular piece of hardware) would actually "get faster over time" due to its automatic software updates (which would presumably bring increased efficiency and performance.) BULL SHIT. Why is the Web largely unusable on anything less than 1 GHz anymore? Oh right, because web pages are getting fatter all the time! Does anyone REALLY think that Google will make the OS more efficient faster than web pages will become more bloated?
Seriously Google: KILL THAT SHIT and let those employees work on something worthwhile.
* and before anyone mentions the iPad: yes, it is more limited in some ways, but it's also more powerful in others. On the other hand, I can't think of a single thing a Chromebook can do that a Netbook can't also do, but a Netbook can do literally everything that any other computer can do, while Chromebooks are limited to "I can do some things that happen within a browser."
Wrong. He wasn't picking on MS, he was refuting a particular point that someone else raised. If someone says 10 things about MS, and one of them isn't true, it isn't "picking on them" to point that out. And since the parent wasn't talking about Apple or Android, there was no reason to mention them. We're not talking (in that particular comment) about what Apple or Google did or didn't do, we're talking about what MS did.
> At the time IE6 was released, yes, all browsers were pretty much > "rubbish" when compared to the versions that are out there today
The funny thing is, MSIE 5 on Mac was, in many ways, a better browser than MSIE 6 on Windows. (The Mac and Windows versions of IE were totally different products, sharing little more than a name.) It was the first browser with really great CSS support. Things like the Complex Spiral demo and CSS Zen Garden worked in IE5/Mac before they worked anywhere else. IE 6 was pretty good but it also had a LOT of IE-only features and it was really popular, so lots of big, expensive corporate products to this day are still IE-only.
If you haven't seen an IE-only site recently, you probably don't have a mediocre corporate-y job with a large company.
"Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 supports several commonly used Web browsers. This article describes different levels of Web browser support [emphasis mine], browser compatibility for published sites, and how ActiveX controls affect features... SharePoint Server 2010 supports several commonly used Web browsers. However, certain Web browsers might cause some SharePoint Server 2010 functionality to be downgraded, limited, or available only through alternative steps."
There's more to the world than just IE and Firefox on Windows. I work in a large publishing company (1,000s of employees) and we're close to 50% Mac overall. (And it's about 90% in design, production, etc.--you know, the departments that actually make what the company sells.) There is a LOT of key stuff in SP that doesn't work, or doesn't work well, on a Mac.
And in other news, here's how MS thinks Wiki software (and HTML in general) should work. http://imgur.com/IaHTb 1) The whole point of Wikis is that you can edit them WITHOUT knowing HTML -- just use *, #, etc. 2) <strong> and <b> tags?!?!? <font> tags in 2012? Makes me want to shoot myself in the back of the head... twice.
1) People were already doing AJAX-y stuff like make sequential menus (i.e., you pick your state from one menu, then another menu appears with a list of the cities in that state) with JavaScript and regular old CGIs for quite a while before MS put out XMLHttpRequest. All MS did was specify some things. Someone else invented the idea, and another someone else (Google) made it famous.
2) Netscape was made free for "individual, academic and research users" in 1994. http://home.mcom.com/info/newsrelease.html Spyglass Mosaic--you know, the browser that MSIE was based on--was free for "non-commercial use" even before that. MSIE 1.0 didn't even come out until 1995. Companies tend to pay for things, so while making a browser free for commercial use certainly helped the web some, leaving it as something companies had to pay for wouldn't have held the web back much.
I don't know if your last line is sarcastic or not, but yes, there is tons of evidence that Microsoft did indeed work very hard to hold back the web. That doesn't mean they never did anything that was pro-web but what little they did was more than offset by all the bad they've done.
Yeah. You know the old Redd Foxx line, "Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing."? The author or his kids are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals after having gotten their asses kicked by some rednecks, trailer trash, or chavs (depending on where you are.)
Will somebody please tell this asshole to use google and than learn the difference between a slash and a backslash? And than use a dictionary to learn the difference between 'than' and 'then'?
If he's rewriting history, you're completely forgetting it. The killer app of the iPhone (before it had 3rd-party apps) was it was the FREAKING INTERNET IN YOUR POCKET. (OK, the WWW, technically, plus email.) Did you ever use a WAP browser on an early PDA, or even a more modern browser on an Axim or iPaq? They SUCKED. Horribly. And they depended on WiFi or, if you had a smartphone, on exorbitant data plans. The iPhone came with a really great web browser that showed real pages--just shrunken, but easily panned and zoomed--at a reasonable cost. PLUS it had a built-in iPod AND a great video player, Maps like had never been seen before on a mobile device, and plenty of other good things.
There are many types of possible exploits. Maybe someone gets an SQL dump but since it doesn't run through the regular method it doesn't get decrypted on the fly. Security in layers, my friend. No single setting will prevent all bad things from happening, so you protect against different exploits in different ways. It doesn't hurt to have additional measures. It's not like there's some rule that says "You're only allowed to protect this data in one way."
Are you familiar with what happens when you multiply very small numbers by very large numbers? A quick google search shows that almost a billion people fly each year. Yes, it's entirely likely that someone--even a group of people--just plain forgot. Haven't you ever had dinner with a dozen people, and not one remembered that there were rolls in the oven until the burning smell hit?
And, as a matter of fact, the more unusual an item is, the more likely I am to forget it. I'm used to patting my pockets to make sure I have my phone, glasses, and wallet, but I rarely travel with a cellphone-controlled robot and I might not remember check for it when moving around.
> There are perfectly legitimate reasons to maintain user account information > in the clear: Namely, that you can't one-way hash anything except the login > credentials and have it remain useful.
There is a middle ground between plain-text and one-way hashes: it's called "encryption" and it's just like a one-way hash except it's two-way.
Mark Zuckerberg didn't do anything that we "nerds" couldn't do, either, but he turns 28 this month and could buy Spain if he wanted to, and you can't.
Instagram got 10M users with one app on one platform. How many people follow any of your sites? It is indeed newsworthy. One thing we nerds need to know is what is going on in the tech world that our friends and family are asking and talking about--not just sticking our heads in the sand yelling "the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached!" like Grandpa Simpson.
I don't know how Google came up with "Play" as a new name. Granted, "iTunes" isn't much better, but at least there's a historical reason for that: once upon a time, it was used for organizing only music, and when theit store first came out, it only sold music. So iTunes grew naturally over time and the name got grandfathered in. If Apple were to start from scratch today with all their content but no name, there's no way they would have named it all "iTunes."
It's funny that every time Apple does something kinda bad, MS comes along and REALLY does what everyone is worried about. Apple starts an App store and people start worrying that someday ONLY apps from the app store will be allowed, then MS comes along and says "App store apps only!" Everyone worries that the iPad is too popular and Apple will quit making a desktop OS, then MS comes along and says "You're going to use this tablet UI whether you want to or not!"
Granted, using the old style desktop gets you around both of these to some extent, but then, what's the point of having it?
Maybe "troll" wasn't the most fitting mod, but the guy who says "it's still in development!!!!!11" is wrong. I mean, I guess he's technically right and, technically, it's still in development, but he's wrong if he thinks that everything will get magically fixed between now and when the final version is out. (Which is the point he was trying to make.)
This isn't an early beta we're talking about here. This is the consumer preview. The OS is 99.5% done and what you see now is pretty much what you'll get. The ones who are pointing out how wrong he is (nicely or otherwise) are the most technically-minded people here--as in, they've been paying attention to how software development and release schedules work for the last 15 years.
They whine about how much bandwidth users are using... yet they REQUIRE that you have a data plan if you have an iPhone (or other suitably "smart" phone, AFAIK.) Even if it's a used/not in contract one! If you get an old iPhone 3GS from a friend and stick a SIM card in it, AT&T says you MUST have a data plan. ($20/month minimum.)
Though I guess they're just using the low end to subsidize the high end, since you can get 10x as much data (3GB instead of 300MB) for 50% more ($30 vs. $20).
Maybe, just maybe, if they charged something vaguely resembling reasonable rates for data, their network capacity issues would go away.
Is there a difference between something that was supposed to be in the water and then sank (like a ship or cargo from a ship) versus something that was thrown away into the water (like, arguably, these engines)?
Slashdot Mirror
> You're conflating the hardware (Chromebook) with the OS (ChromeOS).
Chrome was created to run on small netbooks. From Wikipedia: "Google developers began coding the operating system in 2009, inspired by the growing popularity and lower power consumption of netbooks and the focus of these small laptops on Internet access." They've also shown it on tablets, but the advantages over Android are unclear, especially with how mature Android has become over the years.
Long story short, I don't see any point to Chrome. What needs does it fill that aren't already met by Android or a locked-down Linux distro?
And if you can't reply to the correct comment... ;-)
Mostly because people are idiots, and partly because OS manufacturers haven't figured out how to deal with high density displays.
1) It's easy to see that one CPU is faster than another, or one laptop has more RAM or a bigger HDD than another, or that one screen is larger (in inches) than another, but most people's eyes will glaze over when trying to compare two pairs of numbers in the thousands. (Fun fact: a 20" 4:3 LCD at 1600x1200 has about 10% more pixels than a 20" widescreen LCD at 1680x1050.)
2) Even thought it was obvious that high-res displays would (should) eventually be the norm, MS and Apple both really dragged their feet on resolution independence. We had these gorgeous things (22.2", 200dpi widescreen at 3840x2400) eight years ago but if all of (or most of, or even some of) your UI elements were half the size you needed them to be, life got pretty bad, pretty quick. Ars was hopeful that it would happen SEVEN FREAKING YEARS AGO with OS X 10.4 and then again in 10.5 but... sadly, no.
Even the iPad was launched in 2010 with the same 10", 1024x768 resolution we had on the 10" Compaq TC1100 in 2003. I was really hoping the first iPad would be at least 1400x1050 or, better yet, 1600x1200. The latter would have been 200dpi and would have been awesome. (Not that I'm unhappy we wound up at 2048x1536, but 16x12 would have been very good for quite a while.) I'm not a fan of the original iPad's screen at all.
... and devote the resources to something else. Seriously. The market for "I need a laptop that can run a browser and nothing else" is 1) ridiculously small and 2) can be fulfilled with nothing more than a properly-configured Linux distro. Netbooks, while popular in some areas, were NOT the sales success that many people thought they would be. An even more limited netbook will not likely fare better.*
Laptops are already pretty cheap. The theoretical savings of making a stripped-down laptop that just runs a browser are not offset the costs of such low-volume production.
Tablets are the way to go. The market has spoken. "Simplicity" in computing does not mean "I want to run everything in a browser", it means "I want to click giant icons and run one, fullscreen, sandboxed app at a time." Sorry, Chrome OS team--you went the wrong direction.
In other news, I literally LOLed when some guy at Google was talking about how a Chromebook (that is, one particular piece of hardware) would actually "get faster over time" due to its automatic software updates (which would presumably bring increased efficiency and performance.) BULL SHIT. Why is the Web largely unusable on anything less than 1 GHz anymore? Oh right, because web pages are getting fatter all the time! Does anyone REALLY think that Google will make the OS more efficient faster than web pages will become more bloated?
Seriously Google: KILL THAT SHIT and let those employees work on something worthwhile.
* and before anyone mentions the iPad: yes, it is more limited in some ways, but it's also more powerful in others. On the other hand, I can't think of a single thing a Chromebook can do that a Netbook can't also do, but a Netbook can do literally everything that any other computer can do, while Chromebooks are limited to "I can do some things that happen within a browser."
Wrong. He wasn't picking on MS, he was refuting a particular point that someone else raised. If someone says 10 things about MS, and one of them isn't true, it isn't "picking on them" to point that out. And since the parent wasn't talking about Apple or Android, there was no reason to mention them. We're not talking (in that particular comment) about what Apple or Google did or didn't do, we're talking about what MS did.
> At the time IE6 was released, yes, all browsers were pretty much
> "rubbish" when compared to the versions that are out there today
The funny thing is, MSIE 5 on Mac was, in many ways, a better browser than MSIE 6 on Windows. (The Mac and Windows versions of IE were totally different products, sharing little more than a name.) It was the first browser with really great CSS support. Things like the Complex Spiral demo and CSS Zen Garden worked in IE5/Mac before they worked anywhere else. IE 6 was pretty good but it also had a LOT of IE-only features and it was really popular, so lots of big, expensive corporate products to this day are still IE-only.
If you haven't seen an IE-only site recently, you probably don't have a mediocre corporate-y job with a large company.
Here's a link for you. Is "microsoft.com" a good enough source? http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263526.aspx
"Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 supports several commonly used Web browsers. This article describes different levels of Web browser support [emphasis mine], browser compatibility for published sites, and how ActiveX controls affect features... SharePoint Server 2010 supports several commonly used Web browsers. However, certain Web browsers might cause some SharePoint Server 2010 functionality to be downgraded, limited, or available only through alternative steps."
There's more to the world than just IE and Firefox on Windows. I work in a large publishing company (1,000s of employees) and we're close to 50% Mac overall. (And it's about 90% in design, production, etc.--you know, the departments that actually make what the company sells.) There is a LOT of key stuff in SP that doesn't work, or doesn't work well, on a Mac.
And in other news, here's how MS thinks Wiki software (and HTML in general) should work.
http://imgur.com/IaHTb
1) The whole point of Wikis is that you can edit them WITHOUT knowing HTML -- just use *, #, etc.
2) <strong> and <b> tags?!?!? <font> tags in 2012? Makes me want to shoot myself in the back of the head... twice.
Wrong and wrong.
1) People were already doing AJAX-y stuff like make sequential menus (i.e., you pick your state from one menu, then another menu appears with a list of the cities in that state) with JavaScript and regular old CGIs for quite a while before MS put out XMLHttpRequest. All MS did was specify some things. Someone else invented the idea, and another someone else (Google) made it famous.
2) Netscape was made free for "individual, academic and research users" in 1994. http://home.mcom.com/info/newsrelease.html
Spyglass Mosaic--you know, the browser that MSIE was based on--was free for "non-commercial use" even before that. MSIE 1.0 didn't even come out until 1995. Companies tend to pay for things, so while making a browser free for commercial use certainly helped the web some, leaving it as something companies had to pay for wouldn't have held the web back much.
I don't know if your last line is sarcastic or not, but yes, there is tons of evidence that Microsoft did indeed work very hard to hold back the web. That doesn't mean they never did anything that was pro-web but what little they did was more than offset by all the bad they've done.
Yeah. You know the old Redd Foxx line, "Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing."? The author or his kids are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals after having gotten their asses kicked by some rednecks, trailer trash, or chavs (depending on where you are.)
So, readers, what do you want to see in the coming months?
That is all.
Will somebody please tell this asshole to use google and than learn the difference between a slash and a backslash? And than use a dictionary to learn the difference between 'than' and 'then'?
If he's rewriting history, you're completely forgetting it. The killer app of the iPhone (before it had 3rd-party apps) was it was the FREAKING INTERNET IN YOUR POCKET. (OK, the WWW, technically, plus email.) Did you ever use a WAP browser on an early PDA, or even a more modern browser on an Axim or iPaq? They SUCKED. Horribly. And they depended on WiFi or, if you had a smartphone, on exorbitant data plans. The iPhone came with a really great web browser that showed real pages--just shrunken, but easily panned and zoomed--at a reasonable cost. PLUS it had a built-in iPod AND a great video player, Maps like had never been seen before on a mobile device, and plenty of other good things.
There are many types of possible exploits. Maybe someone gets an SQL dump but since it doesn't run through the regular method it doesn't get decrypted on the fly. Security in layers, my friend. No single setting will prevent all bad things from happening, so you protect against different exploits in different ways. It doesn't hurt to have additional measures. It's not like there's some rule that says "You're only allowed to protect this data in one way."
Are you familiar with what happens when you multiply very small numbers by very large numbers? A quick google search shows that almost a billion people fly each year. Yes, it's entirely likely that someone--even a group of people--just plain forgot. Haven't you ever had dinner with a dozen people, and not one remembered that there were rolls in the oven until the burning smell hit?
And, as a matter of fact, the more unusual an item is, the more likely I am to forget it. I'm used to patting my pockets to make sure I have my phone, glasses, and wallet, but I rarely travel with a cellphone-controlled robot and I might not remember check for it when moving around.
> There are perfectly legitimate reasons to maintain user account information
> in the clear: Namely, that you can't one-way hash anything except the login
> credentials and have it remain useful.
There is a middle ground between plain-text and one-way hashes: it's called "encryption" and it's just like a one-way hash except it's two-way.
Mark Zuckerberg didn't do anything that we "nerds" couldn't do, either, but he turns 28 this month and could buy Spain if he wanted to, and you can't.
Instagram got 10M users with one app on one platform. How many people follow any of your sites? It is indeed newsworthy. One thing we nerds need to know is what is going on in the tech world that our friends and family are asking and talking about--not just sticking our heads in the sand yelling "the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached!" like Grandpa Simpson.
I don't know how Google came up with "Play" as a new name. Granted, "iTunes" isn't much better, but at least there's a historical reason for that: once upon a time, it was used for organizing only music, and when theit store first came out, it only sold music. So iTunes grew naturally over time and the name got grandfathered in. If Apple were to start from scratch today with all their content but no name, there's no way they would have named it all "iTunes."
And if Google is really going to make a tablet and call it the Play also... ugh.
It's funny that every time Apple does something kinda bad, MS comes along and REALLY does what everyone is worried about. Apple starts an App store and people start worrying that someday ONLY apps from the app store will be allowed, then MS comes along and says "App store apps only!" Everyone worries that the iPad is too popular and Apple will quit making a desktop OS, then MS comes along and says "You're going to use this tablet UI whether you want to or not!"
Granted, using the old style desktop gets you around both of these to some extent, but then, what's the point of having it?
Maybe "troll" wasn't the most fitting mod, but the guy who says "it's still in development!!!!!11" is wrong. I mean, I guess he's technically right and, technically, it's still in development, but he's wrong if he thinks that everything will get magically fixed between now and when the final version is out. (Which is the point he was trying to make.)
This isn't an early beta we're talking about here. This is the consumer preview. The OS is 99.5% done and what you see now is pretty much what you'll get. The ones who are pointing out how wrong he is (nicely or otherwise) are the most technically-minded people here--as in, they've been paying attention to how software development and release schedules work for the last 15 years.
They whine about how much bandwidth users are using... yet they REQUIRE that you have a data plan if you have an iPhone (or other suitably "smart" phone, AFAIK.) Even if it's a used/not in contract one! If you get an old iPhone 3GS from a friend and stick a SIM card in it, AT&T says you MUST have a data plan. ($20/month minimum.)
Though I guess they're just using the low end to subsidize the high end, since you can get 10x as much data (3GB instead of 300MB) for 50% more ($30 vs. $20).
Maybe, just maybe, if they charged something vaguely resembling reasonable rates for data, their network capacity issues would go away.
"Jim Rowan, chief operating officer of global operations... is leaving to pursue other interests."
Interests include candle-lit dinners, long walks on the beach, and working for a company that isn't circling the drain.
Is there a difference between something that was supposed to be in the water and then sank (like a ship or cargo from a ship) versus something that was thrown away into the water (like, arguably, these engines)?
April 1 is on a Sunday this year? SWEET! Then I don't have to see it.
The only guaranteed way to double your money in a casino: take a $50 out of your wallet, fold it in half, and put it back into your wallet.
Yup, and that's all attributable to video games. Nothing to do with movies, TV, divorce rates, school problems...
* I know you didn't say anything either way, you just supplied the numbers--I just figured this was a good place to hang this response.